Saved for What?

Last week those who were in worship at Cedar Hills were "introduced to the elephant." You'll have to listen to the sermon if you want to know exactly what that means (listen to it here).  It's been a funny week of conversations, following that sermon.  Comments have been all over the spectrum from, "That was good.  We needed to hear that" to, "The same thing is happening at my brother/sister/cousin's church, so I guess we're not the only ones."  Some have cautiously asked, "So, what have people been saying about that sermon?"  Even in my own family we've had some interesting and spirited conversations.  As if to punctuate the week, I had a long, sad talk with a friend of mine, also a pastor, who is going through difficulties in his church and isn't sure what to do next.

So what this sermon series, Becoming An Outpost for the Kingdom, aims to do is help us rebuild our understanding of what the Church, and our church, is all about.  We've had such an emphasis in Christianity for many decades on being "saved" that we don't really know (or haven't considered) what we're saved for. What's the point?  It's like all we're taught to do is wait.  Wait for the afterlife - in other words we're just hanging out until we die, and then finally something really significant or good will happen.  What kind of a God would do that -- desposit us here for 70 or 80 years like we're prisoners on death row, waiting to see who gets pardoned and released into heavenly bliss?  That's not what the bible teaches at all, but it's what a lot of people believe.

What the bible does teach is what we started to look at last week:  We're here to partner with God in building a new kingdom - or rather restoring the world to the way God intended it to be.  We don't accomplish that on our own, but with God's help and with the complete restoration ultimately in God's hands.  This week we'll begin to study 7 Objectives that God has, and each are ways that he invites us to partner with him.  These 7 objectives begin in our own hearts and lives, and from there they can change our community, our work, our schools - our church - and our world.  See you then...
- Curtis

Soul Surgery (& Prayer)

This week we're starting a three week series of messages looking at prayer.  I'll just be straight-up here and confess that prayer has never come easy for me.  That's not to say that I neglect talking to God, which I do quite often through the course of the day.  But prayer is not something that comes easily to me like breathing, walking or craving a chocolate chip cookie.  Perhaps I have spiritual ADHD.  Prayer often feels like more effort than it's supposed to be.   The father of the Reformation, Martin Luther, supposedly said, “I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours (of each day) in prayer."  I can't really imagine that kind of daily prayer focus.  When I pray for more than about 20 minutes, I get irritated, bored, and doubtful.  I start thinking, right in the middle of talking to the Almighty Creator of Everything, "I've got things to do.  Gotta run!"  That's not what you want your pastor saying about prayer, is it?  


I suspect that there are a lot of other followers of Jesus who are like me.  Charles Spurgeon, an English Baptist preacher in the mid and late 1800's, preached 130 sermons about prayer.  Is it possible that Spurgeon preached about prayer so often because he knew it's hard for the average person to pray?  I long to be someone who can relate to/with God like Moses in Exodus 33,  "The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend."  How great would that be?  


The more I think and even (gasp) pray about my prayer problem, the more I've come to realize that it is my misunderstanding of prayer that's the real trouble.  Even though I know better, I still tend to pray as if it's all about me telling God what I think he should be doing.  I may couch my prayers in a respectful formula (ie, the old ACTS prayer recipe . . . A=Adoration, C=Confession, T-Thanksgiving, S=Supplication - ah! At last supplication where I get to what I want!), but the truth is, I see prayer as all about me.  That, I fear, is the real trouble with my prayer life.  And so that's part of the reason I decided to preach on the Lord's Prayer this week (on the left side of this blog you can see the other sermons coming up).   I figure Jesus must know how to do this prayer thing pretty well, so that when he teaches us to pray he probably knows what he's talking about.  I like how straight forward he is about prayer and that he says, "...don't babble like the pagans because it's really annoying to my Father..." (my paraphrase, but that's actually what Jesus says). 


In worship this week we will unpack this most amazing prayer and try to tear off most of our preconceptions and misconceptions, and get a clear view of what Jesus is teaching.  One peculiarly fascinating possibility is that Jesus' prayer had a lot to do with the Hebrew Exodus story as the Jews were delivered from Egypt.  Could the Lord's Prayer be a later development of praying through our own deliverance from the things that enslave us?  That's one possibility we might explore.  
- Curtis  

What's God Up To - in Haiti?

Did you see the front page picture in the Oregonian today?  The picture (left) shows a reunion of a daughter and her mother who was, thankfully, pulled from a collapsed building in Haiti.   It's only been a couple of days since the terrible quake struck the poor, tiny nation and revealed once again how fragile we humans are.  We've quickly been swamped with hundreds of images of dead bodies and broken people searching for loved ones.  The ability to send massive numbers of these images and communicate instantly across the globe begins to numb us to the reality of the suffering.  Our gut reaction is to feel sorrow and a profound lack of hope.  What can we do anyway?  Maybe that's why the editor of the paper featured a picture of a successful rescue and reunion on the front page.  The image of someone rescued, reunited with family, rekindles hope.
We're lost without hope.

 ...my soul is downcast within me.

Yet this I call to mind 

 and therefore I have hope:

 Because of the LORD's great love 

we are not consumed, 

 for his compassions never fail. - Lamentations 3:20-22

Hope breaks through the numbness that so easily overtakes us - whether we are the sufferers, or the observers.  Hope invites us to expect God to act to us, with us, through us - again whether we are the sufferers, or those who can offer help.

The passage for this week's message is from Isaiah 62:1-5 and it is a word of hope for the hopeless.  Verse 4 has a message that will be so important for the people of Haiti to hear in the weeks and months ahead:

Never again will you be called “The Forsaken City”

      or “The Desolate Land.”

   Your new name will be “The City of God’s Delight”

      and “The Bride of God,”

   for the Lord delights in you

      and will claim you as his bride.

Despite Pat Robertson's bizarre ideas about Haiti making a "pact with the devil" (and the devil somehow having the inclination or power to keep "his end" of the bargain and free Haiti from slavery) and calling the quake a "blessing in disguise," we can be assured that God has not forsaken Haiti.  Because there is hope, God remembers his people and will be working to repair and recreate.  We, as his people, get the privilege of joining in this work with him.  Even if we're not going to Haiti, we can send resources to support those who are helping.  In the process, our prayers are answered and our hope begins to be restored.  Maybe our salvation is tied with our response to God using us to be a part of someone else's rescue and recreation as well.   If so, apathy not only spells doom for those we fail to help, but for ourselves as well.

On Sunday we'll study hope and Isaiah 62 as it relates to us personally - how God makes us beautiful.  Pray and respond generously for the suffering people of Haiti.

- Curtis

Out of the Box

Christmas Eve.  Here it is.
The week has been full for mostly good, significant reasons.  There are a couple of things I wish I'd done differently.  For example, yesterday I took a van load of food to Trihaven house.  It was surplus stuff from our Christmas Box program earlier in the week.  Trihaven is the residential facility for adults with mental and/or substance abuse troubles.  They invited us to their Christmas party, so that was an opportunity to take the food too.  What I wished I'd done differently was to get the word out more effectively so that I wasn't the only one who got to go.  I mentioned it to a few people ahead of time, but that really wasn't enough.  So I was alone due to my own lack of inviting.

I have to admit I really wasn't looking forward to it.  "One more thing to do in an already overloaded week."  That's what I kept thinking.  Then too, packing up all the food took more time than I planned.  By the time I got to Trihaven I was Scrooging (I hereby dub "Scrooging" a genuine verb - ie I Scrooge, you Scrooged, we Scrooge . . . I've been Scrooged).  But of course God had other plans.  I walked in and some of the residents recognized me, but others hadn't seen me before.  "Hi!  Who are you?  Why are you here!?" one young woman shouted across the room from her recliner.
"I'm Curt..." 
"Oh hi Curt!  I just wondered who you were.  Merry Christmas!"
And so it went.  My Scrooginess didn't last long.  The residents opened gifts donated by various organizations or purchased by staff, and they showed an appreciation that was profound and heartwarming.  "Wow!  Another gift for me?  This is perfect!"
When the gifts were all opened, we unpacked the van of food and I had a chance to talk with the facilities manager, Jim, the Trihaven Director, Carol, and Denise who counsels residents with substance abuse and anger issues.  Carol is a recent immigrant from Cameroon in Africa. She's a strong, faith-filled woman who oozes tough love towards the residents.  She's a powerful person; just what Trihaven needs.  Jim, who oversees several Sequoia (the mother ship organization) facilities, is one of the most compassionate, good people I've met.  He knows all the residents by name and interacts with them as a friend and mentor.  I doubt that's in his job description.  He walked around with cookie crumbs on his jacket and took pictures of everyone while brandishing a huge grin.  "Get over in front of the tree.  Big smile!  Got it!"

We talked for about an hour about the need for mentors, about Christmas, and about alienation from God and Church.  I was so glad I went.  It made me thik about my Christmas Eve meditation (and you might here a bit of this stuff again if you come to the Christmas Eve service).  We have a tendency to put Christ into our own box, and forget that he won't be kept there.   One of my boxes was my own agenda for the day, but Jesus would not be confined to where I thought he should be.  He has a knack of showing up in any way he chooses.  So why do we try to keep him in the box at all?  I pray you have a wonderful Christmas and perhaps I'll see you tonight as we do our best not to box him in.
- Curtis

Preparing for a Good Story

One of the truly great things about being a pastor is that no two days are alike.  It's really a dream job for someone with ADHD - which I don't think I have.  But who knows?  This week has been full of getting things done for the Christmas Boxes of Love (food from Barnes Elementary above) program and the final preparations for Christmas Sunday & Christmas Eve.  And then there's a wedding to work on and a sermon for Sunday... all quite joyous stuff (as I remind myself when I'm grumbling about having too many things to do).

It occurred to me this week that most of life is preparing for something which, when it arrives, is frequently not as wonderful as the actual preparation.  I'm not talking about let-downs or things that don't go as well as planned.  No, even the best of events are often not as meaningful as the preparation that lead up to them.  Our celebrations of Christmas are like that.  Christmas day is wonderful, but it's all the preparations that make it worthwhile --- the worship times, the decorating, cookie making, family coming together, presents, charitable projects, etc.  It all builds up like a huge life-crescendo ... and then it's over.  Christmas afternoon comes, we're stuffed again and passed out on the living room floor with a football game on (or is that just me??)

All of the running and work and preparations are exhausting, but they make the Christmas season meaningful.  There's always a story to tell.  The elements that make for a good story are the same things that create a good life (for a good book on this idea, try Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years).  The good deeds, busy times and people we connect with - these are what make this season a good story for us.  In fact, the more we sit around and try to make little cacoons of solitude or entertainment for ourselves, the more our story turns dull and unsatisfying.  I think that's why a lot of people suffer from depression - their stories become too small.

As soon as the angel told Mary about the story she would begin to live, she knew it was going to be good.  Her words in Luke 1:46-55 reveal that she had some small glimpse of what both her story and Jesus' story were all about.  What's powerful is that she seemed to realize (at a very young age), that she was a part of something so much bigger than herself.  Her glimpse of a bigger story tells us a lot about our story as well.  That's what we'll explore on Sunday.
- Curtis

Joy

Friday Night, December 11th
(Nope, the video above isn't mine, but it was similar to what I describe below)
I'm at PDX - the airport - writing tonight while I wait for Amanda to come home from college for Christmas break.  I ended up being here a bit early, so I'm waiting for Amanda where people walk by security after they get off their planes.  It's kind of cool to watch people as they arrive.  Most arrivals around Christmas are very joyful.

• A young soldier just walked through security, met by a  happy young wife and two excited children who look too young to really understand what's happening.  All they know is that they get to cling to a dad who's been gone for too long.  
• A woman just arrived and was met by her pregnant sister.  They hug and the happy future aunt bends over to kiss her sister's protruding tummy.  They smile and laugh.  Towering over them, in the background, is the soon-to-be dad.  He gazes at his growing family with great content.  
• Then there's the grandfather who has been trying to corral his three small grandkids for about 45 minutes.  It isn't working and his patience is just about gone.  These little monsters have been running around the rows of chairs.  They're all ready for momma to get back from a five day trip to somewhere.  When she arrives, they sprint to her shouting, "Mamma!  You're home! You're back!"  Grandad gets the last hug, but no one is happier to see mamma home than he.

I've noticed that romantic welcome-home hugs are long and close; often silent - as if it's finally time for a melding of flesh and hearts.  Friend hugs are shorter and people often sway from side to side while talking.  Women hold the hugee's face in their hands and step back to take a look at that face.  Men may give each other a hug, but men's hugs include hearty slaps on the back.

Joy seems to be the one constant in each of these reunions.

Zephaniah. When's the last time you thought to yourself, "Hey, I think I'll brush up on the old book by Zeph today!"  Can you even think of the last time you read anything from this "minor prophet?" Twelve prophets in the Old Testament are called "minor prophets" not because they are less important but because they are simply shorter books.  So why don't we read old Zeph more often?  Well, it might be because he delivered mostly bad news.  And although we seem to love bad news at 6 & 11 PM, we don't like it in the bible.  We want "gospel" (good news).

Tucked into the last chapter of all the bad news Zephaniah delivers is, at last, some good news.  More than that, it's Joy.  Promises that the story won't have a terrible, downer ending.  But that God will do what God always does - turn the saddest, most disappointing story into a very joy filled reunion with his people.  Joy is what we'll consider in the message this 3rd Sunday of Advent.
- Curtis

A Walk Instead of a Sermon

The "video sermon" above is 10 minutes. That's closer to what some Cedar Hills Baptist folks would like to hear on Sunday morning. But since we didn't get to worship together today I went for a walk and recorded some thoughts about the birth of Jesus and what it's all about. Or a tiny bit of what it's about.
Also, the song at the end has great lyrics that you were going to see on the screen in worship today. Instead they're here below. It's a song by RelientK which they wrote about CS Lewis' The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe.
I hope we get to worship together for Christmas Eve (6 PM)!

"In Like A Lion (Always Winter)"

It's always nice to look out the window
And see those very first few flakes of snow
And later on we can go outside
And create the impression of an angel that just fell from the sky

When February rolls around I'll roll my eyes
Turn a cold shoulder to these even colder skies
And by the fire my heart it heaves a sigh
For the green grass waiting on the other side

It's always winter but never Christmas
It seems this curse just can't be lifted
Yet in the midst of all this ice and snow
Our hearts stay warm cause they are filled with hope

It'd be so nice to look out the window
And see the leaves on the trees begin to show
The birds would congregate and sing
A song of birth a song of newer things

The wind would calm and the sun would shine
I'd go outside and I'd squint my eyes
But for now I will simply just withdraw
Sit here and wish for this world to thaw

And everything it changed overnight
This dying world you brought it back to life
And deep inside I felt things
Shifting everything was melting
Away oh away
And you gave us the most beautiful of days

Cause when it's always winter but never Christmas
Sometimes it feels like you're not with us
But deep inside our hearts we know
That you are here and we will not lose hope