“Somewhere along the way the movement of Jesus Christ became civilized as Christianity. We created a religion using the name of Jesus Christ and convinced ourselves that God’s optimal desire for our lives was to insulate us in a spiritual bubble where we risk nothing, sacrifice nothing, lose nothing, worry about nothing. Yet Jesus’ death wasn’t to free us from dying, but to free us from the fear of death. Jesus came to liberate us so that we could die up front and then live. Jesus Christ wants to take us to places where only dead men and women can go.” - Erwin Mcmanus
Archive for July, 2007
Some cousins left the beach; other cousins (the ones from Vietnam) have arrived.
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We’re choosing to be out of touch for a few days. I’ll assume the Rangers, Cardinals, Angels, and Red Sox are winning and the Yankees are losing. If that’s not the case, don’t tell me.
All right — I didn’t get the Grand Junction trip for my birthday, thanks to a 4-3 loss in the championship game. So the consolation prize was that we got to come to Pensacola Beach, which I wrote about in my very first blog entry four years ago. It’s still being rebuilt since Hurricane Ivan hit, but we’re so thankful to be back.
Here are a couple shots — one of Chris and his cousins on the putt-putt course:
All I want for my birthday (51 today, thank you very much) is a trip to Grand Junction, Colorado.
After winning yesterday, 7-6, we play today for the championship in Waco. The winner will advance to the Southwest Regional tournament in Grand Junction — playing for a chance to go to the World Series.
It was great coming here last year, but we lost two straight games and had to go home. This year we’ve won a couple games. It won’t be easy. We have one loss and Laredo Del Mar has none, so we have to beat them twice.
Someday maybe this blog will return to more substantive material. Like guacamole recipes. But for now, it’s junior league baseball.
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Someone mentioned in the comments from the last post that their favorite part of Leaving Church was the “baptism” scene. It’s also my favorite part. After she resigns from ministry, she’s invited to a pool party when people begin throwing one another in.
“I stood back and watched the mayhem that ensued. All around me, people were grabbing people and wrestling them toward the water. The dark night air was full of pool spray and laughter.”
Some looked at her but decided, in light of her past “position,” to leave her alone. “I still looked waterproof to them,” she remembers.
But then . . .
“Two strong hands grabbed my upper arms from behind, and before I knew it I was in the water, fully immersed and swimming in light. I never found out who my savior was, but when I broke the surface, I looked around at all of those shining people with makeup running down their cheeks, with hair plastered to their heads, and I was so happy to be one of them. If being ordained meant being set apart from them, then I did not want to be ordained anymore. I wanted to be human: I wanted to spit food and let snot run down my chin. I wanted to confess being as lost and found as anyone else without caring that my underwear showed through my wet clothes. Bobbing in that healing pool with all those other flawed beings of light, I looked around and saw them as I had never seen them before, while some of them looked at me the same way. The long wait had come to an end. I was in the water at last.”
A few more quotes from Barbara Brown Taylor:
“At least one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out.”
“Having tried as hard as I knew how to seek and serve Christ in all persons, I knew for sure that I could not do it. I was not even sure that I wanted to do it anymore, and I felt increasingly deceitful saying that I would. Feeding people was no longer feeding me. While I remained constitutionally incapable of walking past a hungry baby bird, it was the wild geese that were calling me. When I heard them coming, I hurried to the window, straining to see them through the branches of the tall pines overhead. Sometimes all I caught was a beating wing or an outstretched neck, but even that was enough to set me weeping again. No thoughts went with the tears. The tears simply fell out of my eyes, and it was not until the geese were gone that the words formed in the empty air. Take me with you.”
“After I left him in search of food [at a pool party], I wound up with a couple I had always thought I would enjoy but whom I never really got to know since they did not serve on any committees and were never, as far as I knew, in crisis. We sat down in adjacent rocking chairs with plates full of lobster and corn balanced on our laps, laughing so much that I spit food clear across the porch. I did not wonder why I had not sought them out earlier because I already knew the answer. By my rules, caring for troubled people always took precedence over enjoying delightful people, and the line of troubled people never ended. Sitting there with corn stuck between my teeth, I wondered why I had not changed that rule sooner.”
Some poignant words from Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith
These words sink deep.
“The call to serve God is first and last the call to be fully human.”
“I guess you could say that my losses have been chiefly in the area of faith, and specifically in the area of being certain who God is, what God wants of me, and what it means to be Christian in a world where religion often seems to do more harm than good.”
“On the subject of divine guidance I side with Susan B. Anthony. ‘I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do,’ she once said, ‘because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.’ Having been somewhat of an expert on the sanctification of my own desires, I try not to pin them on God anymore. At the same time, I recognize the enormous energy in them, which strikes me as something that God might be able to use.”
“As hard as I have tried to remember the exact moment when I fell in love with God, I cannot do it. My earliest memories are bathed in a kind of golden light that seemed to embrace me as surely as my mother’s arms. The Divine Presence was strongest outdoors, and most palpable when I was alone.”
“As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.”
“I know that the Bible is a special kind of book, but I find it as seductive as any other. If I am not careful, I can begin to mistake the words on the page for the realities they describe. I can begin to love the dried ink marks on the page more than I love the encounters that gave rise to them. If I am not careful, I can decide that I am really much happier reading my Bible than I am entering into what God is doing in my own time and place, since shutting the book to go outside will involve the very great risk of taking part in stories that are still taking shape.”
“Once I had begun crying on a regular basis, I realized just how little interest I had in defending Christian beliefs. The parts of the Christian story that had drawn me into the Church were not the believing parts but the beholding parts. ‘Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy . . .’ ‘Behold the Lamb of God . . .’ ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock . . .”
“The easiest thing was to tell [her friends who asked why she resigned from ministry] that I had always wanted to teach college, which was true, but behind the answer lay truths harder to confess. My quest to serve God in the church had exhausted my spiritual savings. My dedication to being good had cost me a fortune in being whole. My desire to do all things well had kept me from doing the one thing within my power to do, which was to discover what it meant to be fully human.”
“With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore.”
“Once, when I attended a workshop on teaching religion, a presenter talked about how he took his students on wilderness trips to give them a taste of life nearer the edge. Whether they went hiking or white-water rafting, the point was to step outside their high-carb comfort zones long enough to encounter the untamed holiness of the wild. ‘Excuse me,’ a member of the audience said, ‘but are there predators in those places who are above you on the food chain?’ ‘Well, of course not,’ the presenter said. ‘I wouldn’t put students in danger like that.’ ‘I wouldn’t either,’ the man in the audience said, ‘but don’t lull them into thinking that they have experienced true wilderness. It’s only wilderness if there’s something out there that can eat you.’”
We played our first game at the state tournament in Waco this morning in the muggy heat. We defeated the Section 1 champions from Lubbock, 17-3. Game two will be tomorrow against the winner of the Del Mar - Eagle Pass game this afternoon.
Here’s our team:
Just finished a few unbelievable days in Vermont with my buddy Landon. He never ceases to bring clarity to my life. Then a little time with Steve and Chrissy in Boston to see what God is doing through them.
Now . . . on to Waco for the state tournament. More later!
Anyone out there have any good Landon Saunders memories?
Ft. Worth is a great place to camp out for a few days during a tournament. The last two mornings I’ve had incredible bike rides along the Trinity River. If it was just a little closer to Abilene, I think I’d drive over once a week to make that ride — just for the beauty.
We won game two against the winner of the Waco district last night, 6-1. Tonight we play the host team from Ft. Worth in the finals of the winners’ bracket. Either late tonight or early tomorrow morning, I’ll hustle back to Abilene to preach. My guess is that the preaching will be a bit blurry-eyed tomorrow. (Note: I’ll just be underscoring the text about how this treasure comes in jars of clay!)
Today: lunch at Pappasito’s. Yes, fajitas, guacamole, and salsa are in my immediate future.
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Is the Pope stealing his speech material from Churches of Christ? (See this article entitled “Pope: Other Denominations Not True Churches.”) Makes a Protestant really miss John Paul 2.
Memories from the quick trip to see Reese and her parents:
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We won the opening game of Sectionals last night in Ft. Worth, 18-4. The game ended at midnight. One thing that made it slow was that the good folks hosting the tournament didn’t have any baseballs. We had to use a couple good balls the team from Wichita Falls had. (Ours were all beat-up practice balls.) But any time both were fouled off we had to wait until they were brought back. It was one step above street ball. Still, lots of fun.