A photographer, who is a Christian, reached out for help. “I have several gay friends, and they keep telling me, ‘When I get engaged/married, I’m definitely having you shoot the photos.’ While I’m honored by their compliments and love them dearly, I’m conflicted about whether or not I can, as a Christian, participate in their weddings as the photographer.” When her friends ask her to shoot their wedding, what should she do?

A Christian college student at a state university wants to join a fraternity, but they have a reputation as a party house. He thinks he can be a witness for Christ in the house, but there is a lot of drinking and drug-use that goes on there. When they ask him to join the house, what should he do?

These are complicated questions that require serious reflection. One of the most common responses I’ve seen to these types of questions goes like this: “Jesus ate with sinners, so you should [shoot the wedding/join the frat/go to the party].” But is it really as simple as that? What, after all, did it mean for Jesus to eat with sinners? And why was it such a big deal?

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What does God look like in slow motion? Does the thunderbolt in his hand meet halfway between the earth and sky, like real lightning? Does the furrow of his angry brow seem extra intimidating in super slo-mo? In fact, God in slow motion is Jesus in real life, and according to author Mike Nappa, there are ten “unexpected lessons” we can learn from his life.

These ten unexpected lessons take the form of apparent contradictions – oxymoronic chapter titles that capture the inverted nature of what we think God looks like and how he actually appears. Mischievous Glory is how Nappa describes the birth of Jesus, which is the first, and perhaps most profound, chapter of the book. Nappa argues that the way in which God chose to enter the world upends all of our expectations of what glory truly is. We see, in the nature of the Incarnation, that Glory = Humility. 

Taking ten stories from Jesus’s life and ministry, Nappa paints a picture of God that is both surprising and comforting. God is, after all, like Jesus, and not like the angry gods of our imaginations. To see God in Jesus is to see God in slow motion, viewing each frame of God’s activity with full clarity and in sharp focus. Jesus makes God clear, though that doesn’t mean the oxymoronic lessons make any more sense to our imperfect, rightside-up (or is that upside-down?) minds.

Nappa’s book reads like a series of sermons about Jesus, and would be useful for new or younger believers that are just getting to know what God is like. It could also be a tremendous help for those who have grown up with a false understanding of God, particularly one that painted a picture of God as a loveless, joyless, graceless deity ready to dole out punishment at the first opportunity.

BookSneeze® provided me with a complimentary copy of this book.

 

Facebook does this “Year in Review” thing now, which is pretty cool. I tend to forget about some of the things that I post on Facebook, so it was nice to stumble upon a couple of thoughts that I put up there. These were too long to tweet, apparently, but I must have wanted to get them out before I lost them. They are reflections on how the kingdom looks in the world:

God’s kingdom does not come through political or social activism, nor through “standing up for what’s right,” but only and always through his people embodying the crucifixion and resurrection by laying down their lives, setting aside their rights, forgiving sins, and breathing life where there was death.

I’m not exactly sure what inspired these thoughts, but I think this was somewhere around the time that I was reading Practice Resurrection by Eugene Peterson. My worldview has also been significantly modified this past year, especially in the ways in which I understand the kingdom’s relationship with this world.

The WAY of God’s Kingdom (the How, the Methods, the Ethos, the Spirit) is fundamentally opposed to the WAY of the world. Because the WAY of the world is victory, winning, and the survival of the strong, the Kingdom of God can only enter this world through loss, suffering, and death. God’s Kingdom does not enter the world through the ways or with the aims of the world, i.e. by the world’s methods. God’s Kingdom comes on his terms and in his ways, which are most clearly demonstrated in the crucifixion of his son. God’s kingdom comes through the weak upending the strong, through the foolish shaming the wise, through crucifixion that leads to resurrection.

This past Sunday we finished up our series A People of His Very Own at Grace Church. I was fortunate enough to preach the last message of the series, which was on the shared mission of God’s people. As I understand it, God’s mission is new creation, and he wants to partner with human beings, both to make them new, and, through them, to make all things new. The impetus for the message came from a question I asked in the other sermon I preached in the series, Eyes Up. Here is the question:

Will you still follow Jesus when it dawns on you that he has not come to fill the God-shaped hole in your heart, but rather to call you, together with all the saints, to fill the cross-shaped hole in the world?

In other words, are you still going to be committed to Jesus when you finally understand that his top priority is not to meet your needs, but rather to equip you and call you to fulfill his mission in the world, in the same way that he fulfilled it? The primary text for the sermon was Matthew 10:38, but I also went to 2 Corinthians 5:17-20 and 2 Corinthians 6:3-10.

The thing that I was most fortunate to take from my sermon prep was the time I spent listening to the stories of how people at Grace have been walking out this mission, and how God is, in turn, causing his kingdom to grow in our neighborhood. The things that Jesus said about God’s kingdom really are true. You sow a small seed and you reap a massive harvest. You do your work, and the kingdom grows without you knowing it, or, sometimes, even seeing it. While I’ve been living in Boston and Columbus for the past ten years, God has been at work in the church where I grew up in powerful and transformative ways. I’m grateful that I now get to be a part of that work as both a participant and a pastor.

Something I said in my sermon Eyes Up resonated with the staff here at Grace, and so I’ve been asked to preach a message that elaborates on it. Here’s the quote:

Will you still follow Jesus when it dawns on you that he has not come to fill the God-shaped hole in your heart, but rather to call you, together with all the saints, to fill the cross-shaped hole in the world?

The obvious text that communicates this (besides the one from which I was preaching at the time – Luke 9:57-62) is Matthew 10:37-39. Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me.

The first thought that struck me was this: The world needs cross-bearers, not because it is bloodthirsty and eager to kill those whom God sends (though it is those things), but because it must be shown, at all costs, the way to New Creation.