Imagining what God will one day do is a compelling thought, is it not? Picturing how God is at work long-term puts our present-tense actions into perspective.

Ultimately, God is ushering in a kingdom that cannot be shaken!

Along the path to this kingdom there are two compelling mountains. In Hebrews 12:18-29, the author contrasts the mountain of fear with the mountain of joy.

The Mountain of Fear:

¹⁸ You have not come to a mountain that can be touched and that is burning with fire; to darkness, gloom and storm; ¹⁹ to a trumpet blast or to such a voice speaking words that those who heard it begged that no further word be spoken to them, ²⁰ because they could not bear what was commanded: “If even an animal touches the mountain, it must be stoned to death.” ²¹ The sight was so terrifying that Moses said, “I am trembling with fear.” 

Clearly, there is something terrifying about experiencing God! Moses was terrified at Mount Sinai as he felt God in his bones. He hid his face. According to Proverbs 9:10,

“The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” 

Just like we fear and respect a burning fire or powerful animal, so do we fear [respect] God. We revere God as the creator of the ENTIRE COSMOS as it continues to expand into Continue reading “God is Shaking the Hell out of Earth.” →

Silas, Maelin, you’re both asleep as I write. Your tiny eyes are closed, and the blankets you threw off during the night are in disarray around you.

You’re snug, cozy, secure.

When you’re awake you’re filled with wonder, energy, excitement, curiosity for life.

Needless to say, I’m a proud dad.

I’m proud of who each of you are. Silas, you’re fascinated with the world. Recently, your big phrase has been, “why daddy, why?” You have got to know how things work in the world. Maelin, you are bold, ruggedly driven to keep up with your brother who is more than twice your age. As a second son myself, I respect your tenacity [and you’re only 1!].

Right now, you’re both concerned about why mommy is away at class [because she’s learning!] or why daddy has to go to work [you’re going on your bike, daddy]. You want to hear our stories about the Gentle Giant, to read books with us, to go on adventures with us.

Eventually, you’re going to wonder new kinds of questions. You’ll begin to ask about what is the source of happiness and deep joy-why people flourish and find contentment in life. Conversely, you’ll want to know what causes unrest and violence in families and communities, what the source of evil is might be.

Mommy and I are going to do our absolute best to walk you each through these questions. We’ll talk about how God is good, how God created each of us-and this beautiful world we live in, and about how God is at work through the Spirit in the church that Jesus initiated-and how the church tries [with the Spirit’s help!] to point us toward the kingdom of heaven, the place where God’s reign is evident.

We’ll also tell you about new creation, the way that Jesus will return to earth and how heaven and earth will one day no longer be separate.

Chances are, there will be some confusion. You’ll wonder if what we’re saying is true. You’ll wonder how the kingdom of God operates. You’ll have doubts, for sure, but also times when you’re convinced God is really at work. Your faith will fluctuate, but your parents will be praying it forward at every step.

Now.

You’ll also have questions about sexuality, and whether or not you voice those questions to us, we are going to be talking through a lot of different things related to relationships and sexuality with you both!

Accordingly, I want to touch on an aspect of our current cultural situation. A lot of women have been recently adding portions of their life stories to a Twitter campaign. Using the hashtag #metoo, they’re letting the world know about how men in their lives have done them wrong.

And there is a massive response. Countless male celebrities and politicians are being called out for their sexual harassment, advances on women, their sexual assaults, their acts of rape. There is power in seeing such powerful men humbled. This happens at church too [#churchtoo], and it’s meaningful to see the hashtag campaign prompting some acts of inner-reformation to the faith community.

The #metoo campaign is giving voice and strength to women who have not felt empowered to share their pain-and we need to listen closely. Recently someone Tweeted about how Christmas is, in part, about believing a woman about her sexual experiences. Indeed, before a holy dream, Joseph had his doubts about his fiancé’s sex life!

When women gain the courage to honestly share their stories, it brings accountability to men who have taken advantage of their powerful positions.

All of that said, there are countless, well-meaning Tweets directed at men saying things along the lines of, “get better, men” or “come on men of America, step up your game.” This is a well-intentioned but sadly unhelpful sentiment, for it offers no pathway forward besides essentially pulling oneself up by the bootstraps.

This “get better” mentality imbues shame while failing to provide resources or direction. Yes, men must get better; but a Tweet won’t fix us. Holy Spirit-inspired, heart-based spiritual transformation will.

With the #metoo campaign happening, I want to offer three ways to not only stay far away from such accusations, but prevent the very conditions that allow for it-to experience heart transformation. The road toward sexual violence has a great many pitstops, from the way a young person observes their parents’ attitudes toward sex, to how they internalize those messages, to pornography or other sexual addictions, to how they approach the place of sex in relationships.

To change the world, we must ourselves be changed. 

To me, sex is to happen in the context of committed marriage, and women [and men too, obviously] are to be respected both relationally and sexually. This may sound odd or old-fashioned, but I believe this is the best way to approach relationships and sex.

The Bible never makes a separation between sex and marriage; they are always part of the same bond. I’m of that same mindset, and there happen to be a great number of resources and research that reveal where the Bible’s ancient wisdom intersects with contemporary life.

Anyway, here are a few admonitions that I want to impart to each of you, just a few steps that will keep you on a path that I pray will lead to relational wholeness. Even if you’re never as famous as Al Franken, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Clinton, Louis C.K., or Bill Cosby, the people you end up in relationship with have much to gain or lose as the women affected by these famous men now caught in their sin [sexual violations of various kinds].

1. Stay anchored in Jesus spiritually, and take his teachings seriously.   

As Christians, we metaphorically participate in the life of Jesus by participating in the body of Christ, the church. Jesus emptied Himself in order that God might fill Him up [Philippians 2:6-11], and in a similar way we, as Christians, learn to imitate Jesus and allow the Spirit of Christ to fill us up.

When it comes to sex, Jesus’s clearest teaching is probably the soaring Sermon on the Mount found in the New Testament’s first book, Matthew, in chapters 5-7. Eugene Peterson translates verses 27-28 like this:

You know the next commandment pretty well, too: ‘Don’t go to bed with another’s spouse.’ But don’t think you’ve preserved your virtue simply by staying out of bed. Your heart can be corrupted by lust even quicker than your body. Those leering looks you think nobody notices-they also corrupt. 

Jesus was talking to Jewish folks who were pretty well-acquainted the laws of the Pentateuch [first 5 books of the Bible]. But some Jewish folks had also gotten pretty good at finding ways around the law. A look into first-century rabbinical literature will reveal varying viewpoints on the permissibility of divorce for various reasons [like when a man’s wife fails to cook a meal to his liking-that’s a serious problem!].

Instead of entering the banter regarding the ins and outs of divorce, Jesus goes straight to the soul. He confronts the heart-attitudes that drive and direct us. Indeed, the heart can be corrupted rather quickly.

And how egregious are the consequences? It’s impossible to overestimate the pain that sexual violence causes. Women are driven to depression, anxiety, isolation, and even suicide. Don’t believe me? Start listening, please, not for me but for people who are affected. Talk to mom about what she has gone through, she’ll be more than willing to share with you. Talk to the [at least] one in three women who has experienced sexual trauma.

An old friend recently posted this picture on Facebook. This isn’t the complete text of what she posted, but it’s the beginning:

Surviving sexual assault is strange.
*
It is so many different things to so many different people.
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It is working downtown and getting out after dark. So, you make sure to take your ponytail out, change into shoes you can run in, activate your emergency apps, make sure not to wear a scarf or visible necklace, put your keys between your fingers, and call a friend who will talk to you on the walk to your car. Making sure to text when you get home safe.

*

*

This is the too-often unspoken reality of sexual assault and abuse. It’s fear that no one should have to experience.

Silas, Maelin, take Jesus seriously! He cares about your soul-yet also about other people in your lives who you affect. Your actions matter. Jesus wants the very best for you and even provides a path to get there. Would you grow into your full spiritual stature and take it? Respecting women and ordering your relationships rightly may take a lot of work, but it’s worth it.

I love you guys.

Ok, on to the next thought.

2. Connect with a local church and be willing to be changed through it. 

Yes, we have raised you guys in church, and by now you have seen the flaws and inconsistencies native to the community of faith.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not shaping you positively. If we disassociated ourselves with every flawed institution and person we’d be stranded entirely. There is no politician, business, organization, or individual apart from Jesus who is unflawed, who is without sin. And Jesus leads the church. That’s good news.

When we’re around church for long enough, it becomes less a place where we learn new things about God and more a place where we are reminded and empowered to live into what we already know. It becomes less a place where we find new spiritual insights and more a place where we have a community to put those insights into real-world practice.

Our communities shape us.

Be a faithful member of a community that will shape you to know and love and follow Jesus. 

3. Build real, lasting spiritual friendships 

There’s a reason I write this directly after the local church piece, for it is so often through the relationships begun in the church community that spiritual relationships grow.

That said, this particular admonition comes from two places within my life experience: 1. experiencing the power of deep spiritual friendship, and 2. at various seasons, not having those relationships and subsequently discovering what I was missing.

Through spiritual friends, God offers us godself. Created in God’s image, when we are at our best, we can help others experience the reality of God’s kingdom. 

There are parts of every person that reflect not our brokenness but God’s wholeness; not our dis-integration but God’s ordered-ness.

And this is why I want to encourage each of you to seek deep friendships, and to carve out a place for trust, for listening, for confession, for accountability, for support, and maybe all of this for a lifetime.

Silas, Maelin, we want your hearts to be transformed! Not only do we want you to stay out of any kind of trouble, but we want your soul to resonate with Jesus, the author and perfecter of your faith. We don’t want you to live lives that are based on looking good and pretending to be some awesome person; instead, we want to deeply desire the things we were created to desire and to walk humbly with Jesus.

Love, mommy and daddy.

***

A number of years ago, I was chatting with a friend about the military. Even then, I was a pacifist, but I still admitted that if I were forced to enlist via a hypothetical draft, I’d comply. I’ve become even more of a pacifist since then, but I’ve been mulling over what it means to be an American Christian.

There’s a wide chasm, I think, between American Christians and Christian Americans. Recently someone I follow on Twitter compared the “America First” brand of American Nationalism to an alternative kind of worship, an alternative to the worship of Yahweh, the God who we know best through the Son, Jesus.

There are Americans who baptize their unwavering nationalism with Christianity, seeing at as a means to support American ideals. Conversely, there are Christians like me who try to somehow make sense of their nation-state in regards to their faith. I realize this is a gross oversimplification of the matter, but it’s a starting place nonetheless.

With the premise that every nation-state is merely a construct, an invention, and that the red/white/blue flag represents a narrative that means very different things to different people groups-allow me to attempt to navigate the intricate link between Christian faith and identity and one’s sense of place within the world as it is currently divided into continents, countries, and districts.

I remember one Thanksgiving when we went around the table, naming one thing for which we’re thankful. Various siblings, aunts, and uncles, named things like freedom, enough food, a solid job, education.

When it got around to my  grandmother, her answer came without pause: “I’m thankful to be an American.”

I was not yet twenty at the time. Now I’m 30. And yet, as I relive the moment, her words strike me in a very similar way. How many people sacrificed for her to be able to be thankful to be an American?

Native Americans immediately think about a long history of displacement.

African Americans may think about slavery and the civil rights era, and maybe about police violence toward young black men, or about the centuries of marginalization that underlines their American experience.

Japanese Americans might think about the not-so-distant American internment camps where Japanese families were sent during WWII.

Mexican Americans may think about the 8 US states that were formerly territories of Mexico, then again about the irony of “crossing the border” to get “into” the United States. I’m typing this article in formerly Mexican land.

European Americans‘ thoughts might drift naturally and ethnocentrically toward Washington, Jefferson, JFK, Lincoln, or other celebrated American leaders who happen to be white.

Any one of these people groups could recall family members who served in the military at any stage of American history. This applies to my own family, and I’m thankful for the sacrifices both my grandfathers made to serve during WWII-an important war even from the vantage point of my pacifist sensibilities. But that is only one dimension of the multitudinous sacrifices made by numerous ethnic groups.

If we’re really honest, we might all be just a teensy bit ethnocentric-and that can be just fine or it can really fog our vision. But my point in bringing up the various ways various ethnic subgroups might understand American history is simply to note how much has happened in this swath of land over the millennia.

So many people have lost their rights, their dignity, their lives in the long journey toward America becoming the nation it is today. So many have gained unfathomable riches from the systems that exist in our nation-state. And yes, of course, the United States has participated in some very good things too-of this there is no doubt at all.

In full disclosure, I benefit greatly at a personal level from the personal and systemic losses of many other people groups. I benefit from the gains too. But at this point, I’m trying to figure out how to be thankful for what I have inherited while rejecting oversimplification and glamorization of the American story.

It’s in only seeing one side of the American story that we become complacent, self-righteous, and unhelpfully angry.

Now, I want to attempt to make a connection. How does allegiance not to country but to Jesus calls us out of this slough of ethnocentrism and national identity? How do we quell the tandem voices of racism and xenophobia? How can live and participate in the world’s unfolding narrative as Americans even as we’re confronted with the bloodshed that laces our history?

I believe transformation comes when we hear our deepest identity: we are sons and daughters of God [Galatians 3:26], made in God’s image [Genesis 1:26-28], sisters and brothers with Jesus himself [Hebrews 2:11]. More than Americans, more than members of a particular demographic, more than members of a particular orientation, we are united in Jesus. 

Whether or not we believe this matters, I think. It’s too easy to get swept up into the push and pull of nationalist political rhetoric if we lack a deeper spiritual foundation. We Christians believe God has extended us a massive amount of grace and that Jesus has paid an extremely high cost-his life-to conquer death, create reconciliation between God and humanity, and atone for sin.

If we genuinely believe God is at work in the world, and that God invites us to partner with him in renewing the earth, matters of American identity quickly fade in terms of importance.

This isn’t to say our national stories are unimportant or trivial. There are very meaningful narratives that can give Americans a sense of togetherness and build bridges of solidarity.

Just a couple weeks ago I was at the DeYoung museum here in San Francisco. On the second floor, there is a room filled with American art. One piece is especially moving to me. It features John Brown, a radical abolitionist who was on his way to execution for leading a slave rebellion, kissing a child, presumably his own.

That day a couple, presumably from another country [they were not speaking English], were observing the piece. I certainly could be wrong in my language-based assessment. Ostensibly, they misunderstood the gravity of the painting, for they proceeded to take smiling pictures in front of it. As they continued taking smiling pictures, the woman backed right into the painting, her hair and shoulders brushing up against it, moving its frame against the museum wall.

Soon, the museum security was on the scene, firmly admonishing her to maintain at least 24 inches between herself and the art.

Of course they gently complied.

The feeling within me as I observed was a mixture of incredulity and frustration. It seems that a middle-aged couple would know typical rules for an art museum. Much more, taking these kinds of pictures in front of a painting that features an execution is simply disrespectful. And the content of the painting made the picture-taking even more unnecessary.

All of that aside, the narrative of John Brown reminds us Americans of the suffering endured by generations of African American slaves. Yes, John Brown was violent, and we can sit comfortably and have a conversation about how he could have responded, but history is history and this is the desperation Brown felt. Some vilify him as an unthinking terrorist; some consider him a hero and martyr. But regardless, he is an important character in the drama of our nation-state.

In that moment, I felt very American. But I didn’t sense that American sentiment because I’m adoring the image of a country that stands as a shining beacon of hope for the rest of the world to see. I felt American because I have a unique personal connection to the people, places, and experiences of this country; I have lived here, loved here, and am raising my family here. And I don’t think I should be faulted for appreciated the country that has shaped me so deeply.

It’s romantic, this grouping of mountains, rivers, plains, fields, and deserts! The contours of my childhood included the vast forests, fields, and rivers of Northwest Michigan. I remember family trips to Colorado, Washington, Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas. I dated an African American for a couple years and felt the tangible difficulty of the American story as our relationship eventually faltered. I live in an area now where one can procure food from just about any remote corner of the world including Eritrea [and there are numerous Eritrean restaurants, not just one!]. This reminds all of us that America can indeed support and include people groups that differ from the earliest European settlers that have culturally and governmentally stayed in power.

As the current political season wanes on, as we do our best to shape our country into the kind of place we think it should be, I pray we remember our long and violent history. And there is no need to compare America’s violent history to other nations, this is unhelpful. Looking past our nation’s many sins can quickly lead us to an unchecked and one-dimensional nationalism that turns us into automatons who worship at the feet of the leader with the most braggadocio. Focusing too much on America’s many problems, on the other hand, can overwhelm us and turn us into self-righteous sidewalk prophets with no sense of gratitude for the good that is, by default, mixed with the bad.

It’s better to know the American stories of heartache and loss, of overcoming and transforming, commending them to honest, realistic memory while searching for true and lasting hope from our Lord, Savior, Brother, and Teacher: Jesus.