The Heavens Declare His Glory, a prayer

Abba,

The heavens declare Your glory.

But what am I?

Do You even think of me?

Why are You mindful of us at all?

And yet You say we matter. I look into the sky and see endless stars, its a joke to even try to count them and I'm reminded in the laughter that they represent your blessings. This sounds nice but even when my life seems so small in comparison with the heavens, my problems and the problems of those I love seem colossal. Why does this distortion of perspective thrive in our hearts?

Maybe, just maybe, it is no distortion. Maybe our fears and pain are as big as creation in Your eyes too. They shouldn't be but I am beginning to believe they are. You have said that Your thoughts and ways are higher than the heavens are from the earth, intrinsically different from all my expectations. And when I pull myself away from the isolated religious speak that says everything will be alright, I find a God big enough to handle my anger. A God so big and yet so intimate. 

Tonight, I have no clue how to pray. I just can't ask for this and that and go on my way, I need to know You care, that You are as close and as strong as You've promised to be. 

Do I dare be noble now?

I remember when all seemed lost not long ago, when every door slammed in my face except for the love I found in the Pierce women, my family. And in their love, their stories, their prayers, their cooking, I found a home and peace. Now life has led me away from that home and I am afraid that I will never again taste the sweetness of those days. And the truth is I never will, that is why it is so special and why it hurts to even consider losing any of it. But maybe You have another door waiting for me, and this time I know it will be more painful but it will lead me home.

So, lead me, lead us home. 

Amen

A Portrait of Christ

A Portrait of Christ from Jeremy Cowart on Vimeo.

A Spring of Hope

There are several reasons why I cherish Easter, some theological, some nostalgic but right now I am meditating on the seasonal change that accompanies the holiday. The pastels we drape on us for that eventful morning echo the awakening color blossoming from the earth outside the church walls. Spring is a season of fulfilled promise. After months of often bitter cold and death, we yearn and hope for Easter, for flowers and green and life. Michala has brought this sense of life into our home by the addition of seeds planted on our window sill. Every day we rush to see what has occurred in the dead of night, desperate for a sprig of hope. And miracles of miracles, life emerges.

Is it any wonder that the season of new life we call Spring coincides with the celebration of new life we call Easter? Jesus tells a story of how unless a wheat seed is broken and dies it will not grow to bear fruit, to bear bread, the bread of life. He is that broken seed, crushed underfoot. And yet the reason we will congregate at all this weekend is that the seed does not remain dead. Just as the basil is sprouting from the soil on my window sill, the crushed wheat yields life and abundant life at that.

I've only been observing this phenomenon we call Spring for 27 years but for some reason, each time it roles around, I am always surprised that it all somehow worked again. I marvel that land so barren and cold could possibly produce such abundance again; but it does, every year. In this faithful rebirth I witness the seeds of hope. My soul is often found wandering in a Winter wasteland, barren and even dead. And as I peer within, I wonder if there is any reason to believe that perhaps once more, New Life will bloom. I desperately await the Sprig of Hope. And miracle of miracles, Easter comes and death is laid in the grave. Miracle of miracles Jesus emerges risen and triumphant. Miracle of miracles, Spring dawns full of color and promise. Miracle of miracles, this very soul of mine find more than courage, more than hope, more than my wildest dreams and miracle of miracles I rise.

He is risen, I am risen, we are all risen indeed!

Common Prayers for Palm Sunday

Right at the crest, where Mount Olives begins its descent, the whole crowd of disciples burst into enthusiastic praise over all the mighty works they had witnessed: Blessed is he who comes, the king in God's name! All's well in heaven! Glory in the high places! Some Pharisees from the crowd told him, "Teacher, get your disciples under control!" But he said, "If they kept quiet, the stones would do it for them, shouting praise." Luke 19:37-40

It is right to praise you, Almighty God, for the acts of love by

which you have redeemed us through your Son Jesus Christ

our Lord. On this day he entered the holy city of Jerusalem in

triumph, and was proclaimed as King of kings by those who

spread their garments and branches of palm along his way.

Let these branches be for us signs of his victory, and grant that

we who bear them in his name may ever hail him as our King,

and follow him in the way that leads to eternal life; who lives

and reigns in glory with you and the Holy Spirit, now and for 

ever. Amen.

Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but

first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he

was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way

of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and

peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Almighty and everliving God, in your tender love for the

human race you sent your Son our Savior Jesus Christ 

to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon 

the cross, giving us the example of his great humility: 

Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his 

suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through 

Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you 

and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Light Reading

For my fellow bibliophiles here is a quick rundown of my current reads and what's on deck.


First And Second Samuel, Walter Brueggemann - I've come to really enjoy reading a commentary all the way through. Brueggemann has a scholar's mind and a poet's eye.


Lake Wobegon Days, Garrison Keillor - A masterful storyteller and down-right funny


Evil and the Justice of God, N. T. Wright - I am becoming a student of Wright's work and can't wait to wrestle with the hardest question of our time with him: "what to do with evil?"


Setting the Table, Danny Meyer - A restaurant entrepreneur's memoir focusing on the art of hospitality


Tell it Slant, Eugene Peterson - My reading for Lent, Peterson is quickly becoming my favorite author, similar to Brueggemann but also with a pastor's heart


Kindle- I know, why have all these actual books if I have a Kindle? I just can't give them up! On deck in the ebook world: Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton and The Importance of Being Foolish by Brennen Manning.


Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe - My all-time favorite work of fiction


Mystery and Manners, Flannery O'Conner - A collection of essays on faith, writing, and the south from another of my favorite fiction authors. What a storyteller!


Classic Colorado Summit - Gearing up for mountaineering this summer


Life With God, Richard Foster - Foster's work on the discipline of spiritual reading and study. I've been putting this one off too long.


Father, Son, and Spirit, Andreas Kostenberger and Scott R. Swain -A biblical theology study of the Gospel of John's portrayal of the Trinity, really enjoyed Professor Blomberg's additions to this series.


Bird by Bird, Anne Lamont - The humility and honesty with which Lamont writes comes through even stronger in this work on writing. What a valuable resource, it was the primary inspiration for me to write 3 blogs a week.


A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis - I have enjoyed Lewis so far and look forward to reading this personal book about the loss of his wife, I have much to learn in the realm of grief.

The Great Omission, Dallas Willard - A modern William Carey, Willard here is calling us to the heart of the Great Commission: to make disciples not merely converts.

Secrets in the Dark, Frederick Buechner - A collection of sermons, most of which I've read, that I want to finish this year. Buechner inspired the name of this blog and has been my greatest influence in the art of preaching.

Sermons from Duke Chapel, edited by William Willimon - Over 50 years of diverse sermons each prefaced by Willimon, this is a treasure.

So what are you reading? Share a picture like mine perhaps, but let us know. Enjoy Palm Sunday.

Peace.

Overflow of the Heart

As we approach Holy Week, I find myself reflective upon this season of Lent. Part of me wonders if I even tried at all to engage with Jesus as our local church has defined Lent. I at least set up a goal for myself, to study and practice the speech ethics of Jesus. To aid me in this I have been reading Eugene Peterson's book Tell it Slant, a study of Jesus' parables as he travels through Samaria on his way to Jerusalem and to the cross. In many ways, this season of Lent has mirrored that journey, as I've walked with Jesus through a foreign land. I wish that I had the same flare for the dramatic as Jesus, that I could interpret people's spiritual situations into well-crafted metaphors that people would be repeating two thousand years later, that I could set aside my agenda to be well-liked and to merely speak words that give life. Yet in my quest to see my tongue changed, I found God working on a very different part of me, my heart. Its often like this, I think, with God, we simply want to change our behaviors but He seems to care far more about who we are at our core. I found that to speak like Jesus did not mean learning smooth rhetoric but to be changed by his words.

And so as Jesus is preparing for his Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem he tells a story about the life he is bringing us into. He tells of a master who entrusts ten servants with some investments, talents. When the master returns a King, he surveys how his tenants spent their talents. One especially daring servant risked his in high-stakes investments and doubled the King's returns. Another held tightly to his, afraid of losing it and is scolded by the master who subsequently takes the servant's little and gives it to the daring one. In this story Jesus is illustrating what it means to live in and move in his coming Kingdom. We are to throw caution to the wind and risk all.  He has given us tools to use and what he most desires is for us to go to work, without fear and with great hope.

So often I find myself like the last servant, keeping my talents to myself out of fear. I am so often afraid of failure that I fail to act at all, a failure in and of itself. Yet I see Jesus telling me that anything worth anything is going to take risk. He knew this keenly as he rode that donkey into the death trap that was Jerusalem. He knew what was on the line and he risked it all, even his life for his dream, for our dreams. He died and in that act of bravery he freed us all to do likewise. This season of Lent has challenged my heart at the basic level: I am coward, yet Jesus looks deep into my eyes and sees far beneath and proclaims that my name is "Courageous" and "Victorious." He bids me, and perhaps us all, to follow in his steps of daring even if it costs me my life, for the reward is doubly, even infinitely, greater.

Becoming King

I finally got around to seeing The King's Speech after numerous testimonies concerning its brilliance. Michala and I snuck away on her birthday to catch a late night showing. We enjoyed a completely empty auditorium which made us feel very important, as if it were a private showing. Despite my a slight fever, we settled into our seats and set our expectations high. We were not disappointed.

By now, most are familiar with the basic storyline of King George's stutter and the help he receives to deliver a speech at the outset of World War II. While the story offers little surprises, it delivers big on content. At its core, this is a story of friendship and transformation and the link between the two. When Bertie (the King's common name to his family) first encounters Lionel, his speech therapist, he is standoffish and unwilling to commit to anything other than pure mechanics. Lionel knows that the stutter is less a product of poor mechanics than of a poor soul and it is only through inner change that Bertie is finally able to produce mechanically. This serves as a great picture of what a group of men I meet with called "being vs. doing."

During our last meeting, we each shared our hopes for our families and careers. Interestingly enough, each of us offered tangible goals as our career hopes, things like opening a restaurant, starting a church, singing music, things that we do. But when we shared our hopes for our families we shared instead rather intangible things, such as our daughters being emotionally healthy and happy, that they would love God and their fellow man, hopes not of what they would do but of what they would become. After this, we posed the question, "what does God our Father hope for us?" We soon realized that He was far more concerned about who we were becoming than what we would do. Even if we accomplished every career goal but had not love, it might just be meaningless.This truth was driven home by the transformation Bertie undergoes in the King's Speech.

Even though Bertie is initially hesitant to explore his heart and not just his mouth, the death of his father begins to bring his pain and insecurities to the surface. Lionel is there to hear him and comfort him. Perhaps in a moment of greatest vulnerability what we need most is not help but a simple presence, especially that of a friend. It is here, that Lionel's goals to "get at" Bertie's heart actually leads away from their professional relationship and towards a friendship.

All throughout the story, Lionel refuses to call Bertie by his proper titles such as "Your Majesty," eventually this becomes indicative of their friendship and of their mutual respect. Later Lionel is exposed as not being an actual doctor and yet, he argues, titles are meaningless without any substance. It is not the title that defines Lionel but who he is and Berte soon realizes that his title also gives him no real rights. Yet in the face of war Bertie begins to find courage to face his own fears so as to help the nation face their collective fears. As he addresses a nation on the brink of war, he speaks of standing up to fear and perhaps he speaks less of the Nazis as of his own demons. Yet he delivers the speech and in the process triumphs over his fears. As he emerges, Lionel looks into his eyes and finally calls him by the name he has finally grown into, "Your Majesty." Bertie is now the true King, not because he has spoken well, not because of what he has done but because of what he has become, courageous.

It was only with the help of his friend that he is able to be transformed. It was only with the help of my friends that my ideas of success have been transformed, and hopefully it with the help of a friend that each of us may one day be transformed and fill the form of who we are with the substance of our being.

A Seat at the Table

Every Thanksgiving, my family congregates at Grandma's house for a feast, sometimes as many as 60 people in attendance. My Dad would tell the story about his first Pierce Thanksgiving. He described a washtub of dressing, nine pies, and what he thought amounted to enough food to feed an army. However, he underestimated the appetites of the Pierce army and after taking a nap found my Uncle Jimmy picking the last scraps of meat off of the turkey carcass. I can assure you that this feeding frenzy we call Thanksgiving has not ceased to be a furious survival of the fittest at Grandma's house.  There is little decorum to these meals, most carry a fork in their front pockets so that they can sample the goods before Grandma prays and we take turns trying to cut each other and pushing the capacity of our paper plates to their limits. Yet there is one aspect of this meal that us newcomers refuse to intrude upon, who sits at the table. Like I said, sometimes as many as 60 people show up for this meal and sit all sorts of places, on stumps, lawn chairs, the floor, but a few, only about three, sit at the table.  These are usually my uncles: Jesse, Steve, Rocky, and Jimmy. Although no one has ever stated that it is off limits to sit there, I wouldn't dare presume to take a chance. Sometimes they do let others sit there, my brother has before and some of my cousins, but none of them lasted very long; my uncles are a tough bunch to sit with I promise you. Throughout my years of sharing this meal, I like my dad, have learned a few lessons, but most of all I learned that you must earn your seat at the table.

Jesus finds himself ,strange enough, at a table similar to my Grandma's. One Sabbath after the Jewish equivalent of church, he is invited to meal at the religous leader's house. There he finds that this extension of hospitality was actually far from it, the host sought to test his guests to evaluate their worth to sit at his table. Jesus, clever as always, addressses this act of inhospitability by reversing the table, he points to another reciepiant of the host's up-turned nose, a man with swollen joints. Jesus asks the group what is the right thing to do on this day, to heal or not to heal? The party remains silent, the answer is clear enough but in the answer they find their hypocrisy revealed. The Sabbath was a day to let go and let God, but they were using it to jockey for position, to earn a right to sit at the table. Instead of showing hospitalty to the injured man, they ignore him because he is in their way. Yet Jesus refuses to let them go along in such a manner. Into their silence, he tells them a story that gives flesh to the skeleton of a meal they are sharing. He says:

"When someone invites you to dinner, don't take the place of honor. Somebody more important than you might have been invited by the host. Then he'll come and call out in front of everybody, 'You're in the wrong place. The place of honor belongs to this man.' Red-faced, you'll have to make your way to the very last table, the only place left. 

"When you're invited to dinner, go and sit at the last place. Then when the host comes he may very well say, 'Friend, come up to the front.' That will give the dinner guests something to talk about! What I'm saying is, If you walk around with your nose in the air, you're going to end up flat on your face. But if you're content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself."

Meals are indeed sacred; times when, if we are true to their intent, we are brought to the same level. We all need meat and bread, we each need sustenance and are utterly dependent upon God and each other for this food. Meals are a time to share our hopes and jokes, time to not only share the gravy but our very lives. Yet we, like the religious leaders Jesus speaks this story to, have perverted the intent of a meal. It has become a time to hoard as opposed to a time to give, a time to expose our power over another as opposed to a time to humble ourselves, and a time to lament our lack as opposed to a time to praise our abundance. But the beauty of this story like most of Jesus' stories is that it not only exposes our deficiencies, it also offers hope of a better story.

In our humility, Jesus says, we find honor. I said that I never presumed to sit at the table with my uncles; this was not because I had some great sense of humility but because I was scared of them. They are some big bad dudes, but through the years I've sought to honor the men who grew up with my Momma and in small ways I've had some of the honor and even respect reciprocated. And I promise you, those few moments and words have been some of the sweetest in my life. I think that all along, if I simply had the courage, I could have found a seat at their table, there was always room, because they had no need to prove themselves to anyone, least of all me. "But these strict Sabbath-keepers had their eyes first on Jesus to see what he was going to do, then on one another to see how they could take advantage of one another. They were betraying the Sabbath in the very act of 'protecting' it. (Peterson, 82,3)" And we betray ourselves when we use the good things God has given us to somehow prove ourselves. May we lower our noses and seek the last place and perhaps we may hear Christ himself say to us, "Friend, come up front."

Working Ideas

Church divisions are almost exclusively academic divisions. The reason I don’t understand my Lutheran neighbor is because a couple academics got into a fight hundreds of years ago. And the rest of the church followed them because, well, they were our leaders. So now we are divided under divisions caused by arguments a laboring leadership might never have noticed of cared about. Practitioners care about what works, what gets things done. They have to agree because there are projects on the line. Educators don’t have to agree at all. They can fight and debate and write papers against each other because, well, the product they are churning out is just thought, not action. - Donald Miller

These words were part of a blog post Donald Miller shared today. In essence, Miller was challenging what he perceived to be the status quo, that scholars are in control of the church today. He argued that this has caused numerous problems that would not have occurred had practitioners been in control. To this I offer both an "Amen!" and an "uhh?"  Without a doubt, academics who sit in their ivory towers of scholarship and pronounce judgement upon the church while never dirtying their hands are not who we need as our leaders. I agree that doctrine is fluid and must be adapted in the face of real-life ministry but also that ministry must be adapted in the face of truth.

I am a big fan of Miller's writings but perhaps he, like so many, saw an aspect of the church that has not been entirely beneficial and choose to throw the baby out with the bathwater. He argues that the Apostles were undereducated labors and that this sense of hard work empowered them to lead a revolutionary movement as opposed to merely argue about it (which they also did). Yet what we often forget was that while they were indeed labors, they were far from uneducated. Most Jews during this time, even if they failed to complete school, still the had the first five books of the Bible memorized. While some were fishermen, others were doctors and even Pharisees. In fact, as the book of Acts progresses, we see the twelve fade away and witness the largest surge of focus and growth coming from Paul, who was a leading scholar in his time. But here is the difference between what Miller is decrying and what the early church did. While they absolutely put an emphasis on educating themselves in the things of God, they also acted upon this knowledge. The answer for the church today is not to toss out scholarship but combine the practices of study and work.

I hardly would call myself a scholar, I spent nine years building docks on the coast of South Carolina, I been a bouncer at a bar, worked at a feed store, and now manage a restaurant, but despite my history of work, I have always benefited from the pursuit of knowledge. Not knowledge simply for the sake of knowledge but for the sake of refining my practices, so that my labor can be informed and productive.  Paul exemplified this balance of knowledge and work. He pondered the depths of what Christ's resurrection meant for us and in I Corinthians 15 he lays out a beautiful theological argument for this doctrine but he sums it all up in these words, "With all this going for us, my dear, dear friends, stand your ground. And don't hold back. Throw yourselves into the work of the Master, confident that nothing you do for him is a waste of time or effort." Paul understood that this theology fueled our work-ethic, that even if our good deeds seem meaningless, their will be a resurrection one day and then we see just how meaningful those deeds were.

So I say all this to challenge you and me to not forsake either our minds nor our hands (nor our hearts for that matter). For to do so leaves us with either a puffed up and crippled faith or uniformed, aimless works.  Neither is healthy. Instead we should think deeply on the mercies of God, having our minds transformed and consequently live sacrificed lives. Then perhaps we can begin to live in the unity that Miller and myself so deeply long for.

Its something to think about.