On Exodus and Immigration

This past Sunday, we had a fantastic sermon on God’s deliverance and Moses’s slightly reluctant role in that.  But as the passages of Exodus were read, something slightly different stood out to me:

 Then a new king, to whom Joseph meant nothing, came to power in Egypt.  “Look,” he said to his people, “the Israelites have become far too numerous for us.  Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country.”
So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh.  But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites  and worked them ruthlessly.  They made their lives bitter with harsh labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields; in all their harsh labor the Egyptians worked them ruthlessly.
(Exodus 1:8-14, NIV)

Does this rhetoric sound eerily familiar?  So often we see ourselves in this story, as the oppressed Israelites, waiting for God’s deliverance.  But pause for a minute.  What if we, as Americans, are the Egyptians in this story?  I see the same fear, the same xenophobia in the Egyptian oppression of the Israelites as I do in the anti-immigrant sentiment prevalent in America.

The first step down this road is forgetfulness.  This new pharaoh knows nothing of Joseph, the Israelite who saved Egypt and all of the surrounding lands from the famine.  Egypt has collectively forgotten the blessing that these “foreigners” have been to them.  In the same way, America cannot forget that it is a nation built upon the contributions of immigrants, whether in innovation and great ideas or hard work and dedication.  In fact, we must remember that, save for Native Americans, we are all immigrants to America, some number of generations removed.

Then, when they cannot remember any appreciation for the Israelites, it is fear that creeps into their hearts.
First, they fear that the Israelites will rise up against them.  The Egyptians fear that the Israelites, as they prosper in their land, will eventually join their enemies and attack them.  This sounds quite a bit like the arguments against allowing Syrian refugees into our country.
They also fear, or as this passage says “dread,” the Israelites’ success, even in the face of oppression.  Their fear increases as the Israelites multiply and spread.  This seems to  parallel the fear of immigrant communities “taking our jobs,” and “taking over our land.”

And in their fear, the Egyptians decide that they must “deal shrewdly” with the Israelites, the very thing we have sworn to do, whether with walls or immigration policies or racial profiling.  But soon this turns into oppression, slavery and cruelty.  They exploit the Israelites to build their cities, tend their fields, and make their bricks.  The Egyptians make their lives miserable.

And it’s here that the warning lies.  As we forget and fear, we lose compassion, and become the oppressors, committing the very evil we fear will be done to us.
America already has a dark history of incredible cruelty to those who we think don’t belong, those “outsiders” who we deem a threat.  Let’s take these warnings from Exodus, as well as our own history, to conquer our national xenophobia and avoid becoming the next generation of slave masters.

Kingdom

Kingdom

Cigarette butts strewn down smoky streets
Alleyways reeking with rotting dreams,
Wasted…

As mothers work late into the night
Struggling to serve that next meal,
hoping their children are home safe for dinner
after each day of playing in these streets

Where women wander
under glaring red lights
waiting for vicious men to buy their flesh.

If the Kingdom could come
to my broken palace
to its rusted gates and cold stone halls
festering dark and dank
But now washed and restored
reclaimed as a temple for the King

Then here in this city
in the eyes of a child
I see hope sprouting
As the Son sets on the center of grace.

(Written 3/25/15)

The story:

Last spring break, I had the privilege of spending a few days helping out Grace City Center with a bunch of fellow Navigators from various college campuses.  Grace City Center is a really cool project of The Grace Network, an organization that hopes to combat human trafficking in the Sacramento area and beyond, an injustice that’s been on my heart for a while.  The Grace City Center is situated in the middle of Del Paso Heights, a neighborhood of Sacramento wrought with poverty, gang violence, and sex trafficking.  The center will serve as a resource center for urban youth and human trafficking survivors, as well as a beacon of hope for restoration in Jesus’ name.

This poem was a reflection on my brief time there, and a vision of hope, for the healing that only Jesus can bring.

Religion in a Godless Age

“Happy Valentine’s Day.”

Welcome to my absolute least favorite holiday.  (Columbus Day is up there, but it’s not very widely celebrated.)  It’s such a contrived holiday, with less meaning than Christmas, but with a similar amount of commercialization.  It’s the one day of the year that companies try to sell us anything love, sell us sex, prey upon our desire to be wanted, to be accepted, to be cherished. It’s a festival to the god of the modern age.

I’ve been noticing a trend in music over the past few years, the co-opting of religious language and imagery in the description of romantic love.  I’ve seen it in Beyonce’s “Halo,” Bruno Mars’s “Locked Out of Heaven,” and most notably, Hosier’s “Take Me to Church.”  And this is just naming a few, out of the ocean of music past and present that use the language of religious worship for romantic love.

I think it was Ernest Becker, in his book Denial of Death, who introduces this idea that in our modern age, as God is slowly being hedged out of our modern existence, we turn to the ideal of romantic love to fill the place of God.  Our innate need for redemption, for satisfaction, for completion, for living for something other than ourselves, we seek in a romantic lover.

It begins with the deification of the human lover.  The description of the lover as angelic or having that heavenly glow, ubiquitously scattered throughout love song lyrics, imparts this god-like quality to the lover, transforming them into an object of worship, worthy of complete devotion.  Even more so, attributing perfection to the lover puts them on that pedestal in the temple of our hearts.  And if the lover is perfect, it is in their presence that we seek redemption.  This quest for redemption is in Beyonce’s “Halo,” where she sings that her “angel” is her “saving grace,” and it’s in every ballad and country song that hopes that this one romantic relationship will make the singer “a better man.”

The desperate search for romantic love becomes a search for completion, for fulfillment, for the satisfaction of our souls.  It’s the dreaded, gnawing fear of never finding romantic love, what most term “loneliness.”  It’s the cliche sayings that our significant other is our “other half,” our “better half,” that they “complete” us.  It’s when Beyonce later sings that her “Halo”-ed lover is “everything [she] needs and more.”

In the absence of God, what is heaven?  What is paradise?  Bruno Mars’s “Locked Out of Heaven” gives us the answer, as he sings, “your sex takes me to paradise” to the woman with whom he’s spent the night.  In the worship of romantic love, this is the end goal, the heaven that we spend all our life trying to reach and then never want to leave.  Sex becomes the “spiritual” experience in an age where science has numbed us to anything beyond our five senses.

Hozier’s “Take Me to Church” epitomizes this modern form of religion.  His lover is his religious experience, his church, which calls him to “worship in the bedroom,” to find heaven in being alone with her.  He finds redemption for his being “born sick,” asking her to “command [him] to be well.”  To her, he sings “Good God, let me give you my life.”  His religion “demands a sacrifice” of his life.  But at least it’s something to live for.

And I think this godless religion permeates our world, even outside of the music scene.  There’s the constant pressure from the cosmetics and beauty products world to be perfection, to be a “goddess.”  In this modern age, what is temptation?  I see it plastered across our food industry–temptation is eating anything other than 100-calorie packs, packing on those pounds and thus becoming undesirable.

But what is this doing to us?  In Hozier’s “Take Me to Church,” there’s an air of dementedness, of “poison” in the “pagan” “Ritual,” in the animalistic “worship like a dog,” in the “shrine of your lies,” in the implied violence of it all.

The religion of this godless age calls us to seek deity, in those who are mortal, to seek divinity in humanity,to seek perfection in those who are hopelessly imperfect.
And we can see how this works out.  We just have to flip the page of the songbook of our day to all of our songs of heartbreak.
I think this is at the core of so much of the brokenness in our culture today.  We lament the gift of singleness, because outside of romantic love, life is clearly meaningless.  We hop from one relationship to the next, always being disappointed in the ways they cannot fill that gap in our souls.  When we do find the One we pledge our lives, hoping that they will finally save us, finally transform us into the people we want to be, hoping that we’ve finally found paradise.  But a few years, a few kids, a hundred fights later, this dream is shattered.

All because we’re looking in all the wrong places.  God, the creator and lover of our souls, is the only one worthy of that kind of worship, the only one who can perfectly love us because His perfection is no exaggeration.  Only He can redeem, only He can fix the brokenness in us, giving us true healing and transformation.  He can give us a satisfaction that lasts longer than a one night stand, deeper than sexual gratification.  Only He is worth living life for.  We’ll never find what we’re looking for among fellow mortals.

With God, there’s a more beautiful vision for what romantic love can be.   No longer seeking to meet the deepest needs of their souls in each other, to find Life in each other, lovers can simply join hands in partnership as they set out together across the hills and valleys of this life, on the quest to know God, their first and greatest love, more and more.
And for those in a state of perpetual singleness, and thus cast out of the temple of Aphrodite and called “cursed” by the religion of this age, there is hope.   No longer bound in a hopeless search for fulfillment here on earth, we turn our eyes heavenward to the perfect Lover of our souls, free to live our lives knowing they are already complete.

 

Lent

It’s that time of year.  Lent is upon us, once again.

What is Lent?

For those of you less familiar with liturgical tradition, Lent is a period of forty days before Easter, in which believers prepare their hearts for celebrating the resurrection of Jesus.    The forty days of Lent parallel the forty days when Jesus went to the desert where he fasted and prayed and was tempted.  In turn, Lent is is a time for fasting, repentance, prayer and meditation.

For me, Lent is a time to restore a godly balance in my life, to put back in their place the good things can come to obstruct my view of what is better.  And that’s where fasting comes in.  Fasting usually refers to refraining from eating food, but in a wider sense, it is intentionally giving up something that I think I need, something that I think is essential to my life.  When that source of comfort of security is taken away, the truth of what truly motivates and controls us is unveiled, and what lies deep in our hearts comes out.  Being “hangry” is a classic example of this.  When we feel that unsatisfied need for food, the irritability that is usually masked rears its ugly head.  Hence Lent also being a time of repentance.  And then in the hunger, the craving, the emptiness, to turn to God to be filled.  It is this time of solemnity, of leaning solely on God, and not any of our usual comforts, a reminder of Christ’s sufferings on our behalf, that prepares us for the joy of Easter.

What are you giving up for Lent?

I’ve been wrestling with this question ever since my 2016 calendar arrived in late January, and I saw how soon Lent was.  The difficult balance between what is costly sacrifice and what is self-imposed torture that God never asked for.  I wanted to challenge myself to rely more fully on God, to feel the “hunger” for something I was so used to, but not impose on myself a legalistic burden that would draw me further from God.

Facebook was an obvious candidate, since it wastes altogether too much of my time.  But I did that last year, and that’s something that needs to be cut down, Lent or not.  I could give up writing, but that would be an easy way out, wouldn’t it?  I could give up some food, but it would be so easy to do that for the wrong motives, focusing on my physical appearance, and not a devotion to God.

This year, I am giving up listening to music…

I love music.  God loves music.  Music is good.
It’s like food for my soul, filled with the flavors of this life.

But so often, it can become what controls my emotions, drives my thought patterns.
Admittedly, I’ve been listening to a good deal of “secular” music these days, and I want to take this season to pause all of these voices, detox from all the messages they carry, and free myself from any influence they have on my heart and mind.

But it’s not purely the fault of secular music.  It’s music in general that I use to tune out the world around me, often disengaging with those around me, even the Lord.  Pope Francis’s call this year was for a fast from indifference.  My hope is that in the silence, I will have no choice but to reject apathy.  In their song “Car Radio,” Twenty One Pilots puts it so profoundly, that in the silence “I’m forced to deal with what I feel/There is no distraction to mask what is real.”  In the silence, I will be able to press further into God, press further into the difficulties instead of retreating into the acoustic landscape of other people’s thoughts.

And perhaps in the silence, the uncomfortable silence without the security blanket of music, I will know what I turn to, and the tendencies of my sin nature may be what emerge.  But when those tendencies are uncovered, I can at last bring them into the light of God.

And instead inviting God into the silence.

In Matthew 12:44-45, Jesus talks about how an “unclean spirit,” once cast out of a person, can return with seven of its more evil friends if it finds its previous dwelling place all tidied up, but otherwise empty.  In Jesus’s day, these were demons that would possess people.  But in this skeptical modern age, these “unclean spirits” take the form of our addictions and bad habits, all the things that control us, dragging us to do what we really don’t want to do, the stuff we regret soon after.  In the same way, we can kick out our bad habit, take away the thing we so often run to, but if we don’t replace it with what is better, some other more hideous thing can take its place.  Suppose I sought my affirmation from Facebook–who liked my post, who commented on my profile picture, so on and so forth.  I give that up for Lent, but in its stead, I find myself seeking my affirmation from people, stretching myself thin to fulfill what I think their expectations are of me.  When we give up some comfort, the emptiness, the hole left by whatever we previously sought to fill us, if not filled with what is better, is simply an invitation for some lesser thing to fill it.  And what can fill the gaping hole in my heart.  Only God, the creator of the universe and the creator of my heart, is big enough to satisfy completely.

And so my follow up question to “What are you giving up for Lent?” has been “What are you replacing it with?  What are you pursuing instead?”

For me last year, I gave up Facebook, and distraction and time-wasting and the attention and approval seeking it allowed.  In the time that I was not wasting mindlessly scrolling down news feeds, I planned to spend with the Lord and doing the things that I was supposed to do.  And instead of hiding behind a persona that I could control, I chose to spend time with people, pursuing intentional, face-to-face, even vulnerable relationships.

So this year, I want to invite God into the silence.  To spend my spare moments not inundated with the thousands of songs on my iPod, but listening for His voice, responding to Him in prayer, meditating on His word, and letting that be what saturates my heart and mind.  To find peace, to find stillness, to let God speak in the silence.   I want to learn to listen well, to God, to others around me, even to the sounds of creation around me—the birds, the rush of wind past my ears.  And then instead of being in my own world, with my ears tightly plugged, to engage in constant prayer, in the tough questions, in meaningful conversation with those around me, in compassion for those on the margins, in wonder at creation.

I also hope that in choosing not to fill my silences with music, I will be able to more fully engage in worship, in those sacred spaces where my otherwise starved ears will be delighted with the music of the Lord.

For more valuable thoughts on fasting:

• Pope Francis’ Guide to Lent  – TIME Magazine
• “The Most Neglected Spiritual Discipline”
  – Thomas Christianson for RELEVANT Magazine.
• The Celebration of Discipline – Richard J. Foster

Tunesday: “Chinese New Year” – MC Jin

恭禧發財！利是逗來!
Gung Hay Fat Choy!  Lai See Dou Loi!
Happy Chinese New Year!  Give me my lucky money!
(Just kidding, mostly.  I have no relatives left to give me red envelopes this year.)

In honor of Chinese New Year, for this week’s #Tunesday I present… Asian American Rap!

The first time I encountered MC Jin (formerly known as Jin) was as wee elementary schooler.  My best friend’s older cousins had been exposed her to “Yum Dom Cha”, a Jin song entirely about dim sum, and she in turn introduced me to it.  At that time, it was a fun foray into an unfamiliar musical genre, that expressed something so iconic in the Cantonese-American culture that I knew.
A few years later, I found myself watching a video of Jin’s testimony.  In the years since I had heard of him via “Yum Dom Cha,” he had become a believer, and had plans to bring Christ into his music.
A year or two ago, I found MC Jin featured on Tim Be Told track, “Into the Stars”, and in a few clicks, I discovered all the work he had done, now reborn as MC Jin.  His music thoughtfully rolls out of the intersection of faith and an Asian American identity.  And as rap, which is not a form of expression that is expected from the stereotypes of the quiet “model minority,” MC Jin’s work touches a part of the soul that not many other things do.

Now for the featured track, “Chinese New Year.”  It includes tidbits of the Chinese American experience, from having immigrant parents, to dim sum and mahjong.  And underneath that runs a blood thick with the values of hard work, that are so core to Asian American culture.  It provides an invitation into the Asian American experience, and then ends with a call unity for all, “Chinese or not”, since “we are more similar than different.”  Lyrics as strong as ginger.  So rich, so good.  Enjoy!

Getting Ready for Church

How do you get ready for church?
Shower.  Brush my teeth.  Brush my hair.  Get dressed.

The first things that pop into my head are all about my appearance, making sure I look good, smell good—it’s all about my ability to present myself before people.
How much of our preparation for church is really just to impress people?  Do we prepare to worship God or to be ourselves the object of adoration?
Perhaps our motives are a bit more pure, simply to wear our “Sunday Best,” as a way of telling God that gathering in His name is important to us—like dressing up for a date with God.

And yet God calls us to so much more.  He calls us to “Rend [our] hearts and not [our] garments. Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster.” (Joel 2:13, ESV).

Perhaps the more important preparation for church is not the preparation of our outward appearance, but the preparation of our hearts, “For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).

What does preparing my heart for church look like?
What if I prepared for church with the intention of being fully engaged with the Lord and his people?  What if I got enough sleep on Saturday night, so I could be fully awake, alive, and enthusiastic on Sunday morning?  What if I actually got there on time, even early enough to greet the people around me?  What if I actually read the morning’s passage before I hear the message, so I can be like the Bereans, who did not simply sit and listen, but took an active role in receiving the Word, searching the scriptures daily, to confirm for themselves the truth that Paul was preaching to them?  What if I spent some time in prayer for my pastors, that they would be led by the Spirit as they faithfully deliver the Word; for the church body, for unity in the Spirit as we seek to grow together to be a pleasing temple for the Lord and be the vessel through which God makes known the mystery of His love to the world; and even for myself, that He would be preparing my heart to respond to Him in worship?

Since the veil was torn, I think we so often forget the amount of effort was needed to come to the temple, to the presence of the Lord to worship.  Back in the day, the Israelites needed to make sure that they were ceremonially clean, having made all the necessary sacrifices, making sure they were right with God.  One did not simply roll out of bed and into the temple to worship.  What if we approached Sunday morning with this same careful reverence, treating it as something truly holy, truly set apart, a privilege paid by the blood of the Lamb, that we get to come together and worship?

Tunesday: Twenty One Pilots – Unconventionally Honest Worship

‪#Tunesday it is!  I’ve been listening to an awful lot of Twenty One Pilots lately.

I usually describe the music of Twenty One Pilots as angry rap across a background of electronic synth.  Wikipedia describes it as alternative hip hop and electropop.
So where does worship come into it?

I began listening to Twenty One Pilots because it resonated with the broken, messed up parts of me, echoed the distraught thoughts that “often happen at night, right.”  But upon doing a little more research on the band, I found mentions of how their lyrics are so laded with Christian allusions, and that the members are Christians.  A band that, like Switchfoot, doesn’t label itself as specifically Christian, whose music has a broad appeal, but another layer of depth.  I began seeing their work through a new lens, one that my heart had heard traces of, but now my eyes could see.

If Chris Tomlin and Hillsong are King David’s Psalm 150, that call us to extol the Lord at all times, and thank Him for his love that endures forever, Twenty One Pilots are Psalm 73 and the Psalm 38, which bring every longing and every sighing before the Lord, hiding nothing, even the disturbed, distraught parts of our hearts.

“Trees” is reminiscent of that moment in the garden, right after the Fall.  In shame, we hide, “Silent in the trees/Standing cowardly,” yet at the same time, wanting to know, to see, to say hello.  Thinking about it more carefully now, it might also be an allusion to Zacchaeus’s encounter with Jesus, wanting to know and experience Jesus, but hidden in the tree so he could see.  Either way, our encounters with God may not always be marked by a complete confidence, and I think “Trees” speaks to that.

In “Goner,” the singer knows that he’s “a goner,” and in that cries out “I want to be known by you.”  If his implied audience is God, he’s asking that God would recognize,  “catch” and know the short lived vapor of his life, his “breath”.  Later in the song, he admits he’s “weak, and beaten down,” and that he needs help to take out “Blurryface,”a character that’s developed elsewhere in the album.  Essentially a cry for help in defeating the sin nature, the person he’s not proud of.  Similarly, in “Heavydirtysoul,” he wonders “Can you save my heavy dirty soul?”

“Screen” reminds me of Psalm 139, in its realization that there is no point in hiding from God, as frontman Tyler Joseph sings, “I do not know why I would go/In front of you and hide my soul/Cause you’re the only one who knows it/Yeah you’re the only one who knows it.”  And yet in that moment when he’s standing before God, there’s the dichotomy between this realization and him pretending to have “everything together, trying to be so cool,” “hid[ing] behind [his] pride.”  Towards the end of the song, the refrain of “we’re broken, we’re broken, we’re broken people”crescendos, and this admission rises to join the facade that we put before God, forming a profound picture of our relationship with Him, where on the one hand we pretend to be put together, but we know, and we know that He knows that we’re totally broken inside.

In “Doubt,” Joseph echoes the psalmist’s cries in Psalm 38 to “not forsake me, O Lord” when he sings “Don’t forget about me/Even when I doubt you/I’m no good without you.”  In the verses of the song, he confesses his fears, as he watches his surroundings get darker, colder, and sees that God’s “all that [he’s] got.”  This gets at the heart of the more moody Psalms, where the psalmist expresses doubt and cries out for God to not forget, not forsake him, but at the end of the day knows that he has nowhere else to turn to but God.

For me, these songs from Twenty One Pilots are an an opportunity to be truly honest, to be real with God, an element that is mostly lacking in the radio-friendly fare of designated “worship artists.”  It’s the spirit of the psalms in a most unconventional place.