Searching to Belong

Took someone to a church the other week who was looking for a place to belong.  Had to search around to find the right community, as there were some unique needs this person had for belonging.  You see, they were part of the LGBTQS community.

It was striking to me that I had to shop around to find in the Church (the community that represents Christ), a specific community that would accept, welcome, and affirm/love them just as they were.  Rather than this being a hallmark of the communities of faith called the ‘church’, it’s the exception.  Thus the careful search.

This experience is similar for others who suffer marginalization of any kind, for whatever reason.  Do they live alternative lifestyles, do they suffer mental illness, are they from a culture/religion we fear, are they disruptive to our comfort zone…?  Fill in your own blank:_______

I’m not on a high horse here.  I am among the guilty who in the past had internalized (and then acted out) an ‘othering’.  I allowed doctrinal, moral and church-culture alignment to influence belonging and acceptance, rather than the wide embrace of love and grace that is the hallmark and the very essence of Christ.  I am so sorry that I did not think more deeply about what my tradition was demonstrating.  I went with the flow because it was what the community practiced.

I was fresh out of seminary and in my first church when I first faced this dilemma head on as a church leader.  Have to say that I failed the test.  My office was in the downtown area of a small Alberta town.  I’d sit in my office and think: “There’s a bar down the street.  I should head in there, have a coke and start meeting some of the people who gather there”.  But I didn’t, even though the Spirit was pushing me to go.  Jesus would have gone.  But I was conditioned into a thinking that declared it wasn’t the ‘right’ place for a pastor to be.  Not a good place for other Christians either.  (You can tell I am old and this was a long time ago given the social mores among Christians now).  What would my congregation say?  Would I be called on the carpet or even lose my job for associating with ‘that crowd’ or going into 'that place'?  The reality was that anyone in that bar probably would not come to my church anyway given they surely had already experienced the Christian cold shoulder.  There would be no welcome from us especially if we knew their ‘story’ was as someone who sat in bars. So there I was – not going TO them and then leading a community that would not let them IN either. 

So much for belonging.  So much for a love that embraces all.   So much for incarnation of the gospel into my neighbourhood and relationships.  And, so much for Jesus being 'good news' to them.

A big win for religion.

By the way, the church we went to the other week was fantastic.  A warm embrace, felt through the teaching, the atmosphere and the welcome.  Just like Jesus would have done. 

I Lost a Friend Today

I lost a friend today.  Found at home dead.  No explanation yet.  Just prior to that I had conversations with 2 families who are suffering through similar family circumstance that have been our experience the past 12 years.  My heart and soul became overwhelmed.  Went to my room and cried, almost uncontrollably, for a long time.  Wave after wave of what felt like the weight of the worlds suffering crashing on me.  Seemed out of proportion, yet it kept coming.

I have experienced this a few times.  An identification with, and realization of the suffering of people in this world.  I don’t ever feel much emotion in my relationship with God, but this comes to me every once in a while, unannounced and definitely uninvited.  And I am wrecked.  Interestingly (to me) it is not about agonizing over the “Why, God?” question.  It is about just entering into the loss, suffering and human experience of pain, and how unjust, unnecessary, and unexplained it is.

My emotion doesn’t need an answer.  I am always sad, but not angry.  It is as though God has me there to just sit in the pain & loss.  The experience comes on me and I cannot control it.  It’s as though Christ just wants me to know it and perhaps feel what He feels. This is the closest I get to feeling intimacy in my relationship with Christ.

Suffering is unjust and frankly, unnatural.  We were not made for suffering, so when it occurs it feels wrong – precisely because according to God’s created intent for us, this was never meant to be.  We feel this deep within us, in the recesses of our souls.  It is the image of God within us crying out for our true state of being all the while we are suffering.

I don’t subscribe to those who seek to glorify suffering as a means to deeper spirituality.  Bull****.  However, we must deal with it as part of the human condition on earth.  I do know that in Christ, who also suffered, I can endure and find strength and hope.  But to glorify suffering itself as though we should seek it, is warped religion.  Christ endured the Cross but He didn’t go looking for it.  Never glorify suffering.  Endure it.  Place your hope and perspective in Christ during your suffering, but never elevate it to some superior state of spiritual experience.  We were made for blessing, love, abundance and eternal life.  Suffering and death and pain are in the way, and while ultimately are resolved and defeated in Christ, in the interim we are left to endure and cope, mitigating the pain (ours and others’) through the strength and promises we have in Christ, that we will be restored to our created being as God intended.

This also why we must be engaged in our world, to alleviate pain, poverty and suffering of all kinds.  It is why we are to ‘show up’ and come alongside with human suffering.  This is how the Kingdom of God (the created intent of God) comes to earth and does its restorative, redemptive work.  Who the hell cares about your theology of salvation if it has little or nothing to do with the state of human life in the here and now?  That’s not gospel.  If your deeper life pursuits and your Christian church experience does not have an immediate & demonstrable relationship of love and grace to the need of the world, you are nothing but noise.

I lost a friend today and I am pissed at the suffering of this world.

Do We Get the Gathering?

 When you hear the word ‘church’, what’s the immediate picture that comes into view?

“Ecclesia” – a common Greek word referring to periodic political gatherings, was used to describe something about the new movement of Christians when they started to gather.  It has been translated as ‘church’, and has morphed from that sense of gathering periodically for a purpose, to describing the organizational expression of that gathering.  

When pastors call you back to ‘church’ in their post-pandemic effort to repopulate the pew, and when they say ‘you can’t love Jesus and not love the ‘church’, it may have a lot more to do about coming back to the ‘big house’, to the regular weekly ‘worship’ service, to the financial support and volunteer positions that need to be filled, than it does to the principle of being gathered around the purpose for which we exist. I am pushing buttons here, but please read on...

What is that purpose?  Jesus zeroed in on this when responding to a question about the most important commandment.  Read the exchange in Mark 12.  It was a question many people have: “What constitutes the core of faith, of devotion to God”?  The questioner wanted to know what they really needed to do if they were to be truly following God.  Jesus revealed the profound simplicity of what it means to live according to the Kingdom of God:  Love God fully, and equally so love your neighbour as you love yourself.  That’s it.  Jesus emphasized this is a more intimate proximity to the purposes of God for us than all our rituals, practices, programs and other accoutrements of our faith(s).

For the current expression of the ecclesia, the gathering called the church, the biggest question then becomes:  “What of your offerings & sacrifices, your services, programs, practices and organizational expressions, actually reveal and turn people toward loving God AND their neighbour?

I want to be careful not to project my own thoughts and experiences as universal, but I am having so many conversations with friends, colleagues, leaders, and believers outside my usual circles, who are deeply struggling with the current expression of church.  Call it what you want – a post pandemic malaise, apathy or laziness – but I think it’s critical to explore this at a deeper level.  Could this not be a movement among true followers who are asking themselves whether the very essence of their faith, loving God and loving their neighbour, is being facilitated, enhanced and enabled by their ‘ecclesia’?

We believe the Holy Spirit of God perpetually illuminates the truth of God to the world.  How we gather right now has not always had this form.  What we believe about God, Christ and the Kingdom has not always been understood as we know it now.  There is a constant metamorphosis to our personal and collective encounters with God.

What is the Spirit illuminating right now to you personally, and to you as a leader of a ‘church’?  

The World is Too Loud

I am emerging out of a period of blogging silence.  For the last while I have been in an unplanned, unforced season of quiet. Some of that was due to my waiting for personal clarity on aspects of my vocational and spiritual life.  I was reflective, but just couldn’t write it down for some reason. Sometimes, it’s just good to be silent and sit – especially for those of us who like to comment on things, stir the pot, and challenge conventions.

It’s a pretty loud world out there. The planet is a cacophony of crises.  There’s constant competition for minds, hearts and money.  How about the loud cheering from the opposite poles of political ideologies?   I have tinnitus – but these sounds are even more annoying!

There’s another noise that aggravates me.

I am a follower of the Jesus Way, desiring to reflect and demonstrate how His way of life makes us more authentically human, and our world a healthier, more abundant place.  Yet the noise around Christianity-as-religion largely drowns out that message.  When I try to put myself in the place of an outside observer looking into whether Christianity ‘works’ or not, I don’t think I’d join up.  Public expressions of my faith/religion are too often issue-based, politically motivated and sometimes just outright hateful and exclusive. There’s a definite leaning toward ‘otherness’ rather than embrace, towards pointing out the darkness rather than shining a light into it, and towards outreach/mission to the world rather than a participating in and with the world to make it a better place.

Now in the US (and it’s bleeding into Canada), there is an unabashed political movement toward Christian nationalism that completely bypasses the Grand Story of God for humanity & the planet.  It is co-opting Christianity as a political platform for narrow and often distinctly un-Christ like ends.  The noise is deafening.

So what do we do – send out a louder, more positive message to counteract all this?? 

There’s a more powerful, more quiet way.   It’s Jesus’ way, and is more silent that you may have been led to believe if you are listening to public Christian rhetoric.  Jesus the Christ isn’t competing to be heard.  He is silently, quietly and powerfully present (in and through us as His representatives), to bring hope and change.  He brings justice and abundance to the world without raising His voice, without loud speeches & demonstrations.  Rather, He demonstrates persistent acts of gentle love and justice.  In a passage in the Gospel of Matthew chapter 12, verses 14-21, Jesus is described as one who is not quarrelsome, and whose voice is not heard yelling in the streets! He is one who will carefully handle a broken reed so that it isn’t further damaged, and will keep a smoldering wick going so its light doesn’t burn out.  This is a gentle, silent and truly transformative power, and we are to act in this Way.

I am a fan of Robert Service’s poem The Call of the Wild because it ‘places’ us humans in the context of Creation so that we humble ourselves in its magnificence.  One line in particular applies to what I have been saying here, and has implications for how real change happens in this world.  Change for the good is not ultimately reliant on government programs, grand social contracts & movements, public or private initiatives or religious efforts.  These are all helpful, but it’s “The simple things, the true things, the silent men (and women) who do things…” that is the unseen, underlying power for transformation.

Be quietly UN-noticeable.  It will truly change the world.

Harv Matchullis

A Pull Toward the Light

Had friends over for a dinner last night.  A welcome return to this form of hospitality we have missed during the pandemic. 

It was a challenging night.  Both are suffering.  One with memory loss.  The other with chronic pain.   Not how they envisioned life for themselves. The dinner conversation had much to do with suffering and our experience (or not) of God in our pain.  More so, it was an acknowledgement that our faith has not grown easier as we age as much as it has become more mysterious and yet, strangely real.

Suffering deeply challenges and changes our comfortable and packaged concepts of the Divine.  In suffering we do not experience a God who acts according to our expectations, hopes, or calculations.  God is frustratingly close and far, intimate and distant, comforting and seemingly callous, with us and against us.  Some eventually abandon God.  Yet some grow deeper.  Why deeper in the face of such struggle to understand? I believe it is because the faith we have, if we have it, is a gift.  God draws us.  

Even in the dark there is a pull toward the light.  Even during God’s silence, as I cry out in pain and frustration, is that not the evidence of a gift in action? Why would I otherwise choose to lash out to the God I feel has abandoned me? To leave God, to fully abandon any conversation or argument, is to be truly alone in this universe.  That is the most frightening suffering of all. 

Have we lost the plot?

Love is the greatest sign and characteristic of Christians according to Christ, their namesake.  Yet looking around at some public displays of Christianity lately, you simply have to ask the question, along with the Black Eyed Peas so long ago:  “Where is the Love?” 

Much of society views Christians as unloving, irrelevant, impractical, arrogant, and narrow.  Can you blame them?  “Christ” has been co-opted to advance political agendas, bully the outsider, judge the ‘other’, and justify positions, statements and protests on just about anything.  Tragically many also use Christ as a means to power-up over others and exert superiority over them, including toward their fellow Christians.  There’s a warped theology-of-sorts behind that which I won’t get into here, but it exists and it shows.

Some Christians have lost the plot.

So many Scriptures, like 1 Corinthians 13, repudiate the arrogant and unloving posture of Christians.  Without love, we are like noisy gongs and clanging symbols – noticed, but unpleasant and without a harmony of meaning.  Christ often speaks to the fact that it is not grand displays of our version of spirituality and moral values that draw people to the love of God (see Matthew 6:5).  Instead it’s the quiet, localized and faithful expressions of love that makes the difference.

Don’t think that God needs you to ‘defend the faith’.  Don’t believe the rhetoric that you have to go public or viral with your faith in order to ‘make’ society or individuals conform to Christian principles.  Christ doesn’t give you a bully pulpit. He needs none of that.  He’s  chosen, as Robert Louis Stevenson expresses in The Call of the Wild, “the simple things, the true things, the silent men (and women) who do things” to eventually change lives.  The small things, like being yeast, seed, salt and light eventually change the environment in which they are scattered.

Eugene Petersen

Put down your placards. Silence your horns. Stop separating yourself from ‘them’. The thing we are to do is to come alongside others and love - unequivocally. That’s how the world will know we are Christians. But it’s not even our ‘reputation’ as Christians that is the important thing here. Since love is the very character of God, it is through demonstrating that love that the world is changed into the design God had for it from the beginning.

It’s not about your design for what this world should be.  It’s about God’s.  You won’t see that happen without doing it His way – the way of love.  

The Gospel Story has one plot - the Love of God.  Don't lose it. 

Melancholy in the Middle

 

 

There’s a relentless sadness in my soul.  I wish I could shake it and be like some friends I know who seem to always express eternal optimism.  Their version of faith in God seems to protect them from sadness and discontent.  I am not there.  Wish I could belt out the worship songs like “Good, Good Father” with conviction.  But then the news of the world, the marriage break up of my neighbour, makes me choke back those words and wonder.  

 

Perhaps it’s just me.  If you’ve read my blogs you know I have an apostolic, prophetic bent.  It’s an orientation that requires me to manage my perspective ‘by faith’ to ensure I don’t descend into depression or cynicism. However, in truth I am pained by the gap between what is possible and what is, between the deep (potential) reach of the gospel into systems, neighbourhoods and relationships, and the limited impact we as an organized church seem to effect on society.  Perhaps my sadness comes because I am in the final phase of my career and have become jaded and cynical. Perhaps the pandemic has overwhelmed my outlook, making me incapable of sustained hope.  Perhaps I am dangerously close to not giving a damn anymore.  Let someone else; let another generation take up the angst and the action. 

Trying to maintain hope of God’s Kingdom promises amid the brokenness and pain of this world is a tough gig.  We all live in between goodness and brokenness, between hope and reality.  In the middle ground is sadness and melancholy. 

I remind myself that this emotion is NOT a sign of lack of trust in God.   Nor is it a negative character quality.  In fact, it’s an utterly human response to the gap between the promised abundant life of God’s Kingdom and the lived-in reality we face on earth.  If we choose not to feel this sadness, letting it grip our soul, we either retreat into a spiritual selfishness of Christian activity & forms of expression that cocoons us from the brokenness around, or we shift into high gear as activists, believing by our good efforts we can change the world, irrespective of any divine involvement.

Could it be that God is also sad, and that our sadness at the state of our world reflects His?  Could we perceive of a Creator who expresses this emotion, this unsettledness between hope and reality? Could it be that the melancholy in the middle that we experience is a sign of our being created in God’s image; a reflection of the divine in us?

One example of MANY expressions of Gods’ sadness comes via the prophet Jeremiah, who profoundly expressed the weeping heart of God. At one point God communicated through Jeremiah these sentiments: “Speak this word to them: ‘Let my eyes overflow with tears night and day without ceasing; for the virgin daughter, my people, has suffered a grievous wound, a crushing blow.’” (Jeremiah 14:17).  That’s divine sadness over the gap between hope and reality.  God also stays close to our own human sadness when He promises that He is “close to the broken-hearted.” (Psalm 34:18). How can God be close to someone who is broken-hearted and not feel their pain? Because our Creator feels pain.

This melancholy in the middle isn’t just an emotion.  It certainly isn’t a sign of weak faith.  It is the proof of the divine Spirit of God calling into your soul with the words “this shouldn’t be this way”.  Then, out of that sadness Christ speaks:  “There is a better Way.  Show that to the world”.

Harv

PS – For an inspiring story of someone who feels this sadness, yet steps into the gap between promise and reality, listen to Father Gregory Boyle here