More Cause for Community

I recently read Donald Miller’s Searching for God Knows What. I had been told that this book was not on the same level as Blue Like Jazz, though I didn’t find this to be true at all. There are some aspects of the book which I felt were lacking, but we must remember that books, like movies, songs, and even people, communicate to us in context. In many ways, our interaction with what we read is a form of relationship, and relationships do not happen in a vacuum. For my context right now, I can think of very few books outside of the Bible that communicate more clearly the power of being in relationship with God.

One metaphor that pops up throughout the book is that of the lifeboat. Miller comments on the state of mankind being like individuals in a lifeboat that has limited supplies. Eventually someone is going overboard so we had better do a good job of convincing the others of our worth! The metaphor addresses a mentality that is so undeniably prevalent in all of our social interactions.

Personally, this struggle to receive affirmation of my worth has been the driving force behind many of my actions in life – both good and bad. We usually address this by telling people that their self-image shouldn’t come from external factors, that we must become self-actualized and look for the value that is within. But Miller points out that God created us to receive our identity rather than to create, build or find it on our own – he gave man a name and Adam was tasked with giving names to the wildlife. We are not created to exist in isolation. Our relationships help to shape us and define us, though this is only possible after we have received the core of our identity from God.

We see in creation that God's design included an interactive exchange in naming and giving identity. God created humanity in his image, Adam named the wildlife and even Eve. This was a part of holy creation, and it was designed to take place in the presence of God. But then sin entered the picture.

We are still very much consumed with giving and receiving identity. Sadly we are now consumed with a giving and receiving that is meant to elevate our own standing in the community; to give validity to our own existence often by denying the validity of someone else’s.

I met with a woman today who is one of countless people down here trying to put life back together after Katrina. Since the storm her family has been through countless hurricanes. Family members have died only to have the remaining family scramble to fight over inheritance. Children and grandchildren have been sick and have needed surgery, she has developed and had surgery for skin cancer, she and her husband both lost their jobs and they’ve been working non-stop just to keep the family afloat. Of course all of this has put a strain on their marriage and has been difficult for their 5 children (ranging in age from 5 to 24 years old…the 24 year-old with 3 kids of her own).

We listened for a couple hours to her story and what struck me most were the things that seemed the most difficult. With all of the financial and logistical frustrations going on, most often it was the relational stresses that seemed to bring the tears. People taking advantage of other people seemed more devastating than the 6 pine trees that were removed from her house. And the story that really struck me was the pain she felt recently when her father told her she was worthless because she didn’t call him one evening. It was obvious that she knew this accusation was not only unfounded, but that her father must be damaged to say or think such a thing. She told me how ridiculous this was, but her eyes were telling a different story.

I knew the story in her eyes, and so do you. I know the pain of being made to feel worthless. It doesn’t have to be debated logically or convincingly, a simple sentence or even a look can communicate it straight to our core. I don’t even have to know who is reading these words to know that you’ve experienced this. Maybe it was in junior high and the popular kids made sure you knew you were not one of them. Maybe it was late at night in the “safety” of your house. Maybe it was in a college classroom or the office break room. Maybe it was in the cutting comment of a parent or the thoughtless comment of someone you hardly knew. But we’ve all felt that feeling. We’ve all feared for our position in the lifeboat.

Enter Jesus.

Jesus had a way of speaking worth into people’s lives. Think about what it would have meant to the woman in John 8 who was caught in the act of adultery to have Jesus speak to her the way he did. Imagine how it would’ve felt to be drug naked through the streets. I wonder if she knew that she meant nothing to the men who had caught her. I wonder if she could tell that they didn’t even really care so much about God’s law but rather that she was simply a pawn to trap Jesus. Did she know how little she mattered to these men?

So how did it feel when Jesus looked up and spoke words of forgiveness and mercy? How did it feel that he spoke directly to her?

Or what about the woman in Mark 5 who had wrestled with the humiliation and social stigma of bleeding for over a decade? After risking everything, coming into the city and touching the hem of Jesus’ garment, it says she was afraid. Of course she was, for 12 years she’d been taught that she was worthless as long as she was unclean. “But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.’”

The Bible is filled with story after story of God communicating to his children that they are valuable. These stories need to be repeated. In the wake of a hurricane or the wake of junior high, we need to be reminded that we are valuable. You are valuable. It doesn’t matter what you do or how much you have. You have great worth. No tribal counsel; no lifeboat popularity contest will ever be able to cast you out. Jesus came to teach us that we should get out of the lifeboat anyway. Listen to him. His message isn’t about systematic theology, it isn’t about politics. The story that Jesus is telling is the majesty of God and value of His children.

Just Me and Jesus

I remember as a young Christian hearing people say things such as, “Me and God make a majority,” or “you don’t have to go to church to be a Christian.” There were always plenty of references to a “personal relationship with Jesus.” (And then there’s “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” But that is a whole other blog post.) I learned pretty quickly that Christianity was about me and my relationship with God – everything else was simply a tool to help me grow closer to Him. The purpose of camp was to achieve a “mountain-top experience” and we commonly discussed whether or not we “got anything” out of the worship service.

In fairness, the emotional aspect of relationship with God is not a bad thing. It is a gift from God, an aspect of our creation that reminds us that we were made to want closeness with God and other people. I don’t believe that these things, in and of themselves, are a development of selfish materialism. There are sub-cultures of Christianity which have lost contact with the truth that God did come near. There are those who have forgotten the truth spoken by Paul in Acts 17, that He is the God “in whom we live and move and have our being.” Some of these people have fallen into traps of seeing God as a distant, non-personal being who lacks interest in His creation, other than to smite folks from time to time.

However, I do believe that the greedy materialistic culture that we’re surrounded by has had maintained some level of creative control. When Christianity is seen as only a personal relationship with Jesus; when the community of believers is an afterthought, an elective, a tool for personal gain or a hindrance to my personal monopoly on God’s time then we’ve messed something up terribly.

I don’t have to go to Church to be a Christian

There was a time when I believed this statement. Eventually it began to seem “off” somehow. I began to nuance it by saying that you can be a Christian without going to church, but why would you want to? But this logic had holes in it as well.

Soon I became convinced that you don’t have to go to Church to be a Christian, but it’s hard to be healthy that way. Then I decided that perhaps it was better to say that you don’t have to go to Church to be a Christian, but something will be missing from your life. And the more I’ve wrestled and tried to allow that statement to make sense, the more ridiculous it has become.

Christianity is not meant to be lived in isolation. It is communal because God is a community. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are a community – and we are created in God’s image. 1 Corinthians 3:16 says, “don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you?” Notice that the plural “you yourselves” are the singular “God’s temple.”

This does not take away from the truth that God is a personal God, interested in you specifically – later in 1 Corinthians, Paul will refer to our individual bodies as “a temple of the Holy Spirit” (6:19). We rejoice in knowing that God knows our names and we should also rejoice that God has called us and given us access to a community which is larger than ourselves and designed to bring glory to God. It goes against everything in our American upbringing to admit that there is value in community which goes beyond the individual. I do not want to admit that there is a body of which I am a part and don’t really have the right to separate myself from. How ridiculous would it be for my left leg to decide that it could just leave and be a leg without the rest of me? Or, to use an analogy that Nate applied to another issue recently, what about a laptop which is not plugged in to an outlet? For a while it will operate with little to no difficulty. My laptop automatically begins functioning at a less intense level when I unplug it. The software designers realized that operating on “all cylinders” drains the battery life too quickly – so when I unplug my computer slows down and its light dims slightly. This allows it to function autonomously for a little while longer, but sooner or later I have to either turn it off or plug it in.

We were created for times of aloneness with God – Jesus set a strong example of that – but this was never intended to be long term. Even if the church seems dysfunctional we are called by God to return. Consider the absolute lack of “get it” exhibited by the disciples of Jesus, yet he kept returning to them.

So perhaps you feel that you’ve exhausted your resources looking for a “good church.” No doubt you have! It has been said that if you do find a perfect Church you better not join because you’ll mess it up!

But that does not mean that you should give up and stay home on Sunday. Maybe you live in an area where there is not a church where you can belong – I’m sorry to hear that. Find someone who feels the same way, find a few others who are longing for community, and meet together with them at Denny’s, or McDonald’s, or the Lake, or their house. Pray together, encourage one another, break bread and remember the Lord Jesus who conquered death. Ask about each other’s children; weep over the years of inability to have children or the recent loss of a beloved son and laugh about the 2 year-old grandkid’s most recent one-liner. Find people with whom you can rejoice in job promotions or degrees completed. Look for people who ask you what you’ve been looking at on the internet. Meet with people who want to look and think and act like Jesus…even if they have no idea how to do it.

Can’t find anyone like this? Then ask yourself why that is. Have you shared with your friends the joy of looking and thinking and acting like Jesus? Have you ever asked them about their relationship with God? Have you considered the state of your own?

I once complained to a good friend about a lack of adult leadership and support for youth ministry. He looked me in the eye and said, “This is not a congregation problem, this is a Bret problem.” It was time for me to stop waiting for these individuals to reveal themselves and to instead go find them or raise them up.

If you’ve been using the excuse of not needing a church because you're just fine with your personal relationship with Jesus, I challenge you to spend time in prayer asking God if you were really created to do this alone. There aren’t many things that I really know the answer to, but I’m confident that the answer to this is one is “No, you weren’t.” If you discern that such is the case, I challenge you to pray that God will open your eyes to the community that he has been preparing for you.

The Unseen Destruction: A Shawshankian Culture of Victims

I heard recently that at least one poll lists The Shawshank Redemption as the second best movie of all times – behind (of course) The Godfather. I’m not sure whether I agree with that or not, though I will say that I didn’t immediately reject the notion.

I’ve seen some crazy things in Southern Louisiana. Doing insurance claims in Chalmette and the Lower 9th revealed the ridiculously destructive power of water. I’ve seen things that are indescribable – no special effects could do it justice. The cars on top of houses were not nearly as wild as seeing the house on top of a car in the middle of a street.

One of my roles here at Tammany Oaks is to help the volunteers process through what they’ve experienced. Even now, 10 months later, the destruction can be quite overwhelming. One person who was in New Orleans last week on a mission trip said, “Speaking as a follower of Christ, I found the whole thing nauseating and completely preventable. When I say nauseating, I mean it. Many people cry and weep when they see the destruction of the city. I got nauseous and pissed off.”

The truth is, and this is going to sound very strange, the destruction we are physically cleaning up is one of the easier types of disasters to address. Katrina ensured that no one in the Gulf Coast area would be able to deny that they had experienced a hurricane. That does not mean that it is easy to actually get the job done, if for no other reason than the sheer magnitude of destruction. Again, 10 months down the road does not really look like 10 months down the road here. However, people come from all over the country to help people reclaim their lives. There are the hippies who’ve set up the “Hippie Kitchen” in order to feed relief workers and residents. There are countless churches and volunteer groups giving up weekends and taking off work to come down and gut houses, clean parks, and listen to the stories of Katrina…stories which must be told and retold in order for healing to be a possibility. Still, I remind the volunteers that people in their hometowns are often hit with hurricanes which don’t leave such obvious destruction. These hurricanes do not attract national headlines nor do they bring in volunteers, funds or assistance of any kind. They just rot.

One reason it is important to help gut houses, even the ones that are going to be bulldozed, is that we have what is being called “bayou muck”, which as you can imagine is mixture of mud, water, mold and 100% Grade A, decaying nastiness. I’ve heard that we may have even bred a whole new strand of toxic mold here in New Orleans! The destruction is more than just debris, because this wreckage happens to be poisonous. But at least we can see where the wreckage is.

So many people live in homes infested with a bayou muck that is not visible. Anger, alcoholism, greed, divorce, abuse – these things may or may not sweep away all of your earthly possessions overnight. But there is real danger found in the decay. These toxic environments are made even more dangerous because they can often be hidden for months, years or even generations. All the while the inhabitants are being consistently poisoned.

While this is true wherever you may live – Thousand Oaks California, Dallas Texas or Omaha Nebraska – the high levels of “unseen” destruction here along the Gulf Coast are of epic proportions. I’m sure that I am not the first person to point this out, but the events of the last year have created a culture of victims, many of whom have little expectation, hope or intention of reclaiming “control” of their lives.

Red, Morgan Freeman’s character in The Shawshank Redemption, referred to this as becoming “institutionalized.” The walls of the Shawshank prison were initially despised, and then familiar and finally depended upon for the stability to survive. According the this theory of life, after years and years of oppression and bondage, a person loses the ability to live free.

I remember learning about something very similar in college. It seems that, as babies, circus elephants are shackled to a stake buried deep in the ground. The young elephant fights against its restraints but eventually realizes that there is no hope and gives up. Later, the full grown elephant is able to be restrained by a simple shackle attached to pretty much any stake – though it could drag a car down the road, it doesn’t even attempt to escape because it is convinced that there is no chance of freedom.

In Exodus we read of a people in a similar situation. Generations of Israelites had known nothing but slavery in Egypt. When delivered into freedom they immediately began longing for their former bondage. The Lord allowed an entire generation to die in the wilderness before the nation entered the Promised Land. Perhaps this was because the Victim Culture was simply too hardwired into their nature for these individuals to ever be able to function as members of a free society.

Fast forward to New Orleans in the year 2006. It seems that there are more and more people convinced that Katrina has destroyed all hope of freedom from bondage and oppression. It seems that many people are resigned to a new way of living. In Dallas we used to complain together that the plumber would tell you that he’d be there between 10 and 4 and he’d show up around 7. Yet here, people will make excuses for the plumber if he says he’ll be there between Monday and Friday and doesn’t show up until September. Don’t get me wrong, patience and understanding are good, but this is something else. It is the crippling belief that nothing good can happen anymore because of Katrina. You can see it in people’s eyes.

And then there are the Andy Dufresne’s of the world. There are people who don’t necessarily say much as they go about rebuilding – but if you talk to them you find out that hope is not something to avoid as dangerous. You find out that they are willing to take a beating or two in order to bring a glimpse of normal to their “co-workers”. You find out that there is, in fact, life after Shawshank.

The Victim Culture is growing like bayou mold, and I fear that it will prove to be much more difficult to get rid of. It has the ability to hide beneath the surface of a cleaned out residence. Accepting the role of victim is often a last ditch attempt at survival, and ironically it can be a death sentence in itself. If you are wondering what needs to be done for New Orleans as we approach the 1 year anniversary, it is this: pray against the Victim Culture, pray that the residents of the Gulf Coast region will not become institutionalized. Pray that hope will not be a word which is either scoffed at as a fairy tale or warned against as a danger.