Jonathan Martin

Courage is one of the great virtues to aspire to in antiquity.  And while I’m certain courage looks differently for people of the cross than other folks, I still think it’s an awfully good one to aim for.

I have never done anything particularly courageous.  That is not false humility nor fishing for compliments.  I flatly do not live the kind of life that requires a great deal of courage, and I can objectively acknowledge that.  I’m okay with that because I think most of the acts of heroism God calls for are small acts of faithfulness.  But who doesn’t want to seize the moment to do a truly courageous thing?

Since I talk for a living more or less, about the only thing courageous I know how to do in my work is to tell the truth.  I think it’s immature to use words recklessly–Jesus Himself was called the Word of God, and He’s also the one who said that every idle word we speak would be subject to judgement.  Words are sacred trusts.  So I don’t look for opportunities to use them for battle.  But it has of course always been the case that speaking the truth as best you know how will get you into trouble.

One such moment in my decidedly non-courageous middle class life was when I gave a speech on the Church of God General Assembly floor that caused a near-riot.  I am a big believer in women in ministry,  from my understanding of Scripture, my experience of great women of God, and my Pentecostal tradition (which apparently many within the tradition don’t understand or appreciate).  I don’t feel like recounting the whole thing, as I’ve done it elsewhere.  But needless to say my words were fiery and the reaction was harsh.  From it came one of my favorite little compliments, however, and I hope you don’t think me crass for passing it along in this context.  One of the guys on our executive council looked over to another as I was told later and said, “MAN! That guy has got some balls!”  Thankfully in his case, this was meant favorably and not merely to imply impertinence.

There have been plenty of times at home where telling the truth as best as I know how has caused me to take some heat. I’m thinking about the people we lost over 2008′s Politics of Jesus preaching series, where I told the truth about how our allegiance to God’s kingdom has to transcend any and all other alliances.  It wasn’t partisan, but apparently there are still plenty of folks who care more about their vision of America as a nation-state than they do seeing God’s kingdom come and will be done on earth as it is in heaven.  I was okay with that.  And by no means did I make everybody happy with my recent series on Revelation, as I had occasion to remember recently.  It was one of the more thorough, accurate and text-honoring pulpit studies I know of, even though it goes against a lot of the more recent (and flagrantly unbiblical) “wisdom” on Revelation that’s been circulated.  Totally okay with that too.

But again, I’m a middle class white guy.  I’m not persecuted, or even close enough to persecution to understand it.  So there is nothing heroic in any of this.  I have enough of a prophetic streak that I love the idea of standing up against bullies, and from time to time I get to do that.  Those days the work is kind of cool, I must admit.  But the more I get to know about God and myself, what I’m learning is that the most courageous and difficult speech I must exercise is not so much in telling off the powers that be as telling on the powers in me.  It is far easier to tell the truth about somebody else or something else rather than the truth of my real life.

Even as I’ve read as of late biographies of great prophetic leaders who spoke out on God’s behalf against worldly injustice, telling the raw truth of where and how they were struggling to live out the gospel themselves always seems to be a difficult thing.  And of course to a point, we are given a message that is bigger than our own lives, and there is wisdom in not making it more about us than it is.  On the other hand–telling the truth about where we are and where we’re not, how the gospel is transforming us and how it has not yet transformed us, is perhaps the most courageous thing most of us can do.  (That’s not just for preachers either.)

I think these days that if my voice is not going to ring hollow in the times and places where I have to speak out about ______ (fill in the blank), it can’t be credible if I’m not willing to speak out against the lies in me.  Or equally, to expose the places I see God’s light at work in the world, to bear witness to the light as he is exposing it in me.  The temptation is to allow there to be just a little bit of distance between myself and the texts I’m preaching and where I’m living–even just a crack.  This may not sound like a big deal to you, but closing the distance between the two takes pretty much all the courage I can muster.

There won’t be many minutes that will pass until you have the opportunity to do something heroic with your story, to be courageous enough to tell what God is doing and/or where you are struggling.  I think if God can trust us to exercise enough courage to do that faithfully, He can trust us with other courageous things down the line.

I just finished reading John Irving’s masterpiece A Prayer for Owen Meany, and I have no intentions of getting over it anytime soon.

I am admittedly late to the party on this contemporary classic tale of two boys “bonded forever by childhood, the stunted Owen Meany, whose life is touched by God, and the orphaned Johnny Wheelwright, whose life is touched by Owen.”  It is the most haunting novel I’ve ever read.  I would put it on the same high and holy shelf with Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (now and always my favorite book across genres) and Frederick Buechner’s Godric.  These books have convinced me, while I am not a fiction writer, that it is impossible to capture the beauty and force of the gospel in non-fiction as powerfully as in fiction.  There is a reason that it was the stories Jesus told (and the story Jesus was) that kept the crowds coming back.  There is a reason that the gospels devote such considerable attention to Jesus’ own practice of storytelling.  There are so many things about the Father Jesus came to reveal that simply could not be told or lectured about–the only medium that would work for God’s heart to be revealed to humans was “let me tell you a story.”

I consider preaching to be sacred work, and I try to perform it with due reverence.  I have felt, and in fact felt it again preaching on the road in Oakland, MD this weekend–the alien presence that is God’s Spirit come upon me and take my words places I could never aspire to take them on my own.  Preaching is foolishness, but it is the foolishness God has chosen to proclaim the gospel.  And yet I am so aware at the end of a book like Owen Meany or Gilead of how inadequate the format is to tell God’s truth with the elegance of a fully-orbed story.  If I felt like I could communicate as much gospel in one sermon as I get in a book like this, I would be tempted to retire tomorrow.

So alas I’m writing under the spell of a powerful witness.  Like all great faith in fiction, A Prayer for Owen Meany mines the depths of our doubts in order to take us to the heights of gospel hope.  Like all great faith in fiction, it has magic and mystery and wonder that cannot be fully accounted for in human language.   It would be a criminal act to share anything here that would spoil Irving’s novel for you; I wouldn’t consider such a thing.  Go buy it today and read it for yourself.

But as it is Thanksgiving and I haven’t had the time nor inclination to post a list of things I’m grateful for or whatever, I did want to at least offer a bit of a Thanksgiving meditation via A Prayer for Owen Meany that requires little context to understand nor significant spoilers to communicate.  It comes late in the novel from the mouth of Johnny Wheelwright.  You don’t need to know anything about the characters referenced to get the sentiment revealed:

…I’ve become the kind of believer that Pastor Merrill used to be.  Doubt one minute, faith the next–sometimes inspired, sometimes in despair.  Canon Campbell taught me to ask myself a question when the latter state settles upon me.  Whom do I know who’s alive whom I love?  Good question–one that can bring you back to life.  These days, I love Dan Needham and the Rev. Katherine Keeting; I know I love them because I worry about them–Dan should lose some weight, Katherine should gain some!

As it is Thanksgiving, the question at hand is “who’s alive whom I love?”  It is indeed a gift that can bring us back to life.  To have people to cherish and people to worry about and people to miss is an unspeakable gift.  God revealed Himself uniquely to us through Jesus of Nazareth, the uniquely begotten Son of Love.  There will only be one of Him.  And yet the miracle of incarnation, even as we now begin to set our sights on Christmas, is that God keeps on making Himself known through flesh and blood.  In the absence of an incarnate Jesus as He was experienced in the gospels, we are given the body of Christ.  More specifically, we are given the gift of bodies, the many people who comprise one body as mysteriously as the three in one God.  As Father, Son and Spirit are one, as are we.

The love and heartache we share with and for each other is evidence of God and evidence of grace.  For each of these gifts in my life today (and by that, I mean people), I bow my knee to give thanks.

“Then he said, ‘Let me go, for the day is breaking.’

But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me.’”–Genesis 32.26

It’s one of the most enigmatic passages in the Bible.

Jacob has a mysterious encounter with an angel.  He wants a blessing from him.  In order to get it, he wrestles with the angel all night long.  When the dawn breaks, Jacob has the blessing he was looking for–but he’s also got a dislocated hip.  He clung on through a tumultuous dark night of the soul, and he got was he looking for.  But he walked away with a permanent limp.

I’m more convinced than ever before of the generosity of God, of the ways He delights to give good gifts to His children.  But if you walk away with a blessing, blessing won’t be the only thing that marks you.  There is still the dried blood and unsightly bruises that come from the long night of wrestling.  Gifts come without strings attached, but that’s not to say they come without consequences.  It’s why so many people will happily go through their lives keeping the greatest blessings at an arm’s length.  Because intrinsically we know that blessing is on the other side of struggle, that blessing is on the other side of the dark night.

If that makes you want to stay home, you’re in good company.   Many strong and competent people have chosen the path of least resistance, deciding it is better to walk away without bruises or broken bones.  They have pragmatically decided it is better to keep the safer blessings they have rather than taking the risk of having to stare down God, the devil and themselves.  And make no mistake–the dark night of the soul will involve wrestling with all three.  In the midst of it, you really don’t know if you are going to make it to sun-up.

It sounds so sterile and truncated to narrate the tale even now: “Jacob wrestled with an angel all night.” It sounds so straight forward, so uncomplicated.  But how could wrestling with angels be uncomplicated?  Night complicates most everything to begin with.  And don’t you know how long a night can feel?  The way that time seems to slow down at night?  In the middle of the night, temperatures shoot up while hope plummets.  If it feels like our lives are in perpetual fast forward sometimes, sleepless nights feel like an endless instant replay–where it is fear and regret that are in slow motion.  Given all of that, it is difficult for me to judge anybody to harshly for wanting to avoid something as terrible as having to stare down God and their own demons.  I understand all too well the desire to avoid bruising.

And yet there still is the reality of blessing, the promise that lies on the other side.  That if you just don’t let go–for it is not necessary to win, only to not lose hold of the one you’re wrestling with–that the blessing is as extravagant as the night is long.  That the bliss is as sweet as the night is painful.  Blessedness is a feast that can only be tasted by those who’ve first tasted the acerbic taste of their own blood in their mouth.

When you’ve been wrestling all night for a blessing, it may be difficult to say that you would do it all over again when the dawn breaks.  But to say that you’re glad you didn’t let go and you hung on for dear life is not the same thing as saying you’d volunteer for it again.  You are glad you didn’t let go.  You can’t escape the truth that the sacredness of your own life has been enhanced not only by the blessing, but even by the wrestling itself.

The truth is, blessings that don’t come with bruises–victory that doesn’t come with a limp as a trophy–will neither be particular sweet nor memorable.  Granted, there is the soreness inherent in a night of wrestling.  It is true that long after the night is over, the slightest movement may trigger the familiar pain.  But with the wince of the wound also comes the visceral reminder of blessedness.  What a fascinating phenomenon: that every time Jacob stepped awkwardly, you couldn’t tell if he was wincing or smiling–and maybe he was doing both.  Because every step would now have the message of blessedness and belovedness implicit in it.  To have that message contained in your joints may well be worth a thousand of years of long nights.

In short, if you have no limp then you likely have no blessing.  Or at the very least without a limp you are unaware of the blessings you have, which is likely just as bad.  I am at this point far more inclined to think that walking with a limp but knowing the blessing is decisively better than walking whole without the blessing.

If you are in the long night of wrestling, there are neither strategy nor steps I could give you to end it faster.  But strategy is not needed–perseverance is.  You wouldn’t remember steps if I gave them to you, not when the night gets dark and long enough.  But you can remember this much: don’t stop until the sun is up.  You can remember that the reason for the wrestling is not because God is out to kill you, but that He’s really wanted to bless you all along.  You don’t have to do anything to earn the blessing–you cannot be strong or powerful enough.  You just have to stay in the ring, and the dawn that creeps up when the wrestling is over will take care of the rest.

“Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.”  Psalm 30.5

At 33, this seems like a good year to be a man–except it seems to be God’s timing in my life to make me into a real boy.

Coming full circle to the kind of joy, imagination and freedom that I experienced in my relationship with God when I was riding my bike in circles at the end of the street has been the theme of this past year.  More concisely, understanding the depth of who I am in God (as opposed to merely what I do for God) has been/continues to be the revelation of my life.  There may be childish things we are supposed to leave behind, but there seems to be boyish things I’ve got to pick back up to be the man I’m supposed to be.  And after all, the kingdom of heaven is available only to children.

When I was a boy who not only knew God but knew that God knew my name, I was good at imagining and creating in my head.  And in many cases, telling those stories out loud when I was on my bike.  My bike was my time machine, where I was able to enter a world where I owned pet robots and saved gorgeous blondes in futuristic jumpsuits from intergalactic danger.  It was a good thing to always be in the center of an adventure–it was a good thing to aspire to be a hero for somebody else.

Of course as we age, we settle for far less than heroism than what we aspire to when we are children. Reality has a way of grinding that out of us.  When you’ve got bills to pay and errands to run, there is not as much time to devote to thinking about how you might save the world.  Or how you might save the girl in distress by doing karate in the back alley, or untying her from the rail road tracks and carrying her over off over your shoulder in just the nick of time.  It is difficult to imagine, by the time we’ve acclimated to real life, to have the faith or imagination left to daydream about doing anything heroic.  We seldom have the time or the creativity we came into the world with, and this almost seems good to us–we are “more practical” now, more pragmatic, more “grown up.”  This is all tragic of course, since realism will pretty much keep you out of the kingdom of God altogether.

The tide of normal is always drawing us out to a sea of noise and distraction that keep us from having to think deeply about who we really are or who we are called to be.  To keep us from dreaming about what we might still become when we grow up.

And yet the kingdom of God compels and the world around us demands that we not settle for a life incapable of inspiring anyone.  It is true that the heroism God calls for will often be through small acts of faithfulness.  But it is also true that small acts of faithfulness change the world.  When we allow space for Sabbath time, silent time, and time spent with people who deeply move us, we can still have the capacity to stir up sacred imagination.  We can gain the divine perspective that allows us to no longer see ourselves as passive spectators to the world we’ve been given, but active participants in the ongoing drama of God’s redemptive work in the world.

It’s a lively, interactive, choose-your-own adventure story we are caught up in, not a static script we’ve been assigned.  But we’ve got to become boys and girls again for God to re-imagine the world through us.

I am conscious that I’ve publicly and privately lauded The Birth: A Reflective Celebration of the Coming of Christ so loudly and so often that I might seem like a hype man.  The good news is that I have no qualms about being the hype man for The Birth, as I genuinely believe it’s the most unique beautiful and provocative theatrical event in our city.  While it’s going into its sixth year of production, The Birth is still navigating uncharted territory.  It’s still dodging the clichés and kitsch of contemporary Christmas productions, as well as the self-conscious artiness of independent theater.  It’s still avoiding easy categories and still walking the tight rope of profound faith and honest human expression.  The Birth is still working its magic on me, refusing to let me enter the holidays on either sentimental or cynical terms.

Nathan Rouse is the creative life-force behind everything that is The Birth, and his courageous performance only gets more textured with every year.  He conceived the original production from the words of Frederick Buechner’s elegant Magnificent Defeat (Buechner being my favorite living writer!)  The creative team around him has familiar faces this go round (faces of people I love: Shelley Jones, Josh Spence, Rodney Kennerly, and Kate Rouse), but has significant additions: the great local talent James K. Flynn and Renovatus Worship Arts Pastor Sarah DeShields.  (Aside: She’s been brewing up magic of her own in the studio with her new EP, The Pilgrim Way—and I can tell you it’s stunning.  Between Sarah’s album and her role driving the musical portion of The Birth, it feels like a long overdue breakout from our Scottish minstrel.)

While The Birth has never been a direct product of Renovatus Church, it’s the most beautiful artistic representation of the vision we’ve always had for faith and the arts.  So while I don’t claim to be without bias towards Nathan and the cast (they are like biological family to me), I’ll tell you just how powerful I think The Birth is: It makes me a believer in the Christmas story year after year.  Whatever doubts I might accumulate or shadows might dance in my mind, the truth of the incarnation of Jesus is never more tangible than when I walk into the crisp winter air after another performance.  I can believe the word became flesh because the word grabs a hold of my flesh at every show.

I love the fact that The Birth requires no context or church back story to be appreciated on its own terms—as demonstrated in the tremendous response we’ve seen from mediums like Creative Loafing in recent years.  But since I am a pastor and my primary sphere of influence is in the faith community, I am especially passionate about getting local ministry leaders out to the free Pastor’s night preview The Birth is offering this Thursday night, November 17^th, at 6:30 and 8:30pm at Renovatus (1209 Little Rock Rd., Charlotte, NC 28205).  Not only will you have the opportunity to bear witness to the latest incarnation (pun intended) of this remarkable theatrical experience before anybody else, but to participate in a talkback session after the performance I’ll be leading personally.  I’d love to see you there and enter into the magic with you.

Mystery can’t be maneuvered or else it would stop being mystery, but I can tell you that in 5 years of performances I’m always finding new reasons to get the shivers before its over.  If you are a ministry leader, click here for more info/to sign up: http://thebirth.net/pastors/  I can’t wait to see you there!  It’s an event I deeply believe in, and we are honored to host the magic for one night only before the show opens formally at Duke Energy Theater.

I couldn’t wait for my grandmother to come over to our house.

She was the sweetest and strongest lady I ever knew, and I would light up the minute she walked in the door.  As an only child, I guess I’ve always been “blessed” with, um, a big personality–and I couldn’t wait for her to come back to my room for me to put on a show.  There were magic shows.  There were high drama super hero church services, campmeeting on steroids, where Hawkman would sing in a trio with Flash and Robin.  I would preach, and the Green Lantern would get saved.  Or Aquaman would get the Holy Ghost.  I lived for the times she would come over and I could share with her all of the things I held most dear.

After I’d been going on for awhile, she would inevitably speak the words I both loved and dreaded to hear: “Okay Jonathan–I can stay for ten more minutes.“  It was always a bittersweet moment.  It marked the finite nature of the time we had (“only ten more minutes”) and yet felt like I had been given this unexpected bonus (“Hey! I’ve got ten more minutes!”)  Whenever she said it though, I didn’t waste any time in angst about only having ten minutes more.  I lived those last ten minutes out loud for all they were worth.  All the energy, silliness and showmanship I could muster crammed into this tiny window of time, the happy weight that this time was precious time, this was marked time–this was holy time.  I couldn’t afford to waste it.  “Ten more minutes” was time to be more alive than usual, because I was suddenly aware of what a precious commodity our time together really was.  What’s troubling is how often our time is not marked at all–there is nothing sacred about any of hours.  Because our time (especially with those we love) really is a finite, fragile thing, whether we acknowledge it or not.

I think the worst thing that can happen to any of us is to live from one assignment to the next or one place to the next, always watching the clock waiting for the hour to be over.  I of course still have meetings/calls/moments in my life that cannot end quickly enough, I have hours I want to only escape.  But as we age, grow and develop, we also come to feel the magnitude of moments we hope will never end.  Which is why it’s a really good idea to learn how to recognize them and how to live in them–and most of all, not to end them until you absolutely have to.

It is a rare and precious gift when its time to cut the lights off–but you’re given ten more minutes:

I know it’s late and we should all go home–but I can talk for few more minutes. 

I guess we’ve got time for one more song… 

I’ve got an early morning tomorrow, but…

I don’t know who or where or what gives you that kind of childish delight.  I’m only asking that when you are there and in that moment, and you realize there is e-mail to check and phone calls to return and errands that need to be run–make time for ten more minutes.

There is plenty of time that we have mismanaged, there are many minutes we will one day consider misspent.  Those last ten minutes are not likely to be among them.

I’ve spent my life in places where there is a whole lot of talk about faith.  I’ve got no complaints about that, because faith is a very good thing.  Faith makes the world go round.  There are plenty of reasons to talk about faith, celebrate our faith, build our faith.

Whenever preachers want to talk about faith, we always go to the “hall of faith” found in Hebrews chapter 11.  It’s where the enigmatic author recounts the all-star cast of faith heroes from the Old Testament, all that they believed and all that God did in response to their belief.  It’s a beautiful and moving text.  And yet there is one verse that always has a way of pricking my skin, the upraised nail I’m never quite looking for.  It does nothing to cheapen or lessen the impact of the sweeping statement on faith–it only gives the message depth and texture.  Verse 39 says, “These all died in faith, without having received the promises and having welcomed them from a distance.”

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is where faith throbs and aches every bit as much as it motivates and inspires.  God keeps His word.  Faith is not empty, as Hebrews tells us it is tough and substantial–you can put your weight down on it.  But you don’t always get to see the fulfillment of the promise.  And you certainly don’t always see the fulfillment on your own schedule.

That’s why its so difficult for us to know how to speak about faith in a way that makes sense.  NPR used to call their Sunday religion show “Speaking of Faith.”  The show is still about religion and ethics, but now they are calling it “On Being.”  I know that given the broad nature of the program across the spectrum of ideas and religion, faith in its former context was used to speak broadly of belief.  I’m not sure what motivated the change.  I can only say that it is harder to speak of anything than it is to speak of faith, that when when we do speak of faith we rarely do it well.

When we speak of faith, we sometimes oversell it.  In my tradition we had the season of: “Name it and claim it, blab it and grab it.”  Think hard enough about what you want–wish hard enough for what you want, and click your heels together three times.  Or send an accompanying check to my ministry.  And we can turn that faith into a pot of gold.  Get your level of faith up to the requisite level, and its automatically done.  God Himself is not even necessary in this process.

But when we speak of faith, we sometimes undersell it.  Faith is optimism.  Faith is seeing the glass half-full instead of half-empty.  Faith is looking at the sunny-side of life.  Faith is believing you can become the next American idol if you believe in yourself really hard.

In both scenarios, faith gets trivialized.  The truth is, faith is weathered and tough.  My image of faith is not of Big Bird on Sesame Street and more like a chain-smoking, scarred old gun fighter.  It’s precisely because faith is so tough that it can take such a tremendous beating.  It’s precisely because its been so assaulted by the elements–chipped at, battered, assailed by nature and by man–that faith is an undefeateable force.

Because when every other virtue is stripped away…when every thing else has been lost–even your own life–faith still remains.  The sort of faith described in Hebrews 11 cannot be undone, even by death.  Because it is faith that says, even I don’t live to see it come to pass with my own eyes–I know that God is still going to do it.

Faith like that is not easy to come by, and if you come by it I don’t suppose it’s easy to hold onto.  Because faith is by nature wild, it will buck you like a bronco, it will make you hold on for dear life.  Real faith is big enough to trample you.  But it’s powerful enough and tenacious enough to outlast you.  If hanging onto faith doesn’t kill you (and maybe even if it does), it will live longer than Methusaleh and bring life into the darkest places of human existence.

Numbers 23.19

God is not a human being, that he should lie,
   or a mortal, that he should change his mind.

Has he promised, and will he not do it?
   Has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?

I only have one permanent scar on my body. While it is hardly a major disfigurement, it feels like a mark God gave me.  Not as severe as the limp Jacob got from wrestling with God all night–more like a divine tattoo.

In the 5th grade, I attended Paw Creek Christian Academy (in the very same building where I’m sitting right now behind a desk.)  We decided to give Paw Creek’s private school a try during the heyday of the controversial Rev. Joe Chambers, because it was just up the street from my house and, unbeknownst to my parents, I heard they sold Pepsi products at lunch in the cafeteria (whereas the Free Will Baptist school I went to before didn’t allow sodas at all).  That was my secret motivation for coming here.

It was the only year of my life where I got in trouble in school.  The teacher paddled me one day for cutting up in class.  I remember the school as being entirely safe from corrupting influences like “laughter” or “fun.”  The guys had to play basketball wearing sweatpants in the gym even though it was all same gender in the room, that kind of thing.  School chapel was largely consistent of speculative end-times nonsense.

One day, I was waiting on my Mom to pick me up after school out in front of the main building.  Horsing around, I was jumping back and forth over the small brick wall that mark the grass off from the sidewalk.  Stumbling, I gashed open my shin on a brick.  I don’t recall it as being horribly painful so much as horribly bloody.  It was deep enough to the bone that the bleeding just would not stop.  It probably needed to be stitched up, but I did everything I could to get around going to the hospital.  It didn’t heal well, and became a pretty unsightly scar.  It’s still visible, though in my adult years it became much less so.

So what a mysterious thing it was when God saw fit to drop Renovatus at 1209 Little Rock Rd., right smack in between the house I grew up in and the middle and high school I would later attend here in West Charlotte.  I run a church from a building where my bare butt got smacked, a place where I once bled in the parking lot. That seems oddly appropriate as a pastor now.  Pastoral ministry is inherently bloody, messy work (and any so-called preacher who attempts to do this without getting blood on them really needs to get out of this business).  I presume I’ve picked up scars on my soul more profound than the one on my leg from this same property, because that is what it is to love people well.

It’s a small thing of course, but a way I feel I’ve been marked by God.  In a metaphor destined to make the Joe Chambers of the world tickled pink, it’s not unlike Harry Potter’s lightning bolt scar.   I think generally scars are often more than the sum total of tragic memories.  Scars speak of identity, scars speak of calling.  Scars speak of the truth of a man beneath the deception of his clothes.  No wonder when Paul writes to early Christian communities, he is always speaking of the scars he has accumulated from persecution for the sake of Jesus’ name.  The message embedded in our scars, the code encrypted implicitly beneath ruptured skin, is not just of our pain but of God’s faithfulness.  Scars tell the story of who we really and where we really come from, even when we refuse to speak the truth with our eyes or our lips. Like the rings on the interior of a tree, everything you could ever want to know about a person can be read from their scars.

It’s not exactly an icebreaker for a party, and not the level of community we even consciously want.  But if I want to know who you really are, there’s nothing mysterious about how that discovery process will work.  It’s a dangerous and impolite question to ask…but if I really want to know you, I’ll ask you to show me your scars.  And if I really believe I can trust you, I may show you a few of my own.

When Jesus is mixed up in the story of our scars, this need not be an unhappy affair.  Swallowed up in the story of Christ’s resurrection, every scar is absorbed into the visible wounds on His hands and on His feet.  In him, scars aren’t just stories.  Scars are testimonies.

When nothing else in my life (including my words) rings true, then I can always rely on my scars to tell the truth.

This week, the Church of God lost one of its giants.

Dr. Walter P. Atkinson was a renown pastor, preacher, and administrator, a former member of our denominational Executive Committee who served the Church on almost every level.  He was known for his sharp wit, his wholly original sermons, and his inimitable mannerisms.  Well I say they were inimitable—though I certainly spent plenty of time trying to imitate him.  When he got wound up preaching, clearly both enjoying the Lord (as well as what he had just said!), he’d fold his arms and say “Great God” with a voice like James Earl Jones.  That was my personal favorite.  My grandfather loved to hear WPA do that as much as I did—I can see his ears and face turn red just to tell about it right now.  He also had some wonderful quotes that are still in my vernacular to this day: i.e., “Stupid like that doesn’t just sneak up on a person.”

During the years that Dr. Atkinson served as Administrative Bishop for the Church of God in Western North Carolina, I came to know him in a different way.  My father was the State Evangelism and Home Missions Director underneath his leadership, and they became the best of friends.  From the day he arrived, he took an unexpected interest in me.  He was there for almost every major event in my life—including coming to see the Gardner-Webb University production of The Miracle Worker wherein I met one Amanda Keen, the show’s lead (though we were not yet dating at the time.)  I remember during my freshman year of college coming to him concerned about my buddy down the hall who had lost his faith in God and was talking to me about ending his life.  He gave me counsel about anything and everything.  There was really nothing that interested me that didn’t seem to interest him, even though he was leading over 300 churches in our region and working at breakneck speed all the time.

But my favorite memory of Dr. Atkinson was when he asked me to go places to preach with him.  I was still in high school at that point, and had no inkling of a call to vocational ministry.  He would call me at random to ride with him to speak at some church across the state, endlessly indulgent of all of my doubts and questions and curiosities.  I remember one night in particular where he took me with him to a very conservative Church of God where the state was doing a rally.  It was one of those churches where the women still don’t wear make-up or jewelry or pants, the kind of old-line holiness church that made me feel uneasy by default.  He wasn’t of course intimidated by any church or anybody, and that night he preached the house down.  When he was done delivering the sermon, he gave an invitation for people to come forward for prayer.  And as the people flooded to the altar, he did an unexpected thing: he asked me to come alongside him and lay hands on the folks that came down.

I can’t begin to tell you how uncomfortable I was with this arrangement.  The product of a lifelong lover’s quarrel with God, perpetually stuck in a sense of inherent unworthiness, I had no confidence in my ability to pray for others in that way.  I never felt “spiritual enough.”  I remember going to campmeeting services where we had healing evangelists pray for almost everybody in the house, watching one after another “fall out under the power.”  By the time the mutli-hour altar service was over, the place looked like a civil war battlefield with bodies strewn across the auditorium.  That is except for me, bobbing up out of the water amidst the divine chaos, the one guy who didn’t “fall out” or even feel anything much.  My inability to enter into such experiences didn’t make me question the validity of them for others, only to question my own spirituality.  At any rate, I had deep reverence for the crazy-eyed prophets who did that kind of ministry—laying on hands, praying for the sick, exercising seemingly herculean faith.  Dr. Atkinson was one of those men who had the authority and unction to pray for people with holy boldness.   Still very much figuring out my relationship with God and nowhere near knowing anything of God’s call on my own life, I did not aspire to share in this sacred act.

But Walter Atkinson believed in God’s hand on me when I didn’t see it on myself.  And he believed in my capacity to touch God’s throne when I didn’t know if I could touch God at all.  Most mysteriously, he believed there was something at work in me powerful enough that my touch could bring something of God’s power into somebody else’s life.  I doubt the impact of such a thing on the shape of my life at 18 years of age is something I could fully quantify—then or now.  I can only hope that I will impact some confused kid somewhere (whether they go into vocational ministry or not) in the way Walter Atkinson impacted me.

One last thing about this tender man who became one of my grandparents in the faith: I will miss his feisty side.  I think anybody who knew him at all could attest that he could be a polarizing character, because he didn’t treat church leadership like professional politics.  Walter P. Atkinson said whatever he thought most of the time.  While gracious, he wasn’t the kind of man who would shy away from a fight.  He had the kind of integrity that meant he acted in complete accordance with his convictions all of the time.  That meant that while he was admired and respected by so many, he was also capable of making an enemy.  But he loved his enemies as faithfully as he loved his friends.  His legacy reminds me that needing to be liked too much by everybody all the time is probably a criminal offense in church leadership.  What I wouldn’t give for more leaders both as loving and wonderfully cantankerous as Walter P. Atkinson.

I look forward to our reunion in the resurrection of the body, old mentor and friend. You will be dearly missed.

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”  The Apostle Paul, I Corinthians 13.11

“Young enough to know the right car to drive, old enough not to put rims on it.”  Jay-Z, “Thirtysomething”

By most standards, I’ve lived a privileged life.  Not an extravagant life, but no less a privileged one.  As such, I’m suspicious of myself if I register anything that sounds like a complaint–when I feel like I’m so perpetually stared down by the blessings of God.  I never want to lose perspective on that.

But if I’ve ever not had perspective on anything, it’s not that I see the glass as half-empty.  We did this animal personality test with our staff, and then all happily claimed our representative counterparts.  Mine, unsurprisingly, is an otter–big heart, high spirited, fundamentally optimistic.  I don’t know if that really ever changes much at all or if it should.  I only know that I’m not a young otter anymore–that the mostly blind sort of optimism and naive cheeriness that has marked the first half of my life is probably not making it into the second.  I used to think if you lost your naivety  you’d lost everything, but I’m re-thinking that.  What does it mean to be a seasoned otter, a weathered otter, an otter with a few callouses?  I’m not old, but I’ve often said I’ve been aged in dog years by the church.  And like Jay-Z, well if nothing else I’m “old enough.”

I’m old enough to know unexplainable tragedy strikes without mercy to very good people, as was brought home to me last week at a funeral for a 7-year old girl named Molly we’d all been praying for.

I’m old enough to know what it’s like to have thought I heard God say somethings that either I didn’t really hear Him say, or otherwise feel like I got strung along.

I’m old enough not to trust people who’ve never been heartbroken.

I’m old enough not to believe everything always works out right in the end, no matter what.

I’m old enough not to offer platitudes or words at all to people around me that are suffering, only my presence (and hopefully, God’s).

I’m old enough to believe that loving any person deeply will inevitably lead to a crucifixion in the end.

I’m old enough to think that anybody who claims to know exactly where they’re going or even how they got to where they are is probably wrong.

I’m old enough not to take everything I hear at face value, even and perhaps especially if I was the one to say it.

I’m old enough to understand Hebrews 11.39, “These all died in faith, without having received the promises and having welcomed them from a distance.”

Someone asked a professor of mine once what to do with the verse in the Psalms where David said he had never seen the righteous forsaken or His seed begging for bread, given that there are documented times where God’s people had to beg for bread.  His response was simple.

He said that when David wrote that line, he just wasn’t yet old enough.