Messenger & Message: Unleashing the Voice

Went to church today, tired & wiped out from the long day yesterday & the later night of staying up late to process thoughts & feelings & to move from realizing that I wasn't all lonely & depressed & something was wrong me, but I was just tired.... had a harder time connecting with church/the order of service today. Likely it was the tiredness, maybe it was more... spent some time trying to sing, listening to comments on the sound quality of the band. We'd mixed in with another church today so there were a lot of 'strangers' around & it felt less homey & more like we were trying to show this other church that we were still a viable, vibrant spiritual entity instead of a collection of friends who somehow refuse to stop hanging out with each other... and who are somehow drawn by this experiment of finding community & living out love to the world around us.....

... I spent time reading in the end of Leviticus, wanting to find something about ritual, but instead hearing about blessings & curses, about the land keeping sabbath, about eating from the 'old stock' before you needed the new crops... cried at a David Crowder lyric of 'Majesty. Finally' - the "Finally" word made my heart ache in the middle of my tiredness, somehow hoping for the day when everything will be 'finally', where God will make things 'right' in His own sense & will wrap up history as we know it... mostly it was a longing for journey's end - or more for things to make sense... maybe it was just that this week was a helpful clarity week & I had my own 'finally' on some things I've been carrying & wrestling in my heart for a while & it's been nice to let my thoughts/heart rest & be at peace with life & who I am.... so for me, maybe I was carrying around my own sigh of 'finally' & the tears were just resonance to that....

We were asked to pray about something(?). The person at the front spoke something about seeing the spirit move & about how we needed iron to sharpen iron & stuff & then said we should pray into that & honestly, I thought I was listening to what he was saying, but didn't have a clue to what he was talking about. I thought about yelling to him to clarify, but hesitated 'cause it 'wasn't polite'... & then I found the others around me didn't know what we were doing either & so called out to the next guy who stepped up to the microphone who tried to explain it, but sounded like he maybe didn't know either.... so we prayed for the people around us....

... then had a sermon from Luke 11 about the neighbor who keeps banging on the door late at night, asking for bread & that the person who is in bed will get up & serve this neighbor, not out of love, but just 'cause he's being put out by the persistent neighbor who won't leave him alone. This somehow comes in the middle of a talk on prayer by Jesus & I sort of don't understand what part of God's heart this is suppossed to show. The speaker talked about how this shows that we need to be persistent & bold in our praying. I ended up half listening to it all & reading/skimming through most of Colossians. The phrase "Christ in you, the hope of glory" has been weighing with me as I think thoughts of our authority as individuals & Christians... I keep mulling over the idea that it is living with the reality of Jesus living His life in & through us that truly radicalizes our life... That it is less about trying to contort ourselves to be Christlike & instead realizing that Christ indwells & the Wellspring of all power & authority somehow takes up residence inside each of us & is just waiting to be unleashed.... Reading Colossians with this mindset seems to completely change the focus/meaning of the rest of the words in this letter of Paul...

and so at the end of the message, after I've closed my Bible at the end of Colossians, I hear this voice in the background proclaim "I am a visitor here & I have a message for the church from God".....

... and there is always the dual reaction when I hear this. Part of me wants to believe, wants to hope that God has brought some mystic prophet into our midst to explain everything, to make it make sense & give this great clarity for life. But the other part is skeptical. I've heard lots of people claiming to be God's voice & they've been speaking for their own benefit, trying to feel important, to feel heard. I've maybe done it once or twice, but sure hope it's been a minimum of times... Most times when God speaks He doesn't need to tell you it's Him speaking, you kind of already know 'cause of the way He talks to you & the way that it strikes to the very core of you....

...so this young guy steps to the front... white shirt, black puffy parka/jacket with a light brown fur rimmed hood, tight grey touque pulled just over his eyes, camouflage baggy pants, earphones hanging around his neck. He looked like some white rapper with angular European features. He spoke with an accent that I pegged as East European, but others said was French. He paced back & forth, part caged animal, part master showman. His diction & voice rose & fell as he made each point, emphasis in all the right places better than most of the televangelists I've heard....

...but the young guy spoke with power & conviction. He called the church to 'wake up'... he spoke of how he's part of a church that's been rejected by most in the city. He lives in the places where the homeless live, where prostitutes come to rest, where people are killed & burned alive. He talked of how he's asked God's heart for the city & 'seen' the streets of Calgary filled with blood. He spoke of how the place of the church is with the poor & needy & cried out to us to believe, to believe that God could heal, that God could set the prostitutes free who walked just outside our front door. He asked if we believed these things or just talked about it. He spoke of seeing hundreds of people healed, of seeing devils cast out in Jesus name. He talked of how he was once one enslaved, but is now free, a sinner saved by grace like all of us. He spoke the message to the church of Laodicea & talked about how the world needed the church while the church spent time in bed asking not to be woken or disturbed... He spoke of how the fear of the Lord is missing in the church. Spoke of how everything comes down to love, but that there is still this thing of the 'fear of the Lord that brings wisdom' that is needed in the church today...

In the end one of the gals asked to pray for him & so we gathered to pray over him & bless him & surround him with love. I prayed for a greater release of authority & power, prayed that this guy would be surrounded with community, prayed thanks for God sending a messenger & that the message would seep into each of us....

... and yeah, as the praying started to close, the young man, named David, headed off to go help load up speakers for street church.... and then the discussions began.

Most of us checked in with each other & asked what we thought. Most of us were trying to weigh it all out through discernment, to see if there was something 'wrong' with his words or whether this was a message to be received or not. Across the board everyone said there was no 'check', there was nothing that raised red flags that this guy was full of it... As I described to a friend, the guy may have been crazy, but he was at least Biblically crazy - nothing he said sounded anything different than anything written in the Bible...

The gal who asked to pray for him wanted to show David that he was loved & was likely 'preaching to the choir' & so he didn't need to be on the defensive...

..and then in the middle of our conversation, another guy walked up to talk with us, the same one who spoke of the outpouring of the spirit & iron sharpening iron & said some things like (& take this with a grain of salt, I'm a bit of a reactive person, so maybe I'm misquoting/misunderstanding) : "I didn't think we should be saying things like this guy is the 'messenger of God'....that stuff can go to someone's head. I mean, I think this message was from God, but maybe that's the only message from God he'll get & so he shouldn't be thinking that everything he says is from God." "I'd like him to come back & all - he sure can't expect to do that any time again, but it'd be good if he came again."

...and yeah, I nearly started swearing at him... they maybe caught it in the way my voice went up a number of notches as I strained to hold back the curse words... "With the whole messenger of God thing, maybe the problem is that we need to realize that all of us are God's messengers. We come here & sit in our (insert strained out curse words here) chairs & just listen & don't say anything & maybe if we all got up like that & really said what was going on, then we wouldn't need to worry about elevating someone to "messenger of God" status" - and yeah, that's a total misquote of what I said, but it's the best I can do... I remember the nearly swearing before chairs/pews, but yeah, the rest of that is what I was trying to get at..... maybe the actual quote held no weight 'cause it seemed to fall on deaf ears....

All morning I'd been weighing out a friend's dream & the interpretation of it & it seemed to align so much with the events of the day & the response of the people.... For some, David's words lit a fire in them & awakened boldness, repentance, longing, hope, love - the church as in the heartbeat of God dwelling in the hearts of men & women - was moved; we cried, we ached for this dream of living as the true church - full of love, full of power & miracles to bless the world, to help the poor, to free captives, to make blind eyes see & the lame walk.... the child within us that remembers the sunday school stories of walking on water, commanding storms to be stilled, healing lepers with a touch, this child awakened & remembered the truth of who we all were & are &, most of all, the truth of who He, Jesus, is....

....but at the same time, the 'crab bucket' effect happened... we were called to be silenced, to not hope, to not reach, to not proclaim that we'd heard God's message 'cause it didn't fit in the patterns of the church order, or didn't come from 'leadership'.... we didn't want to honor the messenger 'cause maybe we'd find this messenger was flesh & blood & fallible like all the rest of us....

and yeah, Colossian talks of this:

"Therefore as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him,having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in your faith, just as you were instructed, and overflowing with gratitude.

See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form, and in Him you have been made complete, and He is the head over all rule and authority; and in Him )you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ; having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised up with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead......

....If you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, why, as if you were living in the world, do you submit yourself to decrees, such as, "Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch!" (which all refer to things destined to perish with use)--in accordance with the commandments and teachings of men? These are matters which have, to be sure, the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body, but are of no value against fleshly indulgence. " (Colossians 2: 6-23 (skip a few in the middle)

The whole of chapter 2 (& the whole 4 chapter letter) is great & powerful. Read the whole thing. I

Rich Mullins' said this in his introduction to "The Color Green" on the "Pursuit of a Legacy" video:

"It started out with this guy who was yelling at this kid for running in the "house of God" , 'cause he was running through a church building. And I, uhm, thought that was funny because I think the Bible is fairly explicit about that 'earth is God's footstool and heaven is my throne, what kind of house can you build for me?" I think it's pretty explicit that the body of Christ is also the house of God, that we are the temple, that it has to do with people and not with buildings. I've often thought, you know, people worry with the catholic thing of revering Mary, uh, and I've often thought that maybe it's not that they revere Mary too much, maybe it's that all of us revere each other too little."

I don't know where the church lost it. Somewhere in the past we read words about all of us being 'kings & priests', about all of us having access to God, about being able to knock on his door at midnight or call him like we'd call up a friend. We used to believe that God would pick fishermen, tax collectors, zealots, prostitutes, murderers & would somehow redeem them & put His words in their hearts & the average, ordinary, everyday men & women could speak the truth & shake the foundations of the systems around us built on lies & the oppression of the poor & needy...

...but somewhere we traded this in for clergy & laity, for the concepts of an informed elite & a dumbed down & dumb (silent) majority of listeners who would look to the clergy as the 'messengers of God' & who would forget that they are all the living word, that the message of the risen Christ blazes inside their chests & waits to be unleashed in love & power on the world around....

... this past week I spent time at the community house for an encouragement night where we were to speak 'nice' things about each other. As I thought about the people around me, the common factor of what I really loved about each of them came down to two things 'heart' (as in the expression of their emotions/passion/dreams & drive) & 'voice' (as in the expression of their words, the expression of their core being as they live out who they really are)... and really the two are maybe the same... again, it's Mary & Martha... Mary being the heart stuff, the inward things, & Martha being the voice, the outward expression of an internal heart reality...

...and yeah, in this place I 'reverenced' each of the people in my own way (to relative levels of freakiness). In my heart of hearts, I sat there in awe of what each of them spoke... and again, these are very normal people, very real people, but.... wow... they are great people... people who have been 'seized by the power of a great affection'... people who live in love & who walk in the tension of being finite humans inhabited by an infinite God.... fragile frames of dust with an ever expanding heart & voice that is filled continually by the wellspring of the divine until they nearly explode.....

... and so as I look at this, I wonder why our voices seem so silent in the organized structure of church.... there must be an unleashing of each of us. We bear the shekinah flame, the cloven tongues of fire, the glory of God, the risen Christ dwelling in each of us... This heart, this voice, cannot be bound, or chained.... His heart's been loving, His voice has been speaking, since before time began....

...and as we join as friends we hear the edges of this heart/voice. We still feel awkward when anyone points out that we sound like Jesus.... and at 'church' (as in the official sunday thing), we sit quietly in the background waiting for permission to speak....

..this has got to change... in me & in all of us. In my grumpier days (a year or so ago) I thought that maybe the solution for my frustration with the church/life was that I just needed to yell at people more often.... maybe that's not quite so far off.... maybe it's not the yelling at people as much as it's just making my voice heard... God spoke through Balaam's donkey/ass... being the messenger isn't a great honor, God can speak through any ass & does all the time... but it's the message that has to be heard (though there is a great reality that the heart of the messenger is hard to separate from the message - Mary & Martha live as perpetual sisters in our minds eye, the tree & fruit go together)...

...and so maybe the first miracle coming is that the mute will speak... that the voice of the church (all of us too quiet, too polite 'laity') will be heard, that we'll start to live as Kings/Queens & priests.... & so God, loosen our tongues, unlock the words you long to say through us - spoken or through our actions.... unleash the voice....