The Campfire

What is it about the campfire that transfixes the eyes and hearts of men? What power lies locked in those smoldering embers that draws and opens the soul? We sit in the day’s waning hours bound to it by a force more powerful than a desire for heat. We are bound to a sort of community of flame. In a world of illumination what power does this conflagration still hold on us?

The only comparison is the pull that television and other visual media have on us. How many of us have watched with perverse interest at the way the eyes of a child are drawn to the flashing images on the screen? How many of us, if we were honest, would confess to feeling that same pull ourselves? How many conversations have been derailed; how many conflicts begun because our attention leaned into its siren song? Visual media often draws us into isolation because our minds cannot forebear to alight on anything else. The flames however speak to us in a different language. Like the tongues of fire in the book of Acts they speak in a way that we can understand and comprehend translating themselves into the deepest questions of our heart. In the light of the campfire deep recesses are unlocked and the secret murmurs of the heart are heard. Far from the frame-a-second barrage from television and movies, the fire works not to suspend but to engage the mind.

So what of the campfire? Why does this chemical reaction of spark and wood and oxygen have such a similar pull; a similar allure? Perhaps we hearken back to an earlier age when the fire brought forth certainty; the assurance of food and safety and warmth. We hear the stirrings of the forest around us. We hear the creatures prowling about on the fringes, yet within the circle there is peace. Within the circle there is comfort. Perhaps the circle of light into which we are drawn echoes the security we desire for our souls. Perhaps we long for the divine intervention as on Sinai. In those flickering flames we draw near to hear, as Moses did, the voice of God.

Far from isolation, however, the fire draws us instead together into a community bound by flame. How many conversations have begun between the crackle and snap of combustion? As the permutation of wood into ash, the tongue itself is loosed. Even the staunchest isolationist has found himself saying things and feeling less alone. The awkwardness that plagues many of us is consumed in that circle; perhaps consumed as the very trees we burn, transformed into a climate of tolerance. Even the walls we have erected within our hearts and minds seem melted by the heat of that fire; dissolved by the slow, unpredictable dance of the flames in the night.

I cannot help but wonder whether we would not be better served by setting more sparks to flame; by sitting down beside the fire at dusk. The answer rings clear in my heart. The answer contains less screen time and more time spent within the circle. There are lessons to be learned, it would seem, as we are drawn closer to the simmering embers. Irrational as these musing seem, there is a mysterious truth to the mingling of tongues of flame and branches; life from death; form to formless; ashes to ashes. We have much to learn if we only would clear the space; to light the fire.

John 9:2

“who sinned, this man or his parents, that he would be born blind?”

John 9:2

We want so badly to understand it all. We want to perfect systems and theologies so that when X happens we can say it happened for Y reason. It is in our nature. If we can understand something we have a power over it. Science seeks to map our genes and to document the laws of physics that govern this world that we may harness them to do our bidding.

As believers we seek to plumb the depths of God. We compose systematic theologies so we can predict the Lord’s behavior as if he were an animal in a lab. Through our haughty efforts we seek to reduce the Lord down to a system we can plan our lives around. Ultimately though, what we are seeking to known is the mind of God; to see the big picture; to known the unknowable. At our worst, we are seeking to control God by mapping out his patterns and behaviors. We think too highly of ourselves. Who are we to know the mind of God? We cannot. His ways are not our ways. His thoughts are not our thoughts. The disciples wanted to know God’s mind; why He did what He did. They wanted to predict the Lord. But the Lord’s plan was bigger than their system. God’s plan is bigger, more confusing, brings more glory than we can imagine. We must broaden our perception of how He will work. To be sure, He will not contradict His Word, but His ways and means are not predictable. Only through a relationship with Him can we truly experience the fullness of His will for our lives.

Freedom

The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery.In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

“No one, sir,” she said.

“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

John 8:3-11

Jesus’ encounter with the adulterous woman illustrates two things prominently. First, it illustrates, the preeminence of grace in our existence. No one can withstand the condemnation of the law (Rom 3:23)—no one. It may not be adultery but we all fall into equally sinful situations. It is only by God’s grace, here demonstrated by Jesus’ rescue of the woman caught in adultery, that we even exist let alone have a relationship with God.

Secondly, this story shows us that a relationship with the Lord trumps legalistic religion. It is easier to commit one’s life to following a set of rules than it is to be in an active relationship with the Lord. We would rather condemn ourselves with a rule of law that we cannot keep than live in the terrifying freedom of a life lived with Christ. To give ourselves a list of dos and don’ts puts the power in our hands to procure our salvation. Embracing the freedom Christ offers acknowledges the Lord’s power to save us despite our sins. Never do we want to encourage sinfulness (Rom 6:1,2) but rather to do everything with a heart set on knowing and serving the Lord. We sin either way, it is the result of our fallen nature, but in grace we are free while under legalism we are in bondage. So the next time I feel weighed down by guilt, or self-righteous because of my deeds, or wanting to condemn another’s actions, I would do well to heed Christ’s momentous words to this woman.

Stop Expecting the Ordinary

 ¹ When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body. ² Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb ³ and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?”

 ⁴ But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. ⁵As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed.

 ⁶ “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. ⁷ But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’”

¹⁴ Later Jesus appeared to the Eleven as they were eating; he rebuked them for their lack of faith and their stubborn refusal to believe those who had seen him after he had risen.

Mark 16:1-6, 14

How many times do we approach our faith expecting the ordinary? We see our habitual sins, our struggles, the unsaved, our churches and ministries with only the vision of what is possible with our own hands. We see a problem or a situation, asses its difficulty, compare it with our own perceived strengths, and then proceed. Despite our pronounced faith in an omnipotent God who has done (and continues to do) supernatural things, we don’t go in expecting the miraculous. The two Marys went expecting to anoint a corpse. Despite having been with Jesus and listening to His teachings, they did not go into this task expecting the miraculous. Yet what they found is that God works in supernatural ways. He goes beyond what we expect; what we anticipate. I think too often we approach the work of God’s Kingdom as if it were some task we were performing ourselves; something done in our own strength. If it were, it would make perfect sense to evaluate its difficulty and proceed as such. But this is not the case. The power of God, working through His Holy Spirit is moving and active in this world. He is not confined by our human strength. He is not stifled by our limited powers of perception. His mind is not our mind. He does not operate according to what is predictable or expected; rather He moves at the direction of the Father.

 As we grow as believers, conformed and conforming into the image of Christ, we must learn to lean more upon the Lord and less upon our own understanding.

We must learn (and coming from me this is telling) to give up our pessimism toward tasks which we have deemed impossible or unlikely and trust in the Father who is willing and able to work in miraculous ways.

We must learn to pray. We must learn to cultivate the faith that fuels deep and powerful prayers; powerful in that they trust wholly and completely in the power of God the Father. We must pray in faith without any doubting. We must search our hearts and ask with pure motives. We must entreat the Lord with persistence. At the end of the day though, we must love our Father enough to trust ourselves to His sovereign will.

In conclusion we need to stop expecting the ordinary. We must open our minds to the idea of a God who transcends the physical and psychological laws of this world. He can move mountains. He can cure diseases. He can stir the hearts of those who are far from Him. That sin in your heart can be broken. Those who are truly lost and opposed to Christ can have their hearts stirred. The event you are planning that you don’t expect many to attend can be the place where God brings hundreds and performs a miracle. We must stop expecting the ordinary and begin to expect the miraculous from a miraculous God.

Fragments #2

                She seldom spoke. Instead she lingered in silence during the daylight hours. When forced, her responses were terse and abrupt like a woman who had more important things to attend to. Despite her mother-in-law’s best efforts, she spent many hours alone on protracted hikes that often occupied the better part of the day. Alone she walked beneath a canopy of leaves, passing in and out of the dappled sunlight which filtered down from above. Hour upon hour her feet took her down nameless trails where the air hung thick with ghosts. Wordlessly she wandered in concentric circles around camp like a lonely electron orbiting a nucleus. She was a restless thing finally settled amid the white pine thickets and dark places. Her footsteps were silent on the carpeted forest floor thick with a lifetime’s worth of fallen needles. She stopped and stood, pausing to ponder that beneath her weary feet rested the ruins and remains of generations of fallen trees. Fallen here was the legacy of their ancestors, buried deep in the perpetual entropy of existence ---a slow decomposition into nothingness or rather into the base elements of life, fuel for progeny. She wondered whether this would always be. Would life always give way to life slowly over the course of decades, of centuries? Or would the mechanics of life eventually still until the ground lay satiated, piled high with the wreckage of civilization? Body upon body. Bone upon bone.

                A squirrel rustled in the brush.

                Her fingers twitched nervously as she rejoined the trail, grasping, it seemed, for some invisible object. She passed over a stream. Frogs, startled by her presence, threw themselves about wildly, hopping to and fro as if struck hysteric. The dilapidated boards shifted perilously as she crossed over the slow moving brook. A trout darted for safety under the bank and disappeared. She envied the thoughtless creatures that lived their short and often tragic lives unencumbered by the concerns of the day. Those whose home was little more than a nestled patch of grass or an eddy in the current had little to consider in the way of possessions. “Consider the lilies,” she recalled, but her heart did not rejoice but rather burned with jealousy for these tiny creatures that remained blissfully ignorant of loss or despair.

                She passed through an oak opening familiar to her. Tyler shot a doe here last fall. It was getting late so all four of them had come out to dress the animal and carry it back to camp. As her husband performed the gory task, she had struggled with a haunch as it tried to slither free from her tenuous grasp. Still fresh in her memory were the stains that bloodied her dress. Afterwards she knelt down beside the creek, submerging her hands in the icy water. Transfixed, she watched as the blood washed away in cloud-like bursts and was swept away by the modest current; carried off like dandelions on a summer day.

Mark 4:35-41

On that day, when evening came, He said to them, “Let us go over to the other side.” Leaving the crowd, they took Him along with them in the boat, just as He was; and other boats were with Him. And there arose a fierce gale of wind, and the waves were breaking over the boat so much that the boat was already filling up. Jesus Himself was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke Him and said to Him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” And He got up and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Hush, be still.” And the wind died down and it became perfectly calm. And He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Do you still have no faith?” They became very much afraid and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey Him?”

-          Mark 4:35-41

I have a hunch that you might be like me. At some point in your life you’ve found yourself asking God: ‘What is this? Don’t you care that I am dying here?’ You see, at some point we made a decision to give Christ control over our lives. On a day of desperation, perhaps, we acknowledged that our way of living only led to more hurt and pain. We cried out, figuratively, if not literally, for Christ to come into our life; to lead our lives. We made a decision; prayed a prayer; got saved; born again; or whatever term you want to attach to it. Then we waited. Turns out that we didn’t go straight to heaven without passing ‘Go,’ but it was okay because now we’d ‘gotten’ Jesus.

Unlike the disciples who physically followed Jesus around for three years, we had to go back into our old lives, albeit with a new outlook and a new nature. Funny thing though, lots of the problems we had before were still there pulling at us. In fact, a whole new crop of problems arose when we tried to bring our behaviors and motives in line with Christ’s teachings. It was okay at first when we thought it was a temporary phase but now it’s starting to look as if these problems are not going away. Our weight is still a problem. The mortgage payment still needs to be paid. Family members still get sick. On top of all that, the sins of our past continue to resurface. It comes to a point where we wonder: ‘is this what I was promised when I accepted Jesus?’ He was supposed to be the great remedy; the ultimate healer. So why am I still sick?

I wonder if the disciples felt this way as their boat was being tossed around. Did they feel bitter that Jesus had healed thousands of others and now here He we was sleeping as they were about to drown? There comes a difficult, confusing, and often painful moment in our lives when we realize that Jesus did not come to prevent us from problems and troubles. If anything, Scripture maintains that we will have even more troubles if we are to follow Christ. After all, if Jesus suffered pain and trouble to the point of death on a cross, what are we to expect? I fear that we have not taken our pursuit of godliness far enough and have been conditioned by the comfortability our lives provided us. But that is not why I write today. I write out of the place of questioning; from the place of one in the boat with Jesus, so to speak, who is forced to answer the question: ‘If being a follower of Jesus isn’t a cure-all for pain and hardship, then what is it?’

I believe the answer comes in Jesus’ response to the disciple’s distress. They awaken their master with their cries. He rebukes the storm and then asks: “Why are you afraid?” Jesus is, in essence, showing who He is and the power He possesses. This is what we need to know. While Jesus doesn’t rid our lives of pain and suffering, He gives us a response to it. He does not take us out of this world, He meets us in it. When we struggle with suffering, persistent sins, or pain, we must remember to focus not on the trouble but rather on the One who is in the boat with us; the One who has the power to heal --- our savior, redeemer, master, and friend --- Jesus Christ, our Lord.

The Spirit of God - Mark 1:4,5

John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And all of the country of Judea was going out to him, and all the people of Jerusalem; and they were being baptized by him in the Jordan River, confessing their sins.

-          Mark 1:4,5

What was it that prompted such a reaction from the residents of Jerusalem and Judea? What was it that brought about such change? There was curiosity, to be sure. After 400 years of prophetic inactivity, to see a prophet the likes of Isaiah or Ezekiel was sure to bring about interest. But curiosity does not bring repentance. At least not to the level they were experiencing there near the Jordan. So what was it that brought the crowds? What was it that made John’s ministry so effective?

It can only be that the Spirit of God brought about such dramatic results. Only the Spirit of God can affect change in a person’s heart. We know this to be true in our own lives and the lives of others. If the Spirit of God is not moving there is no victory, no repentance, and no change.

We put such stock in our efforts; our demographics, our studies, our preparation, our delivery, and all those things have their place, but the pursuit of good reasoning isn’t enough. All of our efforts, as God-pleasing and noble as they may be, cannot save a soul from hell; cannot bring about revival. We should never let ourselves become so haughty and prideful (or, conversely, so despondent) as to believe that our efforts are powerful enough to save or that our weaknesses are enough to ensure failure. Our works are not the end of the story.

I want to ask, as a brother: is there a place in your life for the Spirit of God? Is there a place for a Spirit who defies convention; a Spirit who spoke through a donkey, who brought about repentance in the godless Ninevites despite a reluctant preacher, who built the foundation of the Christian church on eleven unfaithful cowards who abandoned their Messiah? Is there a place for such a Spirit in your life? Or has your faith become too narcissistic?

I worry, friends that we have gone too far in synchronizing our faith with reason. I fear that we have reduced the power of God into something we can manage with our own hands; something we can observe and control; into what our surveys tell us is possible. In short --- we have reduced the power of God into what seems reasonable in our earthly wisdom. The Lord only knows that I have been the guiltiest in this regard; that I have confined God to what I can touch, see, and hear.

But the Spirit cannot be contained by reason. He cannot be quantified by the analysis of experts. He cannot be measured by the limited efforts of man. His Spirit is capable of all things. His Spirit is capable of the miraculous; the illogical. And only through His Spirit can the miraculous occur. In obedience we do our part but the change belongs to the Lord. We need to understand that what we need is not more knowledge, bigger budgets, a more persuasive personality, or more eloquent sermons. We need the Spirit of God to move. We need to trust in the Lord better; deeper, and to ask Him to move, to stir hearts, to bring revival, for only He is able. We must beg Him to transform the lives of our communities, of our family and friends; those people and places that are the most lost and desolate. Only He can bring change. Only He can bring revival. Wind of God, come blow upon us.