Can you name anything that appeals to you that is totally irrational? A like or a love or an expectation -- a favorite thing, story, or experience -- that really makes no sense? Other than God, Jesus, and all that, what other things?

How about pulling for the Gamecocks last Saturday? It was College Gameday, and #1 versus #18...why on earth should any of us logically expect Carolina to win? But we do, we hope against hope for it, and that's true for any underdog.

My sister is a campus minister. She and her students are very connected to a humanitarian agency in Nicaragua that especially tries to aid locals in owning and profiting from their own businesses. One huge undertaking is to establish a fair-trade organic clothing line, with Nicaraguans owning production from start to finish -- cotton growing, spinning, and sewing. Most recently, the already-bought-and-paid-for spinning equipment (hundreds of thousands of dollars) was denied them by shady dealings from their supplier, Coker International (in Greenville, SC). So my sister and three or four students jumped in to help however they could...by showing up at Coker to picket out front.


Now, that's the kind of story most of us love, David/Goliath and all that, a handful of not-exactly-powerful people trying to leverage the corrupt corporation with handmade signs and protest. The story hasn't panned out yet, but they made local news. Most of us consider ourselves "the little guy", so of course it'd be cool to know that if I were being screwed by a big company, "the little guy" would have a shot at getting some justice, yeah? No matter how unlikely or irrational that is.

The same is true for the long-shots. Every time somebody buys a lottery ticket, whether they're serious about it or not, even if you just find one on the sidewalk, what's that little twinkle in our eye at the fleeting thought that "this could be the one? And that's absolutely absurd.

The stories and fairytales we love are chock full of nonsense, and we love it. The true stories we love, "The Blind Side" and Chilean miners and Aron Ralston, have no rational business actually working out and succeeding. But we're human so we hope, and we hope our hope is confirmed.

Jesus knew that, I reckon, especially by telling the story of the widow before the judge in his parable from Luke 18:1-8. The scene kinda smacks of absurdity -- a widow, the lowest of the low in her society's eyes, is relentless to bring her case before a judge. And not just any judge, one with no particular regard for God or people -- no love. But he grants her request eventually because she won't quit and he doesn't wanna get tired hearing about it.

It's a huge long shot, "little gal" versus the judge. And it makes no sense. Rationally, in that culture why should any widow have thought so highly of herself to think she'd be heard, let alone so much so to come back repeatedly. Why should she have hoped to succeed against this judge, of all judges? And why should such a man have ever granted her desire? Shouldn't have. Shouldn't happen. But it did in Jesus' story.

So? So, Jesus in a way seems to confirm our irrationality, and he's speaking in the context of our approaching God. I hear him say, "When it comes to prayer, when it comes to talking to God and communing with God, don't just be so blasted rational all the time."

I mean, consider why we each personally bail out on talking to God, communing with God, or asking from God.... We rationalize. We decide that there's no reason God should hear, or care, or respond. We take it personal and say, "it must be about me, I've done too much wrong or just personally don't matter enough for God to hear." We give up on what we're hoping for and say, "It'll never happen, that would be too good to be true." And, mostly, we make conclusions about God, "God is just too busy, or too distant and uncaring, or too non-existent to hear from me or answer me."

How do we fight back against those feelings of hopelessness? Why not harness the power of human irrationality.

Like, romance. Our soap operas, love stories, and real life pursuits are full of nonsensical risks (and rewards). People go through insane relationships, rebounds, heartbreak...people can feel like they have nothing else to lose and even nothing left to offer...people can think themselves not-so-attractive, not-so-wealthy, not-so-intelligent, not-so-charming...and STILL throw all caution to the wind to pursue that special someone. Really.


I mean, have you ever met a couple and wondered, "Now, how on earth did he end up with her?" Or vice-versa. Maybe it worked because one or the other was willing to go for it, to pursue the other fervently, and to not relent, even if it didn't make any sense to the rest of the world. Well done.

We can harness the power of the irrational child. Do you know, or are you, or have you been a kid who knows how to ask for and get what he/she wants? Yeah. It can be sickening, manipulative, aggravating to heck, to deal with such. Kids can be shameless -- throwing themselves bodily on the floor, screaming, pulling out the dirty tricks like, "If you love me, you'll...." On the road trip, they never stop the "Are we there yet?" Child psychologists call it the "pit-bull mentality" because once they latch on to something there's no breaking free.

And that really makes no sense considering that kids in a family have little or no real authority to expect anything. That's a little old school, but they depend on others truly for everything. They can't overpower an adult and often can't fend for themselves. But they can win the battle of wills by never relenting in the pursuit of their desire.

If they can, with no hope in sight sometimes, why can't we? Not to endorse how some of our culture goes after romance, or how a spoiled kid gets his/her way...can we somehow take the irrationality that pervades humanity and apply it towards our greatest good, our pursuit of relationship with God?

I mean, Jesus paints that picture, a ridiculous, impossible picture, I think to contrast the reality of our true situation. We matter immensely more in God's eyes than a widow did in her society in Jesus' day -- God calls us children, brothers and sisters, heirs of the kingdom. And God is infinitely more loving and invested than this judge. So why should we pursue God any less than she pursued justice.

I mean, above all, here is God in the flesh in Jesus saying, essentially, "Please, please, don't stop trying to talk to me. Don't stop connecting to me. Never stop. Understand who you are. Understand who I am. Don't lose heart."

This is "Homecoming" season for the two churches, and at the same time there's a revival going on with the theme "Beyond these Walls" getting at the whole "don't just stay cooped up in your pretty brick church" bit.

I see all that working together when it comes to a good, truly healthy idea of home. The most solid home we've had is my grandparents' house. It's home for all the good reasons -- there's a twin bedroom there that my brother and I call ours, and a bed that's mine; there are pictures and albums everywhere not just of me but my mom and other folks when they were growing up, that tell our story; and there's a good screeching swinging door at the back of the kitchen, a reminder of my grandparents' hospitality to always welcome everybody. That door always did a good job of swinging both ways -- not just to welcome but also to usher us all back into the world when we would head home, recharged and ready.

I think that's vital for good "home." Comfort, familiarity, roots to our story and identity, and MOSTLY an urging to on with living deeply, back out in the world. Maybe home stops being good when it entices us to stay forever and hide from life, hunker down and cling to its comfort far longer than might be best, or share it with only a select group (or with no one). Clearly that's also true for a church home. Especially when most, most, most of us don't have the personal experience of a good home, and we claim to believe that wherever followers of Jesus gather should be the homiest, best fellowship we can find on earth.

So how to deal with our church walls...? I say, start with the walls of our own hearts; because it's those, taken as a whole when a bunch of us gather, that add up to the collective walls of the church. So what kind of walls do we particularly struggle with?

Think about the different types...

One kind is the partition. For our sports fans, it's a good thing when you go to games and there's a divider or boundary all the way around the field, right? As in, without it sometimes a linebacker would be landing in your lap, or we wouldn't know what to call a home run and all that. Partition walls separate space, especially for different purposes, like to create different rooms ("kitchen" versus "bedroom"). They're important. Don't believe me? Consider the walls of bathroom stalls in a huge public restroom. Separation of space. It's important.

We do that with our hearts, maybe, and sometimes maybe it's okay. We wear different hats, feel/act differently in different situations and company. I can say, "this part of me is the spouse, and this part the parent, or sibling; this part of me is for work, that part is what shows when people are around, that part is for when nobody's watching, that part is me at church," and so on. We partition our hearts, it's multi-purpose space.


But we know the danger of isolating parts of our hearts, I think, or what it is to not feel whole, to put on too many different faces and not be in touch with our deepest, true heart. And the question becomes, what space do we allot to God? How big, what fraction of the whole? And the bigger joke and/or struggle is trying to keep God in that fraction. Some of us struggle most with partition walls of the heart.

Another kind of wall is the structural. As in, load-bearing, holding up floors and roof. Both churches where we worship have the sanctuary over large basement space, so thank goodness for structural walls, eh? These are what we use to build, they lean on each other to hold it all up.

And I wonder what we build in our hearts. I mean, like Ezekiel and the plumb-line a few weeks ago, we know that the slightest error in a coarse of brick can totally warp the rest of a building, so it takes good care. So we carefully build up hopes/dreams/fantasies, and our vision of who we are, who God is, and who others are. But what about the warping? What is informing what we build, and how sound is the finished structure? Like one Baltimore church with a huge sign reading in bold, "Trespassers will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," signed The Sisters of Mercy. It's easy to whack things up. According to our gospel, particularly easy without being informed by the Holy Spirit who knows us best. Do we need to wrestle with what we're building in here?

The last kind of wall to deal with is one that's protective. Moats and ramparts and all that, ancient cities and towns new that to survive they needed protection -- to keep the bad stuff out. Or, to keep stuff in, not just in terms of prisons to protect us from others in our midst, but also for those without any sense to protect themselves -- like livestock in pens, barbed wire and all.

When we erect these walls in our hearts, though, do we wall things in our out? For our country music fans, there's a Toby Keith video for the song, "A Little Too Late" (see below). The lyrics are all about a couple's breakup, and how it's all over and it's too late to reconcile, and throughout the video Keith is slowly brick-walling up the basement space that holds the lady-friend to whom he's singing, his soon-to-be-ex. Problem for Toby is when the video wraps up, he realizes he's walled himself into the wrong side of the basement -- she has the side with the stairs to escape.

So, yes, sometimes when we think we're walling things out, we find ourselves concreted in, eh? Really, what is it we want to keep out, or keep locked up? Certain people, kinds of people, experiences...? Our secret and shameful things, the painful things deep in there?

All told, I think all three of those walls get at one question: "What are we so afraid of?" For instance, what is it we don't want anyone to know? What is it we don't want to feel? What is it that we don't want to get mixed up with God, that we want him to keep his grubby paws out of?

These are the things that keep us in and away and far from LIFE, life to the full. These are also the things that Scripture will challenge every single week we worship, or every day. Because the gospel, by nature, can consistently produce an occasion to be afraid and wall up. But it simultaneously challenges us to tear those things down, clip away the barbed wire, demolish what we've built so whack, and have hearts that are free. Always two roads: try to build on our own or work hand-in-hand with God.

What compels me to keep trying (failing, and trying again) to run with option #2 is that the walls I build just don't do much of a job. Do yours even do what you want them to do? Do they do the whole job, solve every problem, keep things in order, keep everything you want out or in? Puhhh. Mine fail. But our gospel, Scripture, meeting with God and other faithful ones, they consistently tell us that what we have in God is good, and will not fail.

Like today's reading Psalm 91.

Church home, like home-home, and I think ultimately like heaven, should be about dealing with these walls together. Not walling ourselves in as a group together, but doing well to have a screeching but easily-swinging back door that invites us to head back out into God's great earth for whatever adventure we might find there.

It's like a story I heard from a summer day at a beach near Jacksonville, FL. This particular day the wind and current were whacko out of control, and the lifeguard staff were totally vigilant, just going at it all day. They pulled 8 or 10 people out that day. One man couldn't believe it, watched most of the day, and set out that evening to give the lifeguards his gratitude for an awesome job. When he walked up and into the head guard shack, he saw written there in huge letters the motto responsible for the day: "If in doubt, GO!"

We gather as Christians knowing that this is pretty well the state of the world around us. Why, "GO!"? Because life is at stake. We need Christ alive in us. We need others in whom Christ is alive. The rest of the other needs those in whom Christ is alive. So let the walls come a-tumbling down.

Coming to the end of Easter season now. Seven weeks of wondering about resurrection, the longshot that things don't just come to an end for us or other people. The potential that this Chosen One, Jesus from Galilee, never found his end, and never will; that his story continues, he speaks from beyond the grave, he redeems and still calls out, "FOLLOW ME," and so our story continues.

Very quickly it's clear that this is a story for the telling, one that was immediately expanding and enveloping every kind of people on earth, everywhere, in every time. So Jesus said and urged. So his friends and followers believed, and started to bear witness to it by the leading of the very Spirit of God. And whoever the story touched, those who heard and believed, they became characters in it, each enhancing it in a way only he/she could. And so, in the Spirit they too bore the story with them, very much witnesses to the Resurrection.

That's where we've been, watching the witness-story unfold and stretch-out and grow.

And wondering how we fit into it. How to take part in it.

Christian "witness" is treated every kind of way, from people with sandwich-boards and bullhorns (cf. Rob Bell) to those who leap at a chance to tell their "testimony", to those who want to silently serve and let their behavior speak for itself.

But so far the beginning of the story told in the book of "Acts" seems clear on something: this story unfolds moment by unique moment, and having a powerful part in it comes from responding to the free-flowing, uncontrollable Spirit at work in and around us. The way I bear witness will adhere to no rules or guidelines, except that the story is God's and the Spirit guides the way.

This week in Acts 16:16-34 in particular, Paul and Silas do what they do best - get thrown into prison. Why? Because of their part in the story, and the result is that prison becomes part of the story, and also what happens there. Welcome to following Jesus' way. Who knows what's coming, where should we go, what should we do, how do we do it? Ride the wave.

Overall, it kinda reminds me of these guys, really:

Surfers are good at waiting and being in tune, in rhythm. There are lulls but then there are also overwhelmingly powerful times, and they enter in unafraid. There's no mistaking that it's the wave's power that fuels the ride, but it's up to the surfer to pursue the big sets and cooperate in the moment. What about bearing witness to the Resurrection in the Spirit?