The Margins

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.

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.

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.

We were somewhere recently when I had Elijah with me and I was trying to keep him happy and had given him his pacifier which is normally reserved for naps and bedtime. He kept taking it out of his mouth and playing with it, so I decided to try giving him some Cheerios instead. As I laid the Cheerios out in front of him, he immediately put the pacifier back in his mouth and proceeded to pick the Cheerios up in his chubby little fingers and try to put them into his mouth. I laughed at him and told him that he was going to have a hard time eating any as long as the pacifier was blocking the way.

I thought about the many things in my life that deliver an instant gratification that I choose over a harder but ultimately more satisfying pursuit. And I reflected on how the foolishness of what Elijah was doing was so visible: laughable, even. Yet if we are honest, that is exactly how we behave. Too much of the gospel is simply incompatible with the pursuits of the world, yet how many times do we choose allegiance to some pleasure or comfort or cultural norm over commands that are not hidden or far off or incomprehensible but simply unpopular or hard? What we choose can feel good and even satisfy for a season, but ultimately our body will perish if that is all we give it. Yes, the world is there for us to gain in every way, but the cost can be the only thing we have that truly lives.

As a preacher, I take seriously the role of proclamation in the life of the church. And as I stand in front of a gathered body, hopefully declaring what is true about God, I wonder at the ways we are individually and collectively sucking on pacifiers that block us from really ingesting God’s word. We all hear often enough the increasingly popular critique that “I just wasn’t being fed” as the reason for individuals swapping one church family for another. Could it be that some folks can’t taste the food because of the big rubber stopper that they refuse to spit out?

Lest that sound too critical, I believe that there is ample evidence as well for churches and preachers offering brightly colored, sweet-flavored soothers in place of the real flesh and blood food of the gospel. The critique absolutely goes both ways.

“I am the bread of life,” declares Jesus, and all are invited to come and eat. The table is set and the host delights in his company. But if we come to this table, it does not suffice to simply pick up the food and try to shove it in on top of something else. Whatever we have been sucking on to satisfy our heart’s longings must first be spit out if we want to receive this food. My own list is long of what these things are in my life. But that image of my son and the futility of what he was doing pushes me to pray.

“It isn’t often that I can make God and George Bush happy at the same time.”

From a comment at Out of Ur by Ethan Magness discussing a young person’s plan to buy a washer and dryer for a family in need as a Christian response to spending the Economic Stimulus check.

My friend Tyler linked to this amusing piece for a Friday morning titled: Ten Reasons Why Men Should Not Be Ordained For Ministry

10. A man’s place is in the army.
9. The pastoral duties of men who have children might distract them from the responsibility of being a parent.
8. The physique of men indicates that they are more suited to such tasks as chopping down trees and wrestling mountain lions. It would be “unnatural” for them to do ministerial tasks.
7. Man was created before woman, obviously as a prototype. Thus, they represent an experiment rather than the crowning achievement of creation.
6. Men are too emotional to be priests or pastors. Their conduct at football and basketball games demonstrates this.
5. Some men are handsome, and this will distract women worshipers.
4. Pastors need to nurture their congregations. But this is not a traditional male role. Throughout history, women have been recognized as not only more skilled than men at nurturing, but also more fervently attracted to it. This makes them the obvious choice for ordination.
3. Men are prone to violence. No really masculine man wants to settle disputes except by fighting about them. Thus they would be poor role models as well as dangerously unstable in positions of leadership.
2. The New Testament tells us that Jesus was betrayed by a man. His lack of faith and ensuing punishment remind us of the subordinated position that all men should take.
1. Men can still be involved in church activities, even without being ordained. They can sweep sidewalks, repair the church roof, and perhaps even lead the song service on Father’s Day. By confining themselves to such traditional male roles, they can still be vitally important in the life of the church.

Last Saturday I had the privilege of spending the morning with Aaron Smith, the coordinator of Servant Partners’ internship experience in Manila. I have heard enough times from interns how deeply impactful the weeks spent with Aaron and his wife, Emma, in their slum community of Balic-balic are, so I was very excited to meet Aaron and hear more of his story.

Aaron is a gentle soul, and as he spoke of his community, I found myself fighting tears on more than one occasion. There was his description of babies who die because they don’t receive treatment for easily treatable illness; or the fathers who steal money from their children that was intended for school expenses; or the little girls whose life ambition is to go to work as strippers in Japan so that they can send money back to the family (a pursuit that is heartily encouraged by many parents).

I was struck too by the general economic despair that hovers of a community where the vast majority of men cannot find work, and where jobs that are given are by contracts that rarely last more than six months (the time period at which an employer must begin to offer benefits). This ensures a constant stream of needy unemployed who will work for low wages and without benefits under false hope that a job that is temporary just might become steady employment. In a word: oppressive. Aaron spoke of the ways an entire population of men copes with this reality, ranging from liberal unfaithfulness in their marriages to robbery and drug sales to abuse of their children and wives.

As I sat in comfort in our friends’ apartment across the street and listened to Aaron describe his and Emma’s life with a six-month old infant, I was reminded of the ease and security I live with here. I have never treated Elijah for cockroach bites; Mercy or Aaron have never been scratched by rats.

Aaron also told the story of visiting a family from their church in the community with some of the interns and seeing the interns moved to tears by the living conditions they saw there. Later, when Aaron spoke with the family about the interns’ visit, the mother replied: “They shouldn’t cry for us. We know Jesus. They should cry for the others who do not know Him.”

As I walked out of the apartment that day, I couldn’t help but think that everyone should spend at least one Saturday morning with Aaron Smith, or others like him who are seeking first God’s kingdom in the slums of our world.

This past weekend, the Haub family had the very fun experience of being extras for a short film. Mercy and Aaron were excited to tell their friends at church on Sunday about “playing action”, and they actually did exceptionally well for the duration of filming. Of course Elijah spit up all over me (and poor Karla), Mercy charmed the crowd and Aaron required a spit bath (yes, I am now that mother) between every take due to his uncanny ability to cover himself with dirt. Oh, and the final takes did require some form of bribery involving small bite-sized pieces of red vines. But overall they exceeded my expectations in how they handled the whole thing.

It was fun to experience a very tiny piece of an industry that touches so many lives here in Los Angeles. It was great too to contribute in a very small way to the sincere artistic endeavor of some very talented friends. And as always, it was touching to see strangers become friends through playful engagement with my children.

One of my favorite moments of the day was when Mercy walked past the lead actress for the first time and, looking down at her turquoise and white pumps (her wardrobe was intentionally awkward and 80’s-esque) looked up with wide-eyed admiration and said: “Pretty shoes…”

Nicole burst out laughing and went out of her way to engage Mercy for the rest of the afternoon.

I was reminded throughout the day of the ways Dick Staub has reminded me over the years about the role of art and beauty and creativity and storytelling in the life of a people of faith. It was great to see, from the inside, how a group of friends are passionately and joyfully pursuing those things.

Matt, Matt and Aaron: we wish you all the best in bringing your vision to completion. Thanks for letting us be a part of it.

Living in L.A., it is not uncommon to see people with clothing or accessories bearing logos from different film or television productions. So many people here have some connection to “the industry”, and their baseball caps and messenger bags and bomber jackets let you know it.

Yesterday the doorbell rang and I was greeted with the UPS guy and a package from Banyan Productions: inside was a black backpack with a little footprint logo and the words: “Deliver Me”, as well as a DVD and a little bib for Elijah bearing the inaccurate words: “I was delivered on Deliver Me”.

While Doug and I were filmed for this show leading up to Elijah’s birth, we were not interested in having his actual delivery filmed (a decision I was most grateful for when his complication-laden birth actually took place). As a result, the producers could not have us as one of the central story lines for the show since the birth-moment climax kind of makes the story. Regardless, it was fun to watch our footage and touching to see our three amazing OB’s in action.

And now we can proudly walk about L.A. with a logo on our backs.