You're Not Great (Probably), And That's Okay

Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash

I remember growing up believing I could (and would) change the world. As an X-ennial (borderline Gen X and Millennial), I was awash in all the positive, you-can-do-anything-you-put-your-mind-to youth education of the 90s. And like most generations, my friends and I believed we would have the world fixed by the time we became adults. 

I also remember having my mid-life crisis at thirty years old when I realized I hadn't changed the world or accomplished "all the things" I thought I would. Instead, I had a very "normal" life. It wasn't a bad life, and was actually pretty close to what I wanted when I was younger (the career I wanted, a loving spouse and family, and a mortgage on a modest home). 

But I wasn't "great." I hadn't transformed the world, or published a book, or started a mega-church, or won a Nobel prize. (Okay, that last one was probably never a realistic goal.) And not being great made me feel like a failure, like I'd squandered my potential and was a disappointment to myself and my family -- and even God. 

(Side note: Therapy has helped me recognize there's a ton of space between "great" and "failure," and I'm more content trying to live there.)

I was reminded of my struggle to be great recently as I've been reading through Paul's letters for my devotions. Someone recommended that I read them not as theology textbooks, but as what they actually are: letters from a pastor to his church about everyday issues. 

It's amazing what a difference it has made. Instead of a treatise on the end times, 1 Thessalonians says, "I know you feel discouraged, but keep loving each other as you have and it will be fine." 1 Corinthians is less the final word on how to run a church and more: "Stop bickering and pointing fingers like 5 year olds! You know better than that!" 

I'd always kind of thought of Paul's letters as a roadmap to conquering the world, but while the scope of God's story is universal, Paul's concerns are far more personal. When you realize most of the churches he was writing to were probably fewer than fifty people, they feel even more restrained, maybe even mundane. 

Even Jesus rarely acts on a huge scale. The Feeding of the 5,000 happens when he's trying to get AWAY from the crowds (Matthew 14:13). Instead of "Go plant a mission start in the Sinai," he tells many of the people he encounters in the Gospels to go home and live their lives according to the love they've learned.

What I've come to recognize is that much of what Jesus teaches and Paul writes aren't commands to be successful or great or even effective. They are calls to be faithful and follow. 

Martin Luther was passionate about the Priesthood of All Believers, the idea that every Christian is a "priest," called by God to do holy things, but that those "holy things" are generally in our normal lives: being a parent or friend, being kind and honest in our work, etc. 

In other words, God doesn't expect everyone to change the world or be wildly successful in their job. Most of us won't do "great things, only small things with great love," as Mother Teresa once said. And that isn't failure or second class faith; it's how God operates. 

I continue to learn that I don't need to be "great" (whatever that means). My normal life can dwell in a great love from a great God, and that's better anyway.

From the Gray,

Pastor Ari

“When you find there’s nothing special, yeah, about that big hole in your heart, ‘cause everybody’s got one, with precious little time to talk about it.” -Vigilantes of Love, “Nothing Like A Train”

Stories That Matter

(This post was first written for my church's fall newsletter.) 

The year after I graduated college, I volunteered with my church’s youth group. Sometime around midyear, I was asked to share my testimony with the students. 

At first, I was flattered to have the chance to say something to them, but as I thought about it, I started to worry. What did I really have to share with them? I didn’t have a dramatic conversion story or miracle happen to me. I never had a major crisis of faith or heavens-ripped-open moment. I was born and raised a Lutheran and had always been active in church. In my mind, my testimony was like describing vanilla ice cream.

After some thought, I decided to tell them the story of St. Paul’s conversion in Acts 9. 

More specifically I decided to talk about Ananias. 

For those who don’t remember or never read the story, Paul was hunting and arresting Christians until he was struck blind in a vision from God near Damascus. In the city, God spoke to a Christian named Ananias and asked him to go heal Paul’s sight, like, “Go help that guy who wants to arrest you.” Ananias does and Paul’s heart is changed and he becomes perhaps the greatest evangelist the church has ever known. Meanwhile, Ananias is never heard from again.

After I read the story to my youth group, I told them, “I’ve always thought that real faith stories were like Paul: big and dramatic. They involved turning your life around or a near-death experience or helping hundreds or thousands of people. But I’m none of those things, and neither is Ananias. He was just an ordinary guy who did a good deed, but without Ananias, there would have been no Paul. We aren’t all Paul, but we can all be Ananias, trying to be faithful when called to do small things by God. And those small things are still important.”

After youth group that night, a girl named Julia came up to me and said, “Thank you. You’re my Ananias.” I don’t think that I said or did anything praiseworthy that night, but Julia helped me understand my own message, which was: Ananias’s story matters. And my story matters. And your story matters.

Martin Luther Church is a place of stories. We come together here to hear the stories of Jesus and Paul and Mary and other people in the Bible, and to hear the stories of saints and heroes of the faith, and sing stories in our hymns, but we also need to hear each other’s stories of faith. Stories of triumph and struggle, stories of kindnesses received and given, stories of Jesus showing up unexpectedly for us or near us or through us. Paul himself wrote in Romans 10:17 that “faith comes by hearing” and I can’t help but wonder if he wrote that thinking about himself blindly hearing Ananias’s words of faith on the night his life changed.

This year at Martin Luther, in Christian Formation and elsewhere, we are going to be practicing sharing those stories and listening to them and I want to challenge you to look at your own story anew. How has God shaped it? How is God shaping it now? Whose stories have mattered to you and how might your story matter to someone else?

I still don’t think my faith story is much more than vanilla ice cream, but I’ve learned two things since that youth night years ago: 1) faith grows best out of sincere and deep relationships and 2) sincere relationships grow out of sharing personal stories — even the vanilla, Ananias kind.

In God’s Amazing Grace,

Pastor Ari

“These words are my diary screaming out loud.” -Anna Nalick, “Breathe (2 AM)”

Vegetarians for Jesus!

(Author's note: As often happens, this coming Sunday has more than one great text assigned for reading in worship. Since I can't preach on all of them, what follows is something close to what I would preach if I were using the text from 1 Corinthians.)

At first glance, chapter 8 of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians sounds a little bit like a primer on pagan picnic etiquette. He talks a lot about food, idols, and "weak believers." Should you eat this food? How much? What kind? The whole passage can sound strange to modern, Western ears because Paul is addressing an ancient controversy. At the heart of his words, though, Paul offers pastoral and practical advice for a church working to live their faith daily. (That's actually most of Paul's intent in 1 Corinthians. One of the reasons I love it so much.)

The controversy at the heart of this passage is meat that has been offered to idols. Corinth was a religiously diverse city and most of the religions sacrificed animals in their ceremonies. Leftover meat from these ceremonies was usually sold in the public markets. The question Christians had was, "Are we offending God if we eat food that was first offered to idols?" Since many of the local church had converted from these religions, the question could be even more personal: "Can I eat dinner with my pagan relatives/friends if they serve meat?" (This same issue is behind Paul's comments on meat and veggies in Romans 14.)

Paul's answer is simple. "We know that 'no idol ... really exists'" (v. 4). Since there are no other gods, the meat was sacrificed to nothing and it doesn't have any spiritual or magical properties. It's just meat. And eating it doesn't harm us or God. Christians are free to eat whatever we want. 

But there's a "but."

Yes, we know this is just meat, but others may not. If someone sees you eating idol meat, will they think, "She must worship Jesus and Apollo. Maybe they're the same thing" or "I thought these Christians were different, but maybe not." Out of love for others, we must think about how our actions affect them. If eating meat keeps someone from knowing Jesus, then we should be vegetarians. Yes, we are free, Paul says, but what we do with that freedom matters. 

And it's on this point that this passage about an ancient controversy is still profoundly relevant for today. In the 21st century, individual rights are more common, expected, and celebrated than ever before. For those of us who are Christian and American, we have the freedom to live, think, say, and do pretty much whatever we want, both civically and spiritually.  But what we do with that freedom matters.

As a secular example, just because our freedom of speech means we can say or write something cruel or unfriendly, does that mean we should to prove a point? How does being mean in the name of freedom forward our democracy? In the same way, how does using our spiritual freedom to flaunt God’s generosity forward the Kingdom? Using Christian freedom to serve my own personal desires is just another form of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "cheap grace."

After all, to act and live as if our freedom trumps any consequences is the same as saying, “Nothing we do matters. My actions make no difference.” And I’ve never known anyone who has told me they want their life to be meaningless or they want to leave this world having not done anything that matters. 

Part of what Paul is teaching is that the very thing that sets us free from needing to prove ourselves is also what makes our actions meaningful because we are part of a community. God's love sets us free, but our efforts to imitate that love bind us to each other, because love cannot exist in a vacuum. 

Years ago I heard a story of an American entertainer (Will Rogers, maybe?) who was at a social event and reaching for a beer when he saw some kids and thought, "They look up to me. What will my drinking mean to them?" He put the beer down, the story goes, and never drank publicly again. That story and Paul's advice to Corinth are often forefront in my mind as a pastor because I realize how I speak, act, and live affects how people see me, my faith, and my profession... and, in part, how they see God.

Like the Corinthian church of old, we are free to eat/say/do what we want, but we are also called to act with love in all we do. That can be a narrow or even hazy line to walk sometimes and I don't always know what is best in every situation, but as Paul points out, sometimes having the right answer isn't as important as having love in the attempt.

From the Gray,

Pastor Ari

“Give us days to be filled with small rebellions; senseless, brutal acts of kindness from us all.” -Jars of Clay, “Small Rebellions”

St. Paul's #1 Reason to Read the Bible

In Romans 15:4, Paul writes: "Everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope."

I've seen the Bible treated as something to be memorized and recited, as a history book, or as a self-help book or rule book for living (and to be fair, all of these can be found in scripture and have value). There are many who talk about Bible codes to interpret the future or discover the secrets of the universe. But for Paul, the goal is not secret knowledge or personal success, but hope. The scriptures teach us about "endurance" and "encouragement" so that "we might have hope." Hope in the God who has been present and faithful for all those who have struggled with faith and love before us.

In other words, the stories of God's people have been preserved and shared so that we can read ourselves in them and say, "Hey, I'm not the first person to face troubles/have doubts/face backlash for trying to do the right thing/make mistakes." And through that realization, we might find hope for ourselves in the same God who loved them.

I sometimes think of hope as a fluffy, squishy, Hallmark card kind of idea, but for Paul it's bedrock to being a follower of Jesus and core to understanding the Bible. (He uses the word 49 times in his letters, more often than "prayer" or "worship.") Hope enables faith, faith inspires love, and love generates hope.

I've heard and thought about the Bible in various contexts as a love story, a history book, an instruction manual, and a work of literature. Paul insists on another one: source of hope.

“Opened the door, knew what was me; I finally realized: parachute over me.” -Guster, “Parachute”

You Suck and I Love You

I was recently challenged by someone after worship who felt that my sermon that day was saying "you're not good enough" which this person heard enough of elsewhere. "Everyone else in my life tells me I'm not good enough. I don't want to hear that from God."

Now, preaching is an inexact science given that I never know if what someone hears is what I meant to say and I always dread speaking incorrectly. (In other words, because human beings are involved in both sides of the process.) In this particular case, I was not trying to say "you're not good enough," but I think this person was correct in that I didn't make that point as well as I could have.

I had been trying to say that God helps us grow to be more loving and compassionate than we would be on our own. This is the core of a lot of Christian theology, but after listening to the critique of my words, I couldn't help but think that it's a difficult line to walk. God does love us even when we screw up, but I also believe that God calls for us to grow and "improve." Where is the line between being loved as we are and being challenged to become more?

One of the things I love about theology (especially Lutheran theology) is the concept of paradox, that two seemingly contradictory statements can both be true. (It's partly where the title of my blog comes from.) This particular paradox was obvious even to the early church leaders. In Romans 5, Paul writes that God moved first: "While we were still weak, Christ died for the ungodly... While we were sinners, Christ died for us... While we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son." But at the same time, Paul writes in the next chapter that God's gift doesn't let us rest where we are: "How can we who died to sin go on living in it? [We] walk in newness of life."

My go-to line to describe this paradox is, "God loves us enough to meet us where we are, but God loves us too much to let us stay there." Which sounds good on paper, but isn't easy to live out. How do we both accept that we are worthy of being loved while also feeling motivated to change?

As I'm writing, it occurs to me that Lutheran thinking would say that being loved is the motivation to change, that knowing I'm valuable to someone automatically causes me to respond by reciprocating love. It would say it has to be this way because fear and guilt (which are typical "motivators" -- just look at political commercials) are the opposite of trusting love, which is the heart of the relationship God offers us. In other words, only love can drive me to deeper love.

And on my best days, love does drive me to grow, but I'll admit that some days, the love I need is the kind that grabs me by the lapels and slaps my face to wake me up. And sometimes it is guilt and fear that motivates me to seek love in the first place.

Perhaps faith is a constant search for the balance between these seeming opposites. Perhaps all of this is just to say that love and faith are themselves paradoxes, kind of like the statement: "Every time I find an answer about God, it just leads to more questions."

“And love is wild for reasons, and hope, though short in sight, might be the only thing that wakes you by surprise.” -Jars of Clay, "Surprise"

Strength Enough to Have Enough

Philippians 4:13 -- "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me" -- is one of the more popular verses in Christian circles. It's an easy-to-understand, bumper-sticker-ready, spiritual-pep-talk kind of verse. "Set your sights high, because if Christ is with you, no task is too difficult!" 

At least that's what I thought, until I was reading the full passage today and when I connected that verse with the verses immediately before it, I had a light bulb that was just like Inigo Montoya's words to Vizzini: "I do not think it means what you think it means."

So here's the full passage, and consider that Paul is writing this from prison: "I rejoiced greatly in the Lord that at last you renewed your concern for me. Indeed, you were concerned, but you had no opportunity to show it. I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through Christ who gives me strength" (Philippians 4:10-13)

Paul isn't saying he can conquer the Roman Empire single-handedly or perform a miraculous healing (though I don't put anything beyond the power of God). Paul is specifically saying that Christ gives him the power to be content. At peace. Joyful. To find comfort in having enough. 

I know being content is something I struggle with often (usually in the realm of wanting some home improvements or a more reliable car), so this insight really hit home for me. This verse is still a good reminder to find strength in God for difficult tasks, but being content at all times? That would be a welcome miracle indeed.

"It's just enough to be strong in the broken places." -Jars of Clay, "Faith Enough"