Yesterday, I listened again to Krista Tippet’s interview with Jaroslav Pelikan on Speaking of Faith: The Need for Creeds. Later in the day, I did some reading of Pelikan on the internet. Two quotations of his have been ringing in my ears. The first I found on numerous pages:

If Christ is risen, nothing else matters. And if Christ is not risen—nothing else matters.

The second quotation comes from the Speaking of Faith interview. As Pelikan and Tippet discussed the Maasai Creed, he refers to the important feedback loop evangelism creates. As we reach out and express the Christian story in ways that make sense to different cultures, we find that we understand new aspects and see new angles of the story.

[I]t is not enough to Christianize Africa. We have to Africanize Christianity.

Unpacking the riches in these two quotations could take a lifetime.

In an excerpt from The Joyful Christian, C.S. Lewis aptly describes the necessity of both personal experience and doctrine in the Christian life. He shows the connection between the two. As someone who has encountered God in the study of Christian beliefs, I face the regular challenge to remember that knowing things about God is not the same thing as knowing God. To read about doctrine is not the same thing as encountering the real God. On the other hand, I appreciate Lewis’ description of doctrine as the amalgamation of lots of peoples’ real encounters with God. Anyway, here is Lewis:

In a way I quite understand why some people are put off by Theology. I remember once when I had been giving a talk to the R.A.F., an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, “I’ve no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I’m a religious man too. I know there’s a God. I’ve felt him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that’s just why I don’t believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about him. To anyone who’s met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!”

Now in a sense I quite agreed with that man. I think he had probably a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from something real, to something less real. In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from real waves to a bit of colored paper. But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only colored paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single isolated glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America.

Now Theology is like the map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But the map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God—experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you or I are likely to get on our own way are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further, you must use the map. You see, what happened to that man in the desert may have been real, and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes of it. It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it. In fact, that is just why a vague religion—all about feeling God in nature, and so on—is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work; like watching the waves from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way, and you will not get eternal life simply feeling the presence of God in flowers or music. Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps without going to sea. Nor will you be very safe if you go to sea without a map.

While in Hawaii last week—about which I’ll write more later—I read William Willimon’s thought-provoking book on clergy ethics, Calling and Character: Virtues of the Ordained Life. He writes specifically to those ordained for ministry, but because of the difficulty it is within the Body of Christ to distinguish one member’s ethical responsibilities from another’s, much of what Willimon writes is relevant to the whole Church. I appreciate greatly how he describes the necessity of community in order to practice Christian ethics.

We ought to placard over all Christian ethics, “DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME.” That is, do not try to live nonviolently, simply, or graciously without a community strong enough to back you up in such endeavors. Do not try to be extraordinarily faithful apart from a community that is extraordinarily forgiving. Violence, servility to the powers, and deceit come quite naturally to us. The lone individual, attempting to stand alone is no match for the subtle and persistent pressures of the empire. Do not attempt to protect the life of the unborn apart from a community that assumes responsibility for those who are ill equipped to have children in isolation and loneliness. It is the church that makes Christian ethics make sense. (86-87)

I’ll likely post a few quotations over the next few weeks since I found Calling and Character especially invigorating and thought-provoking. But anyone who has read or listened to Willimon will not be surprised that I found the book thought-provoking.

I recently saw John Patrick Shanley’s film, Doubt that he adapted to the screen from a play he wrote. For the week after I watched it, not an hour of the day went by without me thinking about it or at least about its discussion of doubt. A common perception is that doubt is the opposite of faith. I believe, however, that faith is bigger than doubt, and that faith actually contains doubt within it. Certainty seems to be the opposite of doubt. We can describe faith as doubt and certainty. I’d like to explore these matters in a series of posts. What do you think of my description of faith as certainty and doubt?

Both the play and film open with a haunting sermon from Father Flynn, which I will quote in its entirety. I find great comfort and challenge in these words.

What do you do when you’re not sure? That’s the topic of my sermon today. You look for God’s direction and can’t find it. Last year when President Kennedy was assassinated, who among us did not experience the most profound disorientation. Despair. “What now? Which way? What do I say to my kids? What do I tell myself?” It was a time of people sitting together, bound together by a common feeling of hopelessness. But think of that! Your bond with your fellow beings was your despair. It was a public experience, shared by everyone in our society. It was awful, but we were in it together! How much worse is it then for the lone man, the lone woman, stricken by a private calamity? “No one knows I’m sick. No one knows I’ve lost my last real friend. No one knows I’ve done something wrong.” Imagine the isolation. You see the world as through a window. On the one side of the glass: happy, untroubled people. On the other side: you. Something has happened, you have to carry it, and it’s incommunicable. For those so afflicted, only God knows their pain. Their secret. The secret of their alienating sorrow. And when such a person, as they must, howls to the sky, to God: “Help me!” What if no answer comes? Silence. I want to tell you a story. A cargo ship sank and all her crew was drowned. Only this one sailor survived. He made a raft of some spars and, being of a nautical discipline, turned his eyes to the Heavens and read the stars. He set a course for his home, and, exhausted, fell asleep. Clouds rolled in and blanketed the sky. For the next twenty nights, as he floated on the vast ocean, he could no longer see the stars. He thought he was on course by there was no way to be certain. As the days rolled on, and he wasted away with fevers, thirst and starvation, he began to have doubts. Had he set his course right? Was he still going on towards his home? Or was he horribly lost and doomed to a terrible death? No way to know. The message of the constellations—had he imagined it because of his desperate circumstance? Or had he seen Truth once, and now had to hold on to it without further reassurance? This was his dilemma on a voyage without apparent end. There are those of you in church today who know exactly the crisis of faith I describe. I want to say to you: Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty. When you are lost, you are not alone. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.

The congregation I serve shares a campus with a Spanish-speaking Covenant congregation. It has been a joy to get to know the staff and people of Iglesia Del Pacto (IDP) since I started at Eagle Rock Covenant Church. Yesterday IDP had their annual Christmas potluck after the worship service and they graciously invited us from the English-speaking congregation to join them. We had a great time meeting new people, laughing, and eating terrific food. I also experienced one of those moments when the reality of the kingdom of God is overwhelming. Usually those moments are not something altogether unique and yesterday was no different. It came as Gus, the worship pastor of IDP, prayed for the meal in Spanish. I barely picked up a few words since my Spanish is terrible to non-existent. As Gus prayed, I was in awe of the fact that we worship this big and glorious and multilingual God who loves and receives praise from his children who speak all sorts of languages. How many times in my life have I heard prayers in languages I do not speak? For whatever reason, yesterday’s prayer moved me. I am so grateful to be a member of Christ’s bride. We as one are all preparing to celebrate the incarnation in a few days. How amazing it is to think we worship the same God. That is a miracle of Christmas.

Some food for thought from Charles Schulz regarding our Christmas traditions.

On the back of Stanely Hauerwas and Jean Vanier’s new book, Living Gently in a Violent World, I came across this pull-quote from Amos Yong and I love it.

Church takes time, patience, gentleness, vulnerability, friendship, hospitality, mutuality and peaceableness. In other words, church takes practice.

When I was preparing my sermon on the resurrected Jesus meeting the disciples and sending them out in John, I reread some of Miroslav Volf’s amazing book, Exclusion and Embrace. The following quotation has been swimming in my head since:

The ability to know the truth is not just a matter of what your mind does—whether it adjusts itself adequately to reality or thinks coherently—but is also a matter of what your character is. (269)

The following is the sermon I preached at Pasadena Covenant Church on August 31, 2008. The biblical text is Ephesians 2. [1] Audio of the sermon is available here.

Do you ever feel like you’ve been a rut and the mundane “blehs” of life surround you and then all of a sudden, you’re filled with awe and wonder? You encounter something new or something you’ve seen, heard, smelled, touched, or tasted countless times and then, surprisingly, you wake up to a deeper mystery surrounding you. What has evoked that awe in you? Is it a piece of music like a Sufjan Stevens song? Standing before the vastness of the Pacific Ocean? Hearing children laugh? What about a movie like WALL-E? Or a favorite book or story such as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road? Maybe a mathematical formula? Perhaps seeing a perfectly turned double play in baseball or watching Michael Phelps set records these past Olympics? Or is it a favorite meal whose flavors remind you of home? Isn’t it amazing to experience those moments when we feel God’s grace like a cool breeze, when we can sense that there is something special to this life?

I grew up in Sanger, California, a small farming community plopped between Fresno and the Sierra Nevada mountain range. My family spent a lot of time in those mountains. It was a great way to grow up, having granite domes and giant sequoia trees just an hour’s drive away. As a kid, I didn’t think the mountains to our east were all that special—seeing them was as much a part of our daily lives as homework or the street in front of our house. I even worked in those mountains during a couple of summers in college at a Christian camp. The tall trees were beautiful, but they were just the backdrop of my life. Then, one time when I was home from school, my dad and I went on a drive up to Sequoia National Monument. As we drove past trees I must have seen hundreds of times in my life, I felt like I was seeing them for the first time. Here were these behemoths shooting up out of the ground, topping out at a couple of hundred feet into the air. Their bases were fifty feet around or more. They began to grow around the time Jesus was born in Bethlehem. I couldn’t help but stare out the window in awe of these magnificent wonders of God’s creation. If you’ve never seen the giant sequoias, I’ll try to give you some perspective: Pasadena city hall is the tallest building in the city at 163 feet. The General Sherman tree stands at 276 feet. It had a branch that before it fell off was 100 feet tall. What powers of imagination does God possess in order to make trees like that? As we drove through the forest, I felt like I was the first person to ever see them. I remember saying to my dad in shock, “Do you see these trees? They’re awesome.” He just laughed and said he felt the same way the first time he saw them after he moved to California from North Carolina. When I saw those trees that time, I understood the words of the poet E.E. Cummings who wrote, “now the eyes of my eyes are opened.” [2]

The following is the sermon I preached at Eagle Rock Covenant Church on August 17, 2008. The biblical text is John 20.19-23 [1] Audio of the sermon is available here.

In the halls of my childhood church we had a bulletin board filled with prayer letters and pictures from of all the missionaries our congregation supported. I didn’t realize until much later how much this board shaped how I understood the idea of missions. I remember one missionary we supported in particular. She grew up in our congregation and would send my family personal letters that we read aloud at dinner. She served in Afghanistan, giving basic medical care and teaching classes to women and children. Because it was the 1980’s her letters were filled with stories of the war between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. More than once her team had to escape from attacks on their city with shells exploding behind their Jeep. After the Soviets left, she told similar stories of the civil war that brought the Taliban to power. Oddly enough, the one story that sticks in my head, came from a letter she wrote to my family when I was nine or ten. She wrote something she thought my brother and I would enjoy. She said in her report that the first snow of the year had fallen in their community. In the language of the people group she went to serve, the word for snow is, “barf.” She thought—rightly I might add—that my brother and I would appreciate the fact that it was “barfing” outside. We thought that was hilarious. I still think it’s hilarious.

And for most of my young life, my vision of what it meant to be a missionary was to go to a place where women had to cover their faces, where you had to evacuate cities under attack and mortar rounds exploded around your fleeing car, and where people said funny things like “barf” for snow. I thought missionaries were strange, exotic people, and incredibly rare in the Church. God sent them out into the far reaches of the world, but God clearly didn’t send all of us to those nations.

This story from the Gospel according to John that we read confronts the understanding I had of God and missions and being sent by Jesus. While in this story Jesus speaks to his disciples, I think the words are meant for the entire Church to hear. And if we’re all meant to hear these words, that means Jesus sends us all out on a mission. Missions and the call of God to reach the world are not reserved for a few special Christians. Missions are not just one ministry among many ministries of the Church. Nor is mission just an aspect of the kingdom of God or an piece of his character. Our God is a God of mission. We have a God who is active in the world, a God who engages, and who sends his Son. Mission is not just an attribute of his character—mission is God’s character. [2] God calls the universe into existence and seeks out a relationship with the world. He calls people into his kingdom, he seeks to create a new family, and he sends his people out to work alongside him in this mission. God has done this in many ways throughout history from the calling of Abraham that we heard about last week from Brian, to sending his own Son, Jesus, and to creating the Church to be his representatives in the world. I know this is all rather large and lofty, but then again so is God.