Category: personal

There is a good chance that you have seen some of the videos of Italians singing from their windows during their social isolation because of COVID-19. It is very moving.

Here’s a compilation of many different scenes of singing.

This singing also reminds me of one of the things I love about church – singing with others.

Yes, I love singing with others because it strengthens my faith but that isn’t the only reason. There is just something magical about the act of singing with other people. Especially when it is about solidarity rather than performance. I love it so much that I actually believe that if I lost my faith in Christ (I haven’t) I might seriously consider still going to church just to sing with other people. In my opinion, it is difficult to find such singing outside the church. It happens, but it is rare, and that saddens me.

Just look at the videos of singing in Italy. They are singing songs that are common to them (patriotic and religious) or they are just playing prerecorded music on a PA and making noise along with the recording. For everyone to sing it requires music that is known by the majority of people involved. Most songs don’t ever get that near to universal, and most venues outside of churches don’t have songbooks or projected lyrics for those who don’t know the song to be able to sing along.

Some pop stars have been tweeting examples of their songs being sung, which are, as you would expect, almost all fake. This makes sense because while some pop songs get very popular only a very few of the historical classics reach the point that most of a neighborhood would know the lyrics. Seriously, how many of my friends and family who read these blog posts know most of the lyrics to Katy Perry’s song “Roar”? I, as the writer of this post, don’t know the chorus off the top of my head (I just looked it up and now know it is “Cause I am a champion, and you’re gonna hear me roar!
Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh”). Of course, I pretty much only know modern music that my sons have introduced me to, so I may be the exception here rather than the rule.

The church gives you an opportunity to sing in solidarity with others. I’m not really talking about choirs here, though they are nice. As far as I am concerned congregational (crowd) singing is where it is at. That’s where the real solidarity happens. The church is one of the few places where modern American life involves singing with groups that aren’t doing it for performance. It does happen sometimes, like the crowd at a the Tom Petty Wiltern Theatre August 6th 1985, “Southern Accents Tour” concert singing “Breakdown” (this is awesome by the way), but like I said I believe it is rare outside the church.

In many ways, church songs are the majority of our cultural musical heritage. If you want to sing a song that everyone knows the lyrics to, you are pretty much going to sing either a few patriotic songs, a few protest songs, a few classic pop songs, many Christmas songs (which are usually basically church songs), or songs that are a part of a faith tradition. These are basically the only songs we all tend to know. Or if you don’t know them the church songs are probably the only ones you will get the chance to sing with a group. Because outside of the church, you are rarely given the lyrics to a new song that you then get to sing with others.

I sing to myself so many of the songs that I have learned by singing with others in the church. I sing them in moments where I need hope, I sing them in moments when I feel joy, I hum them at all sorts of time. Even when I can’t sing them with others the act of singing them to myself strengthens me by reminding me of the time I loudly confessed the truth of the songs by belting them out with others in a church worship gathering.

I am so thankful that I get to sing with others. I wish we all could right now.

Above is the video that was used for our virtual “gathering” for Tapestry church today. Here are a few thoughts of gratitude at the moment.

I am amazingly thankful for the technology that allowed this today and I still don’t want to normally use it. It was great to know that we could do this, but personally I really missed everyone. This might be the only option for a little while because we have several people in our group that are in at-risk populations and we have several people in our group that are in front-line higher exposure employments. We’ll approach the future by trying to make sure that we limit the risk that our family is exposed to necessarily. The simple technology (basically our phones) that we used today enabled us to do this in a format

I am very thankful for the people who jumped up and made things happen. Thursday evening we still had a meeting place and were really just concerned with how we could sanitize effectively. Friday morning at 9:30 am we no longer had a place to gather and had to come up with something else. The plan was finalized and executed by lat night at 7:30 p.m. I have 4 videos from “threads” that I didn’t include in today’s video that I will use in the near future – either at a location or during another virtual “gathering”. Y’all are amazing.

I’m not sure what the immediate future for our worship gatherings will look like. Meeting together? Meeting in homes? More virtual “gatherings”? What I know is that the “threads” that make up this body of Christ will respond. For that, I can do nothing but be grateful.

SIDE NOTE – I didn’t try Facebook Live or Youtube Live today for this virtual “gathering” because I wasn’t comfortable enough with it. Streaming live video from a phone would have been easy but the route we chose was a video that included lots of people at various times. I wasn’t as comfortable streaming a prerecorded video file – which requires an encoder. Now after a little bit of non-emergency tinkering, I have figured it out. Next time we will be able to at least watch the pre-recorded video together live and respond to one another. If we have to do this I look forward to responding to one another and commenting. That will feel even more like home.

In the midst of this weird time of societal distancing live your faith in the God Who is relational and wash your hands … a lot.

View this post on Instagram

Beautiful list from @mamascondon – who would you add?

A post shared by Mockingbird Ministries (@mockingbirdnyc) on Mar 12, 2020 at 9:50am PDT

ht to Adam for this wonderful Instagram post from Mockingbird Ministries – actually it is from @mamascondon but her account is private. This is a beautiful list that I find very compelling and challenging.

First, a hat-tip to my friend Joy who posted the above video.

Second, since we end Tapestry‘s worship gatherings with the Doxology each week I am going to have a difficult time not thinking of this when we end our gatherings. 🙂

Third, let’s talk about COVID-19 again, because, well, everything is about it now. 🙂

Okay, not really but I do want to talk about being “so heavenly minded that you are no earthly good” for a second. You may have heard that phrase before. It was used a good bit when I was in seminary the first time. Not as much the second time but I hope that may have been because most of the students in the D.Min program were older and had already learned that lesson. What has sparked this subject in my mind is a tweet that has been making the rounds in the group of people I follow on Twitter. It is from Own Strachan, a professor at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary – one of our SBC seminaries I did not attend.

Here’s the tweet:

He goes only to listed 6 other actions that you should do in order to prepare for coronavirus. The problem is that NOT A SINGLE ONE of them involves washing your hands or doing anything that would actually help you prepare for, or more importantly avoid, infection from the COVID-19 virus. Obviously he gets roasted for not mentioning hand washing.

I think my favorite response is this snarky use of scripture.

I mean seriously, that is a pretty awesome snarky scriptural response.

I don’t really have a problem with Strachan’s use of the COVID-19 virus to encourage us to ask deeper questions about our lives. In my opinion, the challenges we face should cause us to think more about what our lives are all about, and I believe our lives are all about connecting with God and through Him connecting with those created in His image. So I like the fact that he uses this moment to encourage us to think deeper, it is just that his encouragement pretty much divorces people from our lives here rather than recognizing that God wants to start that eternal relationship with us now in the nitty-gritty of everyday life. Jesus healed people in the present while preaching the eternal.

C.S. Lewis wrote:

The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven.

It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.

Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.”

Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 134.

Our faith should draw heaven into the present around us, not remove us from that present. Those of us who are believers that Jesus is Lord are ambassadors of His kingdom. We represent His kingdom while we live in the kingdoms around us. Because we believe in the Lord of Host we begin to live out His practices in our everyday lives. We don’t have to fear death from the COVID-19 virus, or anything else, because of the trust we have in Jesus, and therefore we can wash our hands and help those who might be afraid. We get to over them help in the present and the eternal. We get to run into the crisis because we are not afraid, rather than running away from it, and if you are running into a virus crisis you wash your hands regularly so that you can continue demonstrating hope in the midst of fear.

Therefore, let the COVID-19 virus lead you to wash your hands OFTEN and think about what life is all about. Be so heavenly minded that you WASH YOUR HANDS!

Thanks to my friend Andy Lickel I belong to a coffee group on Tuesday mornings that is focused on the interaction of science and faith. They jokingly refer to themselves as “the Heretics”. I really enjoy the conversations each week because these are some people with significantly greater knowledge of science than I have and strong faith in Jesus Christ as Lord. We belong to various churches in town so that also makes for an interesting discussion. I cannot stress enough how much I like listening to these friends. In fact, the only problem I have with the group is that we meet at Starbucks, which isn’t my favorite coffee. We are talking about origins at present – a pretty consistent theme within this group.

Today, I repeated for discussion a statement/question that I know one of their pastors has asked during his current sermon series on origins. The statement/question was “you have to ask yourself ‘why did God put this into the text?'” I think it is a good question, primarily because of a verse from John’s gospel. John ends his gospel by telling us why certain things were included in the gospel and why certain things were not included (after all, we don’t really have any discussion in the gospels concerning Jesus’s favorite snack, and I assume He has one). John writes:

… but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.

John 20:31

So what is in scripture is there that we might believe in Jesus and “belief” in scripture isn’t just mental assent, A scriptural understanding of “belief” is more like trust that influences how we live. To use a Chuck Colson book title to explain this – when we read scripture we need to ask ourselves “‘ Why God put this into the text’ and ‘How Now We Shall Live‘ because of what God put into the text?” Reading scripture is like a call & response hymn, God places something in the text and we respond in our lives to what the Spirit has taught us.

Basically, If you profess Jesus as Lord I don’t really care what you believe about creation if it doesn’t cause you to better lead a life of trust in Jesus … and I don’t think God does either. I believe the creation story should cause us to live in a manner that reflects that we see God’s fingerprints all around us and we see and respond to the image of our Lord (the Imago Dei) in our fellow humans.

So if you are a Christian who says with the Apostles’ Creed ” I believe in God, the father almighty, creator of heaven and earth”, and therefore believe that God placed His image on humanity, it should affect how you respond to the current COVID-19 crisis and specifically those caught in the crisis.

But instead, many Christians are responding to the crisis in fear rather than seeing and responding to God’s image. We’ve been here before folks, at the precipice of fear or faith, and very often those who claim that Jesus is their Lord have responded poorly to the temptation to live out of fear instead of faith. Remember Ebola? We had the chance to respond in faith and many in the church gave into fear.

I’m not meaning by this that having faith means not taking appropriate precautions – having faith doesn’t mean that. It does, however, mean not allowing your fear of a danger to keeps you from responding to the image of God in your fellow human. This past Sunday we at Tapestry slightly changed our normal method of doing the Lord’s Supper so as to lower the risk of spreading anything infectious. It is okay to take precautions. It isn’t okay to be overcome by fear to the point that we fail to see and respond to the image of God in our fellow humans.

We are still called to be with the “least of these” in the midst of the danger of the COVID-19 danger because when we look at those who might be infected, or merely come from a region that we for some reason or another association with COVID-19, we see the eyes of our Lord and know that how we respond to them is how we respond to our Lord. Because what we believe is supposed to shape how we respond.

I believe and I preach at Tapestry that God created humanity as image-bearers. Therefore, when I look at my fellow human I see a reflection of my Lord and what I do or don’t do for them I do or don’t do for Him.

I just started reading Bryan Stevenson’s “Just Mercy” and the opening chapter reinforced a theme that I have been experiencing a good bit recently. It involves asking where is God’s grace in this moment (or the correlated question of “where is God’s grace absent in this moment?”). One of the podcasts that I really like right now is primarily based around this question (thanks Conor for introducing me to the Mockingcast). It is also the question that directs Tapestry’s book group and movie group – in each we ask this question concerning the book we just read or the movie we just watched – we’re going to do this again when we watch “A League of Their Own”, there may not be crying in baseball but there is grace 😁) . Part of the beauty of this question is that whenever we actually encounter God’s grace it calls for us to respond. I’ll use a puppy from the Minnesota Basset Rescue to explain what I mean here.

Pam and I are obsessed with basset hound rescues. Two of the three basset hounds that have been a part of our lives have come from the Loozianna Basset Rescue and we are so thankful for these amazing people who care for these lovely dogs who have often been put through hell on earth. So we get our dogs through basset rescues (seriously who could have mistreated Clive, the greatest of all dogs), go to basset hound events that are sponsored by these basset rescues, and we subscribe and interact with their social media accounts to enjoy and encourage the great stories of recuses that happen through these agencies. This past week the Minnesota Basset Rescue saved 4 puppies from two different bad situations. The photo to the right is of Willie one of the three 4 month old bassets that the MBR rescued. Don’t you just want to say “Ahhhhhhh!”. It is hard not to respond to his cuteness … even for cat people. So let’s use Willie as an example of what recognizing God’s grace in a moment is like.

Lots of people will see Willie and think “how cute” and then go on with eating whatever pastry they are eating. It is a nice moment in their day but it changes nothing. It is a brief warm, fuzzy feeling, but at the end of it Willie stays in his horrific situation – and others might be put into similar circumstances because more puppy mills will develop to produce more consumable cuteness. The wonderful people at the basset rescues see such cuteness and think “Such cuteness cannot be allowed to stay in a horrific situation. THIS CANNOT STAND!” and then they work to change the status quo that would allow Willie to be in dangerous and uncaring circumstances. They see the grace of cuteness in horror and believe that such grace can be expanded to overcome the horror. Seeing such grace changes the status quo.

Let’s take a moment to enjoy Willie’s cuteness again – he’s the one in front.

Seeing God’s grace in a moment calls for gratitude for the grace in the moment and action to expand or continue such grace through other moments and in other lives.

So back to Stevenson’s book. In his first interaction with Henry, his client, Bryan Stevenson is very concerned that he doesn’t have the skills or knowledge to help Henry. Bryan isn’t a lawyer yet, he’s only a student. In fact, the only info he has for Henry at the moment is that they are looking for a lawyer for him, even though he has been on death row for two years, and that he will certainly not be executed in the next year. Not a lot of hope in such statements. Stevenson practices what he is going to say but the second he sees Henry he breaks down and begins repeating over and over “I’m really sorry”, “I’m just a law student, not a real lawyer”, and barely gets out “you’re not at risk of an execution anytime in the next year.”

Henry suddenly gets super excited upon hearing this news. Bryan Stevenson was the first person from outside death row that Henry had seen in two years. In those past two years he hasn’t seen his wife and kids because he was sacred that they would schedule a trip a and he would then be given an execution date while they were there. He couldn’t do that to his family. The uncertainty had led to him asking them not to come, even though he desperately wanted to see them. Now with knowledge that the next year would be free from an execution date he could see his wife and kids. The statement seemed so small and insignificant to Stevenson, but it was the gift of seeing his family to Henry. Stevenson saw God’s grace in the moment, especially when Henry began to sing as he was taken back to his cell, and seeing God’s grace changed him. Henry would no longer be alone, Stevenson would work to make sure of this.

God’s grace wants to expand. We need to look for moments of God’s grace and then work to cultivate the soil of our lives and societies for the expansion of such grace.

Look for His grace in your life. Let it expand. Encourage its growth.