John Fischer The Catch

In the spirit of yesterday’s Catch, I offer this poem for those of you who, like me, might need it.

I was shocked, confused, bewildered

As I entered heaven’s door;

Not by the beauty of it all,

Nor the lights, or its décor.

But it was the folks in heaven

Who made me sputter and gasp –

The thieves, the liars, the sinners,

The alcoholics and the trash.

There stood the kid from seventh grade

Who swiped my lunch money twice.

Next to him was my old neighbor

Who never said anything nice.

Herb, who I always thought

Was rotting away in hell,

Was sitting pretty on cloud nine

Looking incredibly well.

I nudged Jesus, “What’s the deal?

I would love to hear your take.

How’d all these sinners get up here?

God must’ve made a mistake.

“And why’s everyone so quiet,

So somber – give me a clue.”

“Hush, child,” he said, “they’re all in shock.

No one thought they’d be seeing you!”

Go out into the country lanes and behind the hedges and urge anyone you find to come, so that the house will be full. (Luke 14:23)

This is one of my favorite stories Jesus told about the Kingdom of God (Luke 14:16-24). After preparing a great feast, a wealthy man sent his servants out to bring in the invited guests. But none of them could come. They all had pretty lame excuses, too: “I have just bought a field and must inspect it… I have just bought five pairs of oxen, and I want to try them out… I now have a wife so I can’t come…” So he sent his servants out to round up anyone they could find.

Now I’m pretty sure this parable was told mainly for the benefit of the religious leaders who were following Jesus around, testing Him and trying to prove He was not the promised Messiah. They would have been the invited guests who had better things to do when it came time for the big feast. They were the ones with a sense of entitlement. They had received their embossed invitations generations earlier through the Law and the Prophets, and they would certainly have assumed they had reservations in heaven. They would have received this story as a grave insult.

But the other side of the story is all about the people who do get in at the end. They are the ones who never expected it. They don’t have a clue how they got there. They are not sure how to behave — they’re not even sure what this is. What a beautiful picture of the grace of God, to invite a bunch of clueless people into heaven! No one woke up that morning expecting to be at a feast. What good fortune! How could this be happening to me? It’s my presumption that this will be the prevailing attitude of heaven. I just can’t imagine anyone looking around and saying, “Yep, this is about what I expected,” or “Look at that group over there. How did they ever get in?”

No, everyone’s going to be flabbergasted that they got in, and pretty wide-eyed about the whole thing, and this merely captures a refreshing sense of fellowship that has been going on here on earth as long as we’ve known about our salvation. When it comes to fellowship, no one’s any better than anybody else. Everyone is surprised and full of gratitude for receiving what we don’t deserve, and that puts us all in the same boat. This is what we have here on earth; I don’t think heaven will be any different.

Come to think of it, the religious elite probably wouldn’t like heaven anyway. It’s just not their crowd.

Ahaaaaaaaaaa! There it is in red capital letters right on the back of this large tube of Crest toothpaste — right where there is a big thumb indention where my wife, the last to use it, pushed out her bit of “Whitening Plus Scope” from the middle of the tube – FOR BEST RESULTS, SQUEEZE TUBE FROM THE BOTTOM AND FLATTEN AS YOU GO UP .

Could anyone or anything be any clearer? Come now, “FROM THE BOTTOM?” I mean, isn’t that pretty much “End of discussion?”

Come on… admit it: This is huge. After all these years of debate, there it is, right on the back of the tube, printed as instructions, for heaven’s sake, in red and white! Who can argue with that?

Wait-a-minute. Why am I not feeling any better about this? Why has all this gloating started to feel ugly? I thought winning would be a lot more fun than this. You mean, there could be something better than being right?

How about being together…?

“Talk to people about themselves and they will listen for hours.” – Benjamin Disraeli

It is fascinating to me how conventional wisdom always seems to support what the Bible has contained for centuries. For instance, the quote above by Benjamin Disraeli was taken from the classic How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, a book that could have been derived entirely from one verse in the New Testament: “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves” (Philippians 2:3). Or from the words of Jesus: “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 7:12).

It is no coincidence that what Jesus taught works in the world. Peter Drucker knew this; Max Weber knew this; Blaise Pascal knew this; and Laurie Beth Jones, author of Jesus CEO, knew this. All of these were skilled at finding the religious influences embedded in culture.

So is that to say you don’t need conventional wisdom; just stick with the Bible? No, because these authors and thinkers enlarge on the truth. They show us how God’s truth works in the world, and by beginning outside a biblical framework and ending up in one, they confirm the practical wisdom of the word. These connections are everywhere.

So we’re back to thinking about how a good way to engage someone in conversation is to talk about them. That’s connected to: “Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:4).

Works both ways.

I recently heard the story of a young kindergartener who, when asked by her teacher what she was going to create for her art project proudly announced she was going to draw a picture of God. To which the teacher announced, “But no one knows what God looks like.”

“They will in a minute,” came the bold reply.

She’s right, you know. She’s about to paint what God looks like to her, in her imagination, and she will be right. Not that God is relative to everyone’s idea of Him, but that He is so multifaceted that no one picture can capture all of Him, nor can all of the pictures together make Him up.

She is also right about the fact that we bring God to people, not only because are we are in His image, but because He dwells in us by faith.

What I love most assuredly about this statement is its audacity. “Oh, they’ll know all right, because I am about to reveal Him to them.” Would that we were all that confident about our ability to represent Christ to the world.

This was a major part of Christ’s role while on earth—to represent God to the world. “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”

Our task is no less significant. If part of Jesus’ purpose was to reveal God to us, part of ours is to reveal Jesus to others. “Christ in you, the hope of glory,” Paul wrote.

What a great thing to focus on as we prepare to do anything—go anywhere—see anybody… “No one knows what God looks like?” we can say to ourselves, “But they will in a minute…”

“I don’t deny… that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say… it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, to remind men that they are not dead yet.”

Thanks to Jay Davis for sending this splendid quote by G.K. Chesterton in response to yesterday’s Catch about Neil Young and inspiration. It has led me to some thoughts about our life now “in the flesh” and how difficult it is for Christians to embrace being human and living for something other than another world.

Jesus didn’t go around cursing his flesh all the time. He sanctified it by the way he lived. He came not to negate life, but to live it. Jesus was connected to the Spirit of God and to his own humanity at the same time, and he found no conflict. If Jesus Christ was not fully human, then we cannot be fully saved and there is no ultimate hope for our humanity but to discard it completely and try something else. This is not what Jesus did. There is no “something else.” This skin I live in is it for me, and it is what Jesus came to redeem.

This remarkable fact is echoed many times throughout Scripture: Jesus Christ came in the flesh; Job declared that “in my flesh I will see God”; a man and wife become one flesh in marriage; and Paul declared that the life he lives in the flesh he lives by faith in the Son of God. These are arresting statements when you consider how much it has been taught that “in the flesh” was synonymous with sinning.

In truth, when the Bible talks about the negative aspects of the flesh, it is referring to the weaker element in human nature – the unregenerate state of man, the lower, fallen nature. It is not talking about skin. Flesh as a principle to live under is wrong; flesh as the skin I live in is right. It’s the body I’ve been given that will be raised with Christ. It’s the very image of God that I bear along with every other human being who’s ever lived on this earth. It’s the mortal body that can be given life through the Spirit. The flesh is me, and should I choose to have it so, it can become the very temple of the Holy Spirit of God.

This is me. This is all me. Grab me; pinch me. This flesh is me. This spirit is me. When I sin, it’s me sinning. When I glorify God, it’s me glorifying. It’s me here and I am choosing all the time what I am going to do with me. I am responsible. Cut my heart open and you won’t find a throne room with a miniature devil and angel playing musical chairs, you will find a heart beating for whom it wants to beat.

Young and Lanois

“Something’s going on right now. We’re in the middle of a huge change or turn-around, but I don’t really know what it is. But you can feel that something’s going on. We’ve had enough of whatever it was. People have had enough of it. They’ve seen it over and over again. It defies real description of what’s really going on. We won’t know for a little while.”

Such are the words of Neil Young from an interview in the Los Angeles Times along with Daniel Lanois, producer for (among others) U2, Bob Dylan, and Peter Gabriel. Young and Lanois are teaming up for Neil Young’s latest project, “Le Noise,” and the Times interview explored some of the unique characteristics of this new collaboration.

The quote struck me as vaguely prophetic in that Young had a sense of dissatisfaction and change, even though he could not be any more specific than that.

I happen to believe that all artists are prophetic to one degree or another, in that they dabble in the divine via inspiration, and the Holy Spirit is no respecter of persons. He will illumine anyone who comes near enough to receive. Nor is faith a requirement for receiving a message. It is for this reason that we need to realize that revelation can come through a variety of sources.

So if Neil Young says that we are on the verge of some major societal shifts, I would tend to believe him and look for the implications of these changes on our plans, and ask the Holy Spirit to prepare us to receive them. Don’t turn off your spiritual ears just because you are out in the world. You are just as likely to hear from the Lord there as anywhere else.

“Why did we get into all this to begin with?” said Daniel Lanois. “We did it because we thought that our heroes knew something that we didn’t… We’re not saying we’re better than anybody, just that some people have the gift to receive information, and it’s their job as troubadours to pass it on and let the word be heard.”

See… he knows.

“Waves.” That’s what Chandler said when I asked him what I should write about for today. Just one word: “Waves.”

Chandler is into waves because we live close to the beach and because he has recently taken up skimboarding. Now skimboarding is much more than just skimming across the wet sand as the tide recedes. Some of the best skimboarding is to be had a few blocks from my house. That’s because we tend to have a lot of shore break here (waves that crash right up on the sand), and that means you can skim down into the wave, and if you time it right, turn around and surf it back in.

Think about how long those waves have been here and how relatively short the span of time has been that we have realized that we could do anything with them. A local surf shop has skim boards dating back to the 1950s, no farther. And now we have competition, sponsors, apparel and media. This is all relatively new.

There are those who will just watch the waves – and don’t get me wrong – there is much to be gained from watching. But there are those who will get inside them, challenge them, feel their power, flirt with their danger. It’s the difference between observing and experiencing.

Life and faith provide the same two options all the time: observe and experience. I am, by nature, an observer. I would love to do nothing more than observe and comment. That is what I am doing right now – what I do every day with the Catch. But life forces me to experience it, and faith means nothing until it moves from the page or the commentary into action.

The waves keep coming. They never stop. The opportunities wait. What will it be: Look, listen or ride?

What does it mean to believe? For all practical purposes, “believe” has come to mean, “believe like me.” And the more I thought about this the more it seemed that believers had come to represent the opposite of what they should be.

What if believing meant that I had to be open to more ways of understanding truth than I have now? Would I believe?

What if believing meant I had to admit to being wrong much of the time? Would I believe?

What if believing meant I had to hang out with people who think differently than I do? Would I believe?

What if believing meant that no one was my enemy – I had no one to fight but the devil. Would I believe?

What if believing meant that my sin was far more important for me to deal with than anyone else’s? Would I believe?

What if believing made things more complicated instead of more simple? Would I believe?

What if believing didn’t explain everything? Would I believe?

What if believing was more about questions than answers? Would I believe?

What if believing meant I had a lot to learn? Would I believe?

What if believing meant I had to change? Would I believe?

What if believing meant I had to love all the people I currently hate? Would I believe?

What if believing meant exceeding my capacity to give back? Would I believe?

What if believing meant coming in last? Would I believe?

I’ve always been drawn to this story – the story of the sick woman who reached out and touched a piece of Christ’s robe as He walked through a crowd, and was healed instantly before Jesus even knew what had happened. All He knew was that healing power had gone out of Him.

What was it about her touch that made it any different from those around Him who were also touching Him? We know there were many because the disciples immediately wanted to know how Jesus could possibly ask such a question when people were pressing in on Him from all sides.

But Jesus and the woman made a connection and it was all her doing. She made this happen by going to Jesus and knowing He could help her. That’s why He told her that her faith had made her well. Her faith got her there. Her faith made her reach for Him. Her faith made her believe something would happen. “If I only touch his cloak, I will be healed.” (Matthew 9:21)

I wonder what the others who were touching Him at the same time were thinking. Maybe a disciple was acting as a bodyguard, or a Pharisee wanted to see Him up close. It could have been a woman trying to protect Him, or a family member reveling in the glory. I can imagine a doubter, an unbeliever, or perhaps a man of means being up close and thinking, “What’s the big deal? He’s just a peasant like the rest of these people.”

In all of this, one woman touched Him, and she was never the same, because she touched Him in a different way.

Think about it. She got the power even without permission. Her faith made her a priority. When in need, you reach out for Jesus in faith, you will get immediate attention. This is what I find remarkable about this story. The need of a seemingly insignificant person, reaching out in faith, can sway the most significant power in the universe, while others stand by and never feel a thing. Right up next to royalty.

Sometimes, I think we make faith too complicated. This seems pretty simple to me:

1) You have a need.

2) You reach out to Jesus.

3) You believe He can do something about it.