Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, #BlackLivesMatter, and Being a White Man

I've gotta be honest about a few things regarding the police shooting African American men in Louisiana and Minnesota in the past two days:

1. I don't know that I should even be posting this...its really fresh for me. Part of me thinks that as a white Christ-following man that I just need to be quiet and "mourn with those who mourn." I have too often gone to Facebook or social media and said things before trying to empathize.

2. I am a white man. I can't imagine being an African American man and having to even consider that this nonsense is even a possibility. I can't imagine being a parent of an African American male and having to teach my son how to "safely" drive the speed limit and follow the laws or walk through a neighborhood and interact with police while having not broken the law. Not one scenario in this country exists where the current situation for African American men will ever be my situation. So I am not saying "I get it" or "That's my story too" -- it isn't and never will be. 

3. While I am a white man wrestling with whether or not to say anything, I feel I do have to say something: This has to stop. My heart is breaking for our country, our people, our broken-down system of "justice." I don't know what is the fix...broadly on a systematic level or even locally (where I am thankful for our chief of police, Ken Miller, and the bridges he is seeking to build)... 


4. In the scriptures, when something was broken and only God could intervene, the people put on sackcloth and dumped ashes on their head and just sat in silence and mourned and prayed. Today ought to be a day of intense mourning and crying out to God over what is broken. Just silence. (I accept that some will scream "Hypocrite!" for me writing that and throwing my voice into the conversation by calling for silence.)


5. Please, white friends, let's be careful not to soap box or grandstand and offer stupid statements that we tend to make about peripheral issues or comments that somehow "justify" the shootings. Just be quiet and pray and mourn. I'll make it simple; these should be our "talking points" this week: "I am sorry." "I don't understand." "This grieves God as much as it grieves us; it grieves him more." "I love you." "You better know I have your back" (or however you want to say that). 


6. Please do not offer to pray for someone if you aren't going to pray for them. In fact, where we'd offer an "I'll pray for you," please be bold and exchange that for a "Can I please pray for you right now?" You may think, How would I even know what to say? Ask them and then pray for what they share. And beyond that, just talk to God and bless him for all people and agree that he hates violence. 


7. Remember our common humanity. This isn't a white and brown issue or a cops versus citizens issue. This is the fruit of living in a broken world with an Enemy who wants to destroy people and drag their souls to hell. Find common ground. No kid should have to grow up without a dad because he was shot at a traffic stop. No wife should have to bury her husband so senselessly and tragically. No parent should have to bury their child. These are things we all agree on because these are emotions we feel as humans -- not just as white people or African Americans or whatever other race or gender or sexual preference or age or religion or whatever other label we like to slap on people to create some sense of "us" and "them." Let's build bridges of empathy rooted in our common humanity.


8. To my African American neighbors, friends, church members, brothers in ministry, and brothers and sisters in Christ, today know that I am so sorry -- profoundly sorry beyond words. Know that I know that I don't understand. I do believe that these all-too-common situations grieve our loving God. Please, please, please don't lose hope. With gracious and generous hearts, please allow white people like me, with all our sins and ignorance and inability to say the right things all the time, into your grief and teach us how to mourn with you and hope with you. Show us where and how we can serve and honor and have your back... And, finally, know that I love you.

Father's Day for Men without Fathers

Father's Day is a toughie for guys who didn't grow up in homes with a dad. I get it. My dad split when I was four. That was probably for the best as my only recollections of him living in our house are sad and unworthy of even being described in detail. The next 30 years of my life, our relationship would best be described as a rocky emotional roller-coaster ride. We had this awkward dance of me wanting to know my dad closely, him wanting to know me, him trying to figure out what that looked like as a man who never knew his own dad, him trying to have relationships while wrestling with demons of alcoholism and maybe even some self-hate, me probably coming on too strong while trying to hide pain and even misunderstanding, and both of us pulling away for seasons to hurt and to avoid being hurt. 

Father's Days were miserable. The unspoken pain between us was always the elephant in the room. So I always called and he always graciously answered. I'd usually mail a card that was shallow and ended with a punchline rather than tell a lie and buy a card that overstated or misstated our relationship. I couldn't figure out ways to honor my dad well and love him for who he was.

In saying all of that, I'm not trying to play the victim, and I am not trying to make a demon or a saint out of my dad. The past is past and has been a great teacher. My dad was a byproduct of not knowing his own dad; in fact, he was a great dad considering he had no real examples to follow and had been gripped by some demons of addictions long before he and my mom ever had children. Much of my jacked up thinking about my dad was my own inability to process things and carrying over and hanging on to in adulthood the thought patterns of a child rather than learning to think and feel like an adult.

So why do I write all of this? If my story is similar to yours in any way -- and especially if yours is still a story in process -- can I share some words of hope with you as one who, in many ways, has closed a chapter of my life with the passing of my dad in January 2014?

First off, if you had little or no relationship with your father, celebrate and honor the men in your life who acted like fathers. I assume you had and still have some men who showed you how a man ought to believe, live, love, and conduct himself in this life. For me, some of those men were saints I read about in books and longed to know but chose to learn from their example: Jim Elliot, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Billy Graham, and others. Others were men I knew and respected and even asked to lead me or teach me or pour into me: my grandfather, Onus Sanders; my pastors, Joe McDaniel and Denny Brinkman and others; Dennis Nix; Doug Nix; and my father-in-law, Warren Naylor and brother-in-law, Greg Jacobs. Great men who gave me nuggets of wisdom about being a dad, husband, godly man, servant, and leader -- some of them without ever realizing the impact they were having. I guarantee you had men in your life who play a similar role. And if you bear the scars of a broken or absent relationship with a dad, you will find a continued need for these men in your life. As a word of wisdom learned the hard way: Its not the job of these men to be your dad; its their role and privilege, if they choose to accept it, to be a coach and an example. Being our dad is not a job they signed up for or could ever fill.

Second, people always told me that God will be a Father to the fatherless. That made zero sense to me. I wanted God to be my Dad, but I couldn't have recognized a healthy relationship with a dad if it were handed to me on a silver platter. Here is what I have come to learn though: The best dads in this life only present a poor metaphor of the love of God. Further, we are fully loved by God the Father in Christ, signed and sealed with the Holy Spirit. This fierce, steady, relentless love is the love that sets us free. And when we experience that love well, we find that all other lesser loves can't fulfill in the same way. When we realize we are fully loved by God and our cups are full, we are free from the need to be loved. And then we find ourselves able to love and be loved without it saying anything about our worth or the worth of the other person, including our dads. God truly is the perfect Father, and knowing that freed me to love and be loved by my dad with no agenda. 

Third, if your dad is living and you are a follower of Jesus, honor your dad this Father's Day and every day in an authentic way. Refuse to talk bad about him or even to let evil thoughts about him take up residence in your heart or mind. Don't deny or minimize the past; don't sugarcoat the present; but don't forget the future. Just as we are thankful that we are a work in progress, let's remember that our dads are too. I am thankful that what God begins in a life, he always sees through to the end.

With that in mind, finally, remember that God always gets the last word. Six months before he died of a massive heart attack, my dad had this intuition that his days were drawing to a close. He put away alcohol, became sweeter with my stepmom again, began to genuinely mend broken relationships, started attending church and pursuing Jesus, happily put sin to death, and -- four hours before he died -- confessed Christ as his Savior. I can tell you that the goodness of the grace of God became more brilliant when compared to the sadness of the tragedy of human sin. Just like we can't experience Easter Sunday without Good Friday, we can't experience restoration without brokenness, a scar of testimony without a wound of pain. 

Don't give up hope. I hope for you that your relationship with your dad will become whole. I hope for your dad that he will come to Christ, become open to relationship, walk in intimacy with you. Just as much, I hope for you. I hope that you will know healing, peace, acceptance in the love of God (whether you ever experience the full love of your dad or not). Its never too late. God always gets the last word. 

And that, my friends, leads me to the last thing I will say: The greatest lesson my dad ever taught me was his last lesson... That grace wins and Jesus saves -- not because we are good but because he is good. "Happy Father's Day."  

Red Letter Revolution: Jesus on Freedom

Freedom. Just seeing it typed out puts two types of images in my mind that I think our culture associates with the word.

First, we have the whole William Wallace shouting for freedom while dying to gain independence for Scotland. Whether we identify with Wallace or not, this freedom from tyranny has its poster children through the centuries: the American founding fathers, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the young revolutionaries in China or Eastern Europe near the end of the 1980s as the Cold War was drawing to a close.

Second, however, we have the "freedom" that is on display narrowly at events like Woodstock in the 1960s and broadly in movements like the sexual revolution, the expanding casual drug culture, and thugs using social events to loot and create cultural chaos. This "freedom" is seen in old video footage from the 1960s -- casting off the idyllic and perhaps two-dimensional culture of the 1950s seen in the Cleavers and other television couples sleeping in two beds while making corny jokes to obvious laugh tracks. Its also seen in videos of chaotic spring break excursions, "Free the Weed" rallies, and in looting and rioting in the background as CNN reports about the aftermath of the latest senseless police shooting in Anytown, USA where such nonsense sadly occurs.

Freedom. Free to be and do something? Or free from something? Jesus talked about freedom. And Jesus was quite the revolutionary. So I believe that as we talk about freedom we ought to consider Jesus' words about freedom and the way he lived his life, beckoning people to a life of freedom in him.

In John 8, Jesus is talking with critics and doubters and makes this statement:

31 “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free...34 Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. 35 The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. 36 So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed."

Jesus says that freedom comes from knowing him, abiding in his word, and enjoying the freedom that he provides. So as Paul wrote in his letter to the churches in the region of Galatia, "It is for freedom that Christ has set you free; stand firm, therefore, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery" (Galatians 5:1). Freedom isn't being able to do whatever we want; freedom is knowing that we are governed by one who loves us, has our best interests at heart, would do anything to protect us, and wants us to live as free men and women. And our gracious God, because of Jesus, is that one.

Great governments, though all inherently flawed, are mere reflections of the idea of freedom that God offers us in Christ. Great families, though no family is "perfect," live in a freedom that can only come from knowing and abiding in Jesus. Great work places, where the employees are valued and business is done with integrity, operate best when the principle of freedom is modeled like the freedom Christians have in Christ.

So we are not free from authority, expectations, responsibilities. Not at all. Jesus is no "Buddy Christ" because he knows that "freedom from" any type of authority is death. Freedom from is actually anarchy. Its is saying, "I am responsible to no one and am the master of my own fate." A Christian can never say this and then tack on "...because of Jesus." Quite the opposite. The Christian is compelled to trust, surrender, and obey. The Christian is mastered by Jesus but then finds that Jesus is not seeking to be a master but a Friend and a Brother who has our best interests at heart and died to save us from the destruction that an anarchistic spirituality would bring us.

We are free in Jesus but not free to be or do whatever we want. We are free in Jesus from sin, condemnation, slavery, the wealth of awful emotions and consequences that come from unbridled rebellion, a certain and deserved eternity in Hell. We are free, but its not the kind of freedom that gets cheaply peddled around by those who want to live like practical atheists while tipping the cap to a weak Jesus of our own imagination.

The offer of freedom from Jesus in the Gospels was never a call to just believe and do nothing. The call to freedom involved leaving a life of sin for the adulterous woman, selling all he had for the rich young man, renouncing cheap religion for the woman at the well, leaving family for the man who wanted to bury his father, and stepping out of the boat and all that made sense for Peter in order to walk on the waves in freedom.

Jesus calls us to freedom. But please, don't mistake what that freedom really is...and don't underestimate what that freedom cost. A high price was paid for our salvation, and a high calling to live and believe and obey in trust ought to be our response. That's a revolution and never a casting off of restraint.

Red Letter Revolution: Jesus on Conflict and Reconciliation

For the past few weeks at Origins, we've been walking through a series called "Red Letter Revolution," modeled after the book by the same title by Shane Claiborne and Anthony Campolo. While Red Letter Revolution deals primarily with political and social issues, we've tried to narrow the conversation and deal with ground-level, day-to-day issues like marriage and divorce, parenting, loving other Christians, anger, judging, and more. And each week, we've examined only what Jesus, in the red letters, has to say on a given issue without watering down, jazzing up, adding to, or explaining away those teachings. This blog will be a second platform, this month, for sharing thoughts on some of the topics and teachings we won't get to in our Sunday Gatherings.

So concerning Jesus and conflict and reconciliation...

My family doesn't do conflict well. We probably never have. Growing up we believed that you grinned when offended and then either just got over it or shared your frustration with others, running the offender down behind his back, while never dealing with it. Our conflict style was represented well in The Big Bang Theory episode, "The Mommy Observation." While Sheldon Cooper is talking heatedly with his very Christian mom (who checks all the boxes for culture's stereotypes of evangelicals from Texas) about her sexual relationship with a friend, they're figuring out how to proceed in relationship, leading to this exchange:

Sheldon: Well, this is confusing for me. But I don’t want to stand in the way of your happiness. So, I’ll condemn you internally while maintaining an outward appearance of acceptance.  

Mrs Cooper: That is very Christian of you. 

We took it a step further, usually condemning you to others. Like Sheldon, we were "very Christian." Surely, we reasoned, Jesus wouldn't want us to fight out our differences. Or does he? In Matthew 18:15-20 talks about how his followers ought to "do" conflict with one another.

15 “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother.16 But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. 17 If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.18 Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. 19 Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. 20 For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.”

That passage doesn't describe my comfort zone when it comes to conflict. My conflict style is one dangerously bad approach to handling broken relationships. I'd rather smile and bite the bullet, blame myself, swallow it, and move on. I "take one for the team." We endanger two people, however, when we choose this path -- the offender and ourselves. We endanger the offender because he walks away while a wrong goes unpunished. We endanger ourselves because sin is poison, and in swallowing another's sin and leaving it unresolved, we are absorbing poison. More on that in a moment.

A second bad approach to handling broken relationships between Christians involves speaking too much, or being too easily offended. Jesus says, "If your brother sins against you..." We must be careful to distinguish between sin and being inconvenienced or having our preferences disregarded. Sin is missing the mark against God, as it relates to worshiping him and living with one another in this world; inconvenience and being disregarded or disrespected are missing the mark against us. Sin is wronging the Lord; inconvenience and being disregarded or disrespected involve another wronging us. This bad approach chooses to nitpick and always be looking for a "tough conversation" where something forgettable and seemingly insignificant has to be addressed, dealt with, and resolved. When sin is clearly not the case, we need to grow thicker skin, forgive as we have been forgiven, and remember that we are not the ones who occupy the throne of the universe. 

So how do we do conflict, according to Jesus? 

• Decide if we have been sinned against by our brother or sister. Examine the situation and decide whether, intentionally or unintentionally, the offender has wronged God by wronging us. If you're not sure, go to Scripture and check your situation against what God calls sin. If the answer is no, we should ask the Holy Spirit to help us let it go, move on, and love as God has loved us in Christ.
• If we have been sinned against, without swallowing it and without telling another soul, we are to go to the offending brother or sister and let him or her know what has occurred. We don't need to build a coalition, and we don't need an ally to go with us. We just go. And we share honestly. If, like me, this feels unnatural, soak that situation in prayer and ask God's Spirit to fill you up before you go and address it.
• In the moment of confrontation, we state clearly what has happened. State. It. Clearly. "I want you to know I love you and care about you but you sinned against me when you _____, and I want us to make things right." After all, we are family; Jesus is talking about a brother (or sister) who sins against us. Don't minimize. Don't shoulder the blame that's not yours to shoulder. Don't be unclear. Mincing words only ushers in confusion rather than the healing that comes from repentance after feeling the sting of sin's effects.

Hopefully, this is Game Over. They repent. We forgive. We hug. Restoration occurs. We have "gained our brother" because in going through the awkwardness of biblical conflict we watch restoration occur between another person and God and between ourselves as family in Christ. 

But in the event that the person is defiant about sin or denies, negates, or further minimizes the hurt, Jesus gives us Step B in the process. 

• Take one or two others with you. Be careful who you invite into the process. Don't welcome into this holy moment of potential healing one who is divisive, rejoices in wrong, or has an axe to grind. Bring holy healers, followers of Jesus who love the Gospel so much that they want to see it embodied in the way we relate to each other. Bring a person who will pray during the conflict more than cheer for you.
• For the second time, we state clearly what has happened. State. It. Clearly. "I want you to know I love you and care about you but you sinned against me when you _____, and I want us to make things right." Continuing, "In fact, I brought _____ and _____ because I didn't get the impression last time that you understood the gravity of what's at stake here." Repeat: Don't minimize. Don't shoulder the blame that's not yours to shoulder. Don't be unclear. Don't mince words. 

Hopefully, this is now Game Over. Repentance. Forgiveness. Hugging. Restoration. We pray that in the presence of the one offended and a couple of others, healing occurs. 

But in the event that the person still refuses to change, to turn from sin to Christ, Jesus gives us Step C in the process. Steps A, B, and C would be what Jesus calls "church discipline." Sadly, however, many mistakenly think of church discipline as Step C. Further and even more tragically, many churches historically have moved too quickly to Step C without trying Steps A and B or after "attempting" Steps A and B in an unbiblical way. Its sheep pushing wandering sheep over the cliff rather than inviting back into the flock, into the Good Shepherd's protection.

Step C is like a funeral. In telling the church of sin and an unrepentant Christ-follower, the church grieves but surrenders the offender to the Lord, having attempted to do all they can to turn the believer back to Christ. In surrendering that person to the Lord and treating him or her as "a Gentile and a tax collector," we are acknowledging that God loves him or her, that God will have to draw him or her in love through conviction of sin, that we have done all we can, and that he or she is living and believing as one who is a "they." Ultimately the unrepentant believer has little in common with the church. Which demands that, as the church, we are walking in love and in step with the Spirit. Otherwise, our call to repent and surrendering the offender over to God has no "teeth."

We rarely do conflict and reconciliation God's way. Its easier and more justifying to do it our way. Character assassination and lobbing grenades from a distance are less messy than going one-on-one to the one who who sins against us. Yet conflict that honors Christ occurs this way.

So in a red-letter revolution, I want to vow to Christ to live differently. And I want to ask you to do so as well. Our lives and relationships would be so much less cluttered if we kept healthy accounts of loving, encouraging, praying for, challenging, serving, and blessing one another rather than constantly over-drafting and bankrupting relationships by doing conflict in a way that is displeasing to Jesus.