Understanding Revelation

I’m re-reading Revelation and all of the interpretive schemes and crutches I’ve used in the past seem completely inadequate. The book is bigger and weirder than the theological decoder rings I’ve used to try and bring it into focus. So I’m searching for a new one. I need an appropriate frame through which to view the book in a way that makes sense.

What if Revelation is less about time and more about perspective? What if it’s not about the future of the world so much as about a view of the early church ~ her problems and frustrations; her relations with the surrounding culture and with the ruling empire ~ from a new and dramatically different perspective where high is low, crooked is straight and bumpy is flat? Maybe it’s a crazy apocalyptic case study in applied gospel. As the apostle’s creativity ripened, maybe he felt too old and the stakes too high to rely further on prose or epistle or even on testimonial. Maybe his starting point, prompted by the visions of Patmos, was to demonstrate the logical conclusions of gospel and epistle in a real place – here – at a real time – now. How would that look? How would it be?

And Revelation is his answer. “It would be like this!” It would be heavily weird, surreal and other-worldly because every life, seen from the perspective of angels and demons and God would look surreal and other-worldly to mortal earthbound creatures. We may not recognize ourselves at all if we could view our lives from outside our own perspective; if our eyes were open to the realities of spirit and an animated cosmos.

Revelation makes the plodding journey of poor wayfaring strangers into science fiction extravaganzas full of plot, drama and tension; soaring highs and plummeting lows; heart-stopping, monstrous and bizarre. Revelation is like a snapshot, no, like a 3D HD IMAX vision of real life seen, for the first time, by those who have been deaf, mute and blind.

A Ministry of Lending

After we launched a church in La Chureca, the city dump in Managua, it quickly grew to more than 300 members and became a hub for all kinds of ministry. But most of the members still scratched out a living in the dump. Even though their lives were changing on a spiritual level, they still lived in a place where nobody should have to live.

“What should we do?” we wondered. Some suggested we simply buy out the residents, paying them to move into free housing. Others thought we should give handouts. Some of our gifts seemed valid; things like food, clean water and medicine. But others seemed lame and created an awkward imbalance in the relationship. Then, late last winter, it dawned on us: maybe the problem wasn’t that the people there were lazy or lacked creativity or initiative. Maybe they just needed a hand-up. Maybe opportunity was the missing ingredient.

Around that time we discovered the book Banker to the Poor, about the Nobel-prize-winning micro-lending work pioneered by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. We bought a copy in Spanish and gave it to Ramon, who shared it with his team. Gleaning the principles from the book, we invested $10,000 to pilot micro-lending through our church in the dump. Under the leadership of Jorge & Alba Ligia Baltodano, we extended loans to about 60 families over about 4 months and also invested in 3 larger co-op projects. We helped buy a freezer for a popsicle stand and a street-vending French fry cart; we launched a fruit business, purchased a horse and cart for a small recycling business, planted a bean field, plantain bananas, sewing machines, a jewelry-making business; a chicken house and pig-pen, just to name a few.

It worked even better than we had hoped! When our initial loan capital ran out in June, Jorge & the team continued reinvesting loan and interest payments into new loans. Numerous families were lifted from extreme poverty, but it went beyond that. Pastors from our church visit borrowers every week to collect payments. Soon they form a friendship and before long they are praying for people. It didn’t take long before many borrowers became followers of Jesus and started attending church. This ministry alleviates poverty, introduces people to faith, includes them in the life of the church and pays for itself too!

In 2010 we will launch a new round of lending with a goal to grow the ministry and offer at least 500 loans in 2010. Interested? Call me.

Benedictus

I buried hope with bare hands
and laid cut flowers at the graveside
on windswept Monday afternoons.
Then the corpse leapt forth unexpectedly
like a yellow crocus bursting
through frozen mud.
Was it a ghost? Or something more?
Now we snigger over coffee
eyes lifted like steam rising
tongue newly loosed giggling
benedictus!

A priest and his martini

When I was young
            I asked What Would Jesus Do?
  He would shake the world
            I answered glibly
    so that’s what I set out to achieve.
But the winters pile on
  years accumulating like the leaves
            under my maple tree in November
And the world appears neither shaken nor stirred.

While I was burning the Christmas tree I gave up on the church…

Of course it started with great enthusiasm.  After the Church Planter’s Assessment and the Church Planter’s Boot camp I was so buzzed I could taste and smell our vision.  It would be the mother of all church plants, in a word: groundbreaking, on the order of Jerusalem or Antioch or maybe Corinth.  Yeah, Corinth, that was it.

 

Fueled by prayer and Starbucks French Roast we set out to prove ourselves.  Fifty people came to our first service, and then eighty showed up for the second.  “They like us!” I preened, “They really like us!”  I created a line graph to demonstrate our growth, popularity and promise.  When I extended the line into the future I couldn’t believe my bugging pastoral eyes.  If we just kept on this growth pattern everyone in Portland would attend our church within about five years!  We were a sensation!

 

By Christmas, on a rush of adrenaline and Starbucks new Christmas blend, we started going over the top.  A tree farmer donated fifty big evergreens and our new core group threw themselves into building stands and stringing lights.  For a few hours the place looked like a hidden glade in a Tolkien novel, fragrant with pine and coffee and sparkling with such a bright and merry light you half expected to find elves dancing around a bonfire behind the next tree.

 

Until it was over I didn’t give a moment’s thought to the timely disposal of the fifty large trees.  When I shared this lapse (with great humility I thought), my 2-person tear down ministry crew stared in disbelief.  Late into the night we hauled the trees to my duplex apartment and stacked them in the back where I hoped our landlord wouldn’t notice.

 

After Christmas the church hit the skids.  Some of our new leaders were young and immature (well, okay, all of us were).  Some got disgruntled and left.  It rained constantly.  Adrenaline was down.  Attendance was down.  Giving was way down.  My wife and I weren’t sure we had done the right thing in moving to a neighborhood near the church people called “felony flats.”  We had a new baby and no money.

 

In February our furnace went out and our apartment felt like a refrigerator.  I bought the cheapest saw I could find and hacked up the Christmas trees.  And that’s how it was that on a dark February morning I sat feeding Christmas trees into a smoky fireplace, trying to keep our family from freezing to death.  And while the trees crackled and smoked I prayed.

 

“Hey God, I give up!  If you want a church you can build one yourself!”  It was strangely liberating to give up on the church.  It felt so good I said it several more times in different ways, my exhilaration growing each time.

 

After giving up on the church I felt much better.  And I started seeing things in a new and different way.  It wasn’t that I gave up on the church, really; it’s that I gave up on my ability to build it.  It dawned on me that the onus for establishing the church didn’t rest on my shoulders, it rested on God’s.  It’s like he answered, “I do want a church and of course I will be the one to build it.  You couldn’t if you wanted to.  You can no more build a church than you can whistle Mozart from your, um, bellybutton.  But you can cooperate with me in my work.”

 

Since then, when the onus has been on God, good things have followed.  But when I’ve grabbed it back, trying to make things happen, discouragement and defeat have resulted.  I can’t carry the onus worth a toot.  It was true then and it’s still true now.  Thank God I gave up when I did.

Tear Down This Wall!

I went to a new school for second grade.  I was nervous but I had my familiar yellow Snoopy lunchbox, my favorite red hat and my new 10-speed bike.  Of course it was a girl’s bike.  The guy at the Schwinn store thought it would be easier to get on and off without the bar in the middle and persuaded my parents.  He said, “What difference does it make anyway?”

 

So on the first day of school I was fiddling with my bike lock when some big boys – fifth graders – came up and said, “Did you know that’s a girl’s bike?”  Then one of them grabbed my hat off my head and started a game of keep-away with it.  Keep away from me.

 

That’s the first time I remember feeling totally out of place, an outsider who didn’t belong.  There was an invisible wall between me and the other kids.  They knew each other; knew their way to their teachers and classrooms and to the bathroom and drinking fountain.  But I was a stranger.  There was a wall between us.

 

Years later I came across the wall again when I visited a worship service at Temple Beth Israel, a Jewish congregation in Portland.  As soon as I stepped inside I knew I was on the far side of a wall.

 

Every other guy was in a dark suit and wearing a skullcap.  I was in jeans.  No cap.

 

They all knew the Hebrew liturgy and responses; I didn’t even know what page we were on.  They know when to stand and sit and sing.  And the whole time I suspected I was offending them: first because I wasn’t wearing a hat and second, though I hadn’t read Leviticus for a while, because I was pretty sure my unwashed gentile self was inadvertently breaking lots of their rules and laws.  I was an abomination most likely. 

 

Lots of walls.

 

The problem with most “unchurched” people isn’t that they don’t like Jesus; it’s that they don’t like church.  Why don’t they like church?  Because when they go they run into walls.

 

Some churches even take pride in their walls, constantly reinforcing them with religious re-bar and concrete, protecting their church culture with “insider” language, secret handshakes and the like; giving the impression that their side of the wall is the right side, that God smiles on their side and frowns on the other.

 

But the way of Jesus is to tear down that wall.

 

Are there differences between the church and the world?  You bet.  But they should be the right kind of differences, based on substance not style.  The adjective “Christian” must be informed by the noun “Christ” or we’re phony and our walls betray us.

 

Jesus went out of his way to demolish walls: touching lepers, forgiving sins, hanging out with “sinners,” smiling on the good and bad alike.  He was and is a scandal but more often it is the religious establishment that finds itself scandalized than to the “outsider” (if there are outsiders to him).

 

What should the church be about?  How about we work together to tear down this wall!

Easy Cheese

This morning I came across a magazine article that resurrected an embarrassing, dark and long-forgotten era in my life.  The title: Easy Cheese: Explore the secrets of one of the world’s most unnatural foods.

When I was in school I went for a while without a refrigerator in my dorm room and that’s when I discovered the dubious delights of Kraft Easy Cheese on Wheat Thin crackers.

A gooey orange blend of whey, canola oil, salt, sodium citrate, sodium phosphate, calcium phosphate, lactic acid, sodium alginate, and apocarotenal; Easy Cheese is a space-age invention with no parallels in the natural world.  When it was first developed the folks from the “real” cheese industry lobbied to have Kraft’s product regulated by the FDA as “embalmed cheese” but the Feds finally settled on the slightly-less-mortifying “process cheese.”

I am often tempted to replace old-fashioned block-style cheddar and swiss Christianity with an Easy Cheese variety: something that faintly resembles real discipleship but in an unnervingly inert and embalmed state.  Few things are cheesier.  If anything, the faith must be authentic and, preferably, organic & local too.

The ICU

There was once an Intensive Care Unit at a troubled hospital where patients always died in the same bed, on Sunday morning, at about 11 a.m., regardless of their medical condition.  This puzzled all the doctors and spooked some of them so badly that they concluded the problem must have a supernatural source: witchcraft maybe, a spell or curse.

No one could solve the mystery.  Why 11 a.m. Sundays?  It made no sense.  An expert taskforce was assembled to investigate the deaths.  The next Sunday morning they waited nervously outside the room to see what this phenomenon was all about.  Some held wooden crosses, prayer books, bottles of holy oil or rosaries intended to ward off evil spirits.

As the clock struck 11 Pookie Johnson, the weekend janitor, came whistling down the passage with his cleaning cart.  He nodded at the group crowding in the hallway and entered the room.  He headed straight for the back wall and, finding the power outlets all full, unplugged the life support system so that he could use the vacuum cleaner.

Have you ever had the experience that when “church time” arrives the power goes out?!  There you are, in bad shape but holding on, trying to think positive; then “church time” comes and a pall of death descents.  I hate to say it; it’s embarrassing, but my church experiences and my own ministry and witness have sometimes felt for the world like somebody pulled the plug spiritually.  The Door magazine used to print a monthly “Green Weenie” award for church- or ministry-related bombs.  There have been times when I would have nominated myself for the Green Weenie.

In Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, in chapters 2-4, Paul indicates that religion ~ even the Christian faith, depending how it is handled ~ can be a downer or an upper; life-taking or life-giving.  It can breathe God’s new creation into existence or pull the plug on any verve and joy that existed in the first place.

Those of us who create and present worship services should commit to have planned, prepared, practiced and prayed-through each worship time.  They may not all be titillating but they should all be plugged in so that at least life support happens, but hopefully a whole lot more like healing, insight, life-change, spiritual encounter and God’s personal presence to waken and inspire.

There is something you can do to plug in your own worship time too.  Your personal preparation and prayer before church can help you to engage in our worship times to a much greater degree than if you breeze into church unplugged.  Try it.  It works!

The Waterfall

In his book Wind, Sand & Stars, Saint-Exupéry tells of hosting some Bedouin Chieftains from the Sahara Desert on their first visit to France.  Having lived in the desert their entire lives, they had heard of rivers and lakes but never seen them personally.  They read in the Koran of gardens where streams always flowed.  It was a place called paradise, but they assumed it must be a myth.

One of their first outings in France was to a thundering waterfall in the Alps.  The water came rushing down from the glaciers and roaring over granite cliffs.  The Chiefs gaped.

For them water had always been measured in thimble-sized cups.  They had marched through the burning desert to wells that had to be dug out until muddy water oozed up through the sand – puddles of foul liquid tainted with camel urine.

Their children didn’t beg for coins or candy or even for toys during the long droughts, but for water, empty tins in their hands.

Water was lifeblood, worth its weight in gold.  Water could make the desert bloom like a rose.  It meant prosperity and plenty.  Without it you died parched.

They had seen whole camel caravans, mad with thirst, wandering through an eternal nightmare of salt lakes and mirages.  A single second’s flow from the French waterfall would have resuscitated them all.

Eventually the guide told the Chiefs it was time to go.  “No, let’s stay,” they said.

“Why should we stay longer?” he asked, “there are other things to see.”

“We should wait until it stops,” they replied.  They had assumed that the waterfall was an extravagant French show and was bound to dry up at any moment.  It was an enormous grace; a lavish bounty beyond imagining.  Perhaps God in his expansive provision had gone mad.

“This falls has been flowing day and night, summer and winter, for a thousand years!” the guide explained.

Are you hot and thirsty?  Have you been measuring God’s provision for you in thimble-sized cups?  Listen: God is able to do exceeding abundantly above that all you ask or imagine according to his grace that so lavishly works in you!  (Ephesians 3:20).