Cascade Church Portland

Daniel:: Lion's Den

Are you ready for the mane event? 
The wait for lion's den story in Daniel has been quite the dramatic paws. 
It's worth the wait, and will leave you begging for roar. 
Sorry, but I do take pride in my lion puns. 

Let's be honest for a second. When you heard about a message series on Daniel at least some of you were thinking every Sunday, when are we getting to the lion part? A message series on Daniel without talking about the lion's den would be like going to a Journey concert and not hearing "Don't Stop Believing". 

Welp, this is the Sunday and it's going to be fun! The lion's den story is one of the more well known stories in the Bible and we want to view it in context with everything else that has happened in Daniel's life. It's a culminating event in his story and knowing where he has been informs a lot of how he got to the bottom of cave with a bunch of hungry lions. 

Whatever thoughts or ideas you've had about the story, I invite you to bring them to this message. We want to affirm, challenge and evaluate our assumptions surrounding how God works in difficult situations. 

Daniel:: But Even if He Doesn't

I grew up in a world where people had two different words for almonds. 

Almonds and Amonds.

It's a subtle difference and the joke was that they were almonds in the tree until they fell down and it knocked the "L" out of them. Now, it was so common where I grew up to hear these two terms interchangeably that I had no idea which term was the "normal" one. Before I left for college as a 19 year old I had to ask my Mom which was the correct one so I didn't make a fool of myself asking for someone to pass the "amonds".

Things that are very odd can become normal if everyone agrees to call it normal. This is why outsiders have such incredible value to any system. They are able to see the weird things you do that everyone has called normal for so long. 

This week we have Scott Erickson sharing with us from the 3rd chapter of the book of Daniel. It's a great look at an insane system called normal and three outsiders bringing the helpful questions to the community. They ultimately do an equally insane thing when they offer up their lives and safety for the sake of their convictions about who God is.  

Daniel:: Who's Informing Your Story?

Dreams are a lot like clouds. 

People see what they want to see when they look up into the sky and when they look into the dreams of the people around them. One of the things that is scariest is to share a dream you had with someone who has strong thoughts and opinions about what dreams mean. 

So I dreamt I was flying.                                            You probably need to quit your job. 

So I had a dream that I was drowning.                      Cut up all your credit cards. 

I woke up from this dream about a dragon.               Call your mother.

 While the certainty that some feel about interpreting dreams is a warning sign to me, I think it is safe to say that dreams are a sign that something is going on. In the book of Ecclesiastes it says;

A dream comes when there are many cares

Whether dreams are our subconscious working out our biggest problems, or our brain running threat simulations, it usually is a reflection of increased activity in life or exhaustion. 

This Sunday as we continue our Daniel series we're going to look at chapter 2 where Daniel is interpreting the dreams of the king. What kinds of universal truths can we pull from a story about a leader's dream from 1,800 years ago? (Ha! That's a fun sentence!)

More than you might think and I hope you'll join us as we explore the power of the stories that we tell ourselves while we are awake or asleep. 

Daniel:: Character in Chaos

In high school I needed to take 2 years of a foreign language to graduate. 80% of the school took Spanish. We were in California so it made the most sense to learn a language that you would be far more likely to use. So obviously I took 2 years of French.

My primary interest in taking French was satisfied on the first day when I learned to say the one phrase I took the class to learn.

Je suis un opérateur lisse.
I am a smooth operator.

I was positive that this was my ticket to endless dating possibilities.

You will surely be shocked to learn that I did not have a single girlfriend in high school. Please pick your jaw up from the floor.

My experience in French class was brutal. I had no real interest in learning the language and my education consisted of being given a packet at the beginning of the week, doing it in class all week and taking a quiz on Friday. My teacher quickly became a foe to be vanquished. If I could have led a coup d'état in class, I would have.

When my grade would reflect my level of investment in the class I would place all the blame at my teacher's feet.

She wasn't interested in actually teaching us the language.
She stifles my creative spirit.
She gives us unfair quizzes on subjects we haven't adequately covered.
She hasn't taught me the French art of mime even once.

What I experienced in that class is something that I've felt the temptation to do many times since then. Is something going poorly? Blame the person in charge. Anything that goes wrong couldn't possibly be a reflection of me, but a reflection of someone further up the chain of command.

This Sunday we are starting a brand new message series on the book of Daniel. My hope is that this series will help shine a light on the power that we have in life. I have found that the most terrible tyrant blocking God's best exists within me. Daniel shows a path for God's people that doesn't allow the circumstances or interferences from people with more power derail what God is building in our midst.

Safe To Be, Safe to Grow:: Advocacy

When my boys were very young we would sometimes go to play areas at the mall. 

It's a terrifying experience. The cutest toddlers and children were transformed before my eyes. They all became monsters bent on harming my boys. 

This isn't a matter of these other children being bad kids, they're just on a graham cracker and juice-fueled energy spree. As they would run free with sticky-fingers and dirty socks towards my soft-craniumed pride and joy I would become super protective. Shouldn't you be knocking over the sales racks at Macys or licking the glass at Cinnabon instead? The play area is for equally unstable little people crawling and softly bumping into one another, not 9 year old harbingers of doom made entirely of sharp elbows and knees. 

It's one of the little encounters that we have with justice every day. Someone cuts you off in traffic or says a nasty thing to you or someone you love on social media. This is not the way the world should operate. The mistreated and ignored people in our society should be valued and have their humanity honored. Decency and fairness should triumph over manipulation and deceit.

This Sunday we'll be looking at our fifth and final core value of Advocacy. At Cascade we define this value as; We fight injustices with those who have been treated insignificantly by individuals, systems or indifference. 

How does God call us to see and engage situations that are dangerous for people around us and care when we have every excuse not to care.

Safe To Be, Safe to Grow:: Prayer

"I'll be praying for you"

I used to say these words a lot. It was my automatic response to any difficult or painful experience I heard someone talk about. My entire adult life has been spent working at different churches so I've assumed that anybody telling me about something painful is looking for some kind of response. Prayer always felt like the thing that could offer hope and it was a way of doing SOMETHING. 

So what do we mean when we offer prayer to people? Is it kind of like saying, I'll think about you and your issue this week? Is it the offering of positive thoughts and hopes? Is it interceding on behalf of other people and getting these issues pushed to the front of God's priorities? Is it the religious equivalent of contacting your state representative?

This Sunday we are going to be talking about prayer as one of the core values at Cascade. We all interact with prayer differently. Some of us see it as a powerful force for change and healing in our world. Some of us barely engage in prayer anymore after feeling like it hasn't "worked" in past. 

We define prayer as; We engage our hopes and fears by directing them to God and allowing space for the responses. There is something powerful about creating space in our lives for moving the biggest hopes and fears in our life out of our hands and into the hands of God. My hope is that we can talk about the power of this act and give you one or two new ways of engaging with prayer. Whether you're a prayer pro, a complete novice or someone who has given up on prayer, I encourage you to take a listen.  

Safe To Be, Safe to Grow:: Curiosity

When I was a very young child I was certain that there was much of the world that I didn't understand. How did plugging in a TV send me a picture of something that is going on hundreds of miles away? How did pouring a stinky liquid in our car make it go? Why was sleep necessary?

As I got older they forced me to ignore all of these awesome questions and focus on boring stuff like numbers, letters, words and sentences. This process kept building and laying claim to the majority of my life until I was 18 and graduating high school. At that stage I was fairly certain I didn't have much else to learn. I had given most of my time, effort and energy for 13 out of my 18 years on Earth to education. How much more could there be?

But as education continued something funny started to happen. I became more and more convinced that I didn't know anything. Any field of study that you're introduced to has so much depth and complexity. When you look at the number of fields of study that exist you start to realize that you know close to 0% of the information the world has to offer.

I was sure I knew nothing. I was sure I knew it all. Then I'm certain I don't know anything. (To prove that point, I just spent the last 2 minutes debating if the "i" in I'm should be capitalized and had to ask Sarah)

So, how do we react to a world where there is far more that we don't know than what we do know?

Curiosity feels like a good first step and I love this quote from S. Leonard Rubinstein.

"Curiosity is a willing, a proud, an eager confession of ignorance."

How great is that?! We get to drop out of the "know-it-all" game and embrace our ignorance as the engine to growth and maturity. This week we are looking at the third of our five core values in curiosity. We describe it as; We recognize there is more that we don't know about God and the world than what we do know. We lean into mystery with questions and openness to grow.

Safe to Be, Safe to Grow :: Diversity

If you want to feel like you are right about any opinion, it is possible in the world we live in today. And so our world becomes a swirling pool of disagreement and polarization. We are inventing things to disagree on at a staggering level. It creates an incredibly unsafe environment where we don't feel safe to bring up almost any topic for fear of ending a relationship over it. 

What if we surrendered "right"? 
What if we stopped looking at the world through that kind of lens?

This week we are exploring that very question as we have a conversation about Cascade's core value of Diversity. We define it as; We better understand God when we live in a community of people who are different from each other. 

You see if we let go of being "right" we can grab hold of being in relationship. I can hear your voice and perspective because it doesn't threaten my reality. It's not a game that I could lose, but another viewpoint that I could understand. 

To help us in this conversation we are privileged to have Pastor Jonathan Brooks join us from Chicago. Our mutual friend Leroy Barber connected us and Pastor Brooks has great insights to share as a person who has lived his life in diverse communities that are often overlooked and discovered an aspect of God that is also overlooked. 

Safe To Be, Safe to Grow:: Intentionality

Whenever I say goodbye I usually have some idea of what kind of goodbye it is. 

There's generally a couple of different options. 

1) The See You Later - This is the goodbye that doesn't linger because there is a certainty that you will see each other again. When I leave the house in the morning I turn 3 words into one. "Loveyoubye". It's usually delivered in the midst of movement towards the door because I'm certain a few hours is all that separates us. 

2) The See You Soon-ish - This is the least certain of all the goodbyes because its not backed with a reconnection date or time. You don't have anything in either of your schedules that means that you'll definitely see each other soon, but history dictates that it won't be years until you see each other again. This goodbye usually ends with a promise to not let so much time pass until you see each other again. 

3) The See You Never - This is the goodbye that feels most urgent and intense. It can either be that you really don't know if you'll ever see this person again or it's the absence that you will feel most acutely. These goodbyes are both hard to start and finish. There may be tears, there may be uncomfortable joking to ease the tension. This goodbye feels most like a loss. 

One of the saddest moments for me is when I look back at a mis-applied goodbye. When I moved too quickly or lingered too long on a goodbye. It's a missed opportunity to honor the relationship with the intention that it is due. 

This week at Cascade we're going to be looking at how our 5 Core Values inform our vision of being Safe to Be, Safe to Grow. The first value is Intentionality:: We engage in relationships a step beyond what is known or comfortable.

Safe To Be, Safe to Grow

I grew up in the country. 

How country was it??

It was so country that all of our pets came as the result of people releasing them into the "wild" at the end of our road. 

One of the big perks of growing up in the country is the kinds of things that would randomly grow where we lived. One time we threw watermelon remains out into the pasture for the cows to eat and a watermelon vine popped up. I loved watermelon and was so excited at this bit of unplanned agriculture. 

I remember watching it grow and waiting for the day I got to taste the sweet, sweet fruit of surprise homegrown watermelon. I was positive that it would taste much better than any other watermelon I had ever had because of it's miraculous growth. 

I'd love for this to be the part of the story where I regale you with the flavor and texture of the watermelon in too much detail. I cannot because the not-so-unexpected happened. The cows ate it. 

I wasn't the only one watching that watermelon grow. I wasn't the only one celebrating this miracle of good soil, sun and water converging. I was, unfortunately, the only one waiting one day too long to partake in the fruit. 

The story illustrates that while that field was a safe place for growth, it wasn't a safe place to be. It would have been much safer for the watermelon to be in an isolated desert without the greedy eyes of cattle and children planing its delicious demise. That's not possible, however, because the desert isn't a safe place for growth.

The combination of safety in being and growth is vital for success, and at Cascade this best captures our hope for church.