I’ve met my fair share of religious types here in Chicago.  There are certain spiritual gurus that make their religion about words.  Rastafaris say that “isms are for schisms,” (I LOVE that!) but much of their religious convictions revolve around their commitments to their vocabulary, which they believe can actually heal disease and end war.  A friend of mine is considering baptism and beginning a relationship with God, and is confused because he heard a friend (who happens to be a priest) tell him that saying the right words at the event of the baptism is what makes it “count” or not.  Say the wrong words, and there is no magic.

Christians are not without this entrappment of words.  More books are printed today on Christianity and the Christian Life than any other subject.  We have televangelists, Christian radio, and a whole industry built around the language of our faith.

What sort of Christian are you? What church do you go to?  What do you call it?  What about your church model?  Mega?  Cell?  Micro?  Missional?  Emergent?  Organic?  What word do you place before the Body of Christ?

What do your creeds say?  How are they different from what mine say?  Demarkate, delineate, and separate with your words the Body of Christ.  Even the word Christian holds with it assumptions that can weigh down or set free.

The Teacher seems to think that there is no end to the making and studying of words (Ecc 12:12).  And admittedly, we must use language to participate in the world.  But can words really solve the problems of this world?  No!  Ya gotta get out there and do something!

I just met my neighbor at the nearby coffeeshop and we chatted some about this.  We laughed about the nature of our society, where its easier for us to meet at a Starbucks 2 blocks away for a real conversation than to hang out at each other’s homes.  Our fences are much like the words we keep up to protect us from being together.  We had a great conversation about tacit and direct relationship.  We talked about how doctors use tacit touch (scalpals) while people of faith use direct touch (laying on of hands).  We talked about Twitter (tacit) or face to face dialogue (direct), about watches on our wrist, or sun in the sky, about engaging a drive thru or engaging a backyard garden.

When we reach the end of words – its not to be a scary thing.  When we can’t live with the labels of “White” “Black” “Christian” “Muslim” “Protestant” “Catholic” “Missional”… maybe we can step outside of our silos and get to know the enemy – and offer some neighborly peace, a hug, some tomatos from your garden, and the assurance of a that friendship that is willing to cross over the fence we put up in the past.  Tired of the chatter?  So shut up and go do something!

Today we enter into the Lenten season.  While I admittedly don’t dive deep into parts of the traditional Christian calendar, I find Lent to be a perfect time to “remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  If ever there was a time to consider my own mortality through God’s eyes, its now.

We live in a world where we can simply ask for close to a trillion dollars from the Chinese and they will give it to us, (though they say they “hate us for it, but are forced to comply.”)  We live in a place where at the stroke of a pen, tens of thousands of lives are put to death, others sent to war, still others put to work without pay.  Mega-Corporations are the bullies of the whole earth, on panels with national leaders, deciding our fate on issues they seem interested in so far as it affects their bottom line.  This is the world where we live – where we dominate nature and forget the poor.  Where we play god until we die.  Where greed and security are penultimate values.

This is not the season of Lent.  Lent brings sanity, it brings reflection, finiteness, humility.  This is why I love and need Lent – because in me is the same vices plaguing the entire earth.

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SO!  This year I’m focusing in on how my life affects the whole world.  A “footprint” in the dust I suppose.  Each Wednesday, I look forward to fasting and living into different aspects of my life -

• my marriage
• politics
• finances
• environment
• “the others”:  enemies/immigrants/nations at war
• my witness

Each of these reflections will be done under the lens of what I’m recently calling “my purpose in life”: 

“To live in Heaven, right here on Earth.”

How might experiencing the Kingdom affect my finances?  What might it have to do with the environment?  I look forward to reflecting on these issues on this blog.  I welcome any feedback – and I’d love to know what others are doing for Lent!

BTW – Our house church is using a simple worship guide this Lent – you can find it here.

BTW2.0 – Here’s posts on previous Lents:

Lent 2007 – Oil Fast; Reflections

Do we want to be a church with a mission, or a mission with a church?

If we are a part of a church with a mission, then we make the rules. We take a look around us and decide what our core values are. We may look into Scripture in order to pin some verses onto our mission statements and logos, but truly the impetus comes from our own hopes and dreams for the congregation. I remember as a youth intern, sitting with the youth minister as we plotted out the perfect verbiage for our youth ministry. Who were we in a sentence? We even had a memorization contest among the youth!

On the contrary, instead of the church crafting a mission statement lets let the mission craft the church. Prepare hearts and lives to hear the voice of God, and then begin to follow after the specific mission he would have his church do. Rather than creating an “elevator speech” from the top-down, lets let our speech flow from God, and let our lives of love for each other speak more about our church’s purpose than anything we could pen. When we are more attentive to God’s mission than we are to our own mission, things change. We may look less like a corporation, and more like a flock of sheep listening to their shepherd. We may act less like passive recipients of a worship service’s “God-talk” and more like an active, vibrant family of Jesus that can’t stop talking to each other about the great things he has done for each of us. All of a sudden, we stop being the vendor of goods and services, and become instead what we were born to be – an outpost for the reign of God’s Kingdom in this world.

Those are the thoughts that have been rolling through my head this Ash Wednesday. A funny combination of thoughts I suppose; one of penitence and death (“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return”) and one of vigor and life.

We ARE dust – part of creation’s dust, atoms from the first stars. And to dust we shall return. We shall return to creation, perfectly completing the reconciliation to God, his creation, and to each other both with our physical and spiritual bodies. This is living and dying within the mission of God.