Fathering (and mothering, sister and brothering) a Fatherless World

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. - James 1:27

This past Sunday was Father’s Day.

If you are a father, I hope you had a good day. If you have a father, I hope you made him feel honored. My family made me feel honored -- it was a good Father’s Day, and I am blessed.

So many in our world are not able to receive or to give this blessing. Many around us live without fathers. Other’s whom we look at and would say, “He or she has a father,” practically speaking do not. The land of fatherlessness is a land filled with loss, both personal and societal.

God, whom the Bible refers to as our father, whom Jesus refers to as his daddy, seems to care a great deal about the land of fatherlessness and those who dwell there. Throughout scripture followers of God, made in his image, are called to care for those who have no father. We are called as well to care for those without husbands, for foreigners, outcasts, and the discarded. We are called and invited to love with the love of God the very people whom the world seems to see as invisible, disposable. As we love people who so often feel Godforsaken, we carry the presence of God to them even as we experience it ourselves.

At Creekside Covenant Church this past Sunday we were privileged to have a conversation with Brent Christi, Executive Director of Jubilee Center REACH. Brent told us stories, which echo those of many others throughout history who step out despite uncertainty into the areas and towards the people where God is calling them, certain that somehow God will meet them. And he does. And when that happens, he exchanges their uncertainty, not with certainty but with expectant trust. And the world – including those who step out -- is changed, transformed, and restored. It’s God’s plan, and it includes us.

Have you ever experienced the joy (mingled with the fear) of stepping into these types of opportunities? Have you met God there? If you have, I probably don’t need to tell you to continue – it is contagious. Instead, I tell you to keep it up and to share your stories. If you have not, do it; do it now, step out. If you don’t know how, ask. Ask me, ask others – and then share your story as well – success or failure. We are propelled and fueled by the stories of our common journey – inward toward God, outward toward the world and together as a people.

Peace, hope and love,

Doug

Is Jesus a Nice Guy?

As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. These things I command you, so that you will love one another. John 15:9–17

“That Jesus sure is a nice guy.”

If you ask people on the street if they think Jesus was a nice guy, most will say yes. And you know what? I think they’re right, I think that Jesus was, and is a nice guy. I suspect that if you were able to go back in time and talk to his friends from back in the day when he walked the earth, they would tell you that he was, in fact, exceptionally nice.

The problem is that we sometimes confuse niceness with social pleasantness, even passivity – especially if we don’t know the person well. When we only see someone from afar, pleasantness and passivity can come off as nice; “he doesn’t rock the boat,” “she doesn’t cause trouble,” “he is always smiling and happy,” “he doesn’t interject himself into things that don’t concern him,” “she always offers to help if it is really needed,” “what a nice guy.”

A friend, however, is not a “nice guy.” A friend, tells you the truth, a real friend loves you enough to say hard things. Real friendship can handle – and in fact grows – through the journey of hard truths shared. Jesus says in the passage quoted above, “No longer do I call you servants . . . I have called you friends.”

Jesus calls himself “the way, the truth and the life.” Jesus tells us that he has “come that we may have life to the fullest, more and better life than we ever imagined.” Jesus is “the author and the sustainer of life itself.” Jesus is the one who provides “life and breath and everything else.” Jesus invites us: ”follow me.” Jesus instructs us: “I am the vine, you are the branches, abide in me and I in you.” Jesus calls us: “friend.” And he tells us, “As your friend, I will say hard things to you. As your friend, I will challenge you. As your friend, I may make you uncomfortable, I may cause you to re-think things that you have thought for a very long time.”

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to waste my time on a “nice guy Jesus.” I want to give my whole life to the real Jesus, the Jesus who bids me come and die, the Jesus who invites me to drop my nets and follow him, the Jesus who calls me friend.

Offensive and Life Giving

Only insofar as you eat and drink flesh and blood, the flesh and blood of the Son of Man, do you have life within you. The one who brings a hearty appetite to this eating and drinking has eternal life and will be fit and ready for the Final Day. My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. By eating my flesh and drinking my blood you enter into me and I into you. In the same way that the fully alive Father sent me here and I live because of him, so the one who makes a meal of me lives because of me. This is the Bread from heaven. - John 6:53–58 MESSAGE

Jesus offended a lot of people when he talked about his flesh and his blood, when he told him that his flesh was real food and his blood was real drink. Ultimately, he was talking – as he did in so many other places – about abiding in him. He was talking about connecting so closely and so intimately with him that our lives naturally flow from and reflect him. The apostle Paul used phrases like, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” (Gal 2:20) and, “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come,” (2 Cor. 5:17) to convey the depth of abiding that is necessary for us to live as the people God intended us to be.

“Eat my flesh and drink my blood.” That, Jesus said, is the way to think about your faith in him; devour him, take him in, let him be the source of a whole new life, the sustenance for which we have been starved. The words he spoke were offensive to those who heard them. If we are honest, they are to us as well. When he spoke these words, most of the people who heard them walked away; his words the breaking point that caused them to leave. They still cause people to leave today.

But those who left missed out on real life. They did not want to be challenged, they did not want to reprioritize their lives, so they got booked down on the semantics and used that as an excuse to walk away. Many today do the same thing, “I love you I love you I love you, but don’t ask me to go to Africa.” “I worship you, but don’t ask me to change ethics about sex, business, culture, money.” The reality, however, is that Jesus does ask us to change our ethics; he asks to change all of us. Sometimes we feel pushed to far and we leave.

The crowds in John 9 felt they were pushed too far, and they all left him; except the 12 – whose lives were changed, and who changed the world. As we take him at his word, as we “eat his flesh and drink his blood,” as die to ourselves and become alive to him, we too are changed. This change is the first step to an awakening where an entire community changes -- the way they drive, finances, how they live, they become different. (Acts 2).

The world is longing for something different, as followers of Jesus we are lounging for something different as well. Jesus did not come to simply make our lives better, but to completely transform them. It takes submission to him, even to what seems to us offensive. The result? He promises us peace, joy, contentment, love, and fulfillment – lives not wasted, a community with the power to bring about healing to both a world and a church looking for something different.

I want a to be a part of that, don’t you?

Peace, hope and love

Doug