Okay, if anyone is actually turning to this it may be because you recently received a note that mentioned I was going to blow the dust of this blog -- and do my best to keep the dust off it (if you are reading this you are automatically granted permission to lovingly nag me about sticking with it!).
By the way, the pic is Jenny and Kasey together with cousins Brady and Riley for the first time in four years -- on Grandma Gray's birthday, no less!
I figured I may as well start with one of the biggest "Wham!" and then "Wow!" mornings I have had in a long time. It came from my ongoing struggle to "get" the original Bible languages into me more deeply. I was in what Paul had written to some of the original followers of Jesus in the bustling city of Philippi. More than at any time in my life, I have been seeing that Paul's repeated use of the pronoun "you" and the verb forms he chose are plural.
The individual implications are immense and the potential collective result transforms almost everything I hear Paul saying and it has brought the letter to life as an impassioned plea for true unity and genuine community!
One instance in particular led to that "Wham!" and "Wow!" morning.
It came from chapter 4, verse 4 of Philippians. It is one of "those" verses that had made me squirm for as long as I can remember: "Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say: Rejoice!" Early in my spiritual journey I was taught that writers back then would repeat words or phrases as their way of underlining, highlighting or putting them in big fonts -- to try to drive a point home. Through that one line (and a bunch of other things he wrote) I have always seen how seriously Paul took this whole matter of "rejoicing" for followers of Jesus.
But for the first several years that I tried to follow Jesus, the word "always" gnawed at me. Rejoice always? C'mon, Paul -- be realistic. At least be honest -- or give me the freedom to be. Are you saying I am supposed to fake a smile and give a cliché Christian, "I'm doing great; praise the Lord!" when something is really eating me up inside and the last thing I feel like doing is rejoicing?
So I did a little digging (not enough apparently, but I'll get to that), hoping that my embryonic grasp of the original Bible language would show that it really wasn't a command, the way it appears to be in English. Well, it was (and is) a command. My "inner gnawing" got worse -- although I tried to ignore it for the next couple of years. Whenever I came across the verse (unfortunately it seemed to come up a lot in church) I tried to slip past it as quickly as I could.
Then one day a little light went on. Note that: a little light. There was still more to come but not for a few more years. I heard a message where the Pastor explained that "rejoice" didn't mean "to dance a jig; to paste on a fake smile; to grit my teeth and try to will myrself to overcome how I really feel." He said it meant, "To return to the source of your joy." I heard him say that even when I could relate to "Alexander" and was having my own version of a "Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day" I could at least be real with and honest about it -- as long as I took it to "the source of my joy." I had been following Jesus long enough at that point to know that he was "The Source." So the command was to go to him with "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly."
That helped. A lot. Until a couple of years ago. I began to notice that something about it still wasn't sitting right. I couldn't really build an argument against it theologically but the practical truth was, there were times when God was the last one I wanted to turn to. My battle with myself continued: "C'mon dude, that is why it is a command. Sometimes you gotta just suck it up and do it." And I tried; with varying degrees of "success." Still, the "drag myself there" approach sometimes left me feeling anything but joyful. (I learned to appease myself by telling myself that at least I may have been scoring points for obedience.)
Then came my "Wham/Wow!" morning last week. One teacher who had made his way onto my cheapo MP3 player was exploring the verse and hinted at something I had never heard or thought of before. It is just the kind of nugget/thought that I love so I pushed everything else aside and started digging into it with renewed passion. I began looking at that pesky word "rejoice" in a bunch of commentaries and dictionaries of the original language.
I didn't find a lot -- but I did find enough to trigger the "wham/wow!"
Yes, it is written as a command.
Yes, it does mean (at least in large part) to turn to The Source of joy (the God).
But the "you" it was addressed to wasn't singular; it was plural.
That means it wasn't addressed just to me; it was addressed to us.
The more I let that bounce around in my head and my heart I began to see that it has potential to be one of the most solid arguments in favor of true unity and genuine community in the whole Bible!
The command is for "us" collectively -- and we are to come together and to be together in pursuit of The Source of joy.
If there is a command in it for me personally it is to pursue being an active, honest, genuine part of an "us." God never intended me to try to return to the Source of my joy as a Lone Ranger -- at least not over the long haul. There will always be times when I am drawn there on my own...but I am not to set up a one-man tent there for very long and if anything of any value comes out of it, I am to pass it on. Which I am trying to do here.
This should be really obvious but at least based on personal experience it seems as though some (many?) of us twist a key part of it: The repeated plea (command?) for unity and community does not endorse corporate and/or long-simmering griping/whining. That is never part of God's design for true unity and genuine community. It is a call to intentionally seek and nurture "a place" where I can go and be real...knowing that I am going to find people (or at least one person) who is at a different spot in the journey and can lovingly (which at times includes firmly) point toward The Source -- even if I choose not to step that way right then.
"Rejoice in the Lord always" is not a personal guilt trip to "get my act together."
It is a call to active,
engaged
ongoing connection
with others
who want to live in pursuit of
The Source.
The individual implications are immense and the potential collective result transforms almost everything I hear Paul saying and it has brought the letter to life as an impassioned plea for true unity and genuine community!
One instance in particular led to that "Wham!" and "Wow!" morning.
It came from chapter 4, verse 4 of Philippians. It is one of "those" verses that had made me squirm for as long as I can remember: "Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say: Rejoice!" Early in my spiritual journey I was taught that writers back then would repeat words or phrases as their way of underlining, highlighting or putting them in big fonts -- to try to drive a point home. Through that one line (and a bunch of other things he wrote) I have always seen how seriously Paul took this whole matter of "rejoicing" for followers of Jesus.
But for the first several years that I tried to follow Jesus, the word "always" gnawed at me. Rejoice always? C'mon, Paul -- be realistic. At least be honest -- or give me the freedom to be. Are you saying I am supposed to fake a smile and give a cliché Christian, "I'm doing great; praise the Lord!" when something is really eating me up inside and the last thing I feel like doing is rejoicing?
So I did a little digging (not enough apparently, but I'll get to that), hoping that my embryonic grasp of the original Bible language would show that it really wasn't a command, the way it appears to be in English. Well, it was (and is) a command. My "inner gnawing" got worse -- although I tried to ignore it for the next couple of years. Whenever I came across the verse (unfortunately it seemed to come up a lot in church) I tried to slip past it as quickly as I could.
Then one day a little light went on. Note that: a little light. There was still more to come but not for a few more years. I heard a message where the Pastor explained that "rejoice" didn't mean "to dance a jig; to paste on a fake smile; to grit my teeth and try to will myrself to overcome how I really feel." He said it meant, "To return to the source of your joy." I heard him say that even when I could relate to "Alexander" and was having my own version of a "Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day" I could at least be real with and honest about it -- as long as I took it to "the source of my joy." I had been following Jesus long enough at that point to know that he was "The Source." So the command was to go to him with "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly."
That helped. A lot. Until a couple of years ago. I began to notice that something about it still wasn't sitting right. I couldn't really build an argument against it theologically but the practical truth was, there were times when God was the last one I wanted to turn to. My battle with myself continued: "C'mon dude, that is why it is a command. Sometimes you gotta just suck it up and do it." And I tried; with varying degrees of "success." Still, the "drag myself there" approach sometimes left me feeling anything but joyful. (I learned to appease myself by telling myself that at least I may have been scoring points for obedience.)
Then came my "Wham/Wow!" morning last week. One teacher who had made his way onto my cheapo MP3 player was exploring the verse and hinted at something I had never heard or thought of before. It is just the kind of nugget/thought that I love so I pushed everything else aside and started digging into it with renewed passion. I began looking at that pesky word "rejoice" in a bunch of commentaries and dictionaries of the original language.
I didn't find a lot -- but I did find enough to trigger the "wham/wow!"
Yes, it is written as a command.
Yes, it does mean (at least in large part) to turn to The Source of joy (the God).
But the "you" it was addressed to wasn't singular; it was plural.
That means it wasn't addressed just to me; it was addressed to us.
The more I let that bounce around in my head and my heart I began to see that it has potential to be one of the most solid arguments in favor of true unity and genuine community in the whole Bible!
The command is for "us" collectively -- and we are to come together and to be together in pursuit of The Source of joy.
If there is a command in it for me personally it is to pursue being an active, honest, genuine part of an "us." God never intended me to try to return to the Source of my joy as a Lone Ranger -- at least not over the long haul. There will always be times when I am drawn there on my own...but I am not to set up a one-man tent there for very long and if anything of any value comes out of it, I am to pass it on. Which I am trying to do here.
This should be really obvious but at least based on personal experience it seems as though some (many?) of us twist a key part of it: The repeated plea (command?) for unity and community does not endorse corporate and/or long-simmering griping/whining. That is never part of God's design for true unity and genuine community. It is a call to intentionally seek and nurture "a place" where I can go and be real...knowing that I am going to find people (or at least one person) who is at a different spot in the journey and can lovingly (which at times includes firmly) point toward The Source -- even if I choose not to step that way right then.
"Rejoice in the Lord always" is not a personal guilt trip to "get my act together."
It is a call to active,
engaged
ongoing connection
with others
who want to live in pursuit of
The Source.
