When I was a teaching pastor at Fellowship of the Parks, I was often referred to as “the avocado guy.” I’d be talking to someone and they would say, “Oh yeah! You’re the avocado guy!”

During my first year at the church, I preached a sermon in which I brought a bowl full of avocados onstage with me and told about a kid I met whose job it was to make table-side guacamole at Fresco’s Mexican restaurant.

The point was that the avocado--while it is attached to the vine--is alive. However, when an avocado is removed from its life source, it starts to die. But in the process of the avocado dying, it is eaten by a person (me) and fills my body with nourishment that keeps me alive.*

Basically, for me to live, the avocado must die.

New life often begins as a death.

In the introduction to her book Pastrix (which I also cited in yesterday's post), Nadia Bolz-Weber talks about this idea:

The Christian faith, while wildly misrepresented in so much of American culture, is really about death and resurrection. It’s about how God continues to reach into the graves we dig for ourselves and pull us out, giving us new life, in ways both dramatic and small…. It’s about spiritual physics. Something has to die for something new to live (p. xviii).

All of the great moments of resurrection life have been preceded by moments of death.

That’s the thing about resurrection; it always requires a death.

Perhaps you’re experiencing some kind of personal, specific death in your own life.

A relationship that was broken that may or may not ever be put back together again.

A way of seeing the world or God or faith that no longer seems consistent with your own life experiences.

A level of trust you once had for others but were betrayed, and now you don’t know if you will ever have faith in another human being again.

A sudden—and perhaps unwanted—change in your job or career that has forced you to ask all kinds of questions about your own personal calling and purpose in the world.

Each of these things is a kind of a death, and death is painful and scary.

However, resurrection can only happen if there is first a death, and resurrection rarely looks the way we expect it to.

Resurrection rarely means that things go back to normal. On the contrary, it almost always points to something new and unexpected and original.

If you currently are undergoing a kind of death in your own life, and you are in the midst of despair, may you live in hope of restoration and new life.

May you learn to see resurrection in the world around you.

May you let the avocado die so that you can experience something new and beautiful.

What do you think? Have you ever gone through a kind of metaphorical "death" only to later experience a resurrection?

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(*Thanks to Rob Bell for this metaphor in the Nooma video “Tomato.”)

There are certain kinds of Christians that I have no patience for.

You know the type.

They are the people who stand on the street and hold up signs designed to make people feel bad about themselves.

They are the people who think that they are God’s favorites and that they have everything all figured out.

They are the people who say to the world, “The reason you’re suffering is that you have angered God, and you deserve whatever you get.”

And in my frustration, I often become exactly like them—believing that God agrees with me—and therefore loves me—more than them.

I recently read an amazing book by Nadia Bolz-Weber entitled Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint.

In the book, Nadia is invited to speak to a large group of people that will include several fundamentalist church leaders. It is clear that the reason she specifically had been chosen to speak to this group is so that she could shame the fundamentalists, which is an opportunity that most of us would have relished.

However, in thinking through what she would say, she is reminded of something her husband had said to her in a previous conversation:

“Nadia, the thing that sucks is that every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it” (p. 57).

Of course, she decides not to shame the fundamentalists and instead talk about grace and God’s love.

That quote about drawing a line between us and others has stayed with me, and I think about it several times a day. It’s not simply that I want other people to stop drawing those lines; it’s that I need to stop drawing them.

This, to me, is one of the responsibilities of church leaders—teaching their people that we cannot be the kinds of Christians who draw lines, no matter who ends up on the other side of them.

Because when we separate ourselves from others—creating any kind of “us-versus-them” situation—Jesus stands with the people we are excluding or judging or condemning.

What do you think? Are there moments when you want to draw lines between you and others? Have you ever been on the other side of someone else's lines? Do you think there are times when drawing lines is justified?