The Margins

Singing Happy Mother’s Day to Grammy, Grammaline and Lauren (who is visiting her family in Hookem, Texas) over the phone.

Preaching at Church of the Redeemer.

Letting the kids eat way too many sweets at the church brunch.

Taking a long nap with Mercy after church (well, I slept at least!)

Crunchy-lunch-dinner at California Pizza Kitchen with my wonderful husband and precious babies.

Rocking out with Aaron to Jack Johnson in front of the mirror in the girl’s bathroom at CPK.

A big cup of Starbucks Pike’s Place roast.

Mercy asking when “Daughter Day” was.

Patty-cake, knocking down towers and cuddling with Elijah before bed.

Not being pregnant.

Faith is not a reasonable act which fits into the normal scheme of life and perception. The promise of the gospel is not a conventional piece of wisdom that is easily accommodated to everything else. Embrace of this gospel requires shattering and discontinuity.

From Genesis, by Walter Brueggemann

John, an old friend of mine in love with the Old Testament, is often heard saying of the Psalms: “God is glorified even in the grammar.” What exactly is he saying? Grammar, according to Merriam Webster, is “the study of the classes of words, their inflections, and their functions and relations in a sentence; a characteristic system of inflections and syntax of a language; a system of rules that defines the structure of a language.” In short, the grammar is the ‘decoder’ that allows us to identify the meaning, value, and purpose of the words that it contains. Without grammar, the actual meaning of words is impossible to uncover.

I think John was rightly on to something of which we should take serious note. In a recent meeting with a pastor friend whom I respect dearly, we were discussing the shape of our Sunday services and I was asking for feedback on something we were thinking of doing that was a little different than the norm programmatically: less music, more fellowship, less rows, more gathering in smaller groups…. The thoughtful response from my pastor friend was to be mindful not to change things too quickly. Congregants, he said, need consistency and we should be mindful about how quickly and for what reasons we institute change.

It got me thinking about change and what exactly we had learned was important in our worshiping communities. What exactly were we changing? The number of songs sung? Yes. Where people sat? Yes. The amount of sound equipment we were to use? Yes. The wise counsel from my friend implied to me that these things were of central importance, as change in these areas too quickly would set off alarm bells for the congregation that something was not right.

Said in another way: consistency in the style of music, the length of preaching, the bible translation used, the floor arrangement for seating, the attire of the pastor and other leaders, the flow of the service, are the grammatical things we learn as a community. These things are our identity markers. Change one of them and suddenly the community’s identity is ambiguous. Changes in these things are changes in our grammar. The removal of these things, or changes in them, has an immediate impact on identity and understanding.

In other words, if we don’t sing in a particular style, is it worship? If we don’t use a particular bible translation, is it authoritative? If we change the seating in any way, are people going to feel that they are even at church? Do we not learn this from a very early age? Do not even our youngest learn to discern between those who look like “us” in format and style (and thus are what they come to recognize as church) and those who are “other?”

What if we embraced the harder, deeper task of discerning “is God here?” rather than quickly looking for the organ or guitar, the suit or flip-flops, the showered or the dirty, the NIV or KJV, the old or young? What would it look like to change our grammar?

I saw my brother last weekend, and he told me that thirty-two people had been shot in a single weekend in Chicago. Due to the dramatic number of shootings in such a short amount of time, the shootings received significant media attention. The reality is, had only a handful occurred, it is likely that no one would have heard anything about them. Well, maybe the one involving the AK-47 would have made the news cycle. Maybe.

Last night I checked the Homicide Blog and saw that a young man had been shot and killed a few blocks from here while riding his bike to the store on Friday evening. The shooting took place at 7:45 pm. It was not yet dark. We didn’t hear about this killing, and we live so close. Another death so easily ignored.

Monday night our good friend Jade was here, and we got talking poetry and ended up with a bunch of my poetry books out. We were flipping through and reading aloud some of our favorite authors. In an anthology edited by South African author, Wole Soyinka, titled “Poems of Black Africa”, I read these lines by Gambian poet Lenrie Peters:

Isatou died
When she was only five
And full of pride
Just before she knew
How small a loss
It brought to such a few.

The last line made me cry when I first read it. I am haunted by it still.

“He sings so…..so…..so…..singing!”

From Aaron, near speechless, while catching a few moments of American Idol tonight.

I spent Sunday’s worship service helping out in the nursery. At one point, we headed outside to let the kids play on the playground and I stayed in the covered area with Elijah. It was an unusual worship service that focused on prayer, and a few youth had opted to hang out in the back with their skateboards instead of participating. I was sitting there with my baby when I saw a group of three youth come around from the other side of the building carrying skateboards and I realized that they must be in the practice of hopping the fence to skate behind the school.

We didn’t talk much. I mostly enjoyed watching them practice different jumps, and our two boys joined in with what they were doing. The whole skateboarding culture here still cracks me up. It brings back too many of my own memories of junior high.

As I watched them skate, I thought about our friends who joined our church family as a result of meeting us in the park where we met and they slept. Warm coffee and good food shared opened the door to meaningful relationships: with us and with Jesus. I was bummed when I saw that we didn’t have any food this week after the service because I wanted to invite these boys in for something to eat.

There is something good about being a sojourning church. There is something Acts-like in moving about, colliding with people in their everyday pursuits. Mark Galli wrote an interesting post on the importance of a building from his Anglican perspective. He writes:

Every Anglican parish is an icon of Israel, a people with a unique call from God to not wander but to settle down, not to live in exile in strange places, but to gather together on a certain piece of land where Jesus will take on flesh and dwell among them, a place that will become holy.

When I consider Church of the Redeemer, and the community that makes us, it makes sense that we wander: that our “space” speaks of what it means to be aliens; that we sit outside a land of milk and honey and still we choose to worship.

This past week, Doug wrote a guest post here that received extensive comments resulting in a quality dialogue about the identity of the church. I thought I would post a few excerpts here:

I think the concept of outreach versus inreach itself strikes a dissonant chord in me. When I read through the gospels, I find no striking characteristics that necessarily made someone in or out. There are those who are in, who are also out (Judas) and those considered most definitely out, who are ultimately elevated to kin-relationship with Jesus (woman with hemorrhage). Yet even those who are healed and want to follow him are not always given “disciple” status. Troubling!

Before you became a monk/nun you participated alongside the brothers/sisters in their work. Even those who didn’t intend to join were still welcome to participate. Some things were explained outright, other things were left for later explanation when they would actually make sense. Our consumerist mentality demands getting things right now and lacks patience in learning - thus it challenges this type of learning and undercuts any type of successful mentoring. Recently I read that those working toward baptism into the faith community in the first couple centuries had a three year process. For one year they studied Mark - nothing else. For the next year they studied Matthew - nothing else. For a third year they studied Luke/Acts - nothing else. And at the conclusion of that year they were offered (or not offered, mind you) baptism into the community. Then, only after baptism, they were given the gospel of John.

I think the way outreach is conducted is crucial. Without a clear ‘mentoring’ and ‘discipling’ focus that makes use of vigorous outreach as the crucible for growth right from day one, I think ‘delivery systems’ do little to help people mature.

Seems like Jesus developed the disciples ‘on the fly’ and ‘in the midst of mission’ because He used their experiences together in mission as an opportunity to intentionally teach and develop folks.

I think the primary goal should always be out, not in. If the purpose of outreach is ultimately to get people in, then we still have the wrong focus. It is the very fact that we don’t see our purpose as going out that those who are “with us” never become devoted apprentices.

Outreach isn’t just for those who are especially gifted in evangelism. Unless we see our primary identity as disciples sent into the world, we will never reach some imaginary moment of maturity and enlightenment wherein we will be compelled out to the world.

The focus of discipleship is going out, not plugging in.

Check out the entire conversation here.

“The one who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and the one who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”

In Matthew’s context, it is clear that Jesus is warning about the division that can come in a home when one person becomes a disciple of Jesus and others do not. In many cases, new believers can feel rejected, or even be expelled from their families. In such cases, Jesus says, one must decide which relationship to keep. In Luke 14 and Matthew 10, Jesus is saying that if you have to choose, choose him. Ideally, we don’t have to choose - our non-believing family members tolerate our faith, or come to also trust in Jesus. But if they force us to make a choice - choose Jesus, every time.

Both passages remind us that the same is true of life itself. In most cases, the non-believing world allows us to keep living if we become Christians. But if it forces a choice upon us of living without Jesus or dying with Jesus - choose Jesus, every time. Easy to say, not so easy to do.

From Gary Manning (our favorite Greek prof!)

First, thank you, Erika, my lovely bride, for providing a platform for these comments. As part of a class I am taking at Fuller, I must present several public writings that come from my interaction with the course materials. These will be short, incomplete, and perhaps even unsatisfactory ‘snapshots’ of the bigger picture. They are thoughts from a much broader conversation. My hope remains that they will provoke, inspire, prod, whatever, and that you will be willing to jump in.

We have read A LOT about culture, the ‘missional’ corrective, education (particularly regarding the religious educator), and more recently the role of the pastor.

I have been left wondering one thing: what is the point? To what end for all of this? From my position at the seminary, I have a front-row view of the recent trends in theological education (in so much as they have reared themselves at my institution): ‘classical training,’ ‘homogenous church growth,’ ‘healthy church growth,’ ‘natural church development,’ and now ‘missional’ and ‘emerging church.’ To (over)simplify the conversation, these trends fall into two categories: “how to get people in (attractional) and plugged in to getting people in” and “how to get people in by going out (missional) to get them in and then plugged in to go out to get people in.” Delivery systems – not development. Does anyone know what to do with people when they are got? Into what are people coming and how? Or should the question be: what are people becoming and how?

Dallas Willard offers us this:

“It is, I gently suggest, a serious error to make “outreach” a primary goal of the local congregation, and especially so when those who are already “with us” have not become clear-headed and devoted apprentices of Jesus, and are not, for the most part, solidly progressing along the path. Outreach is one essential task of Christ’s people, and among them there will always be those especially gifted for evangelism. But the most successful work of outreach would be the work of inreach that turns people, wherever they are, into lights in the darkened world.”

It was ten o’clock before I finally left to do our family’s grocery shopping last night. In general, we try to avoid evening trips to Ralph’s. There have been enough incidents there at night that it is better to just not take the risk. But we needed to shop and this would be my only chance so I went ahead.

As I backed out of our driveway, I noticed two young men on bikes, men I did not recognize as being from our neighborhood. They were circling around at the end of our street, and I had to exit our driveway carefully because they were hard to see and they were swerving all around.

As I pulled out and turned the corner, one of the men stared me down pretty hard. I just kept driving, but suddenly my heart began to race as I realized he was pedaling hard to follow me. One would think that being in a car would feel mostly safe since you can speed up and race off. But on a residential street, there is only so much speed to be had between stop signs. There is a high volume of property crime in our neighborhood here, and confrontational robberies have been on the rise, many involving guns. I of course had no idea what his intentions were but I was scared.

I managed to only barely stop at the first stop sign and then drive fast enough through the next two blocks where thankfully there is not a sign and by the time I made it to Budlong to turn, I knew I had gained enough distance to feel safe. My heart was still pounding when I drove into the parking lot at Ralph’s.

My shopping itself was uneventful surrounded by mostly USC students, most of whom were buying alcohol. It was eleven o’clock when I was finally checking out, and while my groceries were being bagged, an employee realized that a bottle of cleaner I had purchased was leaking. I finished paying but had to stand next to the checkout lines for a bit waiting for someone to retrieve a new bottle of cleaner for me. It was at this point that I noticed a man being ushered by security out of the main part of the store through one of the unused checkout lines.

As he got a few feet away from where I stood, he turned to my checker and asked: “Do you have any small glass pipes…like this?” and he used his hands to show the size. He then turned to another employee and asked the question a bit louder. By now everyone is laughing at him, with my checker leading the way: “Can you believe he just marched up into here and asked that?” she said loudly, laughing hard and shaking her head. Others around her joined in the laughter.

The man seemed non-plussed and turned to me: “Do you have a glass pipe?” he asked, growing more agitated. “You look like you smoke cocaine…” he added hopefully. I was not laughing at him. It was actually just so sad that nothing in me was inclined to laugh. I smiled at him and said, ‘No, I am sorry. I do not.”

His eyes seemed to harden at this point. “You like to drink wine, don’t you. Your eyes look like you like to drink wine.”

“Yes, I like to drink wine,” I told him.

“Would you buy me some?” he said, stepping closer.

“No, I’m sorry.”

“I’m homeless,” he added.

“I’m very sorry about that.”

“Would you drive me to (I couldn’t understand what he said)?”

“No, I’m sorry I can’t do that.”

“Would you give me some money?”

“No.”

At this point his face grew angry and his voice dropped.

“It’s because I’m homeless.”

“No.”

“It’s because I’m black.”

“No.”

We went around and around like this for some time, and he finally started to just tell me that I was acting stupid. “You’re stupid. You’re acting so stupid,” he kept saying.

About this time, I finally got my cleaner and so I turned to walk out the store telling this man that I hoped he had a good night.

As I got to the exit and pushed my heavy cart through the door, I realized that he was hurrying to follow me out. My car was a ways off and there was no one else outside. Realizing that this was not the best scenario, I stopped and pulled my cart back inside just as he got to where I was standing. I have been assaulted once before, and there is a look in a person’s eyes that terrifies me. This man had that look. I pulled out my cell phone to pretend to make a call at this point, and he came right back up to me and stood close. By now I had started to look for security who had been strangely absent since escorting him out of the main part of the store.

“Let me unload your groceries,” he said.

“No thank you,” I replied.

The security guy finally came over and stood next to me. I asked him to walk me to my car. He said that he would but then just stood there. I asked him again in Spanish and he said he would, but again remained standing. He waited until the other man finally left through the front door and motioned for me to go ahead. He did not walk me to my car. He stood in the doorway and watched me the entire time, and I looked over my shoulder continuously as I unloaded my groceries.

I drove home shaking.