Missio Dei Suburbia

Christians and Politics

This will show up sometime in The Oconee Leader. I'm channeling two semesters as a political science major, involvement in two presidential campaigns on a local level, pastoring in the Bible Belt and thoughts from Charlie Drew's book, A Public Faith.

Christians are lousy at politics.

Thirty years of organized evangelicalism as a political entity has failed to bring about the kingdom of God or better days for all or much else besides the centaurian cross-breeding of conservative social policy and the Republican party. Evangelicals have become a constituency to be pandered to and for the most part we have taken the bit. Walk into almost any church in Oconee County this Sunday (including mine) and political conversation will sound like talking points from Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly or any number of conservative pundits.

I believe that followers of Jesus Christ can and absolutely must walk down a new political road and become the kind of people who provide the resources for hope and change and unity that politicians of all stripes promise but simply cannot deliver. There are deep divisions in our country and in this county – to ignore them or to attempt to wish them away is both naïve and the height of tomfoolery. This is not a call to ignore our differences, only to put down the guns, knives, ninja stars and other rhetorical weaponry that so often accompanies political dialogue.

Living Outside the Bubble

Earlier this summer, I wrote an article about the opportunity that followers of Jesus have to live outside of the bubble that Christianity creates in places like Oconee County. Instead of living as though the church is a place of safety, refuge and protection from a dangerous, hostile and nasty world, the Scriptures teach us that the church is the people that God has gathered together in Jesus Christ to join Him in putting broken people and a broken world back together.

That shouldn’t negate what goes on in our worship gatherings, Sunday School classes and smaller groups that meet throughout the week around town – but it does mean that even those gatherings need to constantly have their gaze turned upward and outward. The church with the healthiest relationships among its members is the church that lives outside of the bubble. Churches implode because the energy that should be directed towards the kind of worship that spills into everyday life and the people around us gets expended on trivial internal matters.

Because Jesus left heaven to come to earth and further his mission to renew and restore all that was wrecked and ruined in the universe, those of us who follow him should be the kind of people whose lives add value to the community around us. That’s what it looks like to live outside of the bubble – to make Oconee County a better place so that all of us might know that there is a God who is true and good and all-satisfying.

To live outside the bubble, we need to breathe in the fresh air of the gospel. I’m not sure how it happens but Christians pick up this nasty addiction called religion – a carcinogen that pollutes our lives and the air around us by leading us to think that God won’t love us unless we’re good people. So we try hard to be better than other people and because God can’t see how good I am unless I’m better than you, I’m going to find intentional and inadvertent ways to make it obvious to God and everyone else that I grade out better than you and therefore deserve whatever good God has stored in his prize closet far more than you do.

Are we addicted to religion? We might be if we think the biggest problems in the community resides anywhere outside of our own heart. While we might get our kicks broadcasting the failures of others and launching verbal tirades against people who aren’t like us, the Scriptures teach that failure is universal and that we’ve all vandalized God’s perfect world. I know that owning up to our own junk isn’t all that popular – who wants to run around feeling bad about who we are and what we’ve done? Actually, that’s another symptom of religion addiction – thinking that our identity is determined by how well we’re living. Religion says that the Christian life is about what we do today but the gospel declares that the Christian life is always about what Jesus did for us on the cross.

Does that mean that it doesn’t matter how we live? Of course not – our life is a reflection on who God is and what he’s about in this world. But we don’t always look like Jesus. Only the gospel humbles us with that reality without crushing us, freeing us without allowing us to float off into a life of our own design. Because we are already loved, our failures don’t destroy us and our success isn’t some kind of badge we use to wield our moral authority in the community.

Only the gospel transforms us from mercenaries to missionaries. We’re don’t have to hunt for pagans or hide from the world – we’re free to love our neighbor and co-worker and classmates by listening well and learning each others’ stories and laughing at our own mistakes. The reformation that Oconee County desperately needs begins with a simple, radical love that flows from a bleeding Savior. Only when we see Jesus bleed out for us will we bleed out for others by inviting them into our home, giving the glory and taking the blame at work, carving out time for a cup of coffee and a conversation that connects their world to Jesus.

Resurrection and Referendums

Here's the new article for this week's Oconee Leader.

If you care about the upcoming referendum that would allow restaurants in Oconee County to serve beer and wine, then you should care deeply about Easter.

This Sunday, millions of Christians around the world will remember and celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Because the followers of Jesus have historically considered Easter to be the most important day of the year – yes, even more important than the beginning of March Madness – Easter and the days around it are filled with activity…dramatic presentations, Easter egg drops, foot washing and communion services. If activity is the measure of meaningfulness, then Easter in Watkinsville is the most meaningful time of the year.

But beyond the bare fact that Christians believe that an actual man named Jesus died only to come back to life more human than before, I think most of us struggle to see Easter as much more than a reason to buy candy and pick up a new outfit for us and the kids. We know that Jesus experienced resurrection, but do we know why that matters?

So that brings us back to the longstanding issue of beer and wine in local restaurants. There are county commissioners and citizens on both sides of the conversation and at times that conversation has become heated and pointed because both sides are convinced that their position on the issue is the best solution for the county. It’s actually a remarkable picture to take in as men and women with different convictions give themselves to the good of other people. And perhaps the tone of our dialogue might change if we could appreciate the desire of others to make life better for everyone, even if we don’t agree with how they propose we get there.

Now here’s where Easter and resurrection come in. It’s not enough for us to declare that Jesus is risen – we have to push deeper into that reality and discover what all the commotion is about. And my humble proposition is that Easter matters because God’s work of re-creation in Jesus on that first Easter is what he intends to do in all of creation. God’s mission in this world is to make everything sad untrue, to repair everything that’s been broken, to return everything that’s been lost – and a risen Jesus is the first note in God’s symphony of redemption and renewal.

This means that our desire for a better Oconee County that leads us to stand on different sides of this particular issue resonates deeply with the plans and purposes of God for his world. Because God cares about every person, every stray dog, every blade of grass in Oconee County, it makes sense that we’d care about the impact this proposal will have in the lives of all who call this place home.

But there’s more to Easter than just painting a picture of how life should be as we work to create an Oconee County where everything works together to create the good life where everything flourishes as every need is met and every good idea gets used and every ounce of talent finds its fullest potential. Only the reality of resurrection on that first Easter and the promise of resurrection for God’s world and God’s people provide the resources to live with the humility and confidence we need to get where God intends for this small part of his world to go.

Several months ago, I wrote that there is nothing in the Scriptures that allows anyone to categorically declare alcohol as evil, yet we would be profoundly foolish to ignore the volatility of alcohol. This means that the way forward calls for a humility that refuses to thump Bibles and resists the urge to only look at the economic bottom line. And lest we confuse humility with being spineless, we also need to say that the reality of resurrection creates an unbelievable confidence that what we’re after really matters in the big scheme of things.

And certainly there are plenty of humble people who don’t follow Jesus and confidence doesn’t only belong to those who walk in the name of Christ, but what we need in the days ahead is the melding together of humility and confidence that only the story of Easter and God’s intent to redeem and renew everything in and through Jesus can create.

Happy Easter – Jesus Christ is alive and well. Grace and peace and hope to all.

Jesus and Politics

My newest article for The Oconee Leader:

So I heard this rumor that a presidential election is going on. Maybe you’ve noticed. Two years of watching men and woman jockey for the right to become mistrusted and second-guessed by half of the country and hated by a good part of the world.  And people think dog fighting is inhumane.

Part of the inhumanity of our modern political process stems from the fact that how we vote goes a long way in shaping our cultural identity. We gain the label of ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’ – and while we only connect those names to social concerns and economic theories, the reality is that we’re talking about two very different ways of seeing the world and determining what’s valuable in us and around us.

In more liberal, non-traditional communities, who you are is determined by what you make of yourself. Instead of allowing family or circumstances to dictate what you can or can’t do, liberal communities value the individual’s unique and self-determined identity. Not only does this create a diversity of hairstyles and fashion statements, but it helps us understand why people can passionately insist on a woman’s personal right to choose abortion or to love whomever they want, however they choose.

But in conservative, traditional communities, your identity is fairly well predetermined because who you are has everything to do with how well you fit the unspoken standards and values of that particular community. Someone moving into town will be considered normal as long as they look like, vote like, and act like us. So you end up with school uniforms and churches that insist that everyone – including people who have no interest in Jesus and even less interest in the church -act like them on secondary matters such as the consumption of alcohol. Communities are formed with almost no racial and socio-economic diversity in neighborhoods that all look the same and everyone says hello but no one knows each other because you can learn all that really matters about someone by what they drive and what they wear.

So where does Jesus fit into our political world? Without delving into side roads and rabbit trails, I’m pretty sure that Jesus would have a difficult time embracing any brand of contemporary politics carte blanche. And while that shouldn’t be taken to mean that followers of Jesus should abandon the political process on a local, state, or federal level, it does mean is that Christians should bring greater balance and stability to an increasingly volatile situation rather than exacerbating the problem by insisting that faithful Christians must embrace a single political party or persuasion.

The truth is that Christianity is far too conservative for liberals and way too liberal for conservatives. The way of Jesus is equally concerned for the rights of individuals and the health of our communities. The message of Christianity that we call the gospel not only deals with the brokenness of individuals but the dysfunction of systems and the injustice of nations. Our identity as followers of Jesus is found in the call of God to make him known by joining him on his mission that emanates from the cross of Jesus Christ.

For churches, this means that we have no business involving ourselves organizationally and institutionally in endorsing political candidates. To do so stands outside our God-given purpose and is practically impossible given that no political party or candidate will consistently uphold both the rights of individuals and the health of our communities. For individual Christians, following Jesus in politics means that whichever political persuasion we’re drawn to, we must always champion those positions which declare and display the kingdom of God while seeking to reform, reshape, and redirect those which deconstruct the vision and values of God for his world and his people.

Advent Conspiracy, Week Four

Apparently, this Advent Conspiracy thing is catching on. Tom Krattenmaker mentions AC in his USA Today column this morning.

Here's what is supposed to show up in The Oconee Leader this week. Thanks again to Rob Peecher for running these articles every week.

Pop quiz: what one word will describe Christmas morning for you and your family? Here are the three most likely answers from the good people in Oconee County.

Tradition.

Christmas is about memories. Road trips to visit family. Christmas Eve candlelight services. Reading ‘The Night Before Christmas.’ Not sleeping on the night before Christmas. Leaving milk and cookies for Santa. Dad eating the aforementioned milk and cookies. Little kids with bed head and footie pajamas hyperventilating with excitement and anticipation. Ripping open presents. Christmas music in the background. Playing with new toys. Trying on new clothes. Everyone. Is. Happy.

Or how about this? Family.

Nothing like Christmas to get three brothers who are normally plotting bodily harm against each other to transform into the best of friends. Co-conspirators. Sharing the thrill of hitting the jackpot together. It’s the college freshman returning home to something familiar only to find that life didn’t stop when they headed off to school. Parents adjusting to the new son-in-law. Granddaddy in his red Christmas pants that rest just below his armpits. Grandma kissing everyone including crazy Cousin Eddie from Eastaboga. Everyone passing the new baby around like a bucket of chicken. Group pictures where everyone smiles and will later wonder why they ever thought wearing that outfit was a good idea.

But then if we’re being honest. Presents.

Loot. Bling. Stuff. Dare I say – booty. The hopes and fears of the last three months since we made our list are realized in those critical moments where we wonder why Mom uses an entire roll of scotch tape to wrap every present. The frantic destruction of perfectly good bows and boxes when we’re kids gives way to a veneer of patience and an air of something close to indifference in adults as we unwrap what we hope and pray to whatever gods are out there that this is a touch iPod and not a solar calculator.

Sound familiar?

Here’s what I’m wondering – as good as your Christmas is going to be, what if there’s something we’re missing that would make it even better. Better than the fruit cake from Aunt Gertie? Surprisingly, yes.

For the past three weeks, I’ve encouraged you to consider becoming part of Advent Conspiracy (www.adventconspiracy.org), an international movement of churches and individuals who have joined together to spend less on gifts for family and friends, choosing to give relational gifts and use the money saved to help some of the 1.1 billion people around the world who don’t have access to clean water. Nothing like a call to compassion to dampen the wildfires of consumerism that marks Christmas in pretty much every home in our neighborhood.

But at the end of the day, trading in consumerism for compassion rings a bit hollow. Don’t get me wrong, it’s better to give than to receive, right? Right? But what if there’s something more revolutionary to this conspiracy than clean water? What if Christmas is ultimately about living water that came to earth as a baby born to peasants who would bring hope, peace, love and joy by being poured out so that thirsty people like you and me and crazy Cousin Eddie from Eastaboga would never be thirsty again? What if making sure that everyone gets clean water is part of helping those same people find their deepest thirst quenched by an all-satisfying, infinitely-valuable Jesus?

Want to do something radical this Christmas? Worship Christ. You’ll find him buried beneath the Santa wrapping paper in your living room on Christmas morning. At last that’s where he tends to end up at my house.

Advent Conspiracy. Love All. Spend Less. Give More. All in the name of Worshipping More.

Advent Conspiracy, Week Three

Here's this week's article in The Oconee Leader:

So when did Christianity lose its soul?

It’s one thing for a band to sell out and lose their edge in order to sell a few more records. I get that – it’s hard to resist the money that is reserved for artists that can craft their sound to the plastic, vanilla melodies that attract the masses. But when did following Jesus become this polyester cliché that ends up trying to find life in days gone by or in the values of the world we live in? And when did Christmas stop being about Jesus and his conspiracy to change the world through compassion?

I know that those of us who do church are going to hear a lot about Jesus over the next couple of weeks. In an effort to counter the increasingly consumeristic message of Christmas in our culture, we’ll program the Christmas season to death – children’s musicals and Sunday School Christmas parties and special sermon series. And the focus will be on the story of Jesus’ birth and if we’re lucky we won’t be subjected to vapid reminders that ‘Jesus is the reason for the season’ – especially if the season is going to continue to look like it does for most Christians.

What has Christmas become for the followers of Jesus? Not the weeks leading up to Christmas – but the actual day itself. Has anyone noticed that for all of our talk about Jesus in the days and nights before Christmas, he somehow gets lost underneath the piles of presents and ripped-apart wrapping paper? Maybe it’s just me, but I’m pretty sure that my thirty-two Christmases to date have had little to do with Jesus and a lot to do with what this Santa character dropped down the chimney for me.

What would it look like if December 25th took on the heartbeat of Jesus when he came to earth? Certainly there would still be gifts since giving is at the heart of God’s mission in our world. But it shouldn’t be lost on us that when God wanted to show his love for us, he didn’t send stuff, he sent Jesus. He sent a person, not a present.

What I think this means for us here in Oconee County is that our gifts never get detached from the gifts of time and self. It’s not about the money – relational giving can include a day out taking pictures or a weekend in Chicago. Maybe it’s a new guitar strap and an afternoon playing vintage guitars at Musician’s Warehouse in Athens. Maybe it’s the college guy who drives back to Marietta to spend an afternoon with his mom and at the end hands her a scrapbook of pictures of the two of them throughout his life. The possibilities are as wide as our interests – what do they like to do and how can you give yourself to do it with them.

I’ll be the first to tell you that this won’t be easy – it’s hard to give this way because it asks us to give our time and energy which we really don’t have to do when we hand over a gift card to Best Buy on Christmas morning. And let’s be honest, if someone gave us the choice between the Best Buy gift card and something ‘homemade,’ we might think we’re getting ripped off if we don’t choose the gift card. What we’ve come to value at Christmas are not the people around us but the stuff that their money can buy us; instead of loving one another, could it be that we’re using each other to get what we want?

I know that more than a few of us have already bought all our presents for this year. Maybe all that happens this Christmas is that conversations begin to happen. It might take more than a few weeks for your family to catch up with where you are in re-imagining a Christmas that looks more like the relational gift named Jesus that God gave to the world 2,000 years ago. So would we all remember that conspiracies are about creating freedom, not new rules – and would we remember that the process of change is usually rather slow as God chooses to work in lifetimes, not days.

Advent Conspiracy. Worship More. Spend Less. Give More. Love All.

Advent Conspiracy, Week Two

This week's article in The Oconee Leader:

I’m pretty sure slavery doesn’t come to mind when we think about Christmas, but the world Jesus walked into 2,000 years ago was a world enslaved not just to a foreign empire but to that kingdom’s values of greed and self-promotion. One of the reasons that Jesus’ life of humility, poverty and self-sacrifice drew in so many people was because of the contrast between Jesus’ kingdom and the Roman kingdom.

I’m wondering what it would look like to enter into the story of Christmas, the story of a God who breaks into our world to free people from slavery to the values of a world in rebellion. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t look like $475 billion dollars, which is the amount of money that the National Retail Federation estimates will be spent in November and December on Christmas in the United States. Just to put this in perspective, one million seconds comes out to around 11 days. A billion seconds is somewhere in the neighborhood of 32 years. 475 billion seconds? About 15,200 years – or just two years shorter than Georgia’s winning streak over Tech in football.

$475 billion. That averages out to $923.36 per person that will be spent on Christmas. We might not live in the shadow of the Roman Empire but it’s hard to ignore the reality that there is another empire of consumerism and materialism that threatens our faithfulness to Jesus.

That’s what worries me about Christmas in Oconee County. To the degree that Christmas for followers of Jesus looks like Christmas for everyone else, we have to wonder whose kingdom we belong to? Could it be that our hunger for Christmas to be different – more meaningful and less hectic – begins with something as simple as rejecting cultural trends towards overspending and over-consumption?

The truth is that many of us don’t have that much money available to spend on Christmas for everyone around us and so we’ll spend months trying to get out of debt, only to find that the presents we bought in the name of Jesus have only furthered an addiction and slavery to consumerism and materialism in both ourselves and our children. And so our spending on Christmas this year will move us further and further away from Jesus next year as we give into a culture that tells us what to buy, wear, and spend with no regard to making much of Christ.

So we’re asking you to be part of Advent Conspiracy (www.adventconspiracy.org), a movement of people and churches around the world that invites people to recover the scandalous hope of Christmas by worshiping Jesus through giving less expensive, relational gifts for the purpose of giving the money saved towards meeting real needs in the world around us. We’re not looking to get rid of Christmas; we’re looking to save it from being hijacked by our self-driven agendas.

At the end of the day, Advent Conspiracy isn’t ultimately about money. It’s about creating an opportunity to upend the false hopes of how we do Christmas by giving gifts that give people more than just what our money can buy them. By using our time, creativity and talents, we’re not only relieving ourselves of the stress of stretching our budget to fit our Christmas list, we’re entering into the story of Christ who with simple and humble means battled the evils of greed and selfishness in his own culture.

Advent Conspiracy – Worship More. Spend Less. Give More. Love All.

Advent Conspiracy, Week One

This year, Christ Church has joined Advent Conspiracy, an international movement restoring the scandal of Christmas by worshiping Jesus through compassion, not consumption. You can read more about AC here.

In conjunction with our hope that the days leading up to Christmas become a time where we worship more, spend less, give more, and love all - The Oconee Leader is running a series of articles written by me in an effort to see Christmas become something different in Oconee County.

Here's the first article:

 

A New Way to Save Water

Here's my next article for our local paper, The Oconee Leader:

So I’m using less water these days. I’m turning off the faucet when I brush my teeth and shave. We’re using more paper plates and plastic utensils around the house. I’m even cutting down my 20 minute shower/sauna every morning that I use to thaw out since my pregnant wife leaves the thermostat somewhere between meat locker and deep freeze.

Six months ago, water conservation ranked somewhere between NASCAR and voluntary root canals on my list of interests – which in my world means it wasn’t on the radar screen. Droughts are things that happen in Africa. This is America after all – isn’t the ability to fill latex balloons with water and launch them with a giant slingshot one of our inalienable rights?

But not now. Lakes are drying up. Gardens and lawns are turning to dust. Governor Perdue is getting ready for a steel cage match with Governor Riley over in Alabama – winner takes all the water they want. It’s gotten so bad that at least two different rumors have made the rounds about UGA canceling the remainder of its home football games this fall. That, my friends, is a sure sign of the apocalypse.

So we’ve turned to conservation. Saving water. Doing stuff that in the past would have gotten us labeled as tree-hugging liberals, people who have watched Bambi three times too many and have become convinced that pure, innocent Mother Earth is being pillaged and plundered by mean, nasty evil humans driving SUVs.

It’s amazing what we’ll do in the name of self-preservation. Or rather, it’s amazing at how quickly we’ll change our habits and our behaviors in order to save our own skin. An inequitable distribution of water leading to drought is not a new problem – it’s just a new problem for me. And so now it matters.

Here’s what I’m worried about for myself when it comes to saving water and other environmental concerns – when drought conditions subside, will I go back to old patterns of life because my well-being is no longer threatened? Is there nothing more to conservation than romanticism or pragmatism – something that is bigger, deeper, wider than me?

In the ninth chapter of the Old Testament book of Genesis, God voluntarily enters into a relationship with the earth – a relationship in which God promises to save creation from the abuse inflicted upon it by humanity (see Romans 8) and from the ability of God himself to destroy the earth as he had just done with a cataclysmic flood.

What I find interesting is that God tells us about this saving relationship he has with the earth. And I think he does so to remind us that he loves and cares for what he created. Instead of being driven by self-interest, self-preservation, or self-centeredness, following God in the way of Jesus creates a radical ecology that conserves water because wise consumption of God’s resources is good for trees and freshwater mussels – things God made and loves and cares for deeply.

Because we understand from the Scriptures and history and our own lives that sin gets a hold of all of us and unravels everything good that God has created, we respect nature even though God has given us power over it. Once we realize that sin disfigures everything, including nature, we begin to work to heal the hurts of creation because if we think that beach sunsets and snow-capped mountains are breathtaking now, imagine what they’ll look like when God gets done putting them back together!

This drought is merely a loud reminder of a much larger ecological problem of misuse and abuse that many of us – particularly Christians – are complicit to. And that is a tragedy because only the gospel story of creation-fall-restoration leads us to care about things like the environment for the right reasons. Only the gospel cares about this world not simply because it is useful but because God loves it and promises to save it.

Suburban Justice

I'm in the middle of a four-week preaching series on compassion, mercy and justice in the suburbs and figured I'd use that as the reason for this month's article in The Oconee Leader. The print version won't be out for a week or two, but I'll go ahead and end the suspense by posting the article here:

I wonder sometimes if I actually believe the Bible. Not because I don’t think it’s true but because the true stuff in there really bothers me sometimes. I don’t mind hearing that God loves me (on my terms, of course) but I have to admit that I really don’t like all this talk about doing justice that you find in the Scriptures.

Maybe you’re not much for reading the Bible or maybe this one slipped by you, but God regularly and routinely tells us that life as a follower of Jesus includes a display of justice. When I think of justice, I think Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and the rest of the Justice League. I think of legal justice. I think of Buford T. Justice from the Smokey and the Bandit movies. And because life in our quiet hamlet of Watkinsville doesn’t really require superheroes or Jackie Gleason, justice isn’t much on my radar.

But God keeps talking about it. A lot. So much that you have to quit listening in order to avoid it. I’ve thought about it – not listening – but have opted instead to just ignore God and worry about the really important stuff like if selling beer in the County will lead to strip clubs and whether getting a tattoo means I have the mark of Satan on me. But I have a hard time finding anything in the Bible that puts the kibosh on drinking and body art unless you completely ignore stuff like context, so I’m back to this whole issue of justice.