Day 136: Being of One Mind

"Finally, all of you be of one mind, having compassion for one another; love as brothers, be tenderhearted, be courteous."  1 Peter 3:8

Don't we need more of this today?

We live where we emphasize the self much more than the community.  We emphasize getting our way before we start thinking about everybody around us.  But that's not what we're called to by God.  Instead, we are called to build up communities.  We are called to live with love.

The interesting thing about the above command is that it implies that love is the way to be of one mind.  Things would be so much easier these days if everybody were with one mind.  One does not need to look far to understand what a privilege it is to have people of one mind.  Aside from a family (which itself might be divided), there are political parties that are doing just that - parting people.  In a party, people will side with one another in a concerted effort to demonize the 'other'.  That's not what we're called to do.

The good thing about this command is that it already gives us instructions on how to go about being of one mind.  We need to have compassion for one another.  We need to love as sisters and brothers.  We need to be tenderhearted.  We need to be courteous.  In other words, we need to be nice people.  That's it!  Just be nice to one another.  We have learned how to be nice to one another as children.  In fact, it is as we grew up that we started to learn about all the exceptions.  Be nice only to people who have the same color of skin as you do.  Be nice only to the people who like things exactly as you do.  Be nice only to those you find attractive.

Instead, we need to erase all those exceptions from our minds and start to unite as one community of love.  It doesn't take much effort.  We can pray and meditate and look through the bible for answers to questions that we feign, but the only way we'll accomplish this is if we actually do.  Do be nice to everyone.  Do love everyone as you did when you were a child.

Day 121: Building up with Love

"nor will they say, 'See here!' or 'See there!'  For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you."  Luke 17:21

If there isn't any other reason to come together as one church, this is the one.

Jesus says this in response to the Pharisees, who were people who did a pretty good job at isolating themselves from everybody else.  They considered themselves the purest of Jews, alienating the rest of the ethnically Jewish people who were in the area.  They came up with so many different interpretations of the law so that only a select group of people would be able to become true Jews.

I don't have to say much else in order to bring this same issue up to today's world.  At the highest levels, we have many bishops, pastors, and other major leaders calling for discrimination of anybody they feel should be taken out: women, the ill, any LGBT person, single parents, orphans, people of different races, non-English speakers.  If we delve even deeper into supposedly united denominations, we can see issues that break communities apart.  Even at the parish/mission/church level, there will be people who want to tear the congregations up.  The worst is that now, with the availability of social media, everybody has a platform they can stand upon to shout and make their points, bringing out their own poison and breeding weeds among the wheat fields.  They will all spread their hate with the same conclusion: See here! This is how the Kingdom of God will be, once we clean it up.

But that's not what Jesus preached.  Jesus made the image plain and simple: the kingdom of God is within you (or y'all, the Greek is plural).  I'm sure we all know what happens whenever teams break up, or when people decide to go their own way, deviating from a great team project - failure.  When we decide to take on the role of a schismatic in a community, we cannot lie that it will be a way to build up a community.  If we are going to maim the body of Christ, that's exactly what we will do.  Rather than build up the Kingdom of God by uniting all the many residents, we will be taking it apart, brick by brick, and, ultimately, execution by execution.  There will be no kingdom to speak of when we finish up our goal of dividing people up.

We are called to learn how to live with each other.  And why is that, exactly?  The Kingdom of God relies on one thing: the abundance of love.  If we do not have love, we cannot be builders of the Kingdom.  Before we start to take construction into our own hands, we have to take a moment and think, are we acting with love?  If not, then reevaluate what you're doing.  God has worked through all of our lives, showing us what the miracles of love are.  How about we start bringing love into our communities to build them up?

Day 051: Holiness

"For I am the Lord who brings you up out of the land of Egypt, to be your God.  You shall therefore be holy, for I, the Lord, am holy."  Leviticus 11:45

Over thousands of years, we have learned more ways to become holy before the Lord.  According to the Old Testament, there was a pretty quick and easy way to achieve this, although today we can look at it as being a backwards method.  Perhaps I could explain this with a parallel image from my personal experience.

Back in high school, I was approaching my unhealthiest state of being, with my years of refusal to perform any physical activity (I'd found a loophole out of it in middle school, and my high school had no physical education class) or to eat healthily.  So, starting around my second year in high school, I started to exercise regularly.  I made some great progress in terms of weight loss.  At the end of my third and final year, I finally learned how to cook, which was a skill that I worked on immensely in my freshman year in college.  During that freshman year, I began counting calories, following guidelines from my own research, and made even more leaps and bounds down the scale.  However, I was quite compulsive with my counting that it was a sort of distraction (mind you, this was in a journal I carried around everywhere).  It was annoying to have to look up every detail about different food that I would eat.  So, after a few months of doing that, I switched over to cutting carbohydrates entirely from my diet (save a cheat day once a week), and I sped down to my final weight (although somewhat far from my unhealthy goal).  In fact, I still must say that cutting carbs entirely is the easiest thing to do since I'm not responsible for portioning things out and keeping track of them.

That's how I see these food laws from the Old Testament: a quick and easy path to sanctification.  It's one thing to keep track of different fasts, prayers, goals, feasts, and traditions, which can seem to be overwhelming to almost anybody.  It's another, though, to paint things in black and white, which makes a complicated thing to be very simple.  It may sound rough, but still simple.

Paul, though, gives us many examples about how we can live out our faith, our holiness, in the New Covenant through Jesus Christ.  We read that we can become teachers, preachers, healers, speakers, evangelists, interpreters, and servants.  We can live a dynamic faith now.  However, that's where we know that we have a large responsibility to God.  God has given us so many ways to be holy, so what is our issue?  We turn away from God.  We need to come back to God.  We need to start taking care of ourselves, sanctifying ourselves through our talents, through our time, through our treasures.  We need to start preparing ourselves to become perfect offerings before God.  Lastly, we need to become the unified body of Christ, with all the many different parts, working for our corporal sanctification.

Day 042: Customs

"Therefore let us pursue the things which make for peace and the things by which one may edify another.  Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food.  All things indeed are pure, but it is evil for the man who eats with offense."  Romans 14:19-20

The history of the Church is quite dismal, to say the very least.  On the one hand, it has spread beyond the borders of the Holy Land to most of the earth; but on the other hand, it has seen so many fractures that we can't keep track of all the different traditions and factions.  There are some that claim to have heritage all the way to the first days of the apostolic church, denouncing all other traditions as simple heresies.  But, in reality, all of our denominations can be traced back to the apostolic church.

Of course, this dispute can be taken to the secular world as well, where we are constantly afraid of those who speak a different language, or those who are a different color, or those who wear different clothes.  But even this secular worldly fear breaks into our churches as well, for such a denial or dismissal of the others is a way that we destroy the work of God.

God is the only one who has constantly been bringing all of creation together.  God called people to join in the family by living holy lives.  God sent Jesus to unite people with a common message of faith and love.  But our taking of the reigns has been our downfall.

So much of the Church's history is riddled with grudges, some held for over a thousand years.  But we are called to turn away from all of that.  We are called to unity.  Unity is something that we can achieve only if we put aside our prejudices and start trying to learn more about and understand the others around us.

During this Lent, we should remember to reach out to the world around us, so that many more can understand our relationship with God.  We also should go out of our way to learn about new traditions.  There are many denominations that observe Lent, and there are some which are observing it starting next month.  There is so much we can learn around us, and that brings up the central point of our faith: that Jesus is revealing himself to us in so many different ways.  If we learn to accept that Jesus is not reserved for just one kind of person, we can learn so much more about Jesus and strengthen our relationship with him.

Day 029: Discerning Speech

"Righteous lips cover hatred, but those who bring forth abuse are very lacking in discernment." Proverbs 10:19

Probably one of the most talked about images or issues in the entire bible is the mouth.  We use it to speak and communicate in a way that most people who speak our same language can understand.  But our words, though on the surface they are just utterances of sound, can bring forth different meanings.  Some of the meanings are mundane, like, "I'm going to the store," or, "The dog barked."  Some of the meanings are provocative, some in the good way, and others in the bad way.

In my personal reading of this proverb from the Septuagint, I understand the second half as reading, "but those who bring forth abuse are senseless" or "are without direction".  Taking all of these for the interpretation of one word, though, can help me understand what is going on in the proverb.

Hate is something that is so easy for us to do, for we can point the finger so quickly when something doesn't go our way.  Think about how easily children say the phrase, "I hate ...".  When we grow up, we become conditioned so that we either say that phrase in a hyperbolic way, or we reserve the phrase for very choice occasions, when we truly have hatred towards something or someone (or, we want to think of it as being in that way).

Hatred separates us from those we hate.  We isolate ourselves by saying that we hate others.  And, when we start saying that we hate every single thing around us, we start to put ourselves into a little box, where we lack direction, where we can't accomplish anything.  When we hate someone, sometimes we just like to go to our little corner and burn with anger against that one person.  We waste our time we could be using to learn or to communicate to think about how much we hate that person.

So what does it mean, then, to cover hatred?  I like to think that this proverb is another way of saying, "think before you speak."  When we can take some time to think about what we are going to say, about what we hate, we can start to consider not only the consequences of our accusations, but also the other qualities in that person.  We can also start to make it a moment to learn more about our sincerest beliefs and about why they exclude that person.  Why does that guy want the room to be red while I cannot have it any other color than blue?  Why does that woman say that there is no church without the liturgy while I enjoy an altar call instead?

The moments where we are tempted by hatred are ones where God is trying to speak to us.  These are challenges of our own faith.  God is trying to help us understand how to be better missionaries, so that we can continue to spread the gospel, both abroad and in our own hearts.  When we have the opportunity to discern whether to bless or to condemn, we have the opportunity to hear God speak to us in a difficult situation.

Day 015: The Good News

Jesus answered and said to them, "Go and tell John the things which you hear and see. The blind see and the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear; the dead are raised up and the poor have the gospel preached to them.  And blessed is he who is not offended because of Me."  Matthew 10:5-6

When Jesus was carrying out his ministry, there were many people who were wondering what was going on.  People wanted guidance, and Jesus reassured them in this way.

Each time I read this, I hear Jesus speaking in a way that is very excited but poignant at the same time.  It's intense.  He raises his hands as he's listing out what's going on.  He's saying that so much is changing.  And that's a good thing.

Any reading through the gospels reveals that there were many outcasts in Jewish society.  If one wants to read more about that, just go to Leviticus to read about how many more people are supposed to be put off to the side in order to sustain the early Jewish society.  The blind and lame were just that, sitting off to the sides.  The lepers were people you wouldn't look at, because your parents told you that their sins brought them there.  The deaf were people who served no purpose.  The dead were eternal, and the poor didn't deserve the gospel.

Jesus came into the world in order to bring together all of the outcasts!  Jesus came to overthrow all the corruption that society had condoned, and Jesus came to bring wisdom and discernment to everybody.  Jesus is here to change all of our lives, and blessed are we who are not offended because of him.

Blessed are we who are not offended because: the poor can have houses; the sick have doctors and healthcare; those who look different aren't ostracized; God's mercy extends to everybody, even those we don't like; our prejudices are proven wrong; God's love reaches to the heavens and God's faithfulness stretches to the skies; God's love extends to all colors, races, sexual orientations, genders, gender expressions; God calls all the faithful.

Jesus made us think in ways that are still difficult for us to comprehend, but he understands that and is willing to work with us, to change us, and bring us closer, so that we may all walk together, in the same direction, hand in hand, with one accord, in the Spirit.

Family

"Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!" (Luke 13:34)
This shows how Jesus knew that though Jerusalem was a major city for the Jews, it still faced quite a few problems.  It is almost like an elaboration on another statement that a prophet is rejected in his own home.
But Jesus is speaking to us.  Imagine, God is in this world, uniting people and gathering them together in a great unity, but we are going after God and making God's job difficult.  We start to reject those that God sends us.  We turn our backs when people point out what we need to work on.  This is a place where we know that we should be listening to others more and helping others out.  We need to be uniting everybody instead of pushing them away.  We must face everybody with love rather than hate; friendship rather than enmity.

The Gospel Centered Life

"But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ." (Ephesians 4:15)
Here's the simple message from Paul, this time, which calls us to love.  The only way we can grow into Christ is through love.  It's simple because the only way we learn anything is through careful practice.  As a musician, I feel like I know this all too well.  For starters, one must practice so much to be good. However, mindlessly spending hours on things only makes a habit, as opposed to perfection.  My teacher always says that I must focus whenever I practice.  Therefore, playing through the things I'm good at only reinforces the things I'm good at, and, consequently, makes everything else glaringly bad.  However, when I focus on a certain issue for a given amount of time, I make my playing all the better.  In the same way, the only way we can make our lives closer to the Gospel is by living in love.  However, we cannot just practice loving those we already love or those who already love us back.  We must practice loving those who may not be easy to love.  We must love those who have hurt us.  We must love those who preach against us.  We must love those who don't understand us.  By practicing what Jesus already did and what God teaches us daily, we will live a truly gospel centered life.

United We Stand

"Every kingdom divided against itself becomes a desert, and house falls on house." (Luke 11:17)
This is a universal ideal that we need to embrace.  When we divide ourselves against each other, we become weaker.  Indeed, we still bear our family names.  When we say certain people of the LGBT community are not for us, we make ourselves smaller, weaker, more vulnerable.  We need to unite with one another.  We need to accept the diversity of our family.  We need to accept each other's personality.  We need to unite in the love of God.  God will deliver us. We need to be ready for God's coming.

The Few

Today, the gospel is a little peculiar, for it sounds as if Jesus judges people based off of their clothing.  Sure, maybe not everybody has the best clothes to win a contest at every dinner party he attends.  However, Jesus gives us a good hint: Many are called, but few are chosen (Matthew 22:14).
Look at us today.  Many men and women have given up their lives so that we, the LGBT community, may have rights, and that we may walk, and that we may hold hands.  Many are working today in all facets of society, from government lobbyists, to priests, to soup kitchen workers, to teachers, and everybody in between.  Yet, we still go about and curse our neighbors.  We go out of our way to discriminate and divide our family.  We say, "bears over there, and queens over here; femmes here, twinks there."  How many of our LGBT martyrs have called on us to be united? How many of them have died for our cause?  Did they want us to hate ourselves as much as, supposedly, everybody else hates us already?  Did they want us to hurt each other?  Did they want us to separate ourselves into a niche where only the rich, the modelesque, and the outspoken can be?
All of our great LGBT figures have set up a banquet for us.  They have cooked us the bread of brother/sisterhood.  They have set for us a tablecloth of values.  They have given us seats of rights.  They have poured out the wine of joy.  And, yet, we go in and trash the table.  We tear the cloth.  We spit on the bread.  We spill the wine.
In the same way, God calls us to love.  God gave us Jesus, and God gives Him to us as a grand feast.  Do we welcome Him with the best that we have?