I’ve been thinking about this concept all day, and to be honest it kind of hurts my head, so I thought I’d share it with you, and maybe release some of the pressure.

Should my identity be made up by my ideas?

To break it down, I’m basically asking, “Should Marty be Marty and be seen as the Marty that people know because of what Marty believes to be true?”

I used to think yes, but now I’m not so sure.  Why?

Because it’s almost impossible (if not impossible) to love someone whose identity you associate with someone who diametrically opposes you in terms of belief.

I grew up a Creationist.  Not in the scientific realm, but in the “God said it, and so did my parents, so I believe it” realm.  When I first moved to Massachusetts, I remember  having lunch at the 99 with a friend of mine who had a science degree from WPI, and my friend basically told me that he believed in evolution, but he was also a Christian.  He called it “Theistic Evolution.”  Because I grew up associating the identity of people with what they believed, my world was crushed as this person who I trusted had quickly become someone who, to me, not only believed scandalous things, but could not possibly be a a true Christ follower.

Thankfully, I reconciled with my friend, and to this day we have a great relationship, but first, I had to separate my friend from what he believed.  Not that I should have to agree with or ignore what he believed, but I first am called to love people before anything else. (See Deuteronomy and that guy who “gave His life” in the New Testament).  So…

I am Marty.  And the first thing you need to know about me is I am loved and am created to love.

I’m reading through the Bible in 90 days right now.  I finished the Pentateuch yesterday.  One interesting verse I ran into a few days ago says, “If the prophet predicts something in the Lord’s name and it does not happen, the Lord did not give the message.  That prophet has spoken on his own and need not be feared.” (Deuteronomy 18:22 – NLT)

So in scripture when things were destroyed, like say the world or Judah or even evil, cannibalistic, homoerotic places like Nineveh or Sodom (My Sunday School teacher had a terrific imagination), typically those things were foretold by a prophet of God or even an angel of God who came beforehand and warned people that they have time to repent before God acts.  Now before you get all bent out of shape that I’m making light of the OT, please know that I believe that these things did happen and that God, though He is love, is also a God of justice.  And I believe there are plenty of times in Scripture when God reacts immediately to people’s individual sin.

But I can’t find a time anywhere in Scripture when a tragedy of epic proportions happened to a group of people, and a prophet of God reacted with “I told you so.”  “You know, I’ve been preaching for years and years about God and who He is, and now this tragedy happened, and I’ll tell you why it is, because of the way you acted. I told you so Sodom!  I told you so  Judah!  Now God got ya!”

No, welcome to the modern world of reactive prophecy.  We don’t actually have to prove that we are speaking for God, we can just talk about stuff after the fact.  Oklahoma Bombings.  September 11th.  Madrid bombings.  Tsunamis.  Hurricanes.  It’s easy for us to speak of why God did it after the fact, isn’t it?  Parents, this makes for an amazing child rearing technique.  You share with little Johnny that he shouldn’t touch the hot stove, and then when he ignores you, bring it up again.  Amidst the pain and bruising on his hand, at the moment when he’s writhing in pain,  feel free to bring a “You should have listened to me.  If you had listened to me, your hand wouldn’t be red and your skin would still be on your hand, and you wouldn’t feel the pain that you do now.”

The truth is, if God wanted you to speak to Haiti, Mr. Robertson, I respectfully ask you to consider the fact that he would have asked you to do it a month or two ago.  Yesterday was too late.  The pain was there.  The lives were lost. The homes were destroyed.  And now we pray that we all learn something about life and love and God.

But we don’t say or even infer, “I told you so.”

Please donate to help Haiti here.

This last Sunday at Fellowship, I laid down a challenge:  The “Love Spreads” challenge.

It’s based on the premise that love is always a better choice than pride, and always impacts our world more positively than it’s “p” word counterpart.  So I laid down the challenge to our church that for one week, we would make every effort to communicate everything we do in love.  Because many times we find ourselves immersed in bad habits of communication, it’s easier to explain in the things this excludes.  This means:

Sarcasm
Negativity (that is not needed to express a valid point)
Bitterness about another person or a negative circumstance (like someone who does something “stupid” or an electronic device that wont do what you want it to)
Joking around which tears down and busting
Talking to someone with malicious intent about someone else
rolling of the eyes when someone’s name is mentioned

While this is not an exhaustive list, I’m interested to see how it’s going for those who accepted the challenge, or if this is the first you’ve heard of it, what you think about the challenge in the first place?  I most certainly have failed a number of times, but I’m still working on it.

Are you willing to “spread only  love” for one week?

I don’t blame the mainstream media for making fun of Christians, because there are times that I certainly want to, like the one and only time I visited Des Moines, Iowa.  I traveled with a vacation Bible School organization known as Neighborhood Bible Time in the summer of 1996.  For the most part it was an amazing time.  3 weeks of training in Colorado led to 10 weeks of going to 10 different churches in 7 different states with another “NBT evangelist”.  The stories I could tell from that summer are endless, but you have to start somewhere, so I begin here, in the central United States, a hot bed of conservatism and the corn fields of moon pies and RC Cola.

My partner, Dave and I had traveled to Ohio and Michigan, and for week three we had the honor of hanging in the 4 lettered state not known as Ohio or Utah.  I had only traveled through the state, so I looked forward to spending the week at this most important of political states (cough, cough).

Though we worked as a team, Dave and I had our separate functions on the team.  I worked with the elementary students, teaching, singing songs, and showing magic tricks like nobody’s business, and Dave worked with the teenagers, playing football, throwing water balloons, and eating lots of junk food – so basically having a way better time than me.

I taught two sessions per day.  One consisted of all the 1st through 3rd graders who came to “Bible Time” and the other included all the 4th through 6th graders who were along for the ride. I met with each group for about an hour.  Training was actually long and arduous that took a lot of effort, yet provided a lot of fun too.  One magic trick I used was called the Burning Bible. The point was to teach kids that the Bible is forever, that it is God’s Word and it will endure.

For whatever reason my bosses instructed me never to show this trick to the younger 1st through 3rd graders, but to restrict this particular trick to the older children.  So week after week, when it came time to run through my games, music, stories, and magic tricks, I would skip “the Burning Bible” for the young kids and go with something a bit less daunting. This week in Iowa the kids were crazy!  They cheered louder than the places I’d been so far, and they were having a blast with Mr. Marty and his most excellent entertainment techniques.

On the 2nd of 5 days of meeting, the 1st – 3rd grade kids were just going nuts, which meant that I was on my game.  They were captivated and laughing and silent when I asked them to be.  I had them in the palm of my hand.  Things were going so well that about half way through, I turned around and grabbed the first thing that I could find because I didn’t want to lose momentum, and in my head as I grabbed the Burning Bible trick I said,  Ya know, it’s just this one time, and I have no clue why I can’t show the kids this anyway, so…

As I suspected, the kids were enamored with my new trick.  Their mouths dropped to the floor and it was almost like they weren’t listening when I explained to them that the Bible was God’s Word, and that it will endure forever.  They were so quiet, I then went into story time, and the rest of the morning went so smoothly, I continued to dwell on the fact that I was the man, and that my 20 year old self was an amazing teacher to these young children.

I thought nothing of the event as the rest of the day went great and that night Dave had a great time with the teenagers too.  The next day we had the same great kind of a day as before, minus the Burning Bible trick, though some kids asked for it again, to which I ignored them and continued doing the other things I had been trained to do.  After the meeting that morning, Dave and I were quite tired, so we headed out the door around 1:00 pm for lunch and a nap (I believe we called it “Bible Time Five”).  As Dave opened the actual solid wooden door out of the church, he hit this lady in the head.

“Oh, sorry,” Dave said quite apologetically.  The women smiled, appearing to be forgiving and very nice.  “That’s okay.  Is there something going on here for children this week?”  “Absolutely!” Dave said with much gusto  “Neighborhood Bible Time is happening here this week!  You should bring your daughter tomorrow morning!”  Dave said this while motioning to the 6 yr. old blond girl standing directly behind the  woman, “It’s a great time for kids.”

The woman continued while smiling, “Oh, yes, I was just wondering, Did someone burn a Bible in that meeting yesterday?”

In that one moment, everything became clear.  I knew I’d seen the little girl before, and I knew why I wasn’t supposed to show the Burning Bible magic trick to the young children.  Stupid Marty!  Stupid, stupid, stupid!

Dave smiled trying to be funny, “Yes, maam, that’s what happened.”  I quickly interjected, “No maam, that was me, and that’s not what happened.  You see, I was doing a…

As I talked the woman lost her smile in between the words “I” and “was” and spoke quite loudly while taking a step back and pointing at me:  “I rebuke you, in the name of Jesus”.  A look of relief came out of her face as she walked away, grabbing the arm of the confused 6 yr old and back towards her car.

“Maam, I’d love to explain to you what happened if you have another minute,” I said, trying to save whatever bit of Christian fellowship I could with this woman.  As she continued to ignore me like I didn’t exist, I then resorted to a touch of sarcasm, “Ummm, maam, can we talk about this like mature Christians?”

At that, the woman flipped me off, called me an asshole, got in her car, and drove away.

Fremont Baptist Temple’s Christmas Cantatas in the 80′s and 90′s were big.  Big everything.  Big drama.  Big music.  Big crowds.  Big hair.  Practice for the choir started in the fall on Sunday evenings a few hours before the Sunday 6pm service.  From the age of 13 I sang in the choir, first as a tenor, then sometime after puberty when I didn’t sound like Charlotte Church anymore, bass.  I loved getting to sing with guys like Steve and Bill, and contributing to the production as a whole.

Sheltered isn’t even the word to begin to describe who I was in those days, because it wasn’t just that I was actually sheltered, but I embodied my parents desire to shelter me.  That is, I never really fought it.  I so wanted to not disappoint them or even impress them at times that I did my best to tow the line when it came to all things “worldly.”

So one Christmas our church performed a production entitled, “Born to die.” The story and song told of a young man who walked away from his family’s Christian tradition to go live with his friends in “the world” and no doubt do some pretty monstrous things like listen to AC/DC  and smoke and get to 2nd base and beyond with his worldly girlfriends.  Eventually our young protaganist loses his job and has no money, which is right about the time all his friends leave him for better concerts (Poison perhaps?) and his girlfriends  go looking for hotter guys with money.

Eventually he gets to the place where he gets evicted from his apartment, and has nothing but a desire to return home for Christmas, a very few dollars, and a gold watch his grandfather had given him years earlier.  So he goes to the bus station trying to get home and attempts to talk the ticket guy into giving him a cheap ticket since he doesn’t have enough money to get across the street much less back home.  A conversation ensues and the guy ends up feeling bad for the repentant hero, and barters with him to trade a ticket home for his grandfather’s gold watch, which also happens to be the last remaining worldly possession the young man has.

I remember sitting in the choir during the rehearsals and the performances refreshed to know that I would never end up like that guy, stripped of everything because of his stupid decisions which could have been avoided had he just listened to what the Bible taught.

Years later I found myself in Christian college, still towing the line and making my parents proud of me for what I was not doing, when I became a floor leader (the rest of the world calls it an RA, but the “tattle tale” structure was different there).  One of my responsibilities was called “shadowing”.  “Shadowing” was necessary when a young male or female college student didn’t tow the line via the rules of the college, and when they got caught (if it were a big enough crime, like going to the movies or talking to the person they were dating on an unchaperoned sidewalk), they would have to go through an appeals process to stay in the school.  During the appeals process, the person being “shadowed” would have to follow the floor leader around their classes or to their rooms and they couldn’t talk to anyone else besides administration or floor leaders.

I remember “shadowing” several of those people during my junior and senior years in college, and feeling sorry for what they were going through, but also encountering a certain happiness that I was glad I would never go through that situation or be like those people, having lost many of their college friends because of one or two bad choices they made when they could have just followed God’s advice.

Then I graduated from school and moved to Atlanta to become a high school history teacher.  I really loved it, but working at a christian school I got paid enough to eat and sometimes pay the rent.  My real life had started, away from the rules and the people telling me what to do and towing the line.  I remember one beautiful September day walking on the school campus feeling like I could take on the world, having put myself in a great situation, loving the co-workers and students with whom I was constantly  surrounded.  And I thanked God I was not that guy who would sell his soul and his family out for a good time, or those people who messed their life plans up by some stupid choice to go off campus and visit Hooters or other people I knew who did bad things.  I towed the line.  I did the right things.

And then, just like that, I became that guy/those people and I would never be the same.

I drove last night and thought to myself that there are more Christmas lights around where I’m from than in years past.  They look beautiful and they display brightly that the holiday season is upon us once again.  Yes, the Christmas spirit has come again and hope is rising.  Not hope in politics or vague change that never really shows up, but hope based on the idea that God will make all things right.   I like to think that this is the reason people put up all those bright and shiny crystals of the yuletide season – to demonstrate the hope that Christmas brought into the world (okay, maybe not the exact date) those many years ago.  This is what I love about the Christian faith too.  Not that someday I will get to go to heaven away from all the bad people.  I feel strongly at this point that this outlook is flawed in many ways, not the least of which being opposite of what Jesus exemplified.

But the thing that I love the most about faith in Christ is that God will eventually (and only He knows how and when) make all things in heaven and on earth right. This is what we can rightly place our hope in as we work to restore the world to how He created it by being the hands and the feet of Christ. And this makes me want to put up Christmas lights this year.

Who’s with me?

Ever since I first remember reading Romans 14, I have had difficulty using language, entertainment, and real estate as the means to create a sub culture for Christendom.  Christian coffeehouses, Christian music, and words that only Christians understand get used up to create this distance between the one who has trusted Christ, and the billions of other people in the world around us.

In fact, I think building a subculture of Christian stuff is probably one of the worst ideas in human history, outside of Nero burning down his own city, of course.

If one uses the Bible as her guide, what she notices is that God had his chosen people, the Israelites, to be a light in a dark world.  To show the rest of the world that there is a better way, when that way comes from the God who created everything.  And Israel did okay for a while.  Even King David, the most famous of all of Israel’s leaders (with apologies to Moses), messed up a time or three, yet he was still known as a man after God’s own heart.  So it wasn’t necessarily the sin that tore up Israel’s relationship with God, but there was something deeper than just their outward failure to comply to God’s laws.

So God showed forgiveness and mercy in a huge way over hundreds of years of them turning their back on Him.  But then eventually He sends the Messiah, Jesus Christ, into the world.  Why then?  So by that time, Israel’s religion had come to a different place, away from what was really intended.  They had come to believe that they were different then everyone else just because they were Israelites.  As we know today, no group of people is more special than another group of people just because of their race, gender, or religion.  What makes anyone different from anyone else always comes from inside us and never from outside of us.

Then Jesus ultimately dies a cruel death on a tree, and pays a price that I was not willing to pay, eventually rising again to life and to the Father.  But He came into a world not only to die, but also to show us how to be a light in a very dark world.  And then what do we do in response to this fabulous act of kindness?

We create segregated churches and keep stale churches alive longer than they should.  We eat our potlucks in the church mess hall and go on our weekend retreats.  We buy our books from Christian bookstores and learn the necessary 8 syllable words that no one understands unless they’ve gone through 20 years of Christian school like I did.  We listen to our Christian music and reprimand anyone who dares to listen to “secular music” (or regular music as I prefer to call it, just like what I call music with Christ at the center).  In reality, we block ourselves in so we’re not tainted by the rest of the world.  Then we say to said world that thinks were crazy (not because we’re being light, mind you, but because we’re not), “Come, be a part of my thing.”

And for the most part, their response is, “Hell no.”

But what if we told them that to surrender to God, you don’t need to be like me or do my thing, but you just have to…well, surrender to God, and put your faith in the person of Jesus Christ who paved a way for them to do that?  And sometimes that means you should stop doing things that take you away from that goal, and sometimes that means you should probably start doing some things that move you towards that goal, like getting involved in Christian community.

That community might include me, or it might not, but it certainly is not about me – of that I am certain.

And what if we made our churches agents of push rather than leeches of pull, sucking the life out of everything that walks into its dark doors?

Wow…that sort of thing would take humility, sacrifice, and a change of mind and heart.

In America, we have a church on every corner, yet we’re still looking for the power of God.  Could it be that the power of God is found not in a place, but when the individual decides to die to themselves and become, not like Paul or John or Peter, but become the person God created them to be, here in this culture?

I ain’t wearing no toga.

Last weekend I was at a wedding in Atlanta. I had a fabulous time enjoying the company of friends and new friends, with activities galore and conversation most of which started out light hearted and eventually evolved into the point where we could be real with one another.  This happens when you spend a significant amount of time with someone with whom you enjoy spending a significant amount of time.

At the end of my time away I talked to Carie on the phone and we talked for a while I was waiting for some transportation to move me toward Worcester.  Carie, always being sensitive to the way I feel and act, mentioned that I sounded really happy.  I told her that I was, and for two reasons.  First of all I couldn’t wait to return to my amazing wife.   She completes me in every way, and I am always able to be the real me when I’m with her.  Second, during the weekend I was able to completely be the real me, in community with a group of guys who accepted the person I am.

Something I’m pondering this week is how to create this type of community outside of a special weekend, retreat, or organized activity.  At our suburban churches in America we get all excited about that weekend away from everything.  That Promise Keepers or Women of Faith event that will definitely take us to the next level, and for what?  So that we can go back to our caged in lives of plastic smiley faces and non authentic words, pretending that we don’t have problems, opinions, or a desire to figure out what it’s all about?  Our world won’t be changed until we take the transforming power of God away from the occasional weekend away and move it into the “normal every day life”.

So at Fellowship that’s what we’re trying to find out – how to have authentic community in a world and a culture where we’re trained to be – I’m sorry – to look perfect.  So that at the end of every week I can come home from work or basketball or whatever it is I might be doing with my time and my wife can say, “Wow, you’re happy”.  And I can respond,

“Yeah, this is the real me.”

I think Thanksgiving gets shafted.

Seriously, we pay more attention to Christmas and Halloween because they make for better marketing, but Thanksgiving is one of my fave holidays.  And not just because it’s the one holiday I can watch my dad suffer through another defeat of the Detroit Lions, his favorite team.  No, I love being thankful.  So all this month I want to share with you what I’m thankful for and I’d love to get a glimpse of what you’re thankful for.

Let’s start with God.

I love His continued presence in my life.  Though I’ve fallen away at times and been as selfish as a bear holding a picnic basket, He is always there, watching, guiding, convicting, loving.  This week I fly to Atlanta to be in the wedding of one of my closest friends.   I have a love/hate relationship with that city.  I loved the year I spent there and the people that were in my life, and I hate the way I acted so selfishly.  Through all of that, God was there.  And through where I am now, He is here too.  You might even say I’d have a difficult time getting away from Him. I love that!

How are you thankful for God?  Or are you?