Shortly after the release of the song “Waiting On the World to Change”, John Mayer told a newspaper reporter, “I wanted to start a debate. Most of us are happy to wait for things to change.” So, maybe, as some have suggested, Johnny boy was being ironic.

Of course, he also reportedly told a concert crowd in Vancouver that this song is as much a political song as “Grey’s Anatomy” is a show about medicine.

Who knows? Supposedly, he smokes a lot of pot, so he might not remember what he was thinking when he wrote it originally.

Regardless of his original intent, my point is this: there are a lot of people who honestly feel the way he describes in the lyric. They feel disenfranchised. They feel like they can’t effect change. They feel powerless, at the mercies of some great “them” out there. Thus, they blame the evils of society on “them” — the government, the wealthy, corporate America, Opus Dei, the Masons, etc.

The general feeling depicted so accurately in Mr. Mayer’s song is one of frustration and resignation. As he sings, “Now we see everything that’s going wrong with the world and those who lead it. We just feel like we don’t have the means to rise above and beat it. So we keep waiting, waiting on the world to change.”

Here’s why I bring this up: It’s not just the whiny, emo kid who feels this way. It’s not just the dope-smoking, seven-year senior at your local community college who feels this way, either. I know a lot — and I mean a lot — of Christians who feel this way, too.

Culture is bad. Universities are liberal strongholds. The media can’t be trusted. Government is corrupt. Hollywood is perverse.

But they won’t listen to us. We’re nobodies. We’re just regular folks who “don’t have the means to rise above and beat” the system.

So, we keep waiting — waiting on the world to change.

And just how do we think that’s going to happen? The world’s going to change itself?

Jesus gave his followers some pretty explicit marching orders. He told us to get out there and mix it up with the world, taking his light and his salt with us as we go. He even promised to be with us as we go. Believe it or not, he’s already out there — in the recording studios and sound stages, in the green rooms of Broadway theatres, in the halls of Congress, in the libraries and lecture halls on University campuses worldwide, in the strip clubs and biker bars and crack dens, too. He’s in the soup kitchens and in the museums of New York, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta.

He’s out there, and he promises to give us everything we need to join him there.

So, tell me, please — and be honest about this because I really want to know — what are we waiting for?

Me and all my friends
We’re all misunderstood
They say we stand for nothing and
There’s no way we ever could

We keep on waiting
Waiting on the world to change

– John Mayer

Before I get into this, I should let you know that I really like John Mayer. I own three of his records (“Continuum”, “Heavier Things” and “Room for Squares”). I think he’s a really talented guitarist, and I enjoy his lyrics.

But this song, as catchy as it is, reveals something about his thought process that’s really disturbing to me. Perhaps it really is the thought process for many of his contemporaries (though I am only seven years older, and it sure doesn’t reflect my thoughts).

Maybe I should give some background first. I was an activist when I was in high school and college — a card-carrying member of Greenpeace, a financial supporter of Amnesty International. I had to be talked out of going to Tiananmen Square to protest the human rights violations going on over there in 1989. I was part of a group of students who got recycling bins on our college campus in the fall of 1988. My friends and I were young and idealistic, and we really believed we could change the world.

I still believe this.

It’s why I’m so passionate about helping parents become better parents. It’s why I travel so often and so far to help churches become better churches. It’s why I write so much to try and help Christians become better Christians. I believe we can change the world. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again.

But John Mayer and his cronies have given up. They would like things to be different, but they feel powerless to do anything about it. So, they’ve resigned themselves to wait. They’ll continue to complain about things, but they won’t try to change anything. Instead, they’re waiting on the world to change. Then they’ll step in and do something. Or it won’t change, but they’ll find themselves in charge by default — with no experience at working for change, just wishing for it.

Anyone else see a problem with that?

It seems many Christians view life in the big city with a jaundiced eye. And that prejudice is returned in kind. Many city dwellers view Christians with suspicion or downright hostility.

Christie Brown left a comment the other day suggesting that it’s because so many Christians give off a vibe that says, “We’re intolerant and exclusive.” I think that’s kind of a two-way street, because many of the urbanites I know give off that same vibe — only they add an air of sophistication bordering on elitism — towards those who live in the suburbs or (heaven forbid) rural areas.

I’ve lived in big cities, and I’ve lived in tiny towns, and I currently live in suburbia. As much as I would like to say, “People are just people,” I’m not sure that’s true. The folks who live in these various areas have distinct personalities. Granted, they share many of the same maladies and idiosyncrasies. We are all human, after all, and the issues that affect us are not legion, there are only a few things that make up what we know as “the human condition”. Loneliness. Regret. A desire for meaning and purpose. Fear. Hope. Doubt. Love. These are universals.

And yet….

Life in the big city shapes a person, no? As does life on the ranch or life in the great outdoors or life in the sanitized housing tracts dotting the suburban landscape.

So, what gives? Why do so many Christians (and the vast majority of the Christians I know live either in suburban or rural areas) view city dwellers with such suspicion? And why do so many city dwellers view Christians with such disdain?

Autumn in New York
Why does it seem so inviting?
Autumn in New York
It spells the thrill of first nighting

– Vernon Duke

So, we went to New York, Manhattan, the Big Apple, The City That Never Sleeps. And we had a fabulous time. We met friends — old and new — and we saw a really good musical (“In the Heights”). We saw the Naked Cowboy in Times Square. We ate at Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill and caught the Dizzy Gillespie Alumni All-stars at The Blue Note. We went to church at St. George’s in Gramercy (near Stuyvesant Square). We visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art and strolled through Central Park in the rain. We ate chicken soup at midnight in the Carnegie Deli. And we visited the Ground Zero Museum Workshop — which was touching and thought-provoking and I’ll have more to say about it later.

We really had a fantastic time. Autumn in New York is so inviting.

And yet….

Autumn in New York is often mingled with pain.

Here in my comfortable neighborhood, I am relatively isolated from any visible sign of human misery. There are no homeless people at the entrance to my driveway. No one asks me for spare change between my house and the grocery store. No one tries to sell me a fake Rolex when I take the dog around the block. Living where I do, it would be easy to assume there are no hookers or adult bookstores left.

I know there are people suffering around me — in my own neighborhood, even — but suburbanites have the common courtesy to suffer privately behind closed doors. They’re not big on bringing their suffering out into the open where the neighborhood watch program can see it.

But when you go to New York, there it all is — front and center — lumped together and stacked on top of itself — 23 square miles of whatever-you-want-whenever-you-want-it — rich and poor, healthy and sick, married, single, gay, straight, bi-, sane, crazy, good, bad, sublime, ridiculous, wholesome, sordid, Christian, pagan, Jewish, Muslim, undecided, unsorted, unwashed, miscellaneous and everything-in-between.

We would walk through the most mouth-watering smell and then get punched in the face with an eye-watering stink we had never before encountered…often within 10 feet of one another.

I live in a pretty sanitized world, and it’s relatively easy to be a Christian in that kind of environment. Living your faith with integrity in a place like New York takes some doing, and I wonder if I’d be up for the challenge. Raising kids there, staying married there, following Jesus there would be difficult.

Heck, paying the bills there would be difficult!

What do you think? Could you do it? Could you live as a Christian in The City? Do you think it would be worth the effort?

If you’ve read this blog for very long, it won’t be a surprise to hear that I’m a big fan of C.S. Lewis’ magnificent book, The Weight of Glory. Clive Staples knew a thing or two about enjoying life, reading all those Nordic myths, taking long, leisurely strolls through the garden and listening to those Wagnerian symphonies. He smoked a pipe and was known to hoist a pint or two. He liked art and theatre, but he knew that our longings for beauty were signposts pointing us to a fulfillment that differed not only in degree but in kind.

These moments of beauty, these flashes of pleasure and yearning, he said, “are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard.”

This weekend, I’m taking my wife to New York, where we will smell some flowers and hear some tunes. We’re hoping to discover some clues about what we’re missing on earth. We’re determined not to divide the world into “natural” and “supernatural” (which is really just code for “spiritual” and “unspiritual”). Instead, we’ll try to combine the two. We’ll walk through Central Park and eat at Bond 45. We’ll catch a musical (or two). We’ll laugh with some old cronies and have brunch with at least one new friend. We’ve planned a trip to the Ground Zero Museum. We’ll poke our heads into some old cathedrals and pray and hold hands and talk about architecture and prayer and trees and God.

We haven’t always been able to take trips like this. It wasn’t too long ago when we couldn’t afford a babysitter for a date night.

But God has been good.

Here’s what I’m trying to get my head around: God owns everything, right? Christians agree on that. He owns everything, and he distributes it all as he sees fit. He wants us to share. He wants us to cultivate generosity of spirit. He wants us to use what he’s given us to help alleviate poverty and suffering. But he decides who has a little (been there) and who has a lot (there now for the first time in a long time).

If he has chosen to give me more than I need right now, why should I feel guilty about that?

I’m going to use it wisely. I’m not going to live an outrageously extravagant lifestyle (though, as I mentioned already, extravagance is extremely subjective). Our family gives money away to help others. We’re going to spend some money on ourselves, and we’re going to feel good about it.

Alright…we’re going to feel okay about it.

The smell of a flower is a lovely thing, but it’s not as lovely as the flower itself. The sights and sounds and smells and tastes we’ll experience this weekend will be amazing. I have no doubt about that. But they won’t be as amazing as the thing they’ll point us to. They’ll point us beyond themselves to the God who loves to give good things to his children and the creative community he provides in a measure now but promises to provide in an ultimate sense one day — maybe soon (“Maranatha”).

So, what will you do this weekend? What will be your way of smelling the flowers?

I grew up in a religious tradition that wasn’t big on celebration or pleasure. We sang a lot of songs about how life wasn’t fair, and how we should just grit our teeth and bear it until Jesus comes back. There will be plenty of time for pleasure and celebration in heaven. There’s too much work to be done in the meantime, so suck it up, quit complaining and remember how hard Jesus had it when he was here on earth being crucified for your sins.

People who had nice things and took nice vacations were viewed with a little bit of suspicion, and all stories of enjoyable experiences were to be prefaced with the phrase, “I felt a little guilty about it…”.

We weren’t the first to do this. Mystics have fled into deserts and caves in a huff of self-denial for centuries. I know Christians who, in a show of solidarity for those who suffer persecution, refuse to enjoy simple creature comforts like good coffee or hair care products. After all, there are Christians in Chinese prisons who don’t have these things. Lots of people resign themselves to bland existence, some even actively pursue suffering in the hopes of having it all turned inside-out in the life to come. Perhaps those who enjoyed life here and now may not have it as good in eternity. Maybe their mansions won’t be as nice or as big as those who willingly went without. Maybe there’s only so much pleasure allotted to each of us, and if you use it all up on this side of eternity, you’ll have to do without once you get to the other side. Could this life be one big exercise in delayed gratification?

But I like big food. And I like to travel to fun and exotic locations. I like to look at the changing leaves or a craggy coastline. I like to hear soulful music. I like a fine Cabernet. I like a good, hoppy beer. I like walking around museums. I like nosing through used bookstores.

Extravagance, as we all know, is relative. I realize that my lifestyle is extravagant compared to people in other parts of the world. But there’s got to be a middle ground, right? I do not believe we earn ourselves brownie points for living austere, ascetic lifestyles. But I don’t believe we should we give in to hedonism, either.

I want to enjoy life, and I think I’ve got some decent theological underpinnings for going with that desire. I think.

How about you? How do you know when you’ve gone too far in one direction or the other? And what are some things you really enjoy in a healthy way?

We’ve spent the past couple of months going back over the basics of salvation. We began with God, of course, and how he created everything perfectly. We saw how the poor choices of the first two people in the Bible opened the door for sin and death. We saw how God’s holiness, love and justice demanded action, but we also saw how our sin had rendered us incapable of doing anything to save ourselves. So, God sent his Son, Jesus, to live a perfectly sinless life (thus defeating sin’s power) and to die a sacrificial death on our behalf (thus paying sin’s price).

But what good is a dead savior?

If death had been the end of the line for Jesus, it would be “Game Over” for the human race. You’d live. You’d sin. You’d die. That’s it.

Thankfully, what comes next in the story begins with my two favorite words: But God….

But God was not content to see Jesus left in the tomb. Nor was he content to leave us without hope in this world. Nor was he content to allow sin and death to have the last words.

So, three days after his death, God brought Jesus back to life, vindicating him, condemning those who rejected him and opening a way for all of those who would place their trust in him to have access to their Heavenly Father who loves them more than they can ever begin to imagine.

Needless to say, this is the part of the story that changes absolutely everything. If a man can come back to life, after having been dead for three days, simply because God’s favor rests upon him…well…then anything is truly possible. By defeating both sin and death — humanity’s most powerful enemies — Jesus gave us more than hope. He gave us a way to be reconciled to God once and for all.

Forget Hemingway or Tolstoy. Forget Dan Brown or John Grisham. Forget Spielberg or Scorsese. This is the greatest, most powerful, most redemptive, most promising, most inspiring story of all time.

But until we respond to it — until we take it personally — that’s all it is: a story.

The question you have to ask yourself now is this: Will you continue to ask God to play a part in your story, or will you submit to the idea that God has graciously invited you to play a role in His Story?

God handed us a perfectly good world, and we broke it. We’ve made a mess of our humanity and racked up quite a bill (which we have no means of ever paying).

While it is true that God loves us, it is also true that his holiness won’t let him pretend nothing’s happened. Somebody’s got to clean it all up. Someone’s got to pay for the damages.

Sin doesn’t just separate us from God; it earns us death. Someone sins? Someone dies. Those are the rules.

So, why aren’t we all toast?

Because Jesus did more than just defeat sin — facing it squarely on its home turf, refusing to give in to temptation, living a perfect sinless life and, thus, qualifying himself as the bridge builder between a perfect God and sinful people. No, as if that weren’t enough, Jesus also paid the price for our sin.

The Apostle Paul put it this way, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Jesus, the only completely innocent person to ever live on planet earth, had the sins of everyone placed on his shoulders. Every last ounce of God’s justified wrath — wrath earned by us because of every sin we’ve ever committed — was poured out on him. Jesus was betrayed, abandoned, mocked, ridiculed, tortured, and killed for all the bad things we’ve done.

God’s justice demanded payment in full.

Jesus paid it all.

Since moving back from California we’ve been attending a church really close to our house called Stonecreek Church. I’ve joked before that I think most new churches (aka “cool churches”) have very few variations on names. I think they take four or five prefixes (Stone, River, North, Rock) and four or five (Bridge, Point, Creek, Park) suffixes. Then they cast lots or spin the wheel or throw dice or something.

Stonebridge. Riverpoint. Northcreek. Rockpark.

Anyway, we attend Stonecreek (after having helped plant Riverpark and doing all that consulting at Northpoint), and yesterday we arrived to find a sizable above-ground pool in the auditorium — where the first five or six rows of chairs usually are set up. About 60 folks had asked to be baptized, but Steven Gibbs (Sr. Pastor) surprised some folks by suggesting that you could be baptized even if you weren’t signed up. In fact, he went through a list of common objections he anticipated people might have (using the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 as an example) of someone spontaneously choosing to be baptized.

In the end, I’m sure we had about 60 baptisms in the first service alone. I haven’t heard the final reports, but Stonecreek may have baptized 100 people yesterday — more than most churches will baptize this year!

Needless to say, with three inquisitive kids living at our house, this generated some good, healthy conversations. Here’s how I explained it to the girls. Imagine you’re on one side of a big cliff, and God is on the other side. You really want to be close to him, and he really wants to be close to you, but there’s this big gap (with one of the girls I said a river you could never swim across– with another I said a canyon you could never jump across).

This river/canyon (which is probably the name of some cool church out there somewhere) is made of our sins. And every time we sin, the gap gets wider and wider and wider. That’s my kid-friendly word picture for Isaiah 59:1-2.

When Jesus came to earth, he built a bridge so we could get back to God. Being baptized is like walking across that bridge.

Theologically speaking, this explanation is not very precise (though I think it explained the gist of things well enough for my kids to “get it”). Jesus did far more than building a bridge across the gap created by our sins. In some cosmic sort of way, he actually defeated sin. He paid the price for our sin because God’s holiness means he can’t just pretend nothing happened. He conquered death, which is the ultimate consequence of sin.

What else did Jesus accomplish on the cross? And how would you explain the significance of baptism in language a child could understand?