God is so tired...tired of playing the game.

If you’ve ever seen Golgotha (the place where Jesus was crucified) painted on an Easter egg, the picture in your head is probably one of three pious crosses on a grassy knoll silhouetted by a beautiful sunset in early spring. This depiction never missed a year in our family egg-decorating competition and we all felt it unrighteous to vote for anything more profane as the winner.

I wonder now if I could ever have won the competition by submitting a more historically accurate setting. How about an egg depicting the crosses in a garbage heap outside the city wall of Jerusalem where things get tossed aside. I’m doubtful that points would ever be awarded for historical accuracy.

I think we tend to want a nice aesthetic to go with our Golgotha, because we always assume that we’re the ones who are receptive to God; we assume that we’re the ones with eyes to see the true beauty of God’s heart as it’s revealed in Jesus; that we somehow know what’s going on behind the scenes in an otherwise gruesome event.

But the fact of the cross is a reminder that we don’t have to guess what would happen if we were to come into contact with God. We already know what happened. We did come into contact with God. We almost immediately decided that God needed to be disposed of.

Now God could respond to us in rage for behaving so shamefully. God could declare us unrighteous and ban us to the fiery furnace of hell. But you see the problem with that, right? That would be for God to start playing the same game that we were playing in the first place, the one where the winners are rewarded and the losers get punished.  If God responds to us in rage, God would certainly come out the winner but the winner of a game to which we ourselves had already determined the rules.

But what if the game itself is not worth playing? What if by quibbling with us about who wins and who loses, God would only be validating a game that should have never gotten started in the first place?

As it turns out, God’s too clever to get tied down by our rules by predictably responding to crucifixion with rage. God’s actual response turns out to be a game-changer.

When Jesus comes back from the grave offering forgiveness for us betrayers and murderers, this is neither God winning nor losing the righteous vs. unrighteous game. It’s more like God saying, “I’m tired of this game. Let’s play something else.”

I assume that as most of us encounter the unchurched or the de-churched, we’re coming into contact with people who really have no idea what the church is supposed to be (the church’s fault, not theirs). Actually, I can say it stronger than that. They tend to think we’re the exact opposite of what we’re supposed to be (because we often are).

Ironically, their assumption of us (not unfounded) is that we must be gathering on Sundays for the sole purpose of sorting winners from losers. Ironic, since we’re maybe the only group in the world founded on a story of betrayal and murder responded to with forgiveness. We’re founded on an authentically game-changing story.

This is why great stories of forgiveness always make for such bright, blinking intersections where God is palpably at work in the world. They’re the sort we just can’t make up.

Remember a few years back when that Amish community made a public statement of forgiveness for the shooters who took so many of their sons and daughters away from them? Remember how angry people got? Not at the shooters, at the forgivers. How dare they? 

Real forgiveness is an offense to us. It makes no sense. We can’t get from here to there just based on the raw materials of our reward and punishment thinking.  Some hocus pocus when the wedding reception is low on booze is one thing. Walking on water is a clever twist on Newtonian physics. But forgiveness is a miracle the likes of which we hardly have language. It introduces something entirely new, something that can’t be accounted for by our conventional wisdom or even our common sense.

The idea itself seems and never stops seeming unjust. It would be like if someone were betrayed and murdered, then came back to life, but rather than using the opportunity to avenge their own death, they came offering peace.

how important is it for a kid to have a saxophone?...in Haiti?

If the question regards a kid living in the wealthy suburb where I grew up, the answer is almost always an enthusiastic “Very important!” The developmental benefits of learning an instrument have been indisputably proven and spill into nearly every other discipline that a child might want to pursue. Few of us would deny this…with regard to a kid in a wealthy American suburb.

But for some reason when the question regards a child living in a poor neighborhood in Haiti, and the well-meaning American organizations that intend to serve that child, the value calculus rarely works out the same. After all, there should be a certain triage of need, right? Haitian kids are in need of food and shelter, not saxophones. So most NGOs measure their inputs accordingly.

As reasonable as that assumption sounds (it’s true, there are kids in Haiti who really are hungry and homeless) it doesn’t have a strong track record of producing long term change in the poorest country in the western hemisphere and quite frequently does more harm than good. There are many reasons why this is. Most of them can be summarized as follows: providing things is not the same as investing in human beings.

Only the latter amounts to any long term results, and I believe, only the latter has any resonance with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

This lesson was first taught to me by Elyon. Elyon wasn’t, in aid-speak, an “area of focus.” She was an 11 year old girl with an unforgettable smile—charmed but quizzical at the sight of us sunscreen lathering blan (meaning "white people," "foreigners," or "generally awkward people"). And Elyon didn’t know that, as a poor Haitian child, the extent of her ambitions should be a daily meal and some hand-me-down clothes. Elyon was a music lover.

So in my first trip to Haiti, through the Haitian Timoun Foundation (HTF) in 2007, I was surprised to find that one of our precious few checked bags was a very clunky, awkward saxophone. I confess that the thought did cross my mind, “Shouldn’t we be bringing with us more immediate needs?”

I still didn’t “get it” at that point.

Seven years after that first trip, Elyon is a young woman. She graduated high school with straight As. With an unstoppable combination of intelligence and charisma and a head full of ideas about how to turn the world upside down, she is poised to join the small handful of students who will ever step foot inside one of the highly competitive Haitian universities. In her neighborhood back in Jacmel, they still tell stories about the saxophone girl who would spend hours each day filling their streets with the type of beauty that can only come from something as wasteful and extravagant as music.

The Haitian Timoun Foundation doesn’t look at the kids with whom we partner as so much intractable need. We look at them as Elyon and Kathleen and Samuel—highly unique, differently gifted individuals who are ready not to just subsist on a handful of necessities but to develop themselves as people capable of one day leading their own country out of a decades old dependency cycle. If the only news we’re hearing from Haiti is the last staggering statistic on extreme poverty or the bracing image from the latest disaster, then it’s our own understanding that’s truly impoverished. Everyone already knows these stories and they’re good for building the viewership of media conglomerates but not much else.

For the hundreds of people I’ve seen come back from travel with HTF, the stories they’re more interested in telling are those of ingenuity, of resourcefulness, of love in the face of loss, hope in the face of death. They tell stories of the empty tomb.

How important is it for a kid to have a saxophone?

As important as the kingdom of God.

Go to:

htflive.org

haitiantimounfoundation.tumblr.com

to learn more.

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why watching the Broncos lose makes me a better disciple

So after nearly breaking my toe on the coffee table in a fit of rage, twice letting out a string of words that my one-year old dog should never have had to hear, and waking up at 4am in a cold sweat wondering if Super Bowl XLVIII was just some terrible nightmare; my physical and marital health requires that I ask myself the question, Why do I care so much?

I don’t ask the question negatively. Yes, sports have been overblown to idolatrous proportions in most every culture that I know of around the world. I don’t deny that. But this isn’t a blog about overpaid players, family-destroying gambling debts and drunken brawls in the parking lot. That exists. It’s true. It’s sad.

But in the final minutes of what is being called one of the worst Super Bowl performances ever, I couldn’t shake the thought, “I would be thrilled to one day have a son or daughter commit themselves to the Broncos (their choice, I won’t pressure them, although the Raiders are off limits) so that they too can experience this kind of agony.”

I really mean that for a reason that bandwagoners and football dilettantes who only show up to a Super Bowl party for the beer and wings will never understand. Committing yourself to a team and being in it for the long haul, come rain or shine, is an excellent way to build what turns out to be one of the most important discipleship qualities we can actually effect:

Character

In our pseudo-Christian culture, emotionalism and intellectual certainty are the signatures of having “faith.” But a serious disciple is more concerned with cultivating what Eugene Peterson calls “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction.” Mature disciples look at things like spiritual euphoria and intellectual certainty as gifts or happy accidents when they come along but not the main thing. What they’re more interested in is what they can actually build through time and intentionality, and that’s character. 

If kept in perspective and understood rightly, football allegiance can be an excellent modern analogy of what I believe Jesus is illustrating in the “Parable of the Sower,” which is essentially about the character that receives faith and practices discipleship.

When the word of the kingdom is sown, some of it falls on the path. These are the party-hoppers whose love of football was discovered the week before the Super Bowl in direct proportion to their dread of being left out of whatever is current in pop culture. They’re the ones at the party who, lacking more sophisticated football jargon, are constantly annoying everyone with commentary that’s accurate but just a pinch too obvious: “Boy, they really scored the football in the end zone on that one.”

As for the seed that was sown on rocky ground, these are the bandwagoners. They’ve watched enough football that they can comment intelligently on whether a receiver got both feet down or a pass interference call was ticky-tack, but by the time the third quarter comes along they’re suddenly uncovering all these revelations about how they’re only wearing the losing running back’s jersey because they were such big fans of his during his college days and they really don’t care who wins as long as it’s a good game. Part of you despises them and part of you wants to be extra nice because, like any traitor or mercenary, deep down they don’t even respect themselves.

Some seed is sown among thorns. These are like the photographic negatives of the bandwagoners. They’re not interested in identifying with the winners. They’re merely interested in twisting the knife in the side of the losers. These people have all the principle and integrity of the Lexus driver who purposely switches lanes so he can splash the shivering dog on the side of the road. I don’t know what type of individual takes pleasure in this kind of arbitrary sadism, but these are worse than the tax collectors or the heathen.

Still, there is the seed that is sown in good soil.

All other things being equal, I will bet on the loyalty, the resilience, the graciousness in life’s victories and defeats, and, yes, even the sense of perspective of a Cleveland Browns fan or Chicago Cubs fan to one of these other soil types any day.

This kind of faithfulness over the long haul is self-evidently valuable. My father and his father suffered through some of the most depressing football teams ever fielded when the Broncos began their franchise with 13 seasons without a winning record. It was never a question of whether they might just decide one day to root for the ’67 Packers or ’72 Dolphins. To seek instant gratification by jumping ship would be to give up any chance at a real victory ever. Abandoning their team for a winner could only happen at the expense of the integrity of the game as a whole.

If I should be so blessed, I want my kids to learn these qualities. I want them to learn that there is great value in waving the flag of a loser decade after decade and that the joy of cheering for a winner is hollow if you didn’t have to earn your stripes to get there. I want them to wear their Broncos shirt to school not just before a big game but after a devastating loss.  

There is something just plain dignified—something that the path, the rocky ground and the thorns will never comprehend—when my Dad (who makes me look like a casual fan) swallows the lump of defeat and texts me at the end of yesterdays game:

“Sometimes things just don’t go right…Don’t forget, a lot of teams don’t make it this far…I’ll still be their most loyal fan.”

Sports can be trivial. They can suck up way too many resources that would be better spent elsewhere.  The relationships many of us have to our teams are full on idolatrous.

But if I were given the chance to select a group of people who likely have the right character for discipleship, all other things being equal, give me the Broncos nation on Feb. 3^rd. Not the one on Feb. 1^st.

GO BRONCOS!