Remember that book that I wrote a small chapter in? Aaron Nee made this great video promoting it. Pretty sweet.

Since being to university I have been able to hold two completely contradictory thoughts in my head at the same time and not go insane.  To many, that sentence probably sounds insane.  Here is what I have noticed though.  On paper, by choice and by my life lived I am a Free Methodist (FM), a pastor and a husband.  I am currently in the process of getting ordained by FMCIC and theStory where I am a pastor is one of their church plants.  Philosophically and in my head I am all over the place.  I am constantly reading books that are against and completely contradict everything I’ve assumed, what feels good or what I was told to believe.  I read books from theologians of all faiths, people from all faiths and people who are straight up opposed to my faith.  I constantly mess up my marriage through selfish moves, because I’m changing or through miscommunication.  I teach wrong things at my church, I hurt people and I give wrong advice sometimes.  Somehow I’ve been able to live in this tension fairly peacefully. Others usually become skeptics and/or stale.  They end up being paralyzed with options and never actually evolve and grow.  So in cautiousness, I have decided that it is best to pick a movement that I can connect with and give it my all.  This doesn’t mean I understand everything and can cognitively explain the systematic doctrine of the Free Methodists to anyone that asks.  It does mean though that I am committed, submissive and willing to do what it takes to make this relationship work.  In the same way that I have chosen to be with my wife, I have chosen to be with the Free Methodists.  This doesn’t mean I won’t screw up, say wrong things, but it does mean that I’ve entered into a relationship where I’m held accountable and I have chosen be submissive along with all sorts of other perks.

The only time this way of living every becomes problematic is when I allow the philosophical side of me seep out.  Coincidentally, this blog is an outlet for that, as has the many social networks online.  I’ve used my blog for a place of wrestling with ideas, not where I list off what I’m supposed to think.  This has caused all sorts of issues.  I’ve had numerous people accuse me of not being a very good Free Methodist, and I’ve had people accuse me of being a heretic or tell me I’m out of God’s will.  If I was to use this marriage analogy again then I can see why this is both healthy or problematic.  If my blog was a place to constantly question my marriage relationship, marriage in general and flirt with the ideas of starting relationships with other females then I can see why my marriage might not be that healthy.  However, if it’s seen as building relationships, seeking to understand and appreciate the other and hoping that my wife joins me in this journey then I can see why this would be an important thing to have.  The latter is how I see my blog.
There seems to be two camps of readers on my blog.  There is my one world where I am supposed to be a good pastor.  Teaching people in the way of Christ, giving answers not asking questions and directing people to solid doctrine.  Half the people that read my blog or interact with me online have this expectation for me.  They have a certain standard of what a good Free Methodist should think and believe and I obviously fall short of that.  So they make no qualms about calling me out, disagreeing or straight up getting involved with my relationship with the FM’s.

The other half of the people want to and do engage in the academic/philosophical conversation.  Somehow this half is able to juggle the two realities along side of me.  If I ask an offensive question or link to an offensive article their first instinct isn’t to judge and figure out my intentions and compare to me the FM standard.  Rather it is to jump into the dialogue, seek with me and see what comes out of it.  The conversation flows better with these people, it’s more honest and their is less baggage.

The problem is, most people inside the church fall into the former category.  They all want to make sure I know what the right answer is, what the right thing to believe is and what the right way to act is.  They don’t want to talk about it, they don’t want to dig deeper or wrestle, because they already know what the answers are.  There is no part of them that understands or wants anything to do with people or thoughts that fall into that second category.  While I was in school, it was all about the second category with very little room for the first.  Now that I’m back in Sarnia, everything is switched.  Somehow I can be a good pastor, hold to the Free Methodist doctrine and yet still struggle with, read about and consider contradictory thoughts and theology.  Maybe I’m just lying to myself but I like to think that I can decide to submit and sign on to one theology yet still have the freedom to seek and learn and grow with others.

This is the problem I’ve always had with statements of faith.  I felt like they limited you where you were allowed to go with your reading, thinking and exploring.  It was like a boundary that you were punished if you dare go outside of it.  I had to stop seeing statements of faith as restrictions and more of identifiers.  A statement of faith to me is an identifier of a community of people who have decided that this is who they are and this is what they are striving to be.  If it just says what everyone thinks, then I think we are truly limiting the creativity and growth of everyone who is under that statement.  I can still hold to a statement of faith that says I am a Free Methodist in one hand and with the other be seeking and evolving and growing and stretching in all sorts of directions.  I don’t know of any other way to identify myself with anything rather than looking like what they say they look like and making a choice to say “I am that.”  Identities aren’t decided by abstract theological ideas or disillusionment.  They are chosen and then lived out.

So I’m struggling to live in these two worlds.  Since leaving school, I am much more accustomed to living in a world of asking questions, reading books, landing in uncomfortable places, being challenged and having great dialogue.  Yet the deeper I get, the more I see that many people are just not interested and many are straight up opposed.  How do these two realities co-exist without one despising the other?  I’m still learning what that looks like.  One side thinks the other side is sheltered, weak and indoctrinated and the other side thinks the other is irresponsible, prideful and heretical.  At some point, somewhere the sides have to seek to understand each other and co-exist.  I’m just not convinced yet they can have great conversation.

Just finished writing this post over on Linking Life.  I’m having an extremely frustrating experience with Acer right now where I am 6 months in, shipped my computer to them four times and I am still without a replacement or a refund.  Read the full post here and why Acer is being horrible and let me know if you have any ideas on how to get their attention?

As we go through the beatitudes we have heard all sorts of different theories and perspectives on what they are. They are values of what people should hold in being part of the Kingdom. They are statements about the fate of the people they describe. They are evolving and natural characteristics of all Christians. We’ve talked about two of his statements thus far:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.

The first beatitude is the very basics of the Christian faith. It asks us to have an honest look at who we are and realize our own poorness and inability to hold onto any righteousness on our own. All are poor in spirit, but only some realize this and live in this reality. As the parables as well teach us, anyone who thinks he can make it on his own or come even close to being better off than someone else (Pharisee and the Tax Collector) is not poor in spirit. When we realize that death to ourselves is the only option and that life only comes by the death and Resurrection of Christ, that is when we become poor in spirit. We’ve also heard the opinion that being poor in spirit is not a quality that we should seek or desire. This isn’t saying you need to be poor. This is making a statement that it is those that are poor in spirit that the kingdom of heaven belong too. However, this of course makes you want to be poor in spirit, so that you will get the kingdom of heaven also.

This inevitably leads to the second statement by Jesus which Aaron spoke about last week. We end up mourning and crying out along with all the father’s of our faith. The earth, the angels, our spirits and Jesus all cry out and mourn the coming and redemption of all things. We mourn because things are not as they should be. We mourn because it doesn’t feel right, something is broken, and that something is us alongside of every else that we are surrounded by. We mourn because we are pour in spirit.

Out of these two, comes the statement by Jesus that we are going to focus on this morning.

Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.

This is a wonderfully backwards statement. The world in Jesus time, and conveniently enough for this sermon, the world today works completely different. In today’s world, in any world actually, the line would normally be something like

Successful are those that push to the top
for they can become anything they want

The world moves around through strength and power and success and self-congratulating and non-stop aggressiveness. We tell our children that they can be anything they want to be. Our schools are setup to be competitive in nature so our children are constantly compared to other children and then based on that we evaluate their performance based on a few letters. The more you assert yourself in this world, the better chance you have to get what you want. This is what we tell our kids, this is what we believe and this is how generally the world, and us, work.

Even in this Jesus time when he was saying these things, people would have not really grasped what was going on. The Jews had ideas for their kingdom that was going to be violent and militaristic. They were waiting for a Messiah to come and wipe their enemies and restore their power. They were trying to scheme all sorts of ways to speed up this process and bring back the control that they so longed for. They were expecting victory and world conquest. Then, this man who people claim is the Messiah launches into his victory speech. Remember the speech that Gladiator does before his army goes into battle? All his troops are lined up and ready to slit the throats of their enemy and then Russel Crowe gives his pump-up speech before the battle. That’s sort of an exaggeration, but this is kind of how I see Jesus’ sermon on the mount. Those that are listening to him are blood-thirsty and longing for freedom from their oppression by the Romans. They want vengeance. This Messiah is exactly that person who is supposed to lead them into that. Thousands follow him at this point in his ministry and it’s not just because he can do magic tricks. It’s because he was ushering in a new kingdom and people thought this meant forcing out the old. They were for their prophecies to come true and freedom to be taken a hold of.

If you’ve seen any war movie, the opening speech is usually a pump up speech that gets people ready to go into battle. People are hooting and hollering and banging their swords on their shields. They are all there to finally get what they deserve and give to the enemy what they deserve. This is how I picture the beatitudes. This kind of scene, with these kind of people just longing for God to end the suffering and free them from oppression and most importantly restore their power. Then Jesus gives his victory speech:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.

What? Really Jesus? What a downer. These are not what they would have expected. This was completely backwards and a little anti-climatic. Especially this blessed are the meek line. Like we get that the people who mourn are going to be comforted and we can even let the fact go that those that are poor will inherit their rewards later in heaven. But this blessed are the meek part doesn’t really fly. So why? Why not? What is meek and why is this so appalling?

Don’t get too caught up in trying to describe the word, sometimes it’s easier to describe the person. Generally the word meek as been thought to mean just humble. In many cases they are right, they definitely have similarities. Meek though has a whole bunch more meaning that doesn’t usually come with the word humble. Greek word Praus which mean gentle strength. So this word more denotes two different realities. Humility is only one of them. We can barely picture someone being strong and meek. A meek person is one who has great power and is confident yet full of humility and self-realization of who they actually are. It’s kind of a paradox. For this person will appear weak at times, but they will have great strength. They will have looked defeated yet they will be content with knowing they have won.

If we look at the word meek to simply mean “humble” then I think we have missed a step. We end up using teaching things like to go into the closet and pray, keep private, your faith doesn’t need to be on display. Jesus though constantly speaks against this type of humility in terms of becoming a disciple. Matthew shows us this in other chapters when he quotes Jesus saying things like ‘You are the light of the world.’ and ‘a city built on a hill cannot be hid.’ Jesus doesn’t want his disciples just to keep to themselves and be humble followers in a corner somewhere. He obviously wants his followers to be out there, not hidden, being light, not dark. Any attempts that we try to make ourselves invisible, Jesus diminishes. So meekness isn’t being hidden, or staying in a closet. So how does a humble person be meek?

So I’m just gonna throw this out there to get the conversation moving. Here is what I think a meek person looks like.

What qualities do you think I am wrong about in this list? Would you add any? What worries you about a meek person?

Lots of great discussion happened in this part.  Some said that you can still be worth something while not defending yourself.  Some said this description didn’t have enough outward action statements about what this guy does actually do.

So Jesus has done it again. He has flipped what was common feeling about how the world should work and he lifts up the losers and those that don’t have it together.

“…in the Gospels the kingdom message transforms those who meekly embrace it, just as it crushes the arrogant, the religiously and socially satisfied.”
- Craig S. Keener

So how do we be transformed into being more meek, if we have to meekly embrace the kingdom to do that? What comes first? Here is my suggestion. This is only one suggestion of a way that we can see the world and an attitude that I think will help transform us to become more meek. Paul echos the words of Jesus in a few of his passages in 2 Corinthians 6,  I think it might help us make more sense of what to do with Jesus’ statement.

We put no stumbling block in anyone’s path, so that our ministry will not be discredited. Rather, as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: in great endurance; in troubles, hardships and distresses; in beatings, imprisonments and riots; in hard work, sleepless nights and hunger; in purity, understanding, patience and kindness; in the Holy Spirit and in sincere love; in truthful speech and in the power of God; with weapons of righteousness in the right hand and in the left; through glory and dishonor, bad report and good report; genuine, yet regarded as impostors; known, yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything.

It’s this last sentence that I think is quite similar with what Jesus is saying here. How can one have nothing and yet possess everything? The same question I ask, how does one be meek and yet inherit the earth? So here is my suggestion. My thought here is that typically when we see a paradox in the gospels is because there are two different realities colliding. One one hand you have to die, but by doing that you live. Now this doesn’t mean that if you jump off a bridge, you are going to be resurrected. What it does mean though is you have to die to yourself spiritually, so that you can come alive in all things. How can we be sorrowful and yet always rejoicing? Well it’s the same like Aaron pointed out last week. Jesus was somehow able to live in both worlds. He was able to mourn the loss of Lazurus all the while knowing he could raise him from the dead. So there is a paradox here, but it’s an easier one to explain because it’s talking about two different realities and living in the tension of both.

To be meek is to understand and live in this tension of both realities. The realities are this.

• You have nothing and are nothing
• You possess everything and are loved

How do these two things work together? A meek man has somehow figured it out. This would be a good explanation of someone who is meek. Someone who has learned to live in both these realities.

On the one hand a meek man recognizes his sinful nature and sees himself as nothing special, nothing to be worshiped, not one to deserve his own way. On the other hand he recognizes he is a child of God, valued beyond all measure, and all things are his for the taking. Meekness can live in both realities. I found this quote online recently, and it came to my mind for this sermon.

All of the computers on Ebay are mine. In fact, everything on Ebay is already mine. All of those things are just in long term storage that I pay nothing for. Storage is free.
When I want to take something out of storage, I just pay the for the storage costs for that particular thing up to that point, plus a nominal shipping fee, and my things are delivered to me so I can use them. When I am done with them, I return them to storage via Craigslist or Ebay, and I am given a fee as compensation for freeing up the storage facilities resources.
This is also the case with all of my stuff that Amazon and Walmart are holding for me. I have antiques, priceless art, cars, estates, and jewels beyond the dreams of avarice.
The world is my museum, displaying my collections on loan. The James Savages of the world are merely curators.
As I am the curator of their things, and thus together we all share the world.

When I first read this quote to people, they gawked because it obviously isn’t a reality. All of the computers aren’t literally mine. However, here would be where I think separates a meek person apart. A meek person would have the attitude where this quote is true whether or not it exists physically or not. This isn’t a statement that describes reality, rather it describes a approach and attitude to a way of looking at the world. Meekness has a large part to do with an attitude towards life, and very little to do with what actually happens in your life. Someone who is meek sees all humans as equal, all in the same boat, all deserving the same fate, all having access to the same gifts as anyone else. All the early church fathers saw all possessions as being in common with all, why would one have more rite to something? They can live their life with this reality. Someone could steal a meek person’s IPod and they wouldn’t really flinch, because they never had the belief that it was really theres in the first place. Someone could hurl insults non-stop at a meek person, and the meek person could go on living their life, because meek people live in truth, not try to create fake ones.

The next part of Jesus’ statement is that they will inherit the earth. When we look at this verse we could interpret it has someone who longs for power would look at it. This meekness is not simply a tool to gain power and inherit the earth. Some think that this verse means that the meek will one day rule over us all. I’m more inclined it’s more like what we were talking about earlier. There is a paradox here. There is statement of what will happen to meek people. What if it means that meek people, because they are meek, have an attitude towards the earth that sees it as all theres already. What if meekness is the quality needed to fully embrace everything that is yours already?

If you don’t have any lower to go. If you have already admitted to yourself that you don’t really deserve anything, that you aren’t all that you want yourself to be, only then can you be free to see the world for what it is and receive God’s grace and your value from a true source. If you don’t see everything in the world’s as being a gift to us all, then you will not see everything in the world as yours already. If you see yourself better than you are, then you only have down to go.

“He that is down need fear no fall.”
- John Bunyan

So this morning what I want to do is grab the journals and write down and answer a few questions, then I want you to comment on your own answers and internally wrestle with your own answers.

Do you get/stay offended when someone says something mean to you?
Do you complain a lot when you go through standard trials in life such as sickness or over material possessions?
Do you think you have anything to learn from children or the disabled?
Do other people annoy you a lot?
When was the last time you took the back seat so someone could surpass you?
Are you mostly a content/happy person?
Do you find yourself upset about where your life is at and unable to make change?
Do you love having new things and shopping?

After you have answered these questions, just write about it. Why did you answer these questions this way? Are they good answers that you are proud of or do you wish you would change? What steps are you going to make to change? I don’t ask these questions to make you feel bad. I think it’s important to ask these questions because they help reveal parts about you that you should begin to discipline yourself to change. Is we are going to be a community of meek followers of Christ, then we need to all be actively seeking this way of living. So be honest with yourself. Question your motives. Dig deep into yourself and ask these questions and then after, just write and reflect on your answers.

Let’s pray together.

In being downtown Sarnia we have always said we never wanted to have an agenda. The idea stemmed from hardcore, door-to-door sales pitches for religious beliefs that we wanted to stay away from. Missionary dating, evangelism surveys, salvation cards, invite your friends to church for a chance to win a stereo Sundays and witnessing in your cworkplace are all part of the deeply disconnected culture of evangelism that we are reacting against. When you have to fake a relationship with someone (or why bother even faking at times?) then we thought there must be something wrong.

So in going downtown, to an environment completely unfamiliar to us, one of the things we were going to make sure we did, was erase all agendas. We had seen the dangers of what agendas could do, so we wanted to steer clear of them. We were not moving downtown to “save” the downtown. We were not moving there so we could better understand their culture and then eventually hit them in the head with Bible verses. We didn’t grab beers with store owners, join the Artwalk committee or go to the concerts so we could get them to come to the events we ran or to church on Sundays. Our sole purpose was going to be to move somewhere that was abandoned and build relationships with the people that are there with no expectation on them at all. So that’s what we did.

We’ve been here for three years now. I would say we’ve done pretty well at successfully integrating ourselves into the fabric of what is happening downtown. Besides a few special circumstances, we get along with many of the people downtown and I would call most of them friends. At this point, any good Christian would see this as a great opportunity to present the gospel as we know it and share it with as many as possible. The only problem is, it sort of feels that would negate the whole non-agenda clause that we established when we first started. So we continue to build relationships, and genuinely care about the people downtown.

I think my problem with agendas are, that they feel inconsistent with what the gospel really is. When somebody has an agenda in a relationship, they are really only nice to you or want to be your friend because they want something from you, or want you to do something for them. If we wanted to have everyone that lives downtown, attend theStory’s service on Sundays, and so we started integrating ourselves into the downtown core so we could start bringing people out to the service, then that would be an agenda. That isn’t why we are there. People showing up at our service really has very little to do what is going on.

However, as Christians, I think it is still crucial that we have a mission. A mission is different than an agenda. Agenda’s can be checked off as completed when the work is done or when I get what I want. Mission is about a commitment to a way of life, something that you bring into whatever happens around you no matter how people respond, if they respond at all. As Christians, we believe that the way we should live our lives is by loving God and loving others. Part of our mission is to do that to the best ability wherever we are. Since we are downtown, our mission is played out daily in our relationships with whoever we run into. Agenda’s come with expectations for the other, mission comes with duty for yourself.

There is a purpose I’m downtown but it isn’t to complete or follow an agenda. I will not be able to wake up tomorrow morning either disappointed or excited because the agenda worked. Mission doesn’t give such a clear picture of what the future looks like. Rather, it gives you an arrow in which direction to head. The other beautiful thing about mission is that it gives purpose that is based on what you should contribute rather than what you need to accomplish or how people must respond. In other words, with mission you aren’t scored and ranked, where with an agenda, you almost get marked with how closely you followed it and how people react to you.

So after three years we are beginning to see what this looks like. If we were following an agenda, we would have been disappointed long ago, since really no one from downtown is attending our Sunday services. However, that was never our goal. Our goal was to move into downtown, and love on downtown people. End of story. Whatever comes from that was awesome, but there will never be any expectation to exactly how that will play out, who will join us or what it will look like. We are constantly accomplishing our mission every day, it will never full be accomplished and that’s what I like about mission. It just gives you daily purpose for how you should live your life rather than mandating what everyone else has to do around you to fit into how you think things should be.

For this, I am grateful. I think throwing out an agenda was a good thing for us. It has allowed us to face into whatever came our way and not pre-determined exactly what we were going to look like. We allow our mission to shape our day to day activities and how we interact and go from there. I don’t feel stuck, and I do not feel like I have failed at anything because there is nothing to fail at. I am here and I love people and I love God. Mission being accomplished.

We spend quite a bit of time pursuing, collecting and naming all of our possessions. We work hard so we can buy more things. We take vacation so we can get a break from all those things. We play hard so we can use those things. We spend an unhealthy amount of time sorting, labeling, cleaning, collecting, shopping, seeking and dreaming about our things. Our entire lives are consumed by the next thing that we get or that we want.

I’m beginning to wonder if we started to think more like this post I wrote a few months ago, that we could start to have a different perspective on material possessions all together?

I think we have a major flaw in the way we look at the world. We see everything in the world as something that we can own. So over centuries we have mined and moved around and cut down and built things so that we could use the world for what we think it should be used for. We see the world through one lens, and that lens is dominantly selfish one. If everything, everywhere is meant to be owned and possessed by someone. If that someone gets to choose the fate of whatever they own, strictly because they own it based on whatever laws in their society. Then the world has become nothing more than a large shopping mall, that instead of cash, it’s first come, first served and people can take and do whatever they want. Ownership and possession become key to the language we use when we talk about material possessions.

May I suggest an alternative? What if instead seeing material things as something to be possessed and owned primarily we look at material things as something to be shared first? What if as soon as you found yourself with the responsibility of any item, your first instinct was how do I share this rather than how do I guarantee my ownership of it? This takes a completely different shift in the way that we look at everything, but I think it is possible.

If we truly see the earth as God’s and everything in it, then it is unnecessary to see these things inside the world as ours at all. We use ideas of stewardship and responsibility to help us spend what is ours more wisely but there is one flaw in this type of thinking. It presupposes there is anything that is ours in the first place. What if material possessions could only truly be experienced when shared, not when owned? What if we can only truly experience what God has for us in this world through sharing and giving away? I think that if we can move away from a type of thinking that tells us that to enjoy something we have to own it and use it up that we might be better off. The best things in life only become a reality when they are shared with others or given away. The kingdom works this way as well. Why should it be any different with material things?