The Pearl

Talking about God, even though he's the God of the universe and gives us immortality, can seem so complicated, so guache. You have to figure out how to make this particular news sound relevant to your neighbor, who’s heard it on the radio, seen it on a billboard sign, been blasted with it in a thousand ways, and is bored to death with it. As the apologist/novelist Walker Percy explains in Message in a Bottle:

“It’s like a man who found a treasure hidden in the attic of an old house, but the people  [who lived in it] have moved to the suburbs, sick of the old house and everything in it.

“It’s like a starving Confederate soldier who finds a hundred-dollar bill on the streets of Atlanta, only to discover that everyone is a millionaire, and the grocers won’t take the money.

“It’s like a man who goes to a wild lonely place to discover the Truth, who finds an apostle there who gives him great news, who runs back to the city to announce it, only to discover that the news he carries has been on the broadcast for so long that in fact, it is now in the weariest canned spot on TV, more commonplace than an Exxon commercial, so he might as well be shouting “Exxon! Exxon!” for all the attention anyone pays attention to him.

“It’s like a man who finds a treasure buried in a field and sells all he has to buy the field, only to discover that everyone else has the same treasure in his field, and that in any case, real estate values have gone so high that all field-owners have forgotten the treasure and plan to subdivide.”

This is our culture. But what we forget is that not all cultures are this jaded. While we research new ways to make good news sound like good news to those around us, other cultures respond to the original story just as the people heard it in Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost, or the Gentiles heard it when Paul preached in their streets. So when we take the Good News to cultures that aren’t jaded, we do well to stick to the original story: “It was written long ago that the Messiah would suffer and die and rise from the dead on the third day. This message would be proclaimed in the authority of his name to all the nations…there is forgiveness of sins for all who repent.” or as Paul taught, “I passed on to you what was most important…that Christ died for our sins just as the Scriptures said. He was buried, and he was raised from the dead on the third day…”

Missiologist Rolland Allen observes that Paul’s sermons resulted not in mere believers but in true disciples. He stuck to a few key elements: he established common ground with his listeners by appealing to the past; he stated the facts of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection; he answered the objections people might have; he appealed to people’s spiritual needs; and finally, he gave grave warnings of the consequences of rejection. All this he did with respect and even sympathy for his listeners (he never attacked the gods of the day, though he did expect absolute commitment to Jesus). He showed courage by facing the difficulties of his message without watering it down or disguising what might give offense. And he spoke with confidence in its power to fulfill those who responded.

I have seen the power of this kind of preaching in Mixtec culture and heard of it in other cultures, too, where good news has been announced for the first time. In this culture, today, it is just as powerful as ever, but it's so hard to hear above the media storm--a pearl buried in a field of noise.

First Day of School

 Today is the first day of school for my students in Oaxaca. I miss them today and regret that I am missing another school year with them.

I think of how, when I went to my friend Kath’s dance recital at the beginning of the summer, the director of the dance school stood up and told the kids how proud she was of them, and told the teachers how well they had done. She had broken her foot mid-season, and they had to carry on without her, and those teachers made it all happen. Kath and the other three moms choreographed their own dance and performed it for hundreds of people. I’d be proud, too.

I think of how the Shakespeare play I had planned to do with my OCS students at the end of last school year had to be canceled when I couldn’t go back. We were going to attempt Henry IV, Part I, our first history play. Every year for the past six years, I’ve done a play with all my 7^th through 10^th graders, some 24 of them last year. I divide the play into two parts, because I only rehearse with two grades at a time, 7-8 or 9-10, and then I pull the whole play together just in the last week before the performance.  I do the play right at the end of the year, because even though it makes scheduling a nightmare with all the grad activities coming up, English class goes out with a bang. It’s an end-of-year memory-maker. Last year I had them all perfectly cast, and had all their scripts printed out, and had their props figured out, including bright yellow hose for Ryan, who was supposed to be Falstaff, when I found out I was moving to Oz. The teacher who graciously took over for me last minute had to cancel the play, of course. But I couldn’t help feeling sad because I knew what the play does for the kids. It makes them work hard, push for excellence, and be creative and responsible, and maybe best of all, it pulls all of us together as a team. In years past, when they came out at the end of the play for the final bow, I was just bursting with pride. It was always the emotional high of the year. There is nothing like it. My great adventure with cancer just doesn’t compare (heavy sarcasm).

The last play we performed was The Tempest on the school’s two-leveled play structure. We called it Shakespeare’s Playground. Isn’t that cute? The kids worked hard. They would tell me how many lines they could handle, and I would try to match their roles with what they could do. They would surprise me. There was JD, who never got his lines right but paraphrased them in a JD way and made us all laugh. There was Noemi, the sprite Ariel, who was so busy flitting around and jumping off benches and climbing ladders (as she was supposed to do), that she had to stop and catch her breath before she could get her lines out. There was Anna as Prospero, who had way too many lines but assured me she could handle it, and of course nailed them all, every time. There was Niclas, who was the evil Caliban, and who plastered his face with mud, and made evil, scary noises, and came out stomping on bugs and banging firewood everywhere to show how evil he was, all the while keeping the sound system going, which was playing, “I’m having a really bad day.” Every last one of my kids made the play work. Every last one. Even Joel. Who said he wanted no lines at all, but still hauled sails, and still yelled, “Heave ho” with a will.

When you work at something good together, really putting your back into the thing and making people glad of it when you are done, no matter what it is, God is glad.  He designed us to love good work and excellent service. He calls us to it. He blesses it. And just as God is there when doctors and nurses are competent, and when moms dance grace, and baby angels try, I think he is there, too, on that school playground, clapping with everyone else, when 19 nervous kids and one proud English teacher attempt 45 minutes of Shakespeare’s Tempest together--and get it. I miss this.

Burning heretics

I already wrote about the Jesus Freak book, mentioning that some things took me aback. Here’s one: the author had a Christian friend who became a Santeria priest. The author readily acknowledged that this was a form of syncretism, but invited her readers to embrace Santeria as an expression of Christianity.

Syncretism is a fusion of different beliefs into a new system. In this case it was the fusion of Catholicism with the Nigerian Yoruba religion that worships nature. A person baptized Catholic begins to add to the rituals of Catholicism the rituals of Santeria, which include feeding powerful but mortal spirits called orishas with animal sacrifices so that they will give him energy to meet his destiny.  The orishas are given the names of Catholic saints, like St Lazarus or St Barbara, but they are not any saints that ever lived in flesh and blood on earth.

Robert and I see syncretism in Mexico all the time. Although the Mixtecs call the spirit they venerate St Mark, the only thing the god of rain and thunder has in common with the writer of the gospel is the day on which they are celebrated on the Catholic calendar. On St Mark’s day in the town we lived in, the celebration is not held in the Catholic Church but on a mountainside, and there are animals sacrificed on an altar. To join the procession to the altar requires drinking, and men carry cases of beer on their shoulders to make sure they are well intoxicated by the time the rituals begin, which include divination and speaking to the dead. Although everyone at the altar is Catholic, this is not a Christian ritual but a veneer of Catholic terms and rituals overlaying a pre-Colombian faith in nature spirits.

I think the Jesus Freak lady does right in welcoming everyone and anyone to dinner at her table, no matter what their creed or status or race. She’s had lots of practice at it and, I bet, does it better than anyone I know. I think Jesus asks this of all of us, and we have much to learn from those who do it well. Our churches should feel like home to anyone coming in the door. But embracing Santeria is another thing. Animal sacrifices pretty much deny the effectiveness of Jesus’ once and for all sacrifice.  This is one mixed up lady, someone who in the churches I frequent would be called a liberal heretic.

And what do we do with heretics? I think Jesus asks us to live out this terrible paradox. We are to welcome people even while we sharply disagree with them. How does one do this?  That’s my question. How do we welcome a Santeria priest and not her spirits? How do we greet her and explore together the truth about Jesus, who makes her orishas obsolete?  More difficult, how do we greet a liberal heretic minister and sharply disagree with her lifestyle and her syncretism without sending her to hell? It’s always harder to handle heretics.

Lord of Paradox, teach us!

I do not think we’ve mastered this skill. Either we rebuff those who believe differently, or we welcome their beliefs right along with them like this lady does. I think it takes practice to live a paradox. I think it takes lots of time and lots of practice, and just when we congratulate ourselves on getting it right, God puts a yet more difficult person in our way, someone even more impossible to eat with, and we have to start from scratch. I think it is so hard that only Jesus ever got it right, and we always fall off the horse on one side or the other. I think “this one only comes out by much prayer and fasting.”

I think the man left wounded on the road that the Samaritan found bleeding learned it, though. Who is my neighbor? The Samaritan was not just a racial half-breed, he was a heretic who didn’t worship in God’s Holy Place but came up with religions of his own. Conscious, the wounded man would have dropped the man’s loaf on the ground and shoved his olive oil aside. But somehow it wasn’t necessary to agree at all to be shown love. This is a crazy parable, because doggone it, we’re the wounded guy! Maybe that’s the only way we learn. Maybe it’s a liberal heretic hoisting us up on the donkey! Aaaaaahh!

All I know is if we get comfortable writing off heretics, especially from a position of power, just on hearsay, without listening to them first, sooner or later we’re going to end up writing off (as close to burning as we get) someone God intended us to listen to—a wacko like John the Baptist, or John Huss, or John Wycliffe or…  It always happens.

Just in time

In Mexico there is a kind of restaurant that doesn’t exist in North America. It’s a small family restaurant where you sit down for a full meal, but it has no menu. You’re served the dish of the day, complete with sides and flavored drink, and it’s fresh, home-cooked, and fast. It’s also cheap, as cheap as any fast food. It’s called comida corrida, meal on the run, a fine Latin American invention. You do get variety from day to day, and I know some people who eat a comida corrida every day. The comida corrida uses a technique newly applied in North America (my brother-in-law uses it in his mechanic business), the just-in-time inventory. The chefs (as do most moms) shop fresh from the market every day. Although I doubt the comida corrida would take off in our culture, the concept of just-in-time is gaining ground in other fields.

Take education, for example. I have a niece who is graduating as a computer programmer from Waterloo University, a university made world famous by its co-op program. This program requires a four month job placement after every four month academic term. By the time my niece graduates, she will already have two years of experience. With great feedback from her employers as well as her profs, she can now pick the job she wants. She chose Google.

My brother-in-law, who uses a just-in-time inventory, also uses just-in-time training. He starts his apprentices on simple jobs, changing oil and spark plugs, but as they learn, he trains them for more complex tasks. Throughout the process, the apprentices bill out their own work, so by the end of their training, they practice all aspects of the business and have clients of their own.  When they finish, they run their own business. This is just-in-time training.

If you think about it, this is the model Jesus used to train his apprentices. He put his disciples to work right away and gave them the training they needed for the immediate tasks at hand. He modeled everything for them and gave them immediate feedback when they finished. Paul did the same with Titus and Timothy. A more familiar term for just-in-time apprenticing would be discipleship.

Discipling means learning what tasks people are facing and helping them do these tasks well. Instead of laying out a long plan of study disconnected from practice, a good teacher teaches to the tasks at hand. This means using a menu-based teaching style, “bringing from his storeroom new gems of truth as well as old.” (Matt 13: 52) If the task is evangelizing, then teach and model how to evangelize. If it is preaching, then teach and model how to preach. If it is baptizing, then teach and model how to baptize. The best teachers have always trained their disciples for specific tasks by giving them the principles, the modeling, and the practice they need, and then putting them to work. How much do we hear complaints about how college didn’t prepare students for the actual work they do or about how quickly they forget everything because at the time it wasn’t relevant? What would it be like if higher education used more of a menu-based approach?

In just three years, Jesus taught his disciples so well that he could step aside and send them on their way. They had what they needed. Paul sent his disciples to start churches, name elders, and manage disputes in a matter of months.

I think it’s a good model, this kind of just-in-time training. I want to learn how to use it more in my teaching and writing.  The first task for my writing project is to build a menu directed at specific tasks that cross-cultural workers might face as they take the Good News to people who have not heard it. The first item to tackle was the menu.

Risk

With Elai around for a few weeks (don’t know how many more times I’ll have the privilege), we introduced her to some classic movies that our hosts have laying around: I Am Sam, which shows how fiercely people can love no matter what are the differences between them (my favorite part is when Sean Penn makes that “O” with his mouth when he first sees his baby daughter as a newborn: you know right there what the whole movie is about). That was the first, and then last night, Shawshank Redemption. Anything with the word “redemption” in it has to have something intriguing, is my guess.

I’m not a risk taker. So of course what gets to me about this movie every time is the risks that Andy takes, knowing what is coming.  I don’t mean the calculated risk when he bargains with the evil guard to get beer for his friends and almost gets himself thrown off a building. This was a risk to get ahead in the game, and it pays off. No, I mean when he locks the guard in the bathroom, and sits back in the warden’s chair, and plays Italian opera for the whole prison camp until the guards break in and stop him. He pays dreadfully for this moment of freedom, but you get the impression he doesn’t regret it. It’s almost exactly the same scene in It’s a Beautiful Life. And there is a scene in one of Ayn Rand’s stories like that, too, that I can never forget: A couple is pursued by the police (can’t remember why) and she is shot, and he stays with her, holding her, even after she dies, and the police get him. Ayn Rand is all about knowing how to value things and being willing to pay, even with your life, for what you really want.

She’s an atheist, but she gets some things really well, for example, this whole “What does it profit a man to save his life and lose his soul,” idea, even though she doesn’t believe in souls. She doesn’t believe in heaven, either, but she has the best picture of heaven in Atlas Shrugged that I’ve ever read. She paints people’s gifts building on each other, and everyone adding value to what everyone else does, so that the community soars together as a body into achievements none could reach alone. And near the end, the hero comes out of hiding to spend a few minutes with the heroine and then pays for it with his life (almost—Rand cheats and practically resurrects him; she just can’t get away from Jesus, no matter how hard she tries, which is why it’s so much fun to read her)

Do you know Rand brought Robert and me together for the first time 25 years ago? We were at a church conference, and at the end of the day I found him in a chair outside his hotel door, reading C S Lewis (my favorite). He asked me what other books I liked, and I mentioned Ayn Rand (his favorite; there is a whole story there, but that’s for another time), and he had never met a Christian who would admit to liking her, and so the conversation began.

Jesus’ whole life was like Shawshank Redemption, was what inspired Shawshank Redemption, as well as Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (isn’t she in for a surprise!) . He prepped for 30 years to get it right. Then he threw his life away so he could spend three short years with us, the love of his life, knowing what was coming, the torture, the death, the consequences he’d pay for what he’d dreamed of and hoped for all those years: us, coming to him, recognizing him. He played his three years like a forbidden opera in a prison camp, and we looked up at him whom we’d pierced, and we tasted freedom for the first time, and we fell in love.

Fledglings

There are parrot nests in the tall eucalyptus trees on the street down from my house in Mexico. They are more like parrot apartments, because several couples seem to be flying in and out of different doorways of the same giant nests. I watch them add twigs when I take walks and sometimes catch the whole family taking off when the babies are grown.

This week Philip drove from Chicago to Colorado to see Cailey. He’s a good driver, but the thought of him driving sixteen hours, late into the night, by himself, weighed on me throughout the day. Couldn’t help it. I called him every couple of hours, when he pulled into rest stops, to check if he was alert. He was, of course. And at the end of the week, he takes another long drive by himself to go back to college. And Elai and Mikael are getting seriously serious, and I think of how young and unprepared they are for a future together. I was 29 when I got married, therefore so much more prepared. The one most unprepared for the kids leaving the nest might just be mom.

Makes me think of how in Scripture God gathered people in families and then let the children go. I think of Jacob leaving home to seek his fortune (I wonder how old he was). I think of how God spoke to three generations of forefathers (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), showing up at dinnertime and at the top of ladders, and then was silent for 400 years while his children turned into slaves in a foreign land. Then I think of Moses holding on to his belief in God while he grew up as an Egyptian prince, then leaving that all behind to live as a shepherd in the desert, and then coming back to confront Pharaoh at 80 years old (think of the 80 year olds you know). God seems to take so much set up time for a lightning drama.

After Moses, the Hebrews kept looking back to those glory days, but for the most part, God was silent, and they had to figure things out for themselves. I think of Jesus “wasting” thirty years to acculturate as a Jew and then spending only three lightning years with his disciples. And if you think about that, God had already invested thousands of years preparing a way for his son to come to earth “in the fullness of time.” He had set up a very specific culture for Jesus to fit into when he “pitched his tent among us" so that he could live incognito for thirty years before his public ministry began and then be recognized as Messiah when the time was right. So much process. So much time. So much preparation for a short, powerful drama.

The days since Christ seem to follow this same pattern. God lived among us for a short time with stunning miracles and revolutionary teaching, which birthed the first congregations of His followers. He passed his mantle on to his disciples and left them so that the Spirit could carry on in all of us now. And since then, he’s been visible to the world only through us, His children. We are his hands and feet and voice. I think we wish He’d do more, take on more of the responsibility, but he refuses. He trusts us.

As Robert and I work with young churches and church planters, this is perhaps the biggest difference between our work and God’s that we see. We trust His children less than He does. He lets go so soon. He trusts so much. When Paul started a church in new culture (Gentile), he stayed for such a short time (months, only) and left so little behind. He never took on its local leadership and never left behind Jewish culture or Jewish sets of rules. He let them find their own way and make their own mistakes and he praised and rebuked as things came up, in letters.

As it’s my job to do now. What a strange transition. From being mom to being peer with no more authority than what love and experience gives you. Our all-powerful God and Father worked hard at this, letting us go and calling us back with no more authority than love and experience gives him. 

Worlds

Yesterday there was sunshine, but today the day is overcast. It’s supposed to rain. Host dad has been out all morning getting the wheat off the last field before it rains, and when he comes in for lunch, after the last pass of the combine, everyone cheers. He looks like he needs a couple nights of long sleep now to recuperate from harvest. And that’s just wheat. Out the window I see a sprawl of corn like city blocks next to a waving sea of soy beans, still waiting.

Out another window, I see another field, a miniature forest of vines, trunks bound by twine but branches waving freely in the wind and laden with heavy bunches of tiny green grapes. The farmer is riding a small tractor, pulling a sprayer. These look tiny next to the equipment needed for wheat.

In another world, I sit in the chemo lounge once again with a needle stuck in my arm. On the heavy double doors as we walk in, Elai notices the red warning “Cytotoxic.”  I guess this warning is for the staff  because which of us would understand it? I had to look it up. It means, “Watch out! There are chemicals in here that kill your cells!” It’s why the nurses suit up completely when they hook me up to the IV machine and hang the bags of cell-killers. This time it’s just for an hour because I am receiving, not chemo, but a monoclonal antibody called Herceptin. My particular cancer is caused by breast cells producing too many (or overexpressing) copies of a gene, labeled Her2. This gene acts like ears or antennae, listening for signals to make the cell grow and split. So you can imagine what happens when suddenly the cell receives far too many signals to grow. That’s why this form of cancer is so aggressive. The Herceptin blocks the receptors on the surface of the cell, killing the signal. As a type of “targeted therapy,” they do double duty, marking the cancer cells so that the immune system will target them for destruction. Hopefully this is what has been happening in my cells for the last four months: targeting, marking, blocking, and destroying. Over the next eight months, more Herceptin treatments are meant to keep the cancer from spreading elsewhere.

In the armchair beside me there is a woman wearing a bandana and a brand new port in her chest. She told the nurse she had to figure out what to wear to accommodate the port, the area still bruised and sore. The port signals to me that her cancer has spread. Her treatments are going to last longer, be harsher, have a harsher prognosis. This is another world.

Elsewhere, on a screen, a young man sits on a stool in shorts, T shirt, and sandals talking about ancient creation myths. With a lattice of wooden pallets hung over some kind of blue/green lighting behind him, and a video camera in front of him, this guy opens his Bible to Job and Psalms and explains how many of the ancient Biblical writers drew from the science of their day to describe God’s power: Job saying God opens his storehouses of snow and hail up in the atmosphere, as if there could be storehouses of such things. Job saying God shakes the pillars of the earth, pillars that steady a flat earth floating on the sea. David mentioning the earth’s foundations, a solid core underneath the sea, underneath the flat earth that floats on water, steadied by pillars. The young man is tackling some of the difficult things we read in the Bible, where the language of ancient sciences shows up. He says that God could speak through prophets who used ancient notions of science because that didn’t change the message that He was pursuing a relationship with us.

In a sister church just a few miles down the road, the preaching is live, and the preacher is wrestling with how to take back our culture for God, how to stand firm in the face of change. I walk in the auditorium, and the place and the people feel like home, as much as that happens in Oz. This, too, is another world. We move in and out of worlds and catch but glimpses. It's a wonder God gets through from His to all of us in all of ours for all these millenniums. But He does!