God's Adventure

Does the title of this week's blog--"God's Adventure"--strike you at all as strange?  It seems to me that many people  embrace an idea of a god who is anything but adventurous.  Their god is a rule-giver, a guardian of the status-quo, the distant judge.  This vision of god impresses me as being more controlling than adventurous. When I contrast the rule-giver/guardian/distant judge vision with the life and ministry of Jesus, it helps me to appreciate why his life was so revolutionary.  Jesus came proclaiming that the kingdom of God--the time of God's reign-- has drawn near.  On the cross (as through his entire ministry) he embodied God's vulnerability.  In resurrection, the work of renewal was let loose right here in this world.  All of this has the aroma of adventure!

It should not be supposed that God's adventure is captured only in the ministry of Jesus--far from it!  Think of the adventure that is involved in creation itself, in God's call of a nation named Israel , in the guidance granted mercifully to them in the gift of the law.  Think of the adventure of God as it is expressed in Isaiah 43:

Forget the former thing;

Do not dwell on the past.

See, I am doing a new thing!

Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?

I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.

In the story of Scripture, I see a narrative of an adventurous God--a narrative in which God becomes vulnerable to our world's pain and leads us forward in hope.  This, it seems to me, is the ground of our call to live our lives as a sacred adventure.  We worship an adventurous creator who calls us to live adventurously.

The Sacred... And Jazz

First, a disclaimer.  I know next to nothing about jazz.  I am not a musician.  I can't describe with any precision what makes jazz different from other forms of music.  All I can say with any certainty is that, well, I like it.  Miles Davis.  John Coltrane.  Good stuff. 

I'm thinking about jazz today because I just read the responses to the last post and it strikes me that jazz might be a metaphor for the coming together of the sacred and playfulness that each of us was trying to describe.  What is apparent to me, a lay listener, is that good jazz performers are exceedingly serious about their art.  A piece by Lionel Loueke is playing softly in the background as I write (thanks to Pandora) and I cannot help but be aware that years of preparation and practice stand behind this piece. It is carefully crafted.  It's quite clear that every musician knows the score.  And yet, at the very same time, the music darts and moves in ways that compel me to suspect that it is astonishingly impromptu and free.

I want to compose a life-in-community that is like that: serious, in the sense that it really matters, it's important, it's sacred; and playful in the sense that it is creative, free and always open to the gift of the present moment.  And I want to be part of faith community that is like that: serious in that we "know the score" of our Scriptures and we seek to live within the story it tells because it really matters, it's important, it's sacred;  and playful in that we give ourselves to the wind of the Spirit, who blows this way and that and takes us to places that our five-year strategies could not have imagined.  Perhaps there is more of art than precision to the sacred adventure.

Sacred Playfulness

"Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin."
                          Luke 15:9

 I thought long and hard about what I wanted to name this blog before I settled on "The Sacred Adventure."  Although I like this theme very much, I was a bit concerned with the word "sacred."  For many, this word seems to evoke ideas of something that is very serious.  Describe something as a "sacred task" and the impression is given that it is something about which you absolutely must not fail, something to which you must give your most serious attention.  For many, the practice of religion is profoundly serious.

The parable of the lost coin, one of the most familiar of the parables of Jesus, suggests to me a different possibility.  After her ardent search, the woman in the parable exclaims to her friends and neighbors, "Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin!'   I believe the faith of Christians embraces, at its very center, the joy of God in finding us.  I also believe that where this is so, we are free to be a great deal more playful in our response to God, to one another, to the world.    I don't mean to suggest for even one second that our faith is frivolous. I do mean to say that when we enter into the joy of God over finding us, we are free to become more creative, to brainstorm new possibilities for our lives, to dream new dreams.

I have observed the phenomenon at work many times in groups of people:  When a group, whether a family, a committee, a Bible study, a class or a church is overly serious, it sees very few possibilities.  What was done yesterday must be done today and tomorrow.   The group is stuck in its own ruts.  When persons in a group become more playful, on the other hand, the process of brainstorming is let loose, imagination is generated, the group is free to look out and beyond to new horizons, new possibilities, a new day.  What if God's action upon us is a generative action, a power that frees us to be more creative, playful and imaginative?  It seems to me that such a thing is no stretch to children who participate in God's joy over finding them.

New Dreams

"We need new dreams tonight."
             U2, from their 1987 single, "In God's Country"

Welcome to the Sacred Adventure: A Blog Exploring Christian Spirituality and Adventurous Living.  Because this is my first post under this title, I'm going to ask you to set aside five to ten minutes to read this post in its entirety.  This will probably be the longest blog entry I will make.  I think you'll understand as you read along why I need a little extra space today.

This blog will explore something that has become a deep concern of mine, best expressed, I believe, in a question:  What is required of us to live our lives as a sacred adventure?

The last two words in the preceding question are carefully chosen.  The word "sacred" suggests to me something that is rooted, filled with mystery, and profoundly important.  "Adventure" implies a journey, fraught with risk, requiring courage and discernment.  Together, these two words--sacred and adventure--speak to what I think our lives can be and are called to be.  As the title of the blog suggests, I will be drawing (deeply, I hope) from the well of Christian spirituality as the primary source for my thinking and writing.  This is not to suggest, however, that this blog will always (or even usually) be overtly religious.  I hope to draw from the world of sport and entertainment, from the writings of poets and novelists, from my journal writings and the Comics page, and, yes, from the lyrics of rock music.  I hope this blog will be playful, curious and thoughtful.  I also hope that it will be a conversation.  I believe that the sacred adventure can only be undertaken in community.  That's where you fit in!  I hope that you will lob your thoughts into the discussion from time to time, ask your questions, stir the waters--and let's see where this conversation might take us. 

My plan will be to post a blog each Monday morning.  Then, as the week progresses, I'll attempt to respond (as I'm able) to some of what you've written.  Some Mondays I may write longer posts, at other times very brief ones and sometimes I'll just ask a question.  I'll try to mix it up and keep things interesting.

Allow me to begin my sharing a recent experience.  Several months ago, while running the dirt trail not far from my house and listening to my I Pod, I heard the five words quoted at the top of this post from U2's song "in God's Country."  I had heard these words dozens of times before, but somehow this day I heard them.  "We need new dreams tonight."  What happened to me next was strange and unsettling.  As those five words registered in my mind, I heard another sound, something emerging from within me, a sound that I can only describe as a groan.  It was as involuntary and immediate as a knee-jerk, and it nearly stopped me in my tracks.  Those five simple words had connected with a longing in me, a longing I did not even know I had until that moment.  The groan seemed to say, "Yes!  We do need new dreams tonight!  I need new dreams tonight.  I need new dreams for my life, for my relationships, for the world in which I live.  My dreams are old and boring and limp, like a balloon, emptied of air.  I need new dreams to empower me to love more deeply and live more vibrantly.  Yes, yes, we do need, I do need new dreams tonight!"  All of that, and much more, expressed as a groan.

The experience was disturbing.  I'm a 51 year old man, a husband and a father, the pastor of a faith community in central Michigan, a self-described follower of Jesus.  The pursuit of Christian spirituality has been a passionate and consistent theme of my life for more that three decades.  I came to faith at a time when it was often said that "Jesus is the answer."  In those early days of my journey, I believed that to embrace faith was to say good-bye to longing, and to embrace contentment.  And yet here I was, thirty-plus years later, wending along the dirt road between the corn fields behind my house, hearing a groan emerge from my soul that expressed my longing for more.

The U2 moment that I've just described has brought into sharp focus some ideas I've been considering for several years.  While I'll be the first to say that a life centered in God does, very often in my experience, grant a sense of being deeply and profoundly at home, I believe there is another side of Christian spirituality, often overlooked and under-thought:  God is also the source of longing, of yearning, of groaning.  The Apostle Paul suggests as much in Romans and Galatians.  To be united with God is to embrace God's joy, but it is also to embrace God's suffering, God's groaning for the world.  Could it be that the groan I encountered between the cornfields was simply an encounter with the love of God?

I decided to recount this story in this, the first Sacred Adventure blog, because I suspect that living our lives as a sacred adventure begins with longing.  It begins with a longing that our lives might somehow be different and better, that our relationships can be truer, that our world can be more whole.  I don't think there has been nearly enough said in our churches about the importance of this longing, this groan.  (I have heard many groans in churches, usually during the sermon, but that's a different thing altogether.)  I fear that in our efforts to point people to Christian faith as "what works," we have given the impression that Jesus is like the aspirin you take to calm the headache.  He fixes all, so that we can get on with our better lives.  But could it be that Jesus the risen one also wishes to evoke in us his groan, his groan that compels us to live differently, to protest all that is sickening and ugly about our world, his groan that compels us to long for more.  My hunch is that there can be no sacred adventure unless we have the courage and freedom to listen to the groan, and then, dream new dreams.