Selfless Repentance?

I've been reading Dark Night of the Soul, the classic of Christian mysticism by St. John of the Cross. With my ruminations on repentance this Lent, one of John's comments stood out. At this point, he is talking about those who are what he calls "spiritual beginners" and how they (we?) become overly sad when they see themselves fall into sin. John attributes this to their thinking themselves to have been saints already. Then he adds:

"Thus they become angry and impatient with themselves, which is another imperfection. Often they beseech God, with great yearnings, that He will take from them their imperfections and faults, but they do this that they may find themselves at peace, and may not be troubled by them, rather than for God's sake; not realizing that, if He should take their imperfections from them, they would probably become prouder and more presumptuous still."

All of this sparks questions and reflections for me.

First, do I think of myself as being more saintly that I am? On one hand, I can affirm that I am already a saint in Christ. Because his holiness becomes my holiness as we are united by the Holy Spirit, I am a saint. But, on the other hand, my sanctification is far from complete. Do I, with the spiritual pride to which John of the Cross refers, think of myself as being farther along than I really am? Do I expect more holiness and less struggle with sin than I should expect at this stage?

Second, is it so bad to ask God to remove my imperfections because of a yearning for peace? I believe such a desire is God-given. It is hardwired into us. It is a desire for the peace of Shalom -- that wholeness that comes as things are as God intended. That it is good. But still, John of the Cross points to a motivation that I confess I often lack, a motivation that is deeper and more profound. Which leads to a third question...

Third, when I confess my sin... when I repent... when I yearn for God to take away my "imperfections and faults," do I do that for God's sake? If I understand John of the Cross correctly, my repentance needs to be less self-centered. The yearning to be freed and forgiven from sin should grow out of desire to love the One who first loved me. My sin is an offense to God's holiness and glory. Yet that is seldom in the forefront of my mind when I make my confessions.

I think of King David's famous confession: "Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight" (Ps. 51:4).

I'm going to have to keep ruminating on this!

Aslan Rescues Eustace from Himself

Recently, I was reminded me of the scene in The Chronicles of Narnia where Eustace recounts his encounter with Aslan, when Aslan frees him from being a dragon. His description captures the notion of repentance and transformation powerfully. Do you recall this part of the story?

“Then the lion said—but I don’t know if it spoke—‘You will have to let me undress you.’ I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it.
“The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know – if you’ve ever picked the scab off a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is fun to see it coming away.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” said Edmund.
“Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off – just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt – and there it was, lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me – I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on – and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became so perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I’d turned into a boy again."

I have to admit that I wept some as I reread that. C.S. Lewis captures the repentance, mortification and vivification, resurrection, baptismal washing, regeneration, etc. that I long for.

Lent Thoughts

At the start of Lent, I started posting on Facebook quotes on repentence that I had been reflecting on. Eventually, I started including reflections on love and grace too. As a way to save them and perhaps include fuller texts, I figure I'll post them here too.

"He who is alone with his sin is utterly alone...You are a sinner, a great, desperate sinner; now come, as the sinner you are, to God who loves you. He wants you as you are; He does not want anything from you, a sacrifice, a work; He wants you alone." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"The usual notion of what Jesus did on the cross runs something like this: people were so bad and so mean and God was so angry with them that he could not forgive them unless somebody big enough took the rap for the whole lot of them. Nothing could be further from the truth. Love, not anger, brought Jesus to the cross." - Richard Foster

"We must ask whether we have not often been deceiving ourselves with our confession of sin to God, whether we have not rather been confessing our sins to ourselves and also granting ourselves absolution. And is not the reason perhaps for our countless relapses and the feebleness of our Christian obedience to be found precisely in the fact that we are living on self-forgiveness and not a real forgiveness?" - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"Repentence always brings a man to this point: I have sinned. The surest sign that God is at work is when a man says that and means it. Anything less than this is remorse for having made blunders, the reflex action of disgust at himself." - Oswald Chambers

"Christians find it is easier to believe that God exists than that God loves them. / In human beings, love is a quality, a high-prized virtue; in God, love is His identity." - Basil Hume / Brennan Manning

"What is your only comfort, in life and in death? That I belong—body and soul, in life and in death—not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ, who at the cost of his own blood has fully paid for all my sins and has completely freed me from the dominion of the devil." - 2nd Helvetic Confession

"Batter my heart, three-personed God; for, you As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new." ~ John Donne

"Beloved, true repentance is sorrow for the sin itself: it has not only a dread of the death which is the wages of sin, but of the sin which earns the wages. If you have no repentance for the sin itself, it is in vain that you should stand and tremble because of judgment to come.” - Charles Spurgeon

And So It Ends; And So It Begins...

It's been waaaay too long since I've posted. So, in a somewhat desparate effort to keep this somewhat current, I'm reprinting here an article on our Guatemala Mission trip from the May 2008 Marine View Press. Hopefully, more will be forthcoming soon!

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Our mission team is back from Guatemala, and we are praising God for a wonderful and eventful trip. As a team, we can testify that God was faithful from beginning to end. We successfully installed over 90 stoves in homes in the remote village of Yuljobe. We gave each family we worked with a Spanish children’s Bible. We gave away over 160 bags of supplies and toys to the school children. We witnessed a contextualized movie presentation of the Prodigal Son and the preaching of the Gospel to the villagers in their native language, Q’anjob’al. We enjoyed gracious hospitality, deepened relationships with one another, and new friendships with our Guatemalan sisters and brothers in Christ. And we did it all without serious illness or injury to any team member.

Behind all of this, we are sincerely thankful for the prayers and for the physical and financial assistance we received both from Marine View and from people around the nation who responded to our support letters. We know that we could not…we did not…do it alone. Now, after months of work and anticipation, many meetings, and lots of prayer and planning, it is difficult to believe that it is over.

And yet, the mission is not completely over.

Although we were impacted in different ways and different degrees, this mission trip caused each member of the team to evaluate his or her life in light of what we experienced. For me personally, God opened my eyes to new dimensions of poverty. But it’s not what you might expect. Having been to Guatemala previously, I had already seen firsthand the impoverished conditions in which so many people live. In this regard, this year’s trip reinforced my gratitude to God for the material blessings I enjoy but frequently take for granted—it is only by God’s grace that I have received such undeserved wealth as citizen of the U.S. The new lesson in poverty actually came not as I looked at the lives of the villagers of Yuljobe, but as I looked back from their village to our lives in the States.

We are much poorer than we realize. With our material wealth we can distract ourselves and numb ourselves, but we truly live in a relationally and spiritually impoverished world. We have difficulty seeing it because we are immersed in it, but looking in from the outside it is plain to see that we are missing a lot. In Yuljobe, there is a rich, deep, and natural sense of community—they know one another, support one another, and share life with one another. Among Guatemalan believers, there is a rich, deep, and passionate love for Christ—they worship expressively, pray regularly, and speak openly about Jesus to others. I do not mean to romanticize their lives or downplay their hardships, but the rich relationships and spirituality displayed by those we encountered in Guatemala make me yearn for more of that in Tacoma.

More than once, our mission team reflected on the Scripture, “We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us” (2 Co. 5:20). In going, we sought to represent Christ to all those we met in Guatemala, sharing the love and truth of the Gospel with our words and our actions. In returning, we seek to bring to you the profound messages and lessons God impressed upon us while we were there. In a very real way, we are all now missionaries to our own homeland.

Saab Story's Happy Ending

Many have been asking what the latest is on my car. Without boring you with the details, the good news is that they were able to put humpty-dumpty back together again. I picked up the Saab last week, and am experiencing an automotive resurrection of sorts. So far, everything seems to be as good as new. The only two problems I found were a handle inside the trunk was put back on backwards and half the stereo speakers weren't working. A quick visit back to the body shop, and we're back to normal.

Unfortunately, my insurance company was never able to track to down the kid who hit me and his insurance. So, I'm very thankful for that uninsured motorist policy!

In all, I was without the car for 42 days... which is especially painful when you think that I'd only had it for 114 days before that!

Job 1:21

Guatemala Mission: Why Go?

The following is an article from the March 2008 Marine View Press, the newsletter of Marine View Presbyterian Church:

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This month a team of fifteen people will leave the comforts of home and normal routines and they will go to a rural village in Guatemala. As mission teams from Marine View have done for the last three years, this year’s group will invest considerable time, energy, and resources to help people they’ve never met who live in foreign culture in a remote and impoverished village almost 3,000 miles away. Why? Why do we go to Guatemala?

1) We Go for Theological Reasons:

We go to follow Christ. We are disciples or apprentices of Jesus who said, “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you” (Jn. 20:21 niv). If we profess that Jesus is Lord, then we must respond obediently when the Master says to go. Jesus also came not to be served but to serve, and he has given an example of humble, active love for us to follow (Mk. 10:45; Jn. 13:15). We go to Guatemala out of a desire to serve Christ by serving others in his name.

We go to show Christ. “What good is it, dear brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but don’t show it by your actions? Can that kind of faith save anyone? Suppose you see a brother or sister who has no food or clothing, and you say, “Good-bye and have a good day; stay warm and eat well”—but then you don’t give that person any food or clothing. What good does that do? So you see, faith by itself isn’t enough. Unless it produces good deeds, it is dead and useless” (Jas. 2:14 nlt). We go to Guatemala to show the love of Christ in both actions and words. We go to share what God has graciously given to us, not only material things but the spiritual truth that God is reconciling the Guatemalans to himself through Christ, not counting their sins against them. We are Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us to his beloved ones in Guatemala: “Be reconciled to God” (2 Cor. 5:19-20).

We go to know Christ. Mission is not a part-time activity of the church; it is a full-time work of God. Throughout the scriptures, we encounter a God who is on a redemptive mission in the world. Throughout the world, we may encounter a God who so loved the world that he sent his Son not to condemn but to save. We go to Guatemala to meet Jesus there among those who suffer under the weight of poverty, malnutrition, and injustice.

We go to grow in Christ. On a short-term mission trip, we see ourselves and our world in a new way. We discover the breadth of God’s love and the depth of our need. By leaving our comfort zones and all our props, we are forced to rely on God’s faithfulness and strength. When we return, we see our lives and our culture differently; we’ve been changed. We go to Guatemala so that we might become more like Christ.

2) We Go for Personal Reasons:

For some of us, we go because we want to make a difference in the world; we want to help those who are in need. For others, we go to experience a different culture; we go for the adventure. For me personally, I am going back to Guatemala because I know that there is more there that God wants me to see and experience. I recently wrote in my journal: “Going to Guatemala will once again force me from my comfort zone. I will once again be in over my head and forced to trust God. And that’s something I need to do more of. I rely too much on my own strength. I miss out on the transformative power of God often.”

3) We Go for Practical Reasons:

The need in the Yuljobe, Guatemala is very real. For centuries, indigenous Maya living in this remote area have cooked their meals using an indoor fire pit located on the house floor called a “three-stone fire.” These open-flame wood-burning fires have caused burns from the flames, respiratory illnesses from the smoke, and deforestation from the inefficient burning of the firewood.

In an effort not only to improve the health conditions and quality of life of the villagers, but also to show tangibly the love of Christ, the 15-member mission team will be working alongside Guatemalan families to install dozens of cast concrete “ONIL” stoves.

You Are Needed Too!

Marine View will be purchasing and installing 90 stoves. The cost per stove is $140.00. In addition, the HFPF staff will conduct critical follow-up with our stove installations, traveling to Yuljobe each month for a six-month period to make sure everyone has adjusted to a new way of cooking and that the units are working properly. The benefit of this effort is that HFPF has a 97% success rate with the installations.

You can participate in this mission both financially and prayerfully. First, use the donation cards found in the pew racks in the sanctuary to make a contribution toward the purchase of the stoves for Yuljobe and the team members’ expenses. Because of the increased size of this year’s project and team, we need to raise approximately $21,000. To this end, the Outreach Team will be designating funds from this year’s One Great Hour of Sharing offering toward the Guatemala mission. Second, please commit to pray regularly and specifically for the team members and the villagers they serve before, during, and after the trip. Prayer guides will be available at the Information Counter.

On behalf of Marine View’s 2008 Guatemala Mission Team, thank you for your support and partnership in ministry!

Choosing My Religion

Question of the Day: Who gets to choose your religion?

Two very different news stories this week have raised the question about who decides what religion a person might be. One I read in the Tacoma News Tribune (01-29-08)--a story about a prison chaplain who is struggling with fallout from a new regulation that allows inmates to be a part of more than one religion. Under the new rules, to select a religious preference, all an inmate has to do is fill out a form. Further, they can change their religion once every six months.

The second story involves an Egyptian man named Muhammad Hegazy, a Muslim convert to Christianity who is requesting that the Egyptian government officially change his religious affiliation. According to the ruling of an Egyptian judge, "He can believe whatever he wants in his heart, but on paper he can't convert."

So, is one's religion really just a matter of filling out the right paperwork and having it approved? And the deeper questions: Who decides what religion an individual truly is? Can a person "self-convert," or must a person be received by the religious community of which he or she seeks to become a part?

As Americans, we are heavily biased toward the individual. We have been trained by our culture to believe that the individual is the center of authority and decision-making power: I decide what to buy; I decide what I want to be when I grow up; I decide who to vote for; I decide what church to attend; I decide what is true for me. But such a perspective is somewhat unique in history.

Even looking across the history of Jesus' followers and the Church, we see that there has always been a place for the community in conversion. In the book of Acts, an individual's conversion or coming to Christ would often be attested to by others who were already a part of the early Christian community (e.g., Saul by Ananias; Cornelius by Peter; Samarians by Peter & John). In addition, acts such as baptism and the laying on of hands accompanied the individual's conversion and reception into the faith community. These acts would be formalized over the years so that becoming a Christian included not only a public confession of faith in Christ, but also a period of training or catechism and the sacrament of baptism. The value of the community is sorely missing in much of American Protestantism.

And as much as we must wrestle with the role we play and the role the community of faith plays in our choosing our religion, we must also look ultimately to God. Jesus said, "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him" (Jn. 6:44). Paul the Apostle likewise understood that it is God who chooses us long before we might choose God, writing that God chose us in Christ before the creation of the world and decided in advance to adopt us as his children (Eph. 1:3-5).

So, how do you understand your conversion? If you are a Christian, how did you get there? What did you do? What did the Christian community do? What did God do?