Month: April 2018

I drive around north central Ohio for my job, logging hundreds of miles a week. Recently, I have noticed a new trend – people with yard signs for their church.

I understand the importance of spreading the message of the kingdom of God. But these signs raise a question for me: what kingdom are they trying to build?

It seems people might be more concerned with promoting their church than the Kingdom. I will be the first to admit we cannot fully know people’s hearts and must exercise caution when evaluating motives, but what is the intent of these signs?

This is what I “hear” when I encounter them: My church is better than the church down the street. Consume our religious product because it’s more appealing.

I also wonder who is the audience for these signs. Some would argue these are to attract people who don’t go to church. But does a yard sign promoting one specific church encourage someone who hasn’t been to church in years – or ever – to get up on a Sunday morning and venture into this strange land of “church.” I fear that more often than not, these signs result in church swapping rather than Kingdom growth.

This is not to deny that someone may visit because of these signs or that they are wrong. They just don’t sit right with me.

I am more concerned with people experiencing the Kingdom of God than convincing them to visit a kingdom on the corner of First and Main. I would rather they encounter the love of I AM by being extended grace and mercy in the community than sitting in an hour long service.

I write these words acknowleding there is power in the gathering of God’s people. There is extreme value of belonging to a community where people can be honest, vulnerable, and loving.

The concern is that attempts like these signs potentially water down our message and our mission. They might cause us to focus on building the wrong kingdom. And in the process, we might become more focused on who is coming to our church instead of how our church is going out into the world to restore Shalom to all of creation.

On this day nineteen years ago, I received a phone call that would change the rest of my life. My dad called telling me my mom had been killed in a car accident less than a mile from home, the place where I type these words today.

Until that day, death had always been more distant. I lost grandparents, aunts, uncles, and others. But that day, it was the day death took up residence in my home. No visit home would be the same. No phone call would find her voice on the other end. The woman in whose womb I grew and from who was I born was gone.

Death was much more present from that day forward. While driving I would often think about someone hitting me. Death found itself on my mind more than ever. Fear, fear of death and suffering, was a constant companion.

During my years in full-time minstry, death continued to take up residence. A mother of four dying from a brain tumor while her children were still relatively young. A worship leader’s unexpected death from an unforseen heart issue leaving behind his wife and three children, one of them yet to be born. A youth group member killed in a tragic car accident and the memory seared into my mind of standing next to the parents as they received the news. A child killed while sleding when he was hit by a truck. The death of my brother-in-law from a heart attack, right in front of his wife and children.

These are certainly not all of my encounters with death, but most of the deaths above occurred in a relatively short period of time, driving me into a depression I told no one about for quite some time.

I subscribed to our American narrative about death. You know the one. We don’t like death. We talk about it as little as necessary. We leave it up to professionals to deal with things like handling the corpse, dressing the body, and preparing it for a proper viewing. We like death as clean as possible.

I believe this is part of the reason we worship youth, health, and medicine in our culture. We want to be young forever, aging serving as a reminder of our mortality. I think it’s one reason we place our elderly in nursing homes. We strive to be healthy, telling ourselves the lie that if we stay healthy, we can cheat death. I am not opposed to taking care of our bodies, but not for the wrong reasons. We often believe the medical profession will save us from death, contributing to our nation spending countless dollars to extend life a few weeks or months, regardless of the quality of that life, seemly to prove that we can beat death.

The reality is, death is unavoidable, an integral part of life.

My relationship with death has shifted from fear to embrace over the last three years, starting December 5, 2014. On that day, shortly after 11:00 in the morning, I stood next to my father, told him I loved him, held his hand, and witnessed his last breath. For the next few hours, I sat there with my dad’s body as family members stopped by.

I slept in the room with my dad the night before, waking several times to look at his body, weary from the cancer that had overtaken him.

Holding my dad’s hand that morning, I was holding death’s hand, too. My journey with death took a turn that morning. The fear exascerbated by my mom’s tragic car accident was overcome by the peace in the moment my dad’s body stopped working. It was a sacred moment.

Since my dad’s death, I have learned to embrace death. Not a desire to die, but no longer a fear of death. Over the last three years, my dad’s death has served as a catalyst, freeing me to face fears that paralyzed and haunted me for years.

Today, death walks with me every day. We hold hands and journey together. Every breath I take, one breath closer to my last. Every morning I awaken, one sunrise closer to my last sunset. Every moment, one step closer to my final moment of life.

This may sound morbid, but it’s actually quite the opposite. Walking hand in hand with death has removed the fear. I die a little every day, making the need to live even more critical. I don’t fear death anymore because my death will simply be the final step in a journey towards death that I walk every single day.

Between now and then, I will live. I will live the abundant life that Jesus speaks of. Death has taken much from me throughout my nearly five decades in this world, and I am sure death will take more before I die. But I will have the last laugh, for I am already holding death’s hand and am half a step ahead.

On Good Friday, I participated in a walk through Sandusky with a group of people from various churches in the area. We walked about a mile and half, stopping along the way to reflect on the words of Jesus from the cross and pray together.

During each leg of the walk, someone in the group had an opportunity to carry a full-size cross that we carried the entire mile and a half.

I was one of the people who carried the cross. While walking with the cross on my shoulder, I thought about how Jesus felt carrying his cross, envisioning how it must have been, treated as a criminal, walking to a sure and painful death.

His crime? Loving his neighbor. Standing up against the power structures of government, religion, and royalty. Punished for his unwillingness to play their games of control, power, coercion, and domination.

In a world where the outsider and outcast were exploited and excluded, Jesus feasted with, healed, and welcomed those the power structures sought to minimize.

But Jesus was more than a social reformer. He came to turn the world upside down and usher in the kingdom of God. To create a world where swords are turned into plowshares, enemies become neighbors, the last becomes first, and true power comes from humility and sacrifice.

For a few minutes on Friday, I experienced a little more palpably what Jesus felt on that lonely walk on a Friday two millennia ago. It was indeed a Good Friday, because it was the day I AM showed that overcoming sin is accomplished not by trying to be morally perfect, but by laying down your life, loving your neighbor, and forgiving even those that brutally murder you.