Sycamore

We don’t have to go looking for trouble. It already has our address. Jesus often reminded his disciples that trials are part of daily living. Seeking God more earnestly does not mean seeking more trouble for our lives. No, the benefit of seeking a deeper relationship with God is to better prepare us for the inevitable. We don’t have a choice about what troubles come our way. However, we can choose to have a relationship with God that prepares us for trouble. Some trials may mean losing our lives for Christ’s sake. Yet this is not the real sacrifice. The extreme sacrifice must come long before. We must sacrifice selfishness at every level in order to develop intimacy with God ahead of time. When we have sacrificed all to pursue a preeminent relationship with Christ, we will have already done the hardest part.

The above is from today’s post at the Persecution Blog.  It follows a story about an Indonesian pastor who was martyred, leaving behind a family.  And while we can thank God that a bloodthirsty mob is a rare threat in the United States, we also can’t put our hope in the laws of our government or think that where we live means we won’t ever face real trouble.  The advice above is sound: seek a deeper relationship with God now, and troubles later of any size (James called them “trials of various kinds“) will not take away your foundation.

But even more than that, I think this quote is helpful in dealing with the constant call for Christians to be “radical” and “passionate.”  These words are rarely challenged - who wants to be the person saying you should be less “radical for God”? - but I think they can cause some serious damage. When someone sells all their possessions because they want to be radical for God, what does that mean for someone who still owns some stuff?  What does legitimate passion for God look like for an accountant with a family of three?  Is he a sellout if he doesn’t move his family to a third-world country?  Does that make him one of those un-passionate Christians, or, to use the now common Christian insult, lukewarm?

The options you are given from Christian culture are either (a) do something crazy so you’ll know you are really passionate and radical or (b) give up on being passionately radical and resign to being one of those “mostly spiritual” people that get a studio apartment instead of a mansion in heaven.  (Mansions are for winners).  There’s a lot that could be said here - the biblical theme that it is God’s grace that motivates obedience, for example - but to keep it simple, I think the quote above illustrates that passion doesn’t look like either of those options.  The pastor in Indonesia wasn’t passionate because he loved Christ enough to die for his faith.  He was passionate because He loved Christ that much before He died. That’s how passion and radical living works - not by finding the most radical thing possible and throwing yourself off the temple to prove you’re all in, but by pursuing intimacy with God in such a way that you’re ready for whatever God throws your way, whether it’s life as an accountant or smuggling Bibles into a closed country.

Jesus spoke hard words, but they weren’t about how you could prove your passion.  They were about how you should decide He is worth anything before it ever comes to that.  Some people will never be called to die for Christ.  Others will.  But everyone is called to hate their life and count the cost of following Jesus, because you never know what God will do with your life.  True passion and radical living mean that all you need to know, to pursue knowing, to never give up knowing, is that Jesus is worth whatever comes next.  So stop worrying about how you rank on the Christian radical passion index and start pursuing the knowledge of God.  People who are immersed in the knowledge and worship of Jesus Christ have already counted the cost, even when they work behind a desk.

LOST is over.  I’m kind of mourning.  Don’t psychoanalyze me too much, but I hate when good stories end.  Usually it’s when books end, but this time it was a TV show.  I get all sad and stuff, even when the endings are happy.  Apparently I’m kind of a sap.

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Speaking of LOST, I think the most spot-on lesson from the show comes from the pen of Abraham Piper.  It’s one sentence long.  That’s supposed to intrigue you.

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Picking up a thesis to clean up for publishing after several months is pretty tough.

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I wonder if the condensed emotional intensity on most movies and television shows adversely affects the way we viewers evaluate our own lives.  If you watch enough quick cuts between scenes with perfect dialogue and huge plot points, your own life - with all the average parts left in and no background music - can seem “less than it could be.”  Maybe the whole “self-esteem/find yourself/be true to who you are/you are special, and so is ever single other person, so special is now normal” thing has something to do with the way modern media tells stories.  If you never see a hero have any downtime, than if you have downtime you must not be a hero, that sort of thing.

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I’m currently reading A Short History of Christianity, by a journalist named Stephen Tomkins.  It’s really good.  Not too long, and it’s made me laugh out loud at least twenty times.  I’m only half-way through.

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This morning: drycleaning dropped off, prescription picked up, groceries bought, haircut received.  All before 9:30.  Monday better watch out, I’m on the warpath.

(Read the introduction to this series here)

Lesson #2: Christians who love Jesus should be your friends, no matter what they look like or where they’re from, even if they’re not cool.

The majority of people at my seminary when I showed up had a similar story - they were driving down the road one day in Nebraska/Pennsylvania/Oklahoma/Arkansas and heard John MacArthur preaching on the radio.  From that moment on, they got every sermon they could find on cassette tape and moved out to California so they could learn at the Master’s Seminary.  Of course, there were some people who didn’t have that story.  Plenty from South Africa and other places across the world, plenty from California (though six or seven years after I enrolled it feels much more diverse on campus).  But the seminary had a type: middle-American fundamentalist.

I, of course, wasn’t from middle America.  I was from California.  I went to UCLA, not Bob Jones University.  I wore jeans, not pleated khakis.  I did not have a buzz cut, and my accent was the same one you heard on TV.  I was not concerned with what synod a Lutheran church was affiliated with.  I had never listened to a sermon on cassette tape.  I did not own any cassette tapes.  At lunch, I did not discuss Luther and Zwingli’s reformation debate about the Eucharist.  I shot the breeze about sports or told old college stories.

For all those reasons and more, my friends and I subtly became the “cool” people.  We didn’t go around wearing varsity jackets or anything, but just about anyone peering in to our little seminary world would have agreed that, as far as cool goes, we were bigger fish in that tiny pond.

Now, don’t get me wrong, no one was staring at our table at lunch and wishing they could be our friend.  At least I hope not.  In seminary, there is much less premium on cool; there are ways that it’s even a bit frowned upon, as though by preferring jeans you’ve sold out a bit.  But there was still some culture shock between the two crowds, just enough to keep us at separate tables at lunch.

It wasn’t that we didn’t like each other, it’s just that we both assumed we wouldn’t really be able to be friends.  We didn’t “fit.”  And, maybe most of all, we were sure that we didn’t want to be like the other guy.  If anything, the other guy could probably use a healthy dose of being like us.

After about a year in seminary, I couldn’t help but realize how arrogant I was.  How arrogant we all were.  As I got to know some of the guys around me, past the superficial stereotypes, I found men who I had a lot in common with.  Mainly, I found men that loved Jesus.  And, as I got to know the guys who were so different from me, I realized that, in the most important ways, I wanted to be just like them.

There are Christians all over the place, and all of us are quirky.  We all fall into various social categories, but seminary taught me that you can’t base your Christian friendships, or even your lunch table choices, on anything but loving Jesus.  If you do, it’s your loss.  It seems to me that God gets a lot of glory when cassette tape sermon listeners and indie music devotees have a good lunch together as Christian family.

Learn about common judgment mistakes

Read about why non-Christians being nice shouldn’t shake your faith

Read why telephones do not belong in polite society

Figure out what it means to be “gospel-centered”

Meet the “poorgeouisie” (an oldie but a goodie)

Read how a community group’s love can create opportunities to share the Gospel

(Read the introduction to this series here)

Lesson #1: It’s easy to start talking about the Bible instead of learning from the Bible.

At UCLA, I took a year of classical Greek.  The classes were the throwback basement rooms of Dodd Hall that made up the Classics department.  Going down there was always a little odd, mainly because the entire department is devoted to things that haven’t been on earth for thousands of years.  Ancient Greek dialects, ancient Roman architecture, ancient emperors and their families.  From what I understand, most people who were classics majors (or professors) got into it because they wanted to mine the past for lessons they could use today.  No one wanted to study a long dead civilization so they could be fun at parties.

But the longer someone stayed down in that basement, the more they’d enjoy stuff that had nothing to do with modern lessons.  Instead of learning about bad leadership from Nero, you’d see heated debates about whether or not he was playing the violin while Rome burned.  Soon, you had professors publishing papers on Latin semantics and Athenian pottery, which, while perfectly good objects for study, had little to do with why they entered the field in the first place.

Something similar happened in seminary.  Everyone showed up because they wanted to be mastered by the Word of God, and help others do the same.  But if you stay there long enough, you can forget why you came, and start to care more about your knowledge than your obedience.  Soon, you’re debating who wrote the book of Hebrews with a passion that is missing from your prayer life.  Things are upside down.

You don’t have to be in seminary to face this temptation.  We’re all called to know God, which of course involves knowing about God.  Theology, Bible study, all of these are fields of knowledge that we should be pursuing (fields which do not require a classroom or a degree, but a desire for God).  But these are all tools that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we use to change our hearts and our lives.  Thank God at the seminary I went to, they pushed us to be as devoted to our holiness as we were to our studies.  I still need that lesson.  We don’t read our Bibles to win intramural debates.  We read our Bibles so that God can master us.

Learn about “non-mentor mentorship” (in just 3 paragraphs)

Find out how cul-de-sacs are killing your community

Learn seven ways you can guard and repair relationships (which we all could use)

Use one question to love a whole lot of people, and open the door to sharing the Gospel

Learn how to pray badly

Be liberated by the doctrine of justification in your everyday life

Spot-on social commentary in a minute and a half:

(HT: Abraham Piper)

Christianity has some confusing  parts to it, but Christian culture is pretty much always confusing.  One of the voices out there that brings some clarity - on a blog, no less - is Kevin DeYoung.  He’s the author of several books (including the stellar Why We Love the Church and Just Do Something), and he has the remarkable ability to write clearly while working through topics that can be really confusing.  He comes highly recommended; below are a few examples of his posts:

What to Do When the Bible Baffles

Wisdom, Complexity, and Chilling the Heck Out

The Missional Conversation: On Green Lights and Red Flags

So, in case you were wondering, Tuscany is really cool.  There’s no such thing as bad food, you see real life castles and stuff, and there’s this really cool looking mist that settles over all the hills, even when it’s sunny and hot.  It’s sort of like looking at a painting, or a movie set, but it’s all real.  In some of the hill towns, you almost expect to hear someone yell “Cut!” and watch all the locals stop whatever they’re doing and head over to the craft services table.  It’s much different when you’re back home, in the city where people really do yell “Cut!” and head to craft services, and you keep waking up at 4am.

Pictures are a little tough on the blog right now, we’ve got some formatting issues, but if we didn’t this is the place you’d see a picture of one of my favorite moments from my trip: when I met Mannina the Shoemaker in Florence.  Here’s the backstory: my step dad is named Robert Mannina.  I love him a lot.  And he is a full-blooded Italian, which comes with a lot of fringe benefits for me: he makes his own red sauce (which takes like 12 hours), can whip up a phenomenal pesto, and barbecues one of the best thanksgiving turkeys you’ll ever eat.  (Bob has plenty of non-culinary benefits as well, they’re just related more to his character than his ethnicity).  So I’ve grown up with an affiliation with Italy, sort of like that guy who never went to Harvard but has a bunch of their hats and sweatshirts and likes to wear them around town.

Well, it turns out that Florence is the home of the Mannina Shoe Shop, where Mannina the Shoemaker (I don’t know his first name) and his son make and sell shoes.  Apparently they are very nice shoes, because they run somewhere upwards of $1,000 a pop.  And, seeing as how I was in Florence, I knew I had to go find Mannina the Shoemaker and, in my best handmotions (I don’t speak Italian), explain to him how I was indirectly related to him.

So last week, Chrissie and I found his workshop below the Ponte Vecchio - not his store, mind you, but the workshop, which is slightly larger than the kitchen in my one bedroom apartment.  This means that my entering the workshop made it near impossible for any of the other occupants to move.  But, before my eyes was Mannina the Shoemaker, who bears a quite striking resemblance to Geppetto.  (He had the apron and everything).  And, a bit taken aback because (a) the workshop isn’t a store, so it’s unusual for them to entertain guests and (b) I am a giant white man that he could easily have mistaken for an eclipse, Mannina the Shoemaker stopped working and said “Buon giorno.”  At which point, I replied in my best Italian, “….Sono….er….um….Roberto Mannina, da California, uh….”  (Bob had been to his store several years earlier and met him, so I figured maybe the name would help).  His face lit up like only a Geppetto lookalike’s could, and he vigorously shook my hand, and we took a picture, and I looked at his workshop and said, “Bene!” (which was all I could think of to say), and he handed me a card for the actual shoe store just in case I wanted to buy a $1000 pair of shoes.

Afterwards I was almost giddy.  And yesterday, as I related all this to Bob Mannina over the phone, we both got a kick out of the fact that I met the Shoemaker.  I’m still not entirely sure why meeting an old man in a shoe shop in Florence could make me giddy, but I know this much: even though the Mannina blood running through my veins is only metaphorical, the truth is that there’s a very old man in a very old country that is somehow a part of my lineage.  His existence ties me to something before, something older (and it’s hard to get older than a tiny shoe shop just past the Ponte Vecchio).  He’s a living generation that’s not mine.  And somewhere along the line, that generation produced another generation that contained a guy that married my Mom and made me try pesto even when I thought green sauce didn’t look very appetizing.

Not sure what the lesson is.  It’s definitely nice to recognize something bigger than yourself, bigger than your own lifetime, that stretches back before you were here and will keep going after you’re gone.  I also like to think that one day I’ll look like a super-sized Geppetto, and I’ll have someone tangentially related to me walk onto my porch and try to explain how, despite a long distance and a language barrier, we’re somehow part of the same thing.  But most of all, I’d like to think that my church family, here, will have a lineage too.  That one day, I’ll meet someone who heard the gospel and believed from someone who was born to a father that was converted by a woman in Virginia who got serious about Christ back when she went to college in Westwood and was invited to a community group of this church called Shoreline.  That bloodline isn’t literal, but it’s no less real.  Maybe it’s more real.