Ray Li’s Blog

This music video was filmed backward. While other people have tried this idea (ie Coldplay - The Scientist), no one has done it to this extent.

The members of Mute Math are actually Christian, but Mute Math isn’t a “Christian” band. Mute Math is getting big in the indie scene and are known for pushing the envelope musically and in their live performances. It’s pretty refreshing to see Christians making music creatively.

If you like their sound, check out their first hit called “Control.”

…Inside Your Mind.”

Yesterday I took my cousin Selena from China and a family friend to go see The Phantom of the Opera. It was the most beautiful musical I have seen thus far.

There was one part in particular that stuck out to me.

::SPOILER ALERT::

It was an exchange Raoul had with the Phantom when he was trying to save Christine but was unable to reach her.

Raoul: Have you no compassion?

The Phantom: Compassion?! The world has never had compassion on me!

As I was watching the musical, I was wondering, how does redemption come to someone in as wretched a position as the Phantom? How does the gospel of Jesus Christ redeem people who have received no compassion from the world?

Sometimes the gospel seems so alien to me. How in the world does it fit into this context to save and redeem? How does a risen Son of God bring renewal and rescue to the earth? The sky and the dirt seem so far apart.

Ad I lack compassion. It’s easier to have fuzzy feelings.

In this present age, the redemption does indeed take form through God’s work in jars of clay, but it’s easier to dwell on my depravity and forget the power of the gospel to transform my heart.

So these days I’ve been pumping some David Crowder Band while driving. There’s this one song called Can You Feel It that I thought sucked lyrically but I’ve actually grown to like it.

It begins with the lines “Life makes it so hard sometimes to know what’s real.” Then it goes into a bridge saying “Our God is here” over and over, rising with a monster of a crescendo. It’s like a narrative, struggling with the reality of God, but then seeing that He’s not just an antiquated idea in a book, or a distant guy in the sky, but He is here, right now. The Savior has come, He is here, He is everywhere. I can’t wrap my mind around it.

This past Sunday I went to Living Faith Community Church. I am starting to look for a new church with my family. I had found LFCC on the list of Redeemer Affiliated Churches.

It was a pretty cool experience. In many ways, it’s exactly what I look for in a church. The music quality was quite good and the song selection was good. They did a few Sovereign Grace Music songs and The Power of the Cross. Here are some neutral observations solely based on this Sunday’s service:

• LFCC uses less songs in its worship service than other worship service I’ve been to.
• It has communion every week.
• There is a leader/emcee figure that facilitates everything.
• It reminded me of Redeemer in terms of how it is structured.
• The church’s mission is to be multi-ethnic. Most of the congregation seem to be Asian young professionals.

In terms of the message itself, it was decent. It was entitled: “The God of Christmas.” Apparently Pastor Ro was a lot more animated than he normally is, so maybe it wasn’t a typical message. I think the message was gospel-centered for sure. He preached from the Word, he was engaging, and he was solid. And as a side note, he pulled out Radical Reformission by Mark Driscoll and read a passage from it.

The one thing was that the gospel wasn’t presented as clearly as I was expecting. But I don’t want to be one of the annoying punks who pick everything apart. I think I just had built up my expectations too much, thinking he would be an Asian Tim Keller (an unfair expectation). . But hearing one message is hardly enough to make any sort of assessment; I think I’ll check out some more of the messages on the LFCC website.

I may check out a church in Astoria called Astoria Community Church. It’s also on the Redeemer Affiliated Church list. Only problem is it is 28 minutes away (with no traffic) and there are no community groups around my home.

I really need to be praying throughout all this. Can’t be a church shopper/hopper, I need to figure out where God wants me to be.

LFCC does seem pretty exciting from its vision statement. Check it out:

1. Gospel-Driven: The Gospel tells us that our root sin is not just failing in our obedience to God but relying on our obedience to save us. Therefore the gospel is not just the way to go to heaven, but is the way to address every problem and is a way to grow at every step.

2. Prayer-Rooted: Healthy church is both a result of and a means to the dynamics of spiritual renewal, therefore we must be rooted in extraordinary prayer as well as corporate and individual repentance before God.

3. World-and-Life View: The Lordship of Christ over every area of life prevents us from dividing life into secular/public vs. private/sacred realms or into physical/worldly vs. spiritual/church realms.

4. Multi-Ethnic: We will mirror our geographic neighborhood, which is very multi-ethnic. We will seek to reflect more racial unity than our neighborhood in order to witness to the truth of the Gospel.

5. City-Positive: We do not just seek our own prosperity, or even the peace of our neighborhood, but the peace and prosperity of the whole city. We will not only have pity or sympathy on our city, but also will respect and learn from it as we show compassion.

6. Community-Based: We believe that the Gospel alone changes people’s lives and creates a new community which loves and serves each other. And this change occurs as Christians learn to apply the Gospel and share their lives with one another in mutual encouragement in small cell groups.

7. Church-Planting Minded: We do not consider church planting to be either traumatic or unusual process. Rather, we are always planning and working toward the next daughter church, just as we are always doing other ministries of the church.

Near Death

I almost killed my dad and my cousin yesterday. We were driving home from work and both of them were sleeping. I had just gotten off the highway when the car locked and slowly drifted to a stop. It was pretty scary, something that had never happened before. I wrestled with the wheel but I could hardly move it.

Luckily, I was already on the left most lane so I drifted to a stop and put on the emergency lights. I realized then that Ihad run out of gas and had not noticed it. Having not driven in so long, it totally slipped my mind to check on gas. While we were sitting in the leftmost lane with the emergency lights on waiting for my mom to come, a car that was speeding a lot behind us tried to pull into another lane and collided with another car. Right before our eyes, an accident took place that would not have happened if I wasn’t there. One car slid to the right side of the lane with its front left side demolished. The other one also got busted and drifted to the left side of the lane a few hundred meters in front of us.

Luckily no one was hurt. But I was thinking, what if people died today? What if those cars flipped over and some people didn’t make it? Or…what if our car locked up a minute earlier while we were on the highway, with cars doing 70 mph? We could be dead.

I realized that being responsible for someone else’s death is a really weighty thing, I felt stunned and numb.

Materialism

I went to the mall two days ago to do Christmas shopping with my mom and my cousin. After we arrived home after several hours in the mall, I realized that a Gap bag with a gift I had bought was gone. I freaked out, jumped in the car, and sped back to the mall.

On getting to the mall, I ran to the book store where I was at earlier and also ran to the food court. No signs of the bag (duh). I was really ticked off, annoyed, and angry: “How could this be lost? Why didn’t mom take care of the bag? That’s a lot of money that’s gone.”

I asked a security guard riding on a little cart if he knew anything about the bag. He radioed in and said there was nothing. As I was walking toward another end of the mall, I asked another security guard. He said they would open the safe in the security office for me. As I went downstairs, I had to wait for one of the guys to bring keys. During that time, I got to chat with the security guards and see what’s been going on in their lives, if only for a little bit. And lo and behold, when the safe was opened, my bag was in there. Some lady had found it and gave it to them.

As I was driving back home, I realized how caught up in material things I was. While it is some concern to lose something that I paid a lot for (it would be strange to be flippant about it), at the same time I had completely lost sight of the gospel, of Jesus, and of the true value of life found in Him. I was so stressed and annoyed.

I’m really glad the bag got lost. Not only did God show me the ugliness of my heart, I had a chance to talk to some of the people at the mall (gotta love the workers). And God didn’t need to help me find that bag again, I didn’t deserve to find the bag again, I didn’t even deserve to make it alive back home after coming from the mall. Truly, we dangle on a thread above eternity by the sheer grace of God.

Summary

I feel like these are two examples of God’s grace smacking me around in my life, getting a hold of me even when I am being a fool. My absent mindedness has consequences. I can’t just brush it off. And I need to stop finding my hope in things that will fade away.

I was very struck by this commentary by a blogger named Peter Ong (I had stumbled across his blog a while ago) regarding racism in the Asian American church. It is well worth the read.

(below blog post entitled “Poor Race” taken from http://peterong.wordpress.com/2007/08/30/poor-race/)

“To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardship.”
W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk

Taking some time out to think about the panel discussion that I participated at the Big Brothers and Big Sisters of New York City. It was a panel discussion entitled “Do Faith-Based Mentorship Programs Work?” As I prepared and sat on the panel of such esteemed faith community leaders, I soon came to knowledge that I was the only non African American on the panel. As I heard their concerns for the African American youth (particularly of African American males.) They spoke of recidivism of incarcerated youth and the cycle of crime and the absence of adult male presence. As I sat there, I shared a picture of the immigrant Chinese and challenge them to look beyond the Asian American community as what Tim Tseng once said as “foreigners” or “model minority.” It was a provocative exchange that left me a bit concerned about my limited view on implications of race in the complex workings of justice and mercy.

In my years serving in Chinatown and the Asian American church there has been an underlying ethnocentrism that borders on racism. We love to send missions trips to “East Asia” and where there are “East Asian” presence. But I believe that we are not racist by culture but the issue was one of leadership and vision. I think that as a culture, we tend to live in our circles and worship the culture more than Christ but it is inherent for us to practice tribalism for the sake of comfort. It is too easy to label Asian American churches as “racist” and not going through a deeper evaluation that we all have tendencies to create huddles. But the gospel challenges us to make intentional steps towards one another. In the Ephesians church, there were those who wanted to create huddles but Paul challenges them to engage. Pastor Tim Keller, Redeemer Presbyterian Church, expounded once that we are not to only “tolerate” those who are foreign to us (spiritually, racially, economically, etc.) but to enter in and love deeply for what they have to contribute to our understanding of the gospel and the yet to be redeemed world. Rob Bell in his book Sex God, says this:

“The temptation is always to avoid things that are difficult and complex. To go around them rather than through them. ” (Italics mine)

So often in our journey is one sidestep after another. To avoid the unknown out of fear. I am afraid to admit that I have ignored this issue for a great deal of time. As I have been serving the Asian American community, I have sidestepped the issues of race in the larger context. But God has a great way of reversing that…

This past weekend, the members of OneHouse met with New York Faith & Justice and had a profound conversation about injustice on both the international and domestic urban context. Lisa Harper, the Director of NY Faith & Justice, opened up the conversation by saying, “if we do not solve our problems here, we are going to transplant the problems overseas.” We talked about justice and the issues of churches being mostly silent on it and how the Asian American church could be perceived as “racist” because of our lack of relevance to underserved communities outside of Asian communities.

During the conversation, my heart was burning as I saw how God has yearned to bring His Shalom into the realm of the affluence of the Asian American church. Beyond our minor church buildings but to the streets, to reclaim our humanity through engaging with those who are blessed (beatitudes blessed: the poor). As we shared over a meal, we learned that we have so much more on this journey to learn. To learn that there are brothers and sisters in our communities, who share the same subway seats who we have not exchanged a single hint of a prayer for one another. What if there is something to be said of Asian Americans and our role in this conversation…to be at the table to share a meal and our hearts for those who are literally disconnected because of our fear. I confess I have been guilty of this. It has been easy for me to send a check to help a family thousands of miles from me. We said how “paternalistic” our motives are and how we are seeing that we are “helping” but not connecting with the humanity of it. So the question is, what am I praying for here in my zip code? What am I am understanding about the issues concerning the neighbors here. How do I work out the gospel in the city? I have ignored that Chinatown is populated by Latinos, African Americans and now with the new influx of the Caucasian hipsters in the Lower East Side. When we become unconcerned we have unleashed chaos into the gospel pursuit of redemption to those things that are broken.

As I remembered a sermon on Jonah (you can download it here) by Steven Ro, Living Faith Community Church pastor. I walked away with the sense that justice is an act of expressing a merciful God. Pastor Ro said a God whose “…mercies extend to the end of the world…to even to the enemies of God.” When we live out justice, it reflects mercy of God. It shows that we are living in a continued message that God is compassionate. Jonah’s understanding was God was only compassionate to the religious people. But through this story of Jonah, it shows that God is not tribal, filled with judgment, not unconcerned, but rather a God who is inclusive, holy pity, and committed concern through compassion.

We are so distorted in our narrow vision and it is this blind spot that will forever mute our faith to nothing more than a spiritual ethnic club that says neither of God’s broad vision for redemption or His profound intent of moving us towards connecting with our disconnectedness.

(from http://weblog.xanga.com/thecuttingtruth/632942578/item.html )

• I confess that my faith has been reduced to going through the motions. Go to church on Sunday. Smile. Lift hands. Sing. Smile. Say goodbye.

• I confess that I pray about five minutes a week.
  

• I confess that when I look at the kids in the youth group, at how emotionally they worship, at how emotionally they express their devotion to God, at how emotionally they seek God’s will, I inwardly smile. For I confess that I think them naive, idealistic, and that their religious enthusiasm is just a stage in life. It’ll pass.
  

• I confess that even though I say there is no higher calling than the pastorate/ministry vocation, I inwardly hope my children go to Yale Law School, and not Gordon-Conwell Seminary. I will feel affirmed if they become doctors and lawyers; I will feel disappointment if they attend seminary.
  

• I confess that I do not like watching body worship.

• I confess that I do like watching body worship.
  

• I confess that I look down on youth pastors. I think of them as academic failures, people unable to get real jobs in the real world. Mostly, I think of them as glorified baby-sitters. They also make very easy targets, and I blame them for all the shortcomings of my children. Somebody has to take the blame, and it sure ain’t gonna be me.

• I confess that I was inwardly shattered when word first came out that the Virginia Tech killer was Asian American; and that shame quickly turned to relief when it was disclosed that the killer was Korean American.

• I confess I prefer to have a white pastor leading the ABC congregation. Blond hair and blue eyes just looks more spiritual. I confess that I find myself always sizing up an Asian American pastor, and feeling like he’s never making the grade. Feeling like he’d never succeed in the corporate/financial/legal/medical/real world.
  

• I confess that I find the typical AA yuppie Christian (in his 20s, single, career-minded and successful, materialistic) unbearable in his spiritual haughtiness.

• I confess that the church is blind to the rampant sex that goes on under the mask of churchly decency and decorum. It is the unacknowledged and unacknowledgeable swampland beneath the church brochure of tidy scenery. Only a few are brave enough to confront and address it; the rest of us put on petty and hypocritical masks of naïve innocence.

• I confess that while I am all for racial harmony (yay for the “multiethnic” church!), my child will marry an African American over my dead body.

• I confess that I feel like a peon in the (white) working world. And that’s why I jockey for position in the Asian church, where it is an even playing field. Where I can gain a modicum of power and (self-)respect. I will give lip-service to the concept of servant-leadership, of course.

• I confess that I do not like most Christians. I find them boring, narrow-minded, petty, judgmental. That if I crash-landed on a deserted island for a year, I’d prefer being with the cast of Lost than the members of my congregation.

• I confess that I am a hypocrite. I confess that I sometimes think this Christianity thing is all a sham, and I want to throw my arms up and just yell to hell with it all!