Landing On Your Feet

After Vacation Bible School this summer, Rev. Kay gave me a gift. It’s a little wind-up plastic monkey. When it’s wound up, it does backflips. Backflips!!!

And here’s the amazing thing — it lands on its feet every time. EVERY. TIME.

It’s become my favorite desk object.

Anytime I go through a rough patch, I wind that monkey up and watch him flip. I’m always amazed that he lands on his feet. In fact, there’s always a little bit of dramatic tension just before he jumps, because I worry that maybe this time he won’t make it.

But he always does.

I don’t know how he does it. Yet that’s how I want to be.

I always want to land on my feet. I never want to be brought so low by a circumstance or piece of news or life situation that I can’t get back on my feet and keep moving forward.

Compared to most people, I am extremely fortunate. I have been blessed with good health, and my family and friends have, too. My parents are still alive, and I’ve never lost anyone close to me yet. I have always had employment, and I’ve never worried about feeding my family. We’ve always lived in a secure and stable environment, and we’ve reaped multiple benefits from being American citizens.

However, I have had professional disappointments. Having to leave Cameroon was the most difficult thing I have ever had to do, and it caused me some personal distress. It took me several years to get over the pain of leaving early.

Somehow I “landed on my feet,” and regained a sense of purpose and meaningfulness again.

After leaving Cameroon, I experienced another major disappointment in my appointment to the church in Rowlett. As I rebooted my pastoral ministry in America, I ran into another obstacle when part of the congregation resisted my interactions with the Muslim community, as well as some of my public social justice work.

This, too, took the wind out of my sails, and I found myself reeling yet again.

But I “landed on my feet,” and found myself with the appointment of a lifetime — Kessler Park!

Ministry isn’t easy, of course. The grind of church politics and administrative minutiae sometimes makes me want to reconsider my life choices, but in the end, I come back to the call of God on my life. I remember that I am tethered to that call, and that it gives me meaning and purpose.

One of the Scriptures that has helped me “land on my feet” time and time again is a story at the end of the Gospel of John. Poor Simon Peter denied knowing Jesus three times on the night of his arrest, and he is still wrestling to absorb the fact that Jesus has risen from the dead. He finds himself sitting on the beach, when Jesus leans over and asks him, “Do you love me?” Peter is quick to respond, “Yes!” Jesus says, “Then feed my sheep.”

This exchange takes place three times. Each time, Jesus’ question is met by Peter’s “Yes!” Each time, Peter’s “Yes!” is met with Jesus’ command to feed his sheep.

Jesus concluded the conversation by saying, “Follow me.” Peter did, and it’s fairly obvious that he landed on his feet quickly. He weathered the personal storm, the shame of having denied his Lord, by becoming the de facto leader of the nascent Christian movement. He got on with the business of feeding the sheep, of leading the flock with a gentle and deft touch.

Every time I feel shame and insecurity, I imagine that Jesus is asking me, “Do you love me?” I always answer, “Yes of course, you know I do!” And he always replies, “Then feed my sheep, and follow me.”

You have to be on your feet to follow Jesus. That’s why I’m confident I’ll always find myself standing in the end.

We All Need New Reading Glasses

I don’t have a particularly good history concerning my eyesight.

I have always been terribly near-sighted. I started wearing glasses in third grade. It was a traumatic experience to walk into the classroom for the first time. I wouldn’t call it “bullying,” but I was called “four-eyes” more times than I cared to hear. It wasn’t helpful that my parents didn’t give me a style choice — I was stuck with black, horn-rimmed glasses all the way through high school graduation.

In college, I finally upgraded to contact lenses, which helped my dating life considerably.

When Lasik surgery came around, Leah jumped on the bandwagon, but I was hesitant. I simply didn’t like the idea of having my eyeballs sliced and diced. So I waited.

Then on a fateful trip to Vietnam in 2010, I found myself on a bus en route to the Mekong Delta. I closed my eyes momentarily and leaned against the window when we hit a huge pothole. My head slammed backward against the seat.

Later that night, I noticed that there appeared to be a growing black hole on the left side of my vision field. When I arrived back in Dallas a few days later, Leah drove me directly to an eye specialist who confirmed that my retina had been detached by the impact. I went immediately into surgery.

Though the reattachment was successful, I have never had perfect eyesight in the left eye since. I have lost quite a bit of my peripheral vision, and hard edges appear wavy, as if I have plastic wrap stretched over my eye.

And more recently, I’ve started to wear reading glasses on a regular basis, which I’m sure you have noticed.

So I understand that, in order to see things clearly, to view reality correctly, your eye must be clear and unhindered, free from distortion. Unfortunately, I will never be able to see things perfectly clearly — I will always see things through a retina that imperfectly stretches across my line of sight, and I increasingly see things through glasses, which are frequently smeared and dirty. At best, I am like the Apostle Paul, who said, “I see things now as through a glass darkly.”

That is also true about the way I read the Bible. I recognize that I do not read Scripture from a completely objective and value-free point of view. Nobody does. All of us come to the Bible and read it with our own wavy retinas, scratched glasses, and imperfect understandings.

This is not an excuse NOT to read it. No, even read poorly, the Bible is still an instrument God uses to touch hearts and move souls.

But this is the only way we can read the Bible. It’s impossible to read it any way except from the perspective of who you are, in the light of your own experience. There is no way to read anything at all without projecting something into the text. This is what we do when we read novels and poems and newspapers, and it's true when we read Scripture, too. It’s the way all people read.

However, this reality should make it clear that we ought to read the Bible from different perspectives as often as possible, to pick up reading glasses from other viewpoints. We should not rely only on our own understanding when it comes to Scripture but should try a variety of contexts, languages, and cultures.

For example, I’m a straight white male who studied the Bible in a Western, male-dominated institution. I ought to recognize that I have some blind spots when it comes to Scripture. What is it like to read the Bible as a woman, as a gay man, as a black woman, as a pygmy in the African rain forest? What do Palestinian Christians hear when they read about the Promised Land? What do Chinese Christians hear when they read Revelation?

As we begin the study of the Gospel of Matthew on Sunday, Sept. 9 in Sunday School, I am starting a twin class on Matthew on Wednesday nights called “Reading Matthew Through New Eyes.” Each week, I will lead the class in reading a passage from Matthew with the help of feminists, Latin American peasants, gay men, county inmates, and others. You’ll be surprised at how your eyes will be opened to new insights and revelations from Scripture.

However, that’s also the goal of the other Wednesday night classes. Mike Smith will be leading a study that uses visual imagery and symbolism to address theological and Biblical issues. Alison Garza is leading a class on Job: A Story of Unlikely Joy, by Lisa Harper, a female Bible teacher. The point is to try on some different perspectives on the Bible and on our faith.

Try putting on some different glasses to read Scripture this fall — what you see might change you!

Discernment and Dreams

How do you make important decisions?

Not what you’re going to wear in the morning or what to fix for dinner, but the big questions of your life. For example, how do you decide where to live or what person to marry, or even when it’s time to move on in your job?

These are matters that can’t be left up to chance; you have to engage and invest some energy into making such decisions.

Ironically, the early Christians seemed to make at least one major decision in an entirely random way. In Acts 1, the disciples “cast lots” to replace Judas Iscariot in the inner circle. Scholars don’t know exactly what it meant to “cast lots” but it was likely akin to flipping a coin or choosing straws of different lengths.

But the disciples didn’t make decisions like this for very long, because in the next chapter of Acts, they were filled with the Holy Spirit, and this changed the way they went about things. To be “filled with the Spirit” means that one has the very presence of God in one’s being, which means that each one of us can access God’s wisdom. Each of us can seek God’s will for our lives.

We call this practice of listening to the Spirit “discernment.” Sister Mary Margaret Funk wrote, “This is discernment: to sort our thoughts and follow the impulse of grace given by the Holy Spirit … We learn to listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit rather than our own voice, self talking to the self. The voice of the Holy Spirit is a dynamic voice that we hear and heed through our interior senses.”

Throughout the centuries, Christians have offered and embodied a number of different ways to understand and develop a discerning spirit. St. Benedict offered instruction on discernment in his “The Rule of St. Benedict”; St. Ignatius did the same in his “Spiritual Exercises”; Quakers introduced Clearness Committees to help persons find clarity in their vocation.

Discernment is not just for individuals, however. Groups can also approach God and ask for direction. In fact, using spiritual discernment for making decisions in a church setting is probably a much better process than the way we usually do things.

Thanks to U.S. Army Major Henry Martyn Robert, most of us do things in an extremely parliamentary way. Robert’s Rules of Order predominate most church meetings, regardless of denomination.

While Robert’s Rules of Order are helpful in all sorts of settings. They ensure that everyone has the right to be heard, and insist that things be settled democratically. Majority rules for Robert, as long as the correct procedure is followed.

But Robert’s Rules were not designed to hear, or respond to, God’s voice. In this matter, they are only helpful insofar as each person in the meeting is also hearing and responding to God’s voice.

Of course, the truth is that, using Robert’s Rules of Order, rarely is everyone able to agree on what God’s will is. In the end, Robert insists on a vote, and when there’s a vote, there are winners and losers.

Authentic Christian community is not about winners and losers, but it is about compromise, mutual subjection, and humility. I believe that there must be a better way to go about answering the difficult questions — and there is. It goes by the name of group spiritual discernment. And it’s not simple … or easy.

The practice of group spiritual discernment creates a sacred space where people can listen for God’s voice together, as well as listen to each other intimately and intently. The group enters into the space with a confidence that God will speak and lead the group to consensus. Consensus is not the same thing as a unanimous vote, nor does it mean complete agreement. It simply means that the group has agreed to move forward in a particular direction, and that all are on board to support that movement.

I’m currently doing quite a bit of reading and research on this model, because I am convinced that it is an excellent way to go about pursuing God’s will. In fact, I’m using a group spiritual discernment model for a new task force which meets this Sunday night to discuss the long-term future of the church building and property.

I can’t wait to see what God reveals to us, because God’s dreams are always bigger than our own. The key is learning to dream God’s dreams …