John Fischer The Catch

So my son is 11, my daughter is 29 and my wife is… is… (she’s going to read this)… 39… and they are all telling me I have to check out this new song, “Coming Home” by the rap group Diddy-Dirty Money featuring Skylar Grey on the chorus. Something tells me that if it communicates across the age span I have in my family, it must be pretty special.

What I found was a refreshingly honest self-evaluation full of regret and self-incrimination: “What if the twins ask why I ain’t married to their mom?” and “What if my son stares with a face like my own and says he wants to be like me when he’s grown?”

These are the harsher rap sections of the song that are musically rescued each time by a beautifully melodic chorus sung with a great deal of sensitivity by Skylar Grey: “Let the rain wash away all the pain of yesterday. I know my kingdom awaits and they’ve forgiven my mistakes, I’m coming home…” The song is basically a musical rendition of how grace and forgiveness cover up our messes.

Home is the mess; home is the loss; home is where I blew it, but home is also the place where forgiveness and grace covers all. So come on home. Embrace it all…  Ain’t no place like home.

Song and video:

Song and lyrics:

Post Memorial Day thoughts

We were young
We have died
Remember us
 

Thomas Edison High School in Philadelphia sustained 54 casualties in the Vietnam War, highest in the nation. Fifty-four out of a total of 58,272. Like those kids from Thomas Edison High, they were, most of them, just kids. The gravestones bear that out. Born in ’48; died in ’69. Yanked from football games, sock hops and drag races and dropped by helicopter in the jungle in the middle of a firestorm. They had no idea what they were getting into. Nothing could have possibly prepared them for this.

No matter what we thought about that war, or think about it today, it doesn’t change the fact that they died, and they died doing what they were called to do. They were called up to serve their country, and they went.

Here’s why we honor them: they did the right thing for the right reason. They answered the call because of loyalty to their country. Doesn’t matter if the country was divided over whether the war was right or wrong; they still did the right thing for the right reason.

Sometimes we have to break it down like that. It’s not a perfect world. We can’t control everything. But we can control what we do, and why we do it.

Think about it. Are you doing the right thing for the right reason? It makes a lot of difference whether you can take the heat of criticism or endure the hardship of completing a difficult task.

For a moment last night I lost it. I lost sight of the goal. I looked elsewhere for a congregation and forgot I already had one. I lost track of the fact that many of you, for reasons known to you and God, have walls and barriers between you and the church, and that we have been a surrogate church for you. Know that we take this seriously and have no intention of abandoning our post.

I have told you that we are building a prototype of the kingdom of God here that will draw people to Jesus and not away from him, and this is what we are doing and will continue to do. The church is changing. We want to be where the new thing is that God is doing. New wine needs to be in new skins.

We’ve been through a lot together. For me to so easily look to another source of income must have appeared terribly ungrateful to so many of you who have supported us so faithfully for so long. Thank you, and we continue to need you as we always have.

I did receive some nice invitations to pursue staff opportunities in churches on the other side of the country, and though flattered, we are not that easily moved. In fact, at this time we are not going anywhere.

No, like Peter out on the water, I got distracted by the wind and the waves and the fact that what I was doing defies natural law, and took my eye of the goal for just a moment and felt myself sinking. It’s not a good feeling.

I learned that it’s not enough to just have a goal; you have to keep your eye on it and keep moving towards it.

In the process of applying for a teaching pastor position, I started to reflect on and write down a number of things I have learned over the years and hours I’ve spent speaking to audiences. I decided to share what I wrote with the Catch because I believe there are things here that will benefit us all.

My preparation to fill this role for you has been as a speaker to the Christian community at large for almost 30 years. I have made a career of speaking to all types of groups, all ages, and in many varying circumstances. In these demanding roles, the challenge is to entertain as well as teach, and I have learned to do both so that people laugh as they learn. I have also learned to make much of the laughter at my expense. People learn much faster if you point at yourself instead of pointing at them.

I have learned the utmost respect for my audience. I pray that I am never caught speaking down to people. I speak across – coming alongside and sharing life – uncovering truth in the ordinary human experiences common to us all. The greatest joy in teaching is to leave room for self-discovery. I seek not to tell as much as to lead people to where they can discover the truth for themselves. Giving people conclusions without showing them how you got there is pointless and leads to weakly held beliefs. Everyone brings their own mind and heart to a teaching; my job is to engage them, not force-feed them. I know I have done my job, not when someone feeds back what I said, but when they share what they discovered for themselves in their own words through listening to me.

And finally, the goal of all good teaching is action. A Sunday sermon without any changed lives is an anathema. The period at the end of the sentence is what to do about what you’ve heard. It’s the “So what?” of any talk that really counts.

Above all, the word of God is paramount. I consider the word alive and vibrant – energized by the Holy Spirit and translated by him to the mind and heart of each one. It is the substance of what I say. I consider it a sacred trust and a grave responsibility to be sure I am handling the word of God correctly. There is nothing casual about this. In today’s church, we may dress casually and speak casually, but the truth is and will always be serious business. If it’s true truth we speak, it will set people free. If it is not – if it’s altered or adulterated in any way – it will put us all in bondage.

[Yes, I am looking for a church that is looking for a teaching pastor. Feel free to suggest any opportunities you may know about. My goal is to not have to rely so much on the Catch for support, but until that happens, your donations are much appreciated.]

This is a line from a song by Terry Scott Taylor. The song is a tender painting of a woman who loved to walk with God in the morning, so God made sure they had one last morning together. He would take her, but not disturb that sacred moment.

I love this for at least two reasons. First, heaven is going to be a glorious place that will eclipse our best moments on earth, but darn if some of those earthly moments aren’t pretty glorious in their own right. So much so that God wouldn’t touch them. What experiences do you have that would rival heaven?

There is something about our experience of God on this earth that transcends time and space while still rooted in it. It’s a moment of meeting that is as special to God as it is to us. I believe it is for moments like these that He made us, and nothing can take them away. And in this lies the second reason. There is something that God experiences with fallen man that can’t be duplicated in heaven. In heaven, total communication is a given. On earth, it’s a rare beauty to be savored. It’s a relationship that only the boundaries of earth could create.

We were made for this. To experience God in these frail, fallible bodies tied to the ground yet filled with eternity. This is the glory of our existence — that He would share these moments with us, and cherish them, too.

There was a man in the early history of the human race as recorded in Genesis whose name was Enoch, and the scriptures say that he walked with God so much so that he never died, God just walked him right into heaven.

What are we here for, if not for this?

I just received the following email: “I just signed up for your ‘Catch.’ I am a new Christian. I call myself ‘in the closet’ because I am still not comfortable with the whole idea of it all. The Holy Spirit has grown in me this year; I feel like I am almost ready to come out. Anyway, thank you for today’s catch…”

To which I replied: “I am so glad you have recently joined us. You are precisely the kind of person we exist for. Hopefully, if you stick with us, you may be able to avoid a lot of the negative aspects of American Christianity that makes you want to stay in the closet. The gospel of Jesus Christ is nothing to be ashamed of, but many aspects of current Christianity are. We’re trying to reduce the amount of stuff you’ll have to unlearn some day.”

Ever thought about how much you’ve had to unlearn versus what you’ve learned in relation to your faith? My guess is that the former is greater than the latter. Take, for instance, our new reader’s tendency to not want to identify herself as a Christian. Why is that? Is she ashamed of the gospel or is she ashamed of an incorrect assumption of what a Christian is? Most people will grant you the opportunity to explain what and why you believe. They respect that. The problem here is what gets communicated automatically without saying anything.

What will get you out of the closet is your ability to put what you believe into your own words. It’s all about meaning versus assumption – relationship versus supposition.

I was in the process of beating myself up over something when an email from a friend arrived with the following verse: “The Lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing” (Zephaniah 3:17).

Wait a minute. God is taking great delight in me and I am beating myself up? What’s wrong with this picture? Obviously I do not have God’s view of myself. I have a warped view and I am going against God’s plan when I give into it. If we were all honest, I think we would find that this view is pretty typical. We continually feel like we are falling way short of what is expected of us spiritually, and to be perfectly honest, most of us probably think God is administering a good share of the beating. That is where we are all wrong about God.

Think about it like this: Why would God heap guilt and punishment on someone he went to such great lengths to save? Doesn’t make sense, does it? And yet we love to engage in this “woe is me” way of thinking. We love to punish ourselves as if we could pay for our own sins. Well God’s got other things in mind for us. He wants to delight in us. This is what life is all about, after all. God created us because it was his pleasure to do so. He made us so he could delight in us and we could delight in him. God gets joy out of every inch of his universe, but nothing like the joy he has over you and me.

Why is it so hard for us to believe this? Probably because it’s so rare in our human experience to have anyone experience sheer delight over someone else. We are so careful and guarded with our praise lest we unknowingly reward some wrong behavior. But God has already gathered up all our wrong doings and put them away on the cross, leaving him free to delight in us, and so he does.

Think about who we could be and what we could do if we really started believing this.

The gospel always calls us to do more than just choose sides.

There are so many issues dividing our country right now—abortion, gay marriage, capital punishment, gun control, universal health insurance, taxes—and in Washington, our legislators are divided right down the middle on everything according to party lines. But this is exactly what the problem is with politics: there are only two sides to everything. Any thinking person knows this can’t be true. There are nuances, subtleties and compromises everywhere, and yet the choice still comes down to one side or the other. Too much is at stake to cross party lines. And with little kindness and civility in the middle, the hope for gentle debate and reaching a more complicated, but equitable consensus is unlikely.

Where do Christians, or more importantly, where does the church fit into all this? Well, unfortunately the church has taken sides along with everyone else and lost its authority to speak into the deeper levels of these issues. The gospel, which values every human being and every human being’s right to freedom, justice and equality has lost its middle ground. While the truth should be speaking into both sides, it is being heard only in one.

But this doesn’t mean you and I can’t be wiser as individuals and act more responsibly with the truth. We need to always go deeper than just choosing sides. This will allow us to reach across the middle and value those who would otherwise be our enemies. We must remember these are real people we are talking about—people who like us, need Jesus. Making an enemy of someone for whom Christ died is not consistent with the message of the gospel.

This may not be able to be accomplished on a large scale but we can make a difference on a smaller personal scale where we live and work. We can reach across and value those on all sides of an issue. We can represent the love of Jesus to everyone. And we can listen and learn even from those with whom we might disagree.

“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ lend to ‘sinners,’ expecting to be repaid in full. 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. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”  (Luke 6:32-36)

The Isaiah House May Day Festival was another smashing success for the Marti Fischer Event Planning Team better known as Women of Vision. These volunteer members of Orange County Women of Vision are not satisfied with standing in the kitchen, serving the soup line and chatting among themselves. They are out with the women – the temporary female residents of the Isaiah House shelter for women without homes. In fact, it’s getting harder and harder to differentiate anymore between the two groups. Last night they were all dancing around the Maypole.

Yes, that’s right, a Maypole. The pole was our neighbor’s portable tetherball stand draped with 12 colorful ribbons. I was skeptical that anyone would want to do this, and once again I was wrong. Everyone did, and enthusiastically at that. There was skipping and dancing and clapping to the music and lots of laughter. I don’t know how Marti does it but she gets away with anything here. One new woman told me she came in late and heard all the commotion – the laughter and carrying on – and then she got closer and realized, “Oh, of course, it was the teacup lady!”

Along with a celebration of spring, they put out a table of paper, paints, glue, chalk, and molding clay for anyone to try their hand at creating. Some of the pieces were remarkable, but the most memorable was a poster that read, “In the end it’s all about love.” Love has created an attitude of acceptance and equality. There is no “us” and “them” here anymore. There is trust, and because of this, there is just “us.”

One picture came with a poignant story. It’s a sketch of palm trees on a deserted island with a very large, warm sun in the background. “It’s what I think about all the time,” the artist told me, “…being all alone on an island in the sea – just me and my children.”

I was overwhelmed yesterday by your birthday wishes and numerous comments about the Catch and its place in your life. That was truly my greatest gift – your affirmation.

The other remarkable gift I received was a poem from my wife, who does not write poetry as a general rule. I share it here with you as a tribute to that part of the nature of God that we all received and need to cultivate in the desire to give. What good is a beautiful moment if you can’t share it with someone?

A Monarch For You

Outside my afternoon window,
Wings beating like breath
Through the first winds of spring,
A monarch appeared
Touching lightly on the limbs of a peach tree

Black and bright yellow sang out
From the green foliage behind
And I put down my work for awhile
To watch it fly

I thought of the mild joy
Of the day
And the lovely little creature
Soon to die
No longer to be that beautiful,
That light in air

My heart moved with it
And the languid day
Wanting to share it with you

I thought to catch
The thing itself
And present it to you
In a jar
But I knew you
Would only be offended by the cage

Still wanting to give you
The beauty of its flight
Around blooming roses
Through the peach boughs
I thought to draw it
But my hand was not agile enough
To hold its beauty either

I have placed it here on this page
The fleeting beauty soon to die
Caught
       For a moment
            In my longing to give it to you.