Mosaic Church Blog

Easter 2011

Sit Up, Get Up, Come Out, and Live. During the month of April, leading up to Easter Sunday, we are looking at narratives of Jesus raising people from the dead. While the narratives are undoubtedly amazing and cool, there is a sense that something more than “just” raising someone from the dead is going on. Each of these narratives are surrounded by, and sometimes even interrupted by other seemingly unrelated events. But the truth is that they aren’t at all unrelated, they may even be the point. As we make our way through these passages, we get the sense that there are whispers of something bigger, grander, and more mysterious than even life from death going on. It’s as though the miracles of raising people from the dead weren’t really big enough…they weren’t the main attraction or the best or biggest thing that could happen. You get the sense that Jesus is trying to show us, teach us, even lead us to something more amazing than that. All through these narratives we catch glimpses and whispers, whispers of the Messiah (Savior) and glimpses of things our minds can’t wrap around. It’s as though when Jesus speaks to a dead boy and says, “Sit up”, speaks to a dead girl and says, “Get up”; when he speaks to his dead friend Lazarus and says, “Come out”…it’s like he wasn’t talking to them, but to the rest of us. It’s like He is inviting all of us looking in to come join in what’s going on. It’s like He’s asking us if we really believe that we are alive, I mean really living…or just waiting for something bigger and better. It’s as though He is saying to me, and to you, “sit up, get up, come out….and live.”

Digging up the past…

We are currently teaching through our Covenant at Mosaic. We renew our covenant with each other every March. A couple of years ago when we first introduced Covenant I wrote a series of blogs about each section. We’ve re-posted those blogs below. You’ll notice some things aren’t quite right (like dates and such), but then again none of us are really quite right anyhow are we?

Covenant

We are in a series on covenant right now, leading up to our ‘Covenant Sunday’ on March 16th. The short version is that we, as a church, are opting to move away from some of the ‘membership’ language that many of us have become familiar with in churches. We don’t think that membership is evil or anything like that, but we do feel like it’s lost some of it’s meaning in our society today. Afterall, you can be a member of the YMCA, the country club, and the book club, along with aproximately 1,573,593 other things. And almost without fail, being a member signifies that you pay your dues, and you therefore expect certain rights, privileges, or items in return. We don’t want to think of church as somewhere that we somehow pay our dues and therefore expect to recieve something, spiritual or otherwise, in return.

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So with that in mind, we are adopting the language of covenant. Covenant is a major theme throughout Scripture. Some of the more well known examples are God’s covenant with Noah never to flood the whole earth again, God’s covenant with Abraham to bless him and bless all peoples through him, and most importantly the new covenant in Christ’s blood which offers us salvation by grace, through faith. As we’ve studied the Scriptural ideas of covenant, we’ve noticed that covenants (Scripturally speaking) are almost always relational in nature. This is different from a contract that says you do ABC and you get XYZ. A covenant involves two or more parties in mutual trust working towards a common goal. A covenant always directly involves the people, and always changes the people involved.

With that in mind, we have drafted a covenant that revolves around the four main points of our mission statement: Begin, Belong, Believe, and Be Whole. As a church we will covenant together, with God and each other, to strive to exhibit certain characteristics based upon those four main points. We have purposely chosen language that is relational in nature, emphasizing ways that we interact with each other. We have also been deliberate in using language that speaks to the faith journey we are on. In other words, the covenant is not a just a document of things that we can check off of our list, and therefore be in covenant. Rather, it emphasizes that our faith is not a point of arrival, but a journey; with ups and downs, twists and turns.

To highlight why and how we, as a church, can and should covenant together, our friend Nate created a mosaic during our gathering a week or so ago. The mosaic is a bunch of different, broken, individual pieces that have been cemented together to create a new and beautiful image. It really is quite amazing to see how all of the pieces came together to create this work of art representing Christ’s love on the cross. And that is why we will covenant together. Because we believe that God can and will take each of us, in all of our brokenness, and cement us together with Christ in His all encompassing love.

Hopefully we’ll be able to get a link to the covenant on the site in the next week or two. In the meantime, I will try to update each week now as we study together those four main points of our covenant and what they mean.

Begin

The first section of our covenant is about beginning. We believe that faith is a journey and not a one-time arrival. So, while there is obviously the beginning of a faith journey in the sense that one must make the very first decision to take the very first steps towards a relationship with Christ, the journey doesn’t end there. Scripture is full of language that emphasizes this idea that faith is not something we mystically achieve and mark off of our list.<##MORE##>Faith is at times strong, at times weak, and at times we may even doubt it’s there at all. We acknowledge this, and we realize that in those times we feel weak, in those times that we have become complacent or settled for who and how we are; we must begin again. This is why Paul says things in Scripture like “continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling” or “run the race marked out for you”. Perhaps one of the best examples from Paul is when he says of his own faith, “Not that I have already obtained all this or been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.” Another vivid example of the twists and turns of our faith journey would be Peter, the disciple of Jesus. Peter at one time had faith enough to walk on water, but moments later doubted and sank. Peter at one time had such fierce faith in Jesus as his Lord that he cut off the ear of one of the men who came to arrest Jesus, but later that same night Peter would shrink back and deny ever even knowing Jesus on three different occassions.

The example of a faith journey that we see in Scripture makes it clear that when we mess up or wander away, it’s not “game over.” Quite the opposite actually. In the gospel of John we read that after Jesus was resurrected from the dead, he went for a walk on the beach with Peter. While walking on the beach, Jesus asks Peter 3 different times if he loves him, and all 3 times Peter replies that he does. Jesus is allowing Peter to begin again. For each time that Peter seemed to have failed, Jesus allows him to start over again.

It’s kind of like when we would play kickball as kids and we would run up, kick with all of our might and …miss the ball. “Do over! Do over!” we would yell, “that one didn’t count”, “give me another chance”. We believe that God is the God of second chances, and third, and fourth, and… well, you get the picture.

So, we will covenant together to begin again each day, each hour, each minute, if necessary. In so doing, we are refusing to settle for where or how we are, and are always looking toward the people we are called to be.

Belong

The need to feel like we belong is one of the strongest driving forces in our lives, whether we realize it or not. We do, or don’t do, countless random things to fit in. We wear certain clothes, cut our hair a certain way, and use all of the right words. We pick up the cool hobby or habit, or drop it if it’s not cool. It’s hard-wired in us to want to be accepted, to belong. Think about it, why do people join gangs, join clubs, stay in abusive relationships, or flock to myspace and facebook? It’s because we shudder at the thought of not being able to say, “we.”

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At Mosaic, we believe this is because God created us in His image, that all people are created in His image, and therefore all people have inherent worth and value. God is a relational being, in the trinity we see God in a sort of mystical relationship with Himself (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). We see in creation God’s desire for us to be in a relationship with Him. And we read in Genesis that before Eve, God said “it’s not good for man to be alone,” so He created Eve to share life with Adam. God is relational, and we reflect that, we desire to be in relationships, to belong.

We believe that in order for us to truly experience the joy of community (a group of people within whom we find acceptance) we must value honesty, transparency, and acceptance in our relationships with others. We want to be the kind of place that any and everyone can feel like they belong; because we will demonstrate that we see their inherent worth and value by welcoming them in and getting to know them. We will covenant together to fervently seek out authentic community by inviting others into the community and striving to create community within the relationships with which God blesses us.

In other words, we want to strive to get to know each other, really get to know each other. We want to do more than just say ‘hi’ and move on, we want to spend time together. We don’t want to just smile and nod as we walk by, we want to sit down and see how life is going, find out what you’re excited about, and what you’re frightened of. We want to get to know you, and we want you to get to know us…so we will share ourselves. We will strive to be open, honest, and transparent with one another. We will share our hopes and dreams, our fears and failures. We will strive to share life together…because that’s what we’re wired for.

Believe

The author Henry David Thoreau once said, “Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.” From what I know, he would not have considered himself a follower of Christ, which is exactly why his statement should cause all of us who claim to be followers of Christ to take pause. According to the biographers, H.D.T. disliked organized religion, and he ignored most aspects of Christianity.

What if those who claim belief in Jesus as their Lord and Savior had lived out their beliefs around H.D.T.? I obviously can’t say if it would have changed anything or not (or even if they did or not), but for someone who basically ingored matters of faith and belief in a higher power to claim that living your belief can turn the world around says quite a bit to me about how he percieved people of faith.

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As we look together at our covenant and wrestle with what it means to believe, one idea rises to the top: we have to live out what we say we believe. I doubt I have to say too much here, we are all familiar with people who say they believe something, but it’s not reflected in their actions. Whether it’s someone who says they believe their team will win, but bets against them, or someone who says they believe in Jesus and follow Him, but they fight, curse, steal, and cheat with the best (or worst) of ‘em. We know what it looks like to live in a world where what people say they believe, and the way the live, are usually inconsistent.

The singer/songwriter Bob Dylan once said, “People seldom do what they believe in, they do what’s convenient, then repent.” The world has seen more than it’s fair share of people who can scream what they claim to believe, but most of the world is still waiting to see it. In Scripture, James says that “religion the Father finds pure and faultless is this, to take care of the widows and orphans.” This is admittedly just one aspect of our faith, but notice… it’s an action. Jesus repeatedly blasted the pharisees and religous leaders of His day for being hypocrites, for not living what they claimed to believe. We see over and over in Scripture that saying it louder, or more often, or with more modern technology, does not necessarily mean that we really believe it.

The proof is in the pudding, as the old saying goes. It’s not what we say, it’s what we do that demonstrates what we believe. Tying a towel on like a cape and saying I believe I can fly really doesn’t mean anything until I’m willing to jump. That’s why as we covenant together, we will look to Scripture to see what some of the common indicators of the faith are, things like confession, repentance, baptism, communion, and helping the hurting. We will be covenanting together to actively seek ways to live out our belief in Jesus as Lord and Savior and, in so doing, to transform our lives, homes, communities, and even the world.

We will make this covenant together because we understand that our belief must change us, it must motivate us to action, or we don’t really believe it. And we believe that when we live out our belief in Jesus, when we strive to live like Christ, that it can’t help but transform those around us as well.

Be Whole

Some of the headlines on cnn.com today are about the New York governor caught with a prostitute, Liberian troops forced to resort to cannibalism, the arrest of a man suspected of killing a Duke student, an archbishop kidnapped and killed, and a 16 year old girl that had been held captive as a sex slave.

We live in a broken and fragemented world, full of broken and fragmented people. We see it all around us, from the headlines to our own road rage and latest screaming match with our spouse. Of all the things that mankind is capable of, chief among them seems to be hurting each other.

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At Mosaic we believe this is because we are broken, and broken things hurt. There’s a collection of poems and songs in Scripture called the Psalms. In the 31st Psalm, the author recounts some details of the broken world of his day, and agonizes over his own brokenness. He says, “My life is consumed by anguish and my years by groaning; my strength fails because of my affliction, and my bones grow weak. Because of all my enemies, I am the utter contempt of my neighbors; I am a dread to my friends–those who see me on the street flee from me. I am forgotten by them as though I were dead; I have become like broken pottery.”

Haven’t we all? We all have sharp, jagged, edges that hurt those around us. Most of us are not content to be like this, most of us want to be ‘put back together’ again, to be whole again. We believe that is God’s plan, that He is remaking us, renovating us, redeeming us. We believe that God wants to take us in all of our brokenness, and join our pieces together with others in community with His all-encompassing love. We believe that, if we will allow Him, God can and will ‘put us back together’ again, but as something even better and more beautiful than before. We believe this happens in community with our brothers and sisters in Christ. We realize that we need each other, because it is in our brokeness we come together in Christ. We believe it is only in this community of believer’s cemented together in His love that we can once again be whole.

So we will covenant to journey together, believing that we can and must give strength when we have it and accept others’ strengths when we need them. In so doing, we believe that God is using us to create a wonderful mosaic of sharp, jagged, broken people who have come together in Christ…and found that we are much more beautiful together in our brokenness than we ever could have been on our own.

It’s just a building…

One of our goals at Mosaic is to be a part of the community, to love and serve the community with no secret agendas; because we believe that is how Jesus loves our community. One of the ways that we strive to do this is by opening up the space that God has blessed us with to our community for various events. Over the past couple of years, we’ve hosted English as a second language classes, Children’s theater/acting classes, Special dinners and meetings for other local churches and ministries, we host the ‘Mosaic Art Gallery’ which is open as part of the citywide First Fridays (of each month), and in October we hosted some events for the Irvington Halloween Festival.

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In addition to providing giant inflatable games and free cotton candy at the festival on Halloween, our space was used to host the First Annual Irvington Halloween Festival Beauty Pageant and we also hosted the first ever indoor presentations of Irvington Ghost Tours with Al Hunter. While it is very exciting to me personally to see Mosaic stepping up and playing a role in these events; I must admit that I have from time to time caught myself wondering if it makes any difference or has any impact to love and serve in these ways.

In last week’s edition of the Eastside Voice, Al Hunter who hosts the Ghost tours and writes a column for the paper; chose to write about Mosaic and his perceptions of us as a church. Al, if you’re reading this, “Thanks!”. To my family at Mosaic, may you be as encouraged by this article as I was. And to anyone and everyone else that sometimes wonders if it’s worth it to keep loving and serving, often without recognition, I pray that this article may spur you on towards more love and more good deeds.

Better Than A Bucket List

So am I wrong, or is the idea of the bucket list all of the stuff you want to do before you “kick the bucket”? Seems kind of odd to me, I mean, isn’t that kind of like a count down to your own death? “Oh, I just checked off number 43, wrestling with a tiger while skydiving into the amazon and then building my own home from indeginous trees!”

Okay, so that would be pretty cool, but I’m not sure even the great Chuck Norris could pull that one off. Here’s a list worth having though.

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I wrote a few days ago about Mosaic’s 2nd anniversary and our idea to give a gift instead of receiving one. Since the traditional gift for a 2nd anniversary is cotton, we decided we would collect school uniforms for our local school IPS 57. The principal, Ms. Brown, will be joining us on Sunday morning September 6th to accept our anniversary gift!

So this is the promised list of approved school uniforms. Some of you are a little surprised right now that I am saying this list is better than a bucket list (even Chuck Norris’ bucket list, which I hear has “Defeat Satan in an arm wrestling contest while simultaneously bringing democracy to North Korea and filming Delta Force 3? as number 17 to do). But really, if you’re going to try and check stuff off a list before you die, shouldn’t it be stuff that matters? Shouldn’t it be stuff that makes a difference, makes the world a better place, and survives long after you? So why not a list of appropriate school uniform attire to donate?

Here it is:

BOTTOMS: khaki, black, or navy slacks, shorts & skirts.

TOPS: solid color golf shirts or plain uniform blouses in red, light blue, navy, black, or white.

SOCKS: solid color white or black.

BELTS: any kind and color.

SIZES NEEDED: children’s small (5) - x large (16), a few adult small and mediums could also be used.

Remember, we are collecting these new or gently used uniforms up to and including Sunday September 6th. So let’s be honest, you’re probably never going to single handedly save a beached whale while driving a Ferrari on the German autobahn; but you can make a difference this week, and check something off of the list that will mean a whole lot more.

Cotton

You know, that white fluffy stuff that comes out of your favorite stuffed animal after the 18,394th time you’ve played tug of war with it. The stuff that comes in little ball shapes of cloud like fun, or like that favorite t-shirt that shrank in the wash; but you just can’t seem to part with it anyway. Well, it turns out that cotton is also the traditional gift for a 2nd anniversary. Mosaic is about to celebrate our 2nd anniversary the weekend of September 6th, and we want lots of cotton…

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As we’ve thought about our 2nd anniversary, and how best to celebrate it, we thought it would be awesome if Mosaic gave a gift instead of receiving one. So, we turned our attention once again to IPS 57 just around the corner from us. School is starting there this week, and as usual, there is a big need for school uniforms for the students that can’t afford them, or can’t afford multiples of them. And there it was, cotton.

So here’s the deal, we are collecting school uniforms up to (and including) Sunday, September 6th, when we will present our 2nd anniversary gift to Ms. Brown, the principal at IPS 57.

Places like Old Navy, Target, Wal-mart, and many others are stocked up on approved uniform attire right now, and many will likely be having sales on it in the coming weeks. There are fliers available in the lobby with approved clothes and colors. I will try to get that list added to the blog in the next cople of days as well.

So help us celebrate our 2nd anniversary as we remember that God has blessed us to be a blessing…and bring lots of cotton.