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Holy Week: Glory

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John 17

Reading John 17, I was left thinking about the words glory and glorify. These words are used quite a few times at the beginning of this chapter – 5 times in 6 verses. They are “churchy” words that we’ve all heard before. We kinda know what they mean and we kinda don’t. John’s Gospel is filled with these kinds of abstract words and concepts. Eternal life is another one , which pops up in these verses as well.

I did a little digging and found a pair of words that are closely related to glory and glorify: magnificence and magnify. Magnify is a word that is a little more concrete for us to get our heads around. When we magnify something what we are doing is enlarging it so that we can get a better picture of what that something is up close – its particular characteristics, its dinstinctive qualities, its unique essence. In short, magnifying  helps us to see something more clearly.

A similar dynamic is at work when we glorify something. To glorify is to enlarge something so as to see its splendor and beauty all the more clearly. Take as an example an athlete. Let’s say, Roger Federer. For the Fed to be glorified is for everyone to see and recognize the greatness of his talent and elegance as a tennis player. His talent and elegance are already and always there; they just need to be drawn out or shown-off so that they can be recognized and known by others. That’s what it means to glorify.

So, this is what Jesus says he came to do – to glorify the Father. In Jesus the beauty and character of God is enlarged. It is magnified. And it is important to point out that Jesus says these words as part of his farewell prayer. After praying this prayer, Jesus begins his harrowing journey to the cross. Before he sets off on that road, Jesus asks of the Father, “Glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you” (John 17:1). With the shadow of the cross hanging over these words, Jesus is saying, “Father, as I am lifted up on that cross, beaten and broken, would your beauty and power be enlarged for all the world to see.”

We as believers are the answer to that prayer, for on the the cross we say that we see the character of God displayed in all its brilliance and glory and magnificence. 
And this ends up being what eternal life is all about. As Jesus says in verse 3, “This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”

As we head towards Good Friday, may we get our microscopes out and focus in on the cross. May the glory of God be magnified for us as we gaze on the man who hangs on it. And in so doing may we find ourselves entering ever more deeply into the life that is eternal.

Amen.

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Holy Week

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As we enter into Holy Week, here is a reading schedule that follows John’s narrative of Jesus’ last days:

Monday (4/10): John 17 (the whole chapter)

This chapter can be read as a last will and testament of sorts. It expresses Jesus’ final wishes in the form of a prayer. He prays for those he will soon leave behind and not only for them, but also for those who will one day believe because of their witness. In other words, Jesus lifts us up in prayer as well.

In pondering this passage it may be helpful to do some deep work on the things that Jesus hopes for his disciples (which includes us). In doing so, may what Jesus wants for us reorder our disordered wants and loves.

Tuesday (4/11): John 18:1-27

These verses are filled with betrayal. There is Judas, of course, who (in)famously betrays Jesus with a kiss (Matthew 26.48, Mark 14:44, Luke 22:47). Then there is Peter, who denies Jesus not once, not twice, but thrice. Both fail to remain true to Jesus, but they do so for different reasons under different circumstances. In spending time in this passage, we might consider how we are vulnerable to the same pressures that pushed Judas and Peter to turn their backs on the one they both called Lord.

Wednesday (4/12): John 18:28-19:16a

As we continue on in John 18, we find Jesus being interrogated by Pilate. If Peter’s denial of Jesus shows us a certain kind of cowardice, we are confronted with another kind in Pilate. It is a kind that is able to hide behind power and security so as to put off making a decision on the truth Jesus testifies to. Is it possible that there is a little Pilate in us, refusing to accept or putting off the truth that confronts us in Jesus?

The other character that finds a prominent place in the narrative is the mob who cries, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” (John 19:6). Pilate’s failure stems from a fear of upsetting popular opinion. Those who demand crucifixion seem to be enraged by the audacity of this poor carpenter from Nazareth who would dare upend and uproot their expectations of what a Savior should be and do. At least they understood that’s what Jesus was up to. The question we might put to ourselves is, “Are we as perceptive as they?”

Thursday (4/13): John 19:16b-42

Here we come to the crucifixion. Jesus is lifted up on a Roman cross between two criminals. John also tells us that some soldiers took his clothes and divided it among themselves. So there hangs the King of the Jews, bloodied and beaten and naked for all to see. And there at the foot of his cross there is a new family forming, of those who come to mourn the death of the crucified King. In reading this portion of Scripture, may we count ourselves among those gathered there and may we spend some time reflecting on just what is meant when Jesus breathed his last and said, “It is finished.”

Good Friday Service (4/14): The Seven Last Words of Christ

Our hope is that our journey through John 18-19 will prepare us well for Good Friday. If you’re in the area Christ Kaleidoscope will be holding a service from 7PM to 9PM at Rancho Senior Center (3 Ethel Coplen Way, Irvine, CA 92612). We will be designing prayer stations based on the 7 last words from Christ.

May we blessed by the reading of God’s Word this Holy Week.

Grace and Peace.

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Three to Read (Mar. 8, 2017)

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This week’s Three to Read contains some explicit language. But it is explicit language used to help us discern what is going on in the wider world, as well as uncover what so often goes unnoticed in our own.

The word is bullshit.

It’s probably a word we say under our breath whenever we hear Trump open his mouth. And so the first article is entitled, The Bullshit of the Trump Administration. It asks the question, “What do we mean when we say someone is “bullshitting”? In answering that question we are better able to see how bullshit differs from and is more dangerous than simply lying.

The second article wants us to know that There’s One Thing Pope Francis Wants Christians to Give Up for Lent. It’s easy to point out all the nonsense coming out of the White House, but Lent is a time where we turn the finger back on ourselves, when we stop staring at the bird turd in our neighbor’s life and start cleaning up the steaming pile of bullshit in ours. (NOTE: The harrowing passage about Lazarus that Pope Francis references is Luke 16:19-31.)

The last reading is just some practical advice on How to Break a Bad Habit That’s Holding You Back. For many of us, our problem is that we just do the same crap over and over and over. As the saying goes, bad habits are so easy to make and so hard to break. This article will give us a good starting place to do the latter.

As we continue in this Lenten season let us keep in mind what the first article concludes: “The bullshitter is the greatest enemy of the truth.” If Jesus is the Truth, as we Christians claim him to be, let us not be his greatest enemy when it comes to our witness of him in the world.

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Three to Read (Feb. 27, 2017)

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This week, instead of 3 readings, there’s just one. And the reason is, its a little long, at just over 2,000 words.

The article is about reading the Bible…or better yet, about letting the Bible read us. I think there is a lot in it that can help us broaden (and maybe even simplify) how we read the Bible. And if you read closely, you’ll find a lot that connects with the talk Esther gave this past Sunday on hearing from God.

Here’s a quote from the article:

Go back and read [the] passage again. But this time, be open to receive whatever God has for you. Don’t manipulate God; just receive. Communion with him isn’t something you institute. It’s like sleep. You can’t make yourself sleep, but you can create the conditions that allow sleep to happen. All I want you to do is create the conditions: Open your Bible, read it slowly, listen to it, and reflect on it.

If you didn’t know Lent starts this Wednesday, Mar. 1. Lent is a season where we subtract something so that we can add something new. One thing we could try is to get rid of something we know is a time-waster so we can carve out some space in our lives to create the conditions that will allow us to receive what God might be saying to us.

Happy Reading!

  1. James Bryan Smith: Who’s Reading Whom?

 

P.S. If you would like a passage to contemplate, try Matthew 25:14-30 or Matthew 25:31-46.

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Sweetly Broken

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Today we have a special post from guest blogger, Brandon Chuang (Ken’s son). Brandon is currently attending optometry school in Boston. His post is a timely one as we head into Lent – a season of self-reflection as we consider our own sinfulness that led to Christ’s death and crucifixion.

Luke 7:47

“Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven–as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.”

I love the NIV version of this verse. I feel that it perfectly captures my greatest struggle, acceptance of the full extent of my brokenness.

We’ve all had those piercing moments. Those moments where the weight of our transgressions comes crashing down on us. It could be something from the past, triggered by something you saw while casually perusing social media. It could be falling, yet again, into a pattern of sin you swore off so many times. These are largely the ways in which it’s manifested in me, but it could be anything.

The past two weeks have been 2 of the most emotionally and spiritually difficult weeks of my life, and I don’t want to minimize that. I’ve been barraged with sins from my past that I’d swept under the rug unknowingly. It’s not that I didn’t confess them to God and ask for forgiveness, but I never let my heart experience just how vile these sins were. I made excuses to minimize them. “Everyone goes through this, it’s a normal struggle.”

My constant coping mechanism stems from this idea that, “I’m not that bad of a person.” This can also be referred to as, “I don’t need that much of God’s grace.” And it has worked as a temporary fix, temporary being 25 years of life. However, as I’m growing older and continually being faced with the magnanimity of my sins both past and present, “I’m not that bad of a person” really doesn’t do it anymore.

These past two weeks, God has been forcing my hand, and I could no longer defend myself. “I’m a really, really, broken, messed up person, and there’s no excuse for all these things I’ve done.” In that moment, the standards I’d set for my life and my self-image were shattered… Yet it was this “crying out” that opened my heart to even more of God’s forgiveness and love, it was what He was waiting for.

We need to understand the degree of our brokenness to fully understand what God’s love and grace covers and redeems. And let’s be clear on one thing, I do NOT fully understand my own brokenness. I don’t think I ever will until I see Him face to face, but I firmly believe a tell-tale sign of maturity is the deepening of our understanding of our own sinful nature, coupled with the further surrendering of our lives to “the One is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine.”

Only when we have been forgiven much, can we love so boldly.

It’s been 3 days since that desperate cry. Already, I feel myself reverting to my old ways. It’s okay. I know it’s a process, a lifelong one at that. I want to encourage you, friends, to fully embrace your brokenness, knowing our God redeems and restores us.

I recently re-uploaded Sweetly Broken by Jeremy Riddle to my Spotify playlist as a reminder of these past 2 weeks. “At the cross You beckon me. You draw me gently to my knees and I am lost for words, so lost in love. I’m sweetly broken, wholly surrendered.”

I pray that these words mean more and more to me every day, and I hope they bless you as well.

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Three to Read (Feb. 21, 2017)

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Here is this week’s Three to Read. The first is a Q&A interview with Old Testament scholar, Walter Bruegemann. He is asked some difficult questions about some pressing questions facing the church today. His responses may be a bit provocative and bring up more questions than answers. By doing so, hopefully, it will spark some good conversation.

The second article, takes us back to a recurring topic we have been discussing as a community: Noise and Distraction. And it asks: What is it costing us spiritually? (You’ll hear more about this in the coming weeks as we head into the season of Lent.)

The last article is a kind of devotional commentary on the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). It would be worthwhile to take some to read this post alongside the passage in Luke to help you reflect more deeply on a familiar story (and our current political climate).

  1. “It’s Not a Matter of Obeying the Bible”
  2. The Spiritual Cost of Distraction
  3. Does Your Heart Break Like a Samaritan?
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Three to Read (Feb. 14, 2017)

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Each week I’d like to try and give three hand-picked blog posts or articles that I found interesting or informative from my explorations around the web.

For this week, the first two articles are related to some of the things we talked about on Sunday – namely, sleep and reading as basic spiritual disciplines we ought to try and incorporate into our daily routines.

The third article is an insightful (somewhat academic) exploration of what it means to have “the mind of Christ,” a phrase the Apostle Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 2:16. It’s written by my New Testament professor from Fuller seminary, Marianne Meye Thompson (loved her!). It’s a bit long, but well worth the read.

1. God Wants You to Get Some Sleep
2. 8 Ways to Read a Lot More Books This Year
3. The Mind of Christ in the Gospels

Happy Reading!

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Stephen Colbert vs. Ricky Gervais on God’s Existence

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I came across this clip form the Colbert show the other day, where he had Ricky Gervais on. Colbert brings up the topic of God’s existence and here’s how their debate went:

Gervais gets a rousing applause after saying this:

“If we take something like, any fiction, any holy book…and destroyed it. In a thousand years time it wouldn’t come back just as it was. If you took every science book, every fact, and destroyed them all, in a thousand years they’d all be back; ’cause all the same tests would be the same result.”

On the surface, there seems to be an undeniable logic at work in what Gervais is saying. Science is more “true” than any truth found in a holy book. Why? Because you can prove it over and over and over and over and over.

Colbert even seems persuaded by it. He has no rebuttal except to say, “That’s good. That’s really good.” (Or maybe he just got caught up in Gervais’ charming and alluring English accent!)

But as I thought about it some more, the logic ends up being rather hollow. The truth of a holy book, and more poignantly, the truth of someone considered holy, like Jesus, is not that it can be proved over and over. The opposite is actually at work.

For Christians, the truth of Jesus is that he shows us something we would never have thought to be true had we not encountered the truth in and through his singularly unique life. In him, we are brought face to face with something we couldn’t and wouldn’t have figured out on our own.

Our problem is not that we need to discover what can be proven by anyone at any time in any place. Our problem is that we need to be shown what we cannot know except through revelation. That’s what, as Christians, we say Scripture is all about.

It is revelation.

And that is ultimately what we believe is given most fully to us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Here we are given the truest and most complete revelation of God and God’s good intentions for us. Of course, it’s not something that can be verified or predicted in a test tube with a Bunsen burner. But that’s precisely the point.

The best and truest things in life are often things that are not repeatable.

The fact that science is reproducible in every generation, while significant, isn’t all that exceptional. What is exceptional is a life that was lived so truthfully and so beautifully that death could not hold it down. And over the course of history, it is one that has proven to be one in a billion.

Which, seems to me, makes it all the more truthful.

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Sometimes Quiet is Violent

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The Hsu family has been listening to a lot of Twenty One Pilots lately. Little Kyrie’s favorite is Doubt and Carissa can’t choose between Semi-Automatic, Trees and The Judge. One of the great things about their music is that, not only is it catchy, but the lyrics also give you a lot to chew on. One that has stuck with me the past few months is the song Car Radio.

Checkout the song before reading on:

Tyler Joseph, vocalist and lyricist for Twenty One Pilots, said this about the song:

The verses are talking about a true story of me being late to class…and I forgot to lock my door and when I came back out everything had been gutted and stolen out my car. At the time financially I was not able to replace anything that was taken, the GPS, the radio, all my CD’s. When I get in the car my first reaction is to put the radio on and for a while I wasn’t able to do that and finding out that once I removed that piece of me I realised that sometimes music can act as a distraction and can get in the way of where your mind wants to go.”

It’s true that quiet can be violent. When there’s no sound to hide behind we get antsy because we dread the oncoming onslaught of silence. And so we click open a browser, turn on the car radio, swipe open our phones. We fill our lives with noise. And it is this immediate stream of stimulation that keeps us living in a constant state of distraction. And as Tyler puts it, “it can get in the way of where your mind wants to go.” Sometimes what we need is to take a long look at the ugly parts of us that, if ignored for too long, will deform us in ways we never intended. This is no easy thing to do.

It is why I love the line, “Faith is to be awake and to be awake is for us to think and for us to think is to be alive and I will try with every rhyme to come across like I am dying to let you know you need to try to think.”

We often equate noise with being alive, with being awake, where, really, the opposite is true. Noise is what allows us to sleep walk through life, “distracted from distraction by distraction” (T.S. Eliot). As one writer aptly observed, “We live in an age of continuous partial attention.” This is our default setting.

Faith, on the other hand, points to an attentiveness that believes there is more to life than what is determined by our default setting. And to see with the eyes of faith requires the space silence creates in order for us to think. As renowned priest, Henri Nouwen, so matter of factly stated, “Without silence and solitude it is impossible to live a spiritual life.” It is an impossibility because such a life is nourished and sustained by what can only be heard when we quiet all the voices that bombard us everyday. When, in silence, we try and hear the only voice that matters.

So maybe we should all get our car radios stolen. Or maybe we can simply try and keep them off.

Then we can “just” sit in silence.
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The Slow Work of God

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I recently came across this quote from Teilhard de Chardin, a French philosopher and priest, writing back in the early twentieth century. His gentle exhortation continues to speak a much needed word to us some hundred years later. I guess immediate gratification has always been an addiction for us humans, but it clearly is becoming one we are able to feed with more ease and consistency.

While Teilhard seems to speaking of the slow work of God in the individual, I think his words can equally express the slow work of God shaping and guiding a community, a people, a church. People are the ultimate speed bump. The more you add the slower things get. But in the economy of grace, we have been given all the time in the world to become what God intends us to be, both individually and communally.

As we enter into the season of Lent, may we delve deeper into the super-abundant grace of our God to receive that which makes possible the kind of patient trust Teilhard so beautifully describes:

Patient Trust
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,

as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

Teilhard de Chardin

(1881-1955)