When Your Pastor Lets You Down

Posted on March 7, 2016 by Joe Chambers

I stand 6’4” and weigh over two hundred pounds but felt physically insignificant standing next to David.  He weighed north of four hundred pounds and was one of my first baptisms in my first church—almost three decades ago.  When we both stood in the baptismal, we displaced a goodly amount of water. The choir seemed a little nervous as two behemoths stepped into the water behind them, for the only thing between them and a biblical flood was an 8-inch tall pane of glass.

I faced the congregation and David faced towards my left.  I told him that he would have to bend his knees and help me get himself back up after he was fully immersed.  He nodded and licked his dry lips like he was nervous. As it turns out, there was good reason for both of us to be nervous.

I wore fishing waders underneath my snow white Baptismal robe.  David was dressed in a blue shirt and “overhauls”—4XL.  He folded his hands together at the surface of the water, ready to clasp his nose as I tipped him back for a full dunking.  I put my right hand in the middle of his back, between his shoulder blades and raised my left hand, palm facing out toward the congregation, and began to recite the familiar incantation: “David, upon your profession of faith and in obedience to the commands of our Lord and Savior, I now baptize my brother in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”

Baptism1-600x340His hands went to his face and clinched his nose as water ran down his elbows.  He bent his knees and began to lean back.  I spread my feet and prepared for his weight in my strong right hand, but it wasn’t strong enough even with the help of the buoyancy of water.  When he passed some sort of geometric tipping point, he went down into the water like a sack of stones.  There was nothing I could do but get out of his way.

As he went under, fear set in and David’s hands left his face.  He began flailing for something to grab to save himself from going to the bottom.  Not once or twice, but at least three times he groped and grabbed at me, the curtains—anything—while his bare feet tried to get purchase on the slick concrete floor.

Heads in the choir turned with furrowed brows of concern upon hearing the thrashing just feet away.  One later said to me that he couldn’t tell if I was trying to help or kill him.  Their eyes got large as offering plates when David’s ham hock of a hand landed on and tightly gripped the only thing standing between them and Noah’s flood.  He had grabbed the glass with his right hand and my robe with his left and was trying to right himself, spitting and spewing water out of flared nostrils like a surfacing beluga whale.

I went low and dead-lifted with all my might so as to take pressure off the glass and thus save the lives of men and women in the choir that tithed regularly.  Somehow, some way with the strength of Samson, I lifted David and saved the flood. As he stood and wiped the water from his eyes, tsunami waves slapped from one end of the tank to the other, the choir released a collective sigh and someone muttered, I think it was Otis Whittington, “That was as close to dying in church service as I have ever come.”

David climbed out with effort.  He was winded.  I was too. After we dried off he confided in me that the reason he wanted to be baptized in our church was because he thought I was the only preacher in the county who was large enough and strong enough to handle him. Then he said something that I have never forgotten. Layered with meaning he said, “Pastor, everything was going great until you let me down.”

It happens.

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A Sin Too Far

Posted on February 29, 2016 by Joe Chambers

Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him… Matthew 12:32

As a pastor I certainly have discovered over the years quite a number of people who have been afraid they have committed the unpardonable sin. People would ask, “Is there such a Unforgivable Sinthing as an act or a deed or something so profound, something so deep, something so deeply wrong and sinful and wicked, that it really can’t even be forgiven by divine love?

Here is the short answer—Yes and No.

Read the rest of this article for the longer answer.

 

Externally

Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him.

That’s what the Bible says everywhere. There’s nothing we actually do that would be somehow off limits and now God can’t do anything to save us.

“Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow…” Isaiah 1:18

The prophet doesn’t say, “If your sins be as scarlet, all but one of them can be whiter than snow.” Think about this:

  • King David kills a man, and probably others, in order to cover up his affair with Bathsheba, yet he’s forgiven. He’s brought back in; he’s accepted.
  • Peter denied that he ever knew Jesus and punctuated that with a curse.
  • Paul was a persecutor of Church people and a murderer of deacons, yet he’s forgiven and becomes an apostle.

Externally, over and over the Bible says, there is no one particular thing you could possibly do to put you outside of God’s mercy.

Internally

But whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him.

However, if you resist the work of the Holy Spirit to lead you to repentance, no sin is forgivable. It is the job of the Holy Spirit to convict us of all our sins.

And when (Holy Spirit) has come, He will convict the world of sin… John 16:8

But once we become aware of that heaviness of heart we find comfort in the promise of Saint John…

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins… (1 John 1:9)

What this is saying is absolutely anything can be healed through this incredible medicine of humble, clean confession and repentance. But it also means without humility, confession, and repentance, nothing can be healed, even the little sins.

The Holy Spirit’s job is to get me to say, without hopelessness, anger, and blame shifting, “I was wrong.” If I resist that, even the tiniest sin can absolutely destroy my life. There’s a remedy for everything if you repent. There’s a remedy for nothing if you don’t.

Let’s just say you don’t have any big sins. But, you tend to be critical.  But you will not admit how far away from God you are. For you, having a critical attitude is not as big of a deal as adultery, murder, or voting Democratic. But this critical spirit can ruin your life. I know lots of people who are lonelier than they need to be. People don’t want to be close to them. The critical spirit keeps them isolated. It’s like trying to cuddle with a porcupine.

A Christian parent who carps and criticizes all the time, they never see it, and they never change, their kids could grow up hating the faith, not because the parent is a hypocrite, not because they are having an affair, but just because they grow up hating that critical attitude about everything.

Kids know intuitively that a critical, censorious spirit is a fundamental violation of Christian love and it is anti-community and it repulses them. Growing up in that death-by-a-thousand-cuts “Christian” environment they turn their back on faith and say, “Look at this lack of Christian character.” They can see it, but you can’t. And because you can’t see it due to your resisting the interior work of the Holy Spirit, you will not confess it as what it is—cosmic treason. And without the confession there is not repentance and forgiveness.

And that what you call “little character flaw” will send you away from the bosom of God.

What Jesus is really saying here is with repentance anything can be healed; without repentance nothing can be healed.

Jesus is teaching that if you deny Him, disobey Him, ignore Him, call His name in curses, and any number of other things—He will forgive you. But if you resist the convicting presence of the Holy Spirit—you will not be forgiven. And the reason you won’t be forgiven is because you won’t see that you have done anything needing forgiveness—therefore you won’t ask for forgiveness.

Here’s your word of assurance. If you’re afraid you’ve committed the unpardonable sin, you haven’t. Because only the Holy Spirit can produce that worry in your heart, so celebrate your anxiety today!

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Are You Who You Want To Be?

Posted on February 21, 2016 by Joe Chambers

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.  Matt 13:44

Adorable Preschooler Eating CrackersIf a small child were to walk into a room where you were sitting with some fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies and they had two fists full of saltine crackers, how long would it take that little crumb-snatcher to drop the crackers?

Does the Kingdom of God require self-denial?  Of course it does, but it’s worth it.

 “The self-denial that Jesus calls us to is always the surrender of a lesser, dying, petty, futile self for a greater eternal one.”                                                                                                   ~ Dallas Willard

Crackers or Cookies?

One day someone came to Jesus and asked him what he must do to inherit eternal life? The man was expecting a list of externals of do’s and don’ts. Here is what Jesus said,

“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’  This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’  All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”  Matt 22:37-40

In other words, when someone repents from running their life on their own terms, receives forgiveness and moves in the direction of loving God and loving people, they are in the Kingdom.

If people do not experience authentic transformation, powered by God, to become more loving, joyful, peaceful people—in time their spirituality will deteriorate into the search for some doable externals to prop up their sense of being different from other people.

Back in 1992 I got a phone call from a person checking out our church and he asked, “What version of the Bible did I preach from? Asked if I was a premillennial, asked if I voted for Bush or Clinton, asked if we sang hymns, asked if I believed in evolution and predestination. These important issues are what sociologists call identity markers or boundary markers. They are the tell-tale signs of who is in and who is out of an organization, but they are not the Gospel of the Kingdom.

Sometimes very good things can be turned into identity markers…

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices–mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law–justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.  Matt 23:23

Doesn’t say quit tithing, but rather pay attention to the kind of person you are becoming.

I wonder if in many Churches they have done what the rabbis of Jesus’ day did by reducing the Gospel down to “identity markers.” Turning good things into the ultimate thing. I wonder if that is why the world is not beating down our churches to get into the Kingdom. Why would they?

What kind of life are you living?

When our oldest son, Cole, was 7 years old and our second son, Clinton, was 4 we were eating at a hamburger joint in Denver—they were acting up, getting loud, being boys.  I snapped at them, “Sit still, be good, eat your food, stop stealing French fries—don’t spill your drink!” People were starting to stare at our table. Clint needed to go the bathroom and in a terse tone I said, “Cole take Clinton to the bathroom.”

Cole went through a stage (it only last 18 years) where he mercilessly antagonized his younger brothers. All of a sudden I heard Clinton screaming from in the bathroom at the burger joint.  I had had enough.  I went in mad and grabbed Cole swatted his little bottom and chewed him out.  Through sobs Cole said, “But daddy I told Clint to wash his hands afterwards and he accidentally turned on the hot water and burned his hands, I was putting them under cold water when you came in.”

I felt as low as whale dung.  What was going on in my life that would let frustration build up in me that would cause me to be more concerned with peace and quiet than to rush to judgment?

That bothered me for days (and is bothering me right now). It caused some real introspection on my part and I remember thinking:  Why would anyone want to be a Christ follower if they made their determination by watching me with my family in the last hour?

Is the life I am inviting other people to live the life I am living myself?

Lots of folks in the Church who are just as anxious, fearful, angry, driven, unsettled, exhausted, envious as everybody else in our culture. Why? Because we have settled for identity markers rather than the Gospel that changes lives!

There was time when a people started to do this. Tell them to be quiet and they would shout about Jesus all the louder. Throw them into prison and they would convert the jailer. Whip them and they sang hymns. Starve them and they shared what little they had with less fortunate. Persecute them and it just filled them with joy. Hate them and they would love you back. Exclude them and they would invite you in. Kill them and 100 would rise up and take their place.

How do you stop a people like this? They loved the Kingdom more than anything else in the world. It happened once—it can happen again.

But we have to drop our crackers.

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Distant Trumpet

Posted on February 15, 2016 by Joe Chambers

Then the seventh angel blew his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, saying,

“The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord
   and of his Messiah and he will reign forever and ever.” Rev 11:15

Did you hear about a trumpet player and a jazz band leader? This band leader was rehearsing a jazz piece where there was a certain trumpet part required to be played at a distance. Sometimes they would use a mute to make it sound like the trumpet is a long way away. But this band leader wanted it to sound authentic so he had this trumpeter get way off stage. Almost out of the theatre and had him play from that distance when the time came.

He rehearsed his part over and over to get his cues just right because he couldn’t see the leader and he wanted it to be perfect.

The night of the performance the place was standing room only. During the beautiful set at just the perfect time the distance trumpet began to play. It was incredible. The trumpet played two bars of his part and then suddenly he stopped. The band leader waited and waited but then couldn’t wait any longer and went on with the ensemble and concluded it.

Chet Baker

Chet Baker

After the performance the angry band leader grabbed the trumpet player and demanded to know what happened. The guy said, “Well, everything was going so well. I hit my cue just right… it was great. Then all of a sudden this stage hand came to me and jerked my trumpet out of my mouth and said, ‘You dummy! Don’t you know there is a concert going on out there?”

If you have joined Jesus in His Kingdom band every note in your life has been planned by our Father and you can relax and enjoy the music.

My problem is that sometimes when I hear the notes, I think it’s noise.

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I Am Not What I Do

Posted on February 5, 2016 by Joe Chambers

All Jesus did that day was tell stories—a long storytelling afternoon. Matt. 13:34 (MSG)

A few years ago my brother and I were having a conversation and he told me about a crisis time in his life.  He was struggling with a sense of identity and so he went on a retreat in the mountains.  After fasting and praying, he felt as if God in all but an audible voice:  “You are my artist.”  I was impressed by that.  I wanted that kind of term of endearment from God.

I didn’t go to a mountain cabin and fast, but I prayed and prayed.  I wanted to hear from God a word that was so intimate and so unique.  I got nothing. That hurt.  I felt as if I didn’t measure up and that somehow I was inadequate; maybe even damaged goods.  I became obsessed with who I was.  I began to define myself by what I did.  I was a minister.  I was a business consultant.  I was a father.  I was a husband.  I was a survey equipment salesman.  All of that, while nice and wholesome, never scratched that deeper itch.

Then one evening we were entertaining friends and, after a wonderful meal, we began to swap stories. We laughed a lot and cried a little.

Suddenly my wife started to tell a story and then turned to me and said, “You tell it.  You are the storyteller.”  Later that night I asked God if that was who I was.  Was I his storyteller? I got a deep sensation that seemed to say, “No.” My heart sank. Then he said, “You are the story. From time-to-time tell about the journey.”

God is writing a story out of my life and I get to tell you about it.  How amazing is that?  Sometimes it is a tragedy and sometimes it is a comedy.  But ultimately it is His story and I get to be in it.  As someone once said, “When God enters your story; your story is no longer your story, it is God’s story and he can call for the telling of that story anytime he chooses.”

So, now…

I love to tell the story of unseen things above,

Of Jesus and His glory, of Jesus and His love.

I love to tell the story, because I know ’tis true;

It satisfies my longings as nothing else can do.

I love to tell the story, ’twill be my theme in glory,

To tell the old, old story of Jesus and His love.

I was put here to live a story.  That is my vocation.  Telling the story is my avocation.

Royal Basin Trail

Royal Basin Trail

Not long ago I was listening to a lecture about identity. As the presenter spoke I found my mind leaving the room and imagining going for a walk in the New Heaven and the New Earth—with Jesus.

We were in dark timber; the squirrels were chattering at our approach. There was a musty smell of forest floor leaves in the air. Dappled light was scattered on the trail in front of us as the sun seemed to try to peek through the evergreen bows to watch us walk, Jesus and me.

We walked for about a mile, talking about the beauty and wonder of this sacred place God had made when Jesus stopped and sat down on a gray log.

He looked up at me, smiled, and said, “Tell me a story, Joe.”

I gulped and stammered, “What story do you want to hear?”

“You choose,” He said.

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Salty Saints

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Joe Chambers

It is an everlasting covenant of salt before the Lord for both you and your offspring.  Numbers 18:19

In the ancient world, there was no refrigeration. Decay and rot were the great enemies of life, and salt was the only force that could arrest decay. It could preserve flesh, so it had a power in the ancient world. It was almost like magic.

In many ways salt was the beginning of trade in the ancient world. Civilizations fought wars over it. Romans would pay their soldiers, their salary, often in salt. In fact, we get the word “salary” from the Latin word for salt, which was sal. We get the word salad from the Roman practice of salting leafy vegetables.

The Bible talks a lot about salt. Some of you know, there was a family of a guy by the name of Lot. They’re fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot’s wife was disobedient to God, and she was turned into a—pillar of salt. And they took her with them on the journey, and that was the beginning of the salt lick.

So, salt is like this magic thing in the ancient world. God says, I want to make with you a covenant of salt.

Why?

God says, “Because in my world there’s rot, there’s decay, there’s sin, there’s deceit, there’s corruption, there’s selfishness. Everything’s spoiled. I’m going to start a new people, and I’m going to have a covenant of salt, so that through my people I can begin the process of saving my world from corruption, and decay, and rot. As you meet with people, you’re Saltfreshness, you’re hope, you’re joy. You are a covenant of salt. Blessed, to be a blessing.”

This is the divine conspiracy of subversive spirituality.

My father told me recently that a guy in their neighborhood came to him and asked him if he could borrow some money.  My dad told him that he would pray about it and talk to his wife.  Next day my dad gave him $1,000 cash and said, “Pay me if you can when you can, so I can help someone else.”

The guys said, “You’re the only person who has agreed to help me.”

Salt of the earth.

Effie Peyton was an 89 year old saint in a church I pastored.  I would go to visit her in the hospital and always leave feeling blessed by her. As I walked into the room with the buzzing machines, the harsh florescent lights and when she would see me she’d always reached over and grabbed her teeth and put them in her mouth and smile a huge smile, this 80 pound woman.

“Pastor, how’s that beautiful wife of yours?” she’d ask. “And what about those boys?  They are getting so big!”

We’d visit a while and then I could tell she was getting tired and I would make a move to leave and she’s say, “Pastor, can I pray for you?”  Then she’d spend the next ten Pentecostal minutes lifting her spindly arms up to her heavenly Father, and pray for me, Lynette, Cole, Clinton and Caleb.

A nurse came in one time while she was praying and Effie new she was in the room so she started praying for the nurse, by name. I smiled.

I left and lingered just outside her room for a moment and heard her say to the nurse, “Honey, that’s my pastor.  He’s a good man.  He loves Jesus.  Honey, do you love Jesus?”

She was the salt of the earth.

In your work, when you are shopping, and you bring joy, or when you challenge somebody, when you listen, when you touch, when you hug, when you laugh, when you say “You matter.” When you give a gift, when you write a note, when you make a call, when you volunteer, when you say to somebody…

Honey, Jesus loves you, He would love to be your friend.

That’s when you are the salt of the earth. And a little of the Kingdom of Heaven falls to this rotten earth.

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Life with God is an Inside Job

Posted on January 25, 2016 by Joe Chambers

For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven. ~ Jesus

Is Jesus being meaner than Moses? No, he is saying that the kind of life-change that matters is when God is birthed deep down inside of you—down where the knobs are— and begins to control the operating-center of your life.

Virginia Stem Owens wrote an article called God and Man at Texas A&M. Owens wrote about how she had assigned her freshman English class “The Sermon on the Mount,” a selection in their rhetoric textbook. Having grown up in church, and being in Texas, a very religious state, she expected them to have some familiarity with it, but as she read the papers, she was shocked at how none of her students were familiar with it. In her words:

The first paper I picked up began, “In my opinion religion is one big hoax. There is an old saying that ‘you shouldn’t believe everything you read’ and it applies in this case.”

“The stuff the churches preach is extremely strict and allows for almost no fun without thinking if it is a sin or not.”

“I did not like the essay ‘Sermon on the Mount.’ It was hard to read and made me feel like I had to be perfect and no one is.”

“The things asked in this sermon are absurd. To look at a woman lustfully is adultery? That is the most extreme, stupid, un-human statement that I have ever heard.”

Owens writes, “At this point I began to be encouraged. There is something exquisitely innocent about not realizing you shouldn’t call Jesus stupid. This was not exactly intellectual agnosticism talking here, usually the perceived foe of the faith. It was just down-home hedonism. This was the real thing, a pristine response to the gospel, unfiltered through a two-millennia cultural haze.”

The common myth in our culture about Christianity is that it is all about rule-keeping.

But the fact is religion is rule-keeping, but the Gospel of Jesus is not rule-keeping. Religion is an outside in strategy. Religion tends to work on behavior modification, but the good news of Jesus is an inside out transformation.

So, when Jesus says that unless your righteousness exceeds the scribes and Pharisees He’s not saying that he wants them to have better rule-keeping skills. He’s saying that a follower of Jesus will have a kind of righteousness, a wholeness, an integrity about their lives that is more profound than the religious professionals of that day because they are being transformed in the depths of their lives.

There is a soul-change, not just a behavioral change. The Jesus Life re-calibrates us at the deepest levels of who we are. And Jesus can do this because he personified the beatitudes. Jesus, the living God among us, becomes poor. Jesus, the living God among us, morns buckets of tears for a broken world. Finally, he is crucified and God shines the light of His forgiveness and truth into the inky darkness of a broken world; into dark lives like yours and mine.

When we taste of God’s grace, life, and love that we have in Jesus—it transforms us, not just at the level of our hands, but at the deeper level of our hearts. Jesus transforms us in our depths.

His promise is that if you are a follower of His  he will so profoundly rearrange your life not just so that you can avoid adultery, but that adultery doesn’t have any attraction to your heart in the first place.

His promise is not that He will give you sufficient will power to not kill the irritating coworker, but that your heart will be filled with so much mercy from God that it will be a natural grace for you to extend that mercy to the most irritating person in your world.

He will change your soul to the point that sin no longer looks good to you.

My favorite story of grace outside of the Bible is Victor Hugo’s Les Miserable.

Jean Valjean, the main character of the story, is an ex-convict, released from prison after serving nineteen years: five for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family, and fourteen more for attempting four escapes. Once he’s finally free he receives no welcome anywhere.

Innkeepers turn him away; even a dog drives him out of a kennel where he tries to sleep. Finally, Valjean knocks on the door of the local bishop, who welcomes him as if he were Christ himself. The bishop prepares a meal for Valjean, sets the table with silver, dines with him, and then provides him with his first real bed in nineteen years.

Despite the bishop’s kindness, Valjean awakes in the wee hours, steals all the silver he can carry, and flees into the night. He remains a fugitive for but a few hours. The long arm of the law reaches out and brings him back to the bishop, just as the household staff is discovering the theft. Upon seeing Valjean hauled into his house with the police, the old bishop instantly sizes up the situation and declares, “So here you are! I’m delighted to see you. Had you forgotten that I gave you the candlesticks as well? They’re silver like the rest, and worth as good as two-hundred francs. Did you forget to take them?”

For Jean Valjean, the bishop’s unexpected and extraordinary grace is almost more than he can comprehend. It changes the course of his life. That act of mercy so changes him that he Jean Valjeanspends the rest of his life saving and serving those who crossed his life. At the very end of the novel, the two candlesticks provide the last light that Jean Valjean sees before he dies.

That is what grace does to people; it changes them from the inside out.

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The Palace of the King

Posted on January 23, 2016 by Joe Chambers

 

ROOMS

By jay chambers

Silhouette pines bush the night’s hair,

her dark wondering locks tossed down around my shoes.

Tall, slender rhododendrons wear their bridal gowns to bed

whispering soon…soon.

And tonight the star-map above my head

could guide you to the palace of God.

My thumping heart is one room in that great residence,

this silver clearing is another.

I need space in my life in order to speak low and tender with my Lord as the above poem written by my brother describes so beautifully. This space is best fostered when I practicing silence, solitude, and Sabbath. They are a part of the rhythm of my life—like favorite rooms. And after all these years of resting in these rooms, I have something new to share about my time in solitude and silence. For me these go together like matching socks.

The discipline of silence is interesting to attend to with the changing seasons here in the Winter Treemountains. The wind through the pines and the swooshing feathered flight of birds overhead; the bark and chatter of squirrels in the woods.

In the winter, the air is cold and silent.  No birds are singing. The squirrels are less active. Thus the silence is quite loud. Only the crunch of snow under my boots.  I would have thought the whisper of God would have been more noticeable, but it wasn’t. Perhaps He is cuddling with the squirrels—keeping them warm.

This quote resonated with me about the current egocentric approach to Christianity:

I’m increasingly uncomfortable with current images of God found in books and workshops that mix popular psychology with a theology wholly devoted to self-realization. They seem to reverse the first question of the catechism I studied as a child, declaring that “the chief end of God is to glorify men and women, and to enjoy them forever.” I really don’t want a God who is solicitous of my every need, fawning for my attention, eager for nothing in the world so much as the fulfillment of my self-potential. One of the scourges of our age is that all our deities are house-broken and eminently companionable. Far from demanding anything, they ask only how they can more meaningfully enhance the lives of those they serve. ~ Fierce Landscapes, by Belden Lane

Of course this is why I enjoy walking in the wild and living in the mountains. It is hard to think of oneself as uber significant while living at the base of a fourteen-thousand-foot mountain. I bask in the thought of being “The Beloved” of the Father and I know that mankind is the crown of God’s creation, but the wilderness reminds me of how transcendent He is. My innate narcissism needs that constant reminder. I feel small in the wild and at the same time I feel as if the Creator-God is closer than my breath.

But in spite of my closeness with the one who calls me “Beloved”, there are those times when my demons come a callin’.

I found a process I have that has helped me when I feel an unwanted emotion.  It is called “Welcoming Prayer.” I found it in as book called Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, by Cynthia Bourgeault

The three-step process is as follows:

  1. Focus and Sink In
  2. Welcome
  3. Let Go

Here is how I used in in my life: I am unusually sensitive to the approval and disapproval of men and yet I became a pastor. Go figure. I have found over the decades of serving God in the Church that I am either the hero or the goat. I don’t mind being the hero, but I loathe being the goat. I want to be liked. I want, nay, crave the approval of my congregants. It is my drug of choice. They don’t always cooperate.

A man shared with me a minor criticism from someone in the fellowship. It surprised me how much the criticism hurt my heart. I would have thought after all these years I would have grown past that. My head knew better—consider the source—, but my heart was wounded. I felt the desolation of God. Then I remembered this process, Welcoming Prayer.

The only way I could, in good conscience, practice this prayer was to try to obey Christ’s admonition to “love your enemies.” Enemies not being the criticizer, but the accompanying emotions of failure or inadequacy.

I thought, “How would I love my enemy?” The same way I would love my friend—invite them into my home for a meal. So, I invited the scary emotion of ‘fear of failure’ into a deep place in my heart, I focused on it. I smiled at it. I imagined opening my arms wide and asking it into my living room and to sit down on my couch while I finished preparing a meal of Apple cider glazed chicken, wild rice, and asparagus.

We didn’t speak. We just looked at each other. Me with a benign gaze, it with a menacing smirk. The more I cooked the less menacing the look. I offered the meal to it. It wouldn’t eat. It was time to go. I opened the door and bid farewell.

I’d like to believe that it will never return, but I am not that naive. Funny thing is when I began to clear the table of the meal I had prepared for my enemy, I found myself smiling and feeling another warm presence in the room—faint smell of a Carpenter that had worked hard all day in his shop.

And suddenly the painful room was changed into a palace.

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The Wilderness

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Joe Chambers

…Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness… Matthew 4:1

Our image of the wilderness is one of landscapes, beauty, and well-marked trails. In a sense, I live in a kind of wilderness right here in the upper Arkansas River Valley, surrounded by mountains that touch the sky.

In the ancient world wilderness was not thought of in the same way. It was a place of isolation, lostness, and death. This image of the wilderness is actually where we get our word “bewildered” from. To be turned around, to be upside down, and to not know where you are going—bewildered.

Three Sisters Wilderness Area, Oregon

Three Sisters Wilderness Area, Oregon

In the Bible the wilderness becomes a kind of visual short-hand for the dark and painful side of life with the living God. Experiences of disorientation, trouble, heartache, depression, and distress—this is the wilderness.

The times when you pray, read, and listen for God—and hear nothing.  That is wilderness.

The writer Thomas Merton said, “God, who is everywhere, never leaves us, yet sometimes He seems to be present and sometimes absent, and if we do not know Him well, we do not realize that He may be more present to us when He’s absent than when He’s present.” Or to put it another way, God may be most powerfully present when he seems most conspicuously absent.

Everyone who follows Jesus, follows Him into the wilderness. You either have been, are in one now, or are headed for a dry, empty, heartbreaking time where your prayers go unanswered and you feel utterly alone.

But here is the truth: God is in the wilderness. Jesus didn’t go out into the wilderness because God forgot about Him or He forgot about God. He’s in the wilderness because the Spirit led Him there.

There might be more than a few of you who feel as God might not care about you because you are spiritually thirsty, spiritually lonely, and spiritually hungry—you are as parched as any time in your life at a soul-level. And it is easy to mutter to yourself that God doesn’t care about you and your plight.

It is good to be between a ruined house of bondage and a holy promised land.  ~Leonard Cohen

That is the wilderness. That land of in between. We are not in the bondage of Egypt, and we are not yet in the land flowing with milk and honey. The wilderness is an important place because in Webster and in life, wilderness always comes before wisdom.

Jesus traces all of mankind’s wandering steps away from God—to lead us back home to God.

In the very opening moments of the drama of scripture Adam and Eve were cast out of paradise for turning their backs on God and driven out into the wilderness—east of Eden— and then several millennia later Jesus goes into the wilderness to bring us back home to God.

In the story of God’s people in the book of Exodus, they chose once again to not listen to God’s voice and turned an eleven day journey into a forty year exodus in the wilderness, Jesus spends forty days in the wilderness faithfully listening to the voice of the Father to bring us back home to God.

In Genesis 3 the human family disobeyed God by eating the fruit of a tree and the world is plunged into death. Around Jesus’ 33rd birthday, Jesus was nailed to the hard wood of a tree to deal with our disobedience and death and to give us life with God.

Jesus joins us in our wildernesses. Here is a story of one of my wilderness experiences:

Jesus knows the way,

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No Perfect People Allowed

Posted on January 13, 2016 by Joe Chambers

 Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost…  ~ Jesus

One of the striking things about Jesus is that He didn’t work real hard to make sure He put together a small group of people who were naturally compatible with each other.

One of them was a man named Simon the Zealot. Zealots were an extremist nationalist political party, committed to the overthrow of the Roman government by any means possible, violence if necessary, and sometimes assassinations. They hated the Romans.

The only people they hated more than the Romans were the people who collaborated with the Romans, like tax collectors who were Jewish people willing to collaborate with the Romans for corrupt financial gain. Zealots were freedom fighters or terrorists, depending upon your political point of view.

Jesus is forming a small group, and He says, Simon, you’re a Zealot. You despise Romans and collaborators like tax collectors. I’ll take you.

And then He says, Matthew, you’re a collaborator and a despised tax collector. I’ll take you. You room with Simon. You guys should have some interesting talks with each other.

Can you imagine what it was like?

When Jesus called his disciples, He comes to Peter and Andrew and they’re casting their nets from the shore, which typically would have meant that they couldn’t afford a boat. They would have been quite poor.

And then He comes to James and John. We are told they have a boat. In fact, He leaves them with their father who is with his other hired men. In other words, he has employees. This is a much higher operation. These are a couple of sets of brothers who are in quite different financial spheres.

Have you ever heard of anybody dealing with envy issues over who has what possessions, or over who lands where vocationally or financially? Jesus puts people in a small community; they have a lot of problems with each other. James and John come back to Jesus later on with their mommy and they have her say for them,

You know, after it’s all over, we’d like to be the ones that sit next to you in Heaven on your right or your left.

Jesus was always teaching about servanthood—die to yourself—and this was what they had their mommy come and ask Him to do? The other ten hear about this, and they are really mad with James and John. This is not a real easy Community.

Jesus did not come to create a Community for perfect people who all have natural chemistry with each other. What made His Community explode was this implacable, Spirit-empowered determination of those within the Community to lavish love on anybody who could possibly stand it!

You will never go wrong by underestimating the hunger of a human being just to be loved. We are bound together by grace.

The Church is a family where water runs thicker than blood.

Listen, it doesn’t matter what your past is like. You are welcome in the family of Jesus of Nazareth. If you have checkered past, you are welcome here. If you have no money, you are welcome here. If you have lots of money, you are welcome here. If you are a political conservative, you are welcome here. If you are a political liberal, you are welcome here.

We are bound together by grace and nothing else.

 

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