“O earth, where is your sting?  O Hell, where is your victory?

Christ is risen, and you are overthrown!
Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen!
Christ is risen, and the Angels rejoice!
Christ is risen, and life reigns!
Christ is risen, and there is none dead in the tomb!
For Christ is raised from the dead, and has become the first-fruits of those that sleep

To him be glory and power, forever and ever, Amen!”

-  John Chrysostom 400 A.D.

From our family to all of our friends, wherever you are around the world, we wish you a joyous Christmas and blessed new year.

Four of us were on our way back from Vancouver, Canada when we got caught in the worst snow storm to hit the Seattle area in many decades.  Flights cancelled, hotels booked, taxis not running, and over 10,000 people stranded at the Seattle airport.  Not the way we intended to spend these days right before Christmas.  But humor has prevailed with Travis, Patty, C’havala and me as we faced this unexpected adventure.

Fortunately, we found a room and hope to rebook on a flight to So. Cal sometime before Christmas.  More later on Vancouver and the NieuCommunities ministry in that city.

It just so happened that the morning after the U.S. presidential election, I found myself standing outside the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, TN.  I was with ten others who comprise CRM-US’s leadership who are meeting this week in this city beside the Mississippi and we spent the morning at this landmark.

This museum is built around the Lorraine Motel, the spot where Martin Luther King was assassinated.  The facade and that actual area of the building remains as it was that fateful day in 1963 on the balcony pictured above.

The poignancy of the moment was gripping.  Here I was at the site of perhaps the most tragic event of the American Civil Rights movement the day after the first person of African descent has ascended to the highest office in the land.

The feelings were multiple and even conflicting.  On one hand, it is remarkable to see how far the nation has come in these intervening years.  Regardless of one’s politics, the election of Barak Obama is a landmark in the long struggle for racial justice and equality.  On the other hand, it’s sad to see how long it has taken to reach such a milestone and to be reminded once again of the appalling price paid by so many over the years in this journey.

At lunch today, an African American pastor from Memphis summed it up well:

“It is mind blowing to think in my lifetime this country would ever live up to its creeds.  I have always told African American children they could be whatever they wanted to be.  However, now I no longer have to qualify it with “but …”

I was impressed with this prayer posted on John Piper’s his Desiring God website.

Father in heaven, as we approach this election on Tuesday, I pray

1) that your people will vote,

2) and that they will vote with a sense of thankfulness for a democratic system that at least partially holds in check the folly and evil in all our hearts so that power which corrupts so readily is not given to one group or person too easily;

3) that we would know and live the meaning of being in the world, but not of it, doing politics as though not doing them, being on the earth, yet having our lives hidden with Christ in God, rendering to Caesar the things that are Caesars, and to God the things that are God’s;

4) that we would discern what truths and values should advance by being made law and which should advance only by the leavening of honest influence;

5) that your people would see what love and justice and far-seeing wisdom demand in regard to the issues of education, business and industry, health care, marriage and family, abortion, welfare, energy, government and taxes, military, terrorism, international relations, and every challenge that we will face in the years to come;

6) and above all, that we will treasure Jesus Christ, and tell everyone of his sovereignty and supremacy over all nations, and that long after America is a footnote to the future world, he will reign with his people from every tribe and tongue and nation.

Keep us faithful to Christ’s all important Word, and may we turn to it every day for light in these dark times.

In Jesus’ name,

Amen.

I just came across the following comment from Russell Riley of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia  about the ideal combination of qualities necessary for one to be President of the United States.  The perfect temperament should include:

“Gerald Ford’s fundamental decency.  Jimmy Carter’s discipline.  Ronald Reagan’s sunny optimism.  George H. W. Bush’s diplomatic instincts.  Bill Clinton’s intellectual curiosity.  And George W. Bush’s dogged determination.”

Bodies of Water is the indie-rock band that David, our son, and his wife, Meredith (above) lead.  This month, they are on tour in Europe.

We just received the following email update:

“Hey mom …we’re in London playing at The Forum tonight.  We just drove here from Cologne, Germany, today. Things have been going well, but it’s pretty rough;  long trips in between each city.Paris was a really good show, but Cologne was strange.  We opened for a bigger band that is more normal than us, so there were a thousand middle-aged Germans looking at us with bewilderment while we played.”

We just received another email from friends who saw them perform in East London.  Deanna Hayes wrote:

“We had a FANTASTIC evening in Shoreditch hearing the amazing talents of Bodies of Water.  WOW! David is one talented guy!  I couldn’t help remembering him as a young boy and then seeing him on stage as a musician with people asking him for his autograph.  It was a bit surreal.  It was an amazing performance.  John has played their CD’s non-stop since we returned home.  We are both very impressed with their music.”

While I’m at it about the absurdity of “retirement,” I have some energy on another related topic.  Might as well spit it all out.

Frequently I encounter people (particularly those who are successful in business, or younger men and women who want to be successful) who are contemplating what God would have them do with the latter half of their lives, and the line I hear runs something like this:

“I would love to serve God with more of my time and talent in the coming years.  But I want to have made enough money to be independently wealthy.  I really don’t think it is right to ask other people to support me when I could pay my own way.   So I want to wait until my nest egg is secure and then Jesus can have all my time and attention.”

1.  Behind such a desire can be an unwillingness to live a life of dependency, either dependency on God or other people.  The need for financial security trumps one’s ability to step out and trust God for the most basic of economic necessities.

2.  There is a subtle, unhealthy independence that such wealth can engender.  I’ve seen it several times when we’ve accepted folks to minister with CRM who didn’t need to raise money.  They had it all.  Inevitably, when times got tough in the crucible of ministry, or there was conflict, or things didn’t go their way, they could pack it up and leave.  Having one’s own resources makes it a lot easier to cut and run.

3.  When I’m independently wealthy, it can put me at odds with those in the apostolic community or team with whom I minister.  I have options they do not have.  I have resources they do not have.  No wonder historically in the missionary orders of the Catholic and Orthodox tradition, one would divest themselves of such material attachments so that all would be laboring together on level ground.

4.  Unfortunately, needing to make my fortune can become an excuse for never responding to what may be God’s clear calling on my life.  It’s a smoke screen.  It’s a way to rationalize away the voice of God.  Movement toward that calling can be inhibited because the nest egg is never considered by the individual to be sufficient enough.

Let me be clear.  I’m not dissing anyone who is doing well financially and particularly those who have learned the grace of giving and sacrificial stewardship and are called to the marketplace.  Rather, I am calling into question when the drive to attain such financial “freedom” is used as the justification for delayed obedience to God’s leading.

When I look for people who are grappling with the calling of God toward ministry that is apostolic in nature, one of the true tests of that calling is that money and financial security are the last and least issues to be considered.  What’s healthy is when these issues are the stubby little tail and not the dog.  When it is the other way around, it’s a portent for trouble.

I was listening to NPR today and the commentator was interviewing people regarding their responses to the recent Wall Street crash.  What adjustments would they have to make in their lives and expectations as a result?

The primary theme in their responses went something like this:  “The life of leisure I am anticipating in retirement may be delayed or may not happen.  My ability to quit my job, play golf, travel, lay on the beach and finally enjoy life is in jeopardy.”

I couldn’t help but think to myself, “What’s wrong with this picture?”  Plenty:

1. Where do we get this idea of “retiring?”  While it is deeply ingrained in the culture, I can’t find any biblical rational for such a concept.


2. Play golf, travel, and enjoy life?   What a prescription for self-absorbed misery!  Rather than giving oneself to significance in the latter half of life, such responses reflect a selfish sense of entitlement that pervades our society.


3. It is a sad commentary on work that so many people simply can’t wait to quit.  Rather than investing a lifetime of wisdom, time and talent in ways uniquely suited to one’s gifts and calling, way too many people endure jobs that suck the very life out of them.  They only stick it out in an 8-5 for the sake of a paycheck.  Tragic.

In Clinton’s leadership emergence theory, the end of life should be characterized by one’s “ultimate contribution.”  This is lived out in “convergence” and ultimately what he describes as “after-glow.”  Neither remotely resembles the culture’s concept of retirement.

Contrary to retirement—which is a stifling, dehumanizing and killing concept—I want to go out with my boots on and with my foot on the accelerator.  I think that’s the way God designed us as beings made in the imago dei rather than sliding into irrelevance with a life that does not finish well.

The economy is in a tailspin, unemployment is skyrocketing, and homes are in foreclosure.

How appropriate for an appeal to be made at the recent USC-Oregon football game at the LA Colosseum for folks to contribute further to the 2 million dollar endowment for Traveler, the white horse that is the mascot for the USC Trojans.  Let’s insure, the announcer said, that Traveler can get to all the games and do so in style.

Hey, nothing but the best for that horse!   Such a “let them eat cake” comment would have made Marie Antoinette smile.

Well, it’s time to re-engage.

I’ve taken a much needed break from posting and am ready as we move into the remaining months of 2008, to begin anew.  I hope to keep the conversations here fresh, creative, and provocative (in a sanctified kind of way).

Thanks for sticking your head under-the-iceberg and being a part!

This week, a hole blew out in the underbelly of a Quantas 747 over the Pacific. For anyone who does a considerable amount of flying, we all harbor those “what if” fears about what could happen on an airplane. Apart from the catastrophic, my shortlist includes:

1. Using the lavatory, my passport falls out of my shirt pocket into the toilet and I have to retrieve it, no matter what the ramifications.

2. Stuck in a window seat on the last row of the plane, next to a 300 lb person who snores.

3. At 35,000 feet, eating one of a couple of foods to which I am deadly allergic, beginning an anaphylacic reaction, and having to stab myself with an EpiPen (spring loaded injection).

4. Trapped on a 19 hour, full flight to Asia in a seat that does not recline.

5. Flying Aeroflot transatlantic, or anywhere for that matter.

6. Being a British Airways customer and losing luggage in the bowels of one of their new terminals at Heathrow.

7. Finding out what ingredients are really in those hard bread rolls that get served in plastic wrapping.

8. Sitting next to a baby with colic on a pan-oceanic flight when the parents are too tired to care.

9. Flying Northwest in the winter and being stuck on a runway for 12 hours.

10. Severe turbulence and no barf bags.

After stumbling onto Charles Wesley’s grave, we dropped into the parish church to which this graveyard originally belonged.

If its walls could talk ….

The same year Wesley died, a young baby was baptized here who grew up to be the poet, Lord Byron. Elizabeth and Robert Browning were married here. Francis Bacon was a parishioner. Lord Nelson worshiped in this place. And Charles Dickens used it as a backdrop for some of his writing, particularly David Copperfield.

But it was also a sober reminder that past glories don’t necessarily impact the present. What is left is a building that is more of a museum and only a mere shadow of its enormous prominence and past influence on the social order. Long gone are the days when it was regularly filled to its 3-4000 person capacity and the Christendom that it represented reigned.

I can’t help but wonder what lessons may be here for the American mega-church, particularly that social hegomony and size are fleeting.

This morning in London, I carved out some significant time to be with God.

During an unusual time of worship, God spoke on a variety of themes, but one which was powerful came through some old, simple lyrics, Part the Waters, on a Selah album:

When I think I’m going under, part the waters Lord.
When I feel the waves around me, calm the seas.

When I cry for help, oh hear me Lord, and hold out your hand.
Touch my life, still the raging storm in me.

I’ve journaled for many years. Today, I happened to pull off the shelf one of my earliest volumes and came across an entry in 1974, shortly before graduating from college. I wrote …

I have some fears on leaving college:

1. I fear loosing my idealism. Being out “in the real world” seems like it can produce narrow conservatism because of a constricted worldview.

2. Instead of being a critic of society and culture, I am fearful I would become a defender of it. I’m afraid of the encroachment of the world’s cultural values and that they would take over instead of maintaining a biblical perspective.

3. I fear clinging to security and particularly to money, and loosing a pilgrim mentality.

4. I fear loosing the excitement, freshness and looseness of being young and identifying with my generation in their 20s.

5. I fear not being able to be a “radical” for Jesus, i.e. capitulating to bourgeois complacency.

6. I fear intellectual stagnation and ceasing to learn and think.