About two weeks ago, about one hundred World Race alumni descended upon AIM headquarters in Gainesville, GA for a reunion, teaching, and coaching to help us take our next steps into Kingdom living. It was a blast.
To bring the Kingdom of Heaven into the realm of academia through teaching applied mathematics at the university level. God has given me a mind for mathematics and heart for community, discipleship and organic church.
So what's next for Scott?
So what's important to you? How do you judge future opportunities? At searchlight they suggested these four criteria:
A chance to make a difference
Community
Discipleship
Personalized Growth Track
So based on those criteria and what I've felt God speaking, I'm moving this weekend to live with Steve Benson and his family in Westminster, CO. I'm moving there to establish instate residency for graduate school at Colorado University at Boulder. I hope to start pursuing a PhD in applied mathematics in August of 2013.
Today is the last day of the world race. Tomorrow afternoon we'll begin the process of returning home. For me that involves 4 plane rides and a night in LA. I wrote this blog while in Australia, but I think today is a suitable day to post it.
The Bible is full of sojourners, wanderers, and adventurers. Most of them giving up everything they had built up simply because they had an encounter with God. Most are only briefly mentioned. Matthew 2:1-12 briefly tells the story of the three magi. The magi bring themselves and their own assumptions on an incredible journey. Church history suggests that they traveled for two to three years before finally reaching the answer to their questions.
Answers found in a toddler (most scholars agree that the magi didn't show up until Jesus was 2-3 years old). The magi allowed their questions found in their secular occupations and foreign gods to bring them on a perilous journey from the east. These questions based in the stars lead them to a land with a strange tongue, a foreign culture and a crazed king bent on destroying the very thing they were seeking. This journey brought them across deserts and probably over the Himalayan mountains. They were probably raided and attacked, hungry and lost.
Compared to the magi most of us prefer our words and ideas, we are afraid of any authentically new experience. Unlike the Magi, we do not allow the stars to divert us to a new place and away from our comfort. We would rather stay in our private castles and avoid such questionable adventures. Yes, we avoid certain danger and supposed death, but we also avoid birth. We miss out on the great epiphany.
God is constantly calling us to encounter Him. To live with greater intimacy and greater dependence on God, He'll often lead us on paths that take us places of perceived risk and discomfort. If you had told me that I would be sitting here in Malaysia writing a blog at the end of this journey about 18 months ago, I would have laughed at you. I was too steeped in my religion and content with my plans to consider such a journey.
‘All this was a long time ago, I remember, And I would do it again, but set down This set down This: were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death, We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.' - from T. S. Eliot's The Journey of the Magi
Over the last 11 months we have journeyed around the world. We've left our private castles and stopped digging in our heels. And because of our own cycles of encountering the Greatest of Epiphanies, we've changed drastically. We are no longer content to live in the pale, little world created by ignorance, apathy and noise. Knowledge without an encounter becomes stale religion. An encounter without knowledge becomes hedonism. But knowledge and an epiphany becomes transformation. And we have been radically transformed.
"What they had done, what they had seen, heard, felt, feared - the places, the sounds, the colors, the cold, the darkness, the emptiness, the bleakness, the beauty. 'Til they died, this stream of memory would set them apart, if imperceptibly to anyone but themselves, from everyone else. For they had crossed the mountains... "
-- Adapted from Bernard DeVoto, The Course of Empire (1952)
The reality is that we cannot return to the way things were. Despite many of us shortly returning to the same environment we left, it is no longer home. We have all been radically initiated into the upside-down Kingdom. Much like the Magi returning home isn't possible, but who would want to?
We've been in Darwin for three days and it's our first Sunday night church service in our Aboriginal community. We arrive around three hours early some of us can setup the community pavilion while the others drive the cars around to pick up the people.
I busy myself with dragging out all of the various sound equipment from the shed. As I search through three large boxes of cables, I notice an aboriginal man as he stumbles around the corner of the pavilion in my direction. I attempt not to make eye contact, I've got things to do.
A dirty palm is stuck in my face, "my name is Howard." Uh. Why is it always me? I stand up from my tangle of cables and grab his extended hand. Howard looks and smells like he hasn't bathed in weeks. His grizzled beard and hair are filled with dirty and food. He reeks of alcohol. I look Howard in the eyes and notice that they are tainted yellow, an affect of a life of alcoholism. "I like to play bass..." he murmurs and stumbles off towards another world racer. "Well, I'm glad that's over, poor guy." I think to myself. One of our contacts mentions that they let him play the bass guitar when he's almost sober.
About thirty minutes later and Howard finds the bass guitar. With a thud the bass falls to the concrete as Howard opens the case upside down. "Bass guitar, I like to play bass" he exclaims. Before I walk over to confront him, Howard manages to find a cable and jam it into the wrong hole of an amp.
Before I can finish my sentence, Howard changes from a slow and drunk to enraged and violent. I quickly place the bass back into case and take the case to the shed, hoping for his apparent rage to simmer down. No luck there. Howard has changed. The stumbling of a drunk has turned to clenched fists and a straight walk. "Come here boy, I want to talk to you, I want to f***ing talk to you," he growled. I immediately begin to look for one of the other 10 T-squad men, but they're out cleaning shards of glass from a sand pit at a play ground (a common occurrence in bagot).
The only other authority figure in the area is our should-be-retired-but-isn't-because-she's-incredible contact Isobel. I manage to convince him (drunks are very suggestible) to go tell Isobele instead of attempting to drag me behind the shed. Isobele somehow manages to step between the two of us. Only issue is she's about 2' shorter then I am, so her barricade is more of a kiddy fence. Despite our attempts at reasoning, Howard is still very drunk, still very angry and still swearing like a sailor. Eventually, something else snapped and the angry demon inside of him decided to start throwing punches through Isobel at me. The good thing was that my face was so far above Isobel that she was out of the way even though she was standing directly between Howard and myself.
I dodge the first, and block the second, all the while attempting to decide if I should just put this drunk, demonic aboriginal on his ass. After a few more profane words, Howard throws another punch and manages to connect with my left temple and my glasses fly. But I am completely at peace. The weight of a full future month of ministry and the very words of Christ weigh on my heart. It's evident that it is not Howard that is swearing and throwing hooks at me. In a moment it becomes obvious that this simply a poor attempt by our enemy to disrupt our ministry and our night.
This circus has gathered the response of my team-mates so Howard is separated and sent home still swearing and stumbling.
Howard doesn't show up to any of our meetings for two weeks. The night he returned, he returned a different man. His decaying beard had been shaved and the stench of alcohol was gone. Vinny speaks that night about the chains of alcoholism and drugs that are so common in the aboriginal culture. And right there in the front row of lawn chairs is Howard yelling confirmations of "amen" and "hallelujah." At the end of the night he approaches me and says "God bless you brother." He is completely oblivious to what had happened two weeks prior. Completely oblivious to the chain and addictions that hold him back.
This is but a small story of the spiritual reality of the Bagot Community of Darwin, Australia. Please join me in continued prayer for our incredible contacts David and Isobel as they serve with relentless hearts. Pray for breakthrough and a generation of aboriginal leaders.
It quickly becomes apparent that the style of Jesus' teaching is exactly opposite of modern televangelism or even the mainline church approach of "Dear Abby" or "Focus on the Family." These forms of teaching conjure up inspiring advice and workable solutions for daily living. Jesus is too much of a Jewish prophet to merely stabilize the status quo by promising cute euphemisms of stability and success. He is much more interested in destabilizing the false assumptions on which an entire world view is built.
In general, we can see that Jesus' style is almost exactly the opposite of modern televangelism or even the mainline church approach of "Dear Abby" bits of inspiring advice and workable solutions for daily living. Jesus is too much the Jewish prophet to merely stabilize the status quo by platitudes or euphemisms. He much more destabilizes the false assumptions on which the entire question or one's world view is built. Jesus knows that his hearers will soon return to the dominant consciousness totally unprepared to deal with their own inner conflicts or the critique of others. The unspoken assumptions are embedded in every aspect of the culture, and the message will quickly evaporate as impossible or irrelevant. This is the normal pattern, in my experience. The shelf life of a sermon is about twenty minutes.
C.S. Lewis addresses this very issue in his essay on Christian Apologetics in God in the Dock. He says, "We can make people attend to the Christian point of view for half an hour or so, but the moment they have gone away from our lecture or laid down our article, they are plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted. As long as that situation exists, widespread success is simply impossible". This is the final anemia of any religion based primarily on sermons rather than relationships or lifestyle.
Instead, Jesus asks questions, good questions, unnerving questions, re-aligning questions, transforming questions. He leads us into liminal, and therefore transformative space, much more than taking us into any moral high ground of immediate certitude or ego superiority. He subverts up front the cultural or theological assumptions that we are eventually going to have to face anyway. He leaves us betwixt and between, where God and grace can get at us, and where we are not at all in control. It probably does not work for a large majority of people, at least in my experience. They merely ignore you or fight you. Maybe this is why we have paid so little attention to Jesus questions and emphasized instead his seeming answers. They give us more a feeling of success and closure. We made of Jesus a systematic theologian, who walked around teaching dogmas, instead of a peripatetic and engaging transformer of the soul. Easy answers instead of hard questions allow us to try to change others instead of allowing God to change us. At least, I know that is true in my life.
Jesus always reminds us that "God alone is good" (Mark 10:18) and we had best not try to concoct our own goodness by providing ourselves with pat or immediate answers about great and intentionally unanswerable questions. Thus he merely lists the memorized commandments to a young inquiring man, while cleverly and compassionately slipping in "Do not defraud" second to the last. He does not really answer his self-reassuring question about "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" but instead quietly reveals the likely sin of this rich young man. Jesus knows how he got rich, and that is why he dares to tell him that he must give it all away. This would-be "13th disciple" cannot bear the ego humiliation of this revelation. "His face fell and he went away" (Mark 10:22). He wanted to think of himself as good instead of rejoicing in the goodness of God. That is the problem with any religion based primarily on morality and satisfying answers, instead of questions. As a result, he missed the primary call, the moment of sheer relationship, the ultimate questioning of the soul--when "Jesus looked steadily at him and loved him". No where else is there such a line in the whole New Testament.
The rich young man wanted satisfying answers instead of an answering person, and as a result, he got neither. He wanted his question answered to reassure himself that he was in the in-crowd of the saved. Jesus told him personally--on the spot-- that he was, but he did not have the freedom to hear any questions but his own.
I should give credit to Richard Rohr for the majority of the thoughts behind these two posts.
For the majority of my life I have sought to answer questions. I have been a proud member of a broken society and religious piety that seeks to systematically divide and conquer the brokeness of our world and our own egos into a system of bullet points. I have been taught to organize every part of my life, disregarding the reality of the entropy of our world (some would say the effects of the fall). I've become better at this then most. Because of years of analytical training, my mind constantly searches for the most efficient path. At times I feel like a child shakily building a tower of loose jenga blocks, oblivious to the ultimate reality that everything (physical and metaphysical) falls apart in the end. Everything of this world (except for pure mathematics) contains an element of entropy.
One of the things I've learned over the last few months is that in the realm of soul and spirit there are not as many answers to these questions as there as answering persons. Despite my tendency to allow my assumptions and ego to build an answer that allows for closure, it's an inadequate solution. The truth is that these questions should not drive us to a theology or religion but to one, vital relationship. The ego's desire for the instant gratification of an immediate solution almost always allows a person to settle for a falsehood rather than remain on a journey for an ultimately equally dissatisfying truth. Jesus keeps us on that journey.
If you where to do a study of the life of Christ contained in the Gospels, you would find that Jesus directly answered 3 of the 183 questions asked of him. (I'll let you find these three!) To a Christian who has grown up in a religion that is entirely defined by answering questions, this is startling. We have been raised believing that the very purpose of religion is to give answers to questions and to resolve dilemmas. This is apparently not the way that Jesus saw the new Kingdom that he was establishing because He operates in a completely different manner. Jesus either keeps silent as with Pilate (John 19:9), returns with another question as with the coin of Caesar (Matthew 22:19), or gives an illustration, as with the Good Samaritan story (Luke 10:30).
At other times he puts the question back inside the frame of reference of the inquirer, as if to make them critique it. He does so with the rich young man: "You know the commandments" (Mark 10:19). Sometimes he can only weep, sigh, or lament because of the seeming ill-will or hostility represented in the question, as when the Pharisees ask for a sign from him (Mark 8:12). Here he out-rightly refuses to respond. He has painfully learned, no doubt, that any attempt to interact with an entrenched position of resentment or ego-fortified suspicion will normally only be used to dig the trench deeper and further fortify the argument. Many times silence, quiet prayer and genuine love for the opponent are the only answers, even though you will be judged harshly in the moment and by any observers. It must have taken immense humility and groundedness on his part.
If we can understand this basic dynamic, perhaps we can see what Jesus is doing in asking his own questions instead. Jesus' questions are to re-position you, make you own your unconscious biases, break you out of your dualistic mind, challenge your image of God or the world, or present new creative possibilities. He himself does not usually wait for or expect specific answers. He hopes to call forth an answering person. He wants to be in relationship with a person, with the idea as it informs the person, and with the process of transformation itself. Thus his questions are worth examining because they, along with the parables, reveal his basic style of encounter with the soul, or what we would call today, his style of "evangelization".
Before I post anything else, I want to share a story with you. This is the story of one of the girls we worked with in Cambodia. You can find the original article here: (here).
Srey Gohn is only 19 years old. She comes from the northwest of Cambodia. Before she was even born her parents separated and divorced. Both of them later took new spouses and abandoned her at an orphanage where she lived until she was 5 years old when another Cambodian family adopted her into their home. While the home was better than an orphanage, most adopted children in Cambodia are never treated with same love and status as children born into the family. At the age of 12 the family no longer wanted Srey Gohn in their home and kicked her out to the streets.
Over the next several years Srey Gohn went to find her biological parents. First she found her mother, but she rejected Srey Gohn. Later Srey Gohn found her father and her step-mother invited her to stay with them. However, shortly after moving into their home, Srey Gohn's step-mother made arrangements for a man from the neighborhood to rape and sleep with Srey Gohn. The step-mother did not love Srey Gohn as a daughter, but saw Srey Gohn as nothing more than an opportunity to make extra money. Soon after it was found that Srey Gohn was pregnant and again the people she called family rejected her and cast her out from their home.
Throughout her pregnancy Srey Gohn was homeless. Just to get by she would wash dishes and clean laundry by hand in exchange for food. However, sometimes she could only get enough food for a few meager meals only 4 or 5 days a week. Soon after giving birth to a beautiful baby girl in the local hospital, Srey Gohn, was shocked when she was able meet with her grandmother. Her grandmother invited her into her home, but again it was not out of love for her granddaughter, but she saw opportunity to make money. After Srey Gohn moved into her grandmother's home, her own grandmother took the newborn baby girl and sold her to another family.
With great passion and love for her child, Srey Gohn went to the home of this family where she stole back her own child and fled to another city to hide from her own family and those who had tried to purchase her baby. Here she endured for 8 more months, being homeless and washing dishes and doing laundry by hand for other families in exchange for food. In early December, Srey Gohn decided that she needed to find a better job to support herself and her baby. She decided she would try to go to Phnom Penh, the capital city, where she hoped she would find work. By chance she met a family who were driving an empty vehicle down to Phnom Penh, however, the family only took her as far as Kampong Chhnang and the family just left her on the street with her baby.
In all this tragedy and suffering in Srey Gohn's some might wonder where is God's grace in all this? However, in Kampong Chhnang a good Samaritan picked her up. A friendly motorcycle taxi driver found her and brought her to the staff of TransformAsia's New Developments Center who immediately brought her in to the center. The staffquickly called Randa Lee to ask what to do and she told them to keep her there and take care of her. For the first time in her life, Srey Gohn now lives somewhere that she and her baby are both safe. She doesn't need to fear someone abusing her, and she doesn't need to fear someone stealing her baby.
We had the privilege of spending our time in Cambodia with girls like Srey Gohn. More to come soon.
