Missional Living

After Part One and Part Two, there is one thing I still cannot get over.

We can no longer look at people and communities and think that they should simply  get an education, work harder, and join our political party of choice. Why? Because according Proverbs 3:27-28, we are not supposed to withold good from someone, as it is their right . If it is in your power to act, act. Thread out your resources because it is their right...

Oops.

It is their ‘right’? Because we modern Americans are extremely and foolishly individualistic–we believe that who we are is a product of our choices (what we’ve done, where we’ve studied, how hard we’ve worked, etc.)–we don’t understand that the reality is that the vast majority of who Tom Cottar will be is already decided by the environment of my community, my parents, and host of other things. My sons, by virtue of being born to me, statistically have about a 300% greater chance of economic and social ’success’ than those living 20 miles away in East Austin…much less those halfway around the world in a country with less resources than mine.  "Well, they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps…" I didn’t pull myself up by my bootstraps. And probably neither did you. "Yeah, but I’ve worked hard for what I have..", we say. Really? Do you really think so? I think we’ve worked hard with what we’ve been given. That’s all.

If you and I have been given money, power, education, skills…it is simply our duty to shalom to thread it out. To reweave the fabric so that we can all flourish. Don’t you think that a failure to be radically invovled with the poor is not just a lack of compassion…but a lack of justice? Proverbs says it is their right. In fact, perhaps that’s why Proverbs 11:10 says that when the righteous prosper, the city rejoices. According to the book of Proverbs, the ‘righteous’  (Heb., tsaddiq or sadik) are those who put  themselves at a disadvantage for the prosperity of the community, while the ‘wicked’  are those who put their own social/economic needs ahead of the community.  Wow. Which one are we? Can we be ‘righteous’ and ‘individualistic’? Can the gospel be about me and be ‘righteous’? Be careful…

Don’t be depressed. As I’ve thought about it over the past few weeks, it’s hard to figure out how to do justice in our community and our world without being overwhelmed. What do I do? Do I buy only Fair Trade coffee? Do I give to Operation Christmas Child or organize something of my own?  Do I support Dan Haseltine (Jars of Clay) in the Blood: Water Mission project in Africa (it’s only $1)? What about the cutters at To Write Love On Her Arms and the addicted at XXX Church ? Not to mention the countless pregnancy centers, homeless shelters, and at-risk teen programs across the country? What about the single mom across the street who needs her yard mowed? What about the elderly that needs their house cleaned…and just needs a listening ear? Do I visit them?

Yes.

Do something. What has God given you? What resources do you possess that, if you were to thread them out, would reweave and rebuild your community the way it ought to be. The way it was intended to be. How can you and I create a city-within-a-city in which all people can flourish? Where Genesis 1 and 2, as well as Revelation 21 and 22, are being rebuilt. That, dear friends, is really what Jesus’ miracles were all about—the restoration of shalom and the proclamation of the good news.

As you know, we were already supposed to change over our collective clocks this past Sunday, but Big Brother decided that we needed an extra couple of weeks of Daylight Savings Time. But it goes further.

TreeHugger Labs ran the numbers and has determined that If DST runs half the year for an hour a day, that is fully 1/48th of our total exposure to the sun that could be eliminated with the cancelling of Daylight Saving Time, almost 2% of solar heat gain annually.

That’s huge!

Read the whole article here.

My allergies are killing me. I can’t breathe. I can’t sing. I can’t talk. I sound like a 70-year-old man who’s been smoking cigars for 69 years, 11 months, and 29 days….kind of like Louis Armstrong. Which got me to thinking about some of the great quotes collected on cigars:

So, after Part One of my rant, I have to consider the fact that The Church is designed to function as the contemporary Hall of Justice (after following in the footsteps of Christ, obviously). Which leads me down this trail:

Proverbs 29:7 says the righteous care about justice, but the wicked do not. Psalm 103 says that the Lord works righteousness and justice for all the oppressed.

Proverbs 3:17-20 says of wisdom that "all her paths are peace (shalom). She is a tree of life to those who embrace her, those who lay hold of her will be blessed. By wisdom the Lord laid hte earth’s foundations, by understanding he set the heavens in place; by His knowledge the deeps were divided, and the clouds dropped their dew."

 Justice and Shalom are closely linked in the Bible. Our English word ‘peace’ is way too little to convey shalom. From what I understand, the Hebrew concept of shalom is more deeply the webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in equity and delight. We translate it ‘peace’, but it means more than peace of mind. It means universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight. Shalom is the way things ought to be as the way God desgined them.

Psalm 102 says that God laid out the world like a garment or a fabric. And the connection with fabric has lodged in my brain. Fabrics are woven together millions of times over. Each individual thread is woven over and under hundreds of other threads. Over and under and over and under and over and under and over and under and over and under and over and under and over and under…..The more ‘over and under’ that happens, the stronger the fabric becomes. The softer. The richer. The ‘community of thread’ is much more valuable as it’s interdependency on other threads increases. Would you rather sleep on rough, 100-thread count sheets at night or the silky, 1200 thread count feel of luxurious Egyptian cotton? 

Our world is designed to function as billions of threads woven together as a God-designed, interdependent fabric.

Think about how it works physically. When your body works together like it was designed to—everything fits together, all the parts are doing what they are supposed to be doing—you experience physical shalom we call ‘health’. But if you get cancer, and your body parts are fighting against each other, working against each other, not interacting correctly or interwoven you experience a loss of physical shalom, i.e. disease.

Another example: ISupposeI have a brother/friend/stranger in need.  My mind tells me it makes sense to give them $1000 (it would benefit and bless them, as well as their family.)  Also, my conscience and convictions tell me it is something I ought to do. Then I call my bank and the teller informs me that I have the $1000 in my account to do it. (what a surprise that would be) And then I follow through and do it…I am experiencing a sort of psychological shalom. Everything is in harmony and agreement to be able to render aid to the one in need.  (…but if I want to do something and my conscience says ‘no’ and I do it and experience guilt over it, then I am experiencing a loss of psychological shalom. Things begin to unravel and are no longer interwoven.)

What about social shalom? When those of us who have power, status, money, influence, etc. are threading it out into our community and our world, we are threading out shalom. Some of us have more, some have less, but we all have good schools. Good parks. Safe streets. We are experiencing social shalom. But if we hang on to our power, status, money, influence, and hoard it up for ourselves, we don’t have an interdependent, interwoven fabric among our community.

(See how this gives us a more ‘corporate’ or ‘communal’ vibe to being a Christian? It’s not about me, it’s about us. And further, the more it becomes about ‘me’, the more unraveling there is of the fabric…)

Then I begin thinking about some real examples in our lives. Why should I not lie? Because it’s wrong and it will get me dookie points with God. True, I guess. But more so, because it destroys shalom—it ruins/weakens the connections and trust we have on each other. Why should I not steal? Because God says so. Yeah, but because stealing is the breaking down of shalom. It’s not just wrong, it’s also stupid, because it is a sin against shalom.

Every time I sin against someone, I am deliberately unraveling …I’m defiantly destroying shalom.  But more than that, I can also be an agent of shalom. I can be a builder/weaver/creator of shalom…(cue the voiceover…’Meanwhile, back at the Hall of Justice…")

In Part Three–How we are called to re-weave the fabric of shalom. 

Beginning Thursday, I will be offline the rest of the week.

Jimmie and I have a dear college and CastMaster friend who lost his mother to cancer this week. I’ll be travelling to far north East Texas for funeral and family activities. Please pray for Kyle and his family.

Also, have been experiencing some whack-job internet problems this week and my internet access is pretty hit-and-miss. I can receive emails sometimes. Sometimes I can even get the whole email. But I can’t send very many. If you’re reading this, it means this post actually made it through the system successfully. Hopefully, I’ll have The Justice League, Part Two up this afternoon if we’re still live….

Step 1: Watch the amazing Stone Sour video ‘Through Glass’ (above).

Step 2: Read thoughts below.

Step 3: Throw your favorite stones.

Warning: Possible heretical thoughts ahead…maybe. I’m still struggling with parts of this, so bear with me. Since this will likely be a multi-part post (at least 3, I’m sure),  please feel free to jump into the discussion. I’m sure I need it. 

WIWAK (When I Was A Kid) we loved the Justice League. Batman. Superman. Wonderwoman. Flash. Green Lantern was my favorite. He still is. They would gather together in the Hall of Justice with the common purpose of saving and preserving the world by fighting one crime/calamity at a time. No matter what happened–hurricanes,floods, bank robbers, or various masked evil doers–at the end of the day, peace was restored because they were on the watch. Children could play in the streets. The elderly were safe. Parents were happy and prosperous. People walked the streets of a world they thought they knew…but it was not the world as it was. Joe Citizen never knew what happened within the walls of the Hall of Justice.

I’m beginning to think there was (and is) a lot more connection between the Gospel and the Justice League than meets the eye.

What is the plotline of the Bible? —creation, fall, redemption and …restoration, right? God creates Earth and Man. Man rebels. God redeems and restores Earth and Man through Jesus, the Messiah and Prince of Shalom. Restoration of the world (in its entirety) is the purpose of salvation. If so, then for us as Christians, the work of justice may be just as important as evangelism or worship. Heretical? Here is the beginning of my thoughts…

What do I see when I step back and look at the whole picture of Scripture? At the end of the book (Revelation 21 and 22)—heaven comes down to renew this earth…restore it…which is the whole purpose of salvation. We do not ‘escape’ the world to some safe place, a la Tim LaHaye.  But Scripture shows the Creator God fully, completely establishing the Kingdom here, with the River of Life flowing out from the throne, right down through the middle of Main Street. We see the Tree of Life mentioned in Genesis 2:9 and 3:22 now growing on each side of the River. The leaves of the tree are for ‘healing the nations’. There is no longer any curse on the earth. No more night. The scene is eerily reminiscent of the Garden of Eden where Man lives in harmony with God and with himself.  Genesis 1 and 2 are extremely similar to Revelation 21 and 22…

Another thought I have about this is from Tim Keller’s  suggestion of looking at Jesus’ miracles. We live in a culture in which spectacular special effects are done strictly to be…spectacular.As a result, IMO, we are inclined to look at Jesus’ miracles the same way. “Why did Jesus turn water into wine? To show His power? Why did he feed the multitude with a kid’s sack lunch of fish and bread? To prove He was God?” Jesus apparently did miracles to say He had power. “Look what I can do…I’m the Son of God…”

Can I be honest? The bread ‘thing’ isn’t really all that spectacular. Water into wine? Not so much. And unless you are the crippled beggar Jesus heals, there’s not much spectacular even about the healing of a crippled beggar. If I would have been there, I would’ve gone to Jesus and offered my help. As a consultant. “Look, dude, if you really want these people to believe you have power, why not levitate? Fly around the temple a few times on the Sabbath. Try the whole Criss-Angel-thing…nothing up my sleeve…nothing up my robe…and, viola! …flaming balls of fire shooting from my fingertips!”

Surely as Creator God, He could come up with something better to impress and win converts than just healing a man from leprosy or healing a crippled beggar. Surely He could burst into flames like Johnny Storm and do some loops over the Sea of Galilee! After all, he stilled the hurricane, right? Couldn’t He pull that off as well?

So perhaps we’ve missed it. Like in the video, maybe what we think we see is different than what is really there. Perhaps we’ve focused on what we thought was the point, when the point was altogether different. Perhaps Jesus’ miracles were not to demonstrate God’s power, but his purpose. We think that miracles are a suspension of the natural order of things…but what if they are, in fact, the restoration of the natural order of things?  But in Christ’s Kingdom, there is no blindness. No leprosy. No cancer. No death. No poverty or injustice. They are simply not part of the original created state of the Garden of Eden, or a part of where the new Kingdom is taking us in Revelation 21 and 22.  So, just maybe, when Jesus feeds the hungry, heals the sick, raises lazarus, etc..he’s restoring the natural order, the original plan of things. When you read the plotline of the Bible, it’s all about restoration anyway…

Maybe the water-into-wine miracle was about restoring celebration to the fact that the Kingdom of God is like a never-ending wedding feast and banquet table. Healing the leper? Restoration of health. Raising the dead?  Feeding the hungry? Giving sight to the blind? Restoration.

In Part Two: How the fabric of Shalom is woven into the gospel and the miracles of Christ. And maybe why, on some levels, our ’salvation’ is a means to an end. We’ll see how that heresy plays out…

This morning, after logging in my morning run, I tallied up my total miles. As of today, I’ve logged 301 miles this year. Not bad considering I’ve also logged an IT band injury and taken several weeks off during the summer madness of student ministry.

Some online resources I’ve found helpful are below:

Thinnmann’s Running Log

Marathon Rookie

Running Towards Fitness

Favorite Run – log in and map your running routes (better than Google Maps)

Triflex (glucosamine/chondriotin/MSM supplement)

Saucony (the absolute best for moderate pronators like me)

Starbucks (gotta gotta keep going, right?)

While jogging along last week listening to the Alamo City Podcast, I heard an old college buddy say something that struck a chord within me.

"Religion is where people who’ve lost the courage to be authentic go to be respected."

(-Neil McClendon, speaker and agitator)

Of course, you’ve seen the picture of Pope John Paul II as appeared in the fire.

Evidently it’s been crashing some religious websites from all the hits…

Perhaps it wasn’t JP after all. Maybe it was actually Johnny Storm…

But that’s just me. Either way…

‘Flame on!’

Our friend (and fellow tomcottar(dot)org lurker) Dana Loran has finally entered the blogoshpere with Looking for Manna in the Modern. I’m sure it’ll run the gamut of everything from following Jesus, to cool interior design ideas to the struggles of a missional young woman…check it out.