The Purposeless Driven Life

Right thinking. Thinking correctly. Being sure of the truth before taking any steps towards it. Having right understanding before being able to have right action.

These and a thousand other qualifiers flutter around us on a daily basis. You've heard them probably sound more like, "What are you going to do with your life? I.e., what is the sole purpose of your life? What are you doing to get there and how can you make money doing it?"

Or, in my world, where theology is king, there cannot exist a conversation where people, lay or ordained, become incredibly concerned with finding the right way forward, the most faithful conviction, the correct people to serve in our community, and so forth.

I am in the midst of reading Jon Acuff's Start in which he discusses the modern fixation on finding our purpose. For any of you in ministry, insert the language of calling, and you'll be close enough to the heart of the matter.

So many people, including myself, use this kind of language with such a sense of finality, as if there is one road by which you must travel and should you lose it, you will be lost forever in meaninglessness and live a life without purpose. But what if that is putting the cart before the horse? What if, instead of trying to find our purpose so that we can live with purpose, we live lives of purpose in which we ultimately discover our purpose? Mr. Acuff has a favorite line, that "purpose is attracted to motion," and I have discovered that for myself in the past year.

How many of you reading this are stuck in a place less fulfilling than what you hoped to have at your current place in life? Are any of you stuck a in a stagnant job? Does this voice sound familiar, "What am I doing with my life? Am I in the wrong career?"

Now, there is such a thing as a toxic work environment. I watched my wife work 90+ hour weeks alongside people who had less personality than Thomas the Tank Engine (from the old show, back before his face moved....).
That was miserable, so don't hear me as just telling you to grin and bear it.

But for many people, purpose is a matter of perspective.

Do you have co-workers? What have you done in the last thirty days to make their lives better or more enjoyable?

Do you have an employer? What have you done to make his or her life better that wasn't prompted by a selfish desire to look out for Number One?

What about clients? When was the last time you called a client because you were genuinely more interested in their wellbeing instead of your quota?

None of these simple scenarios require you to leave your job to find purpose in your life, but they do invite you into a new perspective with the potential being all around you. But finding purpose in your current situation will almost certainly require one thing: action.

Another bane in the search for meaning and purpose is the inherent risk in becoming lazy while you wait around to discover that purpose. I have lived under that threat. We want so badly to just get our purpose, because we know that once we have that purpose, we'll start flying to work wearing red capes and the only person able to stop us will be this guy.

But it will never happen.

The first step, perhaps, is finding a purpose is simply taking the step. In my own job, I went through a season where my responsibilities shifted drastically and I suddenly had a lot of freedom with little oversight. I languished for a while, wondering what my purpose was in my new position. But then a friend and successful business manager (kindly) got in my face and said, "Where is your energy? You're just like everybody else that comes in here, looking for what I can give them. I would love to have someone come in here for a change and tell me what they can do for my company. I'd hire them in a second."

That comment hit me in the stomach because he was right. I had no energy. No drive. I wasn't interesting to anybody, especially myself. And my only excuse was that I did not fully grasp my purpose. So I decided to change, slowly, living intentionally, purposely within my present circumstances. I had to live with purpose as a father, as a husband, as a son, brother, son-in-law, grandson, priest, employee, preacher, writer, organizer, leader...you can see how the list can grow quickly. All of these arenas already existed, and I had the opportunity and the gift to live with purpose in all of them.

What are your arenas? Where can you live with purpose today? Answer those questions and I'll do the same. Here's to your existential crisis. I've had enough of mine.

Redeem This...

Liturgy is a pattern. The order of worship and the calendar of the Church are the unfolding of life itself. Good Friday is, of course, not only a twenty-four hour period for penitence. It is the darkness of our lives, and it is played out in the most dramatic horror that we can fathom: the death of God's only Son. Easter Sunday is not, then, a mimicry of resurrection and new life. It is hope laid out anew, pulsing some type of light back into the darkness.

But both days end, and Easter Tide rolls on and will slowly melt away into Ordinary time with the coming of Pentecost. These may be a lot of strange words that mean nothing to the reader; regardless, we all know the dragging grind of life and the interplay between life and death. These are the absolutes of human experience. To be alive is to expect death, but death cannot exist without life. Somewhere in the middle of these forces resides the peril of human thought and the crucible of faith. It generates the questions that drive humans mad, or gives them life. Why believe, believe what, or simply, why?

We never stop asking these questions. Whether we ask them of God or the stars or just the silence of our souls we all ask them. I am soon to be an Anglican priest, which in part means I have to take reality very seriously. This is called being "sacramental," which is just a big word meaning the very real stuff of this world communicates the most fundamental truths of the universe (whether you call that spiritual, divine, holy, or Godly). In other words, all this spiritual talk doesn't "float between our ears."

My family has experienced waves of death in the past three years. Grandparents, parents, siblings, and even children have been lost.

And we miss them...

That loss, for example, communicates the despair of the human condition. Death is the great and looming threat of loss that stains every single, beautiful reality of this world. It is not "simply" anything, as in being 'natural,' or 'routine,' or 'normal.' Death is the abyss, the final threat. And there is no beauty in it.

If death is a sign for the swallowing up of all beauty, then new life is the promise that all will be made well. This Easter Sunday I held my month-old-daughter in my arms, and she was baptized today, a week later. Her life is a sign, a type of witness of change, of making new. Maybe redemption. By this I mean that if God works this way, then her little life may be a demonstration that some things, at least, will be healed. But this is only a sign.

Because, of course, I will lose her, too, and she will lose me. To be Christian is not to ignore death, or hold resurrection as a type of comfort blanket when death reaches out to us. Instead, it is to walk in the valley of the shadow of death. This is the Christian story itself, that the Author of life took on much shadow and the weight of human flesh so that even the deceased could taste resurrection. It's a promise, to be taken on faith and in the midst of our sufferings. It is certainly not an escape. It is only more horrible because of how much we value life. Life is everything, and if a God can't save that, He's not worth having.

I certainly don't have neat answers to these questions or these problems, so I end this with a blessing for all of you this Eastertide: May you have peace in the midst of life, but especially in death. May you find life in shadow. May you receive love, even the love of God. May you find forgiveness, even if you must forgive yourself. May you find deliverance, even if you are lost.

May the God of hope guard your hearts and minds in all things, for Christ came to bind up what was broken, to heal the afflicted, and to die for us all. I pray you all many, many mercies this evening.

"I've just had an apostrophe." "I think you mean an Epiphany."

Most of you hopefully recognized this line from one of the most iconic films in recent history. The movie, of course, is Hook (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsB2KGaX6bg) and it is appropriate because today is Epiphany. January 6 is a day set aside in the Church to reflect upon the revelation of God the Son in the human being, Jesus of Nazareth. For Christians this seems a no-brainer;"Jesus equals God the Son. No problem here; I agree. Let's move on," we might say. For those outside the Church I am sure this seems to be another superfluous holiday meant to reinforce dogma and offer very little to the secular world. I want to suggest both Christians and non-Christians can take away so much from this day, whether one officially recognizes it as a holiday (Holy Day) or not.

Behind this entire discussion rests one incredibly important question: What does it mean to know the face of God? Now, before I lose some of the readers who aren't interested in God to begin with, let's rephrase the question; this will be helpful for theists as well. Do we ever brush up against something in our lived experience that defies explanation, that suggests the world actually does not revolve around us, and when we encounter this power/force/feeling/being it leaves us with a sense of awe, humility, and maybe even breathless awareness that there is something Great in the universe hiding just behind a vapor-thin veil? This can happen in a myriad of ways, of course. Perhaps in something as miraculous as watching your child be born. Maybe it happens during a long meal with your best friends, when you lean back from the table and look around at faces you love more than you thought possible. Or it can happen in moments of horrible sorrow, like when you watch a parent weep over a dying child and you know the only reason they can and must suffer this is because they love the little one more than life itself.

Whether complex or simple, jubilant or terrible, these moments come and, sometimes, leave us wondering. Was that newborn just another organism entering the human herd? Is this affection for friends just a chemical reaction to good wine and the biological effects of laughter? Is death just the universe's cold reminder that we don't really matter to anyone in anyway at anytime? Maybe so. Maybe so...or...

There is something to be known about the other side of the veil. There is something or someone pressing into our world and willing us to taste life and death in the most beautiful and bizarre moments of our short lives. And, here's the crux: sacramental Christians believe this does not happen in the ether of our spiritual imaginations! God is not floating between your ears; He's working in the world. To believe in a Creator is to believe that Creation offers footprints and fingerprints to those who look, that beauty is not an accident and that everything from sunsets to sex says something about God. Indeed, pressing into Creation is pressing into the mind of God Himself. God has left signs, ranging from birth, marriage, and families to reproduction, the seasons, and even the simplest machinations...like how fire dancing over a fragrant pine log could be called beautiful.

So what's the point? The best we can deduce is that God might be communicating Himself through the world. But there is still Christ. And for the skeptical let's not even talk about the claims made by the Church about who Jesus was; let's just stick to the phenomenon that over two millennia have passed since a lower class, Jewish man named Yeshua walked around for three years or so, taught a lot about ethics and also made some subtle claims that He was bringing light and life to the world. And to prove it, his followers claimed that people were being healed in his wake. Then, by all contemporary accounts he was crucified before he rose from the dead. Now the point is not in these details, the point is that whatever happened two thousand years ago, people are still talking about it. And (here's my bias) I think it was because the people that met Jesus came face to face with the reality we've been discussing in this post. Everyone from the poor to the rich, from the elites to the outcasts, were brushing up against the unexplainable miracle that was this man, and it left them either wanting more or to destroy it.

As a member of Christ's Church I want to say that this is knowing the face of God: it's finding the miracle of God working in the world all around us all the time. And these revelations point back to the point in history where God chose to no longer work through Creation but within and alongside Creation in the body and being of Jesus Christ. I say this not merely as a point of dogma, but as a brief flash of hope to some of us who really need life again. We're weary of that veil and at times the world bears down over our souls. Perhaps knowing Jesus is the most certain step towards knowing God:

"Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my Spirit upon him...and in his name the Gentiles will hope." - Matthew 12:18, 21

Saints, Souls, and Candy

Halloween. It's the holiday no one really knows anything about. Secular viewpoints name it as the day you get candy and then eat all in one sitting. It's a time to dress up, either as something cute or ugly, beautiful or scary. We carve faces into pumpkins, although we don't know why, and some of us are just suspicious of the day in general. Or we may even hate this particular day with its witches, vampires, and ghouls. For those in the Church, all this not-knowing leads to a whole lot of guessing, half-truths, and just plain fear of the unknown. And some of it is common sense. A day where we can all be witches and little red devils, or a day when you can buy cauldrons and skulls at your friendly neighborhood Walgreens could certainly make any rational churchgoer cautious of a day that promulgates these affairs. But even with all the trappings, what is Halloween?

All Hallows Eve, short for All Hallows Evening, as in the evening before All Saints Day (Hallows meaning Holy Ones) was celebrated for centuries in the Church as a day of recognition and remembrance for those who have passed before us into death. This remembrance, though adapted alongside the pagan rituals found in the British Isles over a thousand years ago, simply infused pagan festivals with what the Church had taught for centuries regarding those who are "asleep in Christ." So over the years this same Holiday (Holy Day) became influenced by the trappings of the Harvest, the seasonal transition from Summer to Autumn, and the awareness that even in the midst of life and new harvests, there is always death to face in the end.

So while witches and broomsticks and Jack-O-Lanterns mark the secular celebration of Halloween, much like Santa Claus trumps images of Christ's Incarnation at Christmas, the Church should certainly not fear or lose the meaning of this Holiday. For Halloween and All Saints Day have already come and gone as I write this, yet we remain a people shaped by loss and grief. But even here on the cusp of death's precipice we do not see into the abyss only, but also into Advent. In this way the Church's calendar shows us that even as our Father holds those who are asleep, the Son is coming to make that peace known to the world.

I pray we as the Church never fear All Hallows Eve, for to fear it is to forget the hope of resurrection. Christians should never have to fear the trappings of death, for that's all the skulls and ghosts and coffins truly are in Halloween. They are sad little satires of death, clever in how they remind us of its imminence while being powerless to overcome it. So instead of being a people controlled by fear or suspicion, perhaps we can be a people who have the perspective of imminent Life. In the end that's what everyone craves, inside or outside the Church. Life, Peace, and Hope. We want some assurance that death isn't the end, for us or for those we love.

So let us be a Church that gives life to the weary, and let us remember those who have done the same before us.

Male and Female: Sex, Flesh, and Rib-Bones

If you've spent any time in the church you've read the Creation story. It's dangerously over-familiar so that when we re-read it, we gloss over it or skim. We know how it goes. We know the idea. I'm guilty when it comes to the speedy read through, but tonight at our church small group we found deep truths hidden behind the common words.

Our group is currently working through a curriculum about marriage, and this week focused on the story in Genesis 2:18-24, the creation of Ishah (Heb. - Woman) from Ish (Man). This story is the first account of God naming Creation as being "not good." God creates all the firmament of heaven, the earth has exploded with life, and the Man has just been sculpted from dust and taken on the very Breath or Spirit of God. But not long after we read: "Then the Lord God said, 'It is not good that the man should be alone.'"The following scene tells of Adam naming every creature upon the earth before falling into a deep sleep in his loneliness, unable to find a creature that corresponds to his nature. Yet as he sleeps, God fashions a woman from his rib, taking her from his flesh. And when he wakes, the Hebrew literally reads, "This time, she-is-it! Bone from my bones, flesh from my flesh!"

To understand Creation is to probe the mystery of God's nature. To know the Creation is to know the Creator in some ways. What then can be said that God makes us in need of community? To be alone is not good, so God fashions us within us the desire for the other, the one taken from our flesh or the one from whom we have been taken. The Woman is the only being not fashioned from the earth in the Creation story; instead she is taken from the nature of man. And in that occurrence the nature of humankind develops more fully than before.

When we asked why God would make us with these intense desires for relationship and the need to love and be loved, one of the women in our group said that is the nature of the Trinity. To discover love is to know love with another and the other's love for ourselves. That is why it was "not good" for Adam to be alone; not just because he was lonely. That simply follows from what was already lacking. No, the fact that Creation did not adequately express the mind of God was "not good." Marriage then functions as the sign or sacrament of this grace in the world by joining the two natures to one another as a step towards seeing deeper into the mind of God.

In my own marriage, what I thought was love and the pursuit of mutual felicity changed incredibly when my marriage began to change ME. Our culture only speaks of marriage as one person's individual, independent self being joined to another independent self, and only as long as neither impedes the freedom of the other the marriage is successful. What a horrible view of this gift.

Marriage does not say, 'come as you are and stay that way forever.' Marriage bids you come and love. It is not simply getting your needs met by another, it is the pouring out of our lives to one another while receiving the gift the spouse offers us. And it is worth it because God has fashioned us to 'hold fast' to one another.

The pain and joy and turbulence of this life has required me and my wife to hold fast to one another at times. And I think it may be the mystery of such unconditional love, a love not meant for just happy times but a love meant for the deepest horrors of this life that lets us know Christ's love for his Church. I don't know where I'd be without my wife. It's not always easy, but in the wonder of marriage I have found peace in her gifts to me. And when life and (sometimes) death make it almost impossible to keep going, I know she is my bride, the flesh from my flesh, and that gives me great joy.

To Love, To Hope

Last night a group of high school students from my church discussed Paul's disposition towards death in his letter to the Philippians, particularly in verses 19-30 of the first chapter. This theme of the Christian response to death, or rather how we choose to live in light of its imminence, keeps coming up. Paul, of course, is writing to a church for whom suffering is a present reality. They are oppressed precisely because of their faith, which is an alien experience for most American Christians today. So how then can his attitude be relevant for our churches?

One thing the students noticed is that Paul's attitude is utter foolishness according to the wisdom of our day. Our culture views death as a vague and often distant threat. When it is not being ignored it is being aggrandized to the point of making it unbelievable (think of over-the-top action movies, ridiculously gory blockbusters, or video games that make war entertaining). In this culture, what matters is the now. We are free to further our health, wealth, and felicity given death's non-existence within our worldview. Statements such as, "Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death" are incompatible with our account of the good. We tolerate Christ's commands over our life, but only inasmuch as they cost us as little as possible. This is precisely why, however, when death reenters our narrative through some form of tragedy we find ourselves inadequately prepared to address its ultimate power over us. How can a culture gripped by materialistic impulses to nurture self-worth and self-aggrandizement face a reality that flippantly destroys our highest goods? In short, we cannot. 

So what then? How should the church live? One of the students answered this way: "This life doesn't matter." I think that may be going too far in the other direction, but I think it's the natural move. When death comes into the picture, what does matter? Does your job, or your education, or your friends, or your love for anyone really matter? Death doesn't seem to think so. It ravages at will. Sometimes I think the Christian ethic calls us to live in the (sometimes) horrible tension between illusion and despair. Either death is distant so we live engrossed in the present, or death's shadow makes all the world grow dark and all beauty loses its luster. But maybe there is a way to love more then we've ever loved, more deeply than we thought possible, even in the knowledge that death hangs over the best of who we are. 

God knows this will cost us in this life. Every time I hear the lyrics to the Mumford and Sons, "After the Storm" this truth hammers home:

And I took you by the hand
And we stood tall,
And remembered our own land,
What we lived for.

And there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.

But this hope comes by facing the truth that follows:

I will die alone and be left there.
Well I guess I'll just go home,
Oh God knows where.
Because death is just so full and mine so small.
Well I'm scared of what's behind and what's before.

The song closes with the following lines again:

And there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.

I hear this type of awareness in Paul. "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." And by this Paul means to gain Christ. N.T. Wright notes in his brief commentary of Philippians that 'heaven' is not the same term for Paul as it is for us. Paul never waxes eloquent on the golden roads or 'mansions,' but he does talk about finding Christ and being found in Christ. For Paul that holds all hope, and for the Church it is our only hope. A Christian ethic then must be enraptured with love, but this love is not threatened or overshadowed by death. It is only made more potent by death, and in dying we find only 'gain,' not loss. In Christ we find Christ's Church, his bride, and in her we find one another. To see my Lord would be to see those whom I love, and those whom I have lost. May we hope to all see that glory, serving one another in love while despising the fading power of death.

Ethics without Death: St. Athanasius on Alabama

What guides our actions? Which impulses, lifestyles, or commandments win out when it comes down to the moments of our decision-making? On the surface, ethics seems such a simple thing. To know the right and to do it. The difficulty sets in when we seek to know what is right, or good.

For Christians, this question is frequently treated as a black-and-white simplicity. Debates ebb and flow over the teaching of Scripture, the ethics of Jesus and so forth with varying groups championing their sources of authority and claiming (with little to no doubt) that their spring of divine wisdom has granted them the knowledge of the good. Knowing this to be the case how do we proceed?

Enter the Immigration Debate. The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) estimates thirteen million illegal immigrants lived in the United States in 2007 (http://www.fairus.org/). In 2011 that number has only increased and there has been little improvement towards a helpful resolution. My interest, however, is in the discontinuity demonstrated by the Christian community. Christians, like in so many other issues, disagree on the proper way to respond to illegal immigration. Some argue the law of the land should be upheld, and that all illegal actions are, therefore, immoral or evil by necessity. Others claim self-preservation as their guiding ethic, or more specifically that the existence of cheap labor, free benefits while avoiding certain taxes, or the perceived threat of 'dangerous' foreigners are all reasons to harbor a hostile posture towards illegal immigrants. Still another camp favors a Christological reading of the situation, where we read Jesus challenging us to love even our enemies, to see the despised foreigner as actually our neighbor, and to turn our cheek even after we are struck. This is enough for many of us to throw up our hands and cry it is too complex to resolve. Maybe it is.

But wherever you fall on the politically-charged spectrum of this debate I believe there is something to be learned from St. Athanasius. Not known to many of us Westerners, St. Athanasius was no stranger to debates. In fact, he is chiefly remembered for his own fiery conflict with one of the oldest, strongest, and long lived heresies of the Christian Church: Arianism. And while reading his On the Incarnation with fifteen, first year seminary students at Duke Divinity School, I learned something I had never seen before now. We can either live our lives submitting to the fear and power of death, or we can live with our mind fixed upon the life giving power of the Gospel, a power that does not fear death because it has conquered death. For Athanasius, this truth can be encountered because of one crucial aspect of God's work in the world.

Incarnation. In the beginning God created the cosmos through His Word, and when sin came into the world through the Transgression, humanity lost its innocence and began drifting away from God and eternal goodness and towards the antithesis of good, or evil. So instead of abandoning us to death, Jesus Christ took on the bounds of human nature and flesh and conquered death by dying himself. Then in three days this same Christ rose from the dead, not suffering the power of death to contain his own divine nature, the fulness of life and being. He was the one who gave Life, and that life could not be stilled by death. Because God's Son knew human flesh, human flesh can know God again. And to know God is to know Christ. To know Christ is to know his life, his words, and his actions. All of a sudden Christ's life is extremely important, not just an afterthought to atonement.

And this is why all of this matters for ethics, and in our case, immigration. We are a society absolutely gripped by fear. We are scared or suspicious of everyone and everything. Democrats, Republicans, Muslims, the poor, the rich, politicians, Wall Street, and, of course, immigrants. And we believe this fear gives life. If we fear the right communities or people groups then we can have the proper response to their threat upon our well-being. So, shortly after fear follows hate. And hate can only lead to death.

But then there is Jesus. The ethics of Christ is not one that leads to suburban happiness, wealth, or plenty. But it leads to Life, and this Life has no room for fear, or suspicion, or hate. It is not concerned with death; it is an ethic without death. It loves and only loves. It gives and sacrifices its own self, offering itself up not just for the beloved but also for the enemy. This Love intercedes for the enemy, forgiving the enemy even as the latter murders the former. Our Lord suffered death on a cross, loving his accusers, and forgiving his murderers. And what was their excuse? They were suspicious. They were afraid. So they hated him. And then they killed him.

How then will we choose to live? Can we love enough to have an ethics without death?

[This is on my heart because of the unpopular attention my home state of Alabama has garnered in recent months due to the 'most hostile anti-immigrant law to date.' This article and many of its attached comments offer a good (albeit biased) read on the situation:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/opinion/alabamas-shame.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss ]