Andrew Haak

Grieving is like exercise for the soul.

~ Shane Hipps (sermon, April 16, 2006)

I am conviced that when we bring our griefs and sorrows within the story of God's own grief and sorrow, and allow them to be held there, God is able to bring healing to us and new possibilties to our lives. That is, of course, what Good Friday and Easter are all about.

~ NT Wright Christians at the Cross (pg xv)

This is not the end
This is not the end of this
We will open our eyes wide, wider

This is not our last
This is not our last breath
We will open our mouths wide, wider

And you know you'll be alright
Oh and you know you'll be alright

This is not the end
This is not the end of us
We will shine like the stars bright, brighter

Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.
~ 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14

Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed — in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.
~ 1 Corinthians 15:51-52

Tuesday night at the Bible study
We lift our hands and pray over your body
But nothing ever happens
....
All the glory that the Lord has made
And the complications when I see His face
In the morning in the window

All the glory when He took our place
But He took my shoulders and He shook my face
And He takes and He takes and He takes

 ~ Sufjan Stevens "Casimir Pulaski Day"

You must. You must think I'm strong, to give me what I'm going through...

~ Matthew West "Strong Enough"

She will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel,
which means ‘God is with us.’
~ Matthew 1:23

Because of God’s tender mercy, the morning light from heaven is about to break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
and to guide us to the path of peace.
 ~ Luke 1:78-79

"Go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face and a sound of bolting." (CS Lewis, A Grief Observed)

"See now that I myself am He! There is no god besides me.I put to death and I bring to life.
I have wounded and I will heal, and no one can deliver out of my hand."
~ Deuteronomy 32:39

The poor are weakened when well-meaning people deprive them of the incentives and rewards of their own hard-won achievements by doing for them what they have the capacity to do for themselves. As one leader of a microlending ministry in Nicaragua lamented when describing the effects of U.S. church partnerships, “They are turning my people into beggars.” Why get a loan to build their own church, the peasants reason, when the Americans will do it for them? Predictable byproducts of such service include increased dependency, erosion of work ethic and loss of dignity. Conversely, partnerships, lending relationships and mutual investments require joint effort and grow indigenous capacity. 

 Typically, churches evaluate their service projects and mission trips by the number of volunteers involved, the activities performed and the impact on participants. Less attention is paid to the results on the receiving end of charity. If, however, preserving the dignity and self-esteem of recipients is important to you, then you will need to assess the amount of mutual collaboration, leadership sharing and reciprocity structured into your event. If your goal is to actually empower those you serve, you will focus less on activities performed and more on measurable longer-term outcomes, such as leadership development, increased self-sufficiency and educational and economic progress.

I know of one campus ministry that, on a spring break mission trip to paint an orphanage in Honduras, spent enough money on the trip (transportation, food, lodging, etc.) to have hired two unemployed local painters and two full-time teachers and to supply new uniforms for every child in the school.

... leadership is more like a baton than a trophy. You keep a trophy, but you hand off a baton. In a race, if you don’t hand off the baton, you lose the race. Pastors who fail to realize this may end up winning their leg of the race, but the churches they lead lose after they drop out. So pastors of every age need to be thinking this through. 


“Every organization has a life span. There is birth, growth, maturity, decline and death,” Miller says. “The most dangerous time is at the top of the curve—when you’re mature, when you’re large, when everything is going great. That’s where you should pass the baton. You don’t want to pass the baton when you begin declining, because then it’s harder to find someone to take the baton.”


If Miller is correct, then succession is as important an issue for younger pastors as it is for older pastors. When a younger leader heads a growing church, thinking about transition may seem premature. But according to Miller, it is the most advantageous time to begin making these plans.

So, aside from your kids being emotionally scarred forever, what's the real harm in all this porn? Well, I learned that one of the things I like most in life -- women -- are being transformed by the porn culture. Not women themselves but the way I perceive women. When I think of the millions of men glued to their computer screens watching scenes of exploited girls and women in sex acts that most often turn sadistic, I wonder how many licks it takes to get to the center of our Tootsie Pop brains. How many distorted images do we need to watch before our actions become equally distorted? How many times can someone see or hear women being called "whores" before they begin to believe it themselves?

Even worse for me, because I work as an anti-human trafficking advocate, I have the sneaking suspicion that porn has contributed greatly to the expansion of sex trafficking worldwide and the numbers of children, women and men trapped in modern-day slavery. Those being exploited in porn are not much different from those being exploited in prostitution except the camera has been turned on for your viewing pleasure. If you don't believe that your consumption of porn contributes to the exploitation of innocents, then it may also be hard to convince you that the line of coke you just snorted contributes to the suffering and loss of life south of the border where fighting rages on so that you can get a good high at a low price. But who am I to judge, I'm just beginning to come to my senses. 

The real clincher for me is learning how the packaging and commoditization of sex affects my own manhood. I mean, it's all fun and games until someone gets hurt and the people studying this subject talk about how the unrealistic and violent storylines lead porn viewers further and further away from being able to relate to real women. And, somehow, we begin to feel inadequate when measuring ourselves against studs jacked up on ... well, pretty much everything. I could be wrong, but I'm guessing that most men are not willing to permanently trade-in real women for Internet porn. Or are you?

[Cultural forces] turn us into replicas of our cutural leaders, seeking after power and influence and prestige. These insistent voices drum away at us, telling us pastors to go out and compete against the successful executives and entertainers who have made it to the top, so that we can put our churches on the map and made it big in the world ...

Congregations get their ideas of what makes a pastor from the culture not from the Scriptures: they want a winner; they want their needs met; they want to be part of something zesty and glamorous.

Only when we realize how unnecessary we are will we be free to do the 'one thing needful' - the gospel necessity laid upon the glorious but battered life of the pastor.
~ Eugene Peterson The Unnecessary Pastor

But there's one more part in this song, and it's very personal. Call it the alto part if you like - somethimes a bit shy, sometimes doesn't seem very exciting, but the harmony isn't complete without it, and sometimes it has spectuacular things to do. This is your part, your own personal story, your private bit of the song.

As we listen for the main tune, Jesus on his journey to Jerusalem and Calvary; as we listen to the bass part, the Old Testament which grounds the whole thing; as we reflect on the tenor part, the story of our whole community; so  we have to bring our own story and learn to sing it with this total music.

The world all around us is giving us other music and telling us we have to keep in harmony with that. We are making this journey with Jesus this week because we want to leran again how to keep in with his song, with his story.

~ N.T. Wright Christians at the Cross (page 10)

Handel with his Messiah, Bach with his Matthew Passion, Rembrandt with his Denial of St. Peter, and the architects of those Cistercian churches were not evangelizing, nor making tools for evangelism; they worked to the glory of God. They did not compromise their art. They were not devising tools for religious propaganda or holy advertisement. And precisely because of that they were deep and important.

Their works were not the means to an end, the winning of souls, but they were meaningful and an end in themselves, to God’s glory, and showing forth something of the love that makes things warm and real.

Art has too often become insincere and second-rate in its very effort to speak to all people, and to communicate a message that art was not meant to communicate. In short, art has its own validity and meaning, certainly in the Christian framework.
~ Hans Rookmaaker (Art Needs No Justification)

John Mark McMillian
Seryn
Andrew Osenga
Burlap to Cashmere
(plus a song on the Summer Lovin' Mixtape) 
Steven Delopoulos
Sleeping at Last
Caedmon's Call
Randall Goodgame
Leigh Nash
Lovedrug
The Vespers 

Often we see the confirmation leader as the one responsible for getting kids to know and appropriate the tradition through deep relationship. But what if the objective of the confirmation teacher was not to work to pass on anything but was rather to be a partner and companion in doubt?


What if, instead of depending on lessons bought from publishing houses, we used our very doubts as the curriculum for passing on the faith? Or to say it another way, what if the best way to actually pass on the faith was not through lessons, certainty, and knowledge but through doubt? What if the confirmation teacher was a convincer and co-doubter with adolescents? What if confirmation wasn’t about appropriating a tradition but exploring doubt, placing it on the table and fiercely seeking understanding through it?

Then the responsibility of the confirmation teacher is not to know the tradition in an airtight way, something few to zero volunteers can sign off on, but only to be open enough with young people to explore one’s own doubts as he or she explores the young peoples’. What energy a small group could have if for three years—or three weeks—they sought to express the depth of their unbelief, working to share it with each other and God! The confirmation teacher then is no longer taskmaster-teacher or skilled apologist with defense for all adolescent questions but is the captain of the company of companion doubters. Confirmation would be the time to ask your most disturbing questions about God, self, and world, to place them on the table as the group’s shared curriculum.

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And right here is where we usually go wrong with confirmation. Christianity has nothing to do with certainty, and confirmation is not the ritual of claiming that you will with all certainty believe the tradition and theology of the church. Rather, Christianity is about living in opposition to certainty; it is about faith in the midst of doubt. Christianity has no room for certainty, for certainty lives by the law of self-protection; its own rightness keeps it from hope, and most importantly (the greatest of these, Paul says), love. Certainty demands its rightness in the now, even if it means hurting or hating others to maintain its integrity.

Doubt then is not our enemy but our great friend. For it keeps us from the most un-Christian of things: assuming that we possess certainty, that we need not think our faith, love our neighbors, and worse—that we need not search for God, for we know this God certainly. Faith that has become certain is no longer (by definition) faith; it has become idolatry. We are no longer seeking out a living, personal God but have made this God into a frozen idol.

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Through doubt, the leader is moved not simply to share knowledge or adult wisdom with an adolescent but to share his or her very person, his or her sufferings and longings. A confirmation small group built on the sharing of doubt embraces the mutual openness of relationship. It is a group of place-sharing.

A good confirmation teacher, then, is not someone who knows every answer. It is someone who can create an environment where people feel safe enough to speak their deepest doubts into the life of the group, to speak those doubts and then seek God in them. The job of the confirmation leader is to invite doubts to be spilled without fear of shock or dehumanizing judgment from others. The goal is to make doubt shared, and therefore, part of a community. When our doubts are shared by others, we not only find ourselves squarely in relationship with others, but we discover that our doubts do not alienate us. They invite us to keep searching, to keep seeking for God with these people. We discover that when we cannot believe, others believe for us. And that faith is not a possession or achievement; it is a gift from God.

Confirmation is not the end of a road or a final exam but the welcome and continued encouragement to keep seeking God. The lifeblood of faith seeking understanding is confronting and sharing our doubts with others. If confirmation teachers are co-doubters, conveners of the community of doubt, then they are able to do the two things we often ask of them, the two things that often thrust them into an uncomfortable conundrum: they are able to be in deep relationship with young people and, in so doing, explore deeply the tradition. If relationships are built on mutual identification while respecting the other’s difference and otherness, then exploring each other’s doubts serves as a road to deep connection through mutual exploration (what more can we want?).

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