The problem with "This is all part of God's plan"

Text: Exodus 3:1-12

"O God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."

I changed it up this week—the prayer, that is. This prayer, taken from the Evening Vespers service in the ELW, may as well have been Moses’ prayer. It’s also one of my favorites. The path before us is always only dimly lit. At my ordination last October, a professor mine preached on Psalm 119, which famously says “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path,” and he posited that the lamps that were around in the time of the Psalmist were really pretty weak things. We’re not talking 100 watt halogen bulbs; more like a candle wick only capable of penetrating a foot or two into the darkness.

That is the irony of the burning bush. Light imagery in the Bible so often has to do with knowledge of the future, and yet the burning bush offers only an end destination with no map to get there. It does not light Moses’ path; it just tells him the end result. God does not outline how Moses is going to deliver Israel from Egypt; he just tells Moses he needs him to do it.

If you’re a planner this would be a problem. Kate, my wife, would have a serious problem with these kinds of instructions. She’s a planner. She wants to know how things are going to go down to the finest detail. She needs to know dates, times, contact info; she makes packing lists, shopping lists, to-do lists, cleaning lists, cooking lists. I’m thinking Kate would not like to be summoned to a burning bush that tells her the end result without a map of how to get there. Come to think of it, I don’t think many of us would. Even I would have an issue with this call--and I am anything but a planner. But this is exactly how God calls us most of the time. We are not given all the information. We are not told how we should act or what we should do. All we are told is the end of the story. Whatever you believe is the simplest synthesis of the Christian faith—you are saved by grace through faith, or Christ has died for your sins, or love wins, or whatever answer you would give to that question—that promise gives direction to your life.  

And yet, none of those summations of our faith tell us exactly how to get there; they are at best partial blueprints of how to live right here, right now.

 Moses had no clue what to do. He wanted more information. So he asks for God’s name. It seems like an innocent request—the kind of thing we would like to know—on whose authority does this radical vision come? But the appeal for a name is hardly innocent. To know a name means to have a measure of control. Adam and Eve gain dominion over creation by giving names to all the creatures; now Moses is asking for God’s name not as a matter of clarification but in order to change the playing field. His request is sneaky, which makes God’s response all the more fantastic. My name? says God, “I AM WHO I AM.” In Hebrew: Yahweh, or even better (since the verb tense is not clear): “I will be who I will be."

God is going to be exactly who God will be, and we can do little to change that. God was going to make certain the people of Israel were led out of Egypt no matter Moses’ resistance. For us, God is bringing about salvation regardless of our petty wants and desires. It sounds strange to say it, but God isn’t so interested in the details. At the very least, the details aren’t the point of the story.

We don’t get this. I know, because just about every time something tragic happens I hear the same hollow words. I’m sure you have heard it too. I heard it again this week when a friend of a friend was tragically and senselessly killed. It seems like every time something like this happens somebody—well-meaning and good-hearted as they may be—says the magic words: “This is all part of God’s plan.” I understand the sentiment. We want to be able to say something helpful in a time of helplessness. We want to believe that nothing bad ever happens without a “good” to follow. We long for justice in cases that simply seem unjust, and since we believe in a just God it only follows that this must be part of some divine architecture for the universe. It's just that neither scripture nor experience show us a God who works like that.

Sometimes awful things just happen.

That’s not to say there is not justice for the hurt, joy for the sorrowed, and peace that surpasses the loss we experience in this life. There is. But it’s at the end of the story and not in the middle. God does have a plan but, as with Israel captive in Egypt, it is not the kind of plan that seeks to justify tragic loss as if it being part of God's will makes it better. That should be good news. It frees us from justifying every evil in the world as part of God’s plan; it frees us from defending God whenever anybody experiences loss; it frees us to get about the business of life in a complicated world and to stand alongside those who hurt without feeling the need to give a half-hearted reason for it all. God doesn’t give anybody cancer, but God is redeeming the cancer-sufferer. God does not take the lives of children because heaven needs another angel, but God does give to children the kingdom of God. God does not cause hurt, but God is with us in our suffering.

You see, the burning bush tells us that God does have a plan for us, but it is always bigger than we can figure. Sometimes it doesn’t involve us at all. Moses, for all the work he does in leading the people out of Egypt, never sees the Promised Land. Many of us will never see the fruits of our labor. To the world our lives will look like abject failures. For most of us, nobody is going to write a history of our lives; nobody is going to carve our faces on a mountain.

But, you know, that’s OK.

Our lives are not meant to be remembered. Our lives are meant to discover God, and to know God is not to ask God’s name; to know God is not to have your life planned out ahead of you like a carefully delineated trail map. To know God is to live every day of your life as if you might learn something about God. To know God is to ask yourself how God desires you to work, or how God might wish you to treat your family and friends; and to wonder how God impacts every decision of your lives not because God planned out all those instances and knows what you are going to do but because our lives are more sacred--and just better--with God in them.

Too often we dwell on who God is, what God is, and what we can say about God with certainty. When we find ourselves in that rut we stand like Moses before the burning bush asking, cleverly and all too ignorantly, “God, what is your name?”

I will be what I will be.

Take that, Moses. Take that, preachers and teachers who tell you who and what God is. Take that, books, magazine articles and TV shows debunking the divine. Take that, Confirmation and Sunday School classes. As a teacher of mine once said, “How do you like them apples, Moses?”

I do not know how God is impacting your life. I can’t tell you. All I can hope is that you’re open to seeing it. We believe in one God, and that God is much bigger than our declarations. We believe in one true faith, but that faith is lived by individuals through eyes that see the world in vastly different ways.

The important matter is not who God is but whether we are going to allow God to make any difference in our lives. What is God calling you to be? What is God calling you to do? I don’t care if it’s the voice of a bush lit with fire or quiet deliberations that you feel in your heart. The only way to discover what God would have you be is to live as if the God of the universe is with you now.

Thankfully, God is who God is. He will be what he will be. And he is here with you now and every moment of your lives.

Thanks be to God.

Stepping on God's Toes and Why We Are in Need of Forgiveness

Text: Genesis 50:15-21

            We all have our plans. Our lives can be broken down into little strategic endeavor after little strategic endeavor. We set goals—sometimes realistic, sometimes unrealistic. We try to see what the future holds. Uncertainty makes us nervous. The unknown is our greatest fear.

            When Israel dies Joseph’s brothers are afraid because the rules of the game have changed. Joseph now holds all the power and without their father in the picture he could easily turn on his brothers. They don’t know what the future holds, and just as Joseph’s plans concerning his sons—Ephraim and Manasseh—are turned upside down by Israel’s blessing, so the brothers’ plans are rocked by Israel’s death.

            The future is murky.

            This is the beginning of the first school year since I came to Hallock to serve as pastor and I’m sure when I came there were some hopes about what the church would look like by this time of the year. Probably some of those were realistic hopes—maybe I’ve even lived up to some expectations—but all too often we have huge hopes for a future that doesn’t end up resembling anything like what we would have thought. If you expected this pastor to bring in hundreds on non-church goers and fix every little issue this congregation has ever had you are probably feeling a bit disappointed. This is in no small part because it’s not my job to grow the church. If the church grows it is because God is doing it; not me, not you. And we simply don’t know what God is doing with us. All we know is that the present looks different from the past.

We could spend our time wishing that were not the case; we could wish that we would return to some glory days in the past when everybody attended church on every Sunday and all the women were strong, the men handsome and the children good-looking, but that’s a past that probably never existed; or we can come to the conclusion that our plans are mostly going to come to nothing. I’ve said this before: the only way to grow is to die. The only way to be a growing church is to be a church willing to accept that its plans are pretty much wrong, and the only one who can map our future out is God. I’m not saying if we do that hundreds of people will start pouring in. I’m not sure what God will do with us, but I am sure that we stand like Joseph’s brothers before an Almighty God, tricking, pleading and finally falling on our faces for our misdoings.

            Forgiveness. That is where it starts. You are forgiven for everything that has happened to you—both as a church and as individuals. There’s a reason we start our service every Sunday with confession and forgiveness; it’s not because we are little Lutheran Eeyores who have to dwell on our mistakes. It’s not because we are such awful people that I’ve decided we REALLY need forgiveness. Rather, it’s because when we measure ourselves against God we end up looking pretty pathetic. But there’s also another reason we begin with forgiveness and this is much closer to the place Joseph finds himself with his brothers. We forgive because it is the only way to stay in right relationship with one another.

            Now, I don’t feel like I need forgiveness from many of you for anything significant, but in small ways and often unintentionally I have not loved you as I love myself, I have ignored you when you wanted attention or pestered you when you didn’t want to be bothered. I have done all these things and I’m sure I’ll do it all again. So when we meet in worship, what better way to begin than with forgiveness for all of those things—known and unknown—that separate me from you and you from the other person in your pew. What better way to start a school year—with the busy season of the church ramping up again—than with forgiveness.

(Service of corporate confession and forgiveness here)

            Now, here’s where confession and forgiveness gets tricky. It’s easy—maybe too easy—to read confession from the hymnal; it’s easy also to say “I’m sorry” and only half mean it. What’s hard is standing where Joseph stood in a place of power over those coming to beg your forgiveness and to honestly say, “Am I in the place of God? Of course I forgive you.”

We should have big expectations for ourselves and greater expectations for this church, but the only thing that’s certain about the future is that we are going to try to follow our vision rather than the one God has laid out for us. We are going to try to get our way, effect our strategies, and make our changes. Since I have been called as pastor nobody has done a better job of messing up God’s plan than me. That’s the entitled, sorry position I have been called to. I’m constantly stepping on God’s toes. That’s how we work. That’s why we are in need of forgiveness.

But God’s working in exciting ways in spite of us. We have energy, we have a new school year and renewed pride in who we are, we have new staff, new Sunday Schoolers, new Confirmation students, perhaps soon a new staff member; new, new, new. And it’s all a testament to what God is doing. On our own we are just like Joseph’s brothers. And just as they cast Joseph into the pit, we have cast our own Josephs out. But never mind, “even though we intended to do harm, God intended it for good.” If that isn’t the moral of our lives I don’t know what is.

Amen.

Politics, Economics, and Joseph, Prince of Egypt

Text: Genesis 41:25-36,39-41

            This is the kind of scripture where I can easily get in trouble because at its heart is a story about farming. There is not much scarier than preaching for people who know far more than you about the subject you are talking about, and I’m about as qualified to talk about farming as most of you are about premillenial dispensationalism (and you can thank me later that I’m not talking about that). But thankfully, this isn’t only about farming; it’s also about politics and religion. Hey, what could possibly go wrong?

            Pharaoh has a problem: he has two bad dreams. He doesn’t know exactly what they mean, but he’s pretty certain that no good will come of them. As luck would have it our favorite dream interpreter, Joseph, just happens to be residing in one of Pharaoh’s prisons waiting for just this opportunity. And he knows exactly what Pharaoh’s dreams are about. Three things: land, food, and economics.

            These were the political hot-button issues of the day. If Pharaoh were going to strengthen his power it would be through understanding the land and its food and making the right strategic moves to better the economy. This shouldn’t sound so different from our own politics. These just happen to be the concerns at the forefront of life here in Kittson County. Land, food and economics.

            Things were simpler in Joseph’s day. There was no global economy, no corporations or large-scale businesses, but we shouldn’t confuse a simpler life with an easy life. Things were very tenuous. At the first drought you risked not only losing the farm but quite literally starving to death. There were no safety nets, no insurance, nobody to help save you but your family who was subject to the same natural disasters. In short, drought meant death.

           So when Joseph interprets Pharaoh’s dreams it gives him an incredible economic advantage in an agrarian age. If you know when the drought is coming—and for how long—it is considerably easier to survive. Joseph’s interpretation gives Pharaoh both an economic and political advantage. Take 1/5 of your crops, Joseph says, for the next seven years and store the grain for those lean years ahead. This is the 1800 BC version of betting against the market.

            Most of us could use Joseph’s kind of inside knowledge. No matter your faith in the Farmer’s Almanac or the Weather Channel there is no way to know for certain what is coming. We routinely mock meteorologists for their faulty predictions. In the Twin Cities I would often listen to Dan Barreiro on KFAN perpetually ridicule the “weather terrorists,” as he calls them, especially Paul Douglas—or “the goof on the roof”—for his overly scientific but incredibly inaccurate forecasts. The weather is so big, so complicated, and so completely beyond our comprehension that predicting five days out is hard; never mind laying out the next fourteen years.

            This is why we save up. We are looking for a security blanket just in case the worst comes to pass. Maybe you’ve seen that television program, Doomsday Preppers—it’s essentially a documentary of people who build bunkers for the end of the world. This is the ideology right at its heart. We don’t know what’s coming; it may very well be bad; so we had better stock up… or else.

            But what is enough? What can assure our survival? The story of Pharaoh and Joseph is not about fear for the future; it’s a story about the advantage of knowing how much to save and how much to spend. Pharaoh furthers his political power because—thanks to Joseph—he knows how the resources he will have so he can wisely use what can be used and save what must be saved. Most of us have some idea what we will need—we might have budgets and 401K’s—but there are no guarantees. So it’s easy to become scared, and when we get scared about money, time and resources we become self-centered. Then, we treat our wealth as if it our rightful inheritance. Pretty soon, we forget that all of this comes from God—it never was ours; it can never become ours.

            We make the mistake that Egypt makes when this Pharaoh is no longer in power. We forget about Joseph and the God from whom this blessing came. We forget that everything that we have is God’s. Pretty soon, we are enslaving the things that were gifts freely given. It is amazing how quickly we turn from desperate prayer for survival in the face of extreme adversity to living as if it didn’t matter, as if our most desperate prayers were answered and yet we are entitled to more.

            As Joseph says to Pharaoh, “After [the seven years of plenty], there will arise seven years of famine, and all the plenty will be forgotten in the land of Egypt.” Will the people of Egypt remember the blessings of those seven years? Will they prepare in the boon times? No. They are going to forget all about it, and only out of desperation will they come to Joseph and Pharaoh, with starvation on their lips, and beg for the food they have kept in wait.

             Human beings are notoriously short-sighted. Look at our election rhetoric. What do we want? Short-term gains. When do we want them? Yesterday.

We listen to elected officials talk about economic gains and losses within the terms of various incumbents as if our economic history can be easily dissected into four or six-year chunks. We listen to advertisements about failed economic policies as if the only thing we need in our lives is a bigger and more massive “national economy” more disparate from the things we do in our lives, rather than smaller and more localized economies that values the lives and work of the community. We look at a story like the one of Pharaoh and Joseph and have half a mind to think, “Man, if only our leaders had that kind of foresight.”

But that’s a pipedream. They can’t. As far as I know God isn’t sharing dreams about future economic shortfalls. We don’t have that insider knowledge. This past week I listened to an adviser from Portico, formerly known as the ELCA Board of Pensions, talk about the people who want to tell you when the next “bear market” will be. She said the truth is they don’t know; they can’t know; if they did know they’d have all their money in at the right time. The reality of our lives is that we can only see dimly the future ahead of us. Like the weather terrorists of KFAN fame or the economic analysts we are slaves to a future that is not yet visible to us.

Because of this we are called to God’s kind of stewardship, which is caring for the resources that have been entrusted to us. What does God want of us in a world so unpredictable? The same as always: Love the Lord, your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. And in case you were wondering, yes, that means loving God with your money and your land and your food as well. No long-term, macroeconomic theory can trump the commandment to be present with those in need in our midst. You love your God not by holding on but by letting go of your need to be in control of what may come. The future is a mystery. The present is filled with people in need, people whose lives will interact with your own in ways we can’t anticipate. The world out there is in need of your love. Go. Show it. Be Christ. Love your neighbor. The rest is commentary.

My first duathlon: A recap

There's something awfully great about working toward a goal for a long time and finally completing the work. The harder the goal; the more rewarding the finish line. That was certainly the case this weekend. After the Thief River Falls triathlon in May I made the decision that Ngede was the next, big goal, and I started to work doggedly toward that goal. This weekend I finally did it. The verdict? Hard. Awfully hard. But worth it. Well worth it.

First of all I should say I am indebted to Peter and Janelle Rimmereid for giving me a place to stay on Friday night, even though they were out of town. That made preparation so much easier (driving six miles in the morning rather than over an hour was very helpful). Also, it was great to see people I haven't seen in awhile--Wapo people, seminary people, and all of that. Doing this with familiar friends certainly helped.

With that, let's get to the race. When I arrived at Ox Lake for the start I went through the normal routine of checking over the bikes and warming up, which is usually pretty uneventful. However, if there's one thing I've learned from things like this it is that something--usually little--always goes wrong. This time the problem was more than a little one. When I got around to testing the road bike, checking shifting and all that, I ran into a serious problem. When I accelerated or put a lot of pressure on the pedals the chain was slipping on the gears quite badly. The chain was brand new, which could mean only one thing: the teeth on the rear cassette were worn down. This was something the bike shop had told me was not a problem, but now I was finding it most certainly was. Unfortunately, there was no way to fix this. I would simply have to ride with slipping gears. My best leg (the road bike) was starting to look a lot more challenging.

The other thing was the humidity. It wasn't super hot--right around 72 degrees at start time--but the humidity was around 75% and it meant almost nothing was evaporating. And the thing is I sweat A LOT. It's something we Scandanavians struggle with--we are very white. So, that would prove to be an additional challenge.

10k road run
As always the race started at much too fast a pace. I ran with a group (not the lead group, mind you) that did the first and second miles at 7:10 pace, which considering the hills was blistering (both for me and for most of the others). Some of them were relay runners, but several were individuals like myself. I hung at the back of the group, aware we were running too fast. However, I felt pretty good. The legs were good and I was probably pushing myself around 75%, which was only slightly harder than I would have liked.

Predictably, the times slowed down. My mile times went from 7:10 and 7:10 to 7:35 and 8:00, then a bit over 8 minutes for the last two miles. My goal time was between 47 and 48 minutes, which is about 4 minutes slower than my personal best. I wanted to leave plenty of energy for the next three legs, so I consciously slowed down for the last couple of miles (especially mile 5 which was largely uphill). I even let the small group around me put a little distance between us. I could have closed down the gap, but I knew this was most definitely not a sprint. So, I finished at the back of a group of five--four of which were individuals. My time? 47:50... I was pretty content with that.

10k mountain bike
I knew this was going to be a tough leg. It was much harder than I thought. The elevation change was tough--lots of big hills, some of which also had sand that made riding extremely difficult. The only time I had ever "mashed the gnar" (that's for you, Evan) was prior to my buddy Jesson's wedding last year, which was considerably easier only because of the superior bicycle I was riding and--I can't stress this enough--the clip pedals. I discovered very quickly that riding a mountain bike without clip pedals is just tough. The hills are just awful. Hear that again: awful. Also the shocks, while good, were not good enough to save my back from taking a serious beating.

As the ride went along I felt worse and worse. My back was tightening up. Two guys who I had passed earlier came back and passed me, and I was focusing mostly on not being in pain. I never thought I would have a fast time, but my time was becoming slow, slower and slowest. This leg just never seemed to end. When I finally came out of the woods I was just so thankful to get off the bike that it didn't really matter how fast I finished, but the clock showed I was slow. Right around 0:38:00.

25k road bike
Remember the state of my bike? Well, yes, it sucked. I mean, I'm a good road bicyclist. I'm no cycling star; it's not like I'm going to average 24 mph like some insane triathletes do, but 20 mph is in the picture on a good day. Also, the Ngede course is absolutely made for my strengths. It is filled with short little hills that are absolutely in my wheelhouse. I could have gained a lot of time here (last year when I raced this course as part of a relay I finished with the second fastest time on the longer 40k bike course in spite of crashing and losing 2-3 minutes fixing my bike... and my injuries). Unfortunately, my slipping gears killed any chance of a similar performance this year. I wasn't going to empty the tank--what with the tough trail run yet to come--but I planned on having a very solid, 19+ mph ride. That simply was impossible given the mechanical issues.

So I was a little frustrated. But here's the thing: I still passed people. I passed one of the guys who had passed me on the mountain bike. My time wasn't fast, but it wasn't a complete disaster. I didn't keep up a 19 mph pace, but I did average 18 mph over hills... so considering the situation I wasn't unhappy. But on the other hand, I expended A LOT more energy getting that 18 mph than I otherwise would have. So, that's all I have to say about that. This leg: 51:30.

"5k" trail run
The first thing you need to know about this is the "" around 5k. This was NOT 5k. It's funny/cruel that the two big races I did this year--the TRF tri and Ngede--both advertised their closing runs as "5k"s and neither was particularly close to accurate. The TRF tri was actually 3.28 miles--or 5.3k. Ngede was even more cruel. I was told afterwards that it was more like 6.2k. That's a whole freaking 1.2k extra... over AWFUL hills.

About a half mile into the "run" I realized there was no way I would be doing anything approaching running up some of those hills. I have talked with long distance trail runners before who told me that many people walk up steep hills to save their legs, and I quickly decided that was a good philosophy. At first I was walking up sharp hills--anything that looked over about 4%--then it slowly became every hill big or small, long or short. This course was incredibly hard. It would have been a tough route if it was the only thing I was running, but after three events it was deathly hard.

I felt miserable. My only brief encouragement was that I wasn't getting passed. In fact, I passed two people in front of me over the course and I saw two more a bit ahead though I never could make the pass. Clearly, this was miserable for more than just me. It was almost cruel. Scratch that, it was. I finished right around 36:00 at an average pace of 9:22. That seems slow... and yet, not at all. I walked a lot. My "run" was more like a painful slog. I was just happy to be done. So happy. It was just incredible to no longer be moving forward, whether on a bike or my two feet.

I finished in 2:59:10.

Three hours was a goal of mine, but I realized on the final leg that the time no longer mattered. Neither did it matter who I finished before or after. All that mattered was doing it. After the finish line I struggled to cool down. I overheated like crazy. The humidity meant that little of my sweat was being wicked away. Eventually, I got ice packs on the neck, forehead and arm pits and slowly started to come back to normal. Food started to look attractive again. I was starting to come around.

So, the big question is what's next. Truthfully, I don't know. I'm not sure if I'll be back for Ngede next year, or if there will be another big challenge on the horizon. My next race is in two weeks. There is a half marathon run/bike/rollerblade from Hallock to Lancaster on September 8 with an additional 10k option. I think I will probably run the 10k... or possibly make up for my poor cycling performance by crushing the bike ride. Other than that, there are no firm races on the calendar. I plan on improving my fitness over the winter, then we'll see what next year has in store!

Til then, happy duathlon-ing!

Joseph, the Pit, and Inception

Text: Genesis 37:12-28

           Do you have a younger sibling? Or are you the youngest child in a family? 

Those of you who are older siblings know what I know, which is that this Joseph story was most definitely written by a younger sibling. See, I have a younger brother, so I can imagine what I would feel if he came up to my parents and I one day and said, “Oh, by the way, I had a dream last night, and you were all bowing to me, because—well—I’m going to rule over you.” That would not have gone over well. I can imagine how much worse it would be for eleven brothers—ten of them older—who actually have quite a bit to gain from their father’s favoritism. We older siblings know that if this story was written by one of us Joseph would not have amounted to much.

            What to do with Joseph…

            This is a hard topic for me—perhaps it is for all older siblings—because Joseph earned none of this, and as an older brother I am tempted to play the “That’s not fair!” card on this one. Joseph was the epitome of the spoiled brat, feasting on the riches of his father through no merit of his own. Unlike other Biblical heroes—David, for example—he had no Goliath moment of character. All we know about Joseph is a couple of dreams and, worse still, his exuberance in sharing those dreams with his family. Not only is he brash and arrogant, he is completely unaware of the effect his brashness is likely to have. He is walking on thin ice.

            These dreams are the thing that sets Joseph apart. Analysis and interpretation of dreams has been around since at least the time of Joseph and probably for as long as human beings have dreamt. We have a fascination with this aspect of our subconscious. Are we telling ourselves something? Is something outside of us giving us wisdom? What do dreams mean?

            I can imagine that if I were preaching this sermon sixty years ago I would have talked about Sigmund Freud and his interpretation of dreams, or if I was preaching this forty years ago I would have talked about Carl Jung and his revisions of Freud’s psychology of dreaming, but since this is 2012 I will ditch the psychology and instead interpret Joseph’s dreaming through the only lens that a 26-year-old guy knows—the 2010 Christopher Nolan film, Inception.

For those of you unfamiliar, Inception is a film about invading a person's dream and planting an idea that will ultimately change the course of their lives. One of the questions that the movie raises is: What emotion is so powerful to plant an idea deep enough for it to take hold? Is it personal gain or fear perhaps? No, none of those things emotions will do. The person dreaming rejects these as unrealistic bases for a new idea. Instead, the only emotion that sticks is catharsis. Catharsis combines both reconciliation and forgiveness, which are the only emotions powerful enough to make a person change his course.

            So what does any of this have to do with Joseph?

In these early dreams, Joseph interprets from a point of self-interest. We don’t know if it is God or Joseph’s self-conscious desires that are causing him to dream these dreams, but regardless of their source Joseph sees them as visions of his own future glory. Nobody can mistake his reasons for sharing the dreams with his family. He is setting himself above his clan, but in so doing he is misreading the situation. The vision at the heart of those dreams is one of leadership, but in his excitement to share what he has seen Joseph shows he is not yet fit to be a leader. First, he must fall. Then, there will be the possibility of catharsis before he rises to the place he will one day stand.

            There’s that old saying that pride comes before a fall. That saying may very well originate here, as Joseph quite literally falls into the pit, albeit with a forceful nudge from his brothers. It’s not that his brothers are justified in their actions, though in their situation I probably would have been right there shoving little Joey (I can’t tell you how often I would have sold my brother to some passing Ishmaelites if the opportunity arose). Joseph doesn’t have a voice in this part of the story. We don’t know exactly what is going through his head, but I can imagine this is not what he expected. The dreams of greatness he had were portents of a future beyond his grasp. This was going to be much harder than he could have imagined. It was going to be much harder for the entire family. God had a trajectory in mind for Israel, but it took them much farther astray than anybody could have predicted.

            We have this problem with God’s will. For one, most of us don’t have dreams that depict what the future will hold, or if we do they are muddled visions of a reality we cannot yet discern. There is a real debate among Christians as to whether God has everything planned and whether we have any control over the future. Well, Joseph teaches us quite a lot about what God’s plan looks like. It is never fully crafted, or at the very least it appears to us only dimly. It is never without our input—both positive and negative. God’s plan is not intended for our ill, though ill may come of our response to it. Finally, God’s plan is God’s and not ours.

            I cannot imagine that God, being God and not subject to constraints like time and space, looks at the world like we do. When Joseph dreams these dreams they are visions of a future—yes—but not one that can come to be without the active participation of Joseph, his brothers and his father. Man plans and God laughs—not because God knows every little action that’s going to follow but because God’s view is much wider; ours is one-dimensional. Like Joseph, we interpret things in terms of personal gain. Joseph knew nothing of how to be a leader to his brothers until he was rejected and cast into the pit.

I hope it doesn’t take that kind of betrayal for you to understand your purpose in this life, but some of you have already been down into that pit. You have already had awful things happen to you—some, like Joseph, at the hands of family. You have to fall in order to rise.

            The Joseph story is a story lived out again and again in our lives. First we are prideful and exuberant, then we get shot down; then—slowly and after much backsliding—we discover our purpose in this world. Almost universally, that place in life looks nothing like we imagined it. When his family finally does bow to Joseph it is not in the place or manner he would have supposed. He becomes a leader in Egypt but finally wants nothing more than catharsis for those years gone by.

            We don’t know what we want. That is our fundamental flaw. We think we know—we think we want simple things: money, time, a person or a thing. We think if we have those things then we will be happy, but when we have it all we discover we want more. Soon, we are numb to life, unable to care for the good or the bad. The worst life is the life that no longer values catharsis; the life that learns no lessons from loss; the life that does not care. Catharsis requires loss, then a turning, and finally redemption. It requires falling into the pit. It requires looking deep within ourselves to find the essence of our humanity and turning around. It requires forgiveness.

            May you forgive as you are forgiven; may you find catharsis for all your hurt; and may God lead you in paths you would not have imagined.

My first duathlon

You see all those goodies?

Yes, I am a complete dork, but there is not much that gets me more excited than prepping for a race I have been working toward for a long time. Saturday morning I'll be doing something completely different. Well, maybe not completely. I have done four triathlons now since starting in 2006, but all of them have been sprints--pretty easy, straightforward, fast--you get the picture. This is a duathlon--so easier, right?--no swimming. Woot! Well, except this is definitively not a sprint.

The Ngede Challenge is a 10k road run, 10k mountain bike, 25k road bike and a 5k trail run. And it's hilly--like, western Wisconsin hilly.

Four months ago I had never run 10k. 5 miles was pretty much my limit. And you know what? That extra 1.2 miles sucked. Really sucked. Then it didn't. This has been a fun process of training. I have pushed all kinds of limits and shattered some personal bests. I'm faster and I can go A LOT longer than before. There are still some worries: I've trained exactly zero on the mountain bike (I'm picking one up tomorrow), I've never run more than 8 miles, and I really don't know what three transitions will do to me. But this is all a part of the process. This race has been my goal for some time, but it's not the end of the road. There are plenty of races ahead; it's just a matter of picking the next big challenge.

So, I'm heading out to Wisconsin tomorrow, spending the night at a friend's place and racing Saturday morning. I'm mostly over being sick, mostly over crashing three days ago; I'm mostly feeling really good. So, yes, I'm excited.

Wish me luck!

The Simplest Idea: Inception and the Church

A pastor at our weekly text study came in with an idea yesterday to read a book together and discuss. The book was titled, I Refuse to Lead a Dying Church, by Paul Nixon. This pastor was in need of finding some wisdom to deal with the travails of leading a struggling congregation in the midst of a declining mainline Protestant denomination. In short, he was in a place where a lot of clergy find themselves--pastoring to decline.

I found myself thinking, "Are we still there?" Are we still focusing on leadership techniques and programs for pastors to churches in decline? Are we still moping about the challenges of churches with fewer members? Are we still talking about the death of the church?

Some of us have moved on. I mean, we have thought about this. For many church leaders in my generation the decline of the church is not something new but in fact the only reality we have ever known. When pastors and professors have tried to shock us by saying things like, "The church as you knew it is over" we have looked at them blankly and thought, "Actually, this is the only church I've known. The church you've known is over."

But most of all, we think about how the church is going to look different. I was struck yesterday by the methodology of having a book study in the midst of declining congregations. It felt so wrong. For one, it is not the pastors who need to think about this; it is the congregation members who have no formal training. But more importantly, they need to come to this idea in such a way that it actually sticks--that it actually penetrates their psyche and makes the light bulb go on. For most people, that's not so easy.

That's when it hit me. This is really a matter of inception. The 2010 Christopher Nolan motion picture, Inception, is based on the premise of changing a subject's mind by planting an idea in that person's brain. In order to make inception work you first need a goal--what you want the subject to believe. Second, you need an idea powerful enough to accomplish that change. In the movie, the goal was to get the subject to break up his father's company; the idea was that the subject's father loved him and wanted him to choose his own path.

Crucial to the success of inception is implanting the right idea. I find that churches recognize a problem--there are less people in mainline denominations, less vitality, less energy, etc. But then they come up with all sorts of massive philosophical changes without synthesizing the singular idea behind the matter. So, pastors throw out frightening words like change, missional imagination, rooted confessionalism and the like, which members of our congregation are neither ready nor able to hear. What the mainline denominations have seemingly failed to do is find that one idea that needs to be planted deep in the psyche of our people. So, what is it?

Let's start with what it's not. It's not "we must change;" or "we need to grow." In Inception we learn that neither fear nor material gain are powerful enough motivators to plant an idea. The only emotion powerful enough to make an idea stick is catharsis. Our churches--our congregation members, our people--are desperately in need of catharsis. We need to face our past and hear, like Robert Fischer Jr. on his father's death bed, that the monumental figures of our past want us to go our own way. Semper reformandum, said the leaders of the Reformation, "Always reforming."

But the way most of our people see the church is like that lowest dream level where the buildings and structures of the world are collapsing before their eyes. Moreover, since the structures of the church are tied inextricably to the outside world, this is also how they view their lives. Things are changing: the world is becoming more complicated and chaotic. There are horrible people doing horrible things. There is so much out of our control. The world that we recognize from our past is disintegrating before our eyes.

So, we come to the goal we want to accomplish. In a world whose edifices seem to be crumbling the only catharsis, the only good news, is that this world is not the ultimate reality. Like the spinning top totem that Cobb (Leonardo diCaprio) uses to determine whether he is in the real world, we are in need of something to ground us. The goal of the mainline church's inception, therefore, is not to acclimate our people to change or to get them to see the necessity of being the church in new and different ways. No, none of that will work, and it is precisely the kind of things we have been trying all along. Instead, the goal of our inception is to show people that this world is a mere dream of the ultimate reality. We live in the shadow-lands where things don't quite make sense.

But this realization is not easily achieved. I can preach death and resurrection week after week and it will often seem to be falling on deaf ears. Sure, the Holy Spirit will do its best to open the ears of the people, but I know well enough that the very premise that I'm preaching is far too big. I'm in need of a simpler idea; a synthesis of this new creation. I'm in need of catharsis.

That's when it hit me like a bolt from the blue. We have been making this way, way too complicated. We have been telling people about systems, about programs, about theology and eschatology. We have been telling them about Christology and pneumatology. We have been telling them about historical criticism and other modern methods of reading the Bible. We have been teaching them bits of Greek, Hebrew and Latin. We have been preaching meta-theories when the simplest idea of all has never sunk in, because we never went deep enough. We tried "God loves you" but it just feels so shallow. We tried "You are saved" but it does not connect. These, too, were too complicated. They involved static realities that we could not see. Neither involved catharsis.

You see, we've only taken it down a single level. We've never touched that second dream state, let alone the third, so the idea never stuck. We have to press harder into the subconsciousness of the people we meet and tell them the most fundamental truth that can shape their realities. The truth is this:

You are forgiven.

This is the very essence of catharsis. They are the words that break down the walls around our supposed realities and show us a creation more real than anything our dream-like waking could ever promise. Forgiveness--true forgiveness, not the "I'm sorry" hokum that passes for such in our world--opens doors to a new future with hope.

Church leaders, I cannot impress this enough, the key is going deep enough. This is not just a matter of reciting some words in the liturgy. It is instead meeting those in the most desperate need in their most desperate moments, when their tops are spinning wildly out of whack, and pointing them back to the ultimate, Christ-drenched reality and saying, "You are forgiven in spite of your faults, in spite of the past, in spite of everything historical that binds you to this moment and this place. You are set free--by a Savior who came to re-write history, to make the dead rise and bring about a creation so much more real than anything you experience here and now."

But more important than the words is that single moment of catharsis. In the movie it was the pinwheel that Robert Fischer made for his father, hidden in the safe, that represented the pride his father felt. For us it may be a hug, it may be a cup of tea; it may be something much simpler still. But remember, it is never complicated. Forgiveness never is. But true forgiveness will set the church on fire. It will shake the foundations of our world. It will make us rise again.

So, get planting.