11.03.05 NEXT WEEK AT IKON 11.7.05: EVOLUTION REVOLUTION

Evolve.  Revolt.  Beginning next Tuesday at IKON, 8PM, @ The People’s Church in Franklin, TN.  Check out IKONCOMMUNITY.COM for directions.  We’ll be discussing who we are and why we’re here in this series.  See you there:

11.02.05 BREAKING THE RULES

I never show pictures of my kids to the “world” because 1)other people never think your kids are as interesting and adorable and worth talking about as you do and 2)I don’t want people talking to them about me in public like preachers’ kids - I might be known to some folks but there’s no reason those ten people should be pestering my kids for autographs too right?  But I’m making an exception.

I’m sharing because 1)my kids are the cutest most interesting kids in the whole world and are therefore probably an exception to the above rule #1 and 2)because so many people from my past and hometown have suddenly discovered this blog and reconnected with me (due to Kyle’s death) who’ve never seen my kids and might not even know that I’ve reproduced at all. 

Here are my kids on Halloween: Jasmine, a dalmatian, and Santa Claus.  That’s right, Santa Claus.  He wanted to go as Santa Claus dressed up as Spiderman but we talked him into having only one alter ego this year.  Perplexed people just a little bit to have the young before-he-stopped-shaving-hit-the-donuts-and-let-himself-go Santa Claus standing at their door on Halloween.  Folks gave him extra candy just out of sympathy for his confusion I think. Confused or just brilliant?  At the very least, interesting and adorable right?

10.30.05 REMEMBERING KYLE LAKE

(Picured: UBC Lead Pastor Kyle Lake, UBC Community Pastor Ben Dudley, Lead Worshipper David Crowder celebrating UBC’s tenth anniversary recently)

University Baptist Church in Waco, Texas lost a pastor and friend today.  Kyle Lake, father of three, died this morning baptizing in UBC’s morning service, welcoming people into the Kingdom of Heaven.  Seems appropriate to me.  My greatest memory of Kyle was him teaching me how to tell others about Jesus.  He couldn’t have been more than nineteen and I was just a couple years younger, in the youth group of FIrst Baptist Church in Tyler, Texas where we both grew up.  His enthusiasm for talking about Jesus and his knowledge of scripture inspired me.  I’d never seen anyone so close to me in years so far ahead spiritually, so brave and wise.  We younger kids worshiped Kyle, the good looking soccer player everyone wanted to be, standing before us not to draw attention to himself - though there was plenty to admire - but to focus our desires on Christ.  He pointed us in the right direction, a life of building Heaven on earth, and then left town headed in that direction himself, eventually pastoring University Baptist Church in Waco.

He leaves behind an amazing Mother and Father who showered Kyle and his brothers and sister with love and sound teaching and made him the man he became.  He leaves behind a wife willing to put up with a pastoring husband and his congregation and the demands it must have made on them both, willing to sacrifice for the purpose Kyle and she were made for.  He leaves behind three small children who will no doubt remember their father as a playmate, corrector, protector and teacher and will hopefully be told the stories of his life lived well for the rest of their lives.  He leaves behind a congregation of students who, if they listened and watched closely and imitated well, are closer to the image and walk of Christ for having their lives crossing paths with Kyle’s.  He leaves behind many friends and fellow ministers in the emergent church movement who should now do their best to love and learn and communicate and serve as well as Kyle did.

We know today that Kyle is seeing God clearly now, face to face, his view unobstructed by the haze of this life.  He’s missing none of us.  He’s lacking nothing.  His days are infinite and his heart whole.  His tears gone.  His hope realized.  His company is a crowd that will only grow with time, a multitude of men and women lead to citizenship in Heaven by his words and laughter, random stories and worshipful listening, prayers and preaching of thirty-three years spent well.

We’ll miss Kyle.  He’ll leave a hole in many lives.  So we mourn that death exists, robs, surprises and perplexes.  We mourn children without a father and a wife who’ll sleep alone, parents who couldn’t have imagined they’d bury a child.

We believe God though.  We know that His plan has always included Kyle’s death and that it plays a key role, somehow, in bringing fame to Himself, bringing the image of God into greater focus and putting our lives under examination in light of our mortality. God is up to something.  Always.  And He is keeping His promise to Kyle tonight, the promise of an eternal home, a lasting peace, a crown to lay at the feet of Jesus, a place to worship and delve deeper into the vast knowledge and love of Jesus.  So we celebrate.  This is not the end of Kyle’s life, merely a transition to life at it’s fullest, without boundaries and body and cares and fears.  Kyle is home.

And I’m reminded, losing a friend I’d lost touch with and never got to know as much I wanted to, not to waste people and minutes and skills.  I’m seeing life more clearly tonight, in light of mortality, reawakened to eternal perspective.  The things I fear seem smaller, the people I aim to please seem less worthy of pleasing, and the time seems short and weighty, purposed from sunup to sundown.  The bedtime ritual went by more slowly this evening, in technicolor, slow motion, every sentence prayed by tiny lips reveled in, every stroke of small hands across my beard filled with contentment and comfort.  I hugged and kissed my wife harder, longer, noticing how she smells and talks and feels.  Staring her in the eyes, telling her more often than usual what she means to me and how much better life is with her for me, not with cliches but with new words that on any other day she’d laugh off as cheesy or strange but today they mean more to both of us.  Hundreds of names have filled my head, people I need to talk to, calls I need to make, needs I need to meet and prayers that will be prayed.  The first prayer is that the newness of life that this taste of death has brought many of us will last longer than the funeral flowers, that we’ll live fearlessly and focussed - that we will live like Kyle seemed to years ago teaching me about Jesus and teaching me how to introduce others to Him.

10.28.05 CIVIC RELIGION

“There have been times when Christians have made effective use of the rhetoric of American civil religion to advance goals deeply rooted in the Gospel.  However, civic religion is just as likely to lead Americans into thinking of the United States as the biblical city on the hill (which it is not), to equate American values with Christian virtues (which they are not), and to see loyalty to the American Republic as obedience to God’s kingdom (when in fact these loyalties can and sometimes do conflict).”

~H. Jefferson Powell, Professor of Law and Divinity, Duke University

Originally posted by Jason Jenkins (Duke Divinity student/comedy genius, picture inset)) here.  Parenthetical comments are Professor Powell’s.

10.28.05 UNDERNEATH JACK AND JILL

Charlie Peacock plunges beneath the surface of “Jack and Jill” in his book NEW WAY TO BE HUMAN and sees things under the obvious that most of us wouldn’t:

“What if ‘Jack and Jill’ is about

1. the partnership of male and female in the day-to-day needs of life?
2. the admission of human need (water), and how, in this world, meeting needs is often very difficult, dangerous work?
3. the topography of life where there are hills and valleys, and sometimes you climb a hill just to fall back down again?
4. the fact that human actions with the best of intentions for the purest of needs can still end in tragedy?
5. the ineptitude of men, and how they drag women down with them? (Just kidding, I think.)

What if ‘Jack and Jill’ is about all this (and more), and it is about two people traveling to get water and having an accident?”

ANd this has me thinking.  What if the tales on the evening news - wars, robberies, dogs up for adoption, city council meetings - have a layer of meaning I’m not seeing as well?  What if under the every day dramas and muted minutia tell us something about each other, life together, who we are and what we want and need and we’re just not seeing it, not reading deeply enough, not squinting hard enough at what’s underneath it all?  What if?

And I’m wondering as I read Charlie’s words again with you about how it is that some (like Charlie Peacock and English teachers in general) are able to see the layers of meaning in familiar words and experiences that many of the rest of us just don’t even catch a hint of.  How is it that Jack and Jill’s fumbling antics on an imaginary hillside can communicate so many somethings other than the obvious to one person and be nothing but a child’s rhyme to the masses?  How do we, you and I, get under the skin of everyday conversations, songs, books, people and experiences to see the bones and muscles of meaning underneath?  Is that even worth doing?