Lectio: Luke 19:28-40
March 26, 2010
Cultivating and Sustaining Authentic Discipleship
March 15, 2010
The following an excerpt from my friend Tri Robinson’s new book, Rooted in Good Soil: Cultivating and Sustaining Authentic Discipleship, which will be released in Spring 2010. I first met Tri when we were both joining the Father in combating the wickedness of human trafficking. What I love about Tri is the authenticity and embodiment of discipleship that his life has witnessed to in terms of sustainable faith. He not only teaches about living faith in a sustainable long-term way, but in classic Wimber-ism, Tri is a small-”e” e-pistle, and his life and faith journey witness to how sustainable living is part of a sustainable faith. He and his wife Nancy have just built and moved into a Green ranch outside of Boise, Idaho. Tri is the founding senior pastor of the Boise Vineyard Christian Fellowship and a leader in the environmental justice movement of creation care. In November 2009, Tri and Ken Wilson were invited to Windsor Castle in the UK by Prince Phillip and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon as part of the Alliance of Religions and Conservation, which is a secular body that helps the major religions of the world to develop their own environmental programs, based on their own core teachings, beliefs and practices. They help the religions link with key environmental organizations – creating powerful alliances between faith communities and conservation groups. This is the first of several guest-posts that we will feature from Tri over the next few months.
____________________________________________________________________
Knowing how to grow a healthy bumper crop for harvest on a plot of land isn’t so much a matter of science as it is an art form. Farming demands a passion to create as much as the know-how to grow things. It requires a love and willingness for hard work, gratitude for God’s provision and a love for the gift and miracle of the earth’s soil. Maybe I’m wrong, but sometimes I think working the land somehow taps into and touches a hidden strand of ancient DNA that God placed in the human spirit for a purpose greater than growing fruits and vegetables. I believe successful farming requires not simply the rooting of various plant species, but more so, getting in touch with the very roots of human existence, realizing that all of humanity began with a lone working couple who were called to tend a garden that God had established. Genesis records, “Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. And the LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground-trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. – The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” (Gen. 2:8-15) Mankind was created with a built in love and even a drive to participate in the thrill of harvest; it has been in us all from the very beginning of time. My conclusion is that everyone has been called to farm and harvest in one form or another and because of it, bearing fruit in our lives is the only thing that really satisfies the authentic need for human fulfillment.
I’ve watched Nancy come alive this past summer as she has labored in our vegetable garden. She and Lily, our small golden lab, spend hours together day after day planting, carefully cultivating between rows, watering and pulling undesired weeds with an anticipation of a fruitful future harvest. Our garden is now becoming bountiful and beautiful and it is having the same effect on her. It is medicine to her soul and a sedative of peace to her fears and emotions. It is more than a plot of dirt but a place of healing, renewal and expectant vision. A garden is not only a picture of the Kingdom of God, but is a tangible means of learning about it.
The Bible tells us that the natural speaks of the supernatural, and because of it I believe the things we experience in a natural garden is characteristic of the things He desires for you and I. He wants us to become rooted and established in His (the Fathers) love, he desires for us to mature and grow in strength under the warmth and in the light of His Son, and to experience the refreshing and empowering of the Spirits’ rain. God made us for His spiritual garden, a garden that would one day be used in the process of producing a great harvest of human souls.
living the questions
March 2, 2010
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” - Hebrews 11:1
When I was in 4th grade (Miss Logan’s class! Go locomotives!!), I volunteered to be one of several students to be ‘blind-for-a-day’. We were blind-folded as soon as we got to school and paired with a classmate with sight, who would be our guide. This experience left quite a lasting mark on me. I vividly remember having to ask my guide for everything and about everything, and through our interaction, I learned that I could trust my guide. I learned it through asking and then living the questions I was asking, like:
- where is my pencil (like I could actually write anything?!)
- where exactly were we in the hallways? (and where was the restroom?)
- what was for lunch? (I trusted them to help me sit down in a seat at lunch time and that the seat was there…and that it was my lunch in front of me.)
…but probably my most vivid memory is of my other senses coming alive in Miss Howell’s music class as I experienced music without eyes and only with my auditory and feeling senses…I could feel the music! It made me realize that something that I could not see even with my eyes open had substance and verve and delved deeper inside me than merely my ear-drums. And while I was utterly dependent for almost everything from my guide to live this one day in a disoriented fashion without sight, I discovered something: there was substance to things I could not see, like music and fresh air and even closed air inside the building felt different than outside at recess; I could live by faith (trust) only as I allowed myself to risk trusting my guide and then actually step into the experience that hobbled some of my senses but activated others.
“…for we walk by faith, not by sight…”
2 Corinthains 5:7
The eternity in that teachable moment in my life has had a formational effect that echoes in my journey of faith. As I have reflected on it since that time, quite possibly because of that profound experience, I am comfortable with mystery and living out questions that I may not fully answer completely. I love this quote from Henri Nouwen:
“…we need to live the questions of our lives, both alone and in community, as we seek our mission in the world…frequently, we are restlessly looking for answers, going from door to door, from book to book, or from church to church, without having really listened carefully and attentively to the questions within…Without a question, an answer is experienced as manipulation or control. Without a struggle, the help offered is considered interference. And without the desire to learn, direction is easily felt as oppression.”
Pat answers are seen for what they are: unreal and unloving. Instead, as we interact with people who are truly struggling, I find this piece of advice from the prophet Jeremiah– as translated by Eugene Peterson in The Message at Jeremiah 23:25 – to be essential: “Instead of claiming to know what God says, ask questions of one another, such as ‘How do we understand God in this?’ But don’t go around pretending to know it all…”
Having studied and practiced spiritual direction for a few years, I have come to realize not only how important being non-manipulative is, but also how important the questions are – and following those questions by living in them, toward them in a centered-set kind-of-way; this means I need to trust Jesus. I think we need to trust God in our endeavours to live the questions. The advice the poet Rainer Rilke once wrote to a younger poet seems to ring true for us today:
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”