"Give Me My Robe, Put On My Crown. I Have Immortal Longings In Me"

This evening I wasn't feeling very good, but I was moving slowly around the kitchen getting dinner ready for the kids and warming some leftover soup for Teresa and me. My wife runs a very tight ship around here, so I am not permitted rest or sick days. She demands dinner on the table within 30 minutes of her arrival from work, and I'd best mind my P's and Q's and get it done. No one who knows my wife wants to face her wrath, and after 14 years of marriage, I know better than to test her fury, lest I pay the price for my insolence. Quit your whining, Bill, and fetch my dinner!

Anyway, there I was with something akin to the Bubonic Plague, wearing gloves and a bio hazard suit, so as not to infect the rest of the family. Teresa was sitting at the table waiting and demanding I get her a beer, but I was not allowed to stop fanning her off with the palm branch while reaching for the beer in the fridge - a feat that took some serious dexterity. While reaching for the beer, my arm fell off (most likely from the leprosy I contracted as a result of my plague-weakened immune system). No matter, prosthetics are very well made these days. After grabbing the beer with the toes of my left foot and opening it for Teresa with my nose hairs while continuing my fanning, my daughter Grace looked up from her homework at the dining room table out of the blue and declared, "I don't want a woman to be voted in as President." The comment brought both Teresa and me to a cold halt. My right ear promptly dropped on the hardwood floor. I am not sure if it was from my shock at Grace's comment or the gangrene, but I was grateful that in my condition there was very little blood around the edges of the ear's cartiledge, saving me from more discipline for making a mess on the floor.

I think Teresa and I were thinking the same thing. We both carefully said through clenched teeth and strained breath, "Oh? Why is that?" Our kids go to a fairly conservative Christian school. The teachers are very supportive of letting parents instill the values in our kids that we want instilled. The problem is usually with other students, a few of whom are the offspring of true, red-blooded, ultra-traditionalist, American Evangelicals. Some of them have their kids tell other children in the school that there is no Santa Claus, anyone who believes that the world is older than 6000 years is going to Hell (which is much worse in the Evangelical, ultra-conservative mind than global warming), and women have no business even thinking about leading men. If we're not careful, women may even start wanting to become doctors or may want to vote! Now, those kids are the extreme minority, but they are a very vocal minority. Correcting their words in the minds of our children is not very difficult yet, because our kids are still young enough that they listen to their parents more than their peers. In a couple of years, though, this will be more of a problem. It's not like talking to our kids about something an atheistic kid told them on the playground at a public school. That would be much easier, because our kids have experienced Jesus, and they can see through the BS of most non-believing comments. The problem with this is that these kids profess Jesus just like my kids, so the truth of who we all are in Christ gets much more muddled. Can my creative, imaginative daughter love Jesus and still believe in a beautiful, magical childhood world where Santa Claus, Trick or Treating, and friendly woodland fairies and unicorns abound? I think so, and Teresa and I encourage her to not lose her imagination. We believe that the loss of imagination is possibly the greatest current threat to the Body of Christ. But still, our 8 year old, who wants to please her parents and the Jesus she asked into her heart, struggles at times with the judgmental Jesus portrayed by some of her closest friends. So, we braced ourselves, lining up the arguments and corrections to help our daughter realize that a woman can lead, whether we think Hillary should be that woman was not on the table. Best stick to the simple facts.

After a long pause and some coughing up of blood on my part, my daughter gave her reason for not wanting a woman to be voted in as President: "Because I want to be the first woman to become President of the United States!"

We were so happy, that we didn't even bother to comment on selfishness or too much ambition. We both released our breath and said, "Oh, thank God! Absolutely, you should be the first woman president!" I almost had tears in my eyes (if my tear ducts hadn't completely dried up from my dehydration), as I sat down with Grace to start planning her fund-raising for the campaign. I was so proud of Grace, a kid who was very meek when younger, that she felt strong enough and bold enough to believe she could be President one day!

My reverie was short lived, however, because Teresa saw me sitting down and began beating me with a reed. During the barrage of painful strikes, in my head I kept hearing, "Grace is Woman. Hear her roar!"

"Be Not Afraid of Greatness"

I have been thinking a lot lately about the Kingdom of God and how difficult it can be to live in that tension. People simply don't like it. To have a Kingdom church means to have a somewhat unpopular church, because such a church lives and desires to continue to live in constant tension. It just isn't safe.

There is such a tendency in our faith lives to want immediately out of tension. Tension makes us uncomfortable, and it challenges our boundaries. As we start to explore the power of the Holy Spirit in our church, this will become even more evident. The Spirit goes where it will and does what it will. It will heal someone here and set free someone over there. This makes such an experience difficult to pastor. Churches will tend to go to extremes when encountering the "already and not-yet" nature of the Kingdom of God.

One extreme is to get extremely goofy with the Holy Spirit stuff, where manifestations and experience become the end, rather than the means to the end. They will then fall into triumphalism, declaring victory over all things and proclaiming healing in all situations. This puts human demands on the Spirit, short-circuiting the will and sovereignty of God. This is gnostic at its very core, because it then causes a divide between the physical and the spiritual, placing all things spiritual on a much higher plane than the physical. No thought is given to faith or Biblical exegesis, because why bother? It's all about the experience. The Bible exists for God to give us secret messages when we pop it open during some euphoric, eyes-rolling-back, flopping on the floor, spiritual state of manifest, mystical glee. We will have all the money we need, we just need to claim it. You want to be healed? Believe, and God has to do it. The end result is to invalidate the pain and suffering of people in need and to write them off as unbelieving or weak (in the "flesh"). This is an overly strong focus on the already-inaugurated nature of the Kingdom. The declaration that the Kingdom has fully come (and we just don't know it yet) can lead down a path that takes us far from our reliance on God and far from a healthy, real faith journey.

On the other side, a church may well go to the extreme of ignoring or rejecting the move of the Spirit altogether. This is understandable at times, because the emotionalism and "experience as the highest order of faith" approach can be so distasteful when seen in its true light. But to reject the move of the Spirit is also to circumvent God's sovereignty. It is the declaration that God no longer moves today, and we are in this on our own. It is an unhealthy focus on the fact that the Kingdom is not fully consummated yet. There is nothing but sin and death in this world. This leads to a fatalism and stoicism that kills the fire in any believing person. People become automatons, simply waiting to go to heaven. They end up having to perform all kinds of exegetical gymnastics in order to produce a fantastical account of the end times that sells books but fails to truly inspire a life-transforming faith. There is no urgency or desire to be active in the world. No one will be healed, because God no longer does that kind of stuff. Suck it up and hide like the rest of us in church, peaking your head out into the world only when Walden Media releases a film or there is another protest at Walt Disney World (protests are a great excuse for a family vacation). Toe the line, don't make waves, and everything will be good and safe.

Well, neither of those extremes are acceptable options, as far as I'm concerned. I choose to live in the tension. The Vineyard as a community of churches has chosen as an international body to stay in the tension. We are a Kingdom Church that exists for the sake of the world. God does move today. He does heal, cast out demons, restore broken lives, and set people free! The Kingdom is here! Yet, it is not fully here. There are times that people are not healed. There is sin and death all around. Yet, the good news, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, is a message of hope, for this life and the next. We can be saved now and we will be saved for eternity. The Spirit is moving, and we don't control the Spirit. Yet we realize that we are useless as a Kingdom movement if we don't engage the world. When we pray, we pray with expectant faith, but we pray according to what God is doing, not according to what we want to see happen. We are rooted in the Word of God, seeking to explore the mystery of God and to find more questions that spur us on in our faith, not to dissect God or get simple answers. We think, we feel, we believe, we experience. We have an intellectual faith that is empowered by the Holy Spirit so that we can physically do the stuff of the Kingdom. There is no separation or division within ourselves. Mind, heart, and strength (body) are what we use to love, worship, and obey our God.

What does this mean practically? It means that we move as people who are already set free yet have a journey to complete. We are moving toward what he created us to be: a People in His likeness and image. That, my friends, is something worth living and even dying for. Will we have to be with messy people and see some Spirit stuff that is out of our control? Yes, but only if you don't want to go back to being a stoic who never trusts God to do what he will outside of our scripts and expectations. Will we have to think and work out our faith? Yes, but only if you don't want to be a mindless revival junkie going from one spiritual high to the next. I believe that God is looking for a People to walk that radical middle line.

I want to live out a faith that challenges every part of who I am. I want to walk out that faith with like-minded people who will rise to the challenge and not cut and run when things get messy or tough. I can't do this on my own. We believe that God built the church that God wanted to build in Adullam in order to have the vehicle to take us down that path. I am sick of the status quo. I have been there, and I found it to be bankrupt. I am ready to strap on my helmet, buckle up, and go for the ride.