The Church should be a Hospital

[Mar 2:16-17 ESV] 16 And the scribes of the Pharisees, when they saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, said to his disciples, "Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?" 17 And when Jesus heard it, he said to them, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners."

I believe that we as Christians, as "little Christs" and followers of Him, we are to model Him, not only in His vision of ministry, but also in His attitudes toward sinners.

My heart is warmed when I read this passage, as I see Jesus' spending His precious and valuable time eating with sinners and tax collectors, what people considered the "scum of the earth" in those days.

Eating, in Jesus' time, was more than just eating food. It was a time to share food, ideas, experiences and simply life.

Eating was communal. Jesus was making community with sinners.

Think about it. He could have chosen to make community with the elite; the religious leaders, those in positions of authority in the roman world, and yet he chooses to spend his precious time and beautiful presence with sinners.

This blows my mind.

What also blows my mind is how different the church can be from Jesus.

I have observed and heard from many an attitude from churchgoers that mirrors more the Pharisees' than it does Jesus'

I look at my parish and wonder, if a smelly, homeless, drug addict walked in to church, would he feel welcome? Would people sit next to him or her? Would they try to keep their kids away from that person?

If a transgender individual walked in, would he feel welcomed and loved?

If someone suffering from alcoholism walked in, still with a hangover, would he or she feel welcomed and loved?

When I walk in my church, I wonder, "where are the homeless, the drug addicts, the prostitutes and pimps? Where are the drug dealers and the gangsters?"

Are our churches devoid of such people because the so called "sinners" are uninterested about God?

Or is it because they don't feel welcomed and loved?

Sure, we can shortcut to the first option, but I believe all of us have a hunger for God, for our hearts are restlessly yearning for its creator until they rest in Him.

I believe they don't usually come because they don't feel loved and accepted.

The church should be looking for the sinners. If Christ is our redemptor, if He truly is our savior, then our main interest should be sinners.

If the church (and I talk here not of the institution or a building, but of the community of believers, the mystical body of Christ) is like a hospital, then it should be filled with sick people.

But we can be so busy criticizing the sick that we forget that Christ is our cure! What a dysfunctional hospital we can be! A hospital full of doctors so busy criticizing and commenting and complaining about the sick and yet refusing to take care of them!

And when we do "take care of them" is usually so unChrist like. We Bible thump and call to repentance, we quote scriptures and point fingers. We remind them of their "shameful" sins and worldliness and their need to just "repent and change".

But we don't see this in Christ dealing with sinners. He had community with them.

The Bible tells us that He ate with sinners, not used-to-be-and-now-converted-sinners, meaning He never waited for them to repent before making community with them. He simply accepted them into His presence before they even repented! How opposite is that from what many of us do!

No brothers and sisters, it is in community that mutual repentance must come, not apart from community.

And before we can have community we must accept each other into our collective presence.

Community comes first, repentance and change as a result from community with Christ and His body.

We have it twisted. We demand that sinners repent and get "sanitized" enough before they are accepted into our community.

Brothers and sisters, let us fill our churches and our communities with the sinners the world most hate; the rejected, the drunk and the hungover.

Let us hold the hand of the drug addict on the streets, even if his or her other hands is still busy injecting their bodies with drugs.

Let us not just give food to the poor, but also sit down in the same table with them, eating the same food we give them while we share our life with them.

Let us go and make community with  the one prostituting their body on the street, even as they wait for their next "client".

Let's go and eat with sinners again, just as Jesus did. Maybe in the end we will realize we are just sinners like them.                                                                                                                              

Healing Wounds Part III - Healing Prayer

Click here for part II and here for part I.

There comes a time, however, that we need to bring our wounds to God.

It is worth repeating what I mentioned before: God desires to heal us from these wounds. He waits patiently until we decide to meditate on these painful wounds with the guiding help of His Holy Spirit.

I will share what I found helpful in healing some of my wounds, that is, my way of practicing healing prayer. I owe much to  Brad Jersak's book Can you hear me?, materials from Charles Kraft and my mentor in InnerCHANGE.

Set aside some time for healing prayer. Depending on the wound (or wounds) some may take longer. I know of people who go through their entire life in one long session, bringing every painful memory to God for healing.

The first step is to invite the Holy Spirit to guide you and guard you throughout this whole process. Trust yourself in His arms, and knowing full well that by yourself you are vulnerable in the spiritual world, entrust yourself like a child to the guidance of God's spirit.

Secondly focus on one wound, or a multitude of wounds, or a painful memory that keeps reoccurring and affecting your daily life.

For example, if anxiety and fear is a constant issue for you, you could ask God to heal you from this excessive anxiety.

Ask Him "where is this anxiety coming from? What are the past events that are causing this anxiety? What wounds are causing the anxiety?"

Pay attention to the images and memories that come to your mind. Don't ask yourself "is this just my imagination?" because God can use your imagination during this process.

Concentrate on one memory of the event. Perhaps you may experience a memory that was long forgotten, or repressed in the mind. This is usually a very painful experience, as many of us prefer to stay away from such memories.

But this pain is part of the healing process.

Stay in the memory until the pain of it starts to slowly fade away, or until the pain is bearable.

Ask God "Where were you when this was happening?" Wait and see what happens.

Is there someone that needs to be forgiven? Ask God help in forgiving them. Even better, ask God to help you see that person as He sees them.

Guidance of the Holy Spirit is important at this point, and He will give you promptings on how to go about the memory. He can reveal hidden motives, where you need to forgive and be forgiven, the consequences of such actions. Many times He will tell you that you were not to blame for many of the actions you thought yourself responsible.

Finally ask for healing. At this point God, in the memory, may do a number of things. I have seen Jesus, for example, writing on my forehead "forgiven" and then hugging me, laying hands on my chest and seeing a fresh wound closing.

He may show you a number of things, and at this point there is no guidance needed other than the Holy Spirits'.

This is just an oversimplified guide of how I practice healing prayer, and simply a starting point for those who have not practiced it.

I encourage you to read more about it and practice healing prayer. Healing is painful, but there is freedom to be found in this healing pain.

Putting the Poor First

"We believe that God puts the poor first because the world puts them last" writes John Hayes in Submerge.

We find evidence of how the world puts the poor last anywhere we go. Its unavoidability is so persistent, and yet it can easily evade us.

"We don't want to serve those people" the owner of the gas station I work once told me. "So don't give them the key to the bathroom".

I understood the business logic behind that statement, after all, he doesn't want panhandlers and drug addicts to come into the station and damage the ambiance of the store, but those words pierced me.

This is how the world works. It is easier to put the poor on the outskirts of the city. Let the police deal with them. This can affect us as Christians, where it is so easy to put them on the outskirts of our hearts.

But lets go back to the bathroom at the gas station!

When I worked at a gas station that was in the middle of an upscale neighborhood, I remember how clean the customer's bathroom was. It was cleaned at least twice during the shift, many times even more than that.

It was the bathroom employees and customers used.

In Oakland, we have an employees' bathroom and a customer bathroom. As you can probably imagine the employees' bathroom is clean while the customers' is seldom cleaned.

And so it is, that the gas station bathroom in the upscale neighborhood was impeccably clean, while the one in the poor neighborhood was disgustingly dirty.

The world puts the poor last.

"Perhaps" some might think "the people in the poor neighborhood are dirty and even though you try to keep the bathroom clean they always trash it, and so it is not worth the effort of keeping it clean"

I have found no evidence of this. While it is true that on some odd days someone comes in and leaves a catastrophe in the bathroom, on average days the rate at which the bathroom in the upscale neighborhood gets trashed is comparable to the one in the poor neighborhood, at least in my experience.

I don't think the bathroom in the poor neighborhood is dirty because poor people are dirty. I believe the cause of this is a psychological and even cultural one.

It reveals our collective mindset as people, where we think the rich deserve a clean bathroom while the poor don't.

After a couple of months of working in Oakland, I tried to change this. I went out of my way to constantly clean the bathroom.

At first the assistant manager was annoyed by this. "Where are you going Jose?! You don't need to do that!"

I simply said "the bathroom is dirty and needs cleaning" to which the assistant manager almost always relented.

The assistant manager has recently changed his tone. He told me not too long ago "I was telling [general managers' name] that you are the only one who has cleaned this bathroom in 3 days"

Doing something ordinary as keeping the bathroom clean fills me with joy, because I see it as an act of service to the poor. They deserve it as much as the rich.

And in serving the poor we serve Jesus. And how could we invite Jesus into a dirty bathroom?

Simplicity

 And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Mathew 8:20 ESV.

 “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal,  but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" Mathew 6:19-21 ESV.

When I told my mom that I wanted to lead a life of simplicity, I don't think she was very pleased.

"How can you lead a life of simplicity if you always liked good stuffs?" she asked me bewildered.

And she had a point. I love good stuffs, perhaps as much as everybody else. I love my tech gadgets, I love my TVs and movies.

In my novitiate commitment ceremony with InnerCHANGE, where Simplicity is one of the 7 seven commitments that we take, my mom was crying, saying "if this is the life that you want and choose for yourself, then I support you".

I have a nasty past with money. When my mom told me that I like good stuffs she was making a gross understatement. I love good stuffs.

Even though I never really made large amount of money, I always spent disproportionate amount of it in crap that I liked and never really needed.

I accumulated and accumulated, even in my poverty. You see, greediness and the storing up of treasures has little to do with how much money you make.

My desire to go to college was to get a comfortable job that could enable me to get a big house in the suburbs, a nice comfortable car, and endless gadgets to satisfy all my geeky needs.

And then something happened, a call from God that called to an even deeper desire, a desire long forgotten and buried so deeply in my other superficial desires, that it was necessary for God to slowly uncover it, polish it, and bring it to the surface.

This is the desire to be more like Him.

I'm not saying that in order to be like Him we need to be poor. But I believe that if we are focused on our personal prosperity, and that is the goal and focus of much of what we do, then we are running in opposite direction of the gospel.

Jesus, the son of God, told a scribe that wanted to follow Him that even though foxes and birds have a place to live in, He, because of His mission on this earth, didn't have one.

He was basically telling the scribe "are you willing to lose all your prestige and power, your possessions and social standing, in order to become my disciple?"

Granted, not all of us can be apostles or teachers or prophets. All of us have a place in the kingdom. Even millionaires, investors and businessmen.

But all of us are called to be like Him, and to be like Him is denying ourselves of what we fancy as entitlements. Our pursuit is not happiness, wealth and comfort. As disciples, our pursuit is Jesus. Everything else is secondary, even country and law.

I still struggle with money. My love for good stuffs still overrides my commitment to simplicity. But I'm glad that He is patient with me, as He guides me in my stubbornness.

So I'm not writing from a place of experience or moral authority but a place of personal struggle. I'm writing from a place of countless personal failings in this area.

But more importantly, I'm also writing from a place of desire to be more like Him, no matter how far away I am from that goal.

I Strongly Feel God is Calling me to be a Saint...

I remember my conversion 9 years ago. I remember the refreshing air that seemed to surround my atmosphere. This fresh air brought winds from a new creation. This is the best way I can describe what I was feeling in those days: the joy, the peace, and the incredible desire to be a saint.

But, as the years started to go by, and life's experiences brought me back to even where I was before I converted, that feeling started to "die" slowly, so slowly, that I was unaware of its own death.

I tried to revive this feeling, and while I made some progress in terms of devotion, the feeling was hard to resurrect. It seemed that no matter how hard I tried, the feeling remained dormant, with little hints of it surviving. Until now...

These past events in my life, including the current storm, has brought me into an intimacy with God. "I feel" I told my spiritual director once "I feel as if God and I are in a honeymoon at this moment". This intimacy has gradually increased with time, and as the tribulations rise, His love is even more abundant.

Even though I don't feel God is calling me to be a priest or a religious, even though I'm probably headed to marriage, in despite of all this, I feel so strongly in my heart that I must be a saint, and nothing else would suffice. I feel God is tugging strongly in my heart, this sense of tranquil urgency; I must be a saint, there is no way out of it.

But I believe all of us are called to be a saint. We must receive this calling in our hearts as well, while we are looking for Him, our Beloved, in prayer. Will I fail? If I trust in my own strength, in my own habits and humanity, I will surely fail. With God? I cannot fail.