12/31/06 A New Beginning
Happy New Year!!
We’ve made it through another year,
and another Christmas.
One year ago some of you were not at all sure you’d see this day.
Some of you felt sure there was no way
you could make it another month
much less another year.
There was so much pain,
or so much confusion,
or so much fear
that the thought of facing 2006
seemed like a burden far to great for you to bare.
But one day
and one step at a time you kept going,
clinging tightly to the hand of your Lord.
And now, one year later,
things are so very much better
than you ever dreamed they could have been.
The marriage you almost walked out on
is beginning to work in ways
you never dreamed possible.
The pain you thought would overwhelm you,
and engulf you,
and destroy you
has drawn you closer to your Lord
than you have ever been before,
and now the hurt has subsided some
and deep inside you know
by God’s grace - you can
and you will survive.
For some of you
2006 has not been a year
you would ever choose to live over,
but neither is it a year you would exchange for any other,
because it has brought about changes in you
that nothing else has ever done,
changes you never believed were possible.
And for some of you here this morning
2007 looks like a terrifying enemy
looming up before you.
Right now, as you sit here,
listening to my pastoral voice droning on,
you only half hear what I’m saying
because your heart is so filled with pain,
or confusion,
or fear
that you don’t really know whether you’ll be able to make it another month,
much less another year.
And, if the truth were known,
it was desperation, more than anything else,
that brought you here this mourning.
You’ve never needed answers more
than you need them right now.
You’ve never needed healing more
than you need it right now.
You’ve never needed a real live God
Who hears,
and Who heals,
and Who literally brings beauty out of ashes
more than you do right now.
And your being here this mourning
is mostly your own private cry of hope
that such a God really does exist
somewhere under all of the form,
and image,
and routine,
and ceremony that hangs about
those who gather in His name.
You have your own plan, of course,
your own “solution” for whatever it is
that is causing the turmoil in your life.
But you know it won’t do for you
what you really long to have done.
At best it may just exchange one source of turmoil for another,
and at worst it will bring far greater pain into your life and the lives of others.
What you need is not a better plan,
what you need is a living God
who really does love you,
and really does understand,
a God who has the ability to...well, to do what He said He could do,
ISA 61:2-3 ...to comfort all who mourn, to grant those who mourn in Zion, giving them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a spirit of fainting. So they will be called oaks of righteousness, The planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified.
Interesting words, huh.
They sound great,
and even make nice songs.
But sometimes that’s the problem.
When we sing them
they may touch us emotionally,
but at the same time
they bypass our intellect.
By that I mean that we may feel them,
but we don’t altogether believe them,
or understand them.
Well, maybe I can help with the understanding part, at least.
There are many things about our God
that are relatively easy for us to understand.
They are the obvious things,
the expected things,
the things that, even in the confused state of rebellion against Him that we bring with us into this world,
we still understand.
We understand that He is huge.
Just the magnitude of the physical creation around us
tells us that.
And we understand that He is RIGHTEOUS!
After all,
He’s the One who came up with all of those rules,
all of those commandments,
all of those THOU-SHALT-NOT’S.
In fact,
it’s probably those two things most of all,
knowing that He’s huge,
and knowing that He’s HOLY,
that keeps us from wanting to get too near to Him.
There are so many reasons in our own lives
why He may not be real pleased to have us around,
and why we may not be real comfortable
having Him around.
But there are some other things about Him
that are far more difficult for us to understand,
things that are far more difficult for us to believe
because we simply cannot understand why it should be that way.
We simply cannot understand why HE should be that way.
And then too,
the very fact that we hurt
also makes us wonder if it could be true.
And high on that list
is the compassion He feels for each of us,
and the way He tells us that He not only knows our pain,
and our suffering,
and our confusion,
and our fear,
but He feels that pain with us.
Funny how it is.
We can understand it at the human level, of course.
Ever loved a child who was in pain?
It might even have been
some sort of suffering
that they brought on themselves.
And yet it affected you deeply, didn’t it.
In fact, their suffering became your suffering.
Because they hurt,
you also hurt.
We can understand that
because we’ve experienced it,
because the ability to feel compassion
is part of our humanity,
part of our being human.
But what we find so much more difficult to understand,
or to believe,
is that this capacity for compassion that we sometimes feel
is present within us
because it is part of the imprint of God Himself within us.
It is, in fact,
our experiencing in a very limited way toward one another
what He feels for each of us.
In this passage in Isaiah that I just read for us,
when Isaiah talks with us
about the kind of work our God seeks to accomplish within us,
he begins by allowing us to see into God’s heart,
and to see there the one thing we least expected to find -
not disgust,
not anger,
not irritation or intense frustration,
not condemnation,
but compassion.
...to comfort all who mourn, to grant those who mourn in Zion...
He knows when we mourn,
He knows why we mourn,
and it affects Him deeply,
deeply enough for Him to want to reach into our lives and seek to bring healing,
...to comfort all who mourn.
And it may well be
that the greatest battle you fight right now
is the battle of believing your God truly is FOR you
and not against you.
Maybe it will help
if I tell you that there are many things in life that cause us to mourn.
Typically we think of mourning
as a response within us to the loss of someone we love,
and certainly it is that.
But mourning takes many different forms in our lives,
and can come from many different losses.
It can come from discovering, perhaps in a new way,
the life we could have had
if we had not been so deeply wounded by sin,
either our sin or the sins of others.
It can come from recognizing we made choices in the past
that have caused our life now
to be less than what we hoped it would be.
There are times when I find myself mourning
over the brevity of my own life.
Most of the people I love the most deeply
will have futures that I will never see.
And I hate that,
and in a very real way I mourn over being a part of a world
in which death,
and the separation it brings
is an inescapable part of love this side of the return of Christ.
Anything that causes us to feel deep sorrow,
or loss,
or regret is a potential source of mourning.
And the first, and perhaps the most crucial thing
that I want us to notice about this passage
is the way in which God responds to us
at those times when we mourn.
He doesn’t pounce on us,
He doesn’t tell us to shape up and get a grip,
He doesn’t attack or criticize us in any way.
What He does do
is to make it clear to us that our pain affects Him deeply
and that He both can and will
bring us healing from those wounds in our souls that cause the pain.
And then, from there,
He makes us the best exchange offer we could ever imagine.
...giving them a garland instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the mantle of praise instead of a spirit of fainting...
It’s truth converted into mental imagery, of course,
pictures to help us understand
what it is He’s seeking to do in our lives.
And I want to be sure you heard correctly what I just said.
It is what HE’s seeking to do.
This is where His leadership will take you if you choose to follow.
What you’re holding in your hands right now are ashes.
You may be all too aware of that,
or you may not.
You may think that what you’re clinging to so tightly right now
really does have great value,
and the power to fill your life.
I was involved in a brief, intense correspondence earlier this year
with a young man who had received my name and e-mail address
from a friend of a friend of a friend.
He doesn’t live in Alaska,
I’ve never met him personally,
and probably never will.
He’s nineteen years old,
a deeply committed Christian,
struggling with strong homosexual feelings,
and wondering what to do.
I was amazed that he risked writing
because from our correspondence I learned
that he had already reached out for help to church leaders twice before contacting me
and was told by one that he was most certainly going to hell,
and by the other that the “problem” would go away
if he was just more diligent in praying and reading his Bible.
But the person who’d pointed him my direction
had promised him that I wouldn’t beat him up in the name of Jesus
so he reached out one more time.
And in our early correspondence
what he wanted to know most
was if God really was going to send him to hell
because of what was going on inside him.
That question was easy to answer.
In my first note to him I said,
“Thank you so very much for choosing to invite me into what is very likely the most difficult and confusing mental and emotional battle you’ve ever faced. From your comments it sounds as if you’ve already been strongly confronted with the mainstream fear-based condemnation that is so prevalent within the church world. The truth is, my friend, apart from the healing and redemptive work of our Lord in our lives, we are all evil and disgusting and going to hell. It has nothing whatsoever to do with being gay or not being gay. It has everything to do with being human. And yet the amazing thing is that, for reasons we will never really understand, our Lord loves us and delights in us and longs to share life with us. He is not offended by what’s going on inside you right now. He’s not angry with you. He’s not ashamed of you. He’s certainly not condemning you. Nor is He requiring you to "fix" yourself. The truth is, what He feels right now for you is a depth of compassion beyond anything you could ever imagine. He knows your confusion. He knows the depth of your pain. He knows your fear. And because He loves you the way He does, He hurts with you.
There are, of course, a wide range of thoughts and issues you and I could exchange, and if you choose to keep up communication, I would certainly welcome it. But for now, the first and most crucial truth I want to share with you concerns how your God views what’s going on in your life. From your note I believe you have been flooded with a whole bunch of lies from the Christian community. And they will not end. That’s the type of thing religion generates - condemnation, fear, and performance-based interaction with God. And it’s trash, all of it, of the worst possible kind. So let me say this as simply as I know how - if anyone ever tries to tell you that the impulses you find within yourself right now have the power to separate you from God or cause Him to turn away from you or cut you off from His love they are absolutely and utterly wrong and profoundly anti-Christian in the message they are giving you. The choice our God offers us in our interaction with Him is remarkably simple. We can choose to approach Him on the basis of our performance. If we do, then the only thing that will qualify us to stand before Him is absolute perfection. Or we can choose to approach Him on the basis of our choosing to believe that Christ’s death really did pay the total price for all of our sinfulness forever. And if we choose that option, then He tells us that the barrier of our sin is gone forever. I know you’ve heard that countless times, but I also think you may not have heard it in the context of the struggle going on inside you now. So let me apply it for you - what God is offering you right now is not a choice between Him on one side and being gay on the other. What He’s offering you is quite simply His love, His friendship, His lovingkindness, and His leadership one step at a time through this whole confusing mess, with the assurance that no matter what choices you make or don’t make, He will never leave you, never forsake you, never turn His back on you, never stop loving you because what He longs for most of all is you close to Him, and the one thing that prevented that, your sin, has already been removed from you forever and nailed to the cross with Christ.”
We exchanged several more notes with one another,
dealing with a number of issues concerning the choices he was facing.
But then, at the end of one of my notes,
I asked him a question that, in the end, caused him to stop writing.
It was a question that, I think, scared him,
a question that caused him to see something in himself
that up to that point he had skillfully chosen not to see.
Here’s what I said.
“...which of the following two statements best describes what’s going on inside you right now? "I am now pretty well committed to the reality of being gay and I’m trying to figure out if there is still any place for my Christianity in the life I’m going into." Or, "I’m still deeply committed to the reality of being a Christian and I’m trying to figure out how to relate to these gay feelings within me in the context of my being a Christian."
From the time I asked him that question
our communication began to deteriorate
until he simply stopped writing altogether.
After several weeks of silence
I sent him one final note in which I said in part,
To be honest, I think there is the possibility that you may feel as if my communication with you, rather than helping, may seem to have made life more complicated for you right now. If I'm right in that, I can certainly understand your feeling that way. Before you contacted me I think perhaps you had reached the conclusion that your only option for the future was to figure out first of all how to transition into the gay community in a way that caused the least pain in the process, and then to figure out what to do with your Christianity within the context of that transition. What you were hoping for from me was the assurance that God would not reject you as you moved into the only life you felt you could honestly pursue. But it is possible that some of my earlier notes may have created within you the realization that there may be another alternative, an alternative that does not deny the reality of the homosexual feelings you struggle with, does not even remotely suggest that if you just read your Bible and pray more it will all go away, and yet at the same time does not predestine you to life in which the overwhelming defining issue of your existence is your sexual orientation. You have already fought your way through some huge mental battles and I know that you may feel as though fighting through them yet again may not seem like good news in any sense.
Obviously I'm making a whole bunch of assumptions here, my friend, but most of all I want you to know that, should you choose to seek any additional input from me, I will always, to the best of my ability, offer you those truths that have the power to make you truly free to be the person you most long to be in your spirit.
I never received a response,
and I believe I didn’t because he was not yet ready to believe
that what he was clinging to so tightly as his “answer”
really had no power to heal the pain
or fill the emptiness in his life.
I share this with you this morning
in the context of these words offered to us by Isaiah
because the first step in this remarkable exchange offered to us by our God,
an exchange in which He gives us a garland instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the mantle of praise instead of a spirit of fainting...
is His bringing us to the place
where we can accept the truth
that what we are clinging to so tightly as our “answer”
is really just ashes,
and our willingness to turn it over to Him
is no great loss on our part,
but rather it is the first step in getting rid of a huge burden that will crush us
if we continue to try to carry it on our own.
So if you find yourself hurting this morning,
honestly afraid of what your mind and emotions anticipate in the year ahead,
I know there is nothing I can say or do
that will make the pain go away,
but I can tell you with absolute honesty,
that I have hurt like that myself at times,
and I have found my Lord Jesus Christ adequate for my pain,
and you will too.
Do not minimize the crucial significance of what’s going on in your life right now.
It may well be that up to this point in your life
that nice neat religious system you’ve followed so well
has served you just fine.
It’s served you just fine
because you’ve done what we all do -
you’ve created a life in which you didn’t need a real, true, living God...not really.
Some of us do that by excluding Him altogether,
while many more
do it through the creation or acceptance of a religious system
that pays homage to God
while resting ultimately on our ability to do what needs to be done.
In the end it was all about right answers,
and right choices,
and our strength,
and determination,
and ability to pull it off.
All you needed was a system you could fulfill,
and the one you’d chosen
seemed to work just fine.
But now the whole thing has turned to ashes in your hands
and all of the “right” answers in the world
have no power to quiet the hurricane within your heart.
What you need is not another answer,
what you need, perhaps for the first time in your life,
is a living God
who has the power to heal, and to restore, and to recreate,
and who also has the love to do so.
And if any of this seems close to what you’re going through right now,
let me begin this new year
by pointing you to the offer your God is making to you.
It is His offer,
His promise to give you ... a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a spirit of fainting. So that you will be called an oak of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified.
That’s the way it works,
and that’s the way it should be -
you get the healing,
and the restoration,
and the hope,
and the future,
and He gets the glory.
And when we see things correctly,
the way they really are,
we really wouldn’t have it any other way.