Thumb through your Old Testament until you happen across Habakkuk. His oracle only takes about ten minutes to read through. Read it out loud. You'll be struck by how something so bad can sound so good...so ugly, yet so beautiful.
What do you hear? What do you see?
I see a jazz-shaped relationship with God...
America--Baskets, baskets everywhere.
There are 500,000 children waiting for homes in America's foster care system. We don't half to travel half-way around the world we live in a country with a half-million orphans.
They are every age, ethnicity and background. Notice that I said, "legally free." That is, there are no legal encumbrances to their being adopted. Unfortunately, there are far more children in the foster care system in various stages of the legal process. Good-hearted social workers and advocates are working to reunite them with their family but when all plans fail they become legally free.
The good news is that they are in a basket--safe, floating, waiting...for you to come to the riverside.
Parentless children is a global crisis with over 140 million orphans world wide.
One day, I received an email from a woman in our church about a little girl available for adoption in Ethiopia. At that time my wife, Barbara, and I had four children. Two boys and two girls--a complete symmetrical family. As I skimmed the email I prayed that God would provide a home for this child and then deleted the email. A while later the lady asked Barbara what she thought about the email. Busted! I told my wife that I thought our family was finished so I didn't see the need to forward the message to her. I was wrong.
We entered the process of international adoption. We were prepared for a long road but as we encountered one delay after another we began to wonder if the Lord was at work. We prayed and sensed that perhaps we were to be open to adopting more than one child from Ethiopia. After all, how could we travel half-way around the world to a country with 500,000 orphans and only bring back one!
We told our agency that if they could find another child we would be open. They identified a little boy and we were off to Ethiopia...
After all, how could we be in a country with half a million orphans and not do all we could?
Do you know how many orphans there are in America?
I think that she was down by the riverside to see if there was anything she could do. Powerless to change her father's will and unable to stop the horror upstream she went down by the riverside and immersed herself in the problem. With hope she sent her attendants walking along the shore in search of a miracle.
She hoped beyond hope that one of the little ones had survived.
As she bathed she sought to subvert the system. And the she saw the basket, had it brought to her and when the lid was opened she felt "sorry" the crying little one. "Sorry," that is compassion from her womb. It was then that she knew that she had to do something.
Have you been down by the riverside lately?
"Then Pharaoh's daughter went down to the Nile river to bathe..." (Ex. 2.5)
She went down to the river to bath. Doesn't that seem odd to you?
Pharaoh's daugther, raised in royalty, was bathing in the NILE river? Why would she do that!?
Sure bathing in the Nile was normal practice but it seems to me that given the circumstances she would have changed her routine. She could have had her servants bring water to her in the palace instead of wading in the waters of the Nile...with all of the bodies of the dead babies floating nearby.
Pharoah had come up with a plan to exterminate the Hebrew slaves. He gave the order, "Every boy that is born you must throw into the Nile..." (Ex. 1.22) Within a generation the Hebrew slaves would be no more.
Could this be why Pharoah's daughter was down by the riverside wading in the water?
Resolution follows Acknowledgement
Resolution: Jesus in his death was showing us how to live. Once we hear the call we must resolve to respond. This part of the cross-examen is a prayerful consent to embrace the excruciating life. May have died for the truths we have just acknowledged but what if they are not just world dying for but worth living as well? Resolution is the stage in which we vow to live life out of the cross and accept the invitation to the excruciating life.
Pursuance: Then comes the hard part. Applying the cross to our lives so that we truly become strange fruit.
Psalm: Each examen that folllows will end with an improvisational poem based on a classic sacred hymn of the cross.
Jesuit Christians daily practice the Prayer of Examen. It is a simple form of prayer that seeks to develop receptiveness to the call of God for the purpose of a response.
We need to "examen" the cross not "examine" the cross. Jesus' death was a supreme act of love--a love supreme, that is. "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends."
Coltranes stages provide a good pattern for cross-examEnation.
Stage 1--Acknowledgement: We need to face the facts about the cross. What was God doing on the cross? The basic classical answers are
Resolution is next...
The English word "excruciating" comes from the Latin "excruciare" meaning "out of the cross." It is a wrod invented specifically to describe the pain of crucifixion. We must never minimize the cross. it is the center of our faith. In the same way the jazz never leaves the blues behind, Christians daily carry their cross.
The Christian life is to be excruciating, that is, out of the cross. We are to take our cues from what Jesus was doing on that true and in the process become strange fruit.
In order to understand the excruciating life that we are called to I'm going to make use of John Coltrane's spiritual stages from his album, "A Love Supreme."
These will proved a prayer pattern to "examen" the cross. Notice I didn't say "examine." The latter is a scientific term in which we place ourselves in the role of questioner. I believe that when we approach the cross we should not cross-examine rather we should cross-examen.
The Apostle Peter understood that we are to become strange fruit. Legend says that he was crucified, literally, upside-down. He in turn calls us all to see the cross as a pattern for our lives.
To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. (I Pet. 2.24)
The cross is not just about what jesus did but what we are to do. That is, we recognize that Jesus, in his death, was showing us how to live.
The Apostle Paul said, "I resolved to know nothing...except Jesus Christ and him crucified.
God has a singular desire that he is working in every moment of our lives. That we would become strange fruit. This is the destiny that that all who love God have to look forward to “For we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. Those whom God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed into the likeness of his son.” The good that God is doing in all things is the molding and shaping us into the image of his son. God uses every moment of the life devoted to him to see that it conforms us to Christ. The goal is that would live and love like Jesus. That we would speak as he would speak and listen as he would do so because “we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory…”
This idea is developed even further in Ephesians where we are called to “be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” Our imitation of God is to extend to loving “just as Christ love us” on the cross. Paul was so compelled by this call of God that he took it on as his deep desire. Paul writes, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death.”
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