Saturday, November 23, 2013

For the Days of Loss

They are words spoken all too often: "He was so young..."  Just beginning, really, and then gone in a heart-breaking moment.  Hope shattered, darkness descends, God seems distant at best, cruel at worst.

Why, God?  Why him, why them, why us?  Where are you, God?  How is this loss possible?  For how long, God?  It is all so senseless, but what in this life isn't?  It is all so fragmented, the very fabric of the universe stretched taut to the point of shattering.

Broken.

Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

On this indescribably dark day, God weeps.  He cries with us - the darkness is not ours to bear alone.  His heart breaks with ours.

God with us, Immanuel.  God with us, among us, for us.  God incarnate, God enthroned, the suffering servant who took our sorrows and sin upon himself.

In this hour of loss, what can we say of the sovereignty of God?
God with us, among us, weeping.
God holding us, loving us, our Comforter.
God for us, not against us, our Defender.


One day, Love will triumph once for all.  Death defeated, chains broken, love victorious.  But love is victorious when it suffers for humanity, when it sacrifices its own good, when it dies.  Thanks be to God, death is not the final word.  Love wins.  In our day of loss, in our time of inexpressible sorrow, we remember and cling to the God who died.

The God who carries our sorrows.

The God who weeps.

Thursday, November 21, 2013

the longer I live

The longer I live, the less I know.  

I've heard that line before, I guess, although I never really understood it until entirely too recently.  If only I had learned what it means to hold my beliefs with an open hand, maybe life wouldn't have been so turbulent for so long.  Of course, I still want to know things, still think I know things, and life will always be turbulent.

The longer I live, the less I know.

I want to live my life open to the possibility that God will move.  I fully expect God's moving to be unexpected and uncomfortable, and I'm painfully aware that so often I quench the Spirit with my need for rationality and control.

The longer I live, the less I know.

I've been agonizing in the past year and a half over submission of wives to their husbands and gender roles in the church and what it means to be both a Christian and a feminist.  I feel so torn between my upbringing and my logic and my emotions and my admiration of so many who practice a more traditional form of submission in marriage.  And finally I have landed.  Where have I landed?  I haven't a clue.

The longer I live, the less I know.

Literal or figurative, universal truth/command or culturally bound, selfish or selfless in motivation: the questions accumulate.  And the questions no longer matter.  I want to follow Jesus, it's that simple.

This I know:

Following Jesus is taking the quiet path, the selfless path, the sacrificial path.

Loving Jesus is forgiving again and again and again for repeat offenses.  Loving Jesus is befriending the people in my life with whom I could not have less in common.  Loving Jesus is lending a listening ear.  Loving Jesus is going uncomfortably out of my way to show deference to people who do nothing to earn it.

Loving Jesus is not spotlight, control, or power.

Loving Jesus is submitting myself again and again to my neighbor.  Loving Jesus is deference to the other and death to myself.  Loving Jesus is strength on behalf of the weary and broken.  Defending the defenseless is what I should be about.

The questions don't matter so much now.  Nowadays I just love and trust my Jesus, and that's enough.

Saturday, November 9, 2013

for the nights with no stars

Sometimes I miss the country.  I am a farm girl after all.  I talk to Jesus best when I'm outside gazing at the stars or the pounding waves or the rustling trees.  There are stars here and waves here and certainly plenty of trees here, but I also have the misfortune of living in a place where I don't feel safe walking by myself after dark.  Nights like tonight I want to move back to my college town where I never worried.  And to think I was threatened by the amount of people in that town, to think I missed the country then.

Tonight life became too much.  I was overcome by sadness and guilt and the overwhelming need to have God physically here with me.  I needed Jesus tonight.  

I walked to the tennis courts at my apartment complex.  A compromise between emotions and rationality, I guess.  It's pretty dark there, and I laid on the concrete and watched the stars.  I miss the stars.  They're incredibly beautiful and never changing and they remind me that no matter where I go in this world, the stars always stay the same.  I'm thankful for that.  I'm thankful for how they remind me that God is always with me and never changing, as well.

Tonight I poured out all of my thoughts to God.  Told Him how sad I was, how much tonight, at least, life just hurts.  Told Him I'd appreciate any and all wisdom He could give me.  And He was, as always, silent.

I don't know how to deal with God's silence sometimes.  Often it seems like the only sound is my thoughts ricocheting through my mind.  I fear I have made God into a God of my own design.  Need a loving God?  There he is.  Need a wise God?  Found him.  Need to know that those who wrong me will get it?  Vengeful God it is.

Tonight I stared at the stars and wished that God would speak to me.  He didn't.  I was only there for fifteen minutes, so it's not as if the experiment is very fair at all.  I didn't want it enough, maybe.  I dunno.

I do know that my heart was near to breaking tonight, and God didn't speak.  I do know that I would really have appreciated his wisdom in an audible, specific form.  He didn't oblige.  He doesn't really work that way very often, it seems.

I listened to my music, stared at the stars, half-prayed-half-thought-out-loud, and then I stood up.  I walked home.  My attention span isn't good for much beyond fifteen minutes, it seems.

But my head is clear now.  I saw the stars, and they reminded me that God doesn't change.  And God became man.  He lived among us.  Walked through life's challenges and then died a cruel death.  

And I guess that's going to have to be enough for now.  And enough for the cloudy nights, too.

Maranatha.  Come quickly, Lord Jesus.

Friday, November 8, 2013

My Study of Revelation Part 3

Today I will be going over Revelation 2:1-7.  To see what I've already covered, see Part One and Part Two.

Revelation 2:1-7 - The Letter to Ephesus

Historical Context
Before I talk about this specific passage, I find it important to establish as much historic background as possible on Ephesus.  A few things, then, about Ephesus:
  1. This was the most important city in western Turkey, the capital of its region, and, according to Wright, had a population of around 250,000.  (Revelation for Everyone, N.T. Wright)  This number is hotly debated; many scholars now think it was much less than this.  Regardless, this was one of the largest cities in Asia Minor.
  2. Ephesus contained the temple of Artemis, which was one of the wonders of the world.  Artemis was the Greek name for the Roman goddess Diana.  Within its extensive grounds, the temple of Artemis had a tree which served as a shrine and a system of asylum. (RfE, Wright)  The reference to the tree of life in the letter to Ephesus was no mistake.
  3. Ephesus was completely abandoned by the 15th century. (RfE, Wright)
  4. Today there are no active churches in the vicinity of Ephesus (the modern towns/villages that surround it). (RfE, Wright)
The Framework of the Letters to the Churches
Each of the letters to the seven churches follows roughly the same formula:

  1. Greeting (2:1)
  2. "I know..." (2:2)
  3. Praise (2:3, 7a)
  4. Rebuke (2:4)
  5. Command (2:5a)
  6. Warning (2:5b)
  7. "The one who conquers..." (2:7b)

The Passage Itself
It seems to me that by the time John wrote the book of Revelation, Ephesus was a case study in missing the point of what it means to follow Christ.  They were immovable in their doctrine, calling out false prophets and undergoing much persecution.  But they had forgotten love.

Who, exactly, were the Nicolaitans?  No one seems to know for certain, although church tradition holds that it was a heretical sect that "taught that spiritual liberty gave them sufficient leeway to practice idolatry and immorality." (NIV Study Bible, Zondervan)  Doing this would allow them to avoid persecution by the state (Faithflife Study Bible).  The church in Ephesus stood strongly against this.  There was no question of their being opposed to the pagan religion of Rome, but they had forgotten that correct doctrine is nothing without love.  John had already written the letters of 1-3 John (tradition holds they were written about 10 years before, ironically from Ephesus) in which he emphasizes love.  

Sunday, November 3, 2013

when my church isn't what i'm looking for and that's okay

You know, since leaving home to attend college, I have never found a church in which I fit.

I don't fit here.  I'm too feminist, too cynical, too liberal, too skeptical.  I don't (and won't) hand out tracts, I make fun of Christianity more than I sing its praises, I sometimes wish I could walk out of those doors and never come back.  Church is often more painful than it is salve.

Attending church in my college town was nothing like home.  I didn't fit there because I missed the way things had always been back home.  I attended that church for almost four years and never met a single person.  I walked in and out every week without connection.  And then I moved home again.

I couldn't find it in me to admit the extent of my disagreement when I lived in the Northwest, and the dishonesty I served up week after week was almost enough to tear me apart.  I loved those people, but I couldn't admit to them that I rarely agreed with them.  I led worship and played on the worship team and often felt like I was going against the very fabric of things I believed by doing so, as if I were adding my agreement simply by association.

I'm slowly learning to be honest about my disagreement.  To admit that life is messy, to admit that I don't always see things the same way, to be willing to talk and willing to listen but never willing to simply accept at face value something someone says.  And as I learn to talk about these issues, I'm learning that some things just don't matter.

Dear Church,

I don't really care that you think you and me and the rest of us are gonna be raptured.  We both love Jesus.

I don't really care that you think the world was created in seven twenty-four hour days.  We both love Jesus.

I don't really care that you hand out tracts or are a little too in-your-face for my liking.  That is your way of loving Jesus.

Yes, I care that sometimes you say and do hurtful things.  Sometimes you're uncaring or unthinking.  Sometimes you're racist or sexist.  But I say and do hurtful things at the same rate.  We both are doing our best to love Jesus and being miserable mess-ups at it.

Being a member of the body of Christ means that I won't always agree with you about how to do things, but I will always need you, and we should always be working toward the same goal.  The Kingdom is here among us, the Kingdom is soon to come.  I want to live that reality with you.  I want to love others in Jesus' name with you.  I want to wrestle with the hard questions - truly wrestle with them - with you.

Every week is a struggle.  I'm a cynic, I'm close-minded, I'm easily angered.  I shut down and I judge.  I feel alienated and alone.  These things, although the reality, are not right.  I want to learn to ask the questions without carrying the baggage.  May I learn to love you even if I don't love the things you say and do.  You are not perfect, but none of us are.  In our imperfections Jesus shines all the brighter.  I don't fit with you but then again, I don't fit anywhere.  None of us do.  We're strangers, all of us, trying our best to find our way through this messed up world toward God.

You're not what I'm looking for.  And that's okay.  What I'm looking for isn't what's good for me, anyway.

Your sister,
Marilee

Friday, November 1, 2013

In which life moves on and I [try to] move with it...

They wanted to play Sardines.

Anyone who knew me in high school or even in college knows that night games of any kind used to be one of my life's passions.  I particularly loved "Dark," a cops and robbers hide and seek game played - you guessed it - after dark.  So much of my childhood and early adulthood was spent with that game.  I even have Dark to thank for the huge scar on my ankle and my inability to properly flex my foot and toes.  

Tonight I attended a day-late Halloween costume party that some of us put together for our "young adult" ministry at my church.  We played Sardines.  Tragically, I was the girl that my five-year-ago self could not stand.  The one who refused to get "into it."  I played, yes.  But mostly I just wandered around and pretended to be trying.

I mean, part of my lack of excitement was probably the fact that I unexpectedly got called in to work overtime today and was thus sleep deprived and semi-stressed from a day at work and the knowledge that tomorrow I go back to start my "real" work week.  Part of it was the fact that I didn't know most of the people there.  But mostly?  I've just grown up.  My life has moved on and I found myself stuck in between worlds tonight.

~~~

Sometimes I think about what my life was like here only a year or so ago.  I was surrounded by people I considered family.  We were tight knit and spent at least three or four nights a week together.  Sometimes more.  Some of them were close friends, some were merely people with whom I loved spending time.  My life was far from perfect; I think of my first year in Saint Marys as one of the more emotionally turbulent of my life.  But I can say for certain that I was surrounded by amazing people.

That hasn't changed.  I have amazing friends here.

But tonight the absence of so many who once formed the core of my world here was hard to deal with.  Some are out to sea, others have moved away, still others have simply drifted away from what once was.  Tonight there were only a handful of us from the group of people I once thought indestructible.  I was reminded tonight that life always moves on, and that I must be willing to move with it.

And sometimes I can't move with it.  I'm getting old.  I realized that as I attempted to fit in with people younger than my youngest sister.  I realized that as I found myself just wanting to sit around the bonfire and talk about life and found no one else was interested in such a pursuit (so I sat there by myself and hummed songs into the smoldering fire).  I realized that as I stood lamely by as everyone else crammed into the closet in a rousing game of Sardines.

I've slowed down.  Adulthood has arrived.

I was the oldest there tonight by several years.  I felt so keenly the absence of those my age, those who have, maybe for the same reasons as I didn't fit tonight, drifted away.  I realized something else equally strongly, though.

No matter how difficult, no matter how much I don't handle large groups well, no matter how large the age gap, God has called me to be present here and now.  Here is beautiful, even as it is different.  Now is a new reality in which I am older than the rest.  Here is the opportunity to love these people, to make this new core the old guard.  This group of people, however much changed, is the reason my life is beautiful in this terrible town.  These people have been and still are Jesus to me in a world that can so quickly feel so very lonely.

I will fight for them, for us, for this community that is so fragile and so easily lost.

It's worth it.