Completely Unhelpful Things to Say to Someone in Grief, Part 2

[This is part of a series of posts on completely unhelpful things to say to someone in grief. See the others here.] Two other options for titles for this post were:

• Completely Unhelpful Gifts to Give to Someone in Grief
• Plaques You Shouldn't See at the Christian Bookstore

Although, apparently, there are plenty of people who will disagree with me on this, as evidenced by the fact that my wife pointed it out to me in an actual Christmas gift catalog. I guess there is (and always will be) a market for bad theology, particularly when it comes to trying to console people. If there's a market for this, maybe I should try to do something with my scripture plaques.

Ug. As my wife said, "It makes me want to be sure I'm not the best."

Scripture Plaques You Won't Find at the Christian Bookstore, #9

[This post is one of a series of potential Christian plaques that we would never find at a Christian bookstore. See the rest of the list here.]

Of course the point of these posts is that we wouldn't find these things at a Christian bookstore, but perhaps if one did carry this plaque, it would be packaged together with a new CD titled something like:

"The Best of the Mega-SuperStars of Worship, Volume XIX"

What it Means to be a Methodist

It's a common expression to hear someone described as having "grown up in church." While we understand that normally means they've been involved in church from childhood, I can take it even farther. I literally grew up in church, not only for the reason stated above, but because before being a house, the house that I grew up in was Pioneer Memorial Methodist Church for about 15 years in the 50's and 60's. The community it existed to serve was made up of oil camp workers. The camp closed, leaving no one in the community, so the church closed as well. A few years later, my parents were married and eventually remodeled the church building into their house. They have now lived there 40 years, and it's the primary place where I "grew up in church." As an adult, it has come to hold a lot of meaning for me not only that I grew up in church, but that I grew up in a Methodist church, because my roots there are strong and deep, and surely I don't know the extent to which they have shaped me. I think it's accurate when I say to people that I've been a Methodist a lot longer than I've been alive: my great-grandparents started a Methodist church in their house before moving to this part of West Texas; my grandparents helped start the Methodist church that eventually became the home I was raised in; my parents helped start a new Methodist church in the late 80's. And I began my first staff position in a Methodist church fourteen years ago.Despite my deep roots in Methodism, it wasn't until adulthood and having already been on staff for some time in Methodist churches that I began to understand and treasure the immense value to be found in the "method," or the lifestyle, that originally came along with claiming to be a Methodist. Methodism was a very significant movement in the histories of England and the United States, and largely so because it was such a reliable guide for the development of people characterized by love for God and for one another.

I'm not going out on any limb to say that it no longer serves as such a reliable guide. Yet this is not because the original method of the Methodists has failed or been found lacking, but rather because the way it was intended to shape our lives has been left in our history rather than continuing to be emphasized as standards among us. In conversations with people at my church, the most common reasons that people give for being Methodist are things like, "I was born one," "I like it that we don't have all of the rules like other churches," or from many of the most honest folks, "Because I can be a Methodist and still drink."

Virtually nothing remains in Methodism in our culture today of the practical shape that it once gave to people's lives. Yet writing something like this doesn't accomplish anything good if I only use it to bash my church. Rather, the hope that I have for all of my Methodist family across the world is that we can recover the riches of our heritage and find the best ways to put them into practice in the 21st century.

A couple of years ago, I came across this quotation from Methodism's founder, John Wesley, while re-reading Paul Chilcote's book, Recapturing the Wesleys' Vision, and although the language is old, it is every bit as applicable today as it was when it was written in 1745:

"If you walk by this rule, continually endeavouring to know, and love, and resemble, and obey the great God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, as the God of love, of pardoning mercy; if from this principle of loving, obedient faith, you carefully abstain from all evil, and labour, as you have opportunity, to do good to all men, friends and enemies; if, lastly, you unite together to encourage and help each other in thus working out your salvation, and for that end watch over one another in love- you are they whom I mean by Methodists." (John Wesley, Advice to the People Called Methodists)

If we only had this single paragraph to learn what it means to be a Methodist, we would still have plenty to guide us more fully into "the life that is really life." Just in these few words from Wesley, we learn to:

• Continually endeavor to know, love, and resemble, and obey God
• Abstain from all evil
• Do good to everyone with every opportunity
• Watch over one another in love, helping and encouraging one another to work out our salvation

I want to be one whom Wesley meant by Methodist and live this way, and I deeply want to be part of a community of people committed to doing so as well.

Pray This

You re-create us in Christ, O God, to be holy, to be loving and generous, merciful, kind, and just in all our relationships in life.You re-create us in Christ, O God, so that we might be able to look you squarely in the face, to live with you and enjoy you forever. You re-create us in Christ, O God, simply because you want all of your children to be truly happy now. (Paul Chilcote, from "New Birth" in Praying in the Wesleyan Spirit) One of my favorite guides for praying with other people's words is to use this book by Paul Chilcote. In it, he takes each of John Wesley's 52 Standard Sermons and turns them into 2-3 page prayers. Wesley's sermons are brilliant, and Chilcote mentions in the introduction, if people were to read Wesley's sermons many lives would be changed (not to mention many Wesleyan churches!). But the problem is that you've got to have quite a bit of endurance for 18th century English built up to get through any of them. (Incase you're feeling adventurous, here's the text of the original New Birth sermon.) So, what he's done in this little book is great for anyone who wants to pray, particularly those of us in Wesleyan traditions, as it gives us a chance to dig into Wesley's sermons in a way that he would have been very pleased with: opening ourselves to God through prayer.

The Love of God and Yogurt

Recently my wife was eating some super-healthy kind of yogurt, and I got a laugh out of the description on the container: Incase that's hard to read in the photo, it says, "Agapé" means "love" in Greek. When you discover how indulgently creamy and delicious this healthy, 0% fat yogurt is, you're going to discover pure, divine agapé. Prepare to be stirred...

This, friends, is how words lose their meaning. Simple observation will tell us that eating yogurt is in fact not a reliable way to "discover pure, divine agape," nor any other kind of love. Dallas Willard has a great definition of love: "to will the good of another." As he points out, as much as I may say that I love chocolate cake, it isn't true. I don't love chocolate cake, because I want to eat it.

The scriptures speak of agape as the highest kind of love, perfect love, the love of a perfect God toward his children, as expressed most fully in Jesus. This is something significantly better than the experience we might get when we eat organic yogurt.

The agape love of his Father that Jesus demonstrated to the world two millennia ago was powerful enough to begin a world movement of unparalleled influence by people committed to, above all things, love. After all, our Teacher's command on his last night with his students before laying down his life for them was, "Love each other as I have loved you."

Scriptures and history are full of people trying to put words around this love, and the most successful attempts are still stumbling efforts, but because they represent the reality of agape much more closely than the yogurt tub, here are a few that come to mind:

There's a wideness in God's mercy

I cannot find in my own

And He keeps His fire burning

To melt this heart of stone

Keeps me aching with a yearning

Keeps me glad to have been caught

In the reckless raging fury

That they call the love of God

(Rich Mullins, 1993)

–––

Love divine, all loves excelling,

joy of heaven, to earth come down;

fix in us thy humble dwelling;

all thy faithful mercies crown!

Jesus thou art all compassion,

pure, unbounded love thou art;

visit us with thy salvation;

enter every trembling heart.

(Charles Wesley, 1747)

–––

I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (St. Paul in Ephesians 3:18-19, about AD 60)

Scripture Plaques You Won't Find at the Christian Bookstore, #8

[This post is one of a series of potential Christian plaques that we would never find at a Christian bookstore. See the rest of the list here.]

Not only will you not find this one in the Christian bookstore (nor any of the hundreds of other similar possibilities), but I could also include this passage in a series called, "Scripture passages I'm thankful I've never been required to memorize."

The Best Decision for Us Today

I recently returned from a retreat on discernment led by Ruth Haley Barton as part of her Transforming Community. Ruth teaches, writes, and practices great stuff in regard to becoming discerning people and organizations. The church and world are desperately in need of her wisdom and the practices she encourages in this area. Leading up to this retreat, our group had already been together each quarter for 3 days over 18 months with shared commitments and practices that have brought us to being more the kind of people who could soak in and apply good advice from Ruth and others about receiving God's guidance in our lives. As she often points out, it's silly for us to expect discernment from undiscerning people. But thankfully, because of reliable rhythms of the spiritual life that we have practiced together over the last year and a half, many of us are at a place where we are ready for better ways of listening for and following God (and are desperate to do so).

Ruth encouraged us to come into this retreat with a decision, big or small, to take into the discernment process. That was easy for me to do, and Ruth's teaching on both the habit and practice of discernment were very helpful. I didn't leave the retreat with any clear decisions made, but I did leave with a clear assurance: We can never go wrong by making the choice that helps us to be more fully God's.

Certainly some decisions carry more weight than others. We understand the impact that the choice of a spouse or a career can have on our lives, and many other important decisions are of lesser importance. But there's a part of us that understands that we never really know the extent to which a decision is going to impact our lives. For example, I knew that choosing to leave home and attend Asbury College fourteen years ago was a big decision; I had no idea how much it would impact the rest of my life. The people I met, the passion for study that I found, and the opportunities that came my way in the course of living out that decision ended up having tremendous impact: my wife, the jobs I've had, the friends I turn to, and much of the kind of person I am have all been very heavily influenced by that decision. That's a very positive example, but we all know that the negative examples exist too.

If you're like me, someone to whom deciding correctly is of inestimable value, the unknown future impact of our current decisions can feel paralyzing. What if we choose wrongly? Or what if we miss choosing what's best?

I entered the retreat feeling those fears, and when I left I understood that yes, decisions involve risk. A decision may or may not end up with things going as well as possible, or being the most lucrative in a variety of ways. In those terms, we may make the wrong decision, but... we never know ahead of time how those things will play out. And while I don't know those things, I usually do have an idea of which choice(s) will most effectively help me be more fully God's. I usually have some idea of which option(s) will be more conducive to growing Jesus' kind of character in me, so that qualities like love, joy, peace, patience, and kindness are most likely to grow in me. If I choose in favor of that, I cannot choose wrongly.

One of my heroes, Stu, taught me this in different words a long time ago when he said, "Make sure you're in God's will today, and you won't miss being in it tomorrow." The best decision for you and I today, regardless of which day of our lives today is, is always to be more fully God's, because God always has- and always will- see that we are cared for.

(If you're in leadership and want to know more about Ruth's ideas on discernment, check out her outstanding book, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership, particularly Chapter 12.)