My name is Miriam. I am a Jewish woman and an orphan. I have no family that I know of. I was an only child and both parents died of some disease that swept through Jerusalem 10 years ago. At this time in Israel that gives me the status of a slave or lower. I am rather beautiful even if I do say so myself. Lots of men have told me so as well because to survive I have become a prostitute.

I am not a street walker. I have found a niche market you might say. You see, there are quite a few of the Pharisees that are not as devout as they seem and I have proven to be very discrete. Because of my willingness to keep what happens in my bedroom in my bedroom I have built up a significant clientele. That is I had a nice clientele until a few months ago.

See, I do a lot for my customers almost anything they ask but there are limits. One night this young Pharisee who is a real social climber wanted to cross those boundaries and I refused. He begged, then, he threatened and I still refused. Then, he turned white, ashen really. His hands began to shake and just when I thought he was going to beat me, he simply turned and left my house. I knew I was in deep trouble. I figured that the next stop for me was the street since I was sure the young Pharisee would see to it that all his friends would stop visiting me.

But much to my surprise the next night a friend of the young one showed up and laid his money on my dresser. Everything progressed as usual and we were in bed when the door to my bedroom came crashing down and five other men rushed in with my young Pharisee in the lead. They dragged me from the bed and told me to get dressed while they watched of course. They, then, began to shove me out of the house and down the road. I knew where we were going. I know the law. In a matter of hours I would be dead, beaten beyond recognition by boulders as large as melons thrown by men all of whom I had serviced at one time or another. But instead of heading out of town they turned into town toward the center. They hauled me in front of an other man. He couldn’t have been much over thirty. I heard one of them address him as Jesus.

That is what finally broke me. I still had my spirit even looking death in the face but when I realized that they were using me as some kind of bait before they killed me, I completely gave up. I laid face down in the dirt at the feet of this other man. I really didn’t hear what was going on. There was some yelling and shouting but the one called Jesus didn’t say a word. He looked down and was writing on the ground with his finger. Then, everything got quiet and he spoke. “Let the one among you without sin throw the first stone.” More silence.

I don’t know how long it was after that, that he reached down and lifted me up to a sitting position. There are no words to describe his face. He was beaming, smiling so broadly I thought his face would crack. His eyes didn’t look through me as much as they penetrated me. I knew that he knew who and what I was but here is the strange part. I couldn’t put it into a coherent thought at first. He saw someone else. Someone I didn’t know and he was enjoying being with that person.

I swear there was a chuckle in his voice when he said, “Where have all the men gone, the ones who wanted to kill you?” I replied, “They are gone sir.” Then he took me by the hands lifted me up and looking me straight in the eyes said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.” That’s when I looked down and saw what he had written on the ground, “Miriam”. How did he know my name? When I looked up he was laughing and walking away and I was alone. I didn’t know what to do.

To Be Continued

It is Friday afternoon and I am sitting in my wife’s hospital room where I have been for most of the daylight hours for the past three days. She just had her right knee replaced and is doing fine, well enough for me to begin to think about this week’s blog.

Last week I met with a bunch of guys from my church for a book study led by the Pastor. I wasn’t able to be with them last month so they brought me up to speed by explaining that they had decided that what a “win” would look like for us, the church leadership. It went something like a win is when there is transformation taking place in some or all of the lives of the congregation. This is pretty much in line with our vision statement that comes from Luke 4:18 and can be summarized by the initials PPBO, the Poor, the Prisoner, the Blind and the Oppressed. If you feed, bring release, give sight, and freedom to the people, transformation will happen. However, here is the question, “What is the best environment for this to happen?”

I am going to stop with this line of thought for a minute and go to another and hopefully they will come back together at the end. There is a web site called www.themoth.org. They publish a podcast that I follow fairly closely. This site is the web representation of an organization that started in Manhattan, New York. The founder started it by inviting some friends to his house for cocktails, then, someone would relate a true story from their life, told without notes. The third time he did this over one hundred people showed up and he had to move the next meeting to a larger facility on the island. I don’t know where the name, “The Moth” came from but that is how it got started. They now have several sites going in various major cities. They do road shows and most recently have produced a series of stories which got picked up by over 400 NPR stations across the country.

An evening at The Moth starts out with a cocktail hour followed by the story time. After the stories the people have dinner and swap other stories about their lives with each other. If you want to get an idea of what this feels like here is a link to one of the stories recorded live. Every time I listen to one of these stories I am struck by how engaged the audience is with the performer. Very often the material is funny or heart warming or heart wrenching and you can hear and even feel the audience reaction. I absolutely love listening to them. If you would like to listen to one go to http://www.mefeedia.com/watch/31396912 .

However, here is the point. What brought over 100 people together strictly by word-of-mouth to the founders’ home on that third meeting? What causes that kind of spontaneous response? What keeps the people around after the show? If you listened to the story did you feel a part of the group, maybe just a little?

I think the common denominator here is community. Even though this organization is completely secular, the response is the same. People are looking for a place to belong where they feel safe enough to be emotionally engaged. Both components are equally important. Safety must be integral to the environment. This is safety from exclusion and/or rejection. The other part is that the environment must provide a mechanism to engage the attendee emotionally.

So, I have come back to my original topic. If you want to provide an environment where transformation can happen it must be safe and emotionally engaging. This is true if you are theatre or a church. The temptation here is to launch into how we do or do not achieve this but I am going to resist. I would rather have you think about your church ministries and run it through the filter. Is it safe for everyone? Is it emotionally engaging?

Have a great week.

Ken

I haven’t written about a fingerprint of God for a long time. These are little signs or clues of the character of God that I see when I study His creation. Most of them are based in physics or astronomy.

I remember the first time I saw one. I was reading a book by Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe early in the morning and heard the Spirit say, “What you just read is what I am like.” I was dumb founded. I knew right there that God, creator of the universe had spoken to me and I sensed His pleasure at my finding the clue that He had left behind. I have been watching for them ever since.

I was so excited about this experience that all I wanted to do was share it. After all, a joy not shared is half a joy. But when I did, for the most part, I got blank looks. I couldn’t translate the insight to the point where someone else would get excited about it as well.

This lack of response had a dampening effect over time on my zeal to see “His Fingerprints” until last week. Last week I read two things that relit the spark. One was in the fourth chapter of Abba’s Child by Brennan Manning. Brennan was talking about “Christ’s present risenneess”. By this he means how we need to see Jesus as risen from the dead and with us now. He gave several concrete examples of clues that he, Manning, had seen and interpreted as evidence that God was alive and active in His life. Later in the discussion he quoted Fredrick Buechner, who, after seeing what he considered to be a ‘fingerprint’ said, “. . . . What it meant to me, what I chose to believe it meant was, you are in the right place, the right errand, the right road at that moment.”

How cool is that? These things that some consider coincidence or non-sense, if seen through spiritual eyes may be not only clues of what God is like but they may also be bread crumbs meant to encourage and lead us home.

The second thing I read last week was in an introduction to quantum mechanics entitled, How to Teach Physics to Your Dog by Chad Orzel where I saw another fingerprint. Now, I should say that what I really needed to say today was that we need to practice seeing life through spiritual eyes and rejoice in the clues about God that we find. So, if you stop reading now I will understand. But if you are feeling benevolent read on.

In his book, Orzel, makes the point that everything can be described by an equation called a probability waveform. This mathematical statement says that all particles or objects have a probability of being everywhere in the universe. It may be 1 or it may be 0 or any other value but it has a value everywhere you look. So, everything has a probability of touching everything else. All of our probability waves are entangled.

While thinking about this it dawned on me that, this is what God’s ‘omnipresence’ is like or at least it is a way to think about it. Gods’ wave function has a positive value everywhere in the universe and it continuously intersects with mine and yours!

Omnipresence has always been one of those things that I had trouble wrapping my mind around. But here is a fingerprint, a sign post if you will that points directly to this divine characteristic. If this is too esoteric for you, I’m sorry, but it speaks to me.

Have a great week and if our waveforms should happen to go to 100% at the same place be sure to say hi.

One of the ways the Lord has been changing me over the last couple of years is an increasing desire and ability to love and accept people. I think this change is directly proportional to the amount of His grace I have appropriated into my life. In other words as I accept and understand how completely God loves and accepts me exactly as I am, I feel myself exhibiting the same attitude toward those people God puts in my life. This subtle shift in my direction has changed my personal understanding of evangelism. I have mentioned before that all I am called to do is demonstrate what God is like by mirroring His love and acceptance and leave the rest to the Holy Spirit.

I was with two people recently who are becoming friends of mine. God has un-mistakably put them in my life. I have no expectations for them other than that they become convinced that I love them and accept them just as they are. We were attending a wedding together and during the ceremony the bride and groom served communion to everyone in the audience who wanted to participate. The usual invitation was given, something like; “If you accept Jesus Christ as Lord and savior you are welcome to the table. If not please abstain from participating.”

Now, two things made this awkward, one is that the audience was asked to come forward to receive the elements from the couple and the second was that my two friends are thinking, conscientious people who make no profession of faith. The result was that they both felt excluded. It saddened and angered them. It devastated me. It was exactly the opposite of what I was trying to do.

I have been thinking about this ever since. It made me rethink what the evangelical church does with this sacrament. Why is it so exclusionary? Tell me, if someone who does not know Jesus is presented with an opportunity to experience a ritual commemorating His martyrdom, would He turn them away? Does Abba ever reject any movement toward Himself even if it just comes out of curiosity or social pressure? I don’t think so.

There is the one scripture in 1Corinthians where Paul is admonishing the Corinthian church about how they were observing the sacrament. In this discourse he makes the statement that some of them were eating and drinking in an unworthy manner. We have turned this into a full-blown doctrine.

Context is everything. In the verses ahead of this passage it is clear that the Corinthians had turned the observance into a glutinous meal where people were crowding others out in order to get their food first and others were getting drunk. It wasn’t about the sacrifice of the Lord as much as it was about satisfying the appetites for excess. I don’t think Paul was talking about not letting someone participate who genuinely wanted to be there.

I know, who am I to fly in face of hundreds of years of church tradition? Smarter people than I established this doctrine to begin with. Well, I am not after a revolution either. I am just trying to live out the effects of Gods’ grace in my life. As a result, my method of judging whether something is God-like or not has become rather simple. If it is loving it is of God. If it seeks to modify behavior it is me interpreting what God has said in order to gain more control and it certainly is not Godly. At the moment, I cannot see “fencing the table” as a Godly practice.