Pastor Eugene Cho:
Christians are familiar with another Terrorist – albeit from another time in history.
His name was Saul and he was a persecutor of Christians. He was severely misguided and utterly convicted in his mission in killing Christians. But nevertheless, God had mercy on him and revealed the truth and grace of Christ. It is beyond our rational comprehension. No one is outside of God’s grace.
The government has its role and simultaneously, the Church has a role. While I don’t have any desire to switch roles, our responsibilities are also heavy and burdensome. We are called to even forgive and love our neighbors. I don’t interpret this for Christians to be doormats and allow others to harm you or your loved ones but nevertheless, we are called to forgive and love our neighbors; to believe and pray for the repentance of our enemies. I can’t think of a more difficult thing to do.
The image in this post is both powerful and unbearable, as it should be.
Michael Washington, my mentor’s co-pastor:
It isn’t forgetting the impact of an offense. This is probably the worst assumption about forgiveness, that it requires us to forget an offense. Further, the assumption is that we stuff our feelings about what happened. It doesn’t. We can no more remove from our hearts and heads yesterday’s pain than we can dismiss the last argument we had with someone we love. Those things stay with us. Forgiveness, though, is about how something stays with you, not whether it stays. It is about how we live from an event, not whether we deny that it was.
Maybe we should always show pictures. Bin Laden, pictures of our wounded service people, pictures of maimed innocent civilians. We can only make decisions about war if we see what war actually is — and not as a video game where bodies quickly disappear leaving behind a shiny gold coin.
The discussion on forgiveness begins.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Worship at The Rooftop, 23 April 2011.
I thought that after last night, I should post this. It’s written by a pastor I admire named Eugene Cho.
Today is Good Friday.
Why is it “good?” How could it possibly be good?
- In a culture that is ever so quick to get to the product
- In a culture that is ever so quick to avoid suffering and pain and seek ways to medicate ourselves to avoid pain
- In a culture that is ever so quick to jump to the bunnies and eggs
- In a culture that is ever so quick to commercialize, capitalize, and consumerize
- In a culture that is ever so quick to jump to the good news of Easter Sunday and Resurrection
- In a culture that is ever so quick to minimize the extent of Jesus’ suffering and crucifixion
- In a culture that is ever so quick to ‘disneyize’ the events of the brutal death of a man
- In a culture that is ever so quick to grab hold of grace as if we are entitled to it
Today matters. Dark Friday matters. His death matters.
So, let’s not be so quick to bypass this day. There’s a reason why in the Christian tradition – this day and service is considered the longest and darkest day of the year.
Let it be long. Let it be dark. Let it be silent.
Let it be uncomfortable. Death is always uncomfortable – especially when we’re complicit in this death.
While the good news of our beauty are clearly exemplified in the glorious news of the Resurrection…the depths of our darkness and depravity are also exposed in the last days of Jesus’ life and crucifixion.
And once we understand, if even for a glimpse, the depths of our depravity and brokenness, the amazing depth of God’s grace and mercy is that much more understood and experienced. We understand that our broken image can be restored by the Creator of that original beauty.
Thank you Jesus for this day. For Dark Friday. For Holy Friday. For the cross, sacrifice, and atonement.
Thank you God that you have redeemed this day to be good.
Some nights are so rich and good that to try to describe them in words would spoil them - it wouldn’t do them justice. Tonight was such a night.
— Richie, to Sarah, while walking back home after sending everyone off.
“I’m trying to overcome a typical, wrong, unbiblical attitude on the part of Christians, particularly evangelical Christians, toward this material world.
There’s a tendency for many Christians to think of this material world – the world we’re in now – as a temporary theater for getting saved so that some day you can escape this material world and live happily in heaven forever. An awful lot of Christians say, ‘this world is going to die, it’s going to burn up, and while we’re here basically the only thing that’s important is to get people saved, and if they get saved eventually they’ll be able to leave this world.’ So it’s a temporary theater for salvation.
Instead, let’s start at the end. At the end of time when we actually see what the triune God has been doing in creation and redemption through Jesus Christ, when we get to the very end of the Bible we see not human beings individually rising out of the material world and going to heaven forever. Instead we see heaven, the power of God, coming down and renewing this material world. That the whole purpose of everything God is doing in redemption is to create a material world that’s clean, that’s right, that’s pure. A material world in which there’s no disease and there’s no death and no injustice, there’s no unraveling, there’s no decay. The whole purpose of salvation is to cleanse and purify this material world.
Jews and Christians believe that this material world is permanent – it’s a good thing in itself. That an eagle’s flying and great music and the ocean pounding on the shore and a great cup of wine are good things in themselves, because God is not temporarily ‘God is here so someday we’re going to live in heaven’ but the whole purpose of salvation is to make this world a great place.
God sees this world as not a temporary means to an end of salvation, but actually salvation is a temporary means to an end – to the renewal of creation.
Saving souls is a means to an end of cultural renewal. Does the Christian church understand that? I’m not sure.”
- Tim Keller, in his sermon Cultural Renewal.
(Source: thirtythousandpeople.wordpress.com)
The action is here.
What implications does this have for your life?
For your future?
For the way you engage and live in the world now?
Because the story begins here,
and the story ends here.
‘May you trust Jesus, when he says that death has been taken care of,
and that you can live forever with God, that you’re never, ever, ever going to stop living.
May you believe that death has been taken care of, and you can be a partner
with God in redeeming and restoring this fallen, broken, hurting world.
That you can literally be a partner with God in making this the kind
of place that God originally intended it to be.
May you be the kind person who, when you live this way,
the very trees of Paradise are being planted.’
And speaking of trees…
So awesome.
unfoldingslowly:
Tonight we began something new, something exploratory, something that would not be limited by labels, definitions or existing ideas.
Church has been in the making for two thousand years. In ancient Athens ekklesia was the name given to a particular gathering place where men would assemble to deliberate and vote on political matters. Ekklesia in Greek simply means “called out”. Later on the Romans adopted ekklesia into Latin and used it to define a city established by Caesar. When translating Greek in 250BC, the Jews decided to use the same word to mean ‘assembly’ in Hebrew. Today we use this classical Greek word for church. A community, a gathering place, a calling out of people, a city, a place for discussion -all church. Now, jumping many generations ahead when I think of ‘church’, I see large well lit rooms, speakers bolted to walls, a projector, sound men in the back, comfy chairs propped on carpet, a stage, sleek lighting and a well rehearsed band. Something doesn’t feel right.
I can see how Christians before us have moved with the changing tides and cultures. All their work has brought us here; the Christian message very much alive and not at all dated. But I wonder, if Jesus walked into one of the churches in Hong Kong would he make a whip from strips of cut up designer bags and turn the tables of the coffee machines, book stalls and chairs? When did church have a formula for how you do things? When did we have a set time for prayer, worship, sermon? When were these things even timed into a Sunday schedule? Why does it have to happen on Sunday? My questions could go on. I feel like we’re being limited by what we have today. It’s hard to think out of the box and think of new ways to make a church when all you see are copy cats of one another. Slightly different of course, but a mega church and a small house church have many similarities. Songs, power points, chairs, a pulpit of sorts. They may be in various sizes, be technologically different or waver between glam-ness but a lot of the key things are still there.
I’d like to hope that the rooftop will be a calling out of people of the city to break down the walls of what we know. It’s an experiment. We probably won’t figure it out but at least we’re trying and we’re not allowing ourselves to be pushed into a box labelled ‘church’.
Here’s to rooftop church. an experiment.
An excerpt from an email to our youth group, twe12th:
A few months ago I was praying on my rooftop and I felt this strange urge to “start a church” on our rooftop. Of course, a “church” is nothing more than a simple gathering of people who want to grow in God together. It’s not an institution or an organization, but a community. So starting “a church” would be none too different from what we’ve been doing all these years.
I talked to Sarah about it and discovered that she had been having similar ideas. We mulled it over, but our collective lack of free time seemed to be a river that we could not ford - until last month, that is.
As many of you know, last month many of our regulars could not make it to twe12th. So we’ve been wondering if it is time to take twe12th in a new direction and open it up to something bigger and more expansive. Coincidentally, a number of people - some of them former twe12th-ers - have begun to express an interest in meeting regularly to grow in God together. Which all sounds suspiciously like “church” to me…
And so we think it is time. Time to “start a church” on our rooftop. Time to open our Fridays to a larger community where anyone who is hungry and/or thirsty can come. We don’t know exactly where this will lead, and we are guessing that it will look and feel very much like twe12th. But we think that it would make little sense to try and push ahead with twe12th-as-we-know-it, when it feels like God is moving us forward toward something broader, deeper, and more expansive.
As much as possible, we want this to be a community where we can grow together in God, ask good, provocative questions, and give fresh expression to the ancient and beautiful idea of “church”.
And so this Friday it begins: The Rooftop Church. Or, simply, “The Rooftop.” Sarah’s cooking a sweet meal and we’re inviting you all over to experience church on our rooftop. What will we do? What will we explore? What do we hope to get from it? You’re invited to come and see :)
