The Glory of God

This is my final post for this year. Thanks for all the conversation in 2011, I look forward to more in 2012 (at least until the world ends).

This picture is one of the graffiti prophet Banksy’s newest. It’s called “Shop till you drop” and they have no idea how he did it. But I sure am glad he did.

So earlier today I went to the mall with our two kids, Eden and Samuel, to do some last minute Christmas shopping. Three days before Christmas, and I was there without Leslie and two kids under the age of 4. We were a train wreck. It’s in moments like this that you realize just how much you need your spouse.

I forgot to bring diapers, bibs, water cups, strollers, basically every single thing that human children need, I forgot. It got so bad that at one point, we were at lunch at the mall Pizza place, and I overheard the woman sitting at the table next to us say, “And that’s why I will never have children.”

I’m not kidding.

There are so many levels of irony about the way we celebrate the Christmas story. God gives up everything to be among us, and we have made greed synonymous with celebrating his sacrifice. God comes in subtle unassuming ways, and we have all but turned Christmas into one big Macy’s day parade.

Now I’m all for Christmas parades and lights and celebrations, and I actually think that Christmas can help form the people of God in ways that help us learn how, and what, to celebrate. But it is possible in the middle of all the glitter to lose sight of exactly what Christmas reveals about God. READ MORE

The Tears of Christmas

It’s been one of those weeks. The kind that come along every now and then in life, where creation seems to be screaming more than groaning.

This week, a child with Leukemia who we’ve prayed and fasted for, has taken a turn for the worse. A friend and co-worker at Highland just had his mother pass away, and for reasons that I am not ready to go into today, Leslie and I spent a good part of this week in a hospital room, grieving our own personal stuff. It’s was just us and the sounds of an occasional intercom and much waiting.

As a pastor, I’ve spent a lot of times in Hospitals, and a few of those times it was due to something personal, sometimes those are great joys and sometimes they are not. This time was not.

I’ve referenced over the past couple of weeks that USA Today said that, on some level, a fourth of Americans battle with depression around Christmas time. It’s when our American expectations for a happy life are amped up and we find the discrepancy between the ideal and the real. So we think about lost dreams and hopes, what our lives could have been, and then we look in the mirror and realize what they have become.

Or maybe it’s for more than that. Maybe this is the first (or fifteenth) Christmas without her. And that inside joke that you always shared together, just isn’t possible any longer. And that table that you’ve shared for a lifetime of celebrations now has an empty chair.

On the front cover of a National newspaper a couple of weeks ago, there was a letter to Santa written by a 10 year old boy. But this letter wasn’t for the latest PSP games, or a new bike. It was for his dad to get a job. The article went on to say that this year more than any other there will be present-less families because there are job-less parents.

I was talking with someone a few days ago about some of the personal stuff that I am going through right now, and as I talked I had this profound realization that perhaps this isn’t actually that bad of timing. If the Jesus story is true, than Christmas is actually the best time to suffer. Sure it might be more difficult because all of the lights and smiles seem to ignore your pain. But the one who we are actually celebrating is the one who knows what Christmas means the best.

God enters the mess. READ MORE

Treasuring in the Heart

Last week was a tough one at Highland, we had several reports of people contracting or losing battles with cancer. There were heart disease and car accidents and all at what is supposed to be for many, the most joyful time of the year. Yesterday I heard the news that one of my favorite women at Highland had passed away after a quick battle in the Hospital. After talking to her husband, I had the same thought that I have almost every time I hear that death has claimed someone else that loved and lived well. Death, no matter how natural the causes, is always unnatural.

On the Christmas tree in the Storment living room, we have your standard ornaments of Candy Canes and Glass bulbs, Ceramic ginger-bread and half-tangled Christmas lights. But the ornament that means the most to me each year is the Scottie Pippen collectible Christmas ornament. But in order to understand that one, you have to know something else first.

When I was growing up in Benton Arkansas, Richard lived a few houses down the street from me. He was home schooled, we played everyday together, were on the same teams, participated in the same extra-curricular activities, and basically lived the same lives. Richard was closer than a brother to me. When he went to the hospital for Juvenile Diabetes in his early teens, I went to visit him everyday.

Every year after Christmas presents were opened, I always made the same phone call. It was to Richard, we would compare the loot that we brought in from Jesus’ birthday. And the house we would play at for the rest of the week depended on who wound up getting the better haul. When I would come home from college, or later from Richland Hills for the Christmas Holiday, Richard and I would always hang out. It always felt like we never missed a beat.  READ MORE

Here With Us

So if you are in Abilene, please share this post with your friends before this coming Sunday, December 4th. Highland is hosting a Christmas Celebration at the Paramount Theater at 7 PM for free. It will have instrumental and a cappella moments of worship, bluegrass, slam poetry, preaching and more.

Brandon Scott Thomas has done a great job of getting together some of the most talented people at Highland and Abilene to bless the community. The goal is for Highland to give classic Christian moments back to the community. We want as many people (especially those who are not connected to a church)  to be blessed by the Christmas season as possible. So with that in mind…Here’s a bit of a preview.

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In  Tijuana, Mexico is  one of the worst prisons in the world. It’s filled with some of Mexico’s most notorious and violent criminals. These men have murdered, raped and beaten people in their lives, but when Mother Antonio comes around they melt. They are known to reach through the bars shouting for her to please come visit them today. To the guards and warden they are some of them most violent and dangerous men alive, but when Mother Antonio comes around they turn into family.

Mother Antonio wasn’t always a Catholic nun, in another lifetime she was a Beverly Hills Socialite. She had seven children and she had been twice divorced. A John 4 moment if you ever saw one, It wasn’t until her children was grown that she decided that her calling was to go into prison ministry…and that’s exactly what she did. When her last child moved away for school, Mary Clarke changed into the Catholic nun Mother Antonio and moved to Tijuana, and the rest is history.  READ MORE

Red Ocean, Blue Ocean

So this past week David McQueen, the senior pastor at Beltway Baptist and I, swapped pulpits for one Sunday. I preached at Beltway, and he preached at Highland. It was a great experience for me, Beltway is a Kingdom oriented church, and I was so glad that David (someone who grew up in Churches of Christ, but hadn’t preached in one for decades) was able to bless the people at Highland.

The very next day, Ben Siburt (the Executive Minster at Highland) and I went on a pastors retreat for churches in the area, where we prayed, worshipped and dreamed together for the city of Abilene. And then we all took communion together.

At one point during breaking bread together, one of the pastors stood up and confessed that he had been jealous of another pastor’s success. For years, he had looked at this church across town with envy, he had wanted not just to have what this other pastor had, but he also didn’t want him to have it. He had wanted to build his own little parody of a kingdom, have everyone look at how successful he was, but that was not the lot he was given in life. So he envied.

And all the other ministers squirmed in their seats. Because the dark side of ministry is that all of us can feel like this.

But then the minister went onto say, but God has been working on my heart the past few months, and I’ve realized something. When this other minister succeeds, I succeed. When his church grows so does mine. Because there is only one church.

And this is at the heart of what it means to be a Kingdom church. Kingdom of God language is common in churches, it sounds great, it’s inspiring and taps into the deep recesses of our souls about belonging to something larger than ourselves. But underneath a lot of our language is a little talked about fact, that’s not very Kingdom oriented. Churches compete with one another.  READ MORE

Below the Line

So this will be my last post on my time in Hollywood, thanks for putting up with me taking a detour from normal blog stuff to write about this. If you missed some of them I wrote about it  here,  here, here and here, besides the past two weeks of posts.

After a few hours of being on the set of Good Christian Belles for a few hours, I had come to grips with the reality of what was going on, I was sitting in the holding area and day-dreaming about worst-case scenarios And that’s when Allison spoke up. She had heard that I was a preacher and was intrigued by the fact that I was doing this…particularly this show. Allison had been married before, to a Jewish man She had grown up, and was living in the Bible Belt- and when she married she was vilified by Christian people who she had  grown up with. They saw her marriage as a mixed marriage, and instead of engaging her they kept her at arm length, even telling her from a distance that her marriage was offensive to God.

Allison made the point that the show that we were filming was pretty close to home for her. She had been wounded by Church, and Church people.

She made the point that when she thought about Christians, she automatically thought about the American Families Values Association, the very association that had boycotted the show we were working on. Then she said, “I don’t know a lot about organized religion anymore, but I just want you to know I think it’s cool that you are here doing this.”

Matt Maxwell is a guy who grew up at Highland (the church I work at) and now he works in Hollywood behind the camera. He and his wife love Jesus, are plugged into a community of faith, and view their work as both creative expressions of who God made them to be, and as missionaries. Here’s an email he sent me last week that I asked to share with you:

“This question of where we–as Christians– should work and use our talents is a constant conversation and struggle with me and many here in the entertainment industry. So many worry, wonder and ask about that one line that if we cross we no longer represent our Lord and our faith. But this conversation has always rubbed me wrong because the underlying problem is not how the world might perceive us Christians but how our Christian world and friends might perceive us and, in my eyes, this is a mistake.

I had a conversation with a dear friend several months ago who shared his resentment about working in post-production on the new, and now canceled, Playboy Club. He was considering talking to his superiors about moving to another show. I understood exactly where he was coming from but I kept thinking about all the lives he wouldn’t be able to touch.
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