Word Of Life Church Podcast

Beginning at Bethlehem, Jesus enters the world of the wounded and is himself wounded. Yet there is a beautiful, sacred mystery: It is by those wounds that we are healed. In bringing our hurts to the wounds of Christ we begin to find our healing. But for this to happen we must first acknowledge our wounds, our own pain. In our culture we find this hard to do, because we are schooled in denial. We have been taught to deceive ourselves and deny our pains and our wounds. Of course that kind of denial only bottles up the pain until it poisons the soul. Depression, anger, addiction, sickness are what result from un-lamented pain. When we’re schooled in denial we earn a degree in how to stay miserable. But when we face our pain with honesty, when we grieve and lament openly, we open up space for the comfort of God, given by others, to come to us and heal us.

The Church is the society of Jesus. That is, it is God's alternative society built around Jesus. Within the various societies of the world there are pockets of the society of Jesus, consisting of baptized communities learning to live the Jesus way and embracing the politics of Jesus. As these Jesus societies are faithful to the Jesus way they are the light of the world, the salt of the earth. But if they are unfaithful, they become nothing more than religious versions of the wider culture. This is why our first task must always be to remain faithful to Jesus, not to be "effective" or "successful." At Word of Life Church, we want to learn to be a faithful society of Jesus in 21st century American society.

We inhabit a world of hurt. Pain is an ever-present possibility. Grief stalks us. This is not just true of people in third-world countries suffering deep, grinding poverty. This reality is not restricted to the victims of violent regimes in the Middle East. It is the human condition. Pain is no respecter of persons. It comes to us all. To take part in the journey of life, pain is inevitable and unavoidable. Part of our Christian hope is that God will someday lead his creation beyond pain. We have the hope of a world beyond hurt. But our present world is quite different. For now pain remains the price of admission into God's good creation. What we see in the Bible portraits is people who learned how to transform their pain. They learned that by grace we can transform our pain into a kind of grace: A grace that heals.

In the final track of the summer 2013 series, Finding God On Your iPod, Pastor Brian Zahnd examines the song “Show Me The Place” by Leonard Cohen. It is a serious and prayerful reflection on the Incarnation. If we drift too far into the realm of ideas and out of the realm of matter, we easily drift away from Christianity and toward Gnosticism. Christianity is an intensely earthy, material religion. God came to earth, not merely as an idea, but in the form of a man, with all of the dirtiness and pain that human life requires. God shares human suffering with us. He suffered sorrow, bereavement, betrayal, rejection, torture, and even death. This is the great scandal of Christianity: We worship a suffering, crucified God.

In the final Sunday morning installment of the 2013 edition of Finding God On Your iPod, the rock & roll foursome Alabama Shakes tell us that "you gotta hold on". Take hold of the life of the age to come... and hold on! We can't settle for the script of the old age; we must lay hold of a new way of being human. Jesus in his death and resurrection really did re-found the world. The powers and principalities with their ways and means of death have been overthrown. Believe that in the resurrection of Jesus a new world order has been inaugurated. Sometimes it's hard to see that God's new age has dawned, but hold on! The bitterness of death and the sting of salty tears is still with us, but hold on! The ugly specters of war, poverty, and injustice still haunt us, but hold on!

Our 21st-century Western culture prescribes consumerism to quench the thirst of our soul. The up-and-coming hip-hop artist Macklemore uncovers the fraud of such prescription in his track called Wing$. As consumerism is exposed, it leaves us wondering is there anything that can truly quench the thirst of the human soul.

Dave Matthews is someone who hungers and thirsts for justice. It's a theme that repeatedly appears in his songs. What Dave Matthews may not realize, however, is that the justice he hungers for is what the gospel is really all about. In the song Mercy, Dave Matthews sings, "Imagine that we could get it together / Stand up for what we need to be / Cause crying won’t save or feed a hungry child / Can’t lay down and wait for a miracle to change things". And in the song that immediately follows on the album, the recurring line is, "We gotta do much more than believe if we really wanna change things." We DO have to do more than believe and pray. But, we must believe and we must pray. We do this because believing and praying is how we are properly formed into agents of God’s mercy and redemption in the world. Jesus spent his time on earth in ministry changing the world as it was at that very moment. He did not have a focus of teaching people how to go to heaven when they die. Jesus insists that God actually cares ab

In the song Demons by The National, Matt Berninger sings about wishing that he could rise above his depression, hurt, and pain, but instead "stays down with his demons". Emotions like shame and anger, lust and loneliness, are human emotions. But, improperly processed and left unattended, these wounds can become the breeding ground for demons, such as addiction, depression, violence, and suicide. Jesus never blamed people for their sins or for their demons. Jesus came, not to condemn people for their demons, but to lift them out! Alone, a person may not have the ability to rise above their demons. But a person can always turn towards Jesus. You don't have to stay down with your demons. Jesus can heal you and set you free from those demons.

If Blowin' In The Wind is a modern psalm of prophetic imagination, The Whole Night Sky is a modern psalm of lament. The idea that faith is a means of avoiding suffering is a big con. It is popular, but it's simply not true. Faith does not give us an exception from being human. Faith does not prevent pain and suffering. What faith does is enable us to encounter God, even in our pain, and give us purpose. Our purpose it to become fully human, like Jesus. Jesus endured pain and suffering, but transformed it into grace and beauty. Jesus' faith transformed an ugly crucifixion into the beautiful cruciform. We will either transform our pain or we will transmit our pain and hurt other people. Faith enables us to transform our pain from something ugly and destructive into something beautiful and redemptive. Jesus saves us in our pain and suffering, not by taking us out of it, but by sharing it with us. We are not alone in our pain and suffering; God in Christ shares it with us.

Micah the poet/prophet was living during a time of economic prosperity, but he warned Israel and Judah of pending punishment. While judgment was coming, Micah expressed his desire to wait for the salvation of God. Much of the Christian journey is waiting. Following Jesus requires more patience than power. While many of us hate waiting, we find that in waiting we become more like Jesus. Waiting is the work of prayer where we create space for God to be at work. Prayer, corporate worship, and small groups are all places where we can wait on God.

Pearl Jam front-man Eddie Vedder has quietly written and recorded a number of acoustic-driven songs over the last six years, songs filled with meaning and substance. In 2007, he wrote "Society" for the soundtrack to Into the Wild, a movie about Chris McCandles, a young man who lived life off the grid. Vedder captures the spirit of McCandles who said good-bye to a world filled with greed and consumerism. Jesus gives us a similar call to exit a world of wealth, a culture of consumerism, and a society of stuff. Life, according to Jesus, does not consist in the abundance of possessions.

The Grammy-award winning, Philly-based, hip-hop band The Roots collaborated with Monsters of Folk to create a prayer in the form of a song. The heart of the song is the ancient question, "Why do we suffer?" Through artistry and poetry, the song wrestles with the classic problem of evil, that is, if God is all-good, all-loving, and all-powerful then why is evil and suffering still present in the world? In confronting this problem, we are well served by acknowledging evil instead of ignoring it, praying instead of simply reacting, and looking for solutions instead of assigning blame. In the end, while we do not find explanations, we do find hope in the mystery of our faith: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.

What are prophets? Prophets are channels, conductors, conduits of holy imagination. Prophets have enough of the spirit of God to imagine the world other than it is. They give artistic expression to an alternative way of arranging the world. Today we tend to call them poets—but prophets are really just spirit-filled poets. In Blowin’ In The Wind we have a modern day poet asking a prophetic question: “How many roads must a man walk down? The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.” But what does that even mean? Is the answer just too ethereal to grasp? Or does it mean the answer is right in front of us? Perhaps the answer is from the breath of God, from the deep spirit of God, from the blowin’ wind of God.

When we feel hurt, threatened, angered by a person, an incident, or some situation, we instinctively view it through a perspective of self-defense. If you are a non-contemplative person you will think your perspective is the total truth. We must have a change in perspective, or we will forever look at the world the same way. There are breakthroughs in perspective that occur through the practice of contemplative prayer that can happen no other way. Contemplative prayer is prayer without agenda and largely without words. In contemplative prayer, you sit with your problems and issues in the presence of Jesus. Jesus can give us an entirely new perspective outside of ourselves.

In his gospel John strategically places seven miracles of Jesus as signs to guide us. These signs are intended to point us to the right way to believe in Jesus the Christ. In the final installment of the Seven Signs In The Gospel of John series, we have a surprise. There is actually an eighth, hidden sign in John's book. It is the sign of new beginnings. New beginning is one of John's major themes in his gospel. And when we read the account of Mary Magdalene coming to the tomb early on the third day after Christ's crucifixion, only to find the tomb empty, we are seeing the new beginning of the world. Jesus Christ is the firstborn of the new humanity. In Jesus Christ humanity finds its second genesis. In Jesus Christ we recover our original vocation: to make the world a garden.

Jesus' received word that his friend Lazarus was sick and Jesus responded by waiting two whole days before he went to see him. During this time Lazarus died. His sisters, Martha and Mary, were grief-stricken. When Jesus went to see them, he did not lecture them or preach at them, but he entered into their grief, encouraging them and weeping with them, shedding the very tears of God. When he went to the tomb of Lazarus he raised him from the dead signaling the defeat of death, so that all who put their faith in Jesus no longer fear death, as the sting of death had been removed.

While there are those who have attempted to strip all of the hardship out of the Christian life, the reality is life is hard and following Jesus is hard. The Apostle Paul said he chose to boast in his hardships, calling some of his hardships a “thorn in the flesh.” Jesus said the way he was blazing for us with narrow and hard, so we should accept hardship and expect it. The hard is what makes life great. Indeed everything we call great was bought by the hardship of someone.

When Jesus’ disciples saw a man who had been born blind they asked the a question framed around blame. Who sinned? Who can we blame? Whose bad karma is this? The disciples belief was essentially that because something bad has happened, someone must have sinned, and somehow they deserved it. People who blame suffering on bad karma (and Christians do this all the time) still have mud in their eyes; they are still blind. Jesus is the light of the world. And his light brings a whole new perspective to the works of God. The works of God are not to assign blame and condemn the victim. If we will wash in the water of Jesus, we will get the mud out of our eyes and begin to see. It doesn’t matter who sinned; the way of God is grace and the work of God is mercy!

Often, we confuse God for a malevolent monster that intends us harm. Because of deep-seated shame the thought of God produces anxiety and avoidance and generates a “monster god” neurosis. This becomes the foundation for appeasement-based religion. The monster god narrative feeds into a wrong theology about Jesus— that Jesus came in order to save us from God. We are terrified of the One who is actually trying to help us. We mistakenly think the One coming to help us is coming to harm us. But the revelation of God based in Christ tells us something else: God is love! Jesus comes as the rising sun giving full revelation and dispelling the monster god. Jesus does not save us from God! Jesus reveals God to us! Jesus calls us into a world free from the monster god— A world created by the true and living God, the Father God who is love.

In Jewish culture, the sea is a representation of chaos and the origin of evil. The biblical Israelites were not a seafaring people. This is made evident by the way the bible uses the sea in metaphor. The book of Revelation the new earth has no more sea. Job, in praise of God, says, “God tramples the waves of the sea.” And in the book of Daniel, the author describes a vision of beasts that come up out of the sea. So when Jesus came walking on the sea to the disciples who were in great distress in the storm, it is a sign. It is a sign that leads us to life and informs our faith in Jesus. When we see Jesus walking on water on the rough sea in a dark and stormy night, it tells us that Jesus is Lord! When our life feels like a sinking ship and we are in a dark and stormy situation, we are not alone. Jesus will come to us and calm our fears. When Jesus comes to you everything will be alright!