Join the "Rat Race"

Our North American culture is a "context of persistent denial of grace" (Peterson) and sadly the church is often the biggest culprit. As I was driving this morning I passed a large electronic marquee in front of a church that read: "Hard work brings prosperity and success." This is the North American gospel, isn't it? "Join the rat race!" Is that the best we can offer? Never mind the implication that if you are poor or homeless you are basically lazy. How about Jesus followers offering some alternative definition for what constitutes "prosperity and success?" Anyone care for a cross instead?

Swimming by Grace

In his recent work Practice Resurrection, Eugene Peterson captures a wonderful analogy about the relationship between the believer in Christ and grace. He borrows the analogy from William Stafford's book on creative writing (William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl [Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1978], pp. 23-25).

Stafford observed that any reasonable person who looks at water [grace], and passes a hand through it, can see that it would not hold a person up.... But swimmers [followers of Jesus] know that if they relax on the water [grace] it will prove to be miraculously buoyant; and writers [followers of Jesus] know that a succession of little strokes on the material nearest them - without any prejudgments about the specific gravity of the topic or the reasonableness of their expectations -will result in creative progress [growing up in Christ: maturity]. Writers are persons who write; swimmers [believers] are ... persons who relax in the water, let their heads go down, and reach out with ease and confidence.... Just as the swimmer [believer] does not have a succession of handholds hidden in the water, but instead simply sweeps that yielding medium and finds it hurrying him along, so the swimmer and writer [follower of Jesus] passes his attention through what is at hand, and is propelled by a medium [grace] too thin and all-pervasive for the perceptions of nonbelievers who try to stay on the bank and fathom his accomplishment. (Kindle loc. 1070)

This is helpful because most of us tend to treat grace as something of a commodity dispensed by God to the believer through faith, rather than a realm in which we live (abide) through faith. Peterson calls for a "willed passivity" in order to embrace grace. "Faith in Christ is an act of abandoning the shores of self, where we think we know where we stand and where if we just try hard enough we can be in control. Faith in Christ is a plunge into grace." (Kindle loc. 1081).

Lenten Ironing #2

Sorry, guys, this isn't too exciting so far. I ironed Honduras, two Egypts and then a shirt I didn't iron on the first go-round. This one is from a country called "Maubitius." Never heard of it. A Google search turned up "Mauritius" which makes me wonder if the tag on the shirt is misspelled. I need to do some more research.

As I was ironing this morning and thinking about how *inconvenient* this is, I found myself wondering about the lives of the people who make the shirts that I wear. I wonder what inconvenience looks like for them?

Lenten Ironing - Session #1

If my shirts look a little wrinkled over the next several weeks, here's why. I decided after Pastor Rachel's sermon series on Amos to iron my own shirts during Lent. (Usually I just drop my shirts off at the dry-cleaners and a few days later, voilà! - they're washed and neatly pressed.) I'm combining my desire to slow down during Lent with the hope of learning more about the "vulnerable" in our world. So as I iron each shirt I'll take a peek at the tag and see what country it was made in. I'll make my ironing time prayer time for each of those countries.

I decided to get started last night after the Ash Wednesday service. (If I didn't start right away I could easily let this one slide.) So here's what I discovered.

The eight shirts I ironed were made in six different countries. The green dress shirt was from Egypt. (Egypt was easy to pray for since it was in the news recently... at least until the titillating street fighting subsided.) But then came the brown shirt from Indonesia, the green striped one from Sri Lanka and the orange checkered shirt from Malaysia. I'm embarrassed to say I only know vaguely where these country are on the map. The last two countries, Korea and China, were obviously more familiar. But, I had no idea my meager wardrobe was so international!

As I pray my way through Lent, ironing and asking God for more of his heart for the world, I'll keep you posted on my blog. Perhaps you'll want to also share how God is leading you this Lenten season.