Extending Hospitality is Messy Business in Churches

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

One of my all time favorite images from the vast storehouses of wisdom hoisted on us by Garrison Keillor in his radio show, Prairie Home Companion, as I can recall it, can be reduced to a single two minute moment when a young Garrison, resisting all impulse to do otherwise, found himself in the late fall of the year throwing an overly ripe tomato toward his older sister who just happened to be bending over looking south. The overly juicy tomato came in low and hard from the north and hit her squarely on the part of the anatomy where one normally sits. Can you hear the wonderful, big juicy splat of that tomato?[1]

Putting aside the deviance of an adolescent young boy, this is the kind of sound we need to hear more of in our churches. We need to hear more splattering. We need to see and accept ourselves more in the context of the messiness of our lives. I realize this runs contrary to some of the efficiencies and professionalism that many of us like to bring to doing church life, we corporate types. But, we are not neat and tidy people. Nor do we serve neat and tidy people. In building our lives together—programmatically, institutionally, socially—should we not be more attentive to the actual condition of our lives outside of our gathered community? In our planning, should we not be attentive to the dangers of forcing square individuals into round holes?

Sometimes expressing hospitality to one another abhors the neatness we want to give it. We hesitate extending ourselves, for example, hoping for the “perfect time” to invite someone into our lives, not realizing that sometimes the less-than-perfect time is really the absolute right time. Sometime we are so concerned about chipping our fine china that we don’t extend hospitality on paper plates. And, on a more programmatic level, sometimes we have become so scripted that we have wrung all the spontaneity out of our life together. People live messy, messy lives and churches should bear some of that messiness with it. I leave it to you to decide what this might look like in your church.

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[1] Garrison Keillor, A Prairie Home Companion radio broadcast, recorded, May 15, 2008.

Pain is Inevitable

By Maria Boccia, PhD
Professor of Pastoral Counseling and Psychology
Director of Graduate Programs in Counseling Charlotte campus

I am teaching “Ministering to Women in Pain” this semester. It is one of the new courses in our counseling curriculum, and it is the first time I am teaching it. In preparation, I have been reading about theodicy (the theological question of a good and sovereign God and the problem of evil), and on pain and suffering in general.

One book I have read that has really affected me profoundly is “More than an Aspirin” http://gcts.christianbook.com/than-aspirin-christian-perspective-pain-suffering/gay-hubbard/9781572932579/pd/932579?item_code=WW&netp_id=615307&event=ESRCN&view=details by my friend Gay Hubbard. Gay and I have been exchanging thoughts on pain and the life of faith since I attended the first Sabbatical for Women in Ministry that she and Alice Mathews taught here at GCTS. This latest book of hers has been transformative for me. I would like to share some of her thoughts, and my thoughts about what she has written, with you.

If pain is inevitable, is it possible to live with pain in such a way that we alter its negative impact on our lives? Gay’s answer is, yes. It depends on how we respond to it. If we don’t think about it, pain will often lead to bitterness. It does not have to, however, if we decide to agree with God that pain can be used by him in redemptive ways to grow us into who he intends for us to become. In Gay’s phraseology, we much choose to believe in an Eastering God, even on that black, despairing Saturday.

An important lesson I am learning is that “I am not the pain,” rather pain is something that happens to me, and there are many other wonderful things in my life that make it worthwhile. “My life is more than my pain, and I will not die from this pain. I can choose to survive” (p.106). God has demonstrated to us in Jesus that he values pain for what it accomplishes. By his stripes we are healed. His suffering enables us who believe to become the children of God and to have complete and total forgiveness of our sins, and to live for eternity with God in the new heavens and the new earth. How great is that? So Jesus, although he did not want to suffer, agreed with the Father, not my will by thine be done. Amen. Me too. I don’t like suffering, and neither did Jesus, but he endured for the glory set before him. I want to do this too.

It is important to note that this does not mean I have to LIKE suffering. Jesus did not LIKE going to the cross. He ENDURED it for the sake of what it would accomplish. So, too, I have to ENDURE the suffering God allows in my life for the sake of what it accomplishes. With this new perspective, I can look at my life and the results of the suffering I have endured and see how God has used it to change me into the person he wants me to be, and to empower me to do the ministry he has called me to do. This is greatly encouraging.

Let me encourage you with some thoughts on this process:

1. If you are not your pain, then you can look at other aspects of your life. Notice the good things, and express gratitude for them. Keep doing that on a daily basis. You will be surprised at how this will help you to live the truth that you are not your pain.

2. God is an Eastering God. How can God bring resurrection to your Saturday pain? Do you see things in your life that God has used your pain to grow and create? Be thankful for them. But remember, you don’t have to LIKE the pain!

3. Try to let go of asking God “why?” He may or may not choose to let you know the whys of it all. We have the promise that “all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose.” Trust that and leave it in his hands. When he is ready to le you know why, he will, and until then you will just lose a lot of sleep over it. Focus on God and trusting him for the outcome.

4. What you can change, change. If you are in a destructive relationship, do something about it. If you’ve developed a destructive way of life or pattern of thinking, do the work to change it. Do not continue in self-destructive relationships, behaviors, thoughts or emotions.

5. Don’t worry about whose fault it is. If there is something you are doing that is self-destructive and creating suffering in your life, by all means, take it to God, repent and change. But, if you cannot see any way that you have created the pain, don’t blame yourself. Trust God and leave it in his hands.

6. God does not promise a happy ending. Maybe your pain will end in you knowing God better and depending more on him, without it actually ending. I have learned that this can be okay, too. If I am more than my pain, it need not define me and I can live a full life of loving and serving God even in the midst of it.

7. Remember, what God cares about is your relationship with him. Cling to him, depend on him, trust him, go with him. That is the big thing for God.

I end with Gay’s word on how we may think about our pain (pp. 109-110):

My pain is what it is - my pain. I did not choose this pain. I cannot avoid this pain. But life and God are bigger than my pain, and I am more than my suffering. In this pain I can choose life. I can choose to live productively through this pain.

It is what it is: pain. But that is all that it is: my pain. It is not evidence of my inadequacy, my unloveableness, or the absence of my worth. It is neither proof of my personal culpability nor evidence of the absence of God.

The cycle of life is what it is; laughter and tears; gain and loss; joy and pain. In the cyle of my life I have come to this season of pain. I cannot go around it, but I can and will go through it. I can survive. And I choose to do more than survive. I choose to live in a way that permits good things to emerge from this time of pain. I count upon God’s promise that I cna be more than conqueror in all things (Romans 8:37).

In this pain, I choose life. In the present darkness of my soul and disordered circumstances, I choose life. In wordless faith in an Eastering God, I chose to live.

A Clod, and Unknowing

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

I went into the Montreal Museum of Modern Art (more properly le Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal) in a positive frame of mind. Sure, some of the pieces might be perplexing, and at times I might wonder whether the proverbial roomful of monkeys (armed with brushes rather than typewriters) might produce a more interesting product, but there could be some very interesting stuff in there as well. Entry that evening was free, so I figured I did not have much to lose.

The results were mixed. At the risk of revealing myself as a bourgeois clod, I found much of the material rather pointless. A hanging video monitor shows a woman’s face; the colors change every so often. That was pretty much it, but from the description on the wall (I will spare you the tortured postmodern prose) you would think she had precipitated a quantum leap in human consciousness. It is bad enough to look at a piece and think, “I could have done this.” It’s worse when your next thought is, “But why would I want to?” Tedium and self-indulgence hung over most of the exhibits.

But not all. The highlight was an extended look at the works of the Québécois artist Paul-Émile Borduas. It was encouraging to see from his early works that Borduas was fully capable of doing what many of us would consider art: representation of natural scenes, still-lifes, and so on. I suppose most of the artists on display in the museum have similar talents. But without the evidence on display in front of you, there is always the lingering suspicion that some of them really might be talentless hacks bluffing their way to fame. There was no such concern with Borduas.

This naturally gave me a more sympathetic approach to his later, more abstract works. He had clearly done these pieces for a reason. The most striking of his later works was Translucidité. You can view the picture here (http://amica.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/AMICO~1~1~96423~220818:Translucidit%C3%A9?qvq=w4s:/what/Paintings/Huile+sur+toile/;lc:AMICO~1~1&mi=30&trs=229), though the image does not capture the intense textures of the work, the violent ridges of white paint that cut into the colored portions. I loved looking at it.

As for what it means, that of course is almost entirely subjective. But I saw it as a painting trying to struggle out from behind a white cloud of unknowing – a cloud that not only obscured whatever was back there, but twisted it as well, so that only the slightest hint of the “original” painting could be glimpsed.

As such, it struck me as a moving metaphor for what life is often like: for the ideas we can’t quite express, the relationships we don’t quite understand, the ambitions we can’t quite realize. As Christians, we may believe in Absolute Truth. But that hardly means we know that Truth absolutely, nor that we can adequately express what we do know. Is this postmodernism? I don’t think so, since it was the apostle Paul himself who said that in this present age we see through a glass dimly. Borduas helps us to at least see that truth clearly, and beautifully.

Miracle Baby: the Wonder of the Incarnation

By John Jefferson Davis
Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics

My wife Robin and I just returned recently from Washington, DC and a visit to get acquainted with our new grandson, Isaiah John Tobin, born November 14, 2009, weighing 7 lbs. 14 oz. ( and, coincidentally, Isaiah 7:14: “…. God with us”). Holding my new grandson as a proud grandfather (my third grandchild), I was so thankful to God for the birth of this beautiful new healthy child, and reflected on the amazing process of human embryonic development in the womb and live birth – things that we can easily take for granted because they seem so “normal”. The Old Testament Isaiah spoke about the birth of a “miracle baby” (Is.7:14), but there is something well-nigh miraculous about the formation and birth of any human baby, when seen in the light of modern science and embryology.

In his fascinating book The Hidden Face of God: Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth, Gerald Schroeder reminds us that a normal adult human body contains 75 trillion cells, and all 75 trillion were grown from and encoded genetically in a single fertilized egg cell in our mother’s womb. One cell divides to become two … four … eight …. sixteen … thirty-two …. sixty-four … and so on, all the way to 75 trillion cells – and these cells must appear at the right time, in the right order, in the right spatial configuration, so that brain cells do not appear in our toes or fingernail cells in our liver, and so on. There are 3.5 billion base pairs to specify the human genome in each cell, and this genetic “script” is packed into a space in the cell nucleus that measures only 1/1000 of an inch in diameter – an amazing feat of divinely designed “nanotechnology.”

Each time one of our cells divides, the amount of genetic information that has to be copied without error is like a person xeroxing ten 400 page books per minute for ten hours - and this from the time of conception until we die. As one biologist observed, the process of human embryological development staggers the imagination: the human embryo is like a machine that can not only build itself, but has the “intelligence” to be able to make a copy of itself as well.

At this Christmas season, when we again remember the “Word made flesh” (John 1:14), we can again in all humility reflect on the miracle of the Incarnation: the Author of the genetic code became a zygote, then an embryo, and finally, a 75 trillion-celled human being – himself living through, for our benefit, the amazing process that he himself had designed. Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift: Joy to the world … the Incarnate Lord has come!