John Fischer The Catch

I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now – Bob Dylan

We often think of spiritual growth as getting spiritually bigger and stronger. That would make sense since it’s the meaning of the word. We even have a term we use for those who have walked with God a long time: we call them “spiritual giants.” Yet I’m not sure they, or God, would support the metaphor.

On a couple of occasions when the disciples of Jesus volunteered to shoo the children away, Jesus rebuked them and made a point of His preference for children, going as far as to say that the rest of us need to become like them if we have any desire of finding a heaven in our future.

I wonder what part of being like children he meant. Obviously he didn’t mean we were to be like children in everything, because children are naïve and foolish sometimes. Children are immature and God is pointing us all to maturity in Christ. But in some things spiritual, children have the upper hand.

The most obvious is their simple and total faith and trust in their parents, which becomes an example for us of how to trust our heavenly Father. Secondly, and not quite as obvious, is the wonder of a child. A small child is on a road of discovery and every new thing is full of delight. It does not take much to please young children because their imaginations are so active and their experiences are so new and fresh. Parents love this season. A two-dollar car will completely satisfy the desire of a four-year-old, but an eight-year-old is not going to be happy with anything less than a thirty-nine-dollar remote control Hummer.

Something else I’ve observed with my children is the ease by which they make friends. At the local sandbox, for instance, I have watched them immediately jump in with whomever is there — no introduction necessary. At an early age, there are almost always parents around, and I notice, painfully, how careful and suspicious we are of each other as we play out this little charade to determine whether or not we will introduce ourselves and bother getting into conversation. Our children have no problem with what is a difficult barrier for us, and the contrast makes our isolation even more apparent.

We were created for friendships. Our mission as representatives of the Kingdom of God on earth depends on it. We should borrow a chapter out of our children’s book and jump into the nearest sandbox.

Some guy walked up to me yesterday at the car wash and acted like we were already in a conversation, and it was no time before we were. I was taken aback at this initially until I realized he was just being friendly. Take it from the kids. We can do this if we drop our fears and suspicions and look at each person as a child of God.

I woke up this morning in a different place. I didn’t move, but the air did. This isn’t the moist, cold air off the ocean; this is the hot, dry air from the desert. Sometime in the night the winds shifted. It happens frequently this time of year and it means only one thing for southern California: it means a high fire danger day. These winds come whipping through the mountain canyons like you just opened an oven, and all the vegetation is dry from the summer where they say it never rains in southern California. Well it doesn’t, from May to November, except for a rare tropical thunderstorm now and then. So the stage is set for an accident, or an arsonist, or sometimes a dry electrical storm in the mountains will do it. The sun isn’t even up and its 74 degrees. From Santa Barbara to San Diego, we are on high alert.

Does this happen where you live? I know it isn’t unique to this part of the country because it used to happen when we lived in Massachusetts. Suddenly I would wake up and be in Florida feeling and smelling the tropical breezes off the Keyes. It’s a wind shift, and it can change everything.

Winds of change. They can come without a moment’s notice. They can bring good or ill.  You folks have helped us weather some pretty nasty storms of late, and they are not over. We could use a wind shift.

Regardless, it is strengthening to know that God doesn’t change. He is always there and always available. In times like these – in the shifting winds – these words take on fresh meaning:

God is our refuge and strength,
    an ever-present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way
    and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam
    and the mountains quake with their surging.
 
There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
    the holy place where the Most High dwells.
God is within her, she will not fall;
    God will help her at break of day.
Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall;
    he lifts his voice, the earth melts.
 
The Lord Almighty is with us;
    the God of Jacob is our fortress.
 
Come and see what the Lord has done,
    the desolations he has brought on the earth.
He makes wars cease
    to the ends of the earth.
He breaks the bow and shatters the spear;
    he burns the shields with fire.
He says, “Be still, and know that I am God;
    I will be exalted among the nations,
    I will be exalted in the earth.”
 
The Lord Almighty is with us;
    the God of Jacob is our fortress.
–  Psalm 46

What’s in a name? Everything, as well as all you need to know.

We’ve discussed categories a good deal here at the Catch and each time we do we come up with the same conclusion: any category is an inadequate means of thinking about, defining, or treating a person. Us, them; Christian, non-Christian, Muslim, Jew; gay, straight; outside, inside; wheat, tare; good, bad; sinner, saint; black, white; rich, poor; Republican, Democrat; socialist, capitalist; Asian, Hispanic; Yankee fan, Tiger fan – all are inadequate and unnecessary.

Here is all any of us needs to know about someone: his or her name. When you know someone by name, all categories disappear. This is why names are so important in the Bible. God knows us by name. Our names are written on the palms of God’s hands. It’s personal. It’s complete.

And suddenly there was with me
An ocean of humanity
A sea of many faces
In waves of warm embraces
And while I questioned how to judge them all
Who would rise and who would fall
I found myself among them
And it mattered little who was wrong or right
— from “The Only One” by John Fischer

Everyone has a name, regardless of anything else. If you know a name, you are getting to know a person. That’s what counts. Let everything else go. George, Sally, Debbie, Brian… that’s all you need to know, while at the same time, it’s only the beginning of what you will come to know and experience.

A name. A person. A reflection of God. What’s your name?

One of the most common misconceptions about Christians is that they are good people trying to be better. Most people who are not churchgoers are such because they don’t think they are good enough to go. Even most Christians think like this. You get saved, and then you go to church. People who go to church are generally saved people who are now ready to work on their spiritual lives. Sick people outside; well people (and trying harder) inside. And all of this thinking is based on a certain level of expectation we put on believers. Now that you are a Christian you are expected to behave like one. And all of this is wrong-headed because it is not applying the law as God intended.

Just listen to these words from Paul to Timothy in the New Testament: “We know these laws are good when they are used as God intended. But they were not made for people who do what is right. They are for people who are disobedient and rebellious, who are ungodly and sinful, who consider nothing sacred and defile what is holy.” (1 Timothy 1:8-9)

To put it another way: The laws of God are not to make good people better; they are to show bad people they are bad. The laws of God are there to show us how much we need a savior, but they are never the means by which we will become better people.

The law in the hands of a “good person” (we are speaking relatively here because there is no one good but God) is usually a bad thing. Good people trying to be better just can’t help becoming Pharisees when they get a hold of the law. It becomes a measuring stick, a qualifier, and a means of lording it over others.

The only good any of us ever possess is what comes as a result of faith – a righteousness we have nothing to do with because it comes from Christ. We can’t measure it, we can’t take credit for it, we are usually not even aware of it. Church, therefore, is not a place where good people try to be better; it is a place where bad people can’t believe they have it so good. I can’t help but think that if we were more like this, more people would feel welcome. At this point, our reputation as “good” people is driving people away. We need to put out a different message.

“But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.” – Jesus Christ (Luke 6:35)

If you want to get a little taste of what God is like, try loving your enemies, lending money to those you know won’t pay you back, and then try being kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. What does this do to one’s sense of justice and fairness? What could this possibly be about? Jesus can’t be serious about this, can he?

Here’s what I think. I think Jesus is getting us to think this way because he wants us to see something important about ourselves.

After all, what are we thinking here… that we are God’s friends, that we always pay back what we borrow, and that we are most certainly grateful and holy, and that’s why it’s so hard for us to understand why God would ask us, the holy ones, to be kind to all these wicked and ungrateful folks? Gee, somehow we’re going to have to find it in ourselves to love these awful people. But I suppose that if God can do it, we can too. It will be a stretch, but we will try… Is that what this is about?

Hardly. Here’s what I think it means:

There is relatively little difference between the most ungrateful, wicked people I can think of and me, and I had better be deeply grateful that God is, in fact, “unfair” in this way, because otherwise there would be no hope for me. I know this is what Jesus is saying because the very next verse is: “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful [to you].” And that is followed up with: “Do not judge and you will not be judged.” See where He’s going with this?

When you look at it this way, it changes the whole picture.

Love your enemies and be kind to those who, like you, have received the kindness of God when they didn’t deserve it. And if you are ever tempted to think of God as being unfair, then go all the way and rejoice in the glorious inequity of grace that has made unlikely room for you and me, and in that same spirit of “unfairness,” make room in your heart for others.

You have to always be on the lookout. A little self-righteousness goes a long way.

Blaise Pascal

Here is something you can know about every human being regardless of faith or religion, even if they say something to the contrary: They are searching for God. How can I be so sure about this? Because we were made this way. God put the need for Him in each one of us. Every people group, anywhere on the planet at any time in history gives clear evidence of worship. We are trying to fill a vacuum inside of us. Blaise Pascal wrote 350 years ago that money, power, pleasure, and prestige are all things we shovel into the big black hole we all have in our lives called “Only God fits here,” and that is why we can’t get “no satisfaction” without Him.

Everybody has this need. You don’t have to tell anyone they have it, you only need to know they do, and when you speak about yours, you are telling them something they know even though they might deny it. So tell them anyway.

Here is Solomon’s expression of the same thing: “I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” (Ecclesiastes 3:10-11)

There it is. God has purposely frustrated everyone. He has given us all a big, big heart and a little tiny mind. The mind can’t possibly grasp what the heart knows. This is, in fact, my personal definition of all of art. Art is human beings trying to grapple with having a big, big heart and a little tiny mind.

One of Pascal’s most famous quotes puts the same thing this way: Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point. “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”

This is why no one will ever be argued into becoming a Christian. No mind is big enough to know this. You can only access this truth through the heart. That’s not to say intellect isn’t important. Pascal is one of the greatest Christian apologists of all time, but in all his rationalization of faith, he is only trying to remove the mental obstacles that keep someone from believing – from accessing the heart.

Pascal wrote a blazing poem about his conversion experience. It begins with “Fire!” and goes on to capture the emotional experience of opening up his heart and having God fill it up with Himself. It meant so much to him, he wrote it on a piece of paper and had it sewn into the lining of his coat which he wore until his death at the young age of 39.

You can’t force this on anyone; you can only walk alongside and point to your own experience when asked to do so. Though you probably can’t tell anybody about their need for God, you can know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it is there. And when you talk about your own need, you can know, in spite of what anyone says, that you are speaking their language as well.

Gives new meaning to that statement by the two disciples who were unknowingly walking with the resurrected Christ when they said, “Did not our hearts burn within us as we walked along the way?” Little tiny minds talking… listening… big, big hearts burning!

The Presidential Manse

While at Lancaster Bible College, I have been staying in a guest room in the basement of the college’s Presidential Manse. Built in 1955, it is a house that has had an unusual history, its major claim to fame being that it survived a move of 250 feet to avoid being destroyed by the routing of a state highway through its living room.

Initially, the state condemned the property and paid the owners the value of the house and land, but when those same owners were unable to find any new homes in the area they liked, they bought the house back and had it moved out of harm’s way.

“This process began with the excavation of a new basement,” says a brochure about the manse titled, “A Legacy of Love.” “Then the house was dug out and supported on wheels. Inside, Anna (the owner at the time) simply took mirrors off the walls. No packing or other precautions were required. The actual move took one day, as two bulldozers pulled the house up the ramp from the old foundation, across the field, and centered it over the new basement space – without even one crack in the masonry walls!”

Who would care that much about a house to go to all this trouble to move it when it probably would have cost the same, maybe even less, to build a new one on the new location? Someone must have had a love for this particular house. It’s interesting how this story gives the house value. Ever since I heard the story, I’ve been looking around the house and asking myself what makes it so special. I’ve finally concluded it isn’t anything intrinsic in the house itself – it’s pretty much of an ordinary house, though beautifully remodeled and appointed by the President’s wife – it’s the value the owner placed on it by buying it back and moving it. The owner’s love made it valuable.

How like you and me this is. What is it about us that would make God buy us back and set us on a new foundation? Nothing… except His love. Give yourself a second look in the mirror today. Extra special? Well, no, not really. But God thinks so… and that makes it so.

As you might imagine, I’m thinking about another house that is worth saving because you are making it so by sharing your gifts with us. We aren’t completely out of the woods yet, but when we are, I will look at our house and see something more than just the house it once was – I will see a legacy of love made possible by you. Thank you for all you are doing.

So I’m in a class at Lancaster Bible College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on Christianity and Culture (sound like I’m in my element?) by a professor whose recent book is Getting the Blues: What Blues Music Teaches Us About Suffering and Salvation (sound like I might like this guy?), and though this is midway through the second hour and a half class and my voice is tired, my spirit is not. Since my chapel talk in the morning, I’ve been deconstructing the Christian subculture and finding that these kids are for the most part ready to have it deconstructed. Hardly anyone is fighting me like they often do. This is what I hear them saying so far, “Finally, someone is saying it. Thank you!”

I’m pumped. These kids want to follow Jesus, not conform to a Christian culture. And they’re not just filling up their blank notebooks with all the right things to think; they are thinking some of their own thoughts and rethinking what they’ve been taught. There is hope for the church, my friends, and this is a Bible College, mind you. I would normally expect to find the thinkers/questioners at a more liberal arts college. The Bible College is where you go to learn the Bible. But these kids are doing more than that. They want to learn the Bible, or they wouldn’t be here, but they also want know how the Bible fits into the real world.

Getting it right is one thing; getting it real is another. You can get it right, but if it doesn’t touch your real life – if you didn’t grapple with anything to get it, you didn’t struggle for it, or wonder about it, or question it in any way, then it will mean little to you, and you will lose it as fast as you can say the word “Graduate.”

But back to midway through my second class on Christianity and Culture, that’s when I got this little treat. A student in the back row raised his hand and said he just texted his mom that I was at that moment leading a discussion in his class and his mom wrote right back, “NO WAY!!!!!! I became a Christian at a John Fischer concert in 1979.” And then this young man proceeded to say, “That means I probably wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you!”

God is doing a most wonderful thing through all of us in this world. It’s a tapestry woven through time and space. You are in it, and I am too, and we know very little about how it is all connected, but some day we will, and it will all be part of the amazing glory of God.

I’m on the road again after a pretty quiet summer, at least travel-wise. I knew I’d be a little rusty about getting everything ready so for once I was ahead of the game until I noticed a message I missed from the airport shuttle company that they would be coming 25 minutes early. I read the message just as the knock came to the door. Luckily everything was already packed so I grabbed the University of Southern California sweatshirt from under the bed knowing I would probably need it in Pennsylvania and rushed out the door.

The sweatshirt proved a little warm for the plane, but I wore it anyway because the t-shirt I had on underneath it was full of holes and Clorox stains. (More on that some other time.)

There were a couple times in the airport and on the plane where I was aware of a faint urine smell. It wasn’t bad – just enough to notice. I did look around each time and try and figure out where the smell was coming from, and usually there was someone nearby who looked like they hadn’t had a bath in a week. So I surmised it was them, and went on with my business.

On my second flight – the one from Philadelphia to Baltimore – I got a little chill switching from inside to outside and back in again and started to sneeze. That’s when I buried my nose into my elbow, the considerate germ-free way to sneeze in public – and smelled it. The faint urine smell I’d smelled all day was on me. One of our dogs had probably been lying on the sweatshirt under the bed. And here I had pegged at least three people that day with not taking proper care of themselves.

How often is the thing we judge others for really our problem that we don’t see? Actually I think it is true most of the time. We probably wouldn’t even be aware of it, in someone else, if it wasn’t our problem in the first place.

What smell are you carrying around all the time that you put on everyone else? And isn’t it amazing how many people have it? By golly, its everywhere you turn. What is the world coming to, anyway? When are these people going to get it together and get cleaned up?

If any Catch readers are in the vicinity of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, I’ll be speaking in chapel at Lancaster Bible College over the next three mornings at 9 a.m. Would love to meet you!

We are helping to make it easy for people to come to know the Lord without even trying. Our attitude points the way. Here’s how:

By being accessible. Our lives are an open book. Paul says we are letters “known and read by everybody” (2 Corinthians 3:2). Christians should be the most accessible people on the planet. The reason is: we contain Christ. Someone rummaging around in our lives is going to bump into Jesus. Can’t help it. This isn’t about being a good witness; it’s about being who we are.

By being imperfect. Our ordinary, fallible, broken lives are a constant source of life poured out to others. It is through our sin that others come to know forgiveness. It is through our suffering that others come to know God’s comfort. It is through our sickness that others come to know God’s healing. It is through our pain that others discover joy. It is through our death that others find life. (2 Corinthians 4:12)

By being non-judgmental. This attitude is the natural and normal result of finding out what a total jerk you are (and that word is about four stages removed from what I dare not print here). When you are the poster child for how far grace will go, you can’t possibly bring anything close to judgment upon another human being. Judgment is only for those who are working their way to heaven and relatively sure about already making it. People who know they don’t deserve heaven don’t really care who else gets in.

By being full of gratitude. This is what makes you pleasant to be around. This is what makes you approachable. You just can’t believe you get to breathe another breath. You can’t believe you get forgiven. You don’t know why you are loved and accepted, but you’re not going to bring it up in case one of God’s angels might find out they made a mistake and put you in the wrong group! Truly, God must have made a mistake when He put me in with the good people.