Forests and trees

When Robert and I still lived in Guerrero, we met a Mixtec Christian man named Jose Guadalupe who was a gifted evangelist. One day we took him along to visit a family we were evangelizing. They brought him a chair next to the kitchen fire, and he started telling a story to the few people milling around. The story began with Adam and Eve and was about how God was redeeming the world. As Jose Guadalupe wove his story, the people in the kitchen began pulling up chairs and sitting around him. As more people wandered through the kitchen, the group grew until he had the entire extended family sitting around him, spellbound, listening to God’s story. They later made a commitment to Christ. But Jose Guadalupe never took out a Bible, didn’t even have one on him. He knew the story, loved the story, told the story passionately, the story about Jesus, and the people around him listened and said yes to it—yes to Jesus, the whole point of the story.

The last of the Bible Study sermons this Sunday reminded me of Jose Guadalupe . Mike was talking about how we can miss the forest for the trees. He used an illustration from Psychology about selective attention that I watched when I taught AP Psych in Oaxaca. Here’s a link if you want to be a guinea pig. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo I’m an idea kind of person, someone who lives in her head; so I miss a lot of forests! I remember teaching about missions in a church once and catching myself saying that missions is the most important topic that the Bible covers because it’s about God rescuing us from everywhere we’ve lost ourselves. It’s about our getting back to him. But someone brought me up short saying that no, missions isn’t the most important topic in the Bible. There won’t be any missions in heaven. There is only one most important topic in the Bible. Really, there is only one topic in the Bible. That is Jesus. And that is what Mike was getting at.

He reminded us that the Bible is not Jesus. It’s not as important as Jesus. The purpose of the Bible is to direct us to Jesus, to reveal Jesus, to persuade us of Jesus. Every bit of it, from Genesis to Revelation, is to lead us to Jesus. And the Bible isn’t the only way Jesus reveals himself to us: the Body around us reveals him. Worship reveals him. The sacraments reveal him. Visions reveal him. Even the burning of our own hearts can reveal him. Reading the Bible wasn’t even possible for most people up until the printing press and still isn’t possible for many people today because of language and political barriers. But that doesn’t stop God from revealing Jesus. That was certainly my experience with the conversion of the first Mixtec Christians in Guerrero. They didn’t come to Jesus because of reading a Bible (someone was reading it, but not them).

So Mike’s point is that as we discuss our interpretations of the Bible, agreeing, disagreeing, even sharply disagreeing, we should not forget the forest: Jesus. Perhaps more importantly, as God reveals Jesus to other people through us (scary thought) we shouldn’t forget the forest. In the end, it won’t be our interpretations of Scripture that save us; it will be Jesus. So if people don’t respect the Bible, don’t believe it, don’t know it, don’t trust it, don’t even have it, all is not lost. Isn’t this where our culture is now? Pretty much where the Mixtecs are? A dim memory of some stories told that sounded like tall tales, but not much else? Nothing personal that hits you in the gut?

Perhaps, just as in the days of Paul, we may have to be the word of God to people, knowing how to be Jews to Jews and Gentiles to Gentiles and post-moderns to post-moderns, knowing how to get the facts across about the life of Jesus, how to convince people of his sheer awesomeness, how to lead them to worship. We may have to carry him in our words and in our days and in our acts, so that people who no longer read Scripture may read us. This is how the disciples turned the world upside down, and how the Mixtecs came to Jesus, and how Mixtecs like Jose Guadalupe carry Jesus to other people. Maybe Niagara isn’t much different.

Don’t forget to watch the video. How many passes were there…?

Critical thinking

One of the topics that I would be teaching if I were in Mexico right now is ethos, or credibility. When a speaker starts talking, we are making a decision whether or not that person is trustworthy. We take everything into account including body language and the person’s past. If we don’t know anything about the speaker, we make snap decisions based on appearance, accent, eye contact, opening words, even the volume and modulation of their voice. As we settle in, we are checking what the speaker says against what we already know. Once we decide that a person is trustworthy, we are open to the new things they throw at us. Otherwise we shut them out.

In these days of election in both Canada and the US, we are well aware how political candidates manipulate ethos. But we do this with preachers in our churches, too. Do they sound like they fit the profile we know we can trust? We’re listening for certain key phrases so we can judge whether to stay open or not. What I find frustrating as I get older is that more people I thought I could trust also say things I don’t agree with, and people I’ve written off start saying some things that make sense to me now. I just can’t trust the stereotypes anymore.  I can’t go into conversations predicting the outcome. I find I have to sift the content more and not buy all of it wholesale. Checking ethos is more complicated—more work. Sigh.

In this last month, I have been going to my home church but also listening to a good sermon series at another church that I occasionally attend, a church in the same denomination, just down the road, that helped start my church. The series is called Bible Study, taught by a guy named Mike. It tackles the ways that the Bible, a divine book that teaches salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus, is also a human book narrated by people in specific historical contexts (Your antennae are already going up; I can see them). So they tell the stories from perspectives that made sense thousands of years ago but might not be strictly “accurate” today. They describe the world in terms of domes and storehouses in the sky and pillars and waters under the earth (not scientifically accurate terms). They change the chronology of events in different narratives depending on their focus, and their numbers and names don’t always match up. Mike even says that Jericho during the time depicted in Joshua might not have had walls. No walls? He goes on to say that anyone listening is totally free to disagree with what he says, that’s not a problem. Whew. Because although most of what he says makes sense to me, not all of it does. (I’ve got to check out those walls.) And there are other things Mike says that I heartily disagree with. He doesn’t believe in missionary calling. At all. No missionarying other than what happens right at home.

But what he is saying about the Bible being a divine-human book (like Jesus was a divine-human man) is a relief, and I like this series and have recommended it because I have noticed details in the Bible that could be called inconsistencies when read in a modernist style, and I don’t want these details  to undermine anyone’s faith in the Bible as God’s Word. So in terms of ethos, Mike is a mix and, what I’m discovering is, most of us are.

Meanwhile, down the road, the preaching at my home church is very different. It claims that if you don’t believe in literal 24 hour days during creation, your faith is suspect. You could be in danger of losing your salvation. These are drastically different kinds of preaching going on in sister churches next door to one another, and I’m connected to both and respect both and agree with parts and disagree with parts of what each one teaches. Their ethos is a tangled mix.

My guess is that this scenario is only going to get more complicated as I get older, and that what God wants is for me to listen to my brothers and sisters and think and make the best decisions I can and respect others as they do the same. This is called critical thinking, and it’s what I would be teaching at school, if I were there. We have been good at shutting other people out as soon as they say something we disagree with as if listening were dangerous. With this philosophy we are going to end up with a very small group of people we can talk to, and I don’t think this is how God’s kingdom works. I think it grows, and we grow, rightly dividing the word of truth.

Luxury

What is the strangest sermon you’ve ever heard? I’ve heard some pretty weird ones: I heard a Christmas Day sermon all about Noah’s nakedness and an Easter sermon on how easy it was to go to hell. Robert heard a memorial service about how the parable of Lazarus and the rich man didn’t say a thing about riches. On the same note, I heard a sermon on Job, claiming Job only suffered because he didn’t trust God; he could have walked away if he’d only said the right words. Oh, and there was the sermon claiming that even though we couldn’t know the day or the hour that Jesus was coming back, we could know the year! That would be 1996. The strangest one of all was in a Mixtec village years ago when a visiting preacher claimed that in Russia there was a big hole, and if you let down a microphone on a wire, you could hear the people in hell screaming down there. That got their attention.

Most churches guard against strange sermons by vetting their speakers, but still, some strange ones slip through. Thankfully, we don’t shut down our pulpits to visitors in order to avoid such error, we just hold the reins. Once I was on a mission trip from college to inner-city L.A. and our group was standing around in a big Baptist church after the service, waiting for rides. Without thinking, I climbed up behind the pulpit and stood there with my hands on each side of the podium, staring out over the empty auditorium. I sensed power there. An usher walked up and shooed me out from the privileged spot—I was undeserving.

Power. It’s not always where we think it is. Although we might let the occasional deserving visitor speak, there is one thing in the church we hold onto even more tightly than preaching, and that is sacrament, the sign of the sacred, the holy ceremony, the outward mark of an inward grace. Strange. In the New Testament there is no sign anywhere that our sacraments were controlled by the powerful. People broke bread in their homes (no mention of pastors); people were sent to be baptized (Paul couldn’t even remember if he’d baptized anyone, and Jesus never did). These holy moments were not controlled because it was God who baptized and placed people in the church and Jesus who showed up in the bread and wine. The disciples were just witnesses. In conversation with a missionary in Guerrero once, we asked him what new baby churches did about serving the Lord’s Supper when they didn’t have the credentials to be labeled “church” (his denomination in Mexico holds a strict definition of the word). He said, “You have to control them somehow.” Many denominations in Mexico require that new baby churches send for the pastor of the mother church for sacramental times. Power. It’s just a serving of food and drink, just a bathing in clean water, yet sacraments are so rich in meaning and grace that people use them as reins.

Ironically, how wrong can you go in serving flat bread and grape juice? In dipping someone’s head under water as a sign that new life has begun, connecting them to everyone else in the room and to God himself? How wrong can you go? Can you change their doctrines of money, suffering or the second coming? Ah, but you can. You can teach all about power—who holds it, who doesn’t. Who gets to speak. Who doesn’t.

I think this power does not belong to us. We hold it at our peril, the peril of the body of Christ. If two or three have gathered in the name of Jesus to worship him, who are we to deny them sacrament? If a person has turned from wrong and clung to Jesus for redemption, who are we to hold them back from baptism? I think holding onto this power has cost us many, many baby churches in new places that have need of God. We here in Canada have such easy access to the sacraments. We don’t realize how, for some, it’s a luxury beyond their means.

Mystery

Robert and I live across the river from the city of Buffalo of buffalo wings (but not buffalo soldier) renown. The city has planted buffalo sculptures along the highway coming in from Canada in case you forget. It also has a cool car museum downtown with a life-size model of Frank Loyd Wright’s in-the-round gas station. The gas nozzles hang from clear tanks dropped from the ceiling. Although there are beautiful, quiet neighborhoods with old Victorian homes, there are also parts of town where you can buy a house for a dollar as long as you commit to live in it for a year and a half. Maybe Buffalo’s greatest claim to fame, at least because of its influence today, should actually be something everyone has forgotten, that the first meetings defining the fundamentalist evangelical movement took place in Buffalo in 1920 (a similar meeting took place across the river in Niagara on the Lake).

At these meetings, evangelicals reaffirmed their belief in miraculous things like the resurrection, the virgin birth, the second coming, the inerrancy of Scripture, and the atonement of Christ. While many clergymen were preaching that everything about our faith can be explained by modern science (this was the height of the modernist era before war blasted to bits the idea that modern science could solve the world’s problems), there were some stubborn ones still clinging to miracles. These ministers rallied around the term fundamentals, claiming that our faith is founded on things supernatural.

I agree.  But in hindsight I wish those Buffalo preachers had held out for more. For one thing, they bequeathed to us a tendency to make our faith into a list. Fundamentalists today tend to say we’re “in” or “out” depending on fine points of doctrine instead of being in love with Jesus. For another thing, they left out some pretty key things—like the sacraments. The next time you take the Lord’s Supper at your church, listen to how the minister introduces the bread and the wine (what wine?). Sometimes he says, “This bread represents the body of Christ. It’s a symbol.” That’s modernism at work, undercutting the mystery of it all.

I once watched a circle of Baptist ministers in Honduras sharing the Lord’s Supper together during a workshop. The Honduran pastors were accustomed to using the words of Jesus himself  as they are recorded in the Scriptures, “This is my body.” Such simple words. Such powerful, controversial, paradoxical words. “This is my body. This is my blood.” Jesus got in trouble for using such extravagant words. Many of his fans left him when he told them to eat his flesh and drink his blood.  He claimed to be the bread of heaven come to nourish us and satiate us forever. There is a mystery here, some supernatural gift or measure that we can’t understand and can’t define with all our science. When Jesus said, “this is my body,” what did he mean? What did the disciples see with their eyes when they heard those words? Imagine the scene. They saw the bread; they saw Him, his physical body; and they saw one another, his body, too, his Body for all eternity. Jesus said rightly, “This is my body,” and we will take eternity to unpack his words.

Meanwhile, in the circle of Honduran pastors eating the Lord’s body, each took a piece of the bread and passed the loaf to the next person, repeating His words, “This is my body,” until the loaf reached a visiting American pastor. This pastor was waiting eagerly for his turn because he had a lesson to give, a correction to make: “This represents the body of Christ,” he said proudly. He had done his duty and demoted the mystery to an explainable object for an explainable moment.  “It’s only a symbol,” he said. Only a symbol. Can we say of anything that Jesus did that it was only…? Jesus took a familiar (family/daily) and sensuous event, with all its overtones of celebration, hospitality, grace, redemption, and nourishment and transformed it into a date night and a heavenly feast. And we say “only.” Let us not say “only.” Let us keep the feast. Let us keep the words. Let us keep the mystery. Let us remember that when we celebrate this feast, He is there, present in some way we cannot define nor even dare try. His body, his Body, is there in some way we cannot define nor even dare try. Let us remember that Jesus kept his identity hidden even while he walked and talked his way to Emmaus, but when he broke bread with his walking companions, they knew him. He had to show.

For the early church, the Lord’s Supper was the climax of their meetings. They broke bread together every time they met. Paul mentions having the Lord’s Supper every Lord’s Day. The first Christians never tired of welcoming the Lord’s presence through this celebration. They never got bored with it. Is it possible we have swallowed the modernist lie that everything can be explained by science and have forgotten that our faith is based on mystery…a virgin birth, a resurrection, a loaf that is a body, a cup that’s not just wine?

Difficult, not complicated

Today I went to get my dressing changed. Piece of cake, I thought, not complicated. Until the dressing came off, and I’m staring at a 9 inch red wound across my chest with a fat red tube sticking out the bottom, held on to my innards, apparently, with skinny blue sewing thread. Suddenly I was nauseous and light-headed and had to lie down. There is more to this than I was expecting. Not complicated. Just difficult.

Difficult. Not complicated. It’s good to know the difference.

In one of my posts about church, I said that we should always be creating ways to worship and obey God in community with one another. I grew up watching this happen in Honduras, and more than anything, this has given me confidence that starting churches in new places might be difficult, but it’s not complicated.

When I was four, my dad took us to live in a small town in Honduras so he could teach at a Bible school there. When he arrived, he found eight young, single men living in a tiny brick building, and he set out to give them a few years of teaching at a junior high level. After they graduated, they planned to move into the city where established churches would hire them as pastors.  Meanwhile, thousands of villages, who lacked the money and status to hire these graduates, had no churches at all. Soon after he arrived, my dad realized the school model didn’t work in rural Honduras.

So, having heard about pastoral training by extension from a Presbyterian missionary in Guatemala named Ralph Winter, Dad took a risk and closed the Bible school, sold the property, and set up training through the local church. He began by mentoring mature, family men. He asked them about their contacts in the surrounding villages, and together they went to the homes of these contacts and led whole families to Jesus, right there in those thatched, adobe huts. Together they baptized the new believing families and taught them to reach out to their neighbors. Together they established the families as churches that met, worshipped God, taught one another, cared for one another, and grew. Soon there were dozens of these baby congregations. Then hundreds. Most of the pastors were only semi-literate, so they taught themselves to read their Bibles and their training booklets. (Such a push for literacy followed a burning desire to read the Bible, similar to what happened during the Reformation when the Bible first appeared in local languages.)

Then something sad happened. Some of the graduates of the Bible school became angry. They visited the new congregations and told them that they were not real churches and that their leaders were not real pastors because they were not educated. They even tried to get Dad expelled from the country.

Dad had a crisis on his hands. He went back to the Bible and studied. He came up with this idea. In the Great Commission, Jesus tells his disciples to make disciples, baptizing them into God’s family, and teaching them to obey “all the things I have commanded you.” If you stop and think about that, these commands are not hard to list. They can be summarized in a handful of key principles like Repent, Love, Disciple…etc.

My dad taught those baby Honduran congregations with their semi-literate pastors these basic commands of Christ. They realized that if they were obeying the “everything I have commanded you,” then they were, indeed, true churches, and their leaders were, indeed, true shepherds.

When I talk to new cross-cultural workers about starting churches where there are none, I borrow someone’s smart phone and lay it on the table. “Is there anyone here that can build one of these from scratch?” I ask. “Do you know what the parts are, and how they fit together?”

I think we have the impression that starting a church is like building a smart phone. But it doesn’t have to be. As one church planter put it, “If a guy can grill hot dogs and invite the neighbors over, he can start a group.” Because there it is. If leaders can practice hospitality and engage their neighbors, then they are on their way. It might have more to do with character, and less to do with expertise.

 I think church can be as simple as sitting in a living room and laying out wine and bread (or juice and crackers, or coke and tortillas) on a coffee table with the rest of God’s family gathered around.  It probably shouldn’t stick to that scenario, but it’s beginning enough. If “two or more” can guess at how to do the “all things” Christ taught us, I think that’s all it takes to start.  The “all things” might be difficult (that “love your neighbor” thing gets me every time”), but they aren’t hard to understand, not complicated. Isn’t Jesus a genius? He gets me every time, too.

Post surgery: listening

Whew. I’m home. Glad that's done. With surgery out of the way I have two stages of treatment down and two more to go. I feel ok and am up and around. I never needed pain meds. I can even lift my arm over my head. I could have gone home to eat supper the same day if I hadn't need my heart monitored for 24 hours. Thank you to God for bringing me this far, and thank you to his people for all the praying and messaging and emailing that has shown me so much care. With time to spare, a pad to write on, and Robert gone home to get overnight stuff, so I started writing.

Sunday Robert and I went back to our other home for a bit. We found out Katie passed her Z license for driving 18 wheelers. Yay! Emily starts her full time job today. And Ben and parents are flying to Alberta this week for Marg's dad's wedding (he's in is mid-80's. Go Aaron!) Marg handed me a thick letter from the hospital, and I wondered what it could be because I knew it wasn't a bill (no more hospital bills in Canada!) Canadians might not be surprised by what it was, but I certainly was...a 95 question survey! I'm not even halfway through my treatment regime, and I'm filling out a 10 page survey.  (Maybe someone figured I needed something to do in the hospital.)  I finished the whole thing in a snap because every question was a variation of just one: is the medical staff listening to you?

Yep, they are. My surgeon came in after surgery to check on me and answer any questions. She acted as if she had all the time in the world. She is a calming person. When I was about to go under, she didn't ask me to count. First she took her mask off so I could recognize her. She asked me about my kids, and then when I started getting confused about Elai's age, she just looked in my eyes until I drifted away. When I awakened, the thing was done. I imagine heaven is a bit like that (minus the dizziness from the anesthesia), a sudden awakening, an awareness of events missed, an entry into a new stage of life. After answering my questions, my surgeon left but popped her head in the door a minute later to ask what level of Tylenol I wanted prescribed, two or three? I had no idea. Listening is all very well if the patient has knowledge enough to opine.

This much listening would not happen in Oaxaca, at least not in the public hospitals. They don't place a premium on patient input partly because many patients have almost no knowledge of modern medicine, so how do you include them in the decision making? This would be especially true of Indian patients, and then it looks like sheer racism. Our Colombian friends visiting last week told us about trying to get care for their son in a public Panamanian clinic. They adopted him from the Indian tribe they work with, and there is a noticeable difference in skin color. The doctor asked the mom why she was bringing in an Indian child and didn't want to treat him. Wouldn't touch him. She told him he was in the wrong line of work. I can't imagine facing illness, or worse, facing your child's illness, with those kinds of hurdles to jump.

It's hard for us in Canada to imagine racism this overt in countries with Indian minorities. Here we listen to patients a bit more, no matter their skin color. It probably wasn't always this way. I wonder how far back in the medical profession we'd have to go back to find doctors being authoritarian or condescending or downright racist. What has been the process to bring us to 10 page surveys and doctors asking patients what pills they want? It's a cultural thing. In Oaxaca, authoritarian leadership is often a preference, a safe place. It seems obvious to me as an outsider that Oaxaca should change that and be more like Canada, handing out listening surveys, but as an outsider it might not be my place to decide what Oaxaca needs to be changing right now. That might be someone else's business. I wonder what seems most obvious to Oaxacans that Canadians should change? I bet it's not so obvious to us.

I know! Let's send them a survey.

Surgery

Five months ago when Robert was leaving Mexico to go to Bakersfield for his back surgery, fellow team-member Phil came over for his last peer-to-peer mentoring session before the trip. Standing in the doorway, getting ready to leave, Phil asked, “So, are you nervous?” Robert had no idea what he was talking about. He certainly wasn’t nervous about the surgery and slept through the last night before surgery like a baby (not true after the surgery, of course, but that was a different story). At the dinner table tonight he asked me, “So would you know what Phil was talking about if he showed up and asked you the same question today?” My answer was, of course, YES! Fortunately this is not a competition to see who can be calmest before surgery. I lost already.

Strangely, it’s not the idea of surgery that bothers me most, or even the thought of joining the clan of one-breasted women, though I don’t look forward to that. Rather, it’s the drudgery of the long term side effects: that tingling in my feet (I was going to ask Dr. Blue and Brown about it in our meeting today, but instead I looked it up. I knew I was already in trouble for missing my Muga Scan last week, even though it was written in BRIGHT PINK on my calendar. It was right around the “Mom, I’m getting married,” time, so maybe I have an excuse, but I didn’t want to bother Dr. B&B any more than I had to. I was hoping the tingling was due to dead cells gumming up the system, an easily reversible effect like dead hair or nail cells (my nails are soft, white things)—bits that would grow back quickly now chemo’s done, but unfortunately it’s not. It’s due to damaged myelin sheaths around the peripheral nerves in my feet. The sheaths act like electrical insulators, preventing short circuits, so when they are damaged, the nerves send out false signals.) So, as I was saying, I dread the drudgery of side effects like the tingling, or the loss of sensation wherever the knife cuts, or the swelling where the missing lymph nodes can no longer process fluid adequately. I just want to get back to normal life. Anyone can put up with a short term renunciation—it’s when the loss turns into forever that you think twice. After today, some things just won’t be going back to normal.

If I were as rational as Robert, I probably wouldn’t think about the surgery at all unless you asked. I try to keep my mind occupied with other things, and for the most part, I succeed. But perhaps I should just admit the sense of loss and mourn it. We’re not just rational. There are other bits buried deep in there somewhere.

I’m glad God isn’t just rational. He mourns the losses. Even when mine is small next to the great losses of the world, making mine look utterly insignificant, he knows. He hears. I remember when my kids were little and they suffered some loss—a broken toy or a getting left behind—I would think, “But this is nothing to cry over. It’s such a small thing.” But I realized even then  their grief was real no matter how small the cause. I don’t feel much fear now, just some nervousness about waking up to pain. And then there is a sense of loss. It’s a small loss, really, but nonetheless, it’s probably best to own up to it. Women in my life who have been through this have assured me in these days that it’s doable, and I admire their courage. I know God will help me get through this, too. I know Robert is far more relaxed about this kind of thing, and that’s fine: God made both of us and handed out rationality and feelings by some logic of his own, and he’s ok with both of us.

I’m glad Robert will be there when I wake up. Then we’ll see how rational everyone is.