When God Dreams...

As a dream when [one] awaketh; [so], O Lord, when thou awakest, thou shalt despise their image. Psalm 73:20.

This Psalm has swelled in significance for me as our era of feeling called to "measure" the church continues. It came to us in our own dreams, and fulfilled itself in the last couple of years. For years before that call, we were happily settled into a church home, and even if we moved we generally found a new one with relative ease. Not so the last couple of years. And while we are currently at a church that a good 10,000 feel drawn to attend, we still have a sense of unrest here. We also know You told us to sit in attendance here for a while, but I don't think it is for the same reason You sent us to our churches of old.

For instance, I read the following quote in the book, Crazy Love, "God's definition of what matters is pretty straightforward. He measures our lives by how we love. In our culture, even if a pastor doesn't actually love people, he still can be considered successful as long as he is a gifted speaker, makes his congregation laugh, or prays for 'all those poor, suffering people in the world' every Sunday."

It's not that I don't believe my pastor loves...it's that I have no clue about his love. I have his words, but no experience, no personal certainty as I watch his life. At best, I have only a hope that he loves in some way hidden to me. After all, what can I know about a man who speaks to me in the midst of a sea of 10,000 others? What does he know about me?

If one is to believe the modern church, a pastor and a congregant don't need that kind of one-to-one life visibility. There's an hierarchy in place. The pastor will demonstrate how he "loves" to those in his inner circle even as I will do with mine. But is this really Your preference for the Church? Or...could we be seeing the fruits of a subtle planting of nonspiritual ideology, a methodology that speaks a risky message into our subconscious. What message? Only this: the Church of God is so large after 2000 years of growing, and that added to the tens of thousands of angels gathered around the throne, that we would be foolish to expect You to take a "personal" interest in US as individuals or to reveal Yourself to us! If I am really good, maybe some heavenly version of mid-level management will take an interest in me, but to expect anything different is surely prideful.

When I pause to consider that message, I realize I profess to believe something very different. In fact, I do not believe my God is so small that He must operate under the same limits that govern a lead pastor in a church of thousands. But in practice, I live as if that distance is spiritual truth. Didn't Jesus pray, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven"? Does that go so far as to mean relationship with the shepherd on earth should reflect relationship with the shepherd in heaven? But because the opposing ideology is so backdoor in its presentation, how many of us stop to realize that IT is now sitting, drinking coffee at our kitchen table? And not only is IT sitting there, but IT brought along ITS companion ideology: Complacency.

For me, all this personal reflection brings Psalm 73 back in bold relief.
How easily I relate to the Psalmist as he says:
But as for me, I came so close to the edge of the cliff!
My feet were slipping, and I was almost gone.

Bitterness constitute the edge of that cliff for me. I look over it every time I acknowledge a truth like this one: I learn more through 15 minutes of conversation about the "love" of a young social worker at a Christian homeless shelter than I know about the "love" of the man I've called lead pastor for the last two years.

What happens when this situation persists? Because none of us really have a clue about each other's "love" meter, laziness tempts us. And, because all of us feel virtually invisible to the pastors "called" to speak into our lives weekly, self-protection tempts us. We are quickly positioned to be cast in the worst possible roles that appear in Psalm 73. These are the ones I mean:



They seem to live such a painless life;
their bodies are so healthy and strong.

They aren't troubled like other people
or plagued with problems like everyone else.

They wear pride like a jeweled necklace,
and their clothing is woven of cruelty.

These fat cats have everything
their hearts could ever wish for!

They boast against the very heavens,
and their words strut throughout the earth.

If we're honest, even if we don't live by these traits, don't we often see them as close to our real aspirations? Don't we calculate by them even in our very churches! How many invest the effort to be certain that their clothing isn't woven in the cruelty of a sweat shop? How many have everything we could ever wish for without even realizing it, simply because we aren't aware what classifies as "suffering" on the global median? How many of us use social media to make our words strut throughout the earth?

If God favors us, we are aware of a strata of human existence who "live" the verses that follow those listed above:
And so the people are dismayed and confused,
drinking in all their (the ones previously described) words.

If God favors us, we listen respectfully and hold up the praying-arms of the least of His brethren when they cry the next verse:
"Does God realize what is going on?" they ask.
"Is the Most High even aware of what is happening?"

And, most of all, if God favors us, we leave the ranks of that church in Revelation that doesn't even recognize its own poverty and makes the Son of God gag. We understand who wears this verse from our chosen Psalm:

Look at these arrogant people-
enjoying a life of ease while their riches multiply.

Conviction should strike our hearts when we realize how few are living favored lives by this measure. So how do we answer the problem? Again, those new-church concepts of mass and inertia plant subtle hopelessness patterns across our hearts. Do I stop attending church entirely? Do I realize You spoke strange things about this "modern problem" in ancient times? Do I realize even I might be called for a "sign and a wonder" in this world where You would love for ALL to be saved?

How do I respond when I see my own country's church sadly confirming Your words as they came through Hosea: "When I fed them, they were satisfied; when they were satisfied, they became proud; then they forgot me." Do I embrace that more-convenient posture of shame that my church and its leaders would have me to do, all for having had the audacity to pause and meditate on this prophecy? Or, do I move into it more deeply.

Do I move on to hear You speak yet again, now through Malachi, when You ask pointblank: would your governor/government be satisfied with the quality and quantity of what you offer Me?

And because the answer is obviously no, do I perceive You marking me with that strange call when You, again through Malachi, search for a strange apostle: "Oh, that there were one among you who would shut the gates, that you might not uselessly kindle fire on My altar! I am not pleased with you...nor will I accept an offering from you."

Is this lifeless sanctuary the place where we are left to sit guarding the locks?
Thankfully, no. Our Psalm reminds us to exit this place of difficult commissioning when the opportunity arises. We are not without hope. But "visioneering" must define church differently once our eyes are so opened. I see three things next in this Psalm that are like the compass, the map and the canteen graciously given in answer to our cry of: "Alright! I admit it. I'm totally lost in this forest, and I've been lost here for awhile!"

One grace in the church of my dreams is hidden in this verse:
Then one day I went into your sanctuary, O God,
and I thought about the destiny of the wicked.

I will search and I will build until this is true for me: entering Your sanctuary brings thoughts larger than helplessness and hopelessness, ones that inspire me to think with my own mind about the truths of destiny.

The second grace is hid in this verse:
Then I realized how bitter I had become,
how pained I had been by all I had seen.

I will search and build until time spent in Your sanctuary clarifies my perception of myself and my drifting away as measured by what matters to You.


And the third grace is found in this:
I was so foolish and ignorant-
I must have seemed like a senseless animal to you.
Yet I still belong to you;
you are holding my right hand.

I will search and build until I find a sanctuary where it is on earth as it is in heaven in all the ways that You make available: a place where I can be known for the senseless animal I am, nevertheless, my hand is faithfully held by one who teaches me to love by first loving me.

What Do You Call Judgment?

"Born around 251, Anthony was the son of Egyptian peasants" says Henri Nouwen in his book, The Way of the Heart. Saint Anthony became the first monk of a group called the Desert Fathers. Anthony was called a hermit as he spent years in the desert alone with God and the demons who preyed upon him. (As protrayed by Grunewald on the Isenheim Altarpiece.) But, after he emerged from that time of solitude in the desert, Saint Anthony became someone people flocked to "for healing, comfort, and direction" until in his old age he chose to return to the desert to experience his last earthly days "absorbed in direct communion with God" alone.

Thomas Merton, in Wisdom of the Desert, says "Society...was regarded [by the Desert Fathers] as a shipwreck from which each single individual man had to swim for his life...These were men who believed that to let oneself drift along, passively accepting the tenets and values of what they knew as society, was purely and simply a disaster."

Though monkish living is considered eccentric at best, and is often deemed psychologically unhealthy and even down-right unChristian by the more socially-shaped of our kin, still I find much wisdom in their assessment of society, though we live in a Society almost 1800 years their junior. One difference I notice, though. Those who recognize a shipwreck underway are exercising their right to free speech. They are commenting loudly on the shipwreck of society. Maybe pre-Dark Age society didn't have permission or opportunity to such prophecies to be heard. Maybe they were further along in the act of sinking and had traded talking for diving in and swimming for shore. But for right now in THIS society, the doom seems to be centered in the fact that many are flocking to opposite ends of the boat, finding gaping holes in both places, but only "believing" in the potential harm of the hole they can see. And, they only shout all the louder as voices at the opposite end of the boat become more compelling about the disasters found there. As action is taken to "fix" the boat on the opposite end, these ones scream, "No, the problem is here!" Soon everyone begins to believe the problem is with the people at the other end of the boat drawing attention away from this hole, the one they can see in their own end.

When we reach that place, I believe we are at the moment when judgment becomes our enemy instead of our guide.

What did these desert fathers learn about judgment from their own leap to survival, taking their chances in the icy waters when their sinking ship proved hopeless? They apparently attributed to Solitude with God two profoundly wise lessons.

The first is this: Solitude gives birth to compassion. "If you would ask the Desert Fathers why solitude gives birth to compassion, they would say, 'Because it makes us die to our neighbor.' " Henri Nouwen explains this enigmatic answer: "At first this answer seems quite disturbing to a modern mind. But when we give it a closer look we can see that in order to be of service to others we have to die to them; that is, we have to give up measuring our meaning and value with the yardstick of others. To die to our neighbors means to stop judging them, to stop evaluating them, and thus to become free to be compassionate."

The second is this: Solitude gives birth to the humble self-awareness that is necessary for our forgiveness to be effective in the lives of those we forgive. Nouwen again comments: "The following desert story offers a good illustration: 'A brother...committed a fault. A council was called to which Abba Moses [a Desert Father] was invited, but he refused to go to it. Then the priest sent someone to say to him "Come, for everyone is waiting for you." So he got up and went. He took a leaking jug, filled it with water, and carried it with him. The others came out to meet him and said to him, "What is this, Father?" The old man said to them, "My sins run out behind me, and I do not see them, and today I am coming to judge the error of another." When they heard that they said no more to the brother but forgave him." Nouwen took this quote from a book called The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. I see in it a person walking as nearly as one can to the story of Christ and the adulteress while yet remaining appropriately distinct from Christ.

So this is my prayer:

Dear God,

May I carry that jug, and may I feel that water sloshing down the back of my leg any time I step out to pass judgment passionately but unwisely. Otherwise, my words are at best brass and cymbals making annoying and distracting noise; my words are at best an aid to deciding which end of the boat will bottom up first while doing nothing to help the boat as a whole.

May it be the mud between my toes that helps me know to stoop and wash my brother's feet...

Amen.

What Do You Call Righteous Judgment?

A lot of dung-slinging is going on in society today in the name of righteous judgment. A lot of criticism is floating around in the name of defining justice. (Does it mean giving a pittance to the poor man, but stopping short of detailing why he is poor in the first place?) Most troublesome of all, how do you tell someone you think they're dead wrong when they believe they have all righteous wrath on their side? This is a heavy cloud of many layers over our world today.

And yet, You've been showing me that You have the work of a judge--particularly in the context of prophetic warning--ahead of me. You're working on teaching me how to go about it Your way. I look at the dream I had about warning people of an earthquake, but since they didn't "feel" it in the permanent, main complex of their lives, they did not take the warning seriously. (My husband, too, has had this dream of being sent to warn those who did not want to hear him when he dreamed he was rescuing people off the tail of an airplane. He cried out that it was about to explode; but the first class passengers were taking their time, gathering their belongings, leaving nothing behind, until finally he had to leave them because the fireball erupted at their end of the plane and started flying back toward him. He jumped to the escape slide in time to at least save himself.) What do you do with these calls to warn and rescue?

The first thing I find You're doing with me is to refine my definition of rescuer. I muddy that definition too much with being an enabler of irresponsibility in others. In visiting with a friend, I was able to define for myself a pattern I tend to follow: when I see something before me that I'm fit to do and do well, I rush in and begin to build things that others could help with, even learn from, but because it's easier for me to do them myself, I ignore opportunities to motivate others to do grow, at least in those domains that call for rescue work. So I weaken those around me who should help me and broaden the boundary of my own workload until I make myself so ill and utterly burned out on the assignment that I collapse and have to leave it entirely to recouperate. But this year I've been learning some new ways.

I've been subbing this year, not teaching, just subbing. I've subbed primarily for a woman who is a band director and had some sudden emergency health situations arise in her family that called her out of the workplace pretty frequently. In this subbing assignment, I've had to limit myself. I was not in charge for more than a day or two at a time. I had clear-cut boundaries as to how I could use my skills. I could help kids learn the music in their folders, but I could not choose which kids to help nor choose the music they'd play, etc. So I learned how to walk inside a fence.

As always, a test came after the training. I was offered a specific salaried job, one that fit a skill set I knew I had. Should I take it? This particular job was one the rescuer in me would have lapped up like honey, but fools rush in... So I came to You for an answer, and the answer You gave me at least initially was "No, don't take it." You used supernatural means to tell me; You used natural means, but You made it very clear what Your advice was at this juncture. I could obey or not, but I couldn't say You left me guessing. I backed away from it.

Not until then did I even realize it was the test, nor even the depths of the lesson I'd been learning, but now that I've passed that test, You're showing me how it fits with the larger picture of what You're preparing in me on these other fronts--those of giving appropriate warning where it is needed. I know this is Your next "lesson" because You brought back another dream of portent that made no sense, until now.

In that dream, I was standing beside a fence that was broken, and at the breach stood a very foolish, spotted horse. It was making the breach larger, trying to get out of the fenced area. This horse's motive for destroying the fence was not spite or meanness; it destroyed purely out of ignorance and misplaced curiosity. But it was not a horse that would listen to reason. The only course of action fitting to keep that horse safely inside the fence was to repair the fence itself. Suddenly, I had a tool in my right hand and wire in my left. I repaired the fence with these. When the horse saw the fence repaired, it trotted away back toward the barn. I remember this dream vividly now. Though I had it long ago, still You brought it back. I felt You telling me that this test was a way of proving myself, demonstrate that I'd stay inside a fence myself before I would be fit to mend anyone else's broken fences, before I'd be fit to address anyone else's unintentional transgressions. The offer of a job I'd be good at was the offer of a breach in the fence. My refusing to go through it showed I respected the fence You set for me whether I "had" to remain within its bounds or not.

The next day after I'd come through this test, I reached for my devotional reading and found this:

Mat 7:1 "JUDGE not, that you be not judged.
Mat 7:2 "For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.
Mat 7:3 "And why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye?
Mat 7:4 "Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me remove the speck from your eye'; and look, a plank is in your own eye?
Mat 7:5 "Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.

This text was analyzed further than many writers take it in the devotional I read. Most stop at berating the reader for having an eyeful of un-addressed plank--which when you think about it is rather ironic--but this devotional went on to say that when a person reaches that point of seeing clearly to judge others as verse 5 describes, the act looks quite different from what we usually call judging. It comes more from the position of being an encourager than anything else. "I see a speck in your eye, and if you have the courage and humility to accept that it is there, you might become hopeless, but don't be discouraged. I had a plank in my own eye, and look at me now! You can deal with this if I could deal with that." It is a very different approach to judging than we usually see. Who equates a judge with being a cheerleader? I don't know which is the chicken and which the egg--the man who can't hear he is wrong or the man who does a poor job of talking to him about it.

Now that I'm in the middle of this unit of study, where do I go from here? I can't say I know exactly, but I do know metaphorically. In the dream, tools were put in my hands to repair a broken fence in a world where everyone else seems to be beating up senseless horses. That's where I'm headed now.