As a child, I remember talking to myself.  I remember thinking through conversations with myself in my head and sometimes even mouthing them out with my lips.  I would replay conversations that I had earlier in the day, or I would try and act out and anticipate upcoming conversations that I knew I would be having in the future.

At some point I remember noticing that it was a little weird that I would mouth out conversations and I stopped doing it.  However, I never stopped carrying on conversations in my head.  In a non-schizoprhenic way, I still carry out conversations in my head.  Sometimes they are totally subconscious and other times intentional and thoughtful reflections on what I’ve said or need to say.  I continue to engage in self-talk, and sometimes these conversations have a powerfully formative effect on my future attitudes and behaviors — they frequently shape the decisions I make and the way I live.

I think we all do this.  They can be thoughts about  things like, “I need to hurry up and get out of work before traffic gets to busy” causing us to get anxious and short with people as we try and rush out of work.  Or it can be thoughts that happen as the result of a misinterpreted look from a friend that causes us to think, “Why did she look at me that way.  Is she mad at me?”  This thought may replay in our head over and over again making us feel insecure about ourselves or angry towards this person.  Or, maybe it’s a thought we have about ourselves as we walk past a mirror and think “Wow, I look heavier than I remember looking last time!”  This causes us to feel despondent and defeated at our deflated self-image.

Over the past week, I’ve been working hard at paying closer attention to these thoughts.  They pop up quite a bit, and many of them are destructive to my attitude and resulting behavior.  The Apostle Paul talks about this saying:

“For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.”  (Romans 8:5–6 ESV)

When thoughts of self-loathing, indulgence, anger, or judgment come into my mind I’m working hard at recognizing these as coming from the flesh.  They aren’t true statements, and the faster they die the better.  The longer they linger the more pronounced their effect.  They kill my sense of identity, confidence, and squash my desire to love others.  When my mind is set on the flesh it does bring about a sort of death.  It’s a death of me and all that God has made me to be.

The contrast is a mind set on the Spirit.  A mind set on the Spirit is rooted in the gospel, and it filters all my thoughts through the love of God shown to me in Christ.  If I struggle with feelings of inadequacy about my work or my weight, I can submit those thoughts to the Spirit.  Even when I struggle at my job or pack on a few extra pounds, God’s love for me is unwavering.  There is nothing that can separate me from his loving care and concern.  So instead of letting these thoughts sabotage my life and bring about a sort of “death,” I let the Spirit reign in my mind and enjoy the fuller life and peace that comes as a result.

I don’t think I’m alone in letting my thoughts get the best of me sometimes.  I’m keeping myself accountable right now by engaging in a spiritual discipline called the Prayer of Examen.  It’s a journalling exercise that I do at the end of the day where I spend some time journalling about my day.  As I go through the different parts of my day, I imagine how God saw me in each setting and situation.  I’m asking myself the question, “Was I walking by the flesh or by the Spirit in that situation?”  It’s been really helpful for me in identifying how my “fleshly” thoughts tend to wreck my soul.

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For as long as I can remember living in Minnesota, my dad has had season tickets to the Gopher’s basketball games.  I’ve cheered for the gophers for about two decades.  Going to “The Barn,” the home court of the Gophers, is my favorite sports viewing activity.  I love the intensity of college basketball.  I love the passion of the crowd.  It’s a fun experience and a great venue to watch the game.

But it’s also been heart-breaking.  Over the years, it’s been hard to watch the team struggle to regain some their former glory.  In the late 80s and 90s under Clem Haskins, they put together some pretty good teams.  They even made it to the Elite Eight in the ’89-’90 season (their appearance in the Final Four in 1997 was vacated for NCAA rules violations).  Recently though, they’ve struggled.  They missed the tournament for a number of years, and generally they just seemed to be underperforming for the talent that they were acquiring.   That is up until they hired Tubby Smith.  Smith is now in his third season, and the team is now finally becoming his own.

What strikes me as interesting is just how crucial Tubby’s role as a coach is.  It’s a different sort of role than that of the coach in football.  In football, the head coach has to make decisions.  He calls plays.  He decides whether or not to go for a first down when it is 4th and 1.  He decides if it’s time for a punt or a field goal, and he chooses when, if ever, the team tries an onside kick.  With basketball, the head coach will call scripted plays, and he may even call a timeout to make sure an exact play is run.  But even then, the play may break down and the team ends up having to improvise.  The head coach’s role in Basketball is much different than that of a head coach in football, but no less crucial.

In College Basketball, the head coach creates a culture, an atmosphere, in which the team can thrive and flourish.  He has to know when to rest his players and how to encourage them to play up to and beyond their potential.  In basketball, the head coach’s role is much more of the soft leadership than the hard functional leadership of a football coach.  In basketball, Tubby has to keep streaking and slumping shooting guards focused on playing hard and staying positive.  This leadership role is really made up of a lot of intangibles, in addition to all the standard coaching stuff like picking matchups and calling defensive formations.

And Tubby Smith seems to excel at this.  Right now the Gophers are getting ready to play for the Big Ten Tournament final against Ohio State.  They’re playing better than I’ve seen them play all year…better than they’ve played for many years, and I give much of the credit to Tubby.  He’s found a way to motivate his players to greatness.  He’s created a team environment (despite a plurality of setbacks this year with academic ineligibility and losing top recruits) that allows his players to thrive.  This is hard.  Like the sport of basketball itself, it requires flexibility and the ability to make decisions on the fly.  He has to be able to improvise when new obstacles arise.  Tubby’s rare.  There are few coaches that can do this, and I’m glad he’s on the Gopher’s side.

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Have you ever been annoyed when a spiritual guru has told you to do some self-exploration?  I think that’s fair.  There’s enough self-absorption in our country that when another Christian pastor or spiritual leader tells people to “look inward” or to “know thyself” that it sounds like New Age Narcissism.  Often times, Christians object to this sort of counsel with quotes from Jesus about dying to self, Paul’s exhortation to sacrificial service and the like.  But in a book on the integrity of the soul, A Hidden Wholeness, Parker Palmer adeptly highlights the importance of being self-aware.

I have traveled this country extensively and have met many people.  Rarely have I met people with the overweening sense of self the moralists say we have, people who put themselves first as if they possessed the divine right of kings.

Instead, I have met too many people who suffer from an empty self.  They have a bottomless pit where their identity should be — an inner void they try to fill with competitive success, consumerism, sexism, racism, or anything that might give them the illusion of being better than others.  We embrace attitudes and practices such as these not because we regard ourselves as superior but because we have no sense of self at all.  Putting others down becomes a path to identity, a path we would not need to walk if we knew who we were.

Palmer, Parker, A Hidden Wholeness, pg. 38

He urges us to know our authentic self, and to live with integrity.  He says we often live a divided life swayed this way and that by the external pressures of our peers or the internal expectations we put on ourselves.  We do things that don’t fit with who we are out of obligation, guilt, or shame, and often time it is eating us up inside.  In this book, Palmer pushes us to live an undivided live.  He encourages us to live in such a way that we have a Hidden Wholeness.  I’m excited to get through it all!

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It seems like everyone in the evangelical world is talking about starting over.  Everyone is talking about how corrupt the church has gotten.  Many are urging us to return to the purity of the early church.  Others are saying our theology has been co-opted by a Greek or Roman or Platonic philosophical system, and we need to free our minds from this system in order to tap into the “true version of the church.”  Others, say that the right way to do church is emerging in this new generation that is radically contextualizing the Bible in new forms of Biblical justice and honest community.

I just want to say that while I believe these are all noble pursuits, ultimately they will be disappointing.  Every church sucks.  It’s just the way it is.  This side of heaven, every church is full of people, and people are full of problems.  There is no perfect model.  There is no perfect community.  And, there is no system under which our theology is oppressed and can be liberated into a pure and unadulterated form.  Theological perfection is a pipe-dream.  Theology is always done from within some system, church is always done in some culture, and community is always complicated.  There is no easy, perfect, or un-messy way to do church.

When Jesus laid out for his disciples the essence of what it means to follow him in a bizarre chapter in John 6, he concluded by asking his disciples if they were going to abandon him too.  He had just told them how hard it was going to be to follow him and now he wants to know if it’s too much for them.   They respond by saying:

Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.””

(John 6:67–69 ESV)

It’s as if Peter is saying to Jesus, “Following you is really hard but everything else is worse.  We know that in you are the words of truth even though it is so hard to follow you.  We recognize the source of life and the truth about all things in the words you say and the way you live even though living the way you do is so difficult!”

I think that is why there is a constant temptation to malign the church and look for better ways of doing things.  It’s easy to say the church has gotten it wrong for so long because being a part of the church is just flat out unpleasant at times.  It’s not nearly as rewarding as we dreamt it would be.  There is undeniable disappointment in the church.    But at the same time there is remarkable success and joy in there too — In it are the “words of eternal life”.  People’s lives are literally transformed in the context of Christian community.  People are saved from sin, sickness, and death.  The church is the place where people come in contact with Jesus.  It’s where they learn about his teachings and experience his acts.  The church is Jesus’ Body, his physical presence here on earth, and it’s in the church community that He resides regardless of what model the church follows.  For those of us who make the commitment to stick it out in a church community we end up experiencing God at work and experiencing God’s salvation.

This happens in the church on the corner that’s 110 years old and isn’t following any of the “right” church growth models and it happens in the up-and-coming mega-church that’s bursting at the seams.  God is in both, and neither should be scorned nor dismissed.

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In a soon to be released interview with Playboy magazine, John Mayer says that his “biggest dream is to write pornography.”  He says a lot of other thing in the interview that are unsavory and for which he’s taken a lot of heat.  This statement however mostly just gets an eye-role.  It’s seen as an immature “dream” but not necessarily inappropriate.  Thankfully, Donny Pauling, a former porn producer turned Christian highlights the perversity of producing porn in a personal letter to John Mayer on the devastating effects of being a porn producer for 7 years.  Here are the money quotes:

The biggest deterrent to producing porn is watching what happens in the lives of those who act in it.  I’ve shared my story with more than 4 million people now.  One of the things I’m often asked is whether or not I’m attracted to porn anymore.  I usually respond to that question with a few of my own.  You ready?  Here they are, John:

What’s attractive about a model curled up in the fetal position in a corner between takes, sucking her thumb because her mind is so blown by what she’s just done to herself?   Do the porn companies share, in the credits, a line similar to this one:  ”this girl had to have surgery to repair the damage done to her body by the scene you just found so enticing”?   Of course not!  That’s just not sexy, is it John?  Nobody’d be spankin’ their monkey if stuff like that was thrown on screen, would they?

Lots of my former models are dreamin’ with broken hearts now, John. And the wakin’ up?  That’s the hardest part for sure… because every morning when she does wake up, the stuff she shot for me is still there, as it will be for life.  It isn’t ever, ever, ever going away.  When she’s old and grey, when she has grandkids running around the house, that content is still going to be out there circulating somewhere, John.

…

When I received a round of emails and phone calls from a beautiful girl who was begging me, in tears while sobbing so hard I could barely understand her, to get her content off the Internet as it had ruined the relationship she had with her father… that wasn’t a very lust-inducing experience either.  See, what happened in her case was this:  daddy was leaving his office with his buddies.  They were planning to go grab a beer together.  But when daddy and his buddies got to his car it was covered with photos of his daughter in various explicit poses.  Dad was rather humiliated, John.  He was instantly ashamed of his little girl.  When he shared this incident with her, she was rather ashamed herself.  I shot the photos that ended up on daddy’s car, and when I did so it didn’t cross my mind that she wasn’t someone to visualize while chokin’ the chicken – that she was actually somebody’s baby girl, somebody’s future wife, somebody’s sister… a beautiful person who was born to be loved, not lusted over by millions of men.

…

From my model Karma, who has a baby who will never know his father (because men decided to rape here while she was passed out at a party – after all, she’s a “porn star” so why not take what they want, right?) to the girl who called me in humiliated tears after going to her college campus one day only to find photos of herself stapled on trees all across campus, I have seen the fallout from sexual “sin”.  It makes me ashamed to be a man sometimes, John.  Indeed, the female body is a wonderland, my friend, and so many of us use our hands… and lose our heads and hearts… over it.

Trust me, John… you don’t want to produce porn.  You don’t want to be responsible for devastating lives.  And no matter how good your intentions might be, that’s exactly what you’d be doing.

Pornography is so enticing for guys.  This helps make it way less so.  Hearing the stories of the people behind the cameras, the sad and devastated lives of the producers and actors/actresses, makes porn repulsive.  I’m grateful for Donny’s story.  I’m thankful he’s a christian and I’m glad that he’s sharing so honestly and thoughtfully about his past experiences.

HT: http://mattnightingale.blogspot.com/

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“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” ~ Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

This, the opening line to Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina, is packed full of meaning, and the rest of the book expounds in story form what he means.   We read of one miserable family owing its pain to the self-absorption of the husband.  In another, it’s because of the internal angst of a middle-aged wife that drives her into the arms of a young man.  In another, it’s the insatiable desire for success of the politician husband.  Each family is truly uniquely miserable in its own way.

But is it true that all happy families are alike?  Is it true that there is a model for how to be a family, and the degree to which a family resembles that model dictates the level of happiness the family will experience?

My hunch is that Tolstoy is correct.  I believe that God has created families to relate in a certain way.  Happy families relate to one another the way the Godhead relates to itself.  Happy families love one another the way God loves others.  They are full of sacrificial love and concern for the well being of the each other.  Their relationships are rooted in commitment, and the culture is one of honesty and grace.  In these systems, health, not perfection, is possible, and happiness can emerge.

The problem that Tolstoy so eloquently highlights through his story-telling is that the “happy-family” model is unnatural for us.  We don’t just fall into it.  We have to work at it.  Monogamy is a commitment we have to stick to, and it requires the disciplining of our passions.  Sacrificial service towards our spouses and our children is inconvenient and at times demands the delaying of our dreams.  Love often times looks more like death than it does like lust.  Following the “happy-family” model is hard work and it takes discipline.

But as I read through Anna Karenina and see the truth about families in its pages, it’s obvious that this hard work is well worth it.  Whenever we veer from God’s path of familial happiness, the pain is inevitable, if sometimes delayed.

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There’s often a lot of talk by Christians lamenting the non-religious nature of our government, but what I find ironic is that the early Christians faced criticism from the government lamenting that they weren’t religious!  The Roman Government repeatedly called Christians atheists and even killed them for it.  In fact, the first martyrdom recorded in Christian history outside the pages of the New Testament was due to just such a fact.  Polycarp, a devoted Christian was killed for not being religious 1,854 years ago from this upcoming Monday (scholars believe he was martyred on February 22, 156).

And when finally he was brought up, there was a great tumult on hearing that Polycarp had been arrested.  Therefore, when he was brought before him, the proconsul asked him if he were Polycarp.  And when he confessed that he was, he tried to persuade him to deny [the faith], saying, “Have respect to your age” — and other things that customarily follow this,  such as, “Swear by the fortune of Caesar; change your mind; say ‘Away with the atheists!’”

But Polycarp looked with earnest face at the whole crowd of lawless heathen in the arena, and motioned to them with his hand.  Then, groaning and looking up to heaven, he said, “Away with the atheists!”

But the proconsul was insistent and said: “Take the oath, and I shall release you.  Curse Christ.”

Polycarp said: “Eighty-six years I have served him, and he never did me any wrong.  How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”

ed. Richardson, Early Christian Fathers pg. 152

To the Romans, Christians were atheists.  They didn’t participate in the religious practice of the Roman Empire.  They were often criticized, blamed and scapegoated for the maladies afflicting the Roman empire.  As Christianity spread and their numbers grew, more and more people reasoned that the gods were mad at the Romans and were punishing them for all these Christians who stopped being religious.  Significant writing takes place by early Christians trying to justify themselves as good citizens despite not participating in Roman religious practice.

I find it ironic that the tables have turned.  Now it’s the Christians who are in political office or positions of power that are the ones who are putting “atheists” on trial.  Our country’s problems are blamed on their faltering morality or their lax religious practice.  When natural disaster strikes, the economy tanks, an epidemic breaks out, or when they just need to rouse the troops for re-election these leaders are quick to blame all our woes on the “sinners” who are causing God’s curse on our country.

But that’s not how Christianity works.  God isn’t sitting in heaven waiting for a quota of religious participants to be met before he blesses a country.  He isn’t looking for sacrifices to pile up before extending his grace.  He isn’t looking for us to be good first before he can be gracious in response.  God’s favor and goodness don’t depend on our religious practice.  We can’t earn his grace.

A Christian’s engagement in religious practice is never done to earn God’s favor, it is always done in response to it.  God already loves us, and we engage in religious practice because we need constant reminders.  We engage in prayer, because we need to regularly refocus our vision of love for God’s world and for us.  We show up for a worship service on Sunday because we need to discipline ourselves to worship and give thanks even when we feel like complaining.  We engage in sacrificial service because without it we become so self-absorbed we’re libel to forget about the needs and concerns of those around us.  Religious practice helps us tap into God’s love for us and live out God’s love for others.

Like Polycarp, Christians should resist the notion that going to church and national blessing are yolked.  Like Polycarp, we should embrace the scorn of power-hungry leaders who use religion as political leverage and then call us atheists when we don’t subscribe to their agenda.  Knowing that Polycarp and the early church fathers were called atheists first makes me feel like I’m in good company.  Plus, Polycarp called them atheists right back.

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Imagine a couple that is considering getting married, Jack and Jill. They have been dating for years. Jack and Jill come from different family backgrounds. Jill comes from a family with abusive parents that had a dysfunctional marriage. This has made her skeptical about her ability to have a healthy marriage. She wonders if a healthy marriage is even possible at all. She is worried about the damage she might do to Jack when they get into a fight. If they were ever to have kids, she worries about the damage she might do to her kids. She has grave doubts their ability to make it.

When Jack finally proposed to Jill, it took her 7 days to respond to him with a yes, and when she did she was very hesitant. She says yes, but it’s conditional. She will only marry Jack if he agrees to see a counselor for the first year of their marriage. She will only marry him if he agrees to join a couples small group. She only agrees to marry him if he will read 12 pre-marital advice books before planning the wedding. She says yes, but it’s conditional. She’s worried. On her own, she has serious and significant doubts, but she moves forward with trepidation.

Jack is mad. He feels maligned and insulted. How can she have so little faith in their relationship? How can she believe so little in what they’ve got going on between them? He is mad because he feels Jill doesn’t believe in him. There is no doubt in Jack’s mind that they are going to have a great marriage. He believes in the relationship. He has strong faith that they will be successful, and so he doesn’t see the need for counseling. He thinks reading the books is a waste of time. He is annoyed that Jill has so little faith and so much doubt, and he wonders aloud why she couldn’t be more like him and trust in the love that they have for each other.

But I wonder, who really has more faith? The one who is a realist, or the one who is delusional? Who has a healthier faith, the one with humility or the one with pride? Who is the one with real faith, the one willing to work on her honest doubts or the one who is blind to the real struggles in front of him?

Originally used in a sermon preached at New City Covenant Church on February 7, 2010.

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“So some have doubted.  But then in turn there were some who sought to refute doubt with reasons.  As a matter of fact, the connection was actually this: first of all they tried to demonstrate the truth of Christianity with reasons or by advancing reasons in relations to Christianity.  And the reasons fostered doubt and doubt became the stronger.  The demonstration of Christianity really lies in imitation.  This was taken away.  Then the need for “reasons” was felt, but these reasons, or that there are reasons, are already a kind of doubt — and thus doubt arose and lived on reasons.  It was not observed that the more reasons one advances, the more one nourishes doubt and the stronger it becomes, that offering doubt reasons in order to kill it is just like offering the tasty food it likes best of all to a hungry monster one wishes to eliminate.  No, one must not offer reasons to doubt — at least not if one’s intention is to kill it — but one must do as Luther did, order it to shut its mouth, and to that end keep quiet and offer no reasons….those whose lives are marked by imitation have not doubted….because their lives were too strenuous, too much expended in daily sufferings to be able to sit in idleness keeping company with reasons and doubt, playing evens or odds.”

Soren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, translated Hong and Hong, pg. 68

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Don’t you hate overly serious pastors?  Don’t you know that their earnestness belies their insecurity?  When one’s in a position of spiritual authority, be it a situation where we counsel, preach, or lead a meeting, there can be a temptation to use seriousness to gain leverage.  By being overly serious about a matter, we can manipulate the emotions of a meeting.  It becomes unsafe for anyone to disagree.  We’re so serious in the delivery of our sermon we must be right.  We’re so stern as we warn someone to flee from sin as we counsel them in that we demand allegiance.  We’re so prayerfully dedicated to leading the meeting our way that everyone thinks our plans must be from God.  Or, so we’d have you believe…muhahahaha!

The reality is pastors are just like everybody else.  They are struggling to figure out God’s will just like the person on your left and your right.  We are just as selfish as everyone else around us too, which means we want to get our way and we don’t want to look bad either.  Feigning spiritual intensity helps us accomplish both — we can get our way because those around us are uncomfortable disagreeing with a serious and spiritual person and we avoid the insecurity of not knowing the answer to a theological theodicy, counseling conundrum, or meeting mystery.

The antithesis of seriousness is playfulness.  A playful spirit puts everyone at ease and it allows sermons to be heard honestly, meetings to run smoothly, and when appropriate counseling sessions to move into real heartfelt sharing.  Playfulness seems so unspiritual, but it is the essence of a healthy system.  I hope our church is marked by playfulness.  I hope people feel playful around me…enough so to make fun of me and me them.

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