John Fischer The Catch

In that Gideon’s Bible, there’s blood spilled on every page. – Bill Mallonee, Vigilantes of Love

Helen Mirren, 2007 Academy Award winner for best female actor in a lead role, had a short presentation speech in the next year’s Academy Awards ceremony in which she began by rattling off words from the dark side of human experience such as greed, vengeance, jealousy, and rage, and gradually made her way into more positive aspects of humanity such as hope, love, and kindness. Her point was to show how movies covered them all, because they are all part of the human experience.

It occurred to me that you could say the same thing about the Bible. Greed, vengeance, jealousy, rage, hope, love, kindness… it’s all there just like in the movies. But so is Christ. This is what it means that Christ Jesus came in the flesh: the truth was laid into the human fabric. Life goes on in all its human drama, but the light came, and shines into and out of that darkness.

So bring it all on – the blood, the sweat and the tears. Christ does not meet us only in the sweet by and by. He meets us here, in the middle, through the full range of human emotions and experiences. That’s why He was a man – flesh and blood man. True grit. Just like in the movies.

I didn’t really notice it until Marti came into my life, but she was appalled by what she observed around my family as a torrid sense of sarcasm. I always thought we were a happy family with a great sense of humor, but Marti brought into perspective that our sense of humor was almost always at someone’s expense, and not necessarily someone else’s expense. It could come at the expense of one of us – my mother being a favorite target. I can see now how she would even play into it – act dumber than I knew she was – just to get the attention of being the goat of the sarcastic comments.

This might appear harmless if it were not attached to a longer list – symptoms of living not by the New Covenant of Christ’s blood, but the Old Covenant of the rigid, unyielding law. Old Covenant Christians we were, a distinction all too common in the church today. We talk about the gospel and uphold Christ and his death for us on the cross – something that made possible an adequacy based not in ourselves but in Him – and yet we lived as if it all depended on us. And if we were at all successful at giving a good impression as Christians, all sorts of horrible attitudes ensued. Marti has sense discovered and listed them as the following:

1. First you develop a form of snobbery. You look down on people who are not living up to the standards that you are. It shows up as prejudice. Certain types of people are acceptable and others you cannot stand and wonder how anybody can stand them.

2. You begin to develop a critical spirit; others do not measure up. The ride home from church can turn into a litany of those who are not measuring up.

3. Where you feel you are strong, you begin to put down those who cannot make it in that area.

4. You become absolutely intolerant of others, impatient of lack of progress on their part.

5. You develop a form of sarcasm, the way you talk about people – the names you give them.

6. Bigotry begins to emerge.

You can see by this list that we were pretty well down the line of famous Old Covenant Christian attitudes. The New Covenant has no room for these assessments. You are so amazed at God’s grace, for instance, in spite of yourselves, that nothing comes at anyone else’s expense. Christ has already paid all prices, and we walk in that freedom.

It might be good to check your attitude with this list. Should you find any of these familiar, it would be a first run indication that you might want to consider the source.

Gnostic Pentagram

“If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.” (1 John 1:8-10)

As a child growing up in an evangelical church, I can remember 1 John 1:9 as being one of the first verses we memorized, after John 3:16, of course. How come we didn’t memorize 1 John 1:8 or 10?

I can just here it now… “First John one, eight:” (you always had to say the reference at the beginning and the end of the verse) “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us… First John one, eight.”

“Good work, Johnny. Here’s your gold star.”

Not gonna happen.

Why was I completely unaware of 1 John 8 and 10 until I studied 1 John as an adult? Why were 1 John 8 and 10 a revelation later in life, as if I’d never heard them before, and I was raised on the Bible? Well I guess the answer to that is that there was no basis in our understanding, nor were there models in the leaders we followed to help interpret the fact that as Christians we will continually deal with sin, and that, indeed, it is a worse state to live giving the impression that you don’t sin than to live in open confession of your sins.

And why are there two almost identical verses about living as if you didn’t have sin and only one verse to handle your sin when you do sin? Because living as if you had no sin is the more egregious error. In fact this failure to deal with sin is the main thrust of this whole first chapter.

Go back to verse six: “If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth” (1 John 1:6). The crux of the understanding is around the meaning of walking in darkness and walking in the light. We always thought walking in darkness was doing bad things, being on the dark side, being with bad people. When, in fact, walking in darkness is to live so as to hide the bad things you do. If walking in the light means being revealed, walking in darkness means being secret.

This interpretation of 1 John takes on even more significance when you understand why John wrote this in the first place. He was trying to refute the Gnostic Christians who had wedded the new teachings of Christ with the Greek separation of the physical and spiritual realms and come up with the idea that it didn’t matter how you lived or what you did in the physical world as long as you believed all the right things in the spiritual one. (Sound familiar to anyone?)

So John builds his whole argument around the fact that Jesus came in the flesh – we saw him and touched him – and our faith has to work in the flesh so then we had better be honest about our sinful natures because we still possess them. The Gnostics were living as if they had no sin while they were sinning all over the place and John called that walking in darkness.

It is far worse, and does greater damage to others and the truth to hide your sin than to bring it out into the open.  Let me ask you, “Where do you see this true meaning of 1 John lived out? Where is the gathering of believers where one is more likely to confess sin than to hide it? Tell me, seriously, because I want to know.

Show me a church that has kids memorizing 1 John 1:8 and I’ll move so I can go there.

“First John one, eight: If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us… First John one, eight.”

“Good work, Johnny. Here’s your gold star.”

There’s something about being around the Isaiah House women that brings out the truth in me. There’s nothing neat, nothing tidy, nothing expected. All they are hoping for is dinner. So when they get a show and presents and people taking an interest in them, they aren’t quite sure what to do. There are a few who seem like they might be suspicious (that’s impossible to judge – it’s just their body language), but the great majority take it for what it is, and I find them amazingly trusting.

Maybe that is why everything that happens there seems more real than what happens anywhere else. It’s almost like it doesn’t have to happen, but it does anyway. You are taken for face value at Isaiah House. If I walk around feeling awkward that’s my feeling entirely. No one is making me feel that way.

Prior to our first visit there, I was anticipating being judged by the women. Judge? They don’t have the time or the energy. They don’t care what motivates you; if you are there for them they will gladly receive whatever your bring.

In comparison, I feel so loaded up with pretense, judgment and expectations; it’s amazing that anything real gets through at all. It’s a weary game we play that breeds suspicion and lack of trust. We try to do things we have no business doing, like judge someone else’s motives when we don’t even know our own.

There’s only one way to get over lack of trust. Start trusting. Become vulnerable. Risk who you are to find yourself. It doesn’t matter what anyone else is thinking (you can never determine that anyway); it only matters what you do.

Leave it to the women of Isaiah House to teach me what I thought I’d been teaching: “We have renounced secret and shameful ways; we do not use deception, nor do we distort the word of God. On the contrary, by setting forth the truth plainly we commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.” (2 Corinthians 4:2)

It was a very merry unbirthday party last night at the Isaiah House for women without homes. As luck would have it the Queen of Hearts wasn’t around when the King (yours truly), enjoying his moment of glory, declared, as is his right, all of the Isaiah House Guests pardoned from the Queen’s “Off with their heads!” way of settling all difficulties.

The March Hare (Marti), always advocating solving all difficulties by throwing a tea party, decided an unbirthday party was the best way of celebrating a birthday that was most likely lost in the anonymity of homelessness. The women enthusiastically responded.

But the highlight of the evening was when one guest was begrudgingly coerced into reading her poem “No One Saw Me.” In a moment of unveiled revelation, we were all allowed us to step through the looking glass into her world’s reflection. We gratefully offer it here for you to do the same.

No One Saw Me
by Beverly Cunningham

Probably started at my birth
Through the nursery window, to see
Oh how beautiful the babies are
But no one looked at me.

As I grew older
The only “girl” my Mom’s constant pleas
She looks like her Dad
Why didn’t my only girl, look like me?

Mom was so beautiful
Fair skin, flowing hair
Small-waisted, breathtaking
A “Maiden so Fair”

But me ah, the tomboy
Dark complexion, not so thin
For that was back in the days
When my features weren’t “in”

House full of teen boys
Nine brothers – popular to see
But I was invisible
My friends were chosen – not me

Growing into a loner
Wearing a mask – the “Class Clown”
My best friend name was “unknown”
No one really saw me when I was around

So I lost myself
Into whatever was sent my way
Spent years – lost years
Pain expected from day to day

Until one day I was passing
A store window and did see…
Backed up and saw what?
A beautiful woman – it was me!

He said, “Hope you like it
This is what I wanted you to see
But you never saw it coming
Because “You never saw me!”

“But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.” (1 John 1:5-7)

I believe that there is significance attached to the order in which John mentions these elements. Most of us live as if this verse read: “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin, and we have fellowship with one another.” At least that’s the way we would prefer it to be. Get cleansed privately so we can have squeaky-clean fellowship. But this is about messy, dirty fellowship. This is about going through the whole process of sinning, having our sin revealed and getting cleansed, together.

First off, walking signifies living. It’s about what we do as we pass through life. This is not a one-time experience, nor is it even a frequent occurrence like a once-a-week meeting. It is a state of being – a way of life. The verb tenses in the original Greek indicate this. This could have been translated: “If we are walking in the light, we will be having fellowship with each other and getting cleansed from our sin at the same time.” Which really means that all these things are happening at once, all the time.

Fellowship comes out of not only sharing the light, but sharing our vulnerability as well, and the fellowship is as much about discovering that we are all sinners as it is about discovering we are all forgiven. The fellowship begins at the point of being revealed. There is a pain associated with the process of being revealed, but the pain is lessened by discovering that we are not alone. We are letting our guard down… losing our masks… coming apart, as it were, but doing it together. We are a walking support group.

And getting cleansed, too. That’s the best part.

That’s what I mean by the order being important. We’d love to get the cleansing part over with away from everyone else and then have fellowship – all of us having arrived at the same place where sin is but a past memory. But it doesn’t work that way. Sin is a constant reality, as is our forgiveness and cleansing. We walk together. The light reveals us all together. We get cleansed together.

This is perhaps one of the hardest things about what has become our traditional church environment, it has largely become a place where we put our best foot forward – our most sin-free self (we’re all supposed to be clean) – when, in fact, church should be more like a support group of sinners.

Because we are all like this and all struggling, it doesn’t take much to start. Just one person stepping into the light. Others will follow. It’s human nature, and the way God made us. If you are in a “fellowship” that refuses to open up, that is a group that is choosing to walk in darkness, and going nowhere.

What does it mean to walk in the light? Actually it’s very close to what we have been discussing in our teleconference for the last two weeks about living unveiled.

The true meaning of walking in the light has been hidden for years behind teaching about perfection and the expectation that being a Christian is all about making you into a better person than you were before your conversion. (I always hated that this left me out of the equation seeing as I’ve been a Christian for as long as I can remember.) Indeed, there can be nothing further from the true meaning of walking in the light than this. It is, in fact, thinking like this that actually leads to walking in darkness and walking, as Moses did, with a veil or mask over your face.

Walking in the light means stepping into the light and what does the light do? It reveals. It burns away everything that isn’t you. It sears pretense. It leaves you naked in your soul, so that the Lord can be seen. You can’t walk in the light and have any secrets. You can’t walk in the light and think you are better than anybody. You can’t walk in the light and sin without everybody knowing it.

Walking in the light actually makes you one with the human race. *

Here is the biblical passage on walking in the light:
“This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.” (1 John 1:5-7)

Here is my paraphrase of the biblical passage on walking in the light:
This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is the all-revealing light; around him no darkness can exist. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet hide or veil ourselves in any way, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we step into the revealing light of Christ (as He Himself is that light), we embrace whatever group of sinners we are around, because we are all being revealed together, and happily cleansed together by the blood of Jesus, his Son, who keeps on purifying us when we sin.

Gives new understanding to Marti’s idea of walking alongside, doesn’t it? Walking alongside while walking in the light will reveal the Lord and us at the same time.

[Note: we wish this revealing/cleansing process could happen in private, but it can’t because we cannot be trusted to tell the truth, so we instead have to constantly live in the revealing light of the truth. And, besides, if it could happen in private, then we wouldn’t be having the real fellowship of forgiven sinners celebrating together, we’d be having punch and cookies in the Fellowship Hall and what good is that?]

* I have a song about this (joining the human race). Here are the lyrics:

Not The Only One
Words and Music by John Fischer

I used to think that I was right
A lonely candle in the night
And while the heart of the world was breaking
I could not feel the aching
The mantle had passed down to me
This thing was my destiny
But while the world was out there dying
I was in here lying to myself

For all the knowledge I had gained
Put me on a higher plane
And I became another
No one was my brother
And the loving message He brought down
Turned into a hollow sound
And then I heard Him calling
And His words sent me falling to my knees

You’re not the only one with truth
You’re not the only one with eyes
You’re not the only one
The only one who cries
You’re not the only one

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

And then I saw Him lifted up
The wounded one who drank the cup
Of death for all the dying
The end of justifying
And I laid my mantle on the ground
And felt the rain come pouring down
The rain of my religion
Falling down like weeping from the sky

You’re not the only one with truth
You’re not the only one with eyes
You’re not the only one
The only one who cries
You’re not the only one

And then I saw as in a dream
Reflections of His glory stream
On unsuspecting faces
Enraptured in His graces
And the lost who now had all been found
Sang in pure unfettered sound
A song I knew from memory
Though I’d never heard it sung before

And then the host brought out the wine
And bid us all come and dine
At the banquet of the living
The table of forgiving
And as we raised our glasses high
And tears were forming in our eyes
I heard His words remind me
Of what I’d heard so many times before

You’re not the only one with truth
You’re not the only one with eyes
You’re not the only one
The only one who cries
You’re not the only one

The St. Louis Cardinals baseball team was piling on. They were jumping all over each other, tearing the shirt off the guy who just won the game with a home run, and generally carrying on like they had just won the 2011 World Series. If you had just come on the scene in time for the celebration, that’s what you would have thought, when, in fact, they had just won game 6 to tie the series. It was the way they won it that sparked the celebration. They were behind most of the game but able to keep clawing back, and in the 9^th and the 10^th innings, after giving up two runs to the Texas Rangers in the top of each inning, they were twice one strike away from being eliminated from the contest, and both times the batter delivered a clutch hit that scored two tying runs to keep the game going, until they finally won it on a home run in the bottom of the 11^th. Twice it was: “Strike three; Texas celebrates,” and instead it was: “Big hit; game tied.”

I like this celebration. It was for sure fueled by a huge release of tension, being twice on the brink of elimination and hanging on, but it was also fueled by the sudden realization: “Hey, we’ve got one more game! We can beat these guys tomorrow!”

I think we need more Game six celebrations. We need to celebrate the fact that however hard it’s been, we’re still in the game. We’ve got one more day. Don’t celebrate the win; celebrate the continuation. Celebrate being alive. Celebrate another chance. Celebrate the fact that the overall score is even: three games a piece. We have just as much a chance to win this thing as the other guy. In fact, in life, because of Jesus Christ, the win is coming – it’s guaranteed – so let’s celebrate the fact that we’re still in it.

Live like today is game seven. They haven’t gotten rid of you after all! You still have today!

(I know it might be a little hard for Texas Ranger fans to get into this celebration, but imagine yourself with one more shot at game seven. Even Steven. Besides, there’s always next year, that’s if you can get by the Angels.)

Well it’s that time of year again when little ghosts and goblins come to your door trying to scare you. Mixed into this will be football players, firemen, princesses and your occasional screaming face along with an axe murderer or two. We happen to live on a street that is so into this celebration that realtors have to disclose what happens here on Halloween so there will be no surprises the first October after you buy a house on Oak Street. The police close off a 2-block stretch to traffic, which makes for a lot more peace of mind for parents. Believe me, the press of people is intense. We will purchase over $100 worth of candy and run out by 7:30.

We have heard that our neighbors are going to rig a disco ball this year over the street and hire a DJ to play music from their porch. It’s going to be a Masquerade Ball in the street.

Hopefully more Christians are getting over abdicating this holiday to the devil and running away from their homes. That’s one sure way to let him win. Remove your light from your house and your neighborhood.

I’m sure your street is not as intense as ours, but one thing is probably the same: the whole neighborhood will be out and about meeting neighbors and in some cases meeting people they have never spoken to until now. It would be a shame and I would go as far as to say a victory for the forces of darkness to allow the unfounded fears attached to Halloween to darken a home where Christ lives on the one night of the year the whole neighborhood is coming over.

What a great teleconference we had tonight! We encourage those who were unable to join us to listen in on the recorded session by dialing 218/237-3850 and use access code 124393 and Recording number 102611.

I thank you for your ever-mounting interest as we continue creating a community of what I can best describe as finders-seekers.

God knows we like to be part of something bigger than ourselves.  It is a part of His thinking – His design for each of us.  He created us to seek new beginnings, to ask “why,” to think, to find, to act upon the reality and the glory of His eternal Word.

Your stories, our stories: some end of the road stories, some turn around prickly stories – we are an odd mismatch of beauty and pain.

We are SeekerFinders entangled together – not in a barbwire maze but within a community of faithful and disenfranchised, all at different stages of finding, yet all still seeking.  FinderSeekers all.

We remain committed to you, to the growth of this community, and to helping you find God in the world. Together we can make an impact in the marketplace that comes from being bearers of Christ, spreading His fragrance wherever we go. And who is equal to this task? We all are, because God has made us adequate as servants of His new covenant.

As we seek to help you to this end, we ask that you might be generous with your gifts at this time. The scriptures encourage those who are taught to share all good things with their teachers. It’s a mutual relationship and we are looking to you for financial support.

We are full of gratitude to you and wish you would invite others to join our on-line citizens as fellow shareholders in the lives of many, where the yield is a greater connection between each other and thus a greater impact in the world.