After the shooting, we went to church and had a beer.

            On June 5th one man died and three others were injured by mindless violence right in the middle of the community that I love. SPU is a beautiful place both for the grounds that it occupies in the middle of Seattle, and for the imperfect but loving and gracious community it offers there. That day there was an assault on my beloved community. One man’s brokenness resulted in a brokenness that has spilled over to affect the 4200+ students that attend SPU, and the families of those students. Where can I, a humble seminarian, begin to talk about an event like a school shooting? I don’t presume the right to something to say in this situation, but I do have something I want to share: the beautiful response I observed.

            That night, after hearing about what took place, relentlessly checking the news, and having a few friends respond inappropriately to what had gone on, I went to church. By church I mean a bar in Fremont. Two of my closest friends were already there together and, after checking on me, wanted me to come down. As we sat together there was more silence than usual, more heaviness than usual, but those were the people I most wanted to be with. Those were my grieving partners. There were moments of tender embrace and there were moments of completely understood silence. We never prayed, though we could have, we never spoke “words of affirmation,” though we could have done that too; either would have been fine. Instead, we were together. We were the quiet table at the bar, loving each other in ways that words cannot, talking to God in ways most prayers don’t. I was with four of my favorite people on God’s green earth and “Church” looked like silent presence, the one awkward quiet table at the bar. This is the church I could not have been more thankful for. We eventually left the bar and went to my friend’s house to put aside what was going on. None of us could really forget, but we collectively failed to remember for a little while as we did our best to laugh a little, and that was holy in and of itself.

            It was a blessing and a curse to be able to pull out my phone and see the latest update. A blessing because I could be up to date in an instant. A curse because this instantaneous knowledge had me constantly desiring to know names and what had happened and so on and so forth. At the same time, the fact that my Facebook feed was filled with people sharing articles and asking for prayer was evidence to me of social media at its finest. My people were saying things like, “My community is broken. Please pray.” Evidence that the one word I have cynically taken for granted most in the world of social media is still able to carry very significant weight for those people who are in the midst of their worst days: praying. The word started to mean something as those I love directed this word towards me and mine.

            At some point in this whole event I realized, at seminary we talk about weighty stuff all the time. Theodicy, racism, sexism, disability etc. etc. etc. This time though, theodicy meant something. What does it mean to me that God is all good AND all-powerful AND a shooting just happen in the middle of the community that I love with all of my heart AND he could have stopped it? Suddenly, seminary became 10billion times more than just an academic venture. Suddenly, it seemed that those out-there, vague, hard-to-deal-with concepts were becoming far more real than I had ever hoped they would be… and I know that life will continue to make them real for me as time continues. And I hope that I have a church just like the one I was with at that little bar in Fremont.

            Where is God in the midst of all of this? Three places. First, in the moment when I asked my housemate, who had been previously oblivious, to pray for me, and he did with all the love in his heart. Second, in the sentiment in my heart and in others’ that said, “No matter how unjust and wrong this is, I still want mercy and grace to come together with justice for this man. There was something more going on inside him.” Finally, and most clearly, in the beautiful response that has come from the SPU community as a whole, which I am not the only one raving about.

            Sitting there at the bar with my friends in Fremont, we had our tiny, beautiful community where honesty and grief were equally welcomed, as they often are among close friends. For a while, the music in the background was erratically changing between punk rock and soft folk. When I asked the waitress the favor of changing it to something a little softer, or at least more consistent, she happily obliged and the first song to play was Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me.” There has never been a worse, more cliché time for that song to play and there has also never been a better time for that song to play. I will never forget the one-part joy one-part grief tears that streamed as we smiled and sang together:

“You just call on your brother,

when you need a hand,

we all need somebody, to lean on.”

The community I love oh so deeply has been assaulted and I don’t know what to do about it.

May God be with the SPU community, Sarah Williams, Thomas Fowler, John Meis, the shooter Aaron Ybarra, and their families, and especially with the family of Paul Lee, the young man who died. If you are the praying type I would ask you to pray for my community as we prepare to take finals despite the tragedy, the families of all the affected, and for Aaron Ybarra. He is clearly a broken man and needs God’s hand just like the rest of us. Even if you don’t pray, please remember that he is a human being, just like you, even if he has failed to see others that way.

If God is not boring, how come church is?

This has been an interesting week for me as a result of one small suggestion from God. As I was considering how “wide open” my future presently is, I suddenly felt the inclination that he had something particular in mind for me. I was thinking about the possibilities available to me after I complete seminary, some require a little more schooling, others I could do right away. Since starting seminary I have thought about being a teacher, a nurse, an occupational therapist, a career musician, a professor, and numerous other options. Interestingly, I realized that I had not ever thought as deeply about being a pastor as I likely ought to. Funny how we seminarians operate.

            The word that came to mind for me as I was considering all these other options was “settling.” There is nothing at all wrong with being a teacher, nurse, or whatever, but for me, I may very well be settling. I have had a great many moments in which I have been seriously unimpressed with the church and usually these moments correlate with thoughts along the lines of, “how can we do better” and “how can the church look more like Jesus” and “what did they expect this message to communicate other than the antithesis of the gospel?” As something of a prophetic mind, I find myself operating as the critic over and over and have not, lately, found myself in the reformer/creative/implementer-of-change’s chair at all.

            I love the Church with all my heart, and with how poorly I see it operating all around me my gut reaction is to say, “Hope is lost, nothing can be done to save her, all we can do now is try to bow out gracefully and go do guerilla Christianity elsewhere.” So much of my soul wants to duck out of the church and pass my time with a few friends who believe hard and see the same issues going on that I see going on. The appeal of what I call guerilla Christianity is it makes you responsible to a few people for maintaining a relationship with the most high, without having to sit through sermons that are neither inspiring, nor formative, nor informative and without having to sit through worship that feels shallow and redundant.

            I love the Church with all my heart and I want to see her “walk” what she is “talking.” We say God is infinite, so why are we repeating so many things (sermons, songs, ideas, mistakes) if there is, literally, infinitely more to say. That is infinite “talk” followed up with numerically insignificant “walk.” If God is truly infinite, I should never have to hear the same sermon twice, let alone dozens of times. Often it seems underestimations of God are the cause, other times it seems an excessive commitment to people pleasing is the cause, and still other times incompetent leaders seem to be the cause. But no matter the cause, it seems we still sell ourselves short of what we could do when God is with us.

            And then all of this ends up looking like a gun sight narrowly focused on me and demanding, “so what are you going to do about it?” At first I think I cannot do anything, so I bow out; I’ll go do my faith thing over here and see what happens. Yet, lately, it seems like, as I feel the sight focused on me, I have to say, “Well, I guess I can try and do it the way it should be done. I do not know what that is, but I’ll commit to trying to figure it out and do whatever it seems it is that we are supposed to do.”

            This relatively recent feeling of a “call” to the church is uncomfortable, impractical, and also more “right” feeling than most I have experienced in my life. I do not want to work in a church because I know that I will, if I am true to myself and to God, fight so many uphill battles. If I am a pastor people will be angry, people will be offended, and people will question what they believe. And I think the Church should be angry, offended, and questioning much more often than we are, we accept simplification so easily.

            I wish I remembered the exact words of a highly valued friend as he encouraged me on my 23^rd birthday. It was something to the effect of, “Kendrick you offend me, but you force me to ask more questions and to dig deeper.”

            May we all, myself wholeheartedly included, dig a little deeper.

Swim Until You Can't See Land

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSCQLEzm0nw

My favorite Scottish band Frightened Rabbit has a song on their third album called “Swim Until You Can’t See Land” and it is an absolute gem (above is the link). It starts with a faint plucking bass line, a happy little guitar lick and some tambourine over a pleasant background accordion. As the lyrics start, we find it is the story of a man making his way to the edge of the ocean and the edge of his mind. As he begins to dip his toe in he says, “if I hadn't come now to the coast to disappear, I may have died in a landslide of rocks and hopes and fears” and later, as he is knee deep, “Let's call me a Baptist, call this a drowning of the past. She is there on the shoreline throwing stones at my back” and as the chorus starts for the second time we can understand it; “Swim, until you can’t see land.” Lead singer and songwriter Scott Hutchison commented around the time of the album’s release that this was the first album he had written that was not about a miserable break up. I think that it is good to leave things behind, although hopefully this does not sound like a rehashing of what I said last week about being newly single, that has not been on my mind much this week.

            I put that song on the other night when I was driving home from the library where I had spent about five hours studying Matthew 6:24-34. I was up to my ears in thoughts on what it meant to take Jesus seriously when he said, “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” (Matthew 6:34 NRSV). Do we not make plans? Do we seize the day so hard that we end it feeling like we have become the essence of carpe diem? And what of the fact that we are told that God provides food for the birds though they do not sow or reap and God provides clothes for the lilies though they do not spin or toil? Do we not even need to work? The short answer to these questions is no. As I had already felt and as many commentators explicitly we have not been granted permission to assume God will do everything for us, we have been granted permission to say that despite our best efforts, we need God. Without him, we are so easily consumed by our pasts or our futures that today’s troubles, which are sufficient in and of themselves, are so easily neglected. So how can we allow ourselves to have the proper amount of worry about all the days that are not today?

            The short answer to that question is that I do not know. We cannot simply forget our past and we cannot waste each day worrying about tomorrow. I like the analogy of driving a car here; we use our past as a reference point to figure out where we are yet we do need our eyes primarily focused ahead, but not so far ahead that we miss the things in the road right in front of us. We have to figure out what it means to be right here, right now. Part of that process is remembering that God is with us, right here, right now. Somewhere there are fuzzy lines where too much retrospection or too much speculation happen.

Right now I am coming out of a time when I have been spending a bit more time looking in the rearview mirror and have as a result wanted to do a bit more “swimming” than usual but I think that’s alright. Now I find myself asking God to help me enjoy the waters I am in now that I have left the coast behind me.

Relearning the Art of Leaning on God.

Being in seminary I have the pleasure of worshipping God with my mind all day long. In classes, as I do homework, and in conversations with my professors I get to think about, read about, and discuss the nature of God and his will for the world and for the church. This is a special and particular time of life as most of my life has not involved nearly this much mental engagement with God and I love having the opportunity to do so often in this season. That being said, discussing and reading about theology and scripture is not the same as spiritually engaging God and the opportunity to engage God with my mind all the time has often made me forget that I also need to listen to God, speak directly to God, and worship God with my spirit.

            Over the last week or two I have been reawakened to this need. In the midst of being newly single, being incredibly busy with school, dealing with finances, and being sad that my whole immediate family is now out of state I have often felt overwhelmed and alone. This realization hit me hard the other night and I turned in to God with the full force of what I was feeling that same night. Naturally, God was there, as he always has been. That night I was reminded again of his unending faithfulness to me. I was also reminded of my tendency towards being unfaithful and in those moments I often think of myself as Hosea’s wife Gomer, melodramatic as that may sound. I am so thankful for the reminder, found in the book of Hosea, of God’s faithfulness.

            I am thankful that the breakup I just went through was mutual and that it seems to have been what God was telling us to do. That being said, the complexities involved in breaking up have been stressful and I have had to ask God several times, “Why is this happening?” I had felt such a lack of peace in light of these complexities, until I took the time to sit down and listen for an answer. I felt like he said, in response, “You will not find peace, fulfillment, or real purpose until you found it in me”.  A quote from St. Augustine comes to mind here, “Our hearts cannot rest until they rest in thee.”

            I spent a lot of high school finding fulfillment in being a good student, being a good youth leader, and being a good boyfriend. When I came to Seattle Pacific for undergrad, all three of those things disappeared. I was dumped before college started, I started working for a different church where my ministry felt almost entirely unsuccessful and I graduated from college with a GPA significantly lower than the one I entered college with. As a result, the first three years of college involved a slow descent into depression until I realized that God’s primary concern was not my success in any of the aforementioned areas but in me knowing myself as his son. This realization was essential for pulling me out of depression; unfortunately I have not always been the best at remembering how important that idea is.

            I probably spent far too much of the six months I was with my now ex finding my fulfillment, yet again, in trying to be a good boyfriend. Now, I am again in the process of finding my fulfillment in God, and I do not imagine I will find peace until do. As wonderful as the work of doing seminary is and as much as it connects my mind to God, my heart cannot rest in that and my soul will not truly be fulfilled by that. Instead, I am relearning the art of leaning on God.

Division and Reconciliation

Recently we had a two and half weeklong government shutdown. Simply put, too many people on either side of the aisle simply could not come to consensus. It is easy to blame either side for having been too headstrong and so much mud slinging occurred that hardly anyone involved is above reproach. As the Senate chaplain Barry Black said most poignantly in one of his morning invocations during the first week, “Deliver us from the hypocrisy of attempting to sound reasonable, while being unreasonable.” Clearly when such a stalemate had been reached and so much polarization had happened, neither side could really be considered reasonable.

            A government shutdown is perhaps low hanging fruit for a reflection on division and reconciliation, but it has me thinking about the ways that the church has done this very same thing but with the power, at least in Protestantism, to “secede” readily available to any who find that their way is being rejected. Our Senate cannot simply split the nation in two and allow each to have their own way, yet the Protestant church is known for this kind of activity to the point where the number of denominations world-wide has broken 35,000. By comparison, (to my knowledge) the Roman Catholic church has only split three times in its nearly 2,000 year existence; once with Eastern Orthodoxy, with Protestantism, and with Anglicanism, though my understanding is that the latter maintains some significant catholic identity. How, then, have Protestants become so entitled to the point that their perspectives not being made doctrine is cause for a schism? Perhaps this is a “grass is always greener” mentality, but on some level I find that Catholics, who frequently and vocally disagree with their pope or priest, have a better way of doing things; they seem to be a united church with a diversity of opinions constantly discussing the right way of doing things while the cause of unity nearly always overrules the cause of being right.

            And yet as I reflect on all of this and point fingers at Protestantism, I know I have wanted to leave my own church over conceivably petty matters as well. I do not like that my church vocally designates homosexuality as a sin (though I am not yet sure where I land)***, I do not like that our worship music is cliché, homogenous, and stereotypically “Christian,” and I do not like that we use the ESV translation on the overhead on Sundays. Yet after two years, I still attend and have just recently become a member. I have prayerfully asked God for permission to leave, and he has said no. At which point I have been forced to ask myself, why I am still at Mosaic Community Church. The answer is the same as the answer to the question of why I started attending; Mosaic values community and has excellent attitudes about worship. I am proud to be a part of an expression of the church that genuinely cares for others and that appreciates seeing God glorified in myriad forms of worship. The community aspect I have never doubted. The worship aspect I have doubted frequently, but I also have to concede that since joining the worship team new instruments have appeared on stage for the first time (trumpet, saxophone, xylophone, accordion, mandolin and more) and new forms of worship have been engaged in (ballet, art and spoken word), so progress is happening.

In another morning invocation this week, Barry Black also said, “Unless [God] empower[s] our lawmakers, they can see the ideal but not reach it, they can know the right but not do it, they can comprehend their duty but not perform it.” The church, just as much as our congress, needs to be empowered by God to perform their duty to maintain our unity, and I do mean duty. One cannot simply say that compromise is the solution, but somehow the differences of the congress and of the church must be acknowledged and respected and prayer must be integral to our decisions. From there we might begin to see what direction God points us and, with his empowerment, might press towards the goal that he has set for us.

***I want to note that this last Sunday (about a week after I posted this blog) my pastor gave a sermon in response to the question "Don't Most Christians Hate Gay People?" On the whole I thought he knocked it out of the park and responded to this question very well. The only critique I had was on one comment he made suggesting that those who are not opposed to homosexuality in the church are "changing the word of God." I don't want to make to much of that comment as it may not have been meant how it sounds. Simply put, I think it's dangerous to say that their reading "changes the word of God," but the more important point is that he has not capitulated on his perspective, which I respect, and his sermon was really intended to be a welcome to all.

Why the new blog?

            For the last four years I have been writing, rather inconsistently, under the blog godisadork.blogspot.com where I have chronicled my some of my unique and varied interactions with God and where I see him all around me. This has included my reflections on interactions with people, events at church, the movies and more. Reflecting on the fact that I started the blog as an 18 year old who imagined that he knew something, I see some of the inherent immaturity in the blog posts. Additionally, while the title of the blog was intentionally chosen and I am not embarrassed of it, I do feel that it is time for a new title and a new approach in my reflections on faith and the pursuit of truth. Additionally, the fact that I am attending seminary now means that I am paying lots of money to study the various expressions of faith and spend lots of time reflecting critically upon them, so hopefully I learn how to reflect on my faith a little better along the way.

            My blog is now called “Polyphonic Truth.” The reasons why I have chosen this title may be apparent, but if not I would like to lay them out for you. I believe, like a modernist, that there is such a thing as absolute truth. I also believe, like a postmodernist, that the truth can be accessed in many ways and, equally important, expressed in many ways, hence polyphonic or "many voices/sounds." I see it in movies, in music, in people, in nature and in theology.  I am also keenly aware that as a twenty-two year old, white, male, urban, semi-Pentecostal, graduate student from an upper-middle class background I see truth in a particular way and the way I see it might not be the way you see it. Additionally, you and I may express truth very differently; I primarily use reflections on faith, you might use abstract art, ballet, or sculpting, none of which I understand very well.

            Because the truth is, admittedly, very hard to know, I have to try to take every expression of it seriously. I don’t want the tainted “Kendrick Barnes Translation” of the truth, I want the actual truth, which means that I want to hear about the truth from people who do not think, look, or act like me. As one of my theology professors Rob Wall said, “I must try to listen to other interpreters, believing that true objectivity emerges out of a community of subjectivities.”

            So here is my expression of truth, I am also very interested in yours.