"In Your Dreams"
Job 33:15-18
I switched topics this week. My dream a couple of weeks ago about Gordon Stull getting an exotic illness, the only symptom being, it makes you buy books for no reason, got me thinking about dreams. What they are. Why do we have them? And more importantly, how does God use them?
We spend more of our lives sleeping than anything else. 30 to 35% of our lives are spent asleep. About 25 years, if you live to be 75. 25 years asleep! Sounds like a lot of time wasted for how little of it we get in this life. But if we try to totally deprive ourselves of sleep, we’d last about four weeks--about the same amount of time we can go without food. No sleep means death.
And during all that time asleep, of course, we dream. All kinds of dreams. Some are sheer entertainment. We have a lot of disjointed thoughts and impressions floating around in our minds. During sleep, sometimes all that unconnected stuff gets connected in weird ways that make perfect sense in dreams, but not when we wake up.
There are a lot of dreams recorded in the Bible. Joseph had a dream that his father and brothers would one day bow down to him, represented by sheaves of wheat.
Once thrown in prison in Egypt, the royal baker and butler each had dreams, and Joseph, who was also in prison, interpreted their dreams. Which gave Joseph a face-to-face with Pharaoh, who also had a dream about cows, which represented seven abundant years and seven years of famine. Joseph told Pharaoh, “Do not interpretations belong to God?”
The same thing happens to the prophet, Daniel, who ends up interpreting King Nebuchadnezer’s dream about the giant statue made out of different metals. Daniel, in a Joseph kind of statement, tells the king, “...but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries…” (Daniel 2:28).
In the book of Matthew, we have Joseph getting a string of dreams guiding him through his feelings about Mary and her pregnancy.
The apostle Paul has a dream that directs him to go over to Macedonia to preach the gospel, and opens the way for his missionary journeys.
Dreams, as Joseph and Daniel say, are mysteries. In the Bible, both the giving and meaning of dreams, are seen as one of the main ways that God communicates with people. When you think about it, dreams come when your conscious mind is basically disconnected. All your logic and reasoning is suspended while you sleep. Your self-styled defense systems that you use extensively while awake, have had their wires cut by God while you sleep. God can get at you in your dreams, and you can do nothing about it. We are all defenseless before God when we sleep. And God seems to like it that way.
Morton Kelsey has written extensively about the Christian spiritual life. I don’t agree with everything he writes about, because he’s a bit too “new age” for me. But one of the ideas he has written about has to do with the spiritual world and our everyday world. Kelsey thinks the spiritual world serves as a foundation of our everyday world. The two can come into contact with each other, forming connections, or easy bridges between the two worlds. Especially in dreaming.
Psalm 16:7 says,
I shall bless the LORD who has given me counsel;
in the night he imparts wisdom to my inmost being. (REB)
And the verses from Job 33, read earlier:
In dreams, in visions of the night,
when deepest slumber falls on mortals,
while they lie asleep in bed
God imparts his message...
God has a way, through our dreams, of getting in touch with us, cutting through to parts of ourselves that we’d maybe rather leave hidden, parts of our waking world lives that we’d rather avoid. And whether we’d like to admit it or not, a large part of our avoidance behavior while we’re awake has to do with God. But when you fall asleep, and when you dream, God’s got you! And there’s nothing you can do about it.
The language God uses in dreams is largely symbolic. Like poetry. In a sense, God makes us all into poets when we sleep and dream, filling us with poetic imagery. As you can imagine, these symbols and imagery in our dreaming are specific to the individual and can’t be standardized or universalized for everyone.
The problem with that, is the more we move into a technological and scientific way of being, we lose the ability to value and understand the symbolic. Behind symbols lies a kind of power that evokes feelings. Strong feelings. That’s what God is after in our dreaming. To get a hold of us to the core of our feelings, hoping to evoke some change or insight. For example, if your marriage is in trouble, you may dream of an earthquake where all the buildings around you--all that is supposedly substantial in your life--are shaking and breaking apart. You may think you just had a scary dream about an earthquake, but it may go much deeper than that.
Here’s another fun example of that. Elias Howe spent many years trying to perfect his sewing machine. But he was stumped about how to attach the thread to the needle. Then he had a dream. In the dream he was given 24 hours to complete his invention. If he failed, he’d be killed by cannibals with their deadly spears.
Howe worked feverishly to meet the deadline, but still couldn’t overcome that one obstacle of the needle. The cannibals surrounded him and slowly raised their spears. As they got closer and closer, Howe noticed that all the spears had small holes in their tips. He woke up sweating--but still alive. And now he knew what to do. He’d put a hole in the end of the needle!
Now God may not be trying to get you attention about some invention. As I said, the Holy Spirit puts us in touch, through our dreams, with the images that have the power to get our attention for God. So these images, and the attention they gain, have to do with a lot of things from God.
First, God uses dreams to reassure us. These kinds of dreams, through their imagery are trying to let us know we can trust God, that we can be encouraged by what God may or may not be doing, which in turn gives us a sense of fearlessness.
When my daughter Kristin was about four or five, she woke up, and bounded down the stairs to tell me about a dream she had. She said God came down to her room and played with her. And then God took her up to heaven and played with her up there.
What a great dream! She was excited by it. But it had the opposite effect on me as it did on her. For her it gave her a tremendous childlike trust in God. But for me, I wondered almost instantly if God was preparing her for her imminent death. Preparing me, possibly, for her early death. For a little over a year, I lived in fear that there was going to be something that happened that would take Kristin away, by death. I never told her of my fear. I became very overprotective, that year especially.
Finally God got a hold of me and asked me, since I couldn’t let go of my fear over Kristin’s dream, if I could trust him with Kristin’s life. And with Ryan’s life. I suddenly realized, as parents, we all have to come to that place of entrustment--of giving our children’s lives over to God, even and especially when they are alive. Then, perchance they do die, then we know into whose hands their lives have gone. It became a very important dream--even though it wasn’t my own--that brought me to the place of reassurance that in life and death, my children were always in God’s hands.
Secondly, there are dreams God sends that guide us. The guidance in these dreams may have to do with our true identity in God. We may be really confused about who we are, and who we were meant to be, compared to who we are turning out to be.
Or we may be struggling with our calling, and what it is that God meant us to do in life. I talked about that a couple of weeks ago. Larry Culliford, in his article, “Powerful Dreams” told about one of these kinds of dreams that he had. This is how he described it:
In the dream, I was in a damp, grey, barren landscape of vast horizons under a dark, cloudy sky. I was holding a prospecting hammer. Over my shoulder, there was a collecting sack. In the far distance, I could see just two or three isolated figures, heads bowed like mine, eyes down towards the ground. I was strolling beside a fast-flowing stream, one of several criss-crossing the desolate area. At first I felt lost, unsure of what I was doing or seeking. Soon, however, I stopped, noticing a small, beautiful, teardrop-shaped ingot of purest gold in the mud at my feet. Dislodging it easily with the hammer, I picked it up and placed it in my bag. Immediately, I noticed another of these small but perfect golden teardrops, then another. I knew somehow that I could reap this treasure because I could see it, whereas most others could not. People were away in the towns nearby, enjoying themselves, and had set aside all interest in prospecting – in seeking their true prospects. Their vision for such things had atrophied. (Larry Culliford, “Powerful Dreams” in Psychology Today)
Culliford realized from his dream what he was to do with his life was close at hand. That he had to look in the “mud”, not in the clear running water of the stream. That there were “prospects” that God wanted him to see for his life. Everyone else was lost in mediocrity. But when he got down into the mud, he found the unexpected--his true life and true self and true mission.
Emily Bronte has her heroine, Cathy, in Wuthering Heights, say, “I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.” Those are the kind of dreams God uses to help get your attention about who you are and where you’re going in life.
Thirdly, dreams seem to increase when we are doing some hard work of self-examination. Dreams allow God to get into our emotional and psychological selves in the safe place of our dreams. Our defenses are down, and God can tell us some things in no uncertain terms. God will always tell us the truth, especially if we are paying attention in our dreams.
Roy Fairchild, late professor of Pastoral Care and Spiritual Direction at San Francisco Theological Seminary, told a story at a workshop I attended about a dream he had. He had been deeply depressed for months. He had to take time off from teaching at the seminary.
One night he had a dream. He was building a house. He was making a poor job of it. Studs not straight. Bent nails everywhere. It was a recurring dream. Same kind of poor construction, time after time, night after night. With each segment of the dream, frustration grew. Depression deepened. But at one point a carpenter showed up to help. Together they straightened the studs. The form of the house started taking shape. They put the ceiling joists on. The house was coming together.
Fairchild was telling his spiritual guide about this recurring dream, and how he could not make sense of it. The therapist asked, “Do you know any carpenters?”
“That’s just it; I don’t,” said Fairchild.
The therapist then asked, “Wasn’t Jesus a carpenter?”
All of a sudden it all started to make sense. Jesus was helping him rebuild his life, one task at a time. Fairchild realized he was trying to put his life back together all by himself. He had totally ignored Christ in that process. The more he tried to do everything without Christ, the bigger the mess. God was letting him know, through the imagery of building a house, that if he, Fairchild, let Christ help, his life would get rebuilt. Everything changed after that.
There are all kinds of other reasons God gets our attention through our dreams. To warn us of danger. To give us commands in no uncertain terms. To create wisdom, and solve problems. Dreaming increases when we are learning new things--and maybe God is a part of that as well. And God can use dreams to help us respond to threats in our lives--triggering our fight or flight responses.
In all of those, pay attention. Pay attention to the imagery. Pay attention to what God is trying to get across to you when your defenses are down.
J.M. Barrie, in his book, Peter Pan, has Tinkerbell say to Peter, “You know that place between sleeping and awake, that place you can still remember dreaming? That’s where I’ll always think of you.” In our dreaming, that’s what God is ultimately telling us--I’m always thinking of you, and trying to make connection to you. So sleep, and be ready.
Sunday, June 23, 2013
Monday, June 10, 2013
Bodies R Us
"Bodies R Us"
1 Corinthians 6:19-20
I don't know why God made my body so tall. It would be nice to be of "average" height, whatever that would be. 6'5" would be a nice height. That way, I'd have average sized feet and hands, and not worry about being able to find size 16 shoes. I'd be able to blend in, in a crowd, rather than stick up above everyone like a palm tree. I can't get away with anything--I'm so visible.
I'm an anomaly in my family, as far as this body goes. No one is even close to being this tall. My father was only a short guy at 6 feet. My mother about 5'7" or 5'8". My father used to tell his friends I wasn't only the tallest in our family tree, I was the family tree. So I'm not sure how it is that I got this body.
I used to be averaged height, up until 8th grade. At the start of eighth grade I was 5'5". By the time I started 9th grade I was 6'5". When I got to school at the start of 9th grade, which was the last year of junior high when I was in school, the basketball coach thought I was a new kid who had transferred in. I had to tell him I was there all along. Before, I was invisible. Now, at 6'5" I was highly visible.
I am very self-conscious about my tall body. It’s one of the reasons I preach down here and not up there. A couple of people told me I make the pulpit look small. My body just doesn’t fit there. There’s even a step up that makes me even taller in there.
When I was in seminary, the church I attended was pastored by Jim Catham. He’s a tall guy, 6’7” or 6’8”. When he preached, he’d lean down, and over the pulpit. (demonstrate) I tried that a couple of times in my first church, but just wasn’t comfortable.
I usually get down, almost on my knees when talking to children because I don’t want to overwhelm them with this tall body. Every time Shirley Elder goes out of worship, she looks way up, reminding me how tall I am. A little girl in the grocery store, being pushed in the grocery cart by her mother, looked up at me and said, “Mom, look, a giant!” Her mother was so embarrassed she raced off pushing the cart clear to the other side of the store.
I remember my mother being disgusted having to take me to the shoe store for new shoes every two months. I was afraid my feet wouldn't stop growing and I'd end up with huge clown feet. Hearing the line that I had a "firm understanding in life" didn't help. Neither did hearing the poem from my grandfather whenever he visited,
You're a poet
and don't know it--
you have Longfellows!
My favorite thing to do at the end of the day is take my shoes off. It feels like I've been walking around with a couple of aircraft carriers all day. Although, it is nice when I get a new pair of shoes. I use the boxes for a storage shed, or an extra garage. I always hated to go bowling, because my shoe size was right there on the back of my shoes for everyone to see. *16* *16* *16*
But, I have to confess, my body changed my life, growing as it did that year, and continuing to grow through high school. I started playing basketball. All of a sudden I was a jock. I was in with some of the cool guys--a group I only looked at from afar.
My coach, in that first year of my basketball playing gave me the nickname, "Big Dumb Kid." It stuck. But it didn't bother me because I had a whole new place in the social order of junior high and then senior high the next year. All thanks to my body and it's amazing growth spurt.
Like most people, I've had a love/hate relationship with my body. As I said, I wished I was shorter. In my bathroom, in most bathrooms, I never get to see my face, just my chest, since the mirrors are for "average" people. When I fly out to see Kristin and Nic, I hate being shoe-horned into airplane seats, waiting for the person in front of me to recline into my already jammed knees. Dating has been problematic being so tall. But it's just what is.
None of us gets to decide what kind of body we have. Maybe in the future, as they unlock more and more of the human genome, mothers and fathers will get to decide what kind of body their children will have.
But as I get older I have begun to wonder how much of our bodies, especially as we age, is a result of genetics and how much is a result of our own choices. That is, what we have done to our bodies in terms of eating habits, exercise, etc. It all accumulates, and I discovered it gets harder to change things on the body as those accumulations pile up. All in all, my body has served me well in these 61 years.
For girls and women, bodies and body image is such a difficult relationship between psyche and the body. In one study, it was found that teenaged girls start getting depressed 45 seconds into looking at a clothing catalog or teen magazine. The depression comes not from the articles, but from the advertisements and the models that wear the sassy clothes, or tout the lipstick on pouty lips, or flounce their hair.
Glamour magazine did a study of women and their attitudes toward their bodies. The study found that 97% of women are "cruel to their bodies" every day. Women think or say an average of 13 brutal thoughts about their bodies each day. 97%!!
Our relationship to our bodies is one of the most basic relationships we have. It is more basic than our relationship with each other. Our bodies are one of the main gifts God has given us in this life, if not the main gift. Nobody does anything without a body.
The first thing God did, in creating humans, was to create a body. Then blow the breath of life into the nostrils of those bodies (Genesis 2:7). There was a time, as was read in Genesis, that people were "naked and unashamed." Now we're naked, and full of shame. I would guess there aren't too many of you who can stand in front of a full length mirror, in the buff, for longer than 15 or 20 seconds. The shame just creeps in. That shame leads to self-judgement. And for some the self-judgement leads to self-loathing. And it's all about your body.
At some point in our lives we have to come to terms with our bodies. We have to accept our bodies. We have to be reconciled with our bodies. We have to be friends with our bodies. Maybe even forgive our bodies. But most of all, as Paul says here in 1 Corinthians, we have to "let people see God in and through your body." See God in your body. Which means, that if you are letting people see God in your body, that you are also seeing God in your body.
Letting people see God in your body is entirely different than having a positive body image. I think they feed each other. But I think there's a difference. Knowing that people can see God in your body, no matter what kind of body you have, is the ultimate positive body image. Plus, it should free you from thinking you have to have a specific kind of body in which to bear witness to God. There is no specific body type that God requires to be seen in. It takes all the worry and self-judgement away. The only qualification from Paul is, "your body"--let God be seen in YOUR body.
Paul was speaking to the Gnostic heresy in his day, that still has its claws in some Christian's ways of thinking today--especially as that relates to our bodies. The Gnostics were a weird, off-shoot brand of Christianity in Paul's time. One of their main beliefs was that the spirit and soul of a person was the most important, over against the body. They believed that the body was so tainted by sin and corruption that God didn't even care about bodies. They believed that Jesus, as the sinless Son of God, couldn't have had a real body like we do. They decided Jesus had a different kind of spiritual body, with no physicality to it at all. That when he walked, he didn't make footprints.
Therefore, to the Gnostics, it didn't matter what you did to your body. A believers main concern, in their mind, should be their soul. There was this soul/body split in the Gnostic way of thinking, that totally discounted the body and valued the body as pretty much worthless.
You see that way of thinking when you hear someone, in evangelistic fervor, ask someone if their soul has been saved. My answer has always been, "Well, yes, and so has my body."
So Paul asks the Corinthians some basic questions that would steer them away from any Gnostic misbeliefs: Do these Gnostic type of believers not read Genesis and realize that God made our bodies? That if bodies didn't mean anything to God, God wouldn't have made them in the first place? That the Savior coming into the world was called the Incarnation, which means "in the flesh"? Do they not read the book of 1 John, that starts out:
Our ears have heard,
our own eyes have seen,
and our hands touched this Word. (1 John 1:1)
Robert Morris wrote in his article, "Reclaiming the Body's Soul," "...bodies don't have a soul; they are souls-in-action" (Weavings, XXII:5, pg. 32). I like that. I think St. Paul would have liked that too. Our bodies are souls in action. I got to see that this past Sunday. Carrie Harrold did the devotion at the nursing home service last Sunday afternoon. She had some great thoughts about the stories our Bibles tell.
But there was another devotional that happened before that. Carrie brought Trysten along. Deb was playing "Jesus Loves Me" as a prelude, and Trysten danced. She whirled, and swayed, and hopped to the music. Trysten has definitely picked up her mother's love of the full bodied expression of faith. Trysten was a beautiful example of how the body is the soul in action. I'm so glad I was there to witness it, and now bear witness to it to you all.
Think of all the other ways we can use our bodies as our souls in action in forms of worship. We bow before The Lord in all things. Some lay prostrated on the ground before The Lord in prayer and obedience. Some whirl in ecstasy. Some stand with arms raised in prayer and praise to God. We fold our hands in prayer. We kneel. And like Trysten and her mother, people like King David danced before The Lord as the Ark of the Covenant was brought into Jerusalem. Bodies, as souls in action. That is one way to "let people see God in and through your body."
But that's not all Paul was getting at. Just before that statement, Paul wrote:
You surely know that your body is a temple where the Holy Spirit lives. The Spirit is in you and is a gift from God. You are no longer your own. God paid a great price for you.
Then comes his statement, "So let people see God in and through your body."
We hear and use statements like, "Accepting Christ into your heart," or "Make Christ a part of your life." Your heart and your life has to do with your body--taking Christ into your whole self, a major part of which is your body.
As Paul said, our bodies are that temple into which the Holy Spirit enters. To look upon our bodies with a disdainful eye, means disdaining the temple in which the Holy Spirit lives. To harbor at least 13 brutal thoughts about your body each day, is to think brutally about the temple of the Holy Spirit.
But on the flip side, to look upon our bodies with awe and wonder, no matter what kind of body we have, how intricately each of our bodies are designed, is to look the same way upon this temple of the Holy Spirit. To harbor nothing but thankfulness to God for our body, no matter what kind of body we have, is to offer God that same kind of thanks for the temple which is the abode of His Holy Spirit.
That's the best form of body image. That's the best way to "let people see God in and through your body."
1 Corinthians 6:19-20
I don't know why God made my body so tall. It would be nice to be of "average" height, whatever that would be. 6'5" would be a nice height. That way, I'd have average sized feet and hands, and not worry about being able to find size 16 shoes. I'd be able to blend in, in a crowd, rather than stick up above everyone like a palm tree. I can't get away with anything--I'm so visible.
I'm an anomaly in my family, as far as this body goes. No one is even close to being this tall. My father was only a short guy at 6 feet. My mother about 5'7" or 5'8". My father used to tell his friends I wasn't only the tallest in our family tree, I was the family tree. So I'm not sure how it is that I got this body.
I used to be averaged height, up until 8th grade. At the start of eighth grade I was 5'5". By the time I started 9th grade I was 6'5". When I got to school at the start of 9th grade, which was the last year of junior high when I was in school, the basketball coach thought I was a new kid who had transferred in. I had to tell him I was there all along. Before, I was invisible. Now, at 6'5" I was highly visible.
I am very self-conscious about my tall body. It’s one of the reasons I preach down here and not up there. A couple of people told me I make the pulpit look small. My body just doesn’t fit there. There’s even a step up that makes me even taller in there.
When I was in seminary, the church I attended was pastored by Jim Catham. He’s a tall guy, 6’7” or 6’8”. When he preached, he’d lean down, and over the pulpit. (demonstrate) I tried that a couple of times in my first church, but just wasn’t comfortable.
I usually get down, almost on my knees when talking to children because I don’t want to overwhelm them with this tall body. Every time Shirley Elder goes out of worship, she looks way up, reminding me how tall I am. A little girl in the grocery store, being pushed in the grocery cart by her mother, looked up at me and said, “Mom, look, a giant!” Her mother was so embarrassed she raced off pushing the cart clear to the other side of the store.
I remember my mother being disgusted having to take me to the shoe store for new shoes every two months. I was afraid my feet wouldn't stop growing and I'd end up with huge clown feet. Hearing the line that I had a "firm understanding in life" didn't help. Neither did hearing the poem from my grandfather whenever he visited,
You're a poet
and don't know it--
you have Longfellows!
My favorite thing to do at the end of the day is take my shoes off. It feels like I've been walking around with a couple of aircraft carriers all day. Although, it is nice when I get a new pair of shoes. I use the boxes for a storage shed, or an extra garage. I always hated to go bowling, because my shoe size was right there on the back of my shoes for everyone to see. *16* *16* *16*
But, I have to confess, my body changed my life, growing as it did that year, and continuing to grow through high school. I started playing basketball. All of a sudden I was a jock. I was in with some of the cool guys--a group I only looked at from afar.
My coach, in that first year of my basketball playing gave me the nickname, "Big Dumb Kid." It stuck. But it didn't bother me because I had a whole new place in the social order of junior high and then senior high the next year. All thanks to my body and it's amazing growth spurt.
Like most people, I've had a love/hate relationship with my body. As I said, I wished I was shorter. In my bathroom, in most bathrooms, I never get to see my face, just my chest, since the mirrors are for "average" people. When I fly out to see Kristin and Nic, I hate being shoe-horned into airplane seats, waiting for the person in front of me to recline into my already jammed knees. Dating has been problematic being so tall. But it's just what is.
None of us gets to decide what kind of body we have. Maybe in the future, as they unlock more and more of the human genome, mothers and fathers will get to decide what kind of body their children will have.
But as I get older I have begun to wonder how much of our bodies, especially as we age, is a result of genetics and how much is a result of our own choices. That is, what we have done to our bodies in terms of eating habits, exercise, etc. It all accumulates, and I discovered it gets harder to change things on the body as those accumulations pile up. All in all, my body has served me well in these 61 years.
For girls and women, bodies and body image is such a difficult relationship between psyche and the body. In one study, it was found that teenaged girls start getting depressed 45 seconds into looking at a clothing catalog or teen magazine. The depression comes not from the articles, but from the advertisements and the models that wear the sassy clothes, or tout the lipstick on pouty lips, or flounce their hair.
Glamour magazine did a study of women and their attitudes toward their bodies. The study found that 97% of women are "cruel to their bodies" every day. Women think or say an average of 13 brutal thoughts about their bodies each day. 97%!!
Our relationship to our bodies is one of the most basic relationships we have. It is more basic than our relationship with each other. Our bodies are one of the main gifts God has given us in this life, if not the main gift. Nobody does anything without a body.
The first thing God did, in creating humans, was to create a body. Then blow the breath of life into the nostrils of those bodies (Genesis 2:7). There was a time, as was read in Genesis, that people were "naked and unashamed." Now we're naked, and full of shame. I would guess there aren't too many of you who can stand in front of a full length mirror, in the buff, for longer than 15 or 20 seconds. The shame just creeps in. That shame leads to self-judgement. And for some the self-judgement leads to self-loathing. And it's all about your body.
At some point in our lives we have to come to terms with our bodies. We have to accept our bodies. We have to be reconciled with our bodies. We have to be friends with our bodies. Maybe even forgive our bodies. But most of all, as Paul says here in 1 Corinthians, we have to "let people see God in and through your body." See God in your body. Which means, that if you are letting people see God in your body, that you are also seeing God in your body.
Letting people see God in your body is entirely different than having a positive body image. I think they feed each other. But I think there's a difference. Knowing that people can see God in your body, no matter what kind of body you have, is the ultimate positive body image. Plus, it should free you from thinking you have to have a specific kind of body in which to bear witness to God. There is no specific body type that God requires to be seen in. It takes all the worry and self-judgement away. The only qualification from Paul is, "your body"--let God be seen in YOUR body.
Paul was speaking to the Gnostic heresy in his day, that still has its claws in some Christian's ways of thinking today--especially as that relates to our bodies. The Gnostics were a weird, off-shoot brand of Christianity in Paul's time. One of their main beliefs was that the spirit and soul of a person was the most important, over against the body. They believed that the body was so tainted by sin and corruption that God didn't even care about bodies. They believed that Jesus, as the sinless Son of God, couldn't have had a real body like we do. They decided Jesus had a different kind of spiritual body, with no physicality to it at all. That when he walked, he didn't make footprints.
Therefore, to the Gnostics, it didn't matter what you did to your body. A believers main concern, in their mind, should be their soul. There was this soul/body split in the Gnostic way of thinking, that totally discounted the body and valued the body as pretty much worthless.
You see that way of thinking when you hear someone, in evangelistic fervor, ask someone if their soul has been saved. My answer has always been, "Well, yes, and so has my body."
So Paul asks the Corinthians some basic questions that would steer them away from any Gnostic misbeliefs: Do these Gnostic type of believers not read Genesis and realize that God made our bodies? That if bodies didn't mean anything to God, God wouldn't have made them in the first place? That the Savior coming into the world was called the Incarnation, which means "in the flesh"? Do they not read the book of 1 John, that starts out:
Our ears have heard,
our own eyes have seen,
and our hands touched this Word. (1 John 1:1)
Robert Morris wrote in his article, "Reclaiming the Body's Soul," "...bodies don't have a soul; they are souls-in-action" (Weavings, XXII:5, pg. 32). I like that. I think St. Paul would have liked that too. Our bodies are souls in action. I got to see that this past Sunday. Carrie Harrold did the devotion at the nursing home service last Sunday afternoon. She had some great thoughts about the stories our Bibles tell.
But there was another devotional that happened before that. Carrie brought Trysten along. Deb was playing "Jesus Loves Me" as a prelude, and Trysten danced. She whirled, and swayed, and hopped to the music. Trysten has definitely picked up her mother's love of the full bodied expression of faith. Trysten was a beautiful example of how the body is the soul in action. I'm so glad I was there to witness it, and now bear witness to it to you all.
Think of all the other ways we can use our bodies as our souls in action in forms of worship. We bow before The Lord in all things. Some lay prostrated on the ground before The Lord in prayer and obedience. Some whirl in ecstasy. Some stand with arms raised in prayer and praise to God. We fold our hands in prayer. We kneel. And like Trysten and her mother, people like King David danced before The Lord as the Ark of the Covenant was brought into Jerusalem. Bodies, as souls in action. That is one way to "let people see God in and through your body."
But that's not all Paul was getting at. Just before that statement, Paul wrote:
You surely know that your body is a temple where the Holy Spirit lives. The Spirit is in you and is a gift from God. You are no longer your own. God paid a great price for you.
Then comes his statement, "So let people see God in and through your body."
We hear and use statements like, "Accepting Christ into your heart," or "Make Christ a part of your life." Your heart and your life has to do with your body--taking Christ into your whole self, a major part of which is your body.
As Paul said, our bodies are that temple into which the Holy Spirit enters. To look upon our bodies with a disdainful eye, means disdaining the temple in which the Holy Spirit lives. To harbor at least 13 brutal thoughts about your body each day, is to think brutally about the temple of the Holy Spirit.
But on the flip side, to look upon our bodies with awe and wonder, no matter what kind of body we have, how intricately each of our bodies are designed, is to look the same way upon this temple of the Holy Spirit. To harbor nothing but thankfulness to God for our body, no matter what kind of body we have, is to offer God that same kind of thanks for the temple which is the abode of His Holy Spirit.
That's the best form of body image. That's the best way to "let people see God in and through your body."
Monday, June 3, 2013
Just A Job, Or A Calling?
"Just A Job, Or A Calling?"
Ecclesiastes 1:1-9; 3:12-13
Suffice it to say, the writer of Ecclesiastes is not a happy camper. He's discontented. He's depressed. He's fatalistic. He's burned out. If you were having a birthday party, he's not the one you want to invite--unless it's your 40th and you feel like having a bunch of similarly dour people around you.
What's even more interesting, and somewhat distressing to me, is the writer of Ecclesiastes calls himself "the preacher." I personally like Peterson's translation, The Message where the writer of Ecclesiastes calls himself "the Quester." Someone who’s on a quest. Someone who's searching for something. And the search is not an easy one. It's a search for identity, for meaning, for truth, for finding what you're passionate about, to find out what you are really made of.
Another word for this is "calling." Someone on a quest, who's following an inner voice on some great search, has a calling. They are paying attention to something bigger than themselves, trying to discover who they are and what their place is in that "something bigger."
Maybe that's why so many translations of the Bible call this guy, "the Preacher," because we more often than not think of ministers as people who following a calling. When we ministers are examined by Presbyteries, one of the big questions we are asked is to tell about our calling. No one on the COM would ask something like, "Why do you want this job as a minister?" Maybe someone from our presbytery's COM, but not the good ones. The better ones want to know about your calling--your sense of how God in his largeness, reached out to you in particular and chose you for the ministry.
I don't know of any other profession that asks that kind of question when they are being interviewed or examined for their expertise for a certain job or occupation or career. (Ask different people in the congregation if they were ever examined as to why they felt they were called.)
Here's what I believe. I believe you were all called by God. I'm not talking about the ministry, necessarily. Just because you are a follower of Christ, you are in the ministry, whether you realized that or not. But, I believe God called you to what He wanted you to do, how God wanted you to fit into His big picture, how God saw you on His timeline as it moves the direction God wants that timeline to go. Whether you paid attention to that calling is another thing.
The difference between following that calling or not is the difference maker in the book of Ecclesiastes, and the tone of The Preacher. The Preacher seems to have ignored his calling. Instead he was on a quest to discover what he could that would fulfill him outside of his true calling. The Preacher was making all kinds of futile attempts to make something of his life, other than paying attention to God.
Instead of becoming more and more, The Preacher discovered he was becoming less and less. He tried this. He tried that. The usual things we try to plug into our lives to fill the void when we don't follow our calling is money, sex, power, adventure, and knowledge. The Preacher tried all that. Finally he got to a point in his life when he realized, "None of that worked." All of it turned out to be worthless. "It's all smoke," he says.
That's why I like this book. Ecclesiastes challenges that naive egotism that ignores a person's sense of calling. We go off in some direction that appeals to us. We go after that direction with gusto and all the optimism we can muster. We expect the result of our calling-less choices will result in a good life.
Ecclesiastes gives us a John The Baptist kind of bath--a cleansing, an AHA! moment, a paradigm shift, a purging of such egotistical thinking and living. Ecclesiastes is a refreshing negation of the seductions that make us think we can make something of ourselves outside of our calling--outside of who God is and what God does to make something of us.
In terms of that calling, right at the very start of the book, The Preacher says
What's there to show for a lifetime of work,
a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone?
It's a rhetorical question. The answer is, "Nothing," if you haven't followed your calling! You have nothing to show. Just the boney fingers of working at following your own inclinations. No sense of accomplishment. No particular meaning. A lost identity given over to work that really was never you. Never being truly passionate about anything. Because all of that comes from following your calling.
I can say I have loved everything I've done. I heard my calling when in seventh grade. Sitting in church with my mother. Listening to Rev. Burgess preaching from that tall pulpit. Feeling the Spirit come upon me, call me by name, say to me clearly, "Steve, this is what I want you to do." I was sure. I knew, in the deepest parts of me that I was going to be a minister. I have never wavered. Never considered doing anything else. It was a true calling.
When I was working with a therapist, when I was out in Bakersfield, she once asked me about my calling. She was a person of deep faith. I told her the full story.
"Interesting," she said.
"How so?" I asked.
"At such a young age--but at such an important age. Seventh grade. A time when you were beginning the search for your identity, as all teenagers do." She stopped and looked at me as if I'd understand what she was getting at. I looked back at her, evidently with my characteristic dense expression. She continued.
"You have never seen yourself other than a minister, a pastor. Of course you weren't a pastor in 7th grade, but you have always seen yourself either as a pastor, or person who is going to be a pastor, defining yourself by that self definition. During your most formative years, you never got to explore or wonder who Steve Wing was as just a person, as most of us do at that age. But because your calling came so young, that's all you've ever known your identity to be. I'm just wondering who Steve Wing is, stripped of his pastoral identity.
Her wondering question blew me away. I didn't know what to say, or how to answer her. It wasn't one of those kinds of insights or questions I could throw out a flip answer and be done with it. Think about it no more.
I remember that conversation when I've talked to friends, they're telling me about something going on in their lives, and they look at me and say something like, "Quit listening to me like a pastor; just be my friend." Then I feel bad, or get a little defensive, because I know they are telling me the truth. I don't know how to turn "the pastor" off. I'm not sure I can, or want to. It's who I am. It's all I've ever wanted to be. Notice I didn't say it's all I've ever wanted to do.
Because that's how I think you know you have followed your calling and you aren't just doing a job. What ever it is you are doing is at the same time fashioning you into the best person you are being and becoming.
I can be the best listener I am not because I am a pastor, but because I followed my calling. I have found meaning in life, not because I'm a pastor, but because I followed my calling. I am doing what I am most passionate about, not because I'm a pastor, but because I followed my calling.
To tell you the truth, I don't know who Steve Wing is, stripped of my pastoral identity, because to strip that away is to strip my calling away. To strip my calling away is to strip away my very best self, as fashioned by God, and not by me.
That's what The Preacher didn't realize, but it finally came crashing down on him. If The Preacher is indeed King Solomon, son of David, as most think, then one of the wisest, wealthiest, most powerful men in the world at that time didn't get it. He didn't get this calling stuff. I'm even feeling a bit smug about that--I've understood something even Solomon didn't get.
If I remember right, the book of Ecclesiastes is the only book in the Bible that barely mentions God: only in the last verse. And there's the problem. God as an afterthought. With God as an afterthought, there is no calling. With no calling there is no meaning, no direction, no passion. And with no meaning, direction, or finding that which you are passionate about, you end up with a book like Ecclesiastes--trying to figure out life on your own, looking and living in all the wrong places, without the proper Godly motivation behind it all.
The Preacher, the Quester, the writer of this book is basically saying, if you want to follow in his footsteps, good luck. Nothings going to work or make sense. But with God, luck has nothing to do with it. It's all about calling from God, and following that calling.
Ecclesiastes 1:1-9; 3:12-13
Suffice it to say, the writer of Ecclesiastes is not a happy camper. He's discontented. He's depressed. He's fatalistic. He's burned out. If you were having a birthday party, he's not the one you want to invite--unless it's your 40th and you feel like having a bunch of similarly dour people around you.
What's even more interesting, and somewhat distressing to me, is the writer of Ecclesiastes calls himself "the preacher." I personally like Peterson's translation, The Message where the writer of Ecclesiastes calls himself "the Quester." Someone who’s on a quest. Someone who's searching for something. And the search is not an easy one. It's a search for identity, for meaning, for truth, for finding what you're passionate about, to find out what you are really made of.
Another word for this is "calling." Someone on a quest, who's following an inner voice on some great search, has a calling. They are paying attention to something bigger than themselves, trying to discover who they are and what their place is in that "something bigger."
Maybe that's why so many translations of the Bible call this guy, "the Preacher," because we more often than not think of ministers as people who following a calling. When we ministers are examined by Presbyteries, one of the big questions we are asked is to tell about our calling. No one on the COM would ask something like, "Why do you want this job as a minister?" Maybe someone from our presbytery's COM, but not the good ones. The better ones want to know about your calling--your sense of how God in his largeness, reached out to you in particular and chose you for the ministry.
I don't know of any other profession that asks that kind of question when they are being interviewed or examined for their expertise for a certain job or occupation or career. (Ask different people in the congregation if they were ever examined as to why they felt they were called.)
Here's what I believe. I believe you were all called by God. I'm not talking about the ministry, necessarily. Just because you are a follower of Christ, you are in the ministry, whether you realized that or not. But, I believe God called you to what He wanted you to do, how God wanted you to fit into His big picture, how God saw you on His timeline as it moves the direction God wants that timeline to go. Whether you paid attention to that calling is another thing.
The difference between following that calling or not is the difference maker in the book of Ecclesiastes, and the tone of The Preacher. The Preacher seems to have ignored his calling. Instead he was on a quest to discover what he could that would fulfill him outside of his true calling. The Preacher was making all kinds of futile attempts to make something of his life, other than paying attention to God.
Instead of becoming more and more, The Preacher discovered he was becoming less and less. He tried this. He tried that. The usual things we try to plug into our lives to fill the void when we don't follow our calling is money, sex, power, adventure, and knowledge. The Preacher tried all that. Finally he got to a point in his life when he realized, "None of that worked." All of it turned out to be worthless. "It's all smoke," he says.
That's why I like this book. Ecclesiastes challenges that naive egotism that ignores a person's sense of calling. We go off in some direction that appeals to us. We go after that direction with gusto and all the optimism we can muster. We expect the result of our calling-less choices will result in a good life.
Ecclesiastes gives us a John The Baptist kind of bath--a cleansing, an AHA! moment, a paradigm shift, a purging of such egotistical thinking and living. Ecclesiastes is a refreshing negation of the seductions that make us think we can make something of ourselves outside of our calling--outside of who God is and what God does to make something of us.
In terms of that calling, right at the very start of the book, The Preacher says
What's there to show for a lifetime of work,
a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone?
It's a rhetorical question. The answer is, "Nothing," if you haven't followed your calling! You have nothing to show. Just the boney fingers of working at following your own inclinations. No sense of accomplishment. No particular meaning. A lost identity given over to work that really was never you. Never being truly passionate about anything. Because all of that comes from following your calling.
I can say I have loved everything I've done. I heard my calling when in seventh grade. Sitting in church with my mother. Listening to Rev. Burgess preaching from that tall pulpit. Feeling the Spirit come upon me, call me by name, say to me clearly, "Steve, this is what I want you to do." I was sure. I knew, in the deepest parts of me that I was going to be a minister. I have never wavered. Never considered doing anything else. It was a true calling.
When I was working with a therapist, when I was out in Bakersfield, she once asked me about my calling. She was a person of deep faith. I told her the full story.
"Interesting," she said.
"How so?" I asked.
"At such a young age--but at such an important age. Seventh grade. A time when you were beginning the search for your identity, as all teenagers do." She stopped and looked at me as if I'd understand what she was getting at. I looked back at her, evidently with my characteristic dense expression. She continued.
"You have never seen yourself other than a minister, a pastor. Of course you weren't a pastor in 7th grade, but you have always seen yourself either as a pastor, or person who is going to be a pastor, defining yourself by that self definition. During your most formative years, you never got to explore or wonder who Steve Wing was as just a person, as most of us do at that age. But because your calling came so young, that's all you've ever known your identity to be. I'm just wondering who Steve Wing is, stripped of his pastoral identity.
Her wondering question blew me away. I didn't know what to say, or how to answer her. It wasn't one of those kinds of insights or questions I could throw out a flip answer and be done with it. Think about it no more.
I remember that conversation when I've talked to friends, they're telling me about something going on in their lives, and they look at me and say something like, "Quit listening to me like a pastor; just be my friend." Then I feel bad, or get a little defensive, because I know they are telling me the truth. I don't know how to turn "the pastor" off. I'm not sure I can, or want to. It's who I am. It's all I've ever wanted to be. Notice I didn't say it's all I've ever wanted to do.
Because that's how I think you know you have followed your calling and you aren't just doing a job. What ever it is you are doing is at the same time fashioning you into the best person you are being and becoming.
I can be the best listener I am not because I am a pastor, but because I followed my calling. I have found meaning in life, not because I'm a pastor, but because I followed my calling. I am doing what I am most passionate about, not because I'm a pastor, but because I followed my calling.
To tell you the truth, I don't know who Steve Wing is, stripped of my pastoral identity, because to strip that away is to strip my calling away. To strip my calling away is to strip away my very best self, as fashioned by God, and not by me.
That's what The Preacher didn't realize, but it finally came crashing down on him. If The Preacher is indeed King Solomon, son of David, as most think, then one of the wisest, wealthiest, most powerful men in the world at that time didn't get it. He didn't get this calling stuff. I'm even feeling a bit smug about that--I've understood something even Solomon didn't get.
If I remember right, the book of Ecclesiastes is the only book in the Bible that barely mentions God: only in the last verse. And there's the problem. God as an afterthought. With God as an afterthought, there is no calling. With no calling there is no meaning, no direction, no passion. And with no meaning, direction, or finding that which you are passionate about, you end up with a book like Ecclesiastes--trying to figure out life on your own, looking and living in all the wrong places, without the proper Godly motivation behind it all.
The Preacher, the Quester, the writer of this book is basically saying, if you want to follow in his footsteps, good luck. Nothings going to work or make sense. But with God, luck has nothing to do with it. It's all about calling from God, and following that calling.
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