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While I am at it — paying attention to my blog, I mean — I am adding this reflective piece on Martin Buber’s philosophical-theological-psychological classic, I and Thou.  But a big caveat should be noted here, because just like the book I reflect on, my own thoughts may not be easy to read.

Nevertheless, I add it to this site because it records one of the most important formative moments in my own understanding of the essence and practice of true Christian sprituality.  Maybe you will gain as much as I have from reading Buber.  Maybe not.  But at least you will know something of what has shaped my thinking.

This past week we conducted our annual days of prayer here at Westside King’s Church.  This is the first part of a season and a series we call Via Sacra (sacred road).  As part of the days of prayer we constucted a prayer walk, a progressive and interactive approach to prayer which uses various prayer “stations” as places to pray.  We based this year’s prayer walk on the psalms, seeking to see the psalms as our school of prayer.  I am making available the guide I put together for the prayer walk, The Via Sacra 2009 Prayer Stations Guide.  I hope that this resource is of help to you in your desire to pray.

This is the time in the Christian calendar when we consider the meaning of the incarnation, or, God’s coming to us in the the person of Jesus.  Our current Christmas series intends to look at the meaning of Jesus’ life from the standpoint of his experience of our life, first as a baby, then as boy, and finally as a man.  While at Easter we consider why he died, it is this time in the season where we should consider the meaning of his life.  I was assigned the middle message in the series (the boy).  I began with the one story we have about Jesus’ boyhood and extended it into the 18 long years where he grows into full manhood.

These are what we call the silent years of Jesus, and this topic has fascinated me for some time now.  We call them his silent years because we have nothing written which can illumine that time period.  My interest is in what these years in Jesus’ life might mean to the development of not only his life, but every life.  For years of formation often come about in hiddenness.  You will see that in this message I took a “spiritual formation” track.  Jesus grew (Luke 2:52) is a statement about his humanity and an insight into our own formation before God.

So here is the text of the message I spoke this past weekend at Westside King’s Church.  It is entitled The Boy.

Over the past few weeks, I have been asked for a way to articulate the ethos and background underlstanding of Suburban Monastery, one of my most important responsibilities at Westside King’s Church.  This is what I wrote for a denominational group looking to encourage more prayer within their churches: 

Suburban Monastery is a place, not a program. We say that we are not into the latest thing, but the oldest thing. We believe that the Christian church is rich in good tradition, in true experimentation, in worthy literature and exemplary saints, and that we ought to go back into the attic and rediscover what is ours.

We value and practice a bridge between evangelical and contemplative forms of Christian experience. We do this by taking time to consider the life that Scripture calls us to, understand how the church has reponded to this life in the past, and seek to experience this life right now through creative and engaged prayer. We believe that as we each learn to pray, we begin the path of transformation. Our prayer life is not purposefully one of intercession, but we have come to learn that as we pray the “our father” we inevitably pull others into our prayer.

We have come to understand that formation is related to form, and that a good and solid liturgy assists our experience of God. So we embrace anchor points – Scripture and tradition, respect for the whole church of Jesus, the push away from sectarianism and the embrace of the radical middle of the whole church. We carry deep respect for voices and ways much older than us.

Our name, Suburban Monastery, says two things. First, it speaks to our cultural context. We say that suburbia is not just a place – it is profoundly a state of mind. We fully admit our present condition as postmodern, technologically savvy, relationally broken, consumerist, entertainment driven, suburbanites. Our need is to find a different way of life, a slower and quieter life and more attentive life, one that is capable of the deeper change we need. And second, calling our place a monastery speaks to the alternate way of being we rehearse for 75 minutes on a Wednesday night. We call our place a monastery because the monastics saved culture by contrasting it. We want to be different (the old word here is holy), so that what is truly valuable in human life can be saved.

We do very simple things together. We come together in silence. We learn to listen to readings from Scripture and significant writings. We attempt a real engagement with Scripture so that we can discern the form of life we are called to. We share in conversation. And we respond to God with prayers and practices that open us to God as living presence. We do things that Christians have always done, the ways that Christians have learned to know God as living presence.

Our form of spirituality is a move away from spectacle and the spectacular (we are not loud or boisterous). It is a move towards noticing what is intrinsic to the common and everyday, in which of course, spectacular things happen on a regular basis – if we are able to see them.

I have spent much of my ministry life thinking about and (with varying success) practicing the art of prayer.  Some years ago, I was drawn to the prayer of Jesus in the Gethsemane garden as a model prayer.  What especially struck me was Jesus’ boldness and frankness at this criticial moment.  It still remains utterly amazing to me that Jesus could ask God to release him from the way of the cross (even though he had long seen and taught that his vocation was to suffer and die, and afterwards to be raised up).  Gethsemane startles us when we take it seriously.  But it also opens up what is the true gift of the gospel: the confident and free expression of our selves before God in prayer and what this actually does to us and in us as we participate.

The exploration into the Gethsemane prayer was part of that process where I was learning that the point of prayer was its exploration of true relational confidence.  I came to see that prayer meant nothing if we did not express our truest self to God.  But there was more.  I saw further that what Jesus finally accomplished for us, his fully yielded will to God’s purposes, was realized precisely in this freest kind of prayer.

So prayer meant at least these two things: the freedom to express myself truly before God, and the way to overcome the short-sightedness of my human perspective and self-will.  This was the essence of what Jesus modelled in Gethsemane.

I am adding The Gethsemane Prayer of Jesus.  It is a substantial piece with varying subtleties of argument.  But I hope that you will see what I have come to see, that in Gethsamene, on the night of his arrest, Jesus modelled a prayer that was in sync with what he always taught: the prayer we call The Lord’s Prayer.

I am adding a sermon I recently shared at Westside King’s Church.  It is entitled A Voice Behind the Written Words, and is part of the Unwritten series at the church.  The idea of the series is to talk about the gaps in our knowledge and experience, and is built on the idea that there are books that have not been written.  I took that idea and stretched it a bit to fit something I believe to be a defining deficiency in our time: the lack of appreciation for the living voice of God.  Perhaps because of the way some have overplayed this idea, making a mockery out of hearing and speaking for God, or because of the shyness we have about being too “mystical”, it seems to me that the sense of God as a living and speaking voice seems to have fallen out of favor.  I certainly do recognize the dangers and pitfalls of this issue, but I also affirm that God is a living voice, and that behind and in the written words there is a presence that speaks.  God is not limited by the errors and follies of our age.  There is a way to understand the enduring truth of God’s living voice and to bring mature and considered judgement to how we can listen better.

But first we need to affirm simply that he does speak.  And so I wrote this piece to “prime the pump”, as it were.  I can never escape Philip Yancey’s penetrating thought, that the thing God hates most is being ignored.

I value your feedback and comments.

Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. (Colossians 3:1-2)

I am interested in the integration of two aspects of our inner life – mind and heart, or what we refer to as our intellect and our emotions. While I would assert that these are properties of the same self, it usually helps to make the distinction between what we hold as true in our rational mind from that which we moves us in our emotional mind. And while I would also make the case that these aspects are deeply connected, in the popular conceptualization, these properties of self are distinct. As a Christ-follower, then, I am interested in seeing these two aspects of my self become more integrated.

In philosophy-speak, we talk about the principle of co-inherence. This means that one thing can hold multiple properties at the same time. For instance, we might say that the property of “sweetness” inheres in a sugar cube, but this is not its only property. We can also say that the properties of “whiteness” and “squareness” also inhere. All of these properties thus “co-inhere” in the same sugar cube and are not mutually exclusive. I believe that it was Dallas Willard, the philosopher and student of the soul, who first pointed out the spiritual relevance of this philosophical descriptor.

The point is simple when it comes to authentic spirituality: there are multiple properties to it that must exist at the same time. We are one person, but we can never be described by one property. And to my point, mind and heart as intellect and emotion are both vital and deeply human properties that need a spiritual education. Even more specifically: theological soundness can be found alongside experiential vitality. True spiritual life is not a war between what we know rationally and what have come to experience. In the deepest sense, true spirituality is knowledge of the deepest kind, the kind that is truly felt, and deeply known. In the words of my friend Charles Nienkirchen, “what I know, I really know”.

And so my interest in the text above. In Paul’s letter to the Colossian Christians, he takes time to lay down what God has done for his people in and through Jesus. And then, as he often does, he makes a “since-then” argument. He says in effect: since God has done all this for us, we must put both our thoughts and our emotions in order, and do this in a unified and integrated way. It is this deep integration, this recognition of spiritual co-inherence, that is the sign of a truly maturing Christ-follower.

If you live only by how your Christian faith makes you feel (you would hardly be alone), but know little of it’s substance, you need to follow Paul’s advice: pursue depth of insight, pursue content. If, on the other hand, you know a lot of things about the Christian faith, but are hardly moved emotionally by what you know (and you would hardly be alone in this either), then you will need an education of the heart: seek to be a person who feels and is able to respond emotionally to these great things.

Of course, we need help in this and we cannot develop a mind and heart without God’s help in forming us. But whatever your starting point, pursue integration.

For the past year, I have been making my way through the entire contents of the Spiritual Formation Bible, a wonderful introduction to the “with God life” from the Renovare people.  It is what you might call a tome: a really big and montrously fat book.  But I recommend it as a reading project for those who aspire to bigger ideals.  I recommend it with the caveat that you have to have the mind of a marathoner and not a sprinter.  Sprinters get off the line quicker, but marathoners cover more ground.  In the life with God, we are called to be endurance runners.

This morning’s reading and reflection included this introductory comment by Earl Palmer on Second Thessalonians:

We should not be surprised by the atmosphere of argument and dispute in the early church… Christians argue because they care and also because the Christian fellowship has always faced the problem of false or confused teaching.  It was the theologian Karl Barth who noted, “There are no New Testament letters that are written apart from the problems of the church”

For me, this comment stands as a particular illuminating place in my long reading journey with this particular Bible, a journey that has has paralleled the life issues I have been facing during this season of my life.  And somehow this comment represents for me a kind of “second wind” in the long race, that kind of mysterious ability which overcomes the labored breathing and breaks into new found energy.  If I sound too personal, I apologize, but our connection to truth usually begins that way.  I am beginning to see that what I have experienced and am experiencing may be bigger than my personal story — I am beginning to see (again) that what is most personal is also most universal.

Perhaps my personal story parallels what the church has felt over this last season of its existence in North America.  For we too (and I mean the whole church of Jesus in North America) are faced with issues and problems that are not only large and complex, but important enough to open up and argue for.  This is not bad because problems are (paradoxically) our friends, driving us to rethink and re-orient ourselves to the life we are called to.  If the church of Jesus has been “sucking wind” lately, it is because it has lived disconnected from the voice that sustains it.  If it finds itself again, it will not be because it overcomes problems but because it sees that Scripture engages problems, lives off of problems, is not afraid of problems.

For years now, I have felt that my calling as a pastor was not to merely comfort people, but to comfort them in the large truths of who God is and what he is doing in us and for us.  In other words, it was theology in the service of real life – God’s word for people right where they were.  The connection between the Bible and church life was all-important to me.  I have always believed that if we avoided Scripture, or failed to base our ministries out of Scripture, then we would fail to connect with people where they were.  I feel as I am there again.

I see a world of problems not only in the culture but in the church of North America.  And I see the Scriptures as fully immersed in the the problems of life as we experience them.  Somehow, because of this vital connection — the way our Scriptures connect to the large and seemingly intractable problems of our time — I feel as I am catching new breath.  Go figure.

I belive that the practice of prayer is the most unused and misunderstood gift of the gospel.  And so I am adding Insight into the Mystery, an exposition of Ephesians 3.  If it reads like a sermon it is because this was originally given to the Westside community last January 2007 at the launch of our annual prayer days. I hope that you find something here worth pondering.  And I hope that you are encouraged once more to enter the gift of prayer.

Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.  Happy are those to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity, and in whose spirit is no deceit.  (Psalm 32:1-2)

It is usually taken that humans are universally in search of happiness, and that this is an unqualified good.  A whole nation (our neighbor to the south) has built its common enterprise on ”life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” because their founders saw that these were self-evident goods.  Those who are aware of the classical underpinnings of this statement may assert that our contemporary view of happiness has changed from what the American founders meant (we tend to think of happiness as an emotion, whereas the classical view was to see it as a kind of virtuous well-being), but it is nevertheless true that the pursuit of happiness was considered something that every human would want to be involved in.  Few of us would want to quarrel with that idea.

But happiness to many of us is both elusive and confusing.  It is a pursuit that continually remains just that.  We know the usual list of happiness-helpers that we tend to resort to: consumer purchases, body image, life-style freedoms, fame and fortune, the list goes on.  But what if we keep missing the most important, and most basic ingredient of happiness?  What if happiness was deeply connected to a kind of soul freedom that is simply based in being free from corruption and deciet, a soul that is forgiven and knows it is, a soul that is deeply connected to the God of forgiveness.  Such is the view of the Scriptures and an important clue to happiness that I am beginning to see in more everyday terms.

I don’t want to be trite or cliche about this because some of you will think that what I am saying is a common place.  Everybody who follows Christ knows this.  But I am not so sure.  We pay lip service to the reality of forgiving grace but we hardly see the pragmatic importance of living in this happiness.  There are enough unhappy church people around to tell me I am not mistaken.  I have come to know — through life experience and practice — that a sin-burdened soul is miserable and a sin-relieved soul is joyous.  I have taken note of that as a pastor who watches souls, and I have come to know that for myself.  As a sinner, and as a forgiven sinner, I have learned the deep connection between the two states and how my soul feels in both conditions.  This is really a truth that you can empirically test out.

I began this morning by reading the above statement from Psalm 32 and I was immediately drawn into that blessed (read: happy) state that this happiness is real for me — I am forgiven, my sin is covered, and God holds nothing against me.  And somehow the Spirit helped me experience the joy of it all.  This is the gospel of course, but I am one who needs to experientially connect to it in order to live by it.  I took time to revel in the joy of sins forgiven and this joy became my strength for today.

How about you?  It is really difficult to live with a burden of guilt, or if you are not aware of your failiings, then the murky unclarity of a burdened and troubled soul.  Perhaps you are just confused as to why you are unable to be happy.  May I gently point out a deep connection that you probably need to make?  For there is a kind of misery that goes quite deep, and which cannot be solved by trivial solutions.  And there is a kind of happiness that is just as deep, for in the case of deep misery only forgiveness will lead you back to joy.  You can really test this out.  It is a practical truth.