The following are live service recordings of songs from the line that were sung on november 8th, 2009:

I Am, I Will, I Was
written by Jon Guerra

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Regarding Gold
written by Jake Albaugh

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Hymn #101
written by Joe Pug

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I’m Not Afraid of the Famine
written by Jon Guerra

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Peace In The Valley
written by Thomas A. Dorsey

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Unless the Lord Builds the House
written by Jon Guerra

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The following story was read to accompany the sermon, “fist and mouth,” on November 8th, 2009. The audio link can be found at the end of this post.

My Grief Observed
Written and read by: Sarah Lee

She was riding the train back home when it happened. It was 28 minutes into the commute, 2 days into the week, 4 years into a life of quiet despair. She had been holding a book, lovingly dedicated to the author’s wife, and absentmindedly caressing the cover when the sudden urge to read had tickled her mind.

Later, she would recall that the beginning had felt forced; how else could she explain the strange desire to suddenly open a book that had been sitting untouched in her purse for over a year? A friend had given it to her with good intentions, and she had placed it in the front pocket of her bag with even greater intentions. But as the
days and months stretched out, she had forgotten about the book’s purpose and its only significance was the sense of comfort she got from holding it in her hands while riding the train home.

But on this particular day, while the snow fell quietly outside the steamed window, she lifted one corner of the cover and thought: Well, why not?

The book fell open to a page and these were the words that she read:

The most precious gift that marriage gave me was this constant impact of something very close and intimate yet all the time unmistakably… real. But is all that work to be undone? Is all that I still call my wife, Helen, to sink back horribly into being not much more than one of my old bachelor pipedreams? Oh my love, my love, come back for one moment and drive that miserable phantom away. Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back — to be sucked back — into it?

That night, I missed my train stop and sat in stunned silence all the way to Kenosha. With one paragraph, author C. S. Lewis had ripped the facade off of my life. After his wife, Helen, died from cancer, Lewis wrote a book titled “A Grief Observed” and his words spoke what I’d never allowed my own heart to whisper. Awhile back, a great woman in my life had died suddenly, and my response to the loss had been denial, sometimes courage, but never honesty. Then, I read these five sentences written by Lewis, and I found myself weeping in pain at the unbearable grief he exposed.

He expressed his own suffering through these naked words:

Suppose that the earthly lives my wife and I shared are in reality only the basis for, or prelude to, or earthly appearance of, two unimaginable, supercosmic, eternal somethings. Those somethings could be pictured as spheres or globes. And where the plane of Nature cuts through them, where earthly life cuts through, they appear as two circles. Two circles that touched. But those two circles, above all the point at which they touched, are the very thing I am mourning for, homesick for, famished for. You tell me, ‘my wife goes on to a better place.’ But my heart and body are crying out, come back, come back. Be a circle, touching my circle. But I know this is impossible. I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never have. The old life, the jokes, the drinks, the arguments, the lovemaking, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace things. To say, ‘Helen is dead,’ is to say, ‘All that is gone.’ It is a part of the past. And the past is the past and that is what time means, so time itself is one more name for death, and Heaven itself is a state where ‘the former things have passed away.’

At church, many of my mother’s old friends would hold my hand and ask: ‘Are you okay?’ I would smile and nod because how else do you respond to a question like that? Pastors, with bible in one hand and the other heavy
on my shoulder, would say, ‘She is with God.’ But to this, I have only Lewis’ response:

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I will gladly listen. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I will submissively listen. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I will suspect that you don’t understand.

I sat in silence that day, gently carried away by the rhythm of the train.

And in that profoundly empty, black gaping hole of a life, I observed my grief for the first time and submitted to God’s mercy.

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The following sermon was preached on November 8th, 2009

Preached by: Jack Curran
Text: Psalm 39

Everyone experiences the heaviness of decadent emptiness and what seems like inexplicable, needless suffering to different degrees. Responses to this heaviness are various: despair, labeling, hope that acts, stoicism (“grin and bear it”), vengeance, and occupation. God’s severe mercy calls us to respond to heaviness in a distinctly Christian way:

When you experience the heaviness of life’s vanity, give your mouth to the hand of the one who strikes you.

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The Line is exploring the birth of faith in Abraham and Sarah this fall. The following sermon was preached on November 1st, 2009

Preached by: Pastor Aaron Youngren
Text: Genesis 16, 21:9-21

Compassion towards the oppressed that results in real acts of mercy are born from faith in Jesus’ compassion and mercy.

The plight of the oppressed in the world raises several questions for us:

1. How are we to reconcile a world full of atrocity and oppression with God’s claim to be loving and just?
2. How are we to reconcile our own inaction toward oppression with our belief that we are loving and just?
3. If we are apathetic towards understanding injustice in the world, how do we not that we aren’t its perpetrators?

Ultimately, scripture tells us that we all share in blame for the injustice in the world. And though we seem to be motivated by many factors, ultimately our sin results from unbelief. Shame refuses to believe that God has power over past and identity. Fear refuses to believe that God has power over present circumstances. Pride refuses to believe that God has power over the future.

The miracle is that even when we are in rebellion against Him, God patiently humbles us and meets us in the desert to make us His chosen ones.

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The following are live service recordings of songs from the line from the series: Birth. All songs written and performed Fall 2009 by Artist in Residence, Jon Guerra.

Psalm 127/Isaiah 42 (Unless The Lord Builds The House)

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Psalm 13 (How Long O Lord)

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Psalm 105 (If It Had Not Been The Lord)

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I’m Not Afraid of The Famine

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Gallows

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The way that his family talked about him, you would think that a Google search for “Reverend Jefferson Davis” would conjure a panoply of deep-blue links to flashing fan-sites and meticulously recorded exploits, crowned with a Wikipedia entry that would stretch down deeper than any scrollbar could plunge.

Apparently, the number of jewels in one’s heavenly crown is not a variable in the Google algorithm.

God’s promise to Jefferson happened like this:

On a ordinary Sunday morning, in an ordinary church service, a small woman with eyes tightly shut rose from her chair, walked up to the minister’s pulpit, grabbed his enormous black Bible, marched over to where Jefferson was sitting, opened the Bible to a random page and started reading:
1 The word of the Lord came to me: 2 Son of man, speak to your people and say to them, If I bring the sword upon a land, and the people of the land take a man from among them, and make him their watchman, 3 and if he sees the sword coming upon the land and blows the trumpet and warns the people, 4 then if anyone who hears the sound of the trumpet does not take warning, and the sword comes and takes him away, his blood shall be upon his own head. 5 He heard the sound of the trumpet and did not take warning; his blood shall be upon himself. But if he had taken warning, he would have saved his life.
6 But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, so that the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any one of them, that person is taken away in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at the watchman’s hand. 7 So you, son of man, I have made a watchman for the house of Israel. Whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me.
Ezekiel 33:1-7
In other words, Jefferson was to be a watchman. If he preached and people didn’t repent, their blood was on their heads. But if he didn’t preach and they didn’t repent, well then their blood was on his.

Let’s be clear: Even if you are the son of a New England Pentecostal circuit preacher, this is a pretty dramatic way for God to call you into the ministry.

Jefferson’s track record from that point is equally dramatic: six churches planted in the icy Alaskan tundra among the natives there, ten more churches planted among the natives in Maine and New Hampshire, a career of various regional oversight positions. And this wasn’t church planting in the glory-road, high-dollar, we’ll-plaster-the-town-with-billboards-announcing-the-arrival-of-the-Chosen-One, you-show-up-and-be-the-personality vein either. This was church planting. Digging in, dirty, sweaty, unrewarding, at times impossible-seeming labor. It was Egypt and famine and pain. Still, Jefferson seemed to believe that God’s promises were God’s promises, and God’s to keep.

Later on when they were all grown, his family would talk about Jefferson’s faith in hushed tones, telling stories of nights when bare cupboards and hungry stomachs made setting the table for supper seem absurd. But set it they would, under Jefferson’s orders. They would sit down to the barren table, and Jefferson would pray and thank God for food that was not there. And then, inevitably, food would appear. A knock at the door would interrupt the prayer, and when they opened it — no one there but a box of groceries – daily bread come down from heaven ready to be put on their empty plates. And so God’s big promise that Jefferson would plant churches was kept, but a lot of little promises along the way were kept too.

Jefferson had a pretty daughter named Ramona who would travel with him on his ministry trips, singing with him, praying with him, slogging with him through the Alaska snow. One day the doors of one of their frigid Alaskan churches opened in the middle of the service and a young Navy man, a cook, stumbled through and awkwardly took a seat. Kenneth would later say that from the very moment he laid eyes on Ramona, he knew he would marry her.

And marry her He did.
They settled down in a nice Swedish neighborhood in the Northwest, far from the tundra and Indians, but not without a decent Swedish fire-breathing Pentecostal church close by. Kenneth had a normal job, they had a nice house, and soon they had two strapping boys as well, Steve and Rod.

From a young age, it became clear that Steve would follow in his grandfather’s hallowed footsteps. Before he was even ten years old, Steve would stand up and pray loudly in the Spirit during the church service, and the older men would get up and pray loudly right back at him, their faces all smiles as they raised wrinkled hands out of perfectly pressed suit jackets and praise God for His new child-prophet.
By the time he was twelve, all doubt that God was promising something dramatic for Steve’s life had vanished. Everyone in the church knew about it: The Spirit had spoken to Steve through Acts 10:42:
“And he commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead.”
They all waited and watched the boy with deep anticipation.
Steve’s parents – boy were they proud.

But then, famine found Kenneth and Ramona and their new little family once more. When they moved so that Kenneth could start a cable business on a nearby island, Steve grew resentful and angry. No one knew him in the new neighborhood. No one thought he was special. No one had heard that He was a Child of Promise. And even if they would have known, they would have thought it was more than a little strange, and Steve was too much a stranger in his high school already.

So Steve gave up on the promise, and decided that he would do whatever he could to give God the slip. He started drinking, smoking weed, behaving like all of the other early 70’s shaggy-haired sinners. Kenneth and Ramona were beside themselves, helplessly watching as their son did whatever he could to expose God’s promises for what he thought they were: thin and brittle; a paper contract given to a child greedy for confetti.

As it turned out, the contract was made of tougher stuff than that.

One night, Steve walked into his house to hear his parents urgently praying that the God he was working so hard to defy would rescue him, turn him back somehow. The glimpse he caught of his mother’s tear-stained face sent him back out into the night, the door slamming behind him. Then there was his best friend Dave. He and Dave had made big plans. Dave’s father had left him at an early age, and his mother had died just two weeks previously from incurable cancer. It was rumored that the police to were going to finally interfere with Dave’s chosen vocation of Marajuana distribution hub at their high-school by arresting him and throwing him in jail. So Steve and Dave had decided that it was time to leave. They were going to move to California and be done with it.

Steve didn’t wait for Dave to talk when they met:
“It’s time. We have to get out of here.”

Steve would repeat Dave’s reply to him to hundreds of people in the years to come: “Steve, I don’t know what the answer is for you, but I’ve found what the answer is for me. It’s Jesus Christ.” The words hit Steve with all of the force of a cloud-break on the road to Damascus. It was prophecy. It was pain. It was grace. The end of the day found him in Kenneth and Ramona’s arms: weeping, spent, free.

But still, it did seem like he had broken the promise. At least his part of it. So, when Steve met a beautiful, young Jesus-people convert named Sandi, and decided to start planning out the rest of their lives, he didn’t enroll in Seminary, he enrolled in the Air Force. It wasn’t until a year after they were married that God revealed to Him just how indestructible His contracts can be. This time it was 1 Timothy 2:5-7:
“For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, 6 who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time. 7 For this I was appointed a preacher and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.”
There it was. Incredibly, God would still use him. He hadn’t blown it. He could never blow it. The man Jesus Christ was a ransom. God’s promises were His to keep.

One night, at age 30, Steve had a strange dream. It was just a few short months before Steve would move His family down to California where he would take over a mid-sized church as Sr. Pastor. The dream was so vivid that when he woke from it, he immediately woke Sandi to tell her about it.

In the dream, Steve explained, he found himself a rest-home, walking toward a bed where none other than the legendary Jefferson Davis, Steve’s grandfather, lay sick and dying. The dream had ended strangely: Jefferson had reached out and put his hand on Steve’s arm. Though the hand was frail and weak, the weight it carried was opposite: all of the gravity of calling and blessing and hardship and promise were in that hand, and Jefferson was passing it all on to him.

If Steve was bewildered by the dream, he was even more bewildered when Sandi started crying as he told it. As it turned out, only a few weeks prior Sandi had pooled money together with Kenneth and Ramona to buy Steve a ticket to go and see Jefferson in Maine before he passed away. Steve went. The dream became reality. The torch was passed. God’s promise was made, and God would keep it. Jefferson died in peace.

Up to this point, I’ve tried to recreate these stories as vividly as I can from smiling remembrances around Thanksgiving tables, old sepia photographs and intimate family interviews stretching long into night. But now I rely on none of these, as the next part of the story is mine.

Some of my earliest memories are of my grandparents Ken and Ramona praying for me, heads reverently bowed, voices trembling with urgent supplication, my grandfather’s massive hand resting on my shoulder, the gravity of it pressing me down, but somehow comforting and warm, like the weight of a heavy coat in the snow. “The Lord bless you, Aaron,” they would say, “The Lord bless you.” And, from an early age, “The Lord is going to use you.”

There were signs of this blessing throughout my young life: I had an uncanny ability to memorize and recite scripture from a very young age, and would often join the adults in fervent prayer during the services, kneeling down at wood altar at the front of the church. My prayers were loud as they were heartfelt. One Sunday after a solemn conversation about drunkenness that came as a result of my uncle handing me a Miller Lite as a joke, I approached the altar trembling, and called out in all of the earnestness that my five year old voice could muster, “Oh, God! Help my daddy not to drink beer!” Most Pentecostals take that whole being drunk in the Spirit thing pretty seriously – the hint of even so much as a swig from a wine-cooler could get you sent to the elders for exorcism – but my parents were willing to put up with these prophetic faux-paus’ so long as the Spirit was moving.
And then, famine once more. This time in a literal desert – Palm Springs. My father had taken the Senior Pastor position he knew he had always been destined for. We had moved from the top to the bottom of the country, and if the North was snow capped peak of our family’s story, the south was its furnace.

Almost instantly there were problems. My mom, who until then had thrived in a milk-and-cookies-snuggle-up-with-the-kids-and-watch-little-house-on-the-prairie-after-school sort of existence found herself becoming the little church’s secretary, the church’s bookkeeper, and the church’s all sorts of other things. We had adopted two children a few years earlier: angelic, quiet, careful Amie and foul-mouthed-but-reclusive Nick. Nick was a mystery: if he wasn’t eating the soap mom and dad would use to wash his mouth out, he was getting busted by the fire department for trying to start fires behind the backstop at recess. Amie seemed an angel – cooking, cleaning, never a complaint, always a shy smile – until she disappeared one day with a Latino gangbanger named Jose Padilla. How did my father feel about the all-church rescue mission that followed? Let’s just say that even golden boys can blush.

To top it all off, my father’s credentials as child-of-promise oracle-of-God didn’t seem to matter much to the elders at the new church. These weren’t elders in the Mormon sense of the word – in this Pentecostal tradition the elders were simply the men closest to death in the church.

I still remember the night my dad was fired like it was yesterday. The time and place were carefully chosen. My mother was gone on a woman’s retreat, and it was 10ish, long after we kids were supposed to be in bed. I had heard the voice of my best friend Robert’s dad, so I crept out onto the landing and overheard the whole ordeal. Back then, my father would give his bank account number to a man in a ski mask if he was asked. He just trusted people. To say that the firing was a surprise to him would be like saying that the bombing of Pearl Harbor was a mildly unpleasant development for the United States. No. It was a complete sucker-punch.

Everything changed. Clear skies fogged over, turned opaque. Mirrors that had shined so bright turned into murky seas of doubt and guilt. “Where were God’s promises now?” they seemed to say.

Steve left the church, and just got a normal job back in the Northwest. Construction. Hauling lumber from point A to point B. What else could a recently de-employed pastor do? He was humiliated. His sons thought he was a hero, but their lives were falling apart too. The dramatic pastoral drama was a perfect excuse for Aaron to part ways with the church, his parents, and God Himself. “If He wants me He can come and get me.” He thought. He would learn later how true this was. He moved, coincidentally, from the Northwest to California with his best friend who was also named Dave. He took with him with only a gavel in one hand and a fifth of Jim Beam in the other – a personality that combined the judging eye of fundamentalism with the apathetic angst and agnostic morality of teenage rebellion.

And for many years, that’s where the story seemed destined to end. A famine that stretched out year after year, no hope of reprieve. Awkward holidays full of sharp words and sinking regret, brief conversations that reeked of defeat and dysfunction. Steve had ruptured a disc in his back and was laid out for a year, so finally even the work was gone. There was no hope. There was nothing left.

This is the point in the story where if the storyteller has done his job, the listener will experience a sense of expectation.
“Well,” the listener asks, “What happened? Did Steve become well? Did he go on to find his way, his path, his journey, whatever it was?”

For the listener, there is something at stake: she has perhaps worked herself into a state of agitation, subliminal worry, a subtle anxiety that knits the brow and tenses the shoulders. And she desires that these things should be relieved. She wants to feel that things in the world don’t simply go wrong.

This is why in the successful story every Act II has an Act III, every despair a redemption, every Empire Strikes Back a Return of the Jedi. Concessions don’t do well at independent theaters. We do want to go back to eating our buttered popcorn when the whole thing is said and done after all.

But when the story is your own there is no certainty that Act II won’t be your last. And when what is at stake isn’t whether or not you’ll avenge your uncle Owen, or discover whether or not the force is actually strong in you… if what is at stake is in fact the character of God Himself, then what do you have left when his promises seem broken but to rake clay shards over your boils and wait for the curtain to close?

“And he said to him, I am the Lord who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess. But he said, O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it? He said to him, Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon. And he brought him all these, cut them in half, and laid each half over against the other. But he did not cut the birds in half. And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away. As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. And behold, dreadful and great darkness fell upon him. Then the Lord said to Abram, Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. As for yourself, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. 17 When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates,”
Genesis 15:7-18

It seems strange – Why would God time the climax of my Father’s life and mine so closely together? Why not a more natural path: wizened old man handing down the traditions of the elders to a son just clear of coming of age trials and angst. No real confusion, no real drama, nothing left undone.

Instead, my father and I came to know a new depth of God’s unfailing love almost in parallel. Dad started doing Indiana Jones work in the jungles of South and Central America, training village pastors and planting churches. God timed it so that I would come to faith just as he was starting this new life, and we get to spend a year together in my early twenties. I went on from this to become and elder at my church, a preacher, a pastor, then a church planter.

For both of us, the realization that Jesus was the promised one (and we weren’t) didn’t happen in a day. But it did start to happen. And we loved to talk about it to each other. We became sprinters smiling at each other across lanes, fighting men passing a short in the night watch, old country boys talking across the fence after harvest. And all the while I would think how strange it was that God would choose to make our stories run together in this way.

But then, isn’t this the way He is always telling His story? Father and Son, Son and Father, climbing Moriah burdened with wood and a bewildering command; Earthquakes and dark, cloudy, Fridays of abandonment passing into Sundays resplendent with reunion’s light; the fate of the Father and the fate of the Son united in pain and joy.

And with that I realize that this isn’t just the story of the promises that hung wonder and expectation over me and my dad, and his dad, and his. It isn’t just Father and Son. It’s also the story of the promises that hung over Paul, over Moses, over first-born, second-choice Leah and Joseph with his coat ablaze. It’s the agony of Cain. It’s the madness of Saul. It is the story of mankind. It’s all of us who crown our sons and ourselves with the universe, and howl with rage as we are crushed under its weight.

What deep delight when the children of promise discover that they were not made to wear the crown of heaven! That another wore it, that another wears it still,

for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.
Galatians 3:26-29

We all felt the gravity of the moment on the day my father gave me the black King James Bible to celebrate my formal entrance into pastoral work. The first inscription was faded:
“Rev. J. H. Davis” and under, in newer gold,
“Rev. S. L. Youngren”
There in the ceremony of the moment there was an old and weighty hand on both of us, but this time without the burden. It was heavy, but it was also light and lifting and full of joy. The moment did contain a promise, but the crucial difference now was who had made the promise, and who would keep it.

Listen to this story as read by Pastor Aaron Youngren

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The Line is exploring the birth of faith in Abraham and Sarah this fall. The following sermon was preached on October 25th, 2009

Preached by: Pastor Aaron Youngren
Text: Genesis 15:7-21

God makes promises, and those promises are His to keep.

Although many of God’s covenants with man throughout scripture require men to do certain things, God’s promise to Abraham does not. The implications of this are astonishing: No matter how much Abraham rebels and sins against God, God will still keep His promise to “bless the nations” through Abraham.

This becomes even more astonishing when we take into account scriptures that say that these promises of God to Abraham speak not only of God’s plan to redeem Abraham and Sarah, but also to redeem us (Galatians 3:8, 16).

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The Line is exploring the birth of faith in Abraham and Sarah this fall. The following sermon was preached on October 18th, 2009

Preached by: Pastor Aaron Youngren
Text: Genesis 14

Faith in Jesus not only responds with generosity, but also initiates generosity. In doing so, it reflects the generosity of God.

Biblical generosity might be defined as the unconditional, relentless pursuit of joyful sacrifice for those who are in need by those who can give. It is critical that we don’t limit biblical generosity to generous reactions because our generous God is always initiating with us and for us.

Clearly, if we are going to give generously at all, we need someone to give us both the love and the resources to do so. The author of Hebrews tells us that Jesus is a priest in the order of Melchizedek. The implication is this: Jesus is both our Priest who sacrificed himself generously for us on the cross, and our King who rules over creation and generously gives us every good thing. Through His unconditional, relentless pursuit of joyful sacrifice for us, we can now become His generous initiators.

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Last night we unveiled our new paradigm for discipleship, growth, and mission at The Line. Learn how Jesus is found as the foundation for our church and our values as we explore Movement, Dwelling, Thriving, and Longevity in our Foundation for the City class. Foundation for the City starts this week!

Jon Guerra is an artist in residence at The Line. Jon fronts a band called Milano and plays music on Sunday at The Line. If you haven’t heard Milano or bought their EP yet, be ashamed. Jon and Milano will be featured in an upcoming documentary from The Free Road Scholars. You heard right. A documentary. That’s how we roll.

Preview below:

Find more at hearmilano.com