sermon on the mount

Mars Hill Michigan is starting a 6 month series on the Sermon on the Mount this Sunday. This is one of my favorite (challenging and encouraging and hopeful) passages in the Bible, so I'm pretty excited to join with them over the next half year. As they like to do on these big series, they'll be publishing a page containing verses, thoughts, practices, and prayers at the beginning of the week so you can be meditating on and wrestling with it before the Sunday teaching. There are always some insightful and beautiful ideas so you should get started.

Here's one section that really stood out to me.

No one in his or her right mind would want to live this "blessed" life, would they? Yet Jesus was doing something different from what his hearers expected. He wasn't giving a spiritual to-do list. This wasn't a self-help teaching about how to achieve blessedness by attaining poverty of spirit.

This was an announcement.

The healing that had just taken place was nothing less than the rule and reign of God coming to rest upon the least likely of people.

In the midst of their poorness of spirit, these people had been blessed;the Kingdom of God had come upon them. In other words, fortunate are the racists because the rule and reign of God can come upon even them. Fortunate are the addicts because the rule and reign of God is only a breath away. Fortunate are those who've blown it. Blessed are the nobodies. Jesus begins his Sermon on the Mount with blessing, and there is nothing anybody can do to earn what he's describing.

God is blessing people for no reason other than the fact that blessing is what God does, and everybody, everywhere, is fair game.

They also have some new art for the series which I'm including a small glimpse of below. Click on it to view the whole piece. Open it up and then read the artist's thoughts about their work:

Sometimes I feel as though God is this invisible abstract idea. A voice in my head that has no face but speaks to me in ways I can't even comprehend or explain... Sometimes the vocal is lost among the swirling messages and instruments of the day vying for attention. [But] the voice, the sermon on the mount if you will, never ceases to speak. The father's face can be seen everywhere, even in the speck of dirt the little girl is picking up."

the Gospel

I believe this is from Nooma 015 | You. This is what we are made, and saved, for.

Happy Birthday Mars Hill Grand Rapids!

On Sunday, Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Michigan celebrated 10 years. As part of the service, they had individuals from Grand Rapids and around the world share stories of how much God has done through this community. I didn't hear about it until today as I was a week behind in podcasts, so I didn't send them an email. But if I did, I would have tried to thank them for giving me new dreams about what it means to be a Christian and the Church. I think I would have mentioned some of these things that God has been teaching me through their words and actions.

Love is more than an emotion or vague good idea. Love should be how we look at our friends and enemies. Love is how we should respond to the circumstances that don't go how we expect and the people that hurt us. Love overcomes hate. Love is how God is redeeming everything. Love sacrifices itself. And nothing can stop it, so in the end, after fear and doubt and anger and sickness and death have exhausted all their efforts, love wins.

That when people don't agree with you, or they attack you, or so hurtful things about you, you don't have to defend yourself or prove that you are right, but that sometimes the best response is to smile and say "Grace and peace to you", because the things that separate us are far, far smaller the God who loves all of us.

That the most hurtful and dangerous thing to do is to start dividing people by who is in (or right) and who is out (or wrong), and begin to treat one group of people differently than another- that's hell. We might be terribly uncomfortable one day if we share the wedding feast of the lamb in heaven, and find "those people" at our table.

That Jesus broke himself open and poured himself out as a good gift. And that as Christ-followers, Jesus has invited us to break ourselves open and pour ourselves out to the people around us. To "do this in remembrance of me."

That Jesus thinks we can be like him and do the things he does.

That the Church should be the safest place in the world. If you can't be honest about your failings and struggles with a church community, then something is terribly wrong, because the very point of the Church is to carry each other and love people.

And when you are failing and can only see darkness and have fear and doubt and pain and feel worthless and unloved, you don't have to go through it alone, but there are people who can daily offer you grace and peace. There is no condemnation, only joy, acceptance, every kind of imaginable good, wholeness, rest, all as freely given gifts from God.

That worrying about what will happen tomorrow will choke the life out of today, which is all we have anyway. And that wealth always promises that a little bit more will be enough, and it always comes up empty.

That our purpose and value comes solely from being and never from doing. We need to rest and take time to do nothing, and learn that even then we are still loved and accepted.

That God always hears the cries of the oppressed.

That everything is spiritual, God is not angry but he is Green, Jesus is brilliant and he wants to save Christians, and the Church, man, isn't she beautiful. ;)

That we don't need to know where we are going or why. The central, recurring theme of the Bible is a journey of God rescuing his people from slavery, teaching them how to love him and love each other, and forgiving them and restoring them when they fail so they can try again. And even if our journey hasn't lead us where we want to be, God gives us what we need for today, everyday, and he is walking with us. We can learn to stop obsessing over control of our lives and instead have faith.

That cynicism is a dead end, and the what this desperate, broken, cynical world needs most are people willing to believe that things can get better. That God hasn't given up on his creation.

I can't even begin to think of everything that I've learned since I started walking with Mars Hill 3.5 years ago (and I put up a bunch of my favorite messages here). I have a much wider, deeper, richer understanding of God than I used to. But even more important than that is the deep healing that God has been doing to my heart through this church. I may have only been to one Sunday gathering in those years, but Mars Hill is not about what happens for two hours on Sunday. Mars Hill is a community, and I'm part of that community even if we are separated by a couple thousand miles.

So to you, my brothers and sisters of the Mars Hill community- thank you, and grace and peace be with you.

who are you?

From Rob Bell's counselor, when Rob was breaking down from being the "successful pastor", trying to always be everything to everyone:


"You're job is the relentless pursuit of who God made you to be. Anything else is sin."


Who are you?

The Great Emergence 0

Everybody seems to be talking about the emerging church lately. I think I've only heard the term in the last couple years, and right from the beginning it seemed pretty confusing to me. My friend Ben introduced me and a few of my friends to Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell in fall of 2005, and I remember how much we all loved it. It wasn't a completely revolutionary approach to Christianity for any of us, it just seemed like it was a clearer picture of what we already were about and where we deep-down wanted to go (and I think that is true, but not the way we thought). I guess we thought of it as a new paint job on the same car, or maybe a tune-up or new tires as well.

Since then I've read it several times and I've realized just how much there is underneath the surface that I didn't get the first time. I think we'd all agree that to follow Jesus, you can't just stick his teaching onto your previous life like an extra arm or new set of clothes. You have to be willing to let everything else go and sometimes start over completely. I think one of the underlying themes of Velvet Elvis is that sometimes Christianity itself has to start over and clear out a lot of the extra baggage it's picked up over the many years. That, of course, is a terrifying idea, because we tend to think of Christianity as the way of following Jesus. But what if the religion that carries Jesus' name becomes one of the biggest hindrances to following Jesus?

I first heard about the emerging (or emergent, but that's kind of different- more later) church through reading and listening to Rob Bell. He always has lots of notes about other books to read and often had guest speakers at his church. And lots of people on the internet had interesting things to say about him and those other authors and speakers. A lot of them were angry about this thing called the emerging church, and said Rob and some of the other people who he was influenced by or was friends with presenting heretical ideas. I think that is a pretty serious accusation to make, so I decided to research this myself. I began studying the Bible more and church history and theology- things that never really interested me much before. This eventually is what lead me to Fuller to study theology.

But one thing I noticed right away is how nobody could agree on what the emerging church was. Some people said it was a Christian reaction to post-modernism, or nothing more than a more relevant wrapping on evangelicalism, or an emphasis on simple living and serving the poor. Some said emergents didn't believe in absolute truth, or the Bible, or Jesus, and had very "liberal" views on homosexuality and abortion. Others said that it was a desire to return just to taking seriously the teachings of Jesus on loving your neighbor and being peacemakers. Is it a new denomination? Is it a movement? Is it a new religion? Is it some kind of new age spirituality that takes some of Jesus and some of Buddha and some of whatever else and mixes it together? Is there a difference between emergent and emerging? And nobody could even agree on who was part of the emerging church. Lots of people called Rob Bell emergent, but he always said he wasn't and that he didn't want anything to do with new labels that further divide Christians into smaller and smaller pieces. Some people said that was enough proof that he was emergent...

This last summer I have been reading a lot of books on the subject. What the so-called emergents say and believe and hope for, and what critics say about them. I've taken little online quizzes that that ask theology questions, and then tell you what percentage Charismatic, Wesleyan, Reformed, Liturgical, Evangelical, Catholic, Orthodox, or emergent you are. I've read lots and lots of blogs! And I've continually been struck by how consistently the things I've read from many emerging leaders have resonated with my heart. They seem to put words to the things I've believed deep down, the things that I had questions about or often blurry dreams that God has given me. That's been really exciting, but also very unsettling? I've been frustrated with many things about modern American Christianity for a while, and much of what I have learned has given words and form and even theology to this frustration. Is that me wanting to rebel and do things my way, or is it God leading me to trust him more and religion less?

The pieces of this puzzle finally began coming together, and one of the biggest pieces was a book by Phyllis Tickle called The Great Emergence. She is a grandmother, Anglican lay minister, and has worked as a teacher and head of Publisher Weekly's religion department. In this book, she looks at the current events of our world through a much wider view than most usually do and gains a lot of insight into what's really going on. She discusses the earth-shaking changes we've seen over the last 150 years in science, transportation, communication, war, society, medicine, government, and religion. It becomes pretty clear that we are in the middle of something huge. I've heard others say that the current shifts we are experiencing are comparable to the changes of the Great Reformation, but I thought it was a pretty big exaggeration. After reading this book, I wonder if it might be an understatement.

Since this book has been so useful for giving me a bigger and fuller idea of our times, I wanted to walk through it on here so a lot of you who don't have time to read can still get some of the benefit. All the time I talk to friends who feel unsettled and frustrated. The dreams God has given them seem incompatible with the current life they see every day, and they don't know where to go next or why this is happening. I'm realizing it is not an isolated few that are going through this. I hope this series will help explain why they are feeling this way, and where we might be headed, so they can begin to see their circumstances through eyes opened up a little wider.

Everything is Spiritual

Last year Rob Bell and his family went on tour and did speaking events all over the country. It was essentially 2 hours of him writing on a whiteboard talking about how all of life is spiritual. I didn't get to go because the Colorado Springs stop sold out, but I heard it was pretty cool. The sweet part is that they recorded a couple of the stops, and there is a DVD coming soon! You can pre-order it at www.everythingisspiritual.com. I've heard that if you pre-order Noomas, you usually gt them before the official release date, so consider that... And don't forget that Rob is going on tour this fall. I already got my ticket for that one. YAY!