Danny J Bixby

>Hey you up on the stage. Hey, Mr Fancy-pants electric guitarist. Yeah you.

Knock it off.

Seriously guy, do you think we need to see you dancing around up there on the stage?

During church?

During worship?!?

Where’s the reverence with your leg propped up half a foot high on an amp?

Are you quite happy with yourself, turning worship of God into a show about you and your awesome guitar skills?

Stop going over to that singer or other guitarist and playing back to back. That’s not cool, that’s showboating.

Don’t do that wide stance and put pressure on your front foot when you’re playing a tricky part or a complicated solo. Don’t hop around either. Stop looking like you’re enjoying yourself for crying out loud! Stop being so dramatic, up there, this isn’t a show! This is church!

Open your eyes already, look around. Stop being so intense, so focused, turn it down a bit.

Oh…what’s that?

You think God deserves your best?

You believe God gave you some kind of intrinsic ability to play music and through many years of practice you’ve become pretty great at it? And so now you think that the best thing you can do is to thank God is to use that gift? And you wouldn’t dare giving God a level other than your absolute best?

You say that worshiping God through music is your passion? And you hope that he can use you to bring others close to him as well? That if it only happened ever to 1 person in your whole life that it would be worth it?

Maybe the problem isn’t with you. Who am I to think that God won’t accept what it is you’re doing just because it may not be a personal preference of mine? Maybe I’m jealous. Maybe I see you worshiping in a passionate way, and it reflects on how I could do the same…in my own way…with my own passions.

But I don’t do it. 

So seeing YOU do it, ignites some deep desire and conviction that I don’t quite understand. And I hate you for it.

Maybe I’ll find a way to realize that at some point. And find a way to worship Jesus as authentically as you do…without reservation or care about how other people perceive it, through the passions and abilities that God has given to me.

Until then though, you’re on notice. And you better believe the band leader is going to hear about this.

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Season

You may be thinking, “What? That’s hardly a Christian term, that’s not nearly as widely used as something like atonement, repentance, sanctification, etc etc.”
And you may be right that it doesn’t sound as ‘churchy’ as some other theological terms…but that is kinda a point I want to make:

Christianese is not limited to theological terms.

It’s expanded far beyond theology and gone into buzzwords.

Season is a buzzword.

Maybe you happen to use it yourself? You might talk about how you’re going through a rough time in your life, and as a reminder that it’ll be over eventually (and as a bit of a snub to it as well) you label it a ‘season.’

Also we can use it to reference anything that we might hope ends pretty dang soon. Often while we’re experiencing it. “Man, my kids sure are freaking jerks…hopefully this season will end any day now.”

Or ministers like the phrase “season of ministry.” As in, “We’re entering into a new season of ministry with such and such program,” or “That worked in the old season of ministry, now we’ll be entering a new season of ministry.”

Why do we like that word so much?

Maybe it’s because we really like oldies songs based on Bible verses. I can’t help but think of the Byrd’s “Turn, Turn, Turn” every time I hear the word season….which of course is just Ecclesiastes 3 set to a sweet soothing rhythm.

Maybe, because we recognize it as an obscure Ecc 3 reference, we pepper our conversation with it as an awesome backhand reference to an obscure Bible verse? Seems like it would merit some serious Christian bonus points to me.

I think it’s good to remind ourselves that things are temporary, that the crap we trudge through doesn’t last forever. Though often we don’t like to think that the next “season” after what we’re going through could be worse….that’s pessimistic

What can we use instead?

I think this would depend on the context…as is often the case with buzzwords. And to be honest…I don’t have  great ideas for replacements.

Maybe instead of saying “I’m going through a difficult season right now,” we could be more open with it. Not all details…but not try to deliberately mask exactly what’s wrong either. “Season” in that context seems like a cop-out, you know? So let’s not cop-out.

What other contexts do we use season in?

Any suggestions with what we could put in its place?

>Pride is a funny thing.

By funny, I mean nightmarishingly crushing and destructive. They’re interchangeable, I promise.

Pride is that jerk in the back of your head that tells you “You’re smart enough, you can figure this out. Who cares that you don’t have many years of experience necessary to know how to do this. You’re a genius!”

or maybe…

“That’s not really a problem. Everyone does that, so why should you care? Nobody can help you with it anyway, you can take care of it yourself.”

Pride is arrogant.

Pride keeps telling you that you don’t need help with something. That you can take care of it on your own. That magically, somehow, you have the resources and abilities to solve your own problems. It tells you this every time you think for a second about going to someone for help.

And pride is so arrogant that it makes you not recognize the bad logic of this situation. Because if you had the ability to solve the problem, you wouldn’t have had the problem in the first place.

Pride is isolating. 

It wants to separate you from people who can help you out. Because it knows that people do want to help you. And pride wants to stop that from happening.

Because pride loves your frustration. All the greats are frustrated and miserable aren’t they? And I’m great. That means I must be the same!

So pride makes you keep to yourself, and not reach out for assistance.

Pride is a filthy liar

Pride tells you that you need to keep up appearances. That you need to at least pretend that you know what you’re doing until you figure it out.

You know, “fake it till you make it.” Pride knows you’re not going to make it. It’s banking on it.

Pride is the enemy of progress

You can’t achieve anything when you’re stuck in pride. It’s self defeating. And that’s its favorite thing.

• Pride stops you from asking others for help in a project that is way over your head. 
• Pride makes you keep the problems you’re having with your kids to yourself, instead of looking for advice. 
• Pride tells you to not bring “that” up to your spouse or your best friend. Because it’ll lower their opinion of you. Despite knowing that their compassion towards you is much greater than their opinion of you.

>Lent is the 46 days (that’s 40 regular days plus Sundays….it’s complicated) between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday.

Wow, that sentence had a lot of capitalized words in it.

Anyway, the tradition of Lent has morphed and mutated over time to come to resemble temporary & item specific fast. We “give something up” for a few weeks.

You know the regular things:

I’d bet somewhere, someone is even considering to give up “punching people in the face” for Lent.

Why?

Because for many of us, Lent has turned into a Christian version of a new year’s resolution. Some of us give up things that we probably shouldn’t be doing anyway. Vices we have, indulgences that we take part of.

And I’m not against people bettering themselves, or using whatever metric they can to help them out of a problem. I’m really not.

But I don’t like what Lent has turned into. Lent has nearly become a temporary legalism, where we indulge in our legalistic desires to put extra rules onto our lives and our faith; I don’t see this all as the point of Lent.

I think instead, you should not give up anything for Lent

What if instead, we really looked at Lent as a season of kicking up our spiritual devotion to God and to each other?

Lent is a period of reconciliation. The early church had a habit of “putting people out of fellowship” with it when they did an egregious sin….they kicked them out. And at Lent every year, those people had the opportunity to come back into the church and receive forgiveness and restoration from the church body.

What if we adopted some variation of that practice for Lent?

Not the kicking out part…

The radical forgiveness part

What if during Lent, instead of worrying about eating those chocolates we still have from Valentine’s Day; we intentionally sought out those who are “out of fellowship” with the body of Christ?

If we looked at friends of ours, people we knew who for whatever reason have stopped going to church. Maybe they weren’t kicked out, maybe they just felt that way. Maybe they kicked themselves out. Maybe they got burnt on church, and frankly hate it. What if we took this time and spent our energy welcoming them back into a restoring community…even if it’s just a small one.

What if we tried, with everything we have, to mend broken relationships in our lives? Sacrificing our pride or our “being right” in an effort to restore others to a full relationship with us?

What if, as Paul says in Romans 12:18, as far as it depends on us we lived at peace with everyone? If we were intentional about this, what kind of change could we see in people’s lives? In our own lives?

I think it may be a bit more powerful than not watching American Idol for 6 weeks.

>Seriously, you guys.

Genesis is freaking crazy.

• Talking snakes…with legs
• guys being made out of dirt
• women being made out of bones
• the only people on the planet suddenly founding a city
• mysterious wives who just kinda show up
• people living nearly 1000 years

And what’s up with angels having sex with the ‘hot chicks’ and having herculean/superheros for babies? Is there really any other way to interpret Gen 6: 1, 2 & 4? I think not!

And this is all just from the first few chapters.

My point is; if we’re honest, there are a lot of things in the Bible that seem strange. We can’t just gloss over them and pretend they’re not there. Because people really do have problems with it.

These really are stumbling blocks for people, LOTS of people.

How do we reconcile them with our faith, today?

Do we smash everything together like groups such as “”Answers in Genesis” do and have Noah putting T-Rex onto the ark?

Sorry, but I don’t think it should be a pre-requisite to believe in The Flintstones to believe in Jesus.

To me, I think we have to realize that every story that seems crazy has a nugget of truth buried in it.

There’s a reason every religion has a flood story that is remarkably similar to Noah & the Ark…maybe something like it actually happened?

Maybe the nugget of truth we find in Adam & Eve, is that God’s crowning achievement of creation is humanity. Is it so hard to see the love that he poured into everything that he created as if he were composing a symphony? And then to see it crescendo as he forms man out of clay and breathes life into him!

When you look at the Bible as a textbook, you have to scratch your head…and sometimes, you walk away.

When you look at it as art, as poetry, as story…well, to me it starts to make more sense.

I can worry about the function of the stories instead of the form. It allows me to go after that nugget of truth. It let’s me examine what God would hope we would glean from it.

If God is love, if that is his very essence, then that is the point of the Bible as well.

The point isn’t to try to debunk a fossil record by adding up the years that we have listed in ancient genealogies.

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I try not to post large videos…but today is an exception. This may quite possibly be one of the most powerful things I’ve heard preached on both in subject matter and delivery.

Andrew Marin refers to himself as “the gay guy” in the video, because it was a conference of speakers who were talking about controversial subjects. His was the gay and lesbian community.

He is the self professed “gayest straight man you’ll ever know.”

He was told to give this conference “the best 20 minutes he’s got.” Just to pick one big idea and let it loose.

This is what he came up with.

Please take the time to watch this clip.

My personal opinion is that once you get into it, you’re not going to want to stop.

Andrew Marin’s website is here: Love Is An Orientation You can also buy his book of the same name.

Lumen 1.31 – Andrew Marin from mariners church on Vimeo.

If there is no video, please click here: http://dannyjbixby.blogspot.com/2010/02/gayest-straight-man-youll-ever-know.html

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We’ve all seen the athletes who look up to the sky, point, mouth something like “Thank you God!” when they score a touchdown, hit a home run, score a goal, etc etc.

• This past week, Matt Stover became the oldest person in history to play in a Superbowl at 42 years old. 

• He was a mid season addition to the Colts, because their kicker was injured

• He wasn’t playing anywhere else, because he was cut by the Ravens. 

• He does not kick very long field goals. Even 45 yards is pushing it. 

• What he DOES do is kick incredibly accurately, and he’s a very good kicker…just not for 50 yarders.

And of course, as this was a long field goal, he missed it.

Funny thing, many sports analysts will say this miss was when the momentum of the game shifted. The Saints had excellent field position, got the lead and never gave it up. Granted, Manning threw a pick later that made the game out of reach, but the momentum swung on this missed field goal.

So anyway, Stover misses the field goal and the camera goes back to him to show the “head down walk of shame” back to the sidelines that everyone does after a missed field goal.

But he didn’t do it.

He had both his arms raised, pointing to the sky, head up, mouthing “Thank you God,” and then jogged off the field…

Look familiar? 

And there was a bit of silence from the announcers, the camera just stuck on him, as if the director was stunned by the shot and was planning on following him slowly to the sidelines and now had no backup plan. After a brief moment, one of the announcers said something along the lines of “Matt Stover: Very religious man, thanks God if he makes it, thanks God if he doesn’t.”

And to me, in my brain, those words just hung in the air long after they were said.

Such a seemingly simple thing to understand. But I know I sure don’t do it.

I have a hard time thanking God when things don’t go my way. And to see a kicker thanking God for a missed kick that he probably knew he would miss, and one that he probably knew had the potential of swinging the entire momentum of the game, the Super Bowl, probably his last game of his last season…

That’s something to me.

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And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from his love. Death can’t, and life can’t. The angels can’t, and the demons can’t. Our fears for today, our worries about tomorrow, and even the powers of hell can’t keep God’s love away. Whether we are high above the sky or in the deepest ocean, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.

-Romans 8: 38-39

We don’t believe that.

We believe that once God finds out something else that we’ve kept hidden from him, that we’ll no longer be loved.

We think that we can possibly hide something–anything. That he hasn’t seen everything from us personally. We think that if he really knew, we’d be rejected. We’d be cast out for what we’ve done.

We are scared to death that God’s love works like our love.

That it’s based upon give and take, getting what we deserve, perceptions, expectations and failure. That one day, we’ll go to God for forgiveness and not receive it.

That we’ll lay out all of our crap, failures, and heartbreak and get back a divine “I told you so.” In some way, we think that God is just waiting to show us the error of our ways so that he could be proved right and we could be proved wrong, and we’ll be left to wallow in our failures.

Because no matter how hard we try, we keep projecting our own understanding of human emotion onto him. We can’t fully understand it, I can’t, because we’re not like him. We lack the capacity to see from the depths of our failures and pain; the love, forgiveness and restoration that is offered at every moment.

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“The Watchmen” is my 2nd favorite movie of all time. If you haven’t seen it, do so. One of the things that I love about the movie are the theological implications that it presents.

By that I mean, it takes aspects of God and twists them around. It take truths and blends them with our self-made lies to create something that seems more real than what the truth actually is. It then takes these caricatured principles and character traits and puts them onto people–and you get to see the result.

What if God’s love truly had limits? 

What if there was a level that we could stoop to that would make him say “Ok, that’s enough. I can’t handle this anymore, you are on your own. I can’t save you.”

If you can’t see the video, click here.

Despite our claims to the contrary, a part of us still believe God works like Rorschach (the guy speaking in the clip). And yes, Jesus has seen the real us, our true face, but that doesn’t stop his love.

It doesn’t make him look at our cries for forgiveness and whisper, “no.”

It never will.

>You a morning person? Do you just jump straight out of bed in the morning, ready to face the adventures, opportunities and madness another day brings? I’ve known people like this.

And you’re all crazy.

I’m not much of a morning person. Neither is my wife Jenny for that matter. Or my daughter Brooke. So mornings are interesting at our house, ha ha.

We pretty much all just slam our heads back onto our pillows, pull the covers up and try to use the force of our collective wills to stop time from continuing on. At that moment, the thing I want to do most in the world is to stay in my bed.

Why? Because it’s comfortable there. Because it’s warm. Dark (under covers, remember?). Soft. Inviting. Safe…Yeah, safe works…

It’s safe there. The cold air can’t get you. The morning light can’t either. Or the noise, or the problems of the day, or anything else except your own morning breath.

We’re naturally wired for self-preservation

I think that if we’re not intentional, we will find my attitude towards morning invading all aspects of our lives. And I think that if you’re attempting to follow Christ, that is the exact opposite of what you should be doing.

Because he’s not going into safe places.

Jesus didn’t travel where it was warm and inviting. Where he’d be protected from danger.

In the gospels he was preaching publicly in the synagogues, on mountainsides, with large crowds of people. Public places. Where he could easily be arrested, beaten, stoned, just plain killed for upsetting the religious order of things.

He deliberately made himself vulnerable

Paul took the same lead. He went to areas where people publicly debated philosophy & religion and brought the message of Jesus there. He traveled beyond the safety of Jerusalem to start churches, beyond the safety of the Roman Empire in some cases even.

I believe that if we are following Jesus we will find him leading us into difficult and dangerous situations.

To be honest, I often think we should be rushing into them. Places where we’d have something to lose. Emotional and spiritual places as well as physical. Places where we can lose our pretenses. Lose our pride. Lose parts of us that are valuable as well. Our security. Our safety.

We should be deliberately making ourselves vulnerable as Jesus did.

• Look for difficult conversations that we may feel uncomfortable having.
• Don’t be content surrounding ourselves with people who think like us or act like us.
• Push yourself to constantly do and give more.
• Don’t ever let ourselves get.
• We should be so radical with our forgiveness that it really does cost us something.
• Put ourselves into harm’s way, in order to get others out

It’s hard for me.

I like being under the covers better.

>I haven’t made a new post in a few days, and to be honest, I haven’t thought of a great many different things to write about. More often than not, my thoughts keep going back to the disaster in Haiti.

• To the horrendous poverty that already existed there

• How it didn’t need to be that way

• That the country was a disaster just waiting to happen

• Of course, the disaster that DID happen

And our reactions to it…

How some of us are reacting with compassion, love, and support.

Most blog posts of people I read lately are consumed by issues in Haiti. And no, I don’t believe it’s just because social justice causes are “sexy.” People really do care, people really are disturbed and deeply distressed by what happened. And people are helping.

People are giving money, organizing trips, volunteering.

But then, others of us aren’t. 

We’ve heard the interviews. Some of the outrageous statements.

I’ve had conversations with people who really do believe that people in Haiti “got what they deserved.” With people who were quite adamant that they were not going to help because–one of many reasons–our own country is “so messed up.” That giving money to Haiti is a waste, and that it will indeed be wasted.

Sometimes I just get speechless.

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This was in the Cross Point January reading for today, as it’s the 17th:

“He who mocks the poor shows contempt for their Maker; whoever gloats over disaster will not go unpunished.”

-Proverbs 17:5

I feel that verses like that validate my own opinion, my own reaction. But that doesn’t make me feel better. It doesn’t help anything.

What kind of satisfaction should I take from verses like that? Should I take any?

Knowing that it doesn’t help to change opinions, doesn’t help to change attitudes. And as far as I see, it only brings the chance of making me feel more self-righteous. I feel it brings the chance of putting myself into the same position.

That maybe the poor can be poor in many different ways. That it could be those poor in faith, poor in love, poor in empathy in addition to just traditional poverty.

That perhaps other than an earthquake in Haiti, disasters could be personal. Maybe the belief that people in Haiti don’t deserve our help is a disaster in itself. Maybe the fact that people could become so calloused or have their priorities twisted away from compassion is indeed a disaster.

That maybe the warning is also a warning to me.

Do you think it could be read like that?

That perhaps this serves as both validation and warning?

Do you find yourself in either camp? Both?