All posts by kenmhsu@gmail.com

Formation

Sweetly Broken

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Today we have a special post from guest blogger, Brandon Chuang (Ken’s son). Brandon is currently attending optometry school in Boston. His post is a timely one as we head into Lent – a season of self-reflection as we consider our own sinfulness that led to Christ’s death and crucifixion.

Luke 7:47

“Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven–as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.”

I love the NIV version of this verse. I feel that it perfectly captures my greatest struggle, acceptance of the full extent of my brokenness.

We’ve all had those piercing moments. Those moments where the weight of our transgressions comes crashing down on us. It could be something from the past, triggered by something you saw while casually perusing social media. It could be falling, yet again, into a pattern of sin you swore off so many times. These are largely the ways in which it’s manifested in me, but it could be anything.

The past two weeks have been 2 of the most emotionally and spiritually difficult weeks of my life, and I don’t want to minimize that. I’ve been barraged with sins from my past that I’d swept under the rug unknowingly. It’s not that I didn’t confess them to God and ask for forgiveness, but I never let my heart experience just how vile these sins were. I made excuses to minimize them. “Everyone goes through this, it’s a normal struggle.”

My constant coping mechanism stems from this idea that, “I’m not that bad of a person.” This can also be referred to as, “I don’t need that much of God’s grace.” And it has worked as a temporary fix, temporary being 25 years of life. However, as I’m growing older and continually being faced with the magnanimity of my sins both past and present, “I’m not that bad of a person” really doesn’t do it anymore.

These past two weeks, God has been forcing my hand, and I could no longer defend myself. “I’m a really, really, broken, messed up person, and there’s no excuse for all these things I’ve done.” In that moment, the standards I’d set for my life and my self-image were shattered… Yet it was this “crying out” that opened my heart to even more of God’s forgiveness and love, it was what He was waiting for.

We need to understand the degree of our brokenness to fully understand what God’s love and grace covers and redeems. And let’s be clear on one thing, I do NOT fully understand my own brokenness. I don’t think I ever will until I see Him face to face, but I firmly believe a tell-tale sign of maturity is the deepening of our understanding of our own sinful nature, coupled with the further surrendering of our lives to “the One is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine.”

Only when we have been forgiven much, can we love so boldly.

It’s been 3 days since that desperate cry. Already, I feel myself reverting to my old ways. It’s okay. I know it’s a process, a lifelong one at that. I want to encourage you, friends, to fully embrace your brokenness, knowing our God redeems and restores us.

I recently re-uploaded Sweetly Broken by Jeremy Riddle to my Spotify playlist as a reminder of these past 2 weeks. “At the cross You beckon me. You draw me gently to my knees and I am lost for words, so lost in love. I’m sweetly broken, wholly surrendered.”

I pray that these words mean more and more to me every day, and I hope they bless you as well.

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Three to Read (Feb. 21, 2017)

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Here is this week’s Three to Read. The first is a Q&A interview with Old Testament scholar, Walter Bruegemann. He is asked some difficult questions about some pressing questions facing the church today. His responses may be a bit provocative and bring up more questions than answers. By doing so, hopefully, it will spark some good conversation.

The second article, takes us back to a recurring topic we have been discussing as a community: Noise and Distraction. And it asks: What is it costing us spiritually? (You’ll hear more about this in the coming weeks as we head into the season of Lent.)

The last article is a kind of devotional commentary on the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). It would be worthwhile to take some to read this post alongside the passage in Luke to help you reflect more deeply on a familiar story (and our current political climate).

  1. “It’s Not a Matter of Obeying the Bible”
  2. The Spiritual Cost of Distraction
  3. Does Your Heart Break Like a Samaritan?
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Three to Read (Feb. 14, 2017)

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Each week I’d like to try and give three hand-picked blog posts or articles that I found interesting or informative from my explorations around the web.

For this week, the first two articles are related to some of the things we talked about on Sunday – namely, sleep and reading as basic spiritual disciplines we ought to try and incorporate into our daily routines.

The third article is an insightful (somewhat academic) exploration of what it means to have “the mind of Christ,” a phrase the Apostle Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 2:16. It’s written by my New Testament professor from Fuller seminary, Marianne Meye Thompson (loved her!). It’s a bit long, but well worth the read.

1. God Wants You to Get Some Sleep
2. 8 Ways to Read a Lot More Books This Year
3. The Mind of Christ in the Gospels

Happy Reading!

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Stephen Colbert vs. Ricky Gervais on God’s Existence

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I came across this clip form the Colbert show the other day, where he had Ricky Gervais on. Colbert brings up the topic of God’s existence and here’s how their debate went:

Gervais gets a rousing applause after saying this:

“If we take something like, any fiction, any holy book…and destroyed it. In a thousand years time it wouldn’t come back just as it was. If you took every science book, every fact, and destroyed them all, in a thousand years they’d all be back; ’cause all the same tests would be the same result.”

On the surface, there seems to be an undeniable logic at work in what Gervais is saying. Science is more “true” than any truth found in a holy book. Why? Because you can prove it over and over and over and over and over.

Colbert even seems persuaded by it. He has no rebuttal except to say, “That’s good. That’s really good.” (Or maybe he just got caught up in Gervais’ charming and alluring English accent!)

But as I thought about it some more, the logic ends up being rather hollow. The truth of a holy book, and more poignantly, the truth of someone considered holy, like Jesus, is not that it can be proved over and over. The opposite is actually at work.

For Christians, the truth of Jesus is that he shows us something we would never have thought to be true had we not encountered the truth in and through his singularly unique life. In him, we are brought face to face with something we couldn’t and wouldn’t have figured out on our own.

Our problem is not that we need to discover what can be proven by anyone at any time in any place. Our problem is that we need to be shown what we cannot know except through revelation. That’s what, as Christians, we say Scripture is all about.

It is revelation.

And that is ultimately what we believe is given most fully to us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Here we are given the truest and most complete revelation of God and God’s good intentions for us. Of course, it’s not something that can be verified or predicted in a test tube with a Bunsen burner. But that’s precisely the point.

The best and truest things in life are often things that are not repeatable.

The fact that science is reproducible in every generation, while significant, isn’t all that exceptional. What is exceptional is a life that was lived so truthfully and so beautifully that death could not hold it down. And over the course of history, it is one that has proven to be one in a billion.

Which, seems to me, makes it all the more truthful.

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Sometimes Quiet is Violent

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The Hsu family has been listening to a lot of Twenty One Pilots lately. Little Kyrie’s favorite is Doubt and Carissa can’t choose between Semi-Automatic, Trees and The Judge. One of the great things about their music is that, not only is it catchy, but the lyrics also give you a lot to chew on. One that has stuck with me the past few months is the song Car Radio.

Checkout the song before reading on:

Tyler Joseph, vocalist and lyricist for Twenty One Pilots, said this about the song:

The verses are talking about a true story of me being late to class…and I forgot to lock my door and when I came back out everything had been gutted and stolen out my car. At the time financially I was not able to replace anything that was taken, the GPS, the radio, all my CD’s. When I get in the car my first reaction is to put the radio on and for a while I wasn’t able to do that and finding out that once I removed that piece of me I realised that sometimes music can act as a distraction and can get in the way of where your mind wants to go.”

It’s true that quiet can be violent. When there’s no sound to hide behind we get antsy because we dread the oncoming onslaught of silence. And so we click open a browser, turn on the car radio, swipe open our phones. We fill our lives with noise. And it is this immediate stream of stimulation that keeps us living in a constant state of distraction. And as Tyler puts it, “it can get in the way of where your mind wants to go.” Sometimes what we need is to take a long look at the ugly parts of us that, if ignored for too long, will deform us in ways we never intended. This is no easy thing to do.

It is why I love the line, “Faith is to be awake and to be awake is for us to think and for us to think is to be alive and I will try with every rhyme to come across like I am dying to let you know you need to try to think.”

We often equate noise with being alive, with being awake, where, really, the opposite is true. Noise is what allows us to sleep walk through life, “distracted from distraction by distraction” (T.S. Eliot). As one writer aptly observed, “We live in an age of continuous partial attention.” This is our default setting.

Faith, on the other hand, points to an attentiveness that believes there is more to life than what is determined by our default setting. And to see with the eyes of faith requires the space silence creates in order for us to think. As renowned priest, Henri Nouwen, so matter of factly stated, “Without silence and solitude it is impossible to live a spiritual life.” It is an impossibility because such a life is nourished and sustained by what can only be heard when we quiet all the voices that bombard us everyday. When, in silence, we try and hear the only voice that matters.

So maybe we should all get our car radios stolen. Or maybe we can simply try and keep them off.

Then we can “just” sit in silence.
Formation

The Slow Work of God

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I recently came across this quote from Teilhard de Chardin, a French philosopher and priest, writing back in the early twentieth century. His gentle exhortation continues to speak a much needed word to us some hundred years later. I guess immediate gratification has always been an addiction for us humans, but it clearly is becoming one we are able to feed with more ease and consistency.

While Teilhard seems to speaking of the slow work of God in the individual, I think his words can equally express the slow work of God shaping and guiding a community, a people, a church. People are the ultimate speed bump. The more you add the slower things get. But in the economy of grace, we have been given all the time in the world to become what God intends us to be, both individually and communally.

As we enter into the season of Lent, may we delve deeper into the super-abundant grace of our God to receive that which makes possible the kind of patient trust Teilhard so beautifully describes:

Patient Trust
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,

as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

Teilhard de Chardin

(1881-1955)

 

 

 

 

Formation

Into What are We Being Formed?

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by Alex Kim

The world’s really moved away from being direct and forward. How often are commercials telling us to actually go out and buy something? I think the advertising professionals are onto something here: people don’t like being told what to do overtly. So, they’ve figured out another way to get us to do what they want us to do. They tell me that this phone is cool and everyone has one, and so the expectation is that maybe I’ll get one too.

It worked.

Apple Brainwashing

I have an iPhone 6S Plus. I didn’t buy into the hype at first and this is the first time I got an iPhone since they came out with these things. But they beat me down. How long does it take to make pulled pork in a slow cooker? Too dang long if you ask me, but look at how tender it comes out in the end. If they can get to someone like me, do you think you are safe from all of this?

So all we know so far is that I’d be terrible at writing commercials and I take way too long to make a point. Seriously, though, we are not prepared right now.

But we can be.

Even people that aren’t necessarily going to buy the latest iPhone are going to have an opinion that new phones are cool. Sure, maybe you have no interest in buying that Porsche (or designer bag), but it’s still a cool thing to have, right? (Objection, leading question).

But I guess maybe you really don’t think these things are cool.

Maybe you live under a rock.

Maybe you’re lying.

We’ve been conquered by a culture that tells us these things or qualities are what we should model our lives after. We have been killed by a thousand cuts and tenderized by steady, low heat.

But wait, when do we ever take the time to stop and think about these things?

I think this is one of the most beautiful things about where we stand today with the church plant.

We have stopped.

We are taking the time.

We have the chance now to build this thing anew.

(My sentences got longer little by little as if I’m building something. Thumbs up for painfully unoriginal syntax.)

This is the conversation I’ve been having with people. If we decided to leave OCCEC and all we’re doing is exactly the same as what we were doing before, then what was the point of leaving?

I’m not trying to say that we somehow entirely abandon who we grew to be at OCCEC. Using the seed metaphor, or I guess any metaphor involving the passing of genes, so really even a metaphor about ourselves could work as well, we are inevitably going to retain some elements of where we came from (the tree, OCCEC). And that’s more than fine, because our faiths did grow in these past many (or few) years as the consequence of our time there.

But we still need to look at how a seed grows (or people, I guess–talk about an unnecessary metaphor). You’re going to have water, fertilizer maybe, and the right location and temperature.

To put it another way, as Irene did, is to think of culture as the “Nurture” in Nature vs. Nurture. Our natures, or inherent abilities, are just a starting point. The type of nurturing we receive orients the direction in which we develop.

So then it becomes clear why culture is so important.

Yeah, we come from a certain place and there are significant ways in which we have been shaped by the past. But it’s not like we’re final products, and we have unimaginable potential for growth. You can be the greatest seed that came from the awesomest tree, but you’re not going to survive without adequate water, sunlight, and etc.

I set off to write about all of the “bad” culture we had as OCCEC so we can talk about how we can be different. I’m thinking I don’t need to do that, though. If you’re reading this, I know we’re all in this together and that you’re serious about following God into something bigger than ourselves. Into what are we being formed?

You tell me.

But please tell me that we didn’t leave behind a bunch of people who love us and a very very comfortable place to keep being what we already are.

Let’s let God form us into something beautiful.

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Welcome to the Oikonomist!

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This blog is a collaborative effort to help bring some coherence to the (sometimes perplexing) task of living the Christian life well. That last word (“well”) is significant. On one level, it is not too hard a thing to live the life of a Christian. Because we believe in a wonderful thing called grace we gladly attest with many a bumper that, “I’m not perfect, just forgiven.”

Sweet and simple.

Except Jesus seems to have this little expectation that grace aims to work perfection in us. That’s when things get a bit more complicated. To live the Christian life well moves us from “just forgiven” toward “perfection.” That may sound odd, but perfection is simply a shorthand way of saying what the Apostle Paul calls “conformed to the image of Christ.”

From the perspective of this blog, living the Christian life well also has to do with getting a better grasp on what we believe and do as Christians. Why do we believe and do the things we believe and do? Of the things we do, what’s the most faithful and fruitful way to do them? And how does all this stuff help us become more and more like the one in whom we believe? These are some of the major questions this blog hopes to flesh out.

A Note on the Blogging Team

First, pretty much all the writers for this blog grew up in the wonderful world of conservative evangelicalism. In particular, the Southern California, Immigrant Chinese, Orange County brand of conservative evangelicalism. For sure, there are things we appreciate within this context. But there’s also things we have found wanting. For better or for worse, we may tend to emphasize the latter. Our aim (though we might not always hit the mark) is “to uproot and tear down,” in order “to build and to plant” (Jeremiah 1:10).*

Second, as of this writing, many of us are in the early stages of planning a church plant, so many of the posts will be reflections on specific things we are working through as a community.

*It’s the conservative evangelical part in me that has to include a Bible reference.