John Fischer The Catch

There’s going to be a tea party tonight. It has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with love.

Thanks to some of you, some 60 women or so who are without a home will be able to pick out their own cup and saucer, sip tea from it in grand fashion, imagine they are rich (when they really are) and then slip it away in their humble bag of earthly possessions to treasure and use another time. Perhaps one day, in a much-improved reality, they will pull out that cup and remember today and the fact that someone brought some joy into their life even for a moment.

It’s okay, you know, to bring someone some measure of joy even when you can’t change their situation.

Come to think of it, God didn’t really change a whole lot about our situation when He sent His Son into our world. He just entered it. He subjected Himself to our reality that He might meet us here. He didn’t change a whole lot about it; He just came.

There will be some joy tonight, there will be some laughter, there will be some surprise, and maybe some tears. Some might even tell you it was worth being homeless just to find this place – this home where they are loved. Perhaps that is one way to look at the hardship and suffering in this world that so often defies our understanding. To find that God meets us here in the middle of it might just make it – dare I say – worth it. I don’t know; you’ll have to ask them.

But I do know there’s going to be a tea party tonight. It has nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with love.

The last couple Catches have created some good discussion and many of you have pointed out that the real problem with who we claim to be and how we talk about our faith in the marketplace has to do with labels and semantics. In my lifetime, I’ve been a “Christian,” an “evangelical,” a “Jesus Freak,” a “believer” and a “follower of Christ.”  Each one of these labels has been useful for a while until it developed bad or confusing connotations and I started to favor another label that wasn’t “tainted” yet with negative or inaccurate implications. It’s important to realize these issues spring from popular interpretations of these labels not what they refer to. They could all refer to something wholly true, but indicate something false based on how the term is interpreted by the media or the majority of the public at any given time. At best it’s just a label; at worst, it’s a stereotype.

In other words, we will always have this problem because we are dealing with words. Not that words and definitions are not important – they are – but the true definition of a Christian lies within you and me. Ultimately it is not a label that goes into the marketplace. It’s not a label that goes anywhere. Ultimately, it is YOU. YOU define “Christian,” “evangelical,” “Jesus Freak,” “believer,” “follower of Christ,” and anything else we have come up with or will come up with. It’s the best way to think about this. The only real definition of a Christian anyone can ever understand is YOU.

YOU walk into the world; YOU walk into the marketplace; YOU represent Christ in your neighborhood, your community; YOU are it. YOU are God’s message to the world, because you can’t just tell people about the gospel, you can only truly live the gospel. You don’t write it or speak it; you are it. As my wife likes to say: you will know a true Christian because acts of love are taking place, not just words.

And if there is a bad rap on any one of the labels the world uses for a Christian, YOU and only YOU can change that. If people meet YOU and have to redefine what they thought a Christian was, that is a good thing. That is the way it should be.

See how important you are?

“Therefore, since through God’s mercy we have this ministry, we do not lose heart. Rather, 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.” (italics mine) – 2 Corinthians 4:1-2

Love understands.

Part of loving someone is to attempt to understand them. If someone who is opposed to Christianity for whatever reason determines that you are seeking to understand them for no other reason than to know them better, they will feel loved.

And this will be a whole new feeling for many people who have had contrary experiences with impatient, dogmatic Christians.

To have a Christian genuinely try and understand a person with an opposing argument or a rival world religion just to understand them, not change them – that would be new.

The problem with evangelicalism for as long as I can remember is that doctrine has always been paramount. Believing right is more important than believing. Anyone with another belief or worse yet, an atheist, is seen as either a threat or an enemy. The only option with such a person is to correct them. In this thinking, being right is more important than anything including being loving. So the only option with someone of opposing or differing belief systems is a sort of stalemate protected by a guarded distance. Any meaningful encounter with such a person must include furthering the Christian agenda in some manner in order to overcome what is wrong about what they believe. If after repeated attempts, you get nowhere, then the relationship is usually unproductive and not worth wasting your time.

Evangelical rewrite of 1 Corinthians 13: “These three things remain: faith hope and love, but the greatest of these is conversion.”

Truth of the matter is, a relationship where love and understanding prevail is more likely to reach the desired evangelical goal than an argument, but this is hard to even point out because that makes love and understanding a means to an end when it is not.

God saves people; we don’t.
God changes people; we don’t.
God loves people; we do too.
God honors people; we do too.
God understands people; we try to.

There are circles of people today where, believe it or not, the most effective means to sharing your faith in Christ is by way of explaining why you are not a Christian. Today’s thoughts will shed some light on that.

There were a couple of you from the Chicago area who wanted more information about my friend’s poetry-reading ministry in that city after reading yesterday’s Catch (www.fischtank.com). Here are his own words:

I live in Chicago with my wife and 4 daughters where we do ministry in Chicago’s spoken word poetry community. Much of it involves my being the “token Christian” at several open mics around the city. It is very nontraditional and mostly involves trying to figure out what it is to be a follower of Christ in an artistic culture that often finds itself in conflict with the church. I have found that people don’t want to be preached at, but they are very open to discussing faith and spiritual things. I have also found that people will listen to people who love them.  Real love is such a rare commodity in our world that people will put up with almost anything from someone who loves them. I think that is why they often have a genuine respect for Jesus, but distrust the church. He showed love perfectly. We haven’t always done so well.

Have you found this to be true: When people explain why they are not a Christian, nine out of ten times you agree with them? Based on what they understand of Christianity and the church, I bet you wouldn’t be either.

Well that’s exactly what you should do. Announce you are not a Christian; you are a follower of Jesus. Resist the temptation to try and fix everything that’s wrong with Christianity in this culture. More times than not, what people are rejecting, you don’t want to be a part of anyway. This rejection of cultural Christianity can be a point of agreement opening the way for more meaningful dialogue on what a Christian is anyway.

It’s got to be this way, because, as my friend says, people are very open to discussing faith and spiritual things. Find where people are at and get there. It’s the more loving thing to do, and everyone is open to being loved.

One of our faithful readers is a guy with a fascinating ministry in Chicago. His mission field revolves around an open mic bar downtown that holds regular poetry readings and as such has developed its own poetic culture of thinkers and street philosophers. It’s a kind of modern day Areopagus where they brought Paul when he was discussing the gospel in the marketplace in Athens. The Areopagus was a place where “all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas” (Acts 17:21) Well our fellow reader has chosen this as a place where he can, as a poet himself, develop relationships with these people and give witness to Christ.

In a recent newsletter he described an encounter with two guys he labeled as a “Pacifist” and a “Brawler” just to keep them apart. As he described these men and their beliefs based on past experiences with Christianity, it was evident that they were quite knowledgeable about religion and the church. This is something I find true when we let people talk about what they know about God instead of just making them listen to what we know. We always find out they know more than we realized. In this instance he mentioned that the Pacifist and the Brawler disagreed on many things, “but they were united in their opposition to the church, both feeling the church had a history of abusing power and oppressing people.” Well who can argue with that? My friend went on to point out that in both of these things, the church was missing something central to the teachings of Jesus about letting God have vengeance and turning the other cheek.

This is just another indication of how we need to listen before we talk – and listen to connect and agree, not disagree. This is how we can build bridges into the world instead of erecting walls around us.

Later on our friend wrote, “I’m not smart enough to make them see the truth, or clever enough to explain it so they can understand.  They need God to open their eyes and draw them to Himself.” Is it ever anything else?

We should be helping to make it easy for people to come to know the Lord. We are signposts pointing the way.

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.

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 smug about already making it. People who know they don’t deserve heaven don’t 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 you aren’t supposed to be there!

My wife is my foremost critic when it comes to my writing and I am aware of a little dance I play with this. If I don’t want to have her look over something I’ve written it usually an indication it isn’t very good. Subconsciously I know that if I share it with her, she will confirm to me what I fear – that it isn’t very good – and I will have to do it over. On the other hand, when I want to share something with her, it usually means I don’t need to because I know it’s good.

Which leads me to one of the biggest mistakes of my life: Thinking that I am smarter than my wife.

Here’s why this is no good:

1) It’s not true. I’m not smarter than my wife; I merely think I am.

2) It wastes time. Think of all the times I’ve had to do something over because I didn’t listen to my wife in the first place. (Of course I knew better.)

3) It discounts another person – in this case it happens to be my wife – the last person I would want to discount. To devalue someone’s opinion is to devalue them.

4) I lose her valuable input. This is probably the most costly. Going it alone does just that.

Actually, it’s probably a good idea to not think of yourself as smarter than anyone. Then you can learn from everybody. Isn’t that a better way?

“As he [Jesus] went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’

‘Neither…'” said Jesus. (John 9:1-3)

We are always trying to play cause and effect with righteousness. Read your Bible; go to church; have your quiet time; and you will be a spiritual person, guaranteeing that things will go well for you. Fail to do these things and you leave yourself open to all kinds of bad things happening. And the converse is also the case. If things are going well, you must be doing it right, and if things are not well, you must have screwed up somewhere.

Christ’s answer as to the cause and effect of a man born blind was to detach the blindness from the normal human understanding of cause and effect. Sin didn’t have anything to do with it one way or another. There were reasons for the man’s blindness that had nothing to do with him, or his parent’s righteousness, or lack thereof.

The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. Job, a righteous man in anyone’s book, had the bottom fall out of his life. Lot, Abraham’s nephew, in the Old Testament appeared to be a compromising man with little moral backbone, and yet in the New Testament, we find out his righteous soul was being tormented day and night by the lawlessness around him. (2 Peter 2:7) “Righteous Lot?” That’s a real shocker.

All this means that the issue is not our lives fitting into some preconceived idea of righteousness or spirituality, but our faith holding fast regardless of the circumstances.

What happens when we lose a child, or a mate, or birth a mentally challenged baby?” Do we try and figure out what we did wrong (like Job’s friends did) or do we just accept what God sends our way and seek to find out, by faith, what He wants us to do?

“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.”

What work is God seeking to display in your life right now through what you cannot explain?

A frigid storm is descending on southern California with temperatures not to exceed 55 degrees today. Now to some of you that is no big deal, but in southern California, 55 degrees is like 21 degrees anywhere else. Rain threatens to postpone opening night at Angel Stadium. Snow conditions for the next three days in the mountains east of L.A. are better than in Vail, Colorado.

So what? Well, we’re simply not used to this in April. Actually, we’re not used to this anytime. This would be unusually cold weather for January, much less April. It’s an appropriate backdrop, however, to another song from the album “Still Life” – a song that comes out of the dead of winter, and wraps itself in the cold of December.

Brightest and best of the sons of the morning
Dawn on our darkness and lend us Thine aid
Star of the east the horizon adorning
Guide where our infant redeemer is laid

Cold on His cradle the dewdrops are shining
Low lies His head with the beasts of the stall
Angels adore Him in slumber reclining
Maker and Monarch and Savior of all

Say shall we yield Him in costly devotion
Odors of Edom and offerings divine
Gems from the mountain and pearls from the ocean
Myrrh from the forest or gold from the mine

Vainly we offer each ample oblation
Vainly with gifts would His favor secure
Richer by far is the heart’s adoration
Dearer to God are the prayers of the poor

“Brightest and best” are the proper superlatives to capture the essence of this king born of humble birth. It means He outshines all others. What gift can we possibly bring Him? What can we tell Him that He doesn’t already know?

And yet He has somehow made Himself hungry for our love. He has granted us the power to initiate praise as if we could surprise Him (can we?), and when we discover who He really is, we can’t help but do that.

And then, wonder of wonders, this king has opted to share His kingdom. He has made us, not peasants, but kings like Him – joint heirs with Him in His kingdom.

So bring on the cold. Bring on the wind. Bring on the rain. It’s Christmas in April, His star still adorns the horizon and we have a realm to rule.

Love Him in the morning when you see the sun a-rising
Love Him in the evening ‘cause He took you through the day
And in the in-between-time when you feel the pressure coming
Remember that He loves you and He promises to stay

Today was a day I felt a lot of pressure. I didn’t just feel it coming; it came. It’s still here, actually, and I have not been able to shake it off to write a very good original Catch for you as a result. So I offer instead, this song turned inside out to include also the middle of the night. Thank goodness God never sleeps because I really need to now.

When you think you’ve got to worry
‘Cause it seems the thing to do
Remember He ain’t in a hurry
He’s always got time for you

So…
Love Him in the morning when you see the sun a-rising
Love Him in the evening ‘cause He took you through the day
And in the in-between-time when you feel the pressure coming
Remember that He loves you and He promises to stay