I'm just hoping it rains

So I'm watching Rick McKinley (Donald Miller's pastor) give this talk, and he made a very interesting point, he is saying how people come up to him and ask him what's the next step for the church where he is a pastor (Imago Dei) and he says "I have no idea, I just go: 'God please be birthing something in people, so that we can cultivate this'" and then he makes a brilliant remark "It's like going up to a farmer and saying, hey what's the next crop look like bro, and he's like: 'I'm just hoping it rains, 'cause there might not be a next crop'"

When I heard him say this I remembered the passage in John 15:1-2 "I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. ²He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful." And I remembered another sermon I heard Rick preach a couple of years ago, about the organic connotations of the verse, 'cause you see, trees and nature have very particular rhythms and patterns. Think about a vineyard, it would be easy to say that you can predict how the grapes are going to turn out, but the truth is that you can't. You can take all the necessary steps to make sure it's a good year, don't water the soil too much or too little, try to make the exposure to the sun the better, try to keep the rodents away; but after all that's done, all you can do is sit and wait. Faith communities are exactly like that, all we can do is take certain steps, we try to expose the community to honest teaching of the Word, we try our best to love them, to point in the right direction, we try to do our best in Sunday mornings, good music, childcare, etc. But none of these things guarantees growth, or more important, transformation. These two things are usually dependent on "the rain", the Spirit of God.

I see this played out at the community of faith that I'm a part of. You see I've been part of this church plant for almost a year now, and it's been a rollercoaster ride, we've had our highs and our lows, in attendance, momentum and relationships. And don't get me wrong, it's been great, I wouldn't trade the time I've spent at Centerpoint for anything in the world, but it's so easy to get anxious about the future, and the present as well. And sometimes I find myself asking the question "well what's next? where are we going?" not to say that we don't have dreams and visions of what God could do in our midst, but sometimes I wonder "well, how in the world are we going to get there?" And today while watching Rick give his talk I got my answer "I don't know, I'm just hoping it rains" I don't know what's gonna happen with Centerpoint, all I can do is be faithful, and the same goes for everybody else at every church, from the pastor to the person who sweeps the church, and this thought is extremely liberating, because it is no longer my responsibility to get the attendance to a particular number, or to make sure that everybody feels the presence of the Holy Spirit, that's God's deal. The cool thing is that He does make some promises about that: if we gather in His name, He's going to be there, if we ask the Father anything in the Son's name, the Father is going to listen, if we come to him, he won't throw us out. He is going to build His church... and the gates of hades will not prevail against Her. All I can do is water my part of the vineyard, and take care of it, after that... I'm just hoping it rains.

Vertical Music, singing TO God

As we have already seen, God can be glorified through anything and everything. However, in the same way that a wife appreciates her husband caring for her kids and helping in the house, she also wants him to take her out on a date and whisper romantic things to her ear. The church is the bride of Christ, and there is the aspect of Justice and obedience, but there is also the aspect of romance, of this God saying that He loves us and of us saying that we love him, that's why understanding our purpose in life makes much more sense when we think of being in relationship with God. It's much easier to worship a being that you are in relationship with than an aloof God that just orders you to worship him (which sounds strikingly similar to what the Roman empire would do to when they conquered a new village).

Now thinking about relationship in that way singing songs to God makes total sense, this God has not only created us, but he has rescued us, redeemed us and he cares for us everyday. This Jesus has died for us, and if we as individuals had been the only person on the planet he would have done no less. But it goes beyond that, one of the reasons we sing starts making sense as our relationship with God progresses. What I mean is that as we get to know God more, through the Scriptures as well as through our interactions with Him in prayer and also our interaction with all of creation, we start understanding bits and pieces of His character and nature. What happens is that we start seeing how beautiful God is, how great and mighty and powerful and kind an compassionate and loving. Eventually we sing to God just because, in the same way that you admire a piece of art just because, even if it's not doing anything for you, but just because it's beautiful; not that God does not do anything for us, because He does, every second, but we get less and less pragmatic about worship, we stand in awe of His majesty and it just compels us to worship and sing and dance of joy and wonder and amazement. But this only happens when we do get to know this God, when He starts revealing Himself to us. I guess it's an inverted process as the one of a human relationship. In human romances, usually the guy gets struck by a girl, by how beautiful she is, which causes him to become infatuated, if they pursue that relationship and get to the point of marriage, what will happen is that eventually the initial wonder will fade away, but now there is a relationship built, and He has shared things with this woman and they have children together and she has cared for him and loved him, so now all this things that have gone on their relationship sustain the love. With God I would say the opposite happens, even though God deserves to be worshipped just because, just because He exists and He is so wonderful and beautiful and Great. The truth is that we don't really know that, because we were dead in our sins and trespasses, our spiritual eyes have been closed for so long that it's really hard to see. So God starts romancing us, He shows us His love through Jesus, His power through creation, and these things are what initially move us to worship Him, what He has done, from creating the universe to saving us through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. However, apart from that we don't know much about this God. But then we start walking with Him, we start dwelling in Scripture and learning about all these stories about the interactions of God with His people, about His mighty power and how He's saving and rescuing and judging and redeeming the world. So our understanding of the power of God and the love of God start growing, God starts becoming more real to us, He starts developing depth in a way, like a two-dimension image suddenly gaining depth and becoming a three-dimension image. This is what the apostle Paul refers to when he says that he would wish us to know how deep and wide and broad is the love of Christ. What he is basically saying is "you think you know God, but you know only a hint, only the tip of the iceberg, this God you worship is soooo much more than what you think He is." And gradually in our relationship with God we start really seeing how much more this God really is, and that eventually moves us to a non-pragmatic worship, when we don't even need a specific reason to worship, we worship just because, just because the greatness of His being moves us to do so. Like the boy that loves a girl just because.

Art + Worship Week 1

So after a looong, very long indeed hiatus, I'm back in the blogosphere, mainly due to the multitudinous cries of my audience (meaning Pastor Steve and my sister Eunice). But since I'm too lazy to write anything new (and besides this is the second time I'm writing this 'cause my Word died and I lost my first entry), I'm going to post some of the notes I jotted down a while back for the "Art + Worship" (by the way it's pronounced Art AND Worship, not Art plus Worship) lifegroup I'm leading at Centerpoint. Hey don't judge me for being lazy, I actually think it's a good thing to post this notes, especially 'cause it's impossible for me to teach straight from a written down text, I just take some specific thoughts I want to convey and expand on them, which sometimes turns into something like improv teaching, not that I don't prepare for the teaching. Now this is not necessarily a bad thing, sometimes new ideas or ways of saying things that I hadn't thought about while preparing come out when I'm teaching, but at the same time, some of the ideas that I had wanted to share get left out, so I'm going to try to use this blog entries as a complement for the Monday teaching at the lifegroup, which of course, if you are not coming to it, does not mean much, but still some of this ideas are worth talking about, so here it goes:

We will begin our journey by discussing how everything is spiritual. The main idea of the session is to teach that every action and thought we make and have is spiritual. One of the main problems in understanding the true nature of worship is the distinction we make between the natural or physical world, and the supernatural or spiritual world. The common misunderstanding we have is that there is a divide between the material and the immaterial, which there is, but we think that the material is bad and the immaterial is good. So when we approach the issue of worship, we tend to think that since only the immaterial is good then worship must be immaterial, it is more of a feeling, something we can't see our touch, after all God isn't material right? Or is He? And while it is true that there are supernatural forces both good and bad that we can't see our touch or smell, that is not the whole picture, so worship is not only a feeling, or a spiritual ecstasy, and spiritual things are not only feelings and non-tangible thoughts or feelings. We take this thought even further sometimes, and split our lives in sections, so there is my relationship with God (the immaterial or "spiritual") and my relationship with everything else, my family, my friends, my workplace, this is all the material or "non-spiritual" or "physical." And this is a gross misconception, because everything we do is our relationship with God. Our relationship with our friends, family, coworkers, everything flows out of the intensity or lack thereof of our relationship with God, because everything is spiritual.

Splitting things into spiritual and physical comes mainly from the ancient Greeks, specially Plato's school of thought, that said that the physical world was bad and that we should to be free from it and seek the spiritual world. To a certain extent that was the main concept behind Gnosticism, even until this day. Some could argue that a similar idea is found in the Bible, especially Paul's discourse about the flesh vs. the Spirit. However, Paul's discourse was mainly about the war of good vs. evil, which exists, but it is very difficult to prove that what he meant by the "flesh" is translated as the physical world, as a matter of fact, most of the things he mentions, like envy and hate are non-tangible feelings, which makes them pretty much spiritual. Going even further, evil originated in the spiritual realm, Satan's heart, so evil is pretty much "spiritual" instead of physical. The Bible says that our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against powers and principalities, again, the spiritual realm. Having a body is not a bad thing, the material world is not a bad thing, remember that God wants to fix the world, restore it, reconcile it to Himself, fix it, not destroy it. Even the passages that talk about the destruction of the world, are the prelude to a recreation, God is fixing the world, not just doing away with it. The book of Revelation shows a picture of the Holy city coming down from Heaven, and God coming to dwell, with us, here, in the physical world. Yes there is death and destruction and sin in the physical world, however, evil is not more powerful than good, and eventually God will restore all things to the way they are supposed to be. If we see Jesus as the center of everything, then Jesus is the perfect image of the spiritual meshed with the physical, not only as God made flesh, but also as the Glorified Lamb. The Bible teaches us that after His resurrection, Jesus had a glorified body, he was not only spirit, He shows that to Thomas when He asks him to touch his scars and put his finger where His hands had been pierced, so the Jesus that is sitting right now at the right hand of the father has a physical body, a glorified body yes, but a physical one, we can touch Him. The Bible says that in the age to come, He will wipe away every tear from our face, and I take that literal, after the judgment, Jesus is going to touch my face, He is going to wipe away every tear, with those glorious, marvelous, strong and yet soft majestic hands that were pierced for my transgressions. Because God has a body.

So the purpose of this session is to show that if everything is spiritual, then a "church service" is not holier or "more spiritual" than any other moment of the week, if the presence of God indeed does cover the Earth, then we can find him and worship him everywhere, and in everything, thus the act of worship goes well beyond singing a song.