the sagely blog

Blogging Sacrilege, chapter 6: How to Win

2012-01-22T11:26:00.001-07:00

I don't have to be an oppressive, insecure, offensive fundie to be a Christian. There's a way to follow God in the way of Jesus and win the world with the original message of Good News.
I hope to show that this is why Jesus calls us to meekness in this Beatitude: "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth" (Matt. 5:5)

Jesus the humble and meek, who climbed down out of heaven to come and build a home in our neighborhood, is the answer for both the conflict in the Middle East and the wars fighting within every human heart. Jesus wants his people, his apprentices, to win--to see people changed and converted to his ways--but the methods of winning are just as important as the win itself, because they can't be separated. We win with meekness.
(Hugh Halter, Sacrilege)

A month or so ago I finished Anathea Portier-Young's Apocalypse Against Empire. As part of a larger project contextualizing Jewish apocalyptic writing, Portier-Young provides an approachable yet deeply insightful and precise analysis of life in Jerusalem under imperial Seleucid rule during the years preceding the Maccabean rebellion. I turned over the last page of the volume with a list authors to chase down and my understanding of the literary and cultural context into which Jesus stepped some a century or more later radically redefined.

The fifth chapter of Apocalypse Against Empire, "Seleucid State Terror,"did much of the heavy-lifting in reshaping my understanding of Jesus' context. Portier-Young systematically reviews the archaeological evidence for and the cultural meaning of state sponsored massacres, murders in the home, abductions (for the slave market), and plundering of the temple. Against the backdrop of subjugated Jewish identity Portier-Young establishes in chapter 3, "Interaction and Identity in Seleucid Judea: 188-173 BCE,"this litany of state-sponsored violence (physical and otherwise) begins to help me understand the way in which Jesus' contemporaries--under the oppressive rule of another empire--may have understood themselves, their history, and their oppressors.

Enter Jesus. Jesus proclaiming good news from God about a new kingdom arriving. Jesus disrupting social structures that separated the honorable working poor from beggars, bandits, and those who survived outside the official market in goods and services. In healing the sick, purifying the unclean, exorcising the demonized, Jesus brought the outcasts back into the company of good and honest society.

Without a doubt, Jesus sparked hopes that God was finally going to intervene and set up a utopian society, one in which God truly dwelled in Zion and all the (oppressing) nations came and brought tribute to Jerusalem. (We have no doubt about this because John's Gospel confirms in 6.15).

The first few lines of Jesus' kick-off sermon initially seem to confirm this: "Blessed are the poor"--"Amen!" the people thought, "it's time the good and godly poor were visited by God's blessed intervention on their behalf. Maybe this new kingdom will involve less imperial taxation." Jesus continues, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted." And again the people think, "Amen! We've mourned the ruin of David's kingdom for nearly six hundred years. Now Herod presumptuously builds another stand-in temple for us, but what we long for is God to return and set up God's own temple. God, do, come and comfort your people!"

But just as Jesus' followers reach for the pitchforks and scythes to follow their new leader to the seat of power up in Jerusaelm, Jesus says, "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth."

I'm on board with the grounds of Halter's thesis for this chapter. In his words, "the methods of winning are just as important as the win itself." Halter's argument in chapter six turns on the assumed ground that our lives should imitate Jesus' life, our methods should look like his. (This makes my convinced Anabaptist heart go pitter-patter.)

Still, I'm not sure Jesus' speaks most directly to evangelism in the third beatitude. So, once again, Halter and I part ways.

On the one hand, something like evangelism is in view in the context. What's the first thing Jesus does after announcing the good news of the kingdom's impending arrival (4.17)? He' calls a community around him and promises them, "I will send you out to fish for people" (4.19). In another translation, "I will make you fishers of men."

This statement has prooftexted innumerable impassioned apologies for evangelism from the pulpit. I may have even led a Bible study or two springing from this text to the need to be missionaries in our workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods. However, I suspect that Jesus' call to his first followers stands less in the background of the third beatitude than the account of his testing in the desert that precedes it.

I'm unashamedly following John Howard Yoder's The Politics of Jesus here. One of the recurring themes in The Politics of Jesus is Jesus' refusal of the "Zealot option," that is, his refusal to set things right for God's people by force. Yoder, in tracing Jesus' mission from the announcement of his birth to his resurrection, describes Jesus' final testing in Gethsemane:

Here is now the last opportunity. As Satan had come thrice in the desert, so the real option of Zealot-like kingship comes the third time in the public ministry. . . . Once more, now clearly for the last time, the option of the crusade beckons. Once more Jesus sees this option as a real temptation. Once more he rejects it. (57)

Inheriting the land (probably a better translation than earth) would be quite the promise to Jesus' Jewish followers who now lived only marginally better than slaves as tenant farmers in their ancestral land, tenants for either egregiously rich elite aristocratic landowners or for the imperial governors and lords. Receiving once more than land--a promise given to the ancient Israelites just after they had been famously delivered from the harsh Egyptian empire--this was the great hope, part and parcel of the hope of God's return to and deliverance of God's people.

But Jesus disavows the peasant revolt, disabuses his followers of temptations to the Zealot option of armed revolt. The meek, the gentle, the submissive receive the land. How can this be other than through a direct act of God?

Returning to Halter, we do well to ask what this means for how Jesus' followers today live in relation to their neighbors. If we are the community that is "sent out to fish for people," what does meekness, the rejection of violence, mean for our witness?

And here, amid his backdoor wars over Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism, Halter gets it right. We testify to Jesus' good news best through our meekness. Our rejection of violence (and Jesus takes this to the ultimate level a little later in Mt 5.38-43), our radical dependence on not our own strategies but God to provide for us in terms of safety, honor, and livelihood, is our strongest witness to the Kingdom Jesus proclaims.

Halter concludes,

When Jesus called his followers to be witnesses, he was asking them to allow their lives to tell the story of his life. [I might add, culminating in his obedient crucifixion and then his resurrection.] He wanted their actions, their community, their values, their love and kindness, and their visible transformation to be the most powerful way to communicate God's heart to the world.

I think Halter's right on here.

Blogging Sacrilege, chapter 5: Comfort, comfort ye my people!

2012-01-15T16:37:00.000-07:00

Hugh Halter titles chapter 5 of Sacrilege "The Problem with Family Values." This, IMHO, is a sign of hope.

I am a member of the generation who grew up with "family values" broadcast every morning from Focus on the Family on AM Christian radio. I read the books that, under the guise of defending "absolutes," really duked it out for traditional "family values" (cf. Josh McDowell's Right from Wrong). It seemed then that the fate of Christianity, or American Christianity, stood or fell with the family seated around the table for dinner, teens' attitudes about cheating, and kids keeping their pants on until they were married. The battle over "family values" was in the cultural air so much that Korn would launch the tongue-in-cheek Family Values Tour in Summer 1998.

In his reflection on the second Beatitude, Halter calls "family first" habits and values into question in favor of a practice of hospitality. I fully support this cause. He writes,

"So what I'm suggesting is this: cut out some of the nonstop activities and make room for a few more people in your family room. Keep margin in your life, blank days on your calender, and flexibility in your spare time so that you can adopt a few 'orphans' into your life."

Right on, Hugh! Opening our lives (which some would say is one of the first motions of love) requires that we topple the idols, dethrone the powers which enslave us. Sometimes this is our devotion to our families, our homes, or, even, our hobbies.

Halter mentions Matthew 12.46-50 as a testimony to how Jesus overturned family-first expectations in his own life: Jesus' family comes to talk to Jesus while he's busy teaching his followers. Instead of dropping everything to honor his family, Jesus makes them wait while he finishes teaching. When someone in the crowd objects, Jesus responds, "Who is my mother and who are my brothers?" Pointing to his disciples, he says, "Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother."

Jesus redefines every social relationship. In confronting the powers on the cross, he's made a new world where "there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." And in this up-turned, re-righted world, "from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view; though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!" (2 Cor 5.16-17). In this new creation, Jesus is the arbiter of meaning, of relationships and their significance (and signification).

So I'm with Halter's application point: When we're following Jesus, we must find our relationship to "family" somewhere along his way.

But . . . I'm not sure you can wring all of this out of Mt 5.4: "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted."

To give him due credit, Halter talks a bit about actual mourning, drawing in Eccl 7.2-4 to support Jesus' argument. The Preacher in Ecclesiastes says, "It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of every; the should take this to heart." Maybe Jesus had this in mind.

Then again, maybe not. Like the "poor in spirit," "those who mourn" may be more real-worldly than other-worldly. At his best Halter stumbles in this direction: "Jesus's call is for us to be tuned in to pain, weeping with those who weep and rejoicing with those who rejoice." But, though this is biblical sentiment (cf. Paul's encouragement to some believers in Rom 12.15), Matthew's story present more immediate indicators of how we should interpret Jesus' statement.

Halter and I part ways over our understanding of the genre of the Beatitudes. Halter talks about them as a guide to, well, as the book's subtitle suggests, "Finding Life in the Unorthodox Ways of Jesus." Jesus first discourse in Matthew certainly has a lot to tell us about what it looks like for us to follow him as salt and light. But I'm convinced this how-to instruction only begins after vv 13-20 of chapter 5. Jesus declares that he has come to "fulfil" or bring to complete expression the Torah and the Prophets. The rest of chs 5-7 fill out what this means for his followers.

But vv 3-12 stand apart. Instead of a renewed torah, these versus declare to us the good news, the gospel Jesus preaches. The first beatitude makes this clear. Jesus preaches an arriving kingdom, and in v 3 he explains who it's arriving for. Similarly, the second beatitude expresses this in another way. Think of the Beatitudes as meditation on the many aspects of the gospel, the light sparked by the facets of rotating gem. For those poor for the sake of the Spirit, it means the return of God's presence with them, a world remade and set right; for those wearing the rags of mourning, it means comfort.

Matthew points us in this direction by his stress on exile in the introductory genealogy. He also suggests this reading by including an account of the Massacre of the Innocents in 2.16-18. If we were to read 5.4 and ask, "Who, so far in Matthew's story, has been mourning?" the women of Bethlehem immediate cry out for out attention, their toddlers and infants ripped from their arms by imperial soldiers.

But pay close attention to the way Matthew frames their situation. He writes, "The what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: 'A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.'" I didn't catch this until recently, but Bethlehem is not in the tribal territory of any of Rachel's children. Bethlehem, as the lineage of its other famous son reminds us, is the territory of Jacob's other wife Leah's son Judah.

For Matthew, a prophecy seems to be fulfilled when it meets its ultimate expression. So while Bethlehem is only the step-child of Rachel, the mothers mourning there fulfil in a complete and perfect way Jeremiah prophecy to Jerusalem on the eve of its fall and deportation to Babylon. If we read Jer 31.15 in context, we find the city's neglected prophet promising both the exile of its children and of their eventual return due to God's "everlasting love" and "unfailing kindness."

So, blessed are those who mourn. The later book of Lamentations reminds us that the Jewish people continued to mourn the sack of Jerusalem and the desecration of its temple. Already in Jer 41, mere weeks after the destruction of the city and the temple, we find pilgrims coming to mourn the fallen city and its exiled inhabitants. I suspect that Matthew points in the direction of those who mourn this exile through the story of mothers mourning in Bethlehem the contemporary effects of exile under their imperial rulers.

Comfort, then, sounds extremely similar to the words Yahweh commissions his servant to bring in Isaiah 40: "Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for, that she has received from Yahweh's hand double for all her sins." Those who mourn will be comforted because the exile is finally at an end! God is, once again, with us!

Or as Peter speaks this truth to the mixed congregations of early Christianity: "You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy" (1 Pet 2.9-10).

Now as God's people, we live lives that emulate our leader, his practice of hospitality, his embrace of the bitterness of human life, his mourning with those who mourn. But we do this because we have in him indeed received comfort.

Blogging Sacrilege, chapter 4: Letter to a Greek Professor

2012-01-09T23:38:00.000-07:00

[Source]

After I'd graduated from college with my degree in Bible and smattering of biblical Greek and Hebrew, I remember sitting down and typing out an email to a former prof asking about Jesus inauguratory teaching in Matthew 5: makavroi oiJ ptwcoi; tw/: pneuvmati, o”ti aujtw:n ejstin hJ basileiva tw:n oujranw:n.

For the words that Matthew chooses to introduce Jesus' first meditation on what his good news means for the community he's called around him, these are strange words. Up to this point, in Matthew's telling, Jesus' only public words have been "Repent! For the kingdom of heaven is arriving!" and "Come along with me, and I'll make you fishers for people." So now, after a healing or two, Jesus finally sits down to instruct his followers in what this is all about. And what does he say? "Blessed are the poor in spirit, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs."

Who are these people who have it good? That's what I wanted to know from my Greek professor. What does poverty, spiritual or otherwise, have to do with the dunked-in-the-cleansing-blood gospel I'd confessed from childhood onward? I'm still waiting for an answer that makes complete sense of this to me.

Surprisingly enough, Hugh Halter takes on this saying of Jesus in chapter 4 of Sacrilege. In fact, the remaining chapters of the book seem to take the Beatitudes one-by-one for a structure. Not something I expected from the billing on the book's cover. but I'm always open, even excited, to return to Jesus' words and wait and listen.
The Beatitudes seems to be hitting me from every side at the moment. A small group Cindy and I facilitate is reading and praying our way through Matthew. We've just made our way into the first bits of the Sermon on the Mount. (Incidentally, we're using a great study method a friend with TOAG introduced us to; I eventually hope to post outlining this method.) Our conversation parked at the Mt 5.3-12 for a while.

Then yesterday Scott Brownson, a former youth pastor, mentor, and friend, stopped in to lead worship and preach for a Sunday morning. The sermon was about, yes, the Beatitudes. I sat through the sermon thinking, "Wow, this is starting to get eery."

Whether I'm reading Sacrilege, listening to Scott, or even in my living room praying through a passage, I keep stumbling over (or even stubbing my toe on) the thought that ptwcoi; tw/: pneuvmati primarily points to a "spiritual" reality.

Scott explicated the line as referring to our admission that, no, we can't do it on our own. Spirituality, the kind of spirituality God cares for, depends utterly and wholly upon the Spirit. We're bankrupt without the Spirit.

Halter hears the line as pointing to an epistemological or doctrinal humility. I use the fancy verbiage of epistemology and doctrine, but the thrust of the chapter might better be summed up as "not thinking we have it all together" or "not judging people."

Halter starts off with a story about hot yoga and a conversation with a yoga instructor ostracized by Christian family members. She's still searching for God or spirituality, and Halter maintains that she might be closer to being "in a good space with God" (to use Scott's gloss for blessed) than the Evangelicals who judge her. And on this point, I'm inclined to agree with him.

He writes,

Unlike the philosophers of the day, Jesus did not seem interested in arguing fine points of theology or philosophy. . . . [H]e was primarily trying to prepare his young apprentices for an entirely new paradigm of living under a new order he called the "kingdom of God." Jesus knew that any paradigm shift is difficult to adopt, especially for those who have closed their minds and want to stay comfortably stuck with what is familiar. So it's probably no surprise that he preferred being around the spiritually hungry and disoriented over the already hyperspiritual (but also hyperapathetic).

We might read as thinking we could have all the answers as our original sin (though is definitely not the only way to approach Genesis 3). Hugh skillfully deflects accusations that this outlook doesn't really take scripture as truth. (He says, in effect, "The Bible is God's truth, but we don't have God's brains to understand it. So calm down.") Then he points to our practice as the place we prove whether we know Jesus or not. In his words, "You can know a lot of concepts about a lot of spiritual stuff, but according to Jesus, you don't really understand and 'know truth' until you live it out."

As a whole, I'm on board with Hugh's commitments: we don't know it all, so we shouldn't act like we do; and we only really know what we're living in practice. BUT I think it's off base to read all this into Jesus words in Matthew 5.3: makavroi oiJ ptwcoi; tw/: pneuvmati, o”ti aujtw:n ejstin hJ basileiva tw:n oujranw:n.

I've been using the greek text of the first Beatitude all along to disorient us, to make the words sound strange to us again. Until we struggle with this text--what it means to be blessed, who's being blessed, and the reason Jesus gives for this outlandish statement--we have no room to read over it epistemological humility, spiritual dependency, or even justification by grace alone.

So here's how I hear what Jesus starts to say here.

So far in Matthew's telling, Jesus is born in a context of exile (1.11-12, 17) a scion of the former dynastic rulers of the Jews (1.6,17, 20; 2.2). Jesus is not only a political heir; he is also God returned to the people, Immanuel (1.18, 23). This is important, because the exile represented not only a departure of the people from the land. It also signaled according to some traditions the departure of God from the people (cf. Ezekiel 10). Jesus is God returned to be with the people, Yahweh the deliver, Yahweh the savior (1.21).

Matthew re-emphasizes the exilic political context with two stories. First sages from the east (Iran?) travel to meet a new king only to find a toddler in a sheep town, Bethlehem (2.1-6). Next, Herod reenacts the slaughter of Hebrew babies by Pharaoh (cf. Exodus 1-2) right in the Jews' heartland (Mt 2.16-18). Note where Matthew cites the Prophets. Jesus and the circumstances of his infancy and childhood, somewhat ironically or unexpectedly, brings ultimate fulfilment to these texts. These citations again bring home the political aspect of the ripples Jesus causes, even as a baby.

Matthew moves from these beginning to John's summons to repentance at the Jordan. John's message requires that acceptance of the kingdom message (3.2) effect change in lifestyle and practice (3.8). Nominal membership in the covenant people won't cut it (3.9-10). Neither apparently will assiduous religious observance or social status or role; Pharisees and Sadducees get singled out as those who are farthest from true repentance (3.7), and the one coming after John will come with judgment for them (3.11-12).

Jesus enters the scene, undergoing a baptism with God's people, entering with them into the new thing John has proclaimed God is doing (notice that Jesus word-for-word take ups John's message; compare 3.2 and 4.17). Just as he does this, God confirms Jesus' status and role (the one with the winnowing fork of judgment, God who returns to be with God's people) as God's anointed servant and royal son (cf. Ps 2).

Immediately Jesus status as servant is tested in the desert by the adversary. Will Jesus as Yahweh's servant enact judgment and comfort (cf. Isaiah's Servant Songs) through un-God-like means--feeding the masses in to popular revolt, apocalyptic spectacle, or devotion to the devil's schemes (or however we interpret the three temptations)? No. Jesus perseveres in accomplishing his mission of judgment and comfort in the way God directs him.

So Jesus begins his ministry in Galilee (not Jerusalem, the center of power). He starts in the "land of the shadow of death" (4.16), proclaiming that God's kingdom is arriving. What does this announcement look like? Calling average people away from their jobs--not the super pious Pharisees or expert scribes, not the town elders, not the priests or politicians. He calls fishermen to become fishers for people (4.19)--to invite others into the new thing God is doing. Jesus proclamation looks like healing "every disease and sickness among the people" (4.23) and casting out evil spirits from the demonically possessed (4.24).

In this context, Jesus finally sits down on the mountainside (perhaps like Moses on Sinai) to explain what he's inviting people into.

He "opens his mouth" to teach them, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

After how Matthew's begun his story, I don't think we can 1) de-politicize the word poor, or 2) import a theology of justification by grace through faith that Matthew has never yet spoken a word about. Blessed is fairly easy to interpret. Just read what's happening around Jesus four verses earlier in 4.23-24. These people, whatever their identity, are blessed in that Jesus is working incredible things for them. Blessed might mean a lot more than this. We might want to read in heaven or eternal security and bliss. But at a minimum, and probably most immediately, blessed seems to mean that the poor in spirit are finding blessing in Jesus deeds and words.

oiJ ptwcoi; tw/: pneuvmati. Halter writes that the Greek term means "to be completely empty and dependent upon someone else for provision." He suggest a homeless person as a model. There's a lot of debate over how literally to take Jesus' word here. The Hebrew Bible tradition to label the godly community the anawim, the humble and humiliate, might in fact flow back over the literal meaning of poor. Perhaps poor signals godly in this case. Perhaps not. Jesus certainly did spend a lot of time with the literally poor, and even named our response to the poor and those in need as the arbiter of whether we receive comfort or judgment at the Son of Man's return (25.31-46) in his last public address. But I by no means intend to settle the identity of this group here and now.

Poor is modified by a dative noun, tw/: pneuvmati, what we translate traditional "in Spirit." This modifier, more than anything else, is what caused me to email my Greek professor so many years ago. If our poverty is to be limited only to the spiritual parts of our lives, then maybe there's reason to hear Jesus' first words as telling us not to try to go it under only our own religious effort or not to think too highly of our spirituality. According to my old syntax textbook, the dative may be used (among many other uses) as an adverb. That's the traditional interpretation, poor spiritually. Dan Wallace names this a dative of sphere.

But the dative may also indicate what Wallace calls "interest." We might translate the text then "poor for the Spirit." A dative can also indicate a causal relationship--"poor because of the Spirit." Gustavo Gutiérrez runs with this final way in a chapter well worth reading, "Poverty: Solidarity and Protest," in A Theology of Liberation. Gutiérrez suggests that the first Beatitude should motivate us to join the poor, to live alongside and be numbered with those who are oppressed today.

When I hear Matthew's story, it feels more natural to me if poor in the Spirit indicates the type of people who were finding blessing in Jesus. These were the people, after all, who catching sight of the kingdom's arrival in Jesus' healing, exorcising, and preaching.

A lot of doctrinal assumptions lurk just beneath the surface of any discussion of the Beatitudes. I'm curious to see where Halter's carry him in the unfolding chapters. I'm curious to see how they challenge and reshape my own.

Blogging Sacrilege, chapter 3: Enough Said

2012-01-06T22:12:00.000-07:00

Mike shared this lesson: "You see, Hugh, in a courtroom, people see things based on preconceived beliefs. We think people simply believe what they see, but in reality, people see what they already believe. Thus a good attorney must learn to tell the story in a way that helps people see things differently."
(Hugh Halter, Sacrilege)

Enough said.

Blogging Sacrilege, chapter 2: The Nitty-Gritty and Important

2012-01-05T20:21:00.001-07:00

At one time Christ followers lived every moment in the teachings and style of their leader. But somewhere along the way these adventurers turned into adherents of doctrine. People of faith became risk-averse. Kingdom revolutionaries succumbed to the world's kingdoms. Counterculture architects became wards of the state, sellouts, and seeker-sensitive consumers.
(Hugh Halter, Sacrilege)

It's time to get down to the nitty-gritty. I find myself nodding in time with many of the statements in chapter 2 of Sacrilege. I agree, the gathering of imitators of Christ has over the last two thousand years become a convention of aficionados. But my question--which I believe is an important questions--is about the specifics and the details of this change. From what have changed? Into what are we changing? What elements in this change are appropriate to the evolution of culture, politics, means of production, etc.? What elements are not appropriate to the Pioneer of our faith?

(For more on the idea of expressions of Christianity being appropriate or not, I suggest an under-appreciated collection of essay edited by Charles Kraft, Appropriate Christianity. A seminary prof assigned selections from it for a course on missiological contextualization, and I've been grateful for it many times since.)

Halter roots fidelity in Jesus' demeanor. We've heard many times that Jesus was a friend of sinners, that he associated with people good society looked down upon, that he was accused of partying too hard. These are true statements. I cannot and will not do anything to draw them into question or to soften the harsh light they thrown on my own bourgeoise, safe, acceptable lifestyle.

Yet . . . yet our vision is out of focus if we see mostly the raw fact that Jesus did thus and such. Reading stories from hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years ago means that we absolutely should ask what Jesus actions meant in the there and then culture of Jesus' day. We miss out if imitatio Christi means for us only literally doing again what Jesus did; if we really intend to live like Christ, we need to discern how to live and act along the very trajectory he's set for us in the God's work.

I've just finished reading for the very first time John Howard Yoder's The Politics of Jesus. (I know, what kind of Mennonite am I to have waited so long to read this?) Yoder makes a strong case that the way Jesus lived had real ethical and political significance for the residents of first century Palestine. He goes further, arguing convincingly that the way Jesus lived had similar meaning for Jews and Greeks living elsewhere within the Empire. Some of Jesus' actions--his rejection of violent grabs for power, both his relativizing and his submission to the powers that be, his commitment to redistribution of wealth for mutual aid--persist in exerting the same kind of influence twenty-first century America.

The question--the one caught up in the details--is what significance Jesus has set for us by his life.

Halter sets out his gauge:

How can you know if you are actually an apprentice: people respond to you like they did to Jesus. People are drawn to you. People seek you out for help. People like you, respect you, and want to live like you live. I'm not suggesting that every introvert will become extroverted or the socially awkward will become the life of the party. I'm suggesting that if we take on the purpose of becoming like Jesus, the people of the world whom Jesus died for will want to be our friends.

Jesus did say, "If they obeyed my word, they will obey yours too." But this the first half of this proverb rhymes, "If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you" (Jn 15:20). The consistent testimony of Jesus and his early followers is that world's response to the good news is ambivalent. Some leave everything to follow, and others hold the coats of the Pharisees so they can stone you. Popular opinion seems to be a fickle-hearted standard for fidelity.

So far, my trouble with Sacrilege isn't its application points (brought home with a reflection question and action point at the conclusion of each chapter). Amen! We need to listen again for who Jesus is and where he's leading us! But I get caught on the blunt, ill-defined edges of Hater's argument. I feel like he's writing found poetry pulled from the popular consciousness of disaffected pastors' kids. Somethings are right on, and some are a mile wide of the target.

So it's back to the nitty-gritty, back to the hard work of listening and praying and talking over what Jesus meant and what he means now.

Blogging Sacrilege, chapter 1: Jesus and Joe the Plumber

2012-01-04T08:23:00.000-07:00

Do you remember Joe the Plumber? Picture yourself back in the 2008 US presidential campaigns. Some guy from Ohio happens into a conversation with Obama, and briefly thereafter he’s the media flavor of the minute. One day he’s a small business owner in Holland, Ohio; the next, he’s the symbol of everyman, symbol of the common folk who are going to help this country get back on its feet. He’s the mascot of Candidate X’s ambitions for office.

Jesus often gets the same treatment.

Twice in chapter 1 of Hugh Halter’s Sacrilege Jesus shows up in a subtitle. First we meet “Jesus the Iconoclast.” It’s Jesus who fights and overcomes the hold of popular piety, of social taboos, of skin-deep legalism and false shows of godliness. Hugh writes, “Jesus went against almost every religious norm and won the hearts of the heathen. His ability to de-sacredize the sacred (when doing so was important to the purpose of God) magnetized people to him, and his followers were expected and empowered to do the same.”

As Hugh explains, iconoclast means image or idol breaker. I agree that Jesus disrupts all our pictures of the way things should work, all our self-serving imaginations of God and life and love and why.

But I wonder if introducing Jesus first as iconoclast, a de-sacredizer strays from the stories we’ve heard. See, the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible is full of iconoclasts. Israel had plenty of idol-smashers, from Moses when he comes down from Sinai to find a golden calf replacing the imageless Yahweh to Gideon chopping down the Asherah pole by night to the words of latter prophets filling the back third of our Hebrew Bibles. But Jesus, even with all this material to draw on, doesn’t style himself an idol-smasher.

Does he disrupt enshrined traditions and revolt against the temple-turned-market? Yes. But he does so not in the name of taking out the trash but of welcoming a new kingdom, a new order, a new, true, and living way. He flips tables, and then explains, “Is it not written, ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations’?” He holds up a coin of the empire and says, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”

Remember when Jesus is in synagogue on the sabbath and chooses to heal the man with the crippled hand? He sure looks like an iconoclast here. He flouts those looking for a reason to accuse him of living with disregard to Torah and brings the man new life by healing his hand. But listen to Jesus’ question: “Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?”

Jesus breaks with tradition, but in the name of a higher, better tradition. Jesus breaks the law to keep the law. And I think many people (say, Nicodemus) could affirm that.

First century Judaism gets a pretty bad rap in chapter one. Hugh writes, “The Jews had not heard from God through any prophets for more than three hundred years. In despair, they had settled back into systems of religion, the legalistic faith of the Old Testament law given to Moses.” Things are so bad that the incarnation “was God’s only way to cut through the bull of religion and nebulous spirituality so that we could get a handle on a truer image of God.”

But I believe God’s law, the Torah, is good. God’s good instruction on how to live as God’s special people in God’s way. I believe Jesus believed this--check his words to the rich young ruler--“You know the commandments.” Jesus doesn’t come to abolish the Torah but to fulfil it, to bring it to its ultimate expression, to re-form the worship and way of Yahweh.

Hugh guides us to meet behind the blockages of religion “Jesus the Likable.” He basis this on the fact that “common people loved Jesus!” To an extent this is true--the crowds are always flocking to Jesus. But Jn 6 and Mk 11 remind us that the crowds were also frequently falling away, going home disappointed, and, above all, misunderstanding.

I get that we want to present a Jesus friendly to all our neighbors. But I think we might be picking and choosing only the parts of the story that bolster our campaign. We take Jesus and turn him into a mascot for our cause. The real question is, What is Jesus’ cause?

Hugh sums up the chapter this way: “Jesus’s ability to influence the hearts of man and woman, child and king, prostitute, peasant, and priest was greatly due to his sacrilegious ways of behaving, speaking, listening, loving, and living.” The word I get stuck on is “influence.” We might feel Jesus’ influence most today in his ways of breaking with the things we want to break with--out-of-date religious taboos and moral guidelines. But the Gospels don’t picture Jesus as drawing the masses to see him go head-to-head with the arbiters of popular piety. They come for healings and exorcisms, teaching and bread and the hope political revolution. They come to see the kingdom come.

God knows we need the same today. Will it look different from the powers that be today, from our church services, political elections, social networking sites, and retail jobs? Let’s hope so. But its negations, the ways Jesus’ kingdom breaks with the status quo, certainly do not exhaust what Jesus has to say about it, how Jesus performs it. The antitheses of Jesus’ sermon on the mountainside in Mt 5-7 negate with one hand and give a renewed and better way with the other. Jesus is far more than an idol-smasher, he’s the firstborn from the dead, the firstfruits of the new creation.

Blogging Hugh Halter's Sacrilege, part 1, Introduction

2012-01-03T11:10:00.000-07:00

Sacrilege by Hugh Halter

Mike Morrell turned me on to Hugh Halter's Sacrilege through the guerilla blog book reviews he facilitates. And, while I've never tried this sort of thing with any success in the past, I've purposed to blog my way through the book.

So here goes.

I've had a little previous contact with Hugh. By a little, I mean I once read most of Hugh and Matt Smay's earlier Tangible Kingdom with a friend and mentor in church-planting. I recall liking most of what I read there, though I can remember exactly what I liked about the book. When Sacrilege came up for review, it was less Hugh's name on the cover than the Shapevine series that it is part of that attracted me to it.

Onward to the Introduction.

Hugh begins with stories, two of them. He recounts a trip to Beirut, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem, and retells his own process of find and re-finding the "real Jesus."

Part of me hopes this is good omen for the rest of the direction of the rest of the book: telling and retelling the stories about Jesus. But I'm also a bit concerned. I'm worried the stories will be reduced to props or frames on which to pin up an ideology or personal vendetta.

In the first story, Hugh ends up kneeling in front of a keyhole in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, hoping for a glimpse of the real Jesus' tomb. But bumbling priests returned from mass interrupt him and block his view. Hugh narrates his disappointment on the bus ride out of Jerusalem: traders hocking mementos and badly-painted relics, religious tourists crowding to snap photos, pastors, priests, and monks competing for religious real estate, Israeli soldiers and the police force. He complains that there's nothing left to see of the real Jesus in Jerusalem.

While I listened to the unfolding story, hope flickered inside me. I hoped that in the end, Hugh would find Jesus in the middle of the mess: Jesus the Word who sustains the mess--creation and history and tourists and terrorists and telemarketers. I hoped he would see Jesus in Palestinians pressed against the wall in Bethlehem or even in the Muslim politicos in Beirut as they explained how they saw Jesus. But Hugh doesn't. Instead he sulks in the bus.

Between this story and the second, Hugh's account of how he found Jesus, Hugh reflects on the ways we miss Jesus. He subtitles this intervention "Jesus and Bad PR." I'm with him when he says that there are some toxic stories about Jesus out there, both inside and outside churches. Hugh lists a number of them.

But I wonder if his frustration and disappointment is more rooted in a currently epidemic mythology that fetishizes a "real Jesus" who stands outside and behind the stories we meet him in. This Jesus is more "real"--more authentic, less complicated--than person we meet the church and its Gospels and letters. He lives in a world that is equally more "real"--a world where good and evil, God and the devil are starkly defined. The economy and politics--let alone tourists traps and religious institutions--don't muddy this world with the ambiguity that they do ours. Maybe this world is purer because people still farm and wear sandals.

I suspect that Hugh would (and hopefully will in chapter 1 and everything after) affirm the value of the complex world we live today as the place where God's kingdom comes. My vaguely recalled impressions of Tangible Kingdom point me in that direction.

But I think Hugh assumes something that undercuts the concrete character of the kingdom Jesus announces. Writing about our concept of Jesus in the Introduction, Hughs explains "Our beliefs affect our attitudes, our attitudes affect our behaviors, and our behaviors determine our future." His point is that its important to believe the real Jesus, not a bad caricature.

The latent assumption in this is that concepts are primary, concepts are the movers and shakers of our worlds and, it seems, our future. It's precisely a concept of Jesus and his world that the above-mentioned epidemic fetishizes. Only a concept can be more or less "real." A person is always solidly bound to some reality (whether that of neighborly relations, CNN's global news coverage, WOW, Facebook, or a novel). And it's precisely in our own ambiguous, more-or-less faithful practice of telling and retelling, singing and praying the Jesus' stories in church and outside of it that we meet Jesus and his reality. (Full disclosure: James K. A. Smith Desiring the Kingdom has pretty significantly shaped my thought on this; read him for further details.)

Hugh ends the Introduction by telling his own story of finding (and re-finding) Jesus. He tells this story in a letter to his teenage daughters. I sympathize with Hugh's story; it reminds me a bit of my own: someone completely enamored with Jesus but finding it hard to fit in Christianized institutions.

But let me own with a story of my own. In 2004 I traveled with a college music group for a tour of Greece. By day we were on our own tour bus visiting ancient Christian sites; by night we played in churches and at youth rallies as a warm-up act for a traveling Greek evangelist.

We played a gig in a courtyard at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki. In between each set, we would infiltrate the students who'd gathered to watch and start up conversations about Jesus. I remember stumbling into the middle of debate with a young man studying to become an Orthodox priest. While I did my best to approximate the four spiritual laws, he repeatedly interrupted me with a plea to "read the Fathers!"

I think I walked away shaken by the conversation. I had a copy of Robert Webber's Ancient-Future Faith on my bus seat. I remember reading it and wondering if I really knew the Jesus I claimed to follow, if I really knew what following him meant. In many ways I'm still wondering.

Sandpaper in Hand

2011-11-28T10:40:00.001-07:00

So imagine with me:

You've been freed up by a grant to spend three days a week exclusively working to testify to Jesus' good news about God's kingdom. What would you do?

I really like the image of reality wearing through the map (if this metaphor's unfamiliar to you, sit down with some friends and watch The Matrix or, better, read Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation). Where does the kingdom wear through in your context? Where might it? And would you best invest your time if you had three days a week to work on widening the hole?

I've been working for the last few years (off and on, more off than on) to refinish a cheap electric guitar I bought when I played in a high school garage band. Armed with sandpaper, I sit out on the fire escape or on the front steps slowly removing a garish blue finish to reveal the wood grain beneath it, the canvas for beautiful things to come. That's the work before us.

The Road to Missional and Working Retail

2011-11-27T15:36:00.001-07:00

I'm taking in Mike Frost's new The Road to Missional in preparation for a forthcoming review in Englewood Review of Books. I'll post an update here once it's published.

This is a great and provocative book, definitely the best-presented outline of Christianity as participation in the missio Dei or missio Christi that I've ever picked up. It definitely has me thinking.

First, The Road to Missional has me contemplating a new way of describing Jesus' announcement of God's kingdom. Frost, drawing on David Bosch if I remember right (an author I need to read more), talks about Jesus announcing God's kingdom present in the world, overlapping with it. God's kingdom is here, realized, but not in a way we yet recognize. Or, as Frost says, the world as God desires it and the world as we know it don't "overlap completely." One-to-one correspondence waits for Jesus' return.

Second, then, I'm meditating on the ways in which the kingdom shows through (reality wears through the map) in this mountain valley I call home for now. Frost describes a believer in Cambodia who demonstrates the advent of the kingdom in a displaced persons camp. He dug trenches to drain the land to reduce mosquitoes bearing infectious disease. He found a truck to transport laborers into the city to find work. What does that look like in a part-time tourist town, a city of ski bum college kids, where obsolete ranchhands and cowboys spend up the hours playing video poker, where heroin addicts come to clean up.

Third, and most insistently, I'm back to the question of what God's kingdom and our mission to alert the world to its presence means for people working retail. Retail, especially in a large chain, is not a context that welcomes relationship. Justice does not roll down (even when we're dropping prices). There's no shalom in shopping. Yet I'm there. A lot of people who follow Jesus are there, for our eight hours, five or more days a week. What does faithful witness, faithful testimony look like there? Can God's kingdom wear through behind the checkstand counter?

I'm excited to read the last chapter of The Road to Missional. This is a book that brings me hope.

Soft at the Edges

2011-11-05T06:07:00.002-06:00

I deeply desire to be able to name myself categorically as follow Jesus. That’s half the appeal of participating in a monastic, activist, or non-profit social justice community. If I’m honest, that’s half the appeal of leading a church.

How do we know we follow Jesus? How do we sort out in our day-to-day, nine-to-five lives if we are somehow participating in messianic mission?

Love can take many forms. Redemption may often blend into the background.

A younger version of myself would identify witness as unapologetic apologetics and exploiting every opportunity to confront people with the gospel. But I believe this way of witnessing turns primarily on a theoretical/intellectual mode of understanding “gospel”--a way foreign to Jesus’ own proclamation.

Example: I work in a pharmacy for a day job. In between filling prescriptions and cashing out customers, a coworker mentions that she plans to come again to church, the same church I go to, incidentally. A fellow Christian who also works there immediately takes this opportunity to interrogate the rest of our fellow employees about their church attendance habits. They become defensive, explaining that they go occasionally, when they can, whey they’re not too tired, etc.

My younger self would have joined in the interrogation, hoping for a chance to score an invitation to join me on Sunday morning. But I’m not entirely sure that this is an incredibly faithful way to imagine witness.

I don’t think Jesus pressured people into attending weekly synagogue all too often.

But if this isn’t what witness looks like outside the monastery or the rescue mission, what might it look like?

Jesus meets people where they’re at. The woman at the well, Nicodemus, the wedding at Cana, John’s disciples at the Jordan. He goest to them, asks them questions, hears their stories, and then shares his life--the same life I want to share. It’s a patient process.

Will there ever be confrontation? Perhaps; probably, even. But like the Samaritan woman, confrontation with the truth of the Jesus story comes only after stories and needs have been heard, only after we really know one another.

But this is far from a clean-cut business. It seems difficulty to define. Are we living as witness? Or are we simply living as nice people? Where is Jesus in our friendships? Where is Jesus back in the pharmacy? It’s hard to say.

Rumblings and Musings . . .

2011-08-29T11:52:00.002-06:00

I've recently roused my dormant interest in how apocalyptic eschatology informed early Christian praxis. Nathan Kerr's Christ, History, and Apocalyptic pushed a seed deep into my heart and mind, and I've been watching closely as I wait for its long-coming germination.

I've been reading up on peri-NT apocalyptic literature, with the help of H. H. Rowley's The Relevance of Apocalyptic, John J. Collins' The Apocalyptic Imagination, and a dusty volume I discovered on my shelf by D. S. Russell, Apocalyptic: Ancient and Modern. The more I read, the more I find that reverberations of the eschatology of apocalyptic literature sounding in NT texts. Doug Harink's Brazos Theological Commentary on 1 & 2 Peter samples this sort of sound.

Like Nathan Kerr and Halden Doerge (see his incredible posts on apocalyptic and the praxis of church in response to Kerr's book), I suspect that the apocalyptic eschatological matrix--and I mean eschatology in a big, broad sense, not just End Times speculation--both of the NT and of Jesus shapes the way in which Jesus' followers practice church today.

I need some space to work out what I'm reading, so forgive me occasional posts of fragmented thoughts over the coming months. If you have suggestions for my reading and reflection, please share your thoughts! Peace and thanks.

Revies :: Giver of Life :: Fr. John Oliver

2011-08-29T11:31:00.000-06:00

While I've been preoccupied with relocating across the country (see La Fleur's post for the update), Englewood Review of books published my review of Fr. John Oliver's Give of Life: the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Tradition.

I thoroughly enjoyed this brief, poetic volume--the sort of book I could as easily read devotionally as I could assign it to students in an Intro to Christian Theology course. I highly suggest finding a copy to peruse for yourself.

I've included a couple of excerpts from my review. For the full text, head over to ERB. Subscribe to the email feed for regular updates on other good books to read (I did). Now my excerpted thoughts on the book:

Simone Weil, political mystic and trinitarian philosopher, wrote that love of God and love of neighbor “have attention for [their] substance” (Waiting for God, 114). Oliver waits upon the Spirit with this love, a patient attention that avoids the impatience that contradicts love. Weil writes elsewhere that error is due, fundamentally, to a lack of love: it is “due to the fact that thought has seized upon some idea to hastily, and being thus prematurely blocked, is not open to the truth . . . We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them” (Waiting for God, 112). Oliver is patient with the Spirit he loves.

The historical development of a theology of the Spirit also recommends patience. The mystery of the Holy Spirit has not been disclosed us with an abrupt clarity. In fact, for the better part of three centuries, the Spirit remained in the background of theological conversation, a presence to be confessed but then footnoted (or, perhaps, a presence to be practiced and celebrated but not theorized or formulated).

. . . Father John Oliver does what is best in this complicated history: he prays. Giver of Life could be read quickly; its prose flows graciously and simply even when touching on the highest mysteries of God. But the text itself invites patient, reflective, even prayerful reading. More than just a page-by-page textual invitation to slow reading, Giver of Life takes it structures from a simple, common prayer of Orthodox tradition:

O heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of truth, Who art everywhere present and fillest all things; Treasury of good things and Giver of life; come and abide in us, and cleanse us from every impurity, and save our souls, O Gracious Lord.
Each chapter meditates on one of this prayer’s acclamations or petitions. Oliver explains,

“While a book like this one about the Holy Spirit may transmit information, an interior awakening is the real goal. This is why Orthodox theological insight is embedded in our liturgical life. As we pray, so we believe; as we believe, so we pray. Prayer opens the heart to the penetrating presence of God.” Giver of Life is best read as a confession, a prayer of faith, offered to share the vision of God the Holy Spirit one priest has found within his tradition.

Review :: Revise Us Again :: Frank Viola

2011-05-21T22:10:00.000-06:00

This afternoon I joined many others from my church-community to help a friend move to a new apartment. After we had carted the last box, last couch, last bookshelf up two flights of stairs and milled about for some celebratory Little Caesar’s Hot-N-Ready’s to arrive, a teen let out an exclamation of delight and beckoned me over to the bathroom window.

“Look down, you can see the neighbor’s koi.”

I looked down, and from our birds-eye perspective, we could see a beautiful fish pond and porch the neighbors had constructed behind their three flat. We stood, leaning over the bathtub, elbows on the bathroom window sill, watching their orange and gold and white bodies oscillate slowly in the water.

I’ve seen koi before. I’m usually not a big fan. I think of them like I think of goldfish--carp in a cage, bred to be pretty but vulnerable in the bigger fish-eat-fish ocean. But from this perspective, gazing down from thirty feet up, with the Chicago rain falling out of a hard grey sky, these fish were beautiful. A hint of nature among the bricks and concrete.

I enjoyed parts of Frank Viola’s Revise Us Again: Living from a Renewed Christian Script. I also was annoyed with parts. The book has its up and downs.

I don’t want to focus on Revise Us Again as a whole. Initially because it feels a bit too scattered to draw out a single guiding thesis (though the theme--or is it a conceit--of revising the scripts we are practiced in in practicing our faith does run constant and true throughout form beginning to end). But more pressingly, I don’t want to give my page by page response to Viola’s book because all my attention is caught by Viola’s Afterword appended to the body of the text.

My purpose made clear, let me pause to give a quick overview of the book’s positives and negatives. Positively, Revise Us Again names many unhelpful or even destructive assumptions and practiced instincts in how we go about faith. I wish someone had give me a copy of this book as I started college. Viola’s discussion of God’s three-fold speaking and the related three spiritual conversational styles would have saved me from some frustration when I was dumped unexpectedly into the Christian subculture (predominantly the Quoter SCS, in Viola’s paradigm). Viola provides honest analysis of the varied ways we talk about experiences of God’s presence is refreshingly straightforward, clear of rhetorical flourishes that obscure the phenomenology and theology of what we experience. Good things.

On the downside, the book sometimes reads like a list of religious pet peeves. The casual tone sometimes verges into muddy turns of phrase. I often wanted to know the conversations behind Viola’s statements. The endnotes are sparse; I feel like I’m reading someone’s offhand opinion rather than the product of years of reflection on Christian experience. Overall, reading the book wasn’t a waste of time, but the book fails to set itself apart from the others crowding my shelves (or the shelves of your local bookstore).

At least, the book failed to stand out until I finished Viola’s Afterword. I found myself thinking back over these final pages one day, two days, three days after I’d set the book back on my bookshelf.

Viola subtitles the Afterword “The Three Gospels.” He doesn’t say anything radical here, nothing radical, nothing particularly well-reasoned. He outlines three versions of the gospel: a libertine gospel, a legalist gospel, and “Paul’s gospel.” The first two are familiar enough. Listen, however, to how Viola describes the third gospel:

“Instead of focusing on the demands of God, Paul’s gospel focuses on the spiritual reality of what actually happens to those who have trusted in Christ when He died and rose again. It takes its view from behind the eyes of God--not from the earth but from the heavens

“Paul’s gospel confidently proclaims that Jesus of Nazareth is this earth’s true Lord. It declares the glories of Jesus and unflinchingly proclaims what God has done for all who submit to His lordship. The gospel that Paul preached includes salvation by grace through faith. It includes the call to repent, believe on Christ, and be baptized. It is a call to leave the world system and enter the kingdom of God--to move from the old fallen order into God’s order. It includes the promise of the forgiveness of sins, eternal life, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

“In Paul’s gospel, the standards of God are neither ignored nor rationalized into irrelevant oblivion (as in the gospel of the libertine). On the other hand, the standards of God are never presented as demands by which [sic] our acceptance by God is tied (as in the gospel of the legalist). . . .

“Instead, Paul’s gosepl is rooted in the unconditional acceptance, security, and wealth that those who have trusted in Christ as Lord and Savior enjoy. For this reason, whenever Paul present a standard of God, he always presents it from this vantage point: It is the conduct that those who are in Christ naturally exhibit.”

This handful of paragraphs keeps returning to mind. This gospel sounds strikingly familiar to the gospel I proclaim, the gospel that gets me occasionally accused of universalism and occasionally accused of works-righteousness. Similar, but slightly different. In Viola’s words, I hear what I believe from a slightly different perspective--like looking down from a second story window.

Viola formulates the gospel as it show up in Paul’s letters into a three part pattern. First, Paul reminds believers of “their true identity in Christ.” Viola adds that Paul “also reminds them of the all-sufficiency of Christ who has come to dwell inside them.” Second, Paul outlines how those who are in Christ live. Third, Paul, according to Viola, “exhorts the believers to live according to their true identity rather than according to their false identity.”

I usually see Jesus on the road, walking, calling people to come and follow him. Discipleship is my decided metaphor for the gospel. Jesus liberates us by his call and then calls us to follow him in hope to a new creation community. Viola emphasizes God’s indwelling Spirit that makes us new, that changes who we are. One of my favorite passages from scripture is 2 Cor 5.14-21. In this I read vv 17-18 as the basis for a call, a mission, a participation in God’s work of reconciliation by testifying to it, proclaiming the new creation that has been born out of Jesus’ obedient life, death, and glorious resurrection. Viola comes at this from a different angle. The center of the text for him seems to be vv 16-17, “So we have stopped evaluating others from a human point of view. At one time we thought of Christ merely from a human point of view. How differently we know him now! This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!” The gospel is the same, but the perspective is a few storeys shifted.

I like this. This is beautiful. Usually I back quickly away from versions of the gospel that tie Jesus’ gospel too closely to personal transformation. I believe that personal transformation is just one moment in God’s redemption of people, a renewal of God’s promise to Sarah and Abraham, to all the Israelites at Sinai. But from alongside Viola, this emphasis on personal re-creation and personal indwelling by the Spirit of Christ looks strangely true.

Review :: The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere :: Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, & Cornel West, et. al.

2011-05-09T09:58:00.000-06:00

Englewood Review of Books just published my review of The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere by Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, & Cornel West.

I'll post here the first few paragraphs of the review, but to hear my full take on this interesting volume, you'll have to head over to ERB.

When I hear a sermon or a lecture, I often wonder what sort of script the speaker is using. Not just prepared remarks propped on the lectern or stored in the memory. I’m curious about the cultural scripts that shape and guide what she has to say, the tacitly assumed goals, strategies, evaluative criteria of public discourse.

The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere is less scripted than most essays collections in ethics or political philosophy. That’s because The Power of Religion isn’t an essay collection. It’s a conversation, minimally edited by Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, between Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West. And conversation occasionally careens outside the parameters of the lecture hall.

The October 22, 2009, event this volume recapitulates sought to carry forward dialogue about religion, secularism, and the way we talk about the common good. Fittingly, the event was less four renowned public intellectuals reading four papers and more three discussions between the participants.

Language, deliberation, and translation are key themes that run throughout the four essays and all three discussions. The public sphere is the realm of public conversation about the common good. But a second, unnamed theme runs alongside this consistent concern with language: a concern with power. . . .

For more, head over to ERB. Check out the rest of the issue for other reviews of some good books.

Drinking Water to Give Water :: water.cc

2011-04-08T14:09:00.000-06:00

H20 Project from Living Water International on Vimeo.

Jesus said not to broadcast to fasting, to anoint your head with oil, to keep from your left hand what your right is doing. But I think in this case, Jesus would be okay with letting other people in on what's going on.

For Lent this year, I'm drinking nothing but water. My friend Hannah at Blind Bartimaeus first let me know about an org called Living Water International and the H2O Project. Hannah traveled with Living Water (great name, btw) to El Salvador. She has a great series of daily Lenten posts reflecting on her trip and the global need for clean water.

When I heard about the project, my first thought was, "Oh no, I do not want to do that. That would be hard." So I knew I would have to do it.

I've never been a great fundraiser. I'd rather do with less than have to ask other people for money. (I think I read Stone Soup a few times to often as a child.)

But this fast isn't about my needs. In fact, it only touches tangentially on what I instinctively think of as my spiritual practice. This fast is about clean water--a resource I have in such abundance (Lake Michigan is three blocks away) that I forget that it's a resource.

So check out water.cc. Maybe it's late to sign onto the H2O Project for Lent. Do it for Pentecost. Do it for forty random days. Or, more simply, just send the org some money. Regularly. Water is good, necessary stuff.

The Story of the Thirsty - Short from Living Water International on Vimeo.water.ceewater.cc

Review :: The Road :: Cormac McCarthy

2011-03-26T10:59:00.000-06:00

Last night I felt the last snow of this Chicago winter. This has been a winter for snow--deep snow, wet snow, thunder snow. Today the sun is shining; you couldn't tell that the sky was spitting snow last night.

I was driving home from work when the Blizzard of 2011 hit Chicago. As I drove toward the lake on Howard Street, the snow hit like a wall. Newscasts forewarned catastrophe. Once I'd found parking, I marched toward my apartment head-down to keep the snow out of my eyes. Drifts were already filling the courtyard of my building. My wife and I took shelter in our apartment reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter while the wind shook our windows and the sky flashed lightning.

All told, Chicago received 20.9 inches of snowfall. Chicago Public Schools canceled school for the first time in twelve years, and then did so for a second day while giant snow eaters cleared roads. I spent forty-five minutes digging out my car (which was buried up to the windows), twice.

I had finished Cormac McCarthy's The Road a few weeks earlier. Apocalyptic scenarios were on my mind. And then there I was, in the middle of the biggest snowstorm to hit Chicago since 1967. The city shut down. Maybe this was a glimpse of the end.

But I think not. In fact, I think this is a backward way of thinking. See, the next day, when the sky cleared to let the bitter cold sunlight illumine the shining city, Cindy and I went for a walk. We pulled on snow boots and muffled ourselves in scarves, and we struck out to cut a trail toward (of course) Dunkin Donuts. What I saw were traces of sled tracks, a recent immigrant family from Africa digging out their minivan, a tired buy behind the counter pouring coffee, parents exploring the snowscape with their toddlers. This wasn't the apocalypse. That came later.
McCarthy never narrates What Happened. You can study the book from cover to cover, and all you come away with are, at most, hints toward what's happened to the world. A blinding light before the dark.

McCarthy writes with true instincts here. The apocalypse--the unveiling--is not the event. Instead, the apocalypse is what's left afterward.

In The Road, the event leaves behind hunger and lung disease, homelessness, roving hordes, fire, cannibalism, cold. A dying, grey world where ultimate loyalties rub raw against the cold and dim sunlight. In Chicago, our unveiling came as the snow began to melt. A look at the sidewalk and the gutter named who we really are: battered folding chairs used to save dug-out parking spaces, used condoms, empty Cheetoes bags, muddy hats and children's gloves and scarves, plastic liquor bottles, empty cigarette packs, pieces of bumper and windshield wipers, soggy newspapers and flyers advertising currency exchanges.

Peter writes in his second letter, But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare. (2 Pet 3.10) This is the apocalypse: the laying bare of who really are, what we've wrought in the places we live. The phrase will be laid bare--the Greek term is euJreqhvsetai. An alternative translation is will be found out.

This is what McCarthy's The Road does: it lays us bare. The world we're creating, the abyss of our instinctual self-interest, our fascist ethnocentrism--we see them clearly. But McCarthy also holds us up in the father and the son. We love the father and the son. We love them even as we wonder who they (and we, too) are:

He rinsed the empty tin with water and gave it to the child to drink and that was that. I should have been more careful, he said.

The boy didn't answer.

You have to talk to me.

Okay.

You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?

Yes.

He sate there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? he said.

Yes. We're still the good guys.

And we always will be.

Yes. We always will be.

Okay.

Who are the good guys? Are we the good guys? If everything but that wed to our souls were stripped away from, would we be good?

The son embodies this question throughout the book. We are the father. I think I often have this conversation within myself.

They sat by the side of the road and ate the last of the apples.

What is it? the man said.

Nothing.

We'll find something to eat. We always do.

The boy didn't answer. The man watched him.

That's not it, is it?

It's okay.

Tell me.

The boy looked away down the road.

I want you to tell me. It's okay.

He shook his head.

Look at me, the man said.

He turned and looked. He looked like he'd been crying.

Just tell me.

We wouldn't ever eat anybody, would we?

No. Of course not.

Even if were starving?

We're starving now.

You said we werent.

I said we werent dying. I didnt say we werent starving.

But we wouldnt.

No. We wouldnt.

No matter what.

No. No matter what.

Because we're the good guys.

Yes.

And we're carrying the fire.

And we're carrying the fire. Yes.

Okay.

The apocalypse strips everything away. It's what left, after the unforeseen event, that is our revelation.

Tell me what you think :: Ill Fares the Land :: Tony Judt

2011-03-18T19:18:00.001-06:00

After reviews of Tony Judt's Ill Fares the Land appeared in Commonweal and repeatedly in New York Review Books (here, here-ish, and here), I was curious. Ill Fares the Land reads part political history and part screed. It's the kind of stuff that puts fire in your bones.

That said, I'm new to this game. Recent political history, the rise and fall of social democracy, Keynesian economic theory, and the effects of globalization are all rather new ideas for me.

So I want to know what you think. Or, more precisely, what you read. What books would explicate Judt for me? Blogs? Or, perhaps, what is your opinion of Ill Fares the Land? I'm all ears. . .

Review :: The Lion, the Mouse, and the Dawn Treader :: Carl McColman

2011-02-21T11:38:00.002-07:00

I don't know how you spent your childhood Sundays in church; I spent mine with C.S. Lewis. Our country church had a library full of faith-filled children's literature, the Ladd Family Adventures, the Sugar Creek Gang, and, best of all, The Chronicles of Narnia. Sitting in the pew next to my parents or the parents of my best friend, I read all seven of the Narnia books over and over: in order of publication, in Narnian chronology, in reverse order of publication, and I think I even tried reverse Narnian chronology. Narnia captivated me; Narnia was the world I wanted to live in, a world of adventure and magic and a depth of meaning that grade school (even grade school in Montana) just didn't seem to offer.

Of all the Narnia stories, my favorite since childhood remains The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. When I recently reread the entire Narnia series (aloud) with my wife, I found my opinion hasn't changed. Something about the travel narrative, the unique character of each island, and the mystical conclusion of the book continues to draw my thoughts into this story more deeply than any of the others (I feel the same way about Perelandra, the second of Lewis' space trilogy). When Mike Morrell alerted me to Carl McColman's new book, The Lion, the Mouse, and the Dawn Treader, that explores mysticism in Lewis' Dawn Treader, I jumped at the opportunity to reopen this story that has haunted me (in the best of ways) since childhood.
Over Christmas I saw Walden Media's take on the Lewis' story (thanks to the generosity of my in-laws). In terms of special effects and wash-buckling, the movie met its obligations, but I think the story somehow got lost. Or perhaps it got fabricated. One of the unique qualities of Lewis' Dawn Treader is its fundamental lack of a driving narrative. It is fundamentally episodic. Walden Media thought that like most good (or at least profitable) films, The Dawn Treader needs a story, so they wrote one--something about mystical swords and a green fog of fear belching up every now and again, along with a sea monster that reminded me of a house centipede.

Andrew O'Hehir posted a critical article over on Salon.com. O'Hehir complains (accurately, I believe) that the film adaptation takes the meandering, parabolic episodes of Lewis' book and ramrods it into Evangelical kitsch. He writes,

While the Narnia books are indeed, in part, a form of Christian parable (and we'll get to that), they're also an attempt to repurpose adventure stories of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance for a modern readership.

. . . As my friend and colleague Laura Miller (author of the "The Magician's Book,"an affectionate, skeptical rereading of Lewis) observes, the Adamson-Apted Narnia movies have been significantly Christianized, in the sense that 21st-century American Christianity is a much different animal from the high-Anglican, early-20th-century version Lewis was preaching. This retelling of "Dawn Treader" is relentlessly goal-oriented -- our heroes must collect seven swords, and free a bunch of people imprisoned in mysterious green mist -- in a way Lewis' book simply isn't. It's also prodigiously sentimental about the sanctity of the nuclear family, an article of American faith that would have seemed totally mysterious to Lewis and his age, when middle-class or upper-class English children grew up barely acquainted with their own parents.

My wife Cindy carries forward this conversation over on her blog, lafleurepuisee.blogspot.com. Aslan greets Caspian, Reepicheep, Lucy, Edmund, and Eustace at the far shore of the end of the world. In the book, Aslan appears first as a lamb, offering the sojourners breakfast cooked over the fire. The film subs out the Lamb for Aslan as the great Lion. Cindy reads the dangers of a spirituality that prefers the power of a lion over the gentle, humble, even cruciform service of the Lamb. She writes,

Increasingly, I am compelled to remember that my faith is in one who, for mysterious reasons beyond my understanding, abandoned the roar of a lion for the "sweet milky voice" of a lamb, who chose in earthly ministry to heal and feed rather than rouse a powerful following, who, as the old song says, "could have called ten thousand angels / to destroy the world and set him free," but instead willingly suffered death, even death on a cross. And who rose again, who claimed victory over death's power, yet was did not immediately demand recognition and worship but instead walked with some along the road, appeared at a house, showed up on a beach and cooked breakfast for his friends.

The story we find in The Dawn Treader, as with the story we find in our own lives, shapes us in profound ways. As a grade school kid, I wanted to live in Narnia. What stories do I want to live in today?

Carl McColman in The Lion, the Mouse, and the Dawn Treader: Spiritual Lessons from C.S. Lewis' Narnia finds the just what the subtitle indicates--spiritual lessons, a travel guide, as it were, for our spiritual journeys. Each island or event in the story represents a way station on the path to a living and engaged spirituality, a mysticism of everyday life.

On my most recent reading of the Narnia series, I began to wonder about mysticism. Throughout the novels, Lucy has a special relationship to Aslan. She is the Magdalene of Narnia. And while other novels in the series touch on this friendship and devotion (particularly Prince Caspian), nowhere is it rendered nearly so thematically as in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

In the first few pages of McColman's book, I had hope that he would reflect deeply on Lewis' child-like account of mysticism. Lewis' does something through Lucy that renders her a role model of faith for me even now. But McColman quickly veers away into matters more practical--a how-to of everyday mysticism.

I don't begrudge The Lion, the Mouse, and the Dawn Treader this. The book is good devotional reading. But like the film's take on Lewis' novel, McColman's account finds a story that I think is not quite there, a story that stems more from our contemporary spirituality than from being drawn deeply into Narnia.

Listen to the way McColman begins his journey through Voyage of the Dawn Treader:

Let's turn to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and see how this charming children's tale has, encoded in it, much of the wisdom and insight about spiritual living that has come down to us over the centuries from the great mystics and saints of the Christian world. It's a great adventure story on its own terms. But when understood as a metaphor for the mystical life, Dawn Treader becomes even more wonderful. It's wonderful because it can help ordinary folks like you and me to recognize, understand, and appreciate all the many aspects of the spiritual journey.

McColman and I part ways at the very beginning. I find a well-told tale (especially an adventure story) much more "wonderful" than well-crafted allegory. And while I agree that we need all the help we can get in seeing God's beauty shot through our lives, I doubt that commentary is the best means to cultivate this awareness.

The Lion, the Mouse, and the Dawn Treader is peppered with words like "represents" and "signifies." McColman is not positing a an allegory on the level with Sir Edmund Spenser--he foreswears this sort of reading from the beginning. But McColman leans in that direction. The slavetrade in the Lone Isles represents structural sin, the sea serpent represents an untamed subconscious, the silence of the Silver Sea represents contemplative prayer. I cannot deny that Voyage of the Dawn Treader has its highly symbolic moments: Eustace' bath after being un-dragoned, the sleepers at Aslan's Table. But I think there is much more to the book than this.

Last year I took a course on OT poetry and prophecy with Willem VanGemeren, a man very fond of Lewis (and good literature in general)--my favorite Dutch Evangelical OT scholars. Twice in the course he referred to Lewis' own reflection on the Narnia stories. He quoted Lewis,

I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralyzed much of my religion in childhood. . . . Supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could" (Lewis, Stories 47)

VanGemeren suggested that Lewis has the same insight here that drives Hebrew biblical poetry: that we are changed most when we begin to see differently. By being drawn into the drama of Narnia--not its symbolism (thought that is beautiful) but its story--we begin to see everything differently. These are Aslan's very words at the end of the story to Lucy and Edmund: "You must learn to know me by that name [in your world]. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there."

We must not impress Voyage of the Dawn Treader into service for another cause, another story, neither that of our own spiritual journey nor that of redemptive and virtuous violence against evil. These other stories have their own uses. McColman writes a find guidebook to Christian spirituality (even under the conceit of Voyage of the Dawn Treader). I enjoyed the two hours I spent wearing 3D glasses to fully experience the film adaptation. But we must not let our attention be pulled away permanently from the story Lewis tells, the world he creates. Allegory is the means of the elite, and spectacle is distraction or respite for the masses. But story, story is a means to conversion. For in stories, reality itself is smuggled past the dragons; reality is un-dragoned.

Recommendation :: Red Moon Rising :: Pete Greig & Dave Roberts

2011-02-05T10:35:00.000-07:00

I spent much of Thursday finishing Pete Greig and Dave Roberts' Red Moon Rising: How 24-7 Prayer Is Awakening a Generation. I'm glad I did.

I know very little about 24-7 Prayer (though I'm enjoying digging through www.24-7prayer.com). I know even less about Pete Greig, one of the dreamers of the movement. But I do know my own heart, and this way of doing Jesus' mission lights me up inside. Beautiful stuff.

Fair warning, Red Moon Rising is put out by a small, young press (Relevant Books, the same folks who publish RELEVANT Magazine). The writing is clumsy at points; sometimes it's a bit of a bumpy ride. Another work through with the editor wouldn't have hurt. But hang on for the ride. Some days God likes to use those "of imperfect speech."

Red Moon Rising feels a micro-generation old at this point. These are the stories I heard friends' older sisters and brothers talking about when I was in high school. Reading these stories now feels like listening to the echo of testimonies still bouncing around a prayer room the morning after. But if God did work like this ten years ago, maybe God still works like this today. Some hope, for what it's worth.

Review :: Gilead :: Marilynne Robinson

2011-02-01T16:46:00.000-07:00

Normally this would be the week in January where I return to classes. Lately it's been seminary. Systematics, apologetics, Greek, Hebrew, pastoral practices. But not this week. As of December, I'm through with seminary coursework. A few more months of internship, and then I'll have mastered divinity (for whatever it's worth).

Today my cohort-mates sit down to lectures on the Holiness Code, the emergence of endowed preacherships in the years leading up to the Reformation, and C5 contextualization. Today I sit down in my reading chair to peruse a long-neglected stack of novels. I have to wonder who's getting the better ministerial education.

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead presses this question dearly. Gilead is comprised of the letters of an old an dying minister to the son he fathered very late in life. Karl Barth and Ludwig Feuerbach appear in these pages. So do sermon notes, scripture citations, Abraham, Job, Paul, Jesus. I'll admit, I'm jealous of the theological education of the Reverend John Ames; perhaps my own alma mater could have done with a bit more attention to a few German theologians.

But one ought not read Gilead simply for its theological performance. Read the novel for the way it unveils the world--the tragic world--as beautiful.

The book is shot through with tragedy: goodbyes never said, relationships never healed, the past buried in back by a fencepost, the future miscarried or foreclosed on by by ill-timing. Tragedy everywhere, even, I suppose, in too much seminary education (as is the case with Ames' brother Edward). Tragedy fills the pages of this book the way that it fills the space between the atoms that make up daily life.

But if one will just walk slow or sit with one's eyes open, if one looks deeply enough, beauty appears to be intimately wed to tragedy, making a home just as deep in reality as pain and evil. The letters that one-by-one carry this story read like letters, like journal entries. They sit and they look, absorbed and yet fully self-conscious, a patient self-narration of experience that never forgets itself while yet allowing itself to be caught up in the other. John Ames' letters reveal perceiving beauty and patient attention walk hand-in-hand.

Take this recollection, for instance:

That mention of Feuerbach and joy reminded me of something I saw early one morning a few years ago, as I was walking up to the church. There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn't. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don't know why I I though of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.

Now listen to how he follows it in the next paragraph:

In writing this, I notice the care it costs me not to use certain words more than I ought to. I am thinking about the word "just." I almost wish I could have written that the sun just shone and the tree just glistened, and the water just poured out of it and the girl just laughed--when it's used that way it does indicate a stress on the word that follows it, and also a particular pitch of the voice. People talk that way when they want to call attention to a thing existing in excess of itself, so to speak, a sort of purity or lavishness, at any rate something ordinary in kind but exceptional in degree. So it seems to me at the moment. There is something real signified by the word "just" that proper language won't acknowledge. It's a little like the German ge-. I regret that I must deprive myself of it. I takes half the point out of telling the story.

This "existing in excess of itself"--this is the mode of beauty in real life. The Reverend John Ames stumbles on it, and I think Robinson weaves her novel to run us headlong into it. For how else can the truly tragic--death, violence, heartbreak, sickness, hunger, old age, lies, deceit and the like--be also truly beautiful, if not in excess of its natural existence. Tragedy is "ordinary in kind"; beauty is certain way of being "exceptional in degree."

To read Gilead, you must be a patient reader--at least if you are to realize its beauty. It's story sits so unobtrusively in the ordinariness of the room, waiting on the sofa so comfortably that you'd think it too was just one more piece of furniture, not a guest from out of town or a prodigal returned home. And even after you realize who this guest is, the story feel familiar, like a joke you've heard before or a newspaper clipping you've just rediscovered in the recesses of your desk. Patience reveals the ordinary.

Patience reveals the ordinary as unexpected, and vice versa. Living in place, waking to the same stretches of ranch land or concrete or beach, you slowly become habituated to the foreigness of your day-to-day experience. I found this true when I lived for seven months in Skopje, Macedonia. After only a few weeks the sour smell of garbage, the acrid sting of wood smoke, and the ever present diesel fumes ceased to register in my mind. The looming Millennium Cross atop Mount Vodno seemed natural. The Cyrillic shop signs made more or less sense. The hustle from house to market to Bible study to school back to home kept my sense too busy processing to allow for perception. But when I'd stop in a kafich for a cup of tursko kafe, or when I'd stand waiting for my bus to come to the station, once in a while the beauty, the otherness and yet also the familiarity of my surrounding would register, and I would rejoice in the chance to be here doing precisely what I was doing. (Like John Ames, I often found paper and pen helped this deeper processing.)

In college, my wife had a quote posted somewhere on her desk that said something like "A writer is first and foremost a fierce observer of the world." I am beginning to feel that this should also be true of a Christian. If Jesus is the wisdom--what perhaps we should better translate today beauty--of the world, then we must commit ourselves to finding him, his ordering work, everywhere. Especially in tragedy.

Listen to another (sizable) passage from Gilead, this time from Ames' recollection of the conclusion of a childhood pilgrimage:

When we finished, my father sat down on the ground beside his father's grave. He stayed there for a good while, plucking at little whiskers of straw that still remained on it, fanning himself with his hat. I think he regretted that there was nothing more for him to do. Finally he got up and brushed himself off, and we stood there together with our miserable clothes all damp and our hands all dirty from the work, and the first crickets rasping and the flies really beginning to bother and the birds crying out the way they do when they're not about ready to settle for the night, and my father bowed his head and began to pray, remembering his father to the Lord, and also asking the Lord's pardon, and his father's as well. I missed my grandfather mightily, and I felt the need of pardon, too. But that was a very long prayer.

Every prayer seemed long to me at that age, and I was truly bone tired. I tried to keep my eyes closed, but after a while I had to look around a little. And this is something I remember very well. At first I thought I saw the sun setting in the east; I knew where east was, because the sun was just over the horizon when we got there that morning. Then I realized that what I saw was a full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them. It seemed as if you could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them. I wanted my father to see it, but I knew I'd have to startle him out of his prayer, and I wanted to do it the best way, so I took his hand and kissed it. And then I said, "Look at the moon." And he did. We just stood there until the sun was down and the moon was up. They seemed to float on the horizon for quite a long time, I suppose because they were both so bright you couldn't get a clear look at them. And that grave, and my father and I, were exactly between them, which seemed amazing to me at the time, since I hadn't given much thought to the nature of the horizon.

My father said, "I would never have thought this place could be beautiful. I'm glad to know that."

Beauty, tragedy, patience. When I'd first finished Gilead, I thought of it as a narrative meditation on Luke's parable about the prodigal son, but now I think I was wrong. If the story must be about something, I think it is about baptism. In baptism, what is utterly ordinary is revealed to put together out of millions of millions of shards of the extraordinary. An ordinary life, in all its boredom and tragedy, is shown to be wholly, entirely holy, loved of God, existing in a new creation. Somehow, this cuts both ways.

A final quote:
Ludwig Feuerbach says a wonderful thing about baptism. I have it marked. He says, "Water is the purest, clearest of liquids; in virtue of this its natural character it is the image of the spotless nature of the Divine Spirit. In short, water has a significance in itself, as water; it is on account of its natural quality that it is consecrated and selected as the vehicle of the Holy Spirt. So far there lies at the foundation of Baptism a beautiful, profound natural significance." Feuerbach is a famous atheist, but his about as good on the joyful aspects of religion as anybody, and he love the world.

January 30 - The Wisdom of the Cross

2011-01-30T12:49:00.001-07:00

Living Water Community Church - Sunday Morning Worship

1 Cor 1.18-31 - “The Wisdom of the Cross”

In today’s passage, 1 Cor 1.18-31, Paul tells the Corinthian saints that God saves us

through the foolishness and the weakness of a Messiah who is executed on a cross in order that

we, the ones who are being saved, will hear the emptiness of all the claims of power and

privilege that distract us from the hard work of love. Paul says, “God chose the lowly things of

the world and the despised things--and the things that are not--to nullify the things that are, so

that no one may boast before him.” That’s the theme of today’s passage.

In sixth grade I was in the Montana Middle School Science Fair. I was really proud of my

project. I seriously expected to get ﬁrst place. But here’s the dirty little secret--my dad had

actually done most the work on the project. He came up with the idea; he led me step by step

through the experiments; he showed me how to organize the data. I put in some time on the

project, but, in reality, if my presentation board won the gold ribbon, my dad would be the one

who should put it up on his wall, not me. As things turned out, my science project had plenty of

holes in it (I was never too good at following my dad’s instructions step-by-step), and the judges

rated me quite low.

Now, I want you to picture my awkward sixth grade self pompously bragging about my

science fair project to all my science fair friends. It’s pretty ridiculous, right? First, I was

bragging about work that I hadn’t done, work that my father, not I, had done. Second, my project

wasn’t even any good. I was bragging about a project that really wasn’t worth all that much.

Ridiculous.

Paul accuses the saints in Corinth of bragging like misguided sixth graders. Last week

Kristin told us about the division that plagued the saints in Corinth. No unity in their church.

Instead there were factions, each claiming for itself one of the early teachers to pass through their

community--Paul, Apollos, Peter, or some, those really “spiritual” ones, claimed to follow no one

but Jesus. In the passage that we’re studying this week, Paul confronts the empty, deceitful ways

of thinking that motivate such factions, such divisions. He exposes them to the tragic and

glorious light of the Messiah executed on a cross, and he directs the saints to stop seeking

human honors and to seek the God who saves and redeems them. Paul’s words speak to us today

also. He calls us to change our hearts and to change our actions. So open your Bible, if you

have one with you, to 1 Cor 1.18, or follow along on the text projected on the wall.

While you ﬁnd 1 Cor 1.18, I want to refresh your memory of what Paul says just before

our passage. First Corinthians is a letter, so we need to read it like a letter. Each paragraph ﬂows

out of and carries forward what the previous paragraph says.

First Corinthians 1.18 ﬂows out of and carries forward the conversation Paul begins in 1

Cor 1.10. Paul announces that he’s heard the shocking news that the Corinthain saints aren’t

loving one another; instead, they’re quarreling with one another, feeding rivalry and fostering

division. In vv 12 and 13, Paul exclaims, “One of you says, ‘I follow Paul’; another, ‘I follow

Apollos’; another, ‘I follow Cephas’; still another, ‘I follow Christ.’ Is Christ divided? Was Paul

cruciﬁed for you? Were you baptized into the name of Paul?” Paul is appalled at these divisions--

they run absolutely contrary to the preferential love for one another that Jesus taught his

followers to show. He sums up his disgust with these divisions in v 17: “Christ did not send me

to baptize”--Christ did not send Paul to build the cult of Paul--“but to preach the gospel--not

with wisdom and eloquence, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.”

Here is where v 18 picks up. If you have a Bible, put your ﬁnger on the page and follow

along as I read v 18: “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing,

but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” The message of the cross is foolishness.

The message of the cross is the power of God.

Where you stand can really change how you see some things. I used to hate the city. I

grew up in the mountains in Montana. My parents moved there to get away from the city. Cities,

I heard, were sites of violence, drug abuse, poverty, racial conﬂict, and corruption. Cities were

things to ﬂee. But things change--I changed. I moved. I used to live in Montana, but later I lived

in the cities of Skopje, Macedonia, and Chicago. And moving to these different places changed

the way I saw the city. Is the city a site of violence, substance abuse, poverty, racialized injustice,

corruption, heartbreak, all things falling apart? On most days, yes. But now I see this place where

we live as a mission on which God has sent us. Since I’ve moved, I’ve also begun to see the

beauty, the glimpses of the kingdom in our neighborhood, the grass pushing up through concrete.

In v 18, Paul tells us that the cross is like that. Where one stands in regard to the cross

affects deeply the way in which you see the cross--and not only the cross, but as Paul goes on to

make clear, everything. To most people, nothing could be more absurd than a cruciﬁed savior.

But to those of us who see Jesus’ obedient death on a cross as the door to salvation, God’s power

is nowhere more present. Those who do not walk through that door, who remain in bondage to

sin and death, know our cruciﬁed messiah as a failure. But those of us who are following Jesus to

freedom discover that those who mourn really are comforted, those who righteously suffer do

receive God’s kingdom.

When we’re standing--no, better--when we’re following Jesus in the way of the cross, it

changes how we see everything. It’s like moving to the city, or moving out of your parents’

house, or, I’m told, like having your ﬁrst child. From this new location, this new path, everything

looks different.

This change of perspective is what Paul emphasizes in vv 19 and 20 by citing a bit of the

Old Testament prophet Isaiah. Paul quotes, “For it is written: ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the

wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.’ He continues, “Where is the wise sage?

Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish

the wisdom of the world?”

I was surprised when I looked up the passage Paul quotes from Isaiah. It’s Isaiah 29.14. It

falls near the end of a prophecy about Yahweh’s impending judgment on Jerusalem and just

before the beginning of a prophecy of Yahweh’s later restoration of the city. Isaiah shouts out

Yahweh’s message: “Once more I will astound these people with wonder upon wonder; the

wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish.” What is the

astounding thing that Isaiah promises Yahweh will do? Is it judgment? Is it restoration? The

prophecy isn’t quite clear. It leaves us wondering.

There’s also something in the message about the cross that should leave us feeling this

way--ambiguous, a bit uneasy, a bit off balance, at least at ﬁrst. You see, this world--this age, this

culture--it has its own wisdom. From its perspective, there are things that are worthwhile,

valuable, effective, and there are things that are not. Ask any of the teenagers sitting in the room;

they’ll tell you. Some things are cool, and some things are not. Don’t ask why. Don’t try to ﬁgure

it out. It’s just the way it is.

To be honest, as a junior higher and a high schooler, I was always quite concerned about

what was cool, about what I’d have to do be one of the popular kids. In junior high, I spent hours

ﬁddling with my hair in front of the mirror. I paid close attention to what brands the other kids

were wearing. I wanted to ﬁt in. Though I didn’t have a name for it at the time, what I was doing

was trying to press myself into the world’s wisdom. I was trying to become what the world

wanted, what it valued, what it thought acceptable, worthwhile, sensible, cool.

Some time in high school, everything changed for me. Something wonderful, something

astounding happened to me, and, all of a sudden, what all my peers at Belgrade High thought

was cool and what was not didn’t matter to ne anymore. What happened to me? What changed

the way I saw things? The summer after my freshman year, I discovered through two youth

group trips and many conversations with my youth pastor that Christianity is not just about

who’s in and who’s out--that’s it’s not just about buying in on a deal with God to get my soul to

heaven. I learned and came to believe that Christianity is about following Jesus on the mission

that led him to the cross. Once I started walking on the missionary path of the cross, I began to

see that I had been chasing after lies, mirages, misleading appearances up until that point. The

cross changes everything.

Jesus’ cross is wonderful, astounding. It’s something that we would never predict. Why

would God choose to redeem the world this way? It’s not efﬁcient, it’s not sensible, it certainly

isn’t cool. Is it judgment? Is it restoration? Theologians have argued in circles over what to make

of the cross. All we do know is that it is beautiful, beautiful and scandalous, and it sets us free.

Paul knew that the glorious beauty of Jesus’ cross--of a cruciﬁed messiah--is offensive to

the sensibilities of most people. Look at what he says in vv 21 through 23: “For since in the

wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know God, God was pleased through the

foolishness of the message we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and

Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach a cruciﬁed messiah: a stumbling block to Jews and

foolishness to Gentiles.” The world is looking for a savior in its own image. The Jews in the ﬁrst

century were looking for someone to deliver them from Roman oppression. We today look for

experts to give us the information we need, technology to solve the problems we can’t, witty

people to entertain us, celebrities to inject our lives with a sense of signiﬁcance. Maybe we’re

waiting on better, more just government programs. Maybe we’re waiting for education to give us

the competitive edge in a tough job market.

But Jesus comes to us and says, “Blessed are you poor. Blessed are you when you’re

mourning. Blessed are you when you’re treated unfairly. Blessed are you when you’re laid off.

Blessed are you when your kids tell you they’re hungry and you’re not sure what you’ll feed

them. Blessed are you when your plans are frustrated. Blessed are you when you feel all alone.

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against

you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same

way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” To the world, Jesus makes no sense. It’s

ridiculous to call the cross and the cruciform way of life that led Jesus to it “blessed”--at least

from the world’s perspective.

But then Paul ﬁnishes his idea in vv 24 and 25: “But to those whom God has called, both

Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God

is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.” Praise

God, because God turns everything around. If the cross is true--if Jesus’ execution is in fact the

way that God is ﬁxing the world--then it is the world, not the cross, that doesn’t make sense.

Popularity, efﬁciency, a sense of what is fair and ﬁtting--Jesus’ cross invalidates all of these and

redeﬁnes all of these.

At the end of the Beatitudes, Jesus explains his upside-down blessings by referring to the

prophets. He says, “for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” At

the beginning of this sermon, I said that Paul’s message about the wisdom of the cross asks us to

change our hearts, to change our deepest values and expectations. If the cross--if a cruciﬁed

messiah--is wise and powerful and beautiful, we must train our hearts to love the cross and to

love the cross-shaped presence of God in our lives. What I mean is this: As Jesus states plainly,

God’s way in the world is and has always been a way of weakness, of foolishness, of

persecution. Pharaoh scoffed at Moses, the Israelites stoned the prophets, and Jesus was put to

death on a two pieces of wood. Jesus leads us to this same God. This is the God whose Spirit ﬁlls

us. And this is the God, the God of the persecuted and the oppressed, the God of weakness and

foolishness, that we must love.

Retraining our hearts, reshaping our desires and expectations, is deep-down kind of work.

We’re pressing right up against the boundary where what we have words for fades off into where

our language dissolves into realities too deep for words. But if we continue to listen to Paul’s

letter, he makes clear and concrete what now sounds murky and abstract. Listen to vv 26 through

29: “Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were

wise by human standards; not many were inﬂuential; not many were born into privilege. But God

chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world

to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of the world and the despised things--and the

things that are not--to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.”

This is where Paul gets personal. He says to the Corinthians, “You want proof that God

works through weakness? I’ll give you proof. Look around you. Look in the mirror.” Paul comes

awfully close to insulting the saints in Corinth to press home the critical point that God saves us

through the weakness and foolishness of Jesus’ cross.

Look at us! Are we celebrities? Are we wealthy? Are we the envy of our neighbors? If we

think we are, listen to Paul’s words later in chapter 3, verse 18: “If any of you think you are wise

by the standards of this age, you should become ‘fools’ so that you maybe become wise. For the

wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight.” We are foolish, we are weak, we are the

lowly, we are those who the world counts as nothing. Our bank accounts, they mean nothing. Our

college degrees, they mean nothing. Our well-decorated homes, they mean nothing. Our witty

Facebook conversations, they mean nothing. Our reputations, they mean nothing. Paul says it in

Philippians and we sing it on Sunday: “All I once held dear, built my life upon, all this world

reveres and wars to own, all I once thought gain I have counted loss, spent and worthless now

compared to knowing you . . . To know you in your suffering, to become like you in your

death . . . so with you to live and never die.”

These words sounded harsh to the church at Corinth, to all those saints quarreling over

who was the best teacher. They chose to identify themselves with Paul or Apollos or Cephas in

order to claim some of the honor associated with that particular person. They wanted to be in the

privileged group of their teacher’s star pupils. They wanted ﬁrst shot at the gold star stickers. But

Paul’s words are a slap in the face to this kind of thinking. It’s like Paul puts a hand on the

shoulder of my sixth grade self and says, “No matter how long you ﬁddle with your hair, you’re

still not going to be popular. And this is okay; popularity isn’t the race God’s set before you.”

The saints at Corinth are running as hard as they can in the wrong race. Privilege is not the prize

Jesus sets before us.

Paul concludes his meditation on the wisdom of the cross by pointing to what our heart

should be set on. He says, “It is because of God that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for

us wisdom, holiness, and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: ‘Let the one who boasts boast in

the Lord.’” Paul tells the saints to take pride in the God who works powerfully through

weakness. He tells them to give up the race for privilege, power, and prestige. Instead they are to

receive all of their wisdom, their holiness, their redemption--in short, whatever is of worth in

their lives--as a gift which God gives to those who are weak. Let the one who boasts boast in the

Lord.

This sort of change of heart will change the way we act. We are called by a God who does

not respect the powerful, the clever, the wise, but instead chooses to work resurrection with

lowly, normal people like you and me. The work this God calls us to is not a job for celebrities.

There’s no glamor, no respect in the mission that Jesus leads us in. It’s a way of self-sacriﬁce,

caring for those who don’t care back. It’s a way of vulnerability. We must boldly do what seems

truly foolish: to set aside our own concerns and busy ourselves with what’s in the interest of

others. We must boldly follow Jesus into situations that make no sense, situations where only

God can work things out. We must follow Jesus in the way of love.

I was sitting around a dining hall table with some of the students at the winter youth

retreat last week. We were talking about God’s desires. I was waxing eloquent about how God

wants each of us to follow the path that Jesus walked. One of the teens interrupted me with a

concerned question: “Josh, don’t you know where Jesus ended up? He was killed on a cross.”

Jesus, our cruciﬁed messiah, leads us in the way of love, and the way of love is the way of the

cross.

Review :: Englewood Review of Books' Quarterly Print Edition, Vol. 01, Num. 01

2010-12-30T09:21:00.000-07:00

In my family, Christmas extends all the way to Epiphany. My wife and I open our gifts to one another on January 6, remembering the gifts the astrologers brought Jesus in Bethlehem. So, Mom and Dad (if you do in fact read this blog), it’s not too late to slip a subscription to Englewood Review of Books’ Quarterly Print Edition in the mail (hint hint).

Joking aside, I highly recommend ERB’s new Quarterly Print Edition, whether as a Christmas gift or as a worthwhile addition to your own reading list.

A wise professor once told me that the first step in writing a good book review is to “read, read, read lots of reviews.” I took his words to heart. I began reading nearly every book review I could lay my hands on--Commonweal, The New York Review of Books, reviews in various academic journals. I like books, and I like even better discovering new, worthwhile books to be reading. This is what good book reviews do, so I found myself enraptured in reviews. (I sound a bit like a librarian mystic.)

Over the past year and a half, I’ve found myself eagerly looking forward to ERB’s weekly email update. It features a number of homegrown reviews, links to books reviewed well elsewhere, and always a bit of poetry. I’ve added any number of books to my Amazon wish list after discovering them as I scrolled through the electronic version.

But a good book review is so much more than marketing and promotion. In fact, it’s much more than even directed reading. I realized this more and more as paged through ERB’s Print Edition, Vol. 01, Num. 01. A good review is in itself literary in some sense; it is itself a contribution to the dialogue.
I realize that all along ERB was keeping up the conversation about good books in its subscriber email updates. But there is something about holding the physical object in your hands, turning the pages, marking a particularly well-crafted comment with a √ in the margin. Michael J. Bowling’s review of Anthony Dancer’s new guide to the life and thought of William Stringfellow, An Alien in a Strange Land, birthed in me a fascination with Stringfellow that ERB’s many electronic reflections on Stringfellow never did. Similarly, Brad Fuhauff’s take on Amy Hungerford’s Postmodern Belief challenged my assumptions about belief and meaning. And my curiosity would likely never have moved in the direction of Seamus Heaney’s most recent collection of poems had Brett Foster not held up this new volume as a meditation on the beauty of human community and friendship revealed by the experience of frailty and fracture.

A good review doesn’t sell you a book; it doesn’t force a book upon you (or, if it is negative, drive away the text as unclean). A good review makes you curious about a book. ERB’s new Quarterly Print Edition has piqued my curiosity. I doubt there can be a higher recommendation.

The November 8s :: Blogs

2010-12-23T14:12:00.000-07:00

The November 8s :: Blogs :: The most thought-provoking and world-opening blog posts I've stumbled on in the month of November

1. "The Meaning of 'Mine' and 'Not Mine' in the Early Church" (Boyd Collins, Jesus Radicals / November 1, 2010)

His sermons directly challenged the legal definition of ownership in the Roman Empire which enshrined the absolute disposition of property as a sacred right. The rulers of Antioch found his “socialist” ideas so offensive that they deposed him as Bishop of Antioch and sent him packing into exile. The principle implied in his definition of robbery is that God has given all a right to the goods of the earth, rich and poor alike. For one class to usurp the gifts of God for themselves alone while others starve he defined as robbery in the strict sense of the term.

In the following sermon, the spirit that animated the Acts of the Apostles flowers again:

“And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.”

In this sermon, Chrysostom diagnoses the loss of tranquility which possessions inflict,

“But what is the meaning of ‘mine’ and ‘not mine’? For, truly, the more accurately I weigh these words, the more they seem to me to be but words…And not only in silver and gold, but also in bathing places, gardens, buildings, ‘mine’ and ‘not mine’ you will perceive to be but meaningless words. For use is common to all. Those who seem to be owners have only more care of these things than those who are not.”

Later, he proposes that the very concept of private property has no place in the Church. He says,

“For ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ – those chilly words which introduce innumerable wars into the world – should be eliminated from that holy Church…The poor would not envy the rich, because there would be no rich. Neither would the poor be despised by the rich, for there would be no poor. All things would be in common.”

In this passage, he explicitly argues that the holiness of the Church requires that there should be no “mine” or “thine”, but that property should be a matter of social ownership. The vision of Acts 4:32 shows that the kingdom of God knows nothing of “mine” and “not mine”, but only recognizes the concept of “ours.” For Chrysostom, to be a Christian implies a deep understanding of the need for common ownership and the drive to incarnate this principle in daily life. Property was given to the wealthy so that they might grow in virtue by sharing it – that social goal alone justifies any particular ownership system. The early Christians had no illusions about rising tides lifting all boats.

2. "Existential Multitasking" (Adam Miller, The Church and Postmodern Culture / October 20, 2010)

God does not come and go – your attention does.

All sins are just variations on that same desire to do something else when you’re already doing something. Multitaskers are children of the devil. You can’t serve two masters. Divided attention is just dressed up inattention.

“Hear, O Israel,” the Shema begins, “the Lord our God is one Lord!” (Deuteronomy 6:4) But are you one? Or do you keep getting shucked, splintered, and spread by every distraction that wanders by?

3. "Homophobiaphobia" (Halden Doerge, Inhabitatio Dei / November 9, 2010)

I always find it interesting how the anti-gay sex position always wants to insist on a polite, measured, and properly ordered civil dialogue about the issue. They claim that to toss around terms like “homophobic” is to distract from the “real issues” and inhibit conversation. Honestly I’m pretty convinced that the real diversion from substantive dialogue is the insistence on keeping everything all tidy and polite. To try to sanitize everything in advance and make sure no one gets called any names sounds innocent enough, but it is hardly a neutral move. To insist that things never get heated and self-involving is to cast the argument, in advance, as one in which all participants are good, honest, basically forward thinking folk that just need to speak more clearly to each other. But its an open question whether that is in fact that case. The gay kid who got the shit kicked out of him all through high school, often by Christians, may not feel like he can extend that sort of open hand of politeness, and who are we to say that he has to?

Anyways, my main point is that the desire to sanitize this discussion is itself an ideological move. If we’re really talking about things as important as both sides think we are, there’s no reason to assume that this should be some sort of polite conversation.

4. "Choosing Celibacy" (Jesus Creed / November 15, 2010)

Many of us want to fashion our faith on the basis of the Bible. But encounters with stories of people often force us to think again.

So what do we do? What I’m often seeing is the tension and ambivalence of a both-and: Such persons both think the Bible’s view of homosexuality is that it is out of God’s will and at the same time know that their friend or brother or sister is gay and conclude they think it is OK. The tension is both knowing it is not God’s will from the Bible, and thinking it is OK for the person they know and love.

To summarize: the story of personal experience is what creates this problem. Many people have very little tolerance for homosexuality until they meet a homosexual person. Then things change.

. . . Enter a different story, the story of celibacy:I know enough gay and lesbian people to know the oft-told story above is not the only story. I also know that for many any other story is unacceptable, intolerable and even oppressive. But there is another story: Many gay and lesbian Christians know they are gay or lesbian, know they are committed to the traditional view of the Bible, and are struggling to live a life of celibacy. What we perhaps need is a compelling story of the one who chooses to be celibate but who knows that he or she may never be “healed” and may never be attracted to the opposite sex.

5. "Secularizing Kingdom" (Jesus Creed / November 15, 2010)

The word “secular” and the word “kingdom” should not be brought together. The paradox of what I’m hearing is that “kingdom” is being overwhelmed by the word “secular.”

Example: last Thursday in my Introduction to the Bible class I discussed what “kingdom” means in the teachings of Jesus. I sketched a few ideas that I will mention below, but I want to get to the discussion I had afterwards with one of our students. She told me she admired her sister who was now at work in a major social service organization because she was doing “kingdom” work. I’ve heard this so many times I think I can put it this way:

For many, “kingdom work” means “social” justice while “church work” means “spiritual life.”

A big fat hogwash all over this idea.

6. "Will Wi-Fi Ruin Mount Everest?" (Jeff Greenwald, Salon.com / November 16, 2010)

When I first trekked the Everest route, in October 1983, it felt as though I'd entered a world completely detached from the familiar. After a harrowing flight to the tiny airstrip at Lukla, the 10-day hike to Base Camp (with an elevation gain of more than 8,000 vertical feet) began. Immersion in the Sherpa Buddhist lifestyle was inescapable, and transformative. Phone calls were impossible. Even writing a postcard was like putting a message in a bottle, and tossing it out to sea.

None of this seemed like an inconvenience. Though there were bouts of homesickness, and the occasional longing for new music and old friends, it was exhilarating to have entered such an isolated realm. This, actually, was the point. Travelers embarked on our journeys to Everest or the Annapurnas aware that it would be a full-body experience -- an equation that included our brains.

As a result, trekking in the Himalaya never felt like sightseeing. It was a commitment to the here and now, demanding full-time engagement with both Nepalis and fellow travelers. There were infinite opportunities to forge new friendships, experience Sherpa Buddhist culture, or enjoy exquisite solitude. By day, you could walk alone or with companions; at night, the lodges flickered with candles and butter lamps. Out came the maps, backgammon sets and tattered journals. Tales of avalanches and Yeti sightings were shared, along with cups of the dizzying local rakshi.

During my most recent trek to Everest region in 2008, it was clear that the area was changing. Though the mountains looked the same, they felt less like a world apart.

7. "How Long Can We Keep Preaching Christ's Coming?" (Tony Jones / November 22, 2010)

This Sunday marks the beginning of Year A in the The Revised Common Lectionary. So here we go again. We get texts from Isaiah and the Gospels, about John the Baptist and the Second Coming. And once again we’ve got to preach the immanent advent of the Christ. “He’s Coming!” we preach, pray, and sing.

But is he?

I’m not really saying that my own personal belief in Jesus’ second coming is in doubt. Anyone who knows my commitment the theological programme of Jürgen Moltmann can guess that my belief in a concrete eschaton is pretty, well, concrete. What I am asking is, How long will people believe us? We preach the advent of Christ every Advent, and I just wonder how long until the parishioners start thinking that we’re the Preachers Who Cried Wolf.

8. Mark Van Steenwyk posted the third installment in a series on radical hospitality. All three are well worth reading.

"Unpacking Hospitality [radical hospitality, part one]" (Mark Van Steenwyk, Jesus Radicals / September 23, 2010)

"Making Room [radical hospitality, part two]" (Mark Van Steenwyk, Jesus Radicals / September 29, 2010)

"Are we becoming more inhospitable [radical hospitality, part three]" (Mark Van Steenwyk, Jesus Radicals / November 8, 2010)

The October 8s :: Blogs

2010-12-20T12:58:00.000-07:00

The October 8s :: Blogs :: The most thought-provoking and world-opening blog posts I've stumbled on in the month of October

1. "Is Your Youth Group Accomplishing Anything?" (Dustin Nickerson, The Resurgence / October 1, 2010)
(These are not my favorite questions to asks . . . )

Look at the students in your chairs. If you were convinced that six out of ten were going to leave the church once they go to college, would you stick with what you’re doing? The point of all ministry is disciple-making. Ask yourself, Youth Pastor, does that happen on a Wednesday night through your games, skits, teen worship band, videos, and 20-minute message?

A little over a year ago, it became absolutely clear that I was leading a ministry that wasn’t focused on making disciples. My leaders had a heart to disciple, but how could they in 90 minutes that were filled with programming? Any disciple-making that I or my leaders were doing was extracurricular.

We had to get into the lives of our students.

Wednesday night groups were cancelled. As opposed to everyone coming together, we broke into community groups spread throughout our region and connected by gender and geography. Suddenly, our students’ “youth group” experience was 5-10 other teenagers meeting in a home with two adult leaders wrestling through the Scriptures, bearing burdens (Galatians 6:2), confessing sins and praying for each other (James 5:16), teaching and admonishing (Colossians 3:16), and rebuking one another (2 Timothy 3:16).

Suddenly, discipleship started happening—every week.

2. "How Do We Find Stability in a Changing World" (Christine Sine, Godspace / October 1, 2010)
Sine asks how in the midst of a complicated and rapidly changing world we can "maintain our stability and move our ability to move forward as God intends us to?" I find her answers helpful, and I hope you will too. Read her post for a robust explanation of each item.

1) Identify stability zones.

2) Move as infrequently as possible.

3) Surround yourself with items that give an 'at home' feeling.

4) Establish friendships that have the potential to be stable.

5) Identify 'enemy factors' and ways to deal with them.

6) Affirm the good.

7) Avoid surprises.

8) Cultivate meaningful leisure time.

9) Get adequate sleep.

10) Take time out regularly to evaluate your spiritual, emotional, and practical goals and priorities.

3. "Living Off the Grid" (Jocelyn Perry, Jesus Radicals / October 7, 2010)

People of faith and justice have also coined the phrase to live without cell phones, TVs, cars, or other technologies that can be technological distractions. But the question is, “How do people of faith and justice stay connected without the power-lines of technology?” The answer to this challenge is community.

. . . In our ever-more-complex culture of technology and consumption, tuning in using such strategies as educational play, living in intentional community, the art of radical hospitality, the art of radical love, and meaningful non-violent communication free us to live happier and more creative lives.

4. "The Video Venue Farce: Why Video Venue is the Antithesis of Missional" (David Fitch, Reclaiming the Mission / September 29, 2010)
Fitch's post features a Gospel Coalition video of James McDonald & Mark Driscoll (pro video venue) and Mark Dever (anti video venue). These are not figures who often feature on my blog (due to a few ideological disagreements); however, their conversation highlights the absurdity of the video venue, multisite phenomenon. Fitch's commentary raises three congenital weaknesses of the video venue, multisite strategy:

1) Video venue decontextualizes preaching.

2) Video venues draw crowds to a celebrity, and this attraction works against (contra helps) the formation of church in mission.

3) Mission requires more than words. Video venues intensify the dependence on words.

5. "Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted" (Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker / October 4, 2010)

Activism that challenges the status quo—that attacks deeply rooted problems—is not for the faint of heart.

What makes people capable of this kind of activism? The Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam compared the Freedom Summer dropouts with the participants who stayed, and discovered that the key difference wasn’t, as might be expected, ideological fervor. “All of the applicants—participants and withdrawals alike—emerge as highly committed, articulate supporters of the goals and values of the summer program,” he concluded. What mattered more was an applicant’s degree of personal connection to the civil-rights movement. All the volunteers were required to provide a list of personal contacts—the people they wanted kept apprised of their activities—and participants were far more likely than dropouts to have close friends who were also going to Mississippi. High-risk activism, McAdam concluded, is a “strong-tie” phenomenon.

. . . The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.

This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.

. . . [Clay] Shirky considers this model of [Here Comes Everybody] activism an upgrade. But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

6. "Deer Hunter :: Halcyon Digest" (S McDonald, Aquarium Drunkard / October 11, 2010)
I don’t usually post music reviews on this blog, but I find S McDonald’s review of Deer Hunter’s Halcyon Digest to resonate with a deep restiveness current in American culture. We’re looking for the kind of beauty, the kind of truth, the kind of solidity that McDonald attributes to Deer Hunter’s newest album.

Albums used to seem larger than life and the release dates extremely important whereas now there’s a disposable feel to everything — no matter how strong the rating. Personally, I feel caught in between both cycles and love electronic and traditionally crafted music equally, but I also feel that deep down every “wave” that’s been assigned to a track or full-length represents a glaring reminder of where our heads are at. Popular and influential music should be addressing our real-life issues (work, money, relationships, etc.), decisions and the state of the union, yet it continues to reflect the increasingly immobile position we are all stuck in; one giant sonic mush. New music everywhere, yet I feel further apart from it than ever before.

. . .Deerhunter used to keep themselves warm and comfy with blankets of noise that both hid and unveiled the group’s melodicism. But there’s no hiding here, no gimmicks to be found. Halcyon Digest leaves me with the impression that the band is ready to embark on a new path, an honest and clear-headed one at that.

7. “Poser Christianity: a Review of Brett McCracken’s Hipster Christianity” (James K. A. Smith, The Other Journal / October 4, 2010)
I must confess my own prejudice against anything labeled “hipster” (this probably stems in large part from some graffiti I saw while visiting some friends in Brooklyn). At the same time, my lifestyle scored high on the Hipster Christianity Quiz that went viral among the post-Christian university demographic a few months back. I felt simultaneously that McCracken’s Hipster Christianity indicted my lifestyle while justifying my prejudices. Enter Smith’s review. Smith names a third latent category in his critical review of McCracken’s book: poser. Smith hates posers but loves people whose following of Jesus shows up in their lifestyle.
Read the following three long excerpts for the flavor of Smith’s incisive review of McCracken’s Hipster Christianity.

But his analysis only works if, in fact, all hipsters are really just posers. That is, McCracken effectively reduces all hipsters to posers precisely because he can only imagine someone adopting such a lifestyle in order to be cool.

. . . But let me be very clear now: Relevant-magazine hipsters are really just posers. Like all the posers hanging around the half-pipes of my youth, these are people looking for cool by association, with a slight thrill of rebellion as a side-effect. And while McCracken’s analysis perhaps pertains to a bunch of suburban kids who have adopted hipster as a style—just as they might have adopted “urban” as a style—his analysis doesn’t even touch those students I know who, from Christian convictions, have intentionally pursued a lifestyle that rejects the bourgeois consumerism of mass, commercialized culture. They shop at Goodwill and Salvation Army because they have concerns about the injustice of the mass-market clothing industry, because they believe recycling is good stewardship of God’s creation, and frankly, because they’re relatively poor. They’re relatively poor because they’re pursuing work that is meaningful and just and creative and won’t eat them alive, and such work, although not lucrative, gives them time to spend on the things that really matter: community, friendship, service, and creative collaboration. And despite McCracken’s misguided claims about autonomy and independence (192-193), the Christian hipsters I know are actually willing to sacrifice the American sacred cow of privacy and independence, living in intentional communities as families and singles, working through all the difficulties and blessings of “life together” as Bonhoeffer describes it. In short, the lives of the Christian hipsters I know are a gazillion miles away from being worried about image or trendiness; they live the way they do because they are pursuing the good life characterized by well-ordered culture-making that is just and conducive to flourishing—and this requires resisting the mass-produced, mass-marketed, and mass-consumed banalities of the corporate ladder, the suburban veneer of so-called success, as well as the irresponsibility of perpetual adolescence that characterizes so many twentysomethings who imagine life as one big frat house.

. . . To be blunt (because I’m not sure how else to put this), the Christian bohemians I’m describing are educated evangelicals. So when McCracken lists (not so tongue in cheek) “ten signs that a Christian college senior has officially become a Democrat” (159), I’m sorry but the list just looks like characteristics of an educated, thoughtful Christian (and believe me, I’m no Democrat). Or when McCracken, in a remarkably cynical flourish in the vein of “Stuff White People Like,” catalogs the authors that Christian hipsters like (Stanley Hauerwas, Ron Sider, Jim Wallis, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Wendell Berry, N. T. Wright, G. K. Chesterton, and others; 97), he does so as if people could only “like” such authors because it’s “cool” to do so. But perhaps they’re just good. McCracken seems unable to really accept what Paste magazine editor Josh Jackson emphasizes: “It’s not about what’s cool. It’s about what good” (92). And if that’s true, then it should be no surprise that Christian colleges and universities are shapers of Christian hipster culture: if McCracken is lamenting the fact that Christian colleges are producing alumni that are smart and discerning with good taste and deep passions about justice, then we’re happy to live with his ire. The fact that young evangelicals, when immersed in a thoughtful liberal arts education, turn out to value what really matters and look critically on the way of life that has been extolled to them in both mass media and mass Christian media—well, we’ll wear that as a badge of honor.

8. “Gods Behaving Badly: Celebrity as a “Kind of” Religion” (Pete Ward, The Other Journal / October 22, 2010)
Pete Ward's analysis of celebrity cultures sits alongside Smith’s review of Hipster Christianity as part of The Other Journal’s issue examining celebrity. The entire issue is well worth reading.

The perplexing thing is that while commentators and the media talk about celebrity worship as a kind of religion, interviews with fans and indeed mourners generally reveal that most have no sense that what they are engaging in is “religious” and that they would reject entirely the idea that the figure they are celebrating is a god. So celebrity worship is ambiguous; it is a kind of religion.

. . . Celebrities and celebrity culture, I want to argue, operate in a similar way to Twitchell’s understanding of Adcult. They portray a kind of theology. In this sense, celebrities are akin to the Greek gods or the saints. They exist in a mythic world of stories and tales. They’re godlike, not in the Christian Trinitarian way, but in a mythic sense. Celebrity stories are kind of like tales from Mount Olympus. When we read about celebrities, they are like us and yet not like us. They live in a sort of parallel world, which is real and yet unreal. Like Greek mythology and the stories of the saints, celebrity stories are peopled with the incredibly beautiful and the hopelessly flawed, with angels and demons, saints and sinners, the venerable and the venal. Celebrity stories are in many ways like morality tales. They portray possible ways of being good or bad, faithful or unfaithful, ideal or not ideal.

Update :: "Early Christian Ecclesiology and 'The Property Question' [part 3]" up!

2010-12-17T11:19:00.000-07:00

In the September 8s :: Blogs, I posted the first two installations of Andy Alexis-Baker's series "Early Christian Ecclesiology and 'The Property Question.'" Today the third installment is up!

"Early Christian Ecclesiology and 'The Property Question' [part 3]" (Andy Alexis-Baker, Jesus Radicals / October 11, 2010)

For, once there were no church buildings. People normally worshiped out doors. In the Hebrew Scriptures, for example, Abraham met God under an oak tree, and most early Hebrew worship occurred outside of human built structures. And while Jesus certainly visited the temple and synagogues, many of his most memorable stories come from encounters in nature: the temptations in the wilderness, the sermon on the mount, the transfiguration, walking on water, etc. Paul, speaking to those in Athens with their grand temples said, “The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things” (Acts 17:24–25). While in biblical times encountering God in nature was normal, in the modern western world, such things are extremely rare: we worship in enclosed spaces of our own making. Our buildings reinforce notions that God, Christianity, and holiness are not only compartmentalized from nature but quite possibly contrary to one another.

Alexis-Baker goes on to cite examples from the early Christian movement, including the accounts of The Acts of Judas Thomas the Apostle in India to the archaeological evidence of early Celtic Christian practice.

This is well worth reading, as are the early installments, part 1 and part 2.

The September 8s :: Blogs

2010-10-29T10:59:00.000-06:00

The September 8s :: Blogs :: The most thought-provoking and world-opening blog posts I've stumbled on in the month of September

1. "Global nomads, existential migrants" (Tall Skinny Kiwi / September 29, 2010)

We are global nomads.

We went on walkabout but we are still walking.

We started as backpackers but became serial travelers.

We embarked on pilgrimage but our spiritual quest continues.

We were circumstantial migrants but now we are voluntary migrants.

We were TCK's and now we are families on the road.

We were MK's and now we are itinerants.

We are existential migrants

We are global nomads

Urban nomads.

Digital nomads.

We couch-surf.

We travel light.

Our bags have straps, not wheels.

We are at home when we are away.

We chose migrancy over mortgage.

We are the perpetual dispersion.

We are the chosen exile.

Our accents do not place us.

Our current location does not define us.

Our closest communities are not geographical.

Our passport does not reflect our true citizenship.

We do not live anywhere but we do live everywhere.

The land of our birth does not feel like our homeland.

We cannot answer "Where are you from?" in a single sentence.

You may also want to take a look at these two interesting articles on existential migration the TSK links to:
"Existential Migration: Feeling at Home as the Foreigner" (Greg Wesson, TravelBlogs.com / September 22, 2009)
"Existential Migration: Is Travel an Existential Need?" (Greg Madison, MatadorAbroad / December 7, 2009)

2. Andy Alexis-Baker posted the first two of an ongoing series of essays on architecture, property, and early Christian ecclesiology. Keep watching Jesus Radicals for subsequent installments.

"Early Christian Ecclesiology and 'The Property Question' [part 1]" (Andy Alexis-Baker, Jesus Radicals / September 28, 2010)

Christians did meet in private homes, but Christians also met in other places, which White himself acknowledges but ignores. Christianity thrived in urban environments where people lived in apartment buildings called insulae. For example, Justin Martyr, a second century Christian in Rome, gives an account that is almost assuredly set not in a private house, but in an apartment. Thus this standard account of early Christianity and property needs to be significantly nuanced and supplanted with other images of the church and how they related to property.

"Early Christian Ecclesiology and 'The Property Question' [part 2]" (Andy Alexis-Baker, Jesus Radicals / October 5, 2010)

German scholar Peter Lampe has shown that Christians at Rome in the first two centuries lived in the most poverty-stricken areas. The typical Jew living in these slums was “one who was pushed by his mother to go begging. . . . The Christians of the quarter could hardly have lifted themselves much above that social level.” 1 For the overwhelming majority of Christians living in Rome’s poorest quarters, White’s terminology of wealthy patrons hardly applies. Bereft of private houses, the well-to-do did not live in these areas. These slums were for the lower classes which claimed 90% of Rome’s population. In modern terms, these apartment buildings were low income housing. Wealthy people simply did not (and do not) go to these places. Church growth, leadership and social relationships could not be based on patronage for “apartment churches.”

. . . This apartment church was not based upon patronage and the patriarchal head of a household, but on mutual friendships, visitations, common worship and learning together centered on Jesus. So early Christian apartment churches had a different ecclesiology than the churches that met in private houses. We might call this “apartment ecclesiology.” They did not own property. Their teachers advocated voluntary poverty. They gave what they could for their neediest. They were necessarily small in size, but their decentralized missionary thrust would help Christianity grow more rapidly and more authentically than the bishop- or patron-oriented and property owning churches.

3. "Rural Renewal?" (Sarah Monroe, Emergent Village Weblog / September 12, 2010)
This excerpt is lengthy, but its length is proportionate to the critical questions Monroe invites us to ask.

Rural areas are places of declining church membership, economic slump, growing poverty and drug use, and a breeding ground for the rise of hate groups appealing to an already disenfranchised people. What if there was a way to address all of these problems? What if a new model of being church could be applied to declining rural churches? What if, in turn, rural churches could stand with their communities as they face the many challenges of the 21st century?

Rural areas have their own culture. The emergent church model of the urban context—with theology pubs and funky art spaces—contextualizes the church’s message for an urban, youthful culture. But rural culture is different—it is the place of wide open fields and towering forests, Native American reservations, cabins in the forest, farmers barely making a living, county fairs and greasy taverns on the way to a national park. More than that, it is also a disenfranchised culture on the edge of empire, cut off from the rest of American life and barely able to feed its kids and keep them out of trouble or pay the rent on substandard housing. Rural Americans face growing poverty and domestic violence, closing farms and ranches, and large corporations that take local natural resources but leave little for the local community. They also lose an increasing number of sons and daughters in foreign wars that have less and less meaning. Understandably, rural Americans are bitter and tired of being ignored. As David Neiwert points out, the astounding rise in local militias, hate groups and anti-immigrant sentiment in rural areas is only one symptom of a people at their wits end.

Rural churches have been a landmark for a long time, a part of rural life that prioritizes God, country, and family. But the pews become increasingly empty and the services continue as they have for the last hundred years. The church seems to have lost its way—desperately wanting to increase membership and at a loss for how to do so. Is it because the church is offering no answers to an increasingly desperate rural society? Is it because we continue to do church in the same way it is done everywhere else, ignoring the local circumstances?

4. "Post-Colonial Theology" (Brian McLaren, Emergent Village Weblog / September 12, 2010)

I was involved for several years in “the postmodern conversation” before I realized that it was only one side of the coin. It took place largely among the former colonizers. Meanwhile, the post-colonial conversation had arisen among the formerly colonized. While the postmodern conversation focused on important intellectual issues like the objectivity and absoluteness of statements, the interpretation of texts, the limitations and biases of language, and so on, the postcolonial conversation focused on how those intellectual issues were playing out in history, especially during and since the era of the Conquistadors. The former was largely about knowledge, and the latter largely about how knowledge became a tool of power. So the two conversations were inter-related, and the latter in some ways enfolded and extended the former from the realm of theory to the realm of practice, from philosophy to ethics.

As I expanded my own considerations in these directions, important words in the postmodern conversation suddenly made more sense to me. I realized that deconstruction, for example, was specifically (even if unconsciously at times) focused on dismantling the foundations of colonialism. Metanarratives weren’t simply big stories – they were the stories that fueled colonialism. In this light, the moral arc of the postmodern conversation—which was understated by its advocates and invisible to its critics—started to shine through for me.

If standard Christian theology has indeed been colonial, then we would expect it to have certain characteristics, perhaps including these:

. . . If standard Christian theology were determined to be essentially colonial by these and other standards, a natural question would arise: must the Christianity of the future forever maintain this colonial bias? Is an imperial or dominating mindset inherent to Christian faith, for better or worse – or can there be a new and different kind of Christianity?

5. "ONE SIMPLE ORIENTING QUESTION 'What is God saying? How will I respond?': Missional Discipleship" (Reclaiming the Mission / September 20, 2010)

This one simple question can be a starting point for discipleship into what we at the Vine describe as “living in Christ together for God’s Mission in the World.” It is not that this one question explains everything. Rather, it is an orienting question from which practically anyone, at any stage of belief, can begin to seek God and enter into His Kingdom work in their lives personally and what He is doing in the world. This one question initiates one into the activity of the Spirit as opposed to merely teaching about it conceptually. That’s right, can I say this again, ONE SIMPLE ORIENTING QUESTION, “What is God saying? How Will You Respond?”

So we at the Vine have begun a process this September of calling our people into God’s inbreaking Kingdom. The entrance into God’s Kingdom always begins in faith, opening our lives to God’s salvation begun in Christ’s work of atonement. IT IS NECESSARILY A RECEPTION, TRUST AND DEPENDENCE UPON THE HOLY SPIRIT (I had to emphasize that because it is an assumption that sometimes goes unnoticed). It is furthermore a continual following of Christ into the Kingdom, the world of His Lordship where He is working for new creation, reconciliation and righteousness in our lives and in the world (2 Cor 5:16-21). “In Christ, God is reconciling the world to Himself.”

6. "Sanctuary or Living Room? Senior Pastor or 'Community Organizer'?: What You Do the First Year Shapes Your Congregation for Decades" (Reclaiming the Mission / September 8, 2010)

Although there is much to be thankful for in what God is doing with Acts 29, for me, this is an approach heavily dependent on the cultural conditions of Christendom. The preaching requires people already habitualized to go to church and hear a sermon. It requires people who understand the language. It organizes the church structure toward the center – where the single strong leader is – instead of outward where lost people are. It will work where there are wandering peoples who have a Christian past and/or have discontent with existing forms of church (i.e. Roman Catholic or traditional evangelical) who are easily drawn to something new and impressive. This is not, however, a Missional strategy because in many ways it sets the new community up to be a centralized attractional community. Its dynamic works against invading the rhythms of a context, living the gospel in ways that invade the secular spaces of the world that is living oblivious to God and His work in Christ for the world. If we would be missionaries, we need to think differently about congregational formation

. . . I said there should be three goals for the first year of a church plant- a seeding of a missional community:1.) Establish a small community of fellowship in the neighborhood who can pray together for the Kingdom. This community will develop as friends, dialoguing, listening, praying – learning to listen for God’s voice, observing where He is working so as to respond and participate in what He is doing to reconcile, heal, create anew and birth righteousness.

2.) Get to know the neighborhood. Exegete it so as to know how to pray, minister, adopt rhythms, hang out, and be Christ’s presence.

3.) Facilitate hospitality. Become a place to facilitate hospitality in the neighborhood as well as helping people move to the neigborhood. I urge a contant calling of people into the Kingdom. When these people don’t live in the neighborhood, I encourage the community to help these people of the kingdom find jobs, find a place to live at reasonable cost, know how to live in this community.

7. "How (Not) to Change the World" (James K. A. Smith, The Other Journal / September 8, 2010)

So how do we change the world? Wrong question, Hunter argues (285). The desire to change the world too easily tends toward reactive strategies ofressentiment and ends up playing by the rules of the will-to-power. So instead we should be asking: what does faithful culture-making look like? What does it mean for us to care for the gardens—and cities—in which God has placed us? When that is our concern, change will be a by-product at best. Hunter summarizes this in an important, italicized passage:

If there are benevolent consequences of our engagement with the world, in other words, it is precisely because it is not rooted in a desire to change the world for the better but rather because it is an expression of a desire to honor the creator of all goodness, beauty, and truth, a manifestation of our loving obedience to God, and a fulfillment of God’s comment to love our neighbor. (234, bold in original)

8. "5 Game Changers that didn't make my video for The Nines" (Tall Skinny Kiwi / September 3, 2010)

1. In 1995 I moved out of my office and held regular hours at a particular coffee shop in San Francisco where I was ministering. Since then, I have not had an office. A few years later I got my first laptop (a gift from Chris Seay) and I never used an office again. Its good to get out among the people. We are not going to change the world from our offices!

2. Dr Paul Jackson once told me that half my audience were females and if I didn't read books written by women and try to understand their way of thinking then I would only communicate to 50% of my intended hearers. Game changer! . . .

The August 8s :: Blogs

2010-09-23T09:52:00.002-06:00

The August 8s :: Blogs - The most thought-provoking and world-opening blog posts I've stumbled on in the month of August

1) "Corpus Mysticum: How the Eucharistic Image Informs My Eating" (Lisa Carlson, the River Beneath / May 20, 2010)

It appears to me that what was so miraculous about Jesus eating practices was not that everyone got fed, but that everyone ate together. Because in this eating together, people became more aware that Christianity is about relational wholeness, which makes us all Christ’s Body and members of one another: “The knitting together would be the beginning of the recapitulation of all systems in Christ… It is clear that Paul sees the concrete working out of real presence in a community of people who are open and who identify not with the few, the like-believers, but with all- with Christ himself in the whole body.”

Our tradition, in its very beingness, is revolutionary. It is a tradition deeply rooted in the ways that Jesus subverted and transformed the complex structural issues of society that served to separate the elite and the non-elite, rich from the poor, the clean from the unclean. He did this not by talking about how the rules should be changed, but by simply living (and in this- modeling) a different way in the face of the ruling cultural narrative.

. . . Gustavo Gutierrez speaks to this when he says: “Jesus’ table fellowship with tax collectors and sinners vividly expresses his solidarity with the victims of established powers. Eating is a symbol of fellowship. Jesus got into trouble for eating with social outcasts because for the Jews, meal is also a symbol of fellowship with God. This is why Jesus used the meal as a picture of the Kingdom.” This is precisely what makes Christ’s way of eating revolutionary- it is because he is with them, and all are invited

2) "Defining justice (AKA: How not to do theology Fox news style)" and "More on Justice: Rawls and Mill" (Melissa D. Browning, Imagining Justice / August 16 & 19, 2010)

These tandem posts clarify my understanding of justice. I hope you also find them helpful.
Two excerpts (one from each post, of course):

1) So law and morality have never been the same thing, just like theological justice and legal justice are not the same thing. It may seem like a small nuance, but it is an important concept to understand if we want to talk about justice from a theo-ethical perspective. The distinction helps us to conceptualize what we mean when we say something is “right” or something is “wrong.” Separating legal obligations from moral obligations, also helps us get at what we “ought” to do as moral people.

For instance, when we talk about a subject such as immigration, we usually begin with either plea for a legal obligation or a moral obligation, yet we often don’t name the space from which we’re speaking. The two are collapsed into one another and when this happens, there is very little space for dialogue. Its like doing theology Fox news style.

2) Both Mill’s utilitarianism and Rawl’s understanding of “justice as fairness” can bring us two steps closer to imagining justice. If utilitarianism served only to restrain us, reminding us that we cannot steal happiness as the expense of others, it would be revolutionary for our society. And if “justice as fairness” could really teach us to imagine our lives as a little less secure, then perhaps we could imagine spaces where security for all could be abundant.

3) "Choice Blindness" (Jonah Lehrer, The Frontal Cortex / August 16, 2010)

The problem with our sensory world – this “blooming, buzzing confusion” of sights, sounds and smells – is that we put so much faith in it. We believe that the world we experience the world as it is, and that our sensations are an accurate summary of reality.

But that’s a convenient illusion. In fact, it is the one illusion that makes every other perceptual illusion possible. Although we’re convinced that we’re living in an Ingres canvas – full of exquisite detail and verisimilitude – we actually inhabit a post-impressionist painting, rife with empty spaces and abstraction. It’s a world so full of ambiguities that it requires constant interpretation.

4) David Fitch's Series of Posts on Mission and GLBTQ Relations (Reclaiming the Mission / March through September 2010)

My friend Darin pointed me to this ongoing conversation. I'm still mulling over what to make of it, but, in the word's of another friend, I think it represents a "minimum starting point" for understanding GLBTQ questions within the context of missional discipleship.

"Women in Ministry and the Gay/Lesbian Question: The Post-Evangelical Terrain as I See It" (March 3, 2010)
"A NEW KIND OF INCLUSIVITY: Before I Talk about Women in Ministry and GLBT Relations" (March 12, 2010)
"'On Being Missional' with the Gay/Lesbian Peoples Among Us" (April 12, 2010)
"'Being Missional' and the GLBTQ #2: Mission and the Nature of Desire" (April 28, 2010)
"The Mission and GLBTQ Relations: Three Commitments of a 'Welcoming and Mutually Transforming' Missional Community #1" (July 22, 2010)
"Why Pre-Labeling a Church Community's Stance on Same-Sex Relations Is a Bad Idea: Mission and GLBTQ Relations #2" (July 28, 2010)
"The Witness of Transforming Sexually Redemptive Community: Mission and GLBTQ Relations #3" (August 12, 2010)
"The Welcoming and Mutually Transforming Community Among the LGBTQ: An Example and Some Questions" (August 30, 2010)
"Me Vs. Craig Carter on Same Sex Relations: How My Position Differs from the Traditional Evangelical Approach" (September 2, 2010)

5) "A Material Semiotics?" (Adam Miller, the church and postmodern culture: conversation / August 5, 2010)

If we recognize the material character of signs but not the semiological character of matter, then we’ll remain stuck within a “representational” notion of signs. That is to say, we’ll end up thinking that the “gap” between me, the sign, and the recipient is an epistemological gap.

This, I think, is not the way to go.

. . . Enter the qualification of matter by semiotics. It’s my claim that not only are signs material, but that matter is itself semiotic. (Or, perhaps more modestly, that semiotic relationships are not different in kind from any other kind of material relationship.)

This is to say that, when we speak and use signs, we are not engaging in a practice that is foreign to the materials of which speak. Signs are not a way of “overlaying” material reality with a “representational” system that will hopefully more or less “fit” the way things actually are.

Rather, signs are just another variation on the way that all material things - that is, all real things – interact with and relate to one another.

6) "The Diversity We Seek: The Danger of Manufactured Pre-Determined Diversity" (Reclaiming the Mission / July 13, 2010)

My friend said Waukegan is more diverse than Hyde Parke. What she meant when was that Waukegan is a place which is more “not us.” We are middle class suburban (majority) white people with the comforts of education, stable families, homes and jobs. Waukegan is more on the “margins,” people who are struggling for all those things. When I said Hyde Park is more diverse, I was referring to the makeup internal to that community, and its broad differences within one community. When my friend said Waukegan was more diverse, she was saying Waukegan was more “other” than us: diversity as a function of a relation external to us.

As we plant communities what are the opportunities and pitfalls of each? Which diversity should we seek to plant in? Diversity a.) or Diversity b.)? What different things should we consider in terms of God’s redemptive purposes in each? Which diversity should we seek as the most appropriate context for a church like ours to seek to inhabit?

7) "The 'Righteous Rich' in the Old Testament" (Christopher J. H. Wright, The Other Journal / August 5, 2010)

Wright analyses the connections between wealth and righteousness in the Old Testament.

In other words, in most discussions of wealth and poverty, the rich are the bad guys. And in scholarly discussions about poverty in the Bible, that is also frequently the case.

. . . Righteous and rich are words not often found in each other’s company. Perhaps it is to the familiar rhetoric of Amos that we owe the dominance of the reverse word association, wicked and rich.

. . . Yet clearly the Old Testament has a lot more to say on the subject than we can glean from the prophetic monochrome of Amos. It does not assert thatall wealth must have been gained through wickedness. To paraphrase Shakespeare: some are born rich, some achieve riches, and others have riches thrust upon them. And, as the Old Testament would doubtlessly say, some are blessed by God with riches within the framework of covenant obedience.

8) "Micro Review: On the Heights of Despair" (Adam Miller, the church and postmodern culture: conversation / July 12, 2010)

This review of E. M. Cioran's On the Heights of Despair makes me want to read the book. That's what a good review should do, right?

Cioran is a kind of 20th century, Romanian Nietzsche who "denounced systematic thought and abstract speculation in favor of indulgence in personal reflection and passionate lyricism."

"I've invented nothing," he said, "I've simply been the secretary of my sensations."

It will come as no surprise that On the Heights of Despair is not light reading and that, at first approach, it provides little obvious sustenance for those of us practicing fidelity to the good news. Nonetheless, the book is short and worth some effort because it addresses some crucial aspects of the path that often get little attention from the pulpit: if you are serious about God, then you must be prepared to have your idols - those perpetually iterated simulacra of your ego - smashed. That is, if you are serious about God, then you must be prepared to live without the comfort and commiseration of your gods.

Recommendation :: The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight :: Gina Ochsner

2010-09-16T11:06:00.001-06:00

Hands down, Gina Ochsner's The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight is the best book I've read all summer. Incredibly beautiful, deeply true, heartbreaking and funny.

Give it a read. (That's all I'll say)

Also: Meghan Young published a stunning review in The Other Journal. This makes for good reading too.
"An Ancient, Unbroken Song: A Review of Gina Ochsner's The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight"

Review :: The Red Letters Project :: Book of Matthew

2010-09-14T10:00:00.003-06:00

I got excited when I saw that ViralBloggers had a musical interpretation of the words of Christ from Matthew up for review. Me and music go way back, just like me and the Gospel of Matthew. An artist can open up new ways of seeing familiar things. This happened for me my junior year of college with Apt.Core’s Rhythms of Remembrance; the Lord’s Prayer became the beat I live my life to with the song “Kingdom.” I hoped that The Red Letters Project: Book of Matthew would break me open to something new in the same way.

I was excited enough to save the three-disc project for a six hour road trip to visit some friends and their new baby in Evansville, Indiana. There is a lot of artistic space in Jesus’ words in Matthew. As I inserted disc one into my car CD player, I hoped Mario Canido (the artist behind TRLP) would open up the text of Matthew like a prayer candle in a Byzantine monastery.

I strongly believe that good art is like a good conversation: it happens in a place, in a relationship, with a history, with emotion and spontaneity. TRLP opens with a pop anthem with U2-esque aspirations. The next five tracks imbibe deeply of hardcore gone pop, followed by two rock ballad tracks. TRLP strikes me more as a spoken word performance or a monologue in a black box theatre.

I powered through first disc somewhere in the middle of Indiana cornfields, teeth gritted the whole time. My wife frowned in the passenger seat. Disc one of TRLP does to Jesus’ words in Matthew what the Christian publishing industry all too often does to Jesus’ words in book form: they are processed through the moneymaking mill and come out molded into hollow shells of pop culture forms. (My father-in-law works in injection blow-molding; disc one of TRLP feels like one of the plastic auto parts he makes.)

Only a week or two later (after Okkervil River and smalltown college radio stations got me home from Indiana) did I give a listen to discs two and three. I am glad I did.

I was prepared to do the hard work of eviscerating TRLP in my review, but discs two and three have dictated a different task for me. While an over-produced, pop aesthetic runs consistently through all three discs (I picture three or four guys in a studio with Ibanez guitars and Line 6 amps and gear), many of the songs on discs two and three enter into a worthwhile conversation between the text and the artist’s context.

TRLP handles some difficult phrasing issues (the NLT does not render Jesus a poet) with grace. I appreciate the way “What Sorrow Awaits You” handles the Seven Woes (Mt 23.13-23.36). I’ve never found Jesus’ pronouncements on oath-taking particularly catchy, but after listening to the TRLP rendition, I find myself singing it to myself.

The Red Letters Project :: 70 x 7 (v. 18:22-18:35) :: Book of Matthew

The Red Letters Project :: You Must Love (v. 22:37-23:4) :: Book of Matthew

The Red Letters Project :: The Future (v. 24:2-24:22) :: Book of Matthew

Works like Apt.Core’s Rhythms of Remembrance and TRLP: Book of Matthew revive the long tradition of singing scripture (and they do so well at points). These are not congregational singalongs, but they are tunes to rock out to in the car. And between sing and rocking out, scripture can press itself into our lives, molding us instead of us molding it.

I’m curious: What other musical or artistic renditions of scripture do you find beautiful, true, formative, life-giving? We need more of these; we need to make more of these. We need scripture to press in on us from all sides.

Review :: This House of Sky :: Ivan Doig

2010-08-18T11:27:00.000-06:00

If you want to see the country, there's no advice better than that of Peter Jenkins: Go on foot, with your life strapped to your back and, hopefully, a friend and a good camera by your side. There's no other way to get to know the breadth and depth of the land on a personal basis.

But if cross-country backpacking isn't for you, Greyhound is a good second. Maybe crowded, usually behind schedule, often hot, cramped, prone to arguments and the occasional fistfight, Greyhound pushes travel up in your face (and in your nostrils). It's a journey not simply through miles and landscape but through people, the ones who get on and off at each stop for a smoke and chance to stretch out their legs.

I've just returned from a few weeks by bus, a pilgrimage to my birthplace to help my family reroof their secondhand farmhouse. As the bus moved me from the treed hills of Wisconsin through the cornfields of Minnesota and the stark, unending sky of North Dakota, I completed another journey: Ivan Doig's memoir, This House of Sky. My dad lent me the book with a high recommendations two years ago, and I first peeled back its cover somewhere in eastern Montana, that time by car, as we drove home. Two summers later, the time had come to see Doig through to the end.

I'm glad I did. Making the rounds of White Sulphur Springs' bars and cafes with Doig, riding miles of potholed highways in the Smith River valley, fighting the windblown drifts high in the Big Belt Mountains--these are all pieces of life, memories and stories I share with Doig. These people, these places, this way of life brings me home.

Doig often writes about the power of stories, the power of voices, turns of phrase, the brogue of his father, the forgotten asthmatic gasps of his mother. Stories keep us alive, keep us rooted in one world over against all others.

I left Montana to go to school in the cornfields of southern Ohio. (Doig's college departure, incidentally, was for Northwestern University, five miles north of where I currently reside.) Two or three years into my studies, I found myself feeling profoundly unrooted--philosophically, spiritually, relationally. I played in the college jazz band. We were on tour in Chicago or maybe somewhere in PA, and in the midst of my feelings of homelessness, storylessness, I penned a preemptive eulogy for my past, my family, my father, Montana. I was mourning the stories that were not being told, the ones that rooted me to the land, to the elk and the mule deer in high mountain parks, to the icy dirt roads that stretched between my family home and civilization.

This House of Sky reads like a eulogy. The story remembers not only Doig's life, but also the life and death of his father and his grandmother. In another way, the story recounts the slow decline of a way of life now long since passed on: the Montana sheep ranch and the range town culture that lived and died with it. White Sulphur Springs, a center point for Doig's early itinerant life, has shrunk dramatically in the years between his childhood and mine. Valier, where Doig went to high school, is smaller now than it was even ten years ago. The story plays out like a Rocky Mountain rendition of Wendell Berry's account of Kentucky.

My dad read through this copy of This House of Sky before he passed it on to me. He marked up the book rather little, far less than the way nearly ten years of academia have trained me to. But he did highlight a few paragraphs:

All of his [Doig's father's] way of life that I had sought escape from--the grindstone routine of ranching, the existence at the mercy of mauling weather, the endless starting-over from one calamity or another--was passing with him, and while I still wanted my distance from such a gauntlet, I found that I did not want my knowing of it to go from me. The perseverance to have lasted nearly seventy years amid such cold prospects was what heritage Dad had for me; I had begun to see that it counted for much.

Through all this ran the zipperlike whisper of history as well. Dad's time span, and even the late portion of it when I was growing up at his side, quickly was being peeled away by change. To my constant surprise, in our years in the north and the time I was away at college White Sulphur had swapped itself from being a livestock town to a logging town. Each time I drove in now across the long deck of the valley, the blue plume of smoke from the sawmill's scrap burners at the edge of town startled me, made me wonder for an instant whose house had caught fire. Out from town, along the forks of the Smith River and beneath the flanks of the Castles and the Big Belts, the ranches were being reached by the continental metamorphosis from agriculture to agri-business. No longer were there the summer's haying crews Dad had foremanned so many times, only a few men on galloping machines. Nor were there any longer the dozens of sheepherders, nor the roving shearing crews, because there no longer were sheep; we are a people swathed in synthetics now.

I grew up one valley away from these stories, just the other side of the Bridger Mountains, fifty years removed. Doig tells the kind of stories that root this world--Montana then, Montana now--firmly in existence. It is the kind of book to read on foot, to walk through, one in which you feel the scuff of the ground beneath your feet. It's the kind of book to pack in with your life strapped to your back, whether you hike your way across the country or take the bus. It is a trip worth taking.

The July 8s :: Blogs

2010-08-05T11:54:00.001-06:00

The July 8s :: Blogs - The most thought-provoking and world-opening blog posts I've stumbled on in the month of July

1) "Air-Conditioning is Terrible for the Earth--Here's How to Live without It" (Stan Cox, Alternet / July 10, 2010)

Over the past decade, gains in the general energy efficiency of appliances have been wiped out by our growing reliance on one device in particular: the air conditioner. Just since the mid-1990s, as the U.S. population was growing by less than 15 percent, consumption of electricity to cool the residential, retail and automotive sectors doubled.

... But while working on Chapter 1 (pdf) of Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World, I learned that there are still plenty of people who, out of ecological and other concerns, live without air-conditioning -- even in the hot heart of the Sunbelt.

Read on for tips and tricks!

2) "Is Food the New Sex?" (Mary Eberstadt, Policy Review no. 153 / January 27, 2009)

What happens when, for the first time in history — at least in theory, and at least in the advanced nations — adult human beings are more or less free to have all the sex and food they want?

This question opens the door to a real paradox. For given how closely connected the two appetites appear to be, it would be natural to expect that people would do the same kinds of things with both appetites — that they would pursue both with equal ardor when finally allowed to do so, for example, or with equal abandon for consequence; or conversely, with similar degrees of discipline in the consumption of each.

In fact, though, evidence from the advanced West suggests that nearly the opposite seems to be true. The answer appears to be that when many people are faced with these possibilities for the very first time, they end up doing very different things — things we might signal by shorthand as mindful eating, and mindless sex. This essay is both an exploration of that curious dynamic, and a speculation about what is driving it.

3) "Out of the Doldrums" (Tall Skinny Kiwi / June 26, 2010)

Photos of beautifully cheerful Albanian apartment buildings. Check them out!

4) "Transform 2010 and the law of preferential attraction" (Tall Skinny Kiwi / June 15, 2010)

Why do missionaries always go to the same places? The same reason why most of mission funding goes to the same organizations . . .

The answer? It happens because of what someone called the "law of preferential attraction". He who has gets more. Big web sites get even bigger because they attract more links and grow exponentially. Mission resources are sucked into the larger already-well-funded ministries. Short term mission teams avoid the hardest and neediest places in favor of the countries that always get the mission teams and are better set up to host them. THUS the squeaky wheel gets more grease and the rusty wheel stays dry.

The solution? You can only break this by an intentional effort to go further, go harder, go beyond. Take the road hardly-ever traveled, push into new territory and avoid landing wherever the stream's flow wants to push you.
5) "Though the Earth Give Way: Haiti, Suffering, and the Crucified God" (Brad East, The Other Journal / July 7, 2010)

The following syllogism seems to be the internal logic of the theological shape of what many people speak or think in the wake of disasters like the earthquake in Haiti: (1) everything that happens is the direct result of God’s will; (2) everything that God wills is for a good reason, comprehensible to human understanding; (3) therefore, the earthquake and massive suffering in Haiti is the will of God, and we may and ought to seek and name the reason for its happening.

As has been noted in various other places, what is uniformly lamentable about these propositions is their untenable relation to, and categorical distance from, the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth; instead, this deity bears more than a passing resemblance to the god envisioned (or, better, created) as acceptable within the bounds of a philosophical theism unrelated to exodus or resurrection. Indeed, what is distressing about these categories of thought is the way they capture the most representatively pro- and anti-God responses available in the American context.

6) "Is Your Cell Phone Drenched in Blood" (Godspace / July 28, 2010)

Cell phones were once a luxury, something that people thought were sort of frivolous. But in today’s age of ever-advancing technology, we’ve come to consider them an absolute necessity. Now practically everyone owns one – and we replace them with new ones every 1-2 years. But at what cost? It turns out that a vital raw material used in many cell phones is often mined illegally, and by slave labor.

7) The Kingdom Is Here Where Do You See It Synchroblog (Godspace / Summer 2010)

The Kingdom Has Come--Will You Join Me in Helping People See It (May 21, 2010)

Blog With Me--An Invitation to Participate (June 3, 2010)

What Does God's Kingdom Look Like--Unveiling God's Dream for Shalom (June 7, 2010)

What Does God's Kingdom Look Like--Anti Shalom Forces at Work (June 8, 2010)

What Does God's Kingdom Look Like for the Children of Israel (June 9, 2010)

What Does the Kingdom of God Look Like to the Prophets? (June 10, 2010)

What Does the Kingdom of God Look Like to Jesus (June 11, 2010)

The Kingdom Is Here--Let's Celebrate! (June 15, 2010)

What Does the Promise of the Kingdom of God Look Like--Reflections from Dave Perry (June 16, 2010)

The Kingdom Is--Becoming Instruments of Change (June 17, 2010)

The Kingdom Is Here--Reflections from Richard Rohr (June 18, 2010)

The Kingdom is Here--Where Do We See It? (June 21, 2010)

In Christ Jesus the Kingdom Has Come (June 22, 2010)

Martyn Joseph--Thunder and Rainbow Lyrics (June 23, 2010)

Where Is the Kingdom--In Age and Disability (June 27, 2010)

God's Kingdom: Arts for the Wider Community by Lynne Baab (June 30 2010)

8) Food and Me (In a Hazelnut Shell / Spring-Summer 2010)

I'd like to reflect spiritually on the food that I'm thinking about and planning and making and eating. What do my food choices (about health, sustainability, etc.) mean about my relationship to God's creation? What does the work that we put into (or don't put into) our food mean? Does it matter if I eat with other people or stuff my face with toast while walking to class? Basically, does God care about what I eat and how I eat it?

Food and Me (May 22, 2010)

Food and Me, #1: Cornography (May 25, 2010)

Food and Me, #2: The Middle Years (May 29, 2010)

Food and Me, #3: Catching Up (June 15, 2010)

Food and Me, #4: On Corn and how it is in everything (June 16, 2010)

Food and Me, #5: The Supermarket Experience (June 18, 2010)

Food and Me, #6: The Kitchen (June 25, 20100

Food and Me, #7: Five Sense Sabbath (Three weeks removed) (June 26, 2010)

Review :: The Power and the Glory :: Graham Greene

2010-08-02T14:35:00.000-06:00

In the last few weeks Cindy has read two novels about what happens when the world falls apart: The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. She enjoyed both, I think. At the very least she's inspired me to give each book a read.

Her reading has also made me reappraise the book I've been reading, Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. Like a good novel should, The Power and the Glory tells a good story--the story of the last priest in a province of revolutionary Mexico in where all the church have been forcibly shut down. The priest is all too human, crippled by alcohol and by fear, both yearning for and cowering from his inevitable capture by the red-shirt authorities. Greene writes beautifully. And, as one might expect of a Graham Greene novel, the hard question of faith--why believe?--emerges subtly in the texture of characters and events. The story is worth reading as a story.

As much as it is a philosophical novel working out the motivations and consequences of a journey toward faith, The Power and the Glory also offers us an apocalyptic glimpse. Here I want apocalyptic to mean much more than just the Atwood-McCarthian dystopian landscapes. An apocalypse is an unveiling, the dis-covering (apo + kalypsis) of the world. Something old is pulled out from underfoot, and something new descends out of heaven.

Listen to this passage from Greene:

They had travelled by the sun until the black wooded bar of mountain told them where to go. They might have been the only survivors of a world which was dying out; they carried the visible marks of the dying with them.

Sometimes he wondered whether he was safe, but when there are no visible boundaries between one state and another--no passport examination or customs house--danger just seems to go on, travelling with you, lifting its heavy feet in the same way as you do. . . .

At sunset on the second day they came out on to a wide plateau covered with short grass. A grove of crosses stood up blackly against the sky, leaning at different angles--some as high as twenty feet, some not much more than eight. They were like trees that had been left to seed. The priest stopped and stared at them. They were the first Christian symbols he had seen for more than five years publicly exposed--if you could call this empty plateau in the mountains a public place. No priest could have been concerned in the strange rough group; it was the work of Indians and had nothing in common with the tidy vestments of the Mass and the elaborately worked out symbols of the liturgy. It was like a short cut to the dark and magical heart of the faith--to the night when the graves opened and the dead walked.

I read the first fifty pages or so of this novel in Detroit at the 2010 US Social Forum. The USSF website descries the event as a "movement building process"; the best summary I've been able to muster is a gargantuan brainstorming session by hundreds (thousands?) of organization pursuing social justice, gender justice, ecological justice, labor justice. Or, we might say, a lot of people working against the Atwood-McCarthian apocalypse.

Greene doesn't deal with justice. He depicts poverty, he depicts corruption, he depicts the complex ethnically-based classism, unplanned child of colonization. But Greene doesn't comment on these. He is not Las Casas. Injustice seems, at best, to be incidental to Greene's apocalypse--one of those things that simply happens while the world is being shaken apart.

I think Greene offers us a richer, more life-giving way of understanding apocalypse. The Atwood-McCarthian model, our gaze focuses on what we are losing, the missing pieces of a world destined for fire or ice. And, while we know this world wobbles under its own weight of injustice and suffering, we get strangely sentimental about the way things have changed. To translate this into the political terms of the USSF, we begin to worry that the corrupt system will implode before we get our chance to benefit from it.

In The Power and the Glory, Greene pictures something more hopeful. No perceptive reader can sympathize with what the whiskey priest was before the Revolution: a self-satisfied cleric surrounded by assiduously pious aristocratic women, a clergyman consumed by reputation, status, and winning a promotion to a better positioned parish. And what the priest is now--coward, craven, lecher--no one admires. But the horror of apocalypse is a shriving, a stripping away of sin (and we might imagine injustice) for the sake of a better religion, a truer faith, a more faithful imitatio Christi. And in the jail cell, in the home of the Lehrs, in the hut where James Culver lies dying, before the executioners' rifles, we begin to see something new, something that can be admired.

This is the true apocalypse: the overturning of the old order to give way to something new.

When Your Worlds Collide . . .

2010-07-10T19:07:00.002-06:00

Tall Skinny Kiwi pointed me to this community in Skopje. Longtime readers know that I spent some time in Skopje. Seven very good months with very good people (drinking a lot of tursko kafe).

Since I returned to the States, I've stumbled into a simpler way of following Jesus, a way that leads into the flesh-and-blood, dollars-and-cents realities of making sure poor people have housing, hungry people get food, and that my kitchen table always has a few open chairs around it ready for anyone who needs some conversation and a cup of coffee (good American filter kafe).

Glasnost is a community in Skopje, proclaiming Jesus' good news both by telling the Jesus stories in worship and by getting themselves dirty meeting concrete needs in their city. They run a kindergarten for Roma kids. They missionally teach jujitsu. I know little else about the community. God is good.

*Update*
Tall Skinny Kiwi posted more on Glasnost:
Observation: Running a kindergarten (a little school for little kids aged 3-5) might be a new way for new [emerging] churches to impact their community and become more sustainable at the same time.

Last week in Macedonia, we listened to leaders from the Glasnost community in Skopje talked about their kindergarten for Romany children. They actually pay the mothers a small sum to let their children attend kindergarten rather than beg on the streets with them. By teaching the children how to read and write, they are breaking the poverty cycle. Now they are looking into primary schooling so they can continue helping the same kids.

June 20 - Yahweh is Looking for a Faithful People

2010-06-20T11:36:00.001-06:00

Living Water Community Church - Sunday Worship

1 Kings 17 - “Yahweh is Looking for a Faithful People”

Yahweh loves with a loyal love. Yahweh provides for our needs. Yahweh alone provides for our needs. Yahweh is true and reliable. Yahweh alone is reliable, dependable, worthy of our trust. When Yahweh says something will happen, it happens. Yahweh loves with a loyal and faithful love.

Israel and its king did not believe these things. One hundred years after David, Israel denied every one of these claims. They did not believe that Yahweh was loyal, faithful, true, reliable, dependable, loving. Israel did not believe Yahweh was sufficient. Ahab, Israel’s king, did not believe Yahweh was sufficient.

When I was growing up, I had a story book about Elijah. Elijah being fed by ravens, Elijah and the jar of oil, Elijah on Mount Carmel, Elijah and the fiery chariot. My mom would sit on the bed with me and let me turn the pages while she read. I had other Bible story books--they were in a series, thin and paperback: Samson and the Philistines, David and Goliath, Daniel and the Lions’ Den. These stories were simply told with matching simple, colorful illustrations. I would turn the pages and learn the moral or find an example to imitate in each story.

The moral of the stories we’ve heard this morning is that God is the one who is control and the one who provides for us. Elijah and also the Sidonian widow are wonderful examples to imitate, heroes of faith. This is what my childhood storybook said.

But we can hear more in these stories when we listen to them in context. The storybook moral of David and Goliath, for instance, was that when we trust in God, no one (however big) can stand against us. When we read the story in the unfolding history of 1 Samuel, however, we find that the contest is less about David versus Goliath and more about the question of who will be God’s chosen shepherd-king-protector of the people--David who completely depends on Yahweh or Saul who is a tall and strong warrior. No one can stand against us when we trust in Yahweh, but the real threat is Saul, not some Philistine giant.

In the same way, we need to hear these Elijah stories as part of a larger story about how God’s people move from theocratic rule under Samuel to exile in the Assyrian and Babylonian empires. The moral of that bigger story is a theme that shows up over and over again in each of the intervening narratives: Yahweh’s people must depend on Yahweh alone.

First Kings 17 introduces a cycle of stories about Elijah and his disciple Elisha that continues on for nineteen chapters, from 1 Ki 17 to 2 Ki 13. The events focus on the reigns of King Ahab and his successors in the northern kingdom of Israel. The theme of this story cycle is that while Yahweh is faithful and loyal, the king and his kingdom are faithless, trusting in anything and everything but Yahweh, refusing to obey him.

Chapter 16, verses 29 through 33 show us the situation:

In the thirty-eighth year of Asa’s reign over Judah, Omri’s son Ahab became king over Isarel. Ahab son of Omri ruled over Israel for twenty-two years in Samaria. Ahab son of Omri did more evil in the sight of Yahweh than all who were before him. As if following in the sinful footsteps of Jeroboam son of Nebat were not bad enough, he married Jezebel the daughter of King Eth-baal of the Sidonians. Then he worshiped and bowed to Baal. He set up an altar for Baal in the temple of Baal he had built in Samaria. Ahab also made an Asherah pole; he did more to anger Yahweh, God of Israel, than all the kings who were before him.

It is sixty-five years since Jeroboam and the ten northern tribes of Israel revolted against the oppressive rule of Solomon and his son Rehoboam. It has been sixty-five years since Jeroboam, first king of the the northern kingdom Israel, set up two golden bull statues so his people could worship Yahweh without going to the temple in the enemy capital city, Jerusalem. This idol-laced Yahweh-worship is the “sin of Jeroboam.” These have been sixty-five rocky years, with assassinations and wars, political intrigue and the killing off of entire families to establish new dynasties.

But now there is a new king, Ahab. Jeroboam bent the rules to shore up his political advantage while still paying lip-service to Yahweh worship. Ahab, on the other hand, treats religion as nothing more than a tool--a political and technological tool. Yahweh worship hadn’t been working too well for his family dynasty, so he chose to import a new religion: Baal worship.

Yahweh loves with a loyal and faithful love, but his people do not. When Ahab treats religion as a piece of ideological, political, or, even, agricultural technology, he’s merely thinking about religion in the same way as all the other nations and peoples do. Religion is a way to get things done. Ahab is feeling politically and fiscally insecure. He has an ongoing war with the southern kingdom Judah (the two tribes who remained loyal to the David dynasty), and he needs allies to help fight and fund this war. Sidon is a wealthy merchant kingdom on the coast. Ahab forms an alliance in the usual way: marry the daughter and set up a temple-consulate for foreign worship. It sweetens the deal that Sidon’s gods are Baal, the storm god who brings the rain, and Ahserah, his consort and goddess who brings fertility in field, flock, and family. Adopting the Baal and Asherah cult is good business and good politics. It’s also faithless and disloyal to Yahweh, the God of Israel.

This is where Elijah appears for the first time, without fanfare or even much introduction. Chapter 17 begins, “Elijah the Tishbite, from Tishbe in Gilead, said to Ahab, “As certainly as Yahweh, the God of Israel, lives (whom I serve), there will be no dew or rain in the years ahead unless I give the command.” In effect, “Worship your so-called rain and fertility gods! See what they can do! I’ll leave you to them.”

If we were to listen to all of the Elijah stories, we would find that Yahweh is not a god who can be reduced to a tool. Yahweh is not an abstract law or concept that we can plan around or use to our advantage. Yahweh is personal. Yahweh loves with a loyal and faithful love. We see this in Yahweh’s attention to Elijah, to the Sidonian widow, to foreign kings and generals, even to Ahab. Yahweh pays attention to the needs, the hopes and the hardships of individual people. He feeds Elijah during a famine, he feeds a woman from Sidon, he revives her lifeless son. Yahweh loves us personally and wants us to love him in return.

We today should know that God is personal much more than Elijah or Ahab knew. We have seen the person who is God, we have seen Jesus. Jesus is not merely a moral example or a theological idea that we can safely build our lives around. Jesus loves us and asks that we love him in return. This means following him. He said, “If you love me, you will do what I command.”

The stories we heard this morning--Elijah fed by ravens, Elijah fed by a starving widow, Elijah reviving the dead boy--these stories also show us what faithful and obedient love for Yahweh looks like. When the hot anger of Yahweh withers the crops and causes widespread famine to show the faithless lies king and people have built their lives around, Elijah obeys Yahweh’s command and finds Yahweh’s faithful, loyal love.

Yahweh sends Elijah to a creek in the wilderness, and Elijah obeys. Unlike Ahab, Elijah trusts that Yahweh, not the supposed rain-god Baal, is the one who gives water and food. And the food is good. While the faithless people struggle to scrape together bread and water, Elijah is miraculously delivered a meat feast fit for a king twice a day. Yahweh shows Elijah faithful love.

But this isn’t the limit of Yahweh’s love. One day Elijah goes to get water from the creek and finds only a mud puddle. We might think, “What’s this? Has God failed us?” But Elijah listens and hears Yahweh’s voice. Yahweh says, “Get up, go to Zarephath in Sidonian territory, and live there. I have already told a widow who lives there to provide for you.” If the creek drying up was confusing, this is even more troubling. God does not seem to be making sense. The two square meals a day next to the creekside retreat was the kind of love we want. But go to Sidon--the home of Baal worship? Stay with an impoverished widow? Depend on her to supply food when she can’t even provide for herself and her son? This doesn’t make sense to us. But Elijah trusts Yahweh and obeys.

The person in this story who impresses me even more than Elijah is the widow. She is, in many ways, the opposite of Ahab. Ahab is an Israelite king rejects Yahweh for politically advantageous Baal worship imported from Sidon; the Sidonian widow, from Sidon not Israel, trusts Yahweh even when she has no earthly reason to. Her people worship Baal. She is poor. Her husband has died. The famine caused by Yahweh has reduced her to her last meal. But she obeys.

Elijah finds her at the city gate, picking sticks to bake her last loaf of bread. When he asks her for a meal and a drink, she confesses that she has nothing to offer. Nevertheless, she is willing to trust Yahweh, and she discovers Yahweh’s faithful and loyal love in a bottomless jar of oil and a never-failing sack of flour. By obeying Yahweh’s command, feeding the prophet even from her poverty, she find that Yahweh is faithful to provide not only for his prophet but also for her and her family.

It’s easy to trust God when we see God’s provision on a daily basis. But what do we do when God’s provision, God’s love do not seem to be present? The widow had a son, and the son got sick. He got sicker and sicker everyday. Finally he stopped breathing. The first two stories have tested Elijah’s and the widow’s faithful love for Yahweh, but this is now a test of Yahweh’s faithful love for Elijah and the widow. The woman asks, “Why, prophet, have you come to me to confront me with my sin and kill my son?” Elijah asks, “O Yahweh, my God, are you also bringing disaster on this widow I am staying with by killing her son?” What will Yahweh do? How will he respond?

We are at a turning point in the Elijah stories. So far Yahweh has worked through Elijah to show the faithless and futile way Israel and its king use religion. Elijah has been an obedient spokesman, and Yahweh has faithfully provided for him, first beside the creek and now in the widow’s house in Sidon. But Yahweh is not the kind of god who is content merely to speak the truth and walk away. Yahweh is looking for a faithful people.

In the next chapter, Yahweh sends Elijah to confront Ahab, the people, and all the prophets of Baal on the top of Mount Carmel with the demand that they choose which god they will love. In a trial-by-fire-from-the-sky, Elijah prays before all the people of Israel, “O Yahweh, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, prove today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things at your command. Answer me, O Yahweh, answer me, so these people will know that you, O Yahweh, are the true God and that you are winning back their allegiance” (1 Ki 18.36-37). Elijah prays before the people, and God sends lightning to burn up the sacrifice on the water-soaked altar. Yahweh is showing his faithful love, proving that he loves this people. But the people impressed by the fireworks on the mountaintop are just as quickly swayed back to Baal and Asherah by the anger of Queen Jezebel and King Ahab.

So, at this turning point, what does Yahweh do about the widow’s lifeless son? On the one hand, we might wonder if the fate of the widow’s son really even matters. After all, we’ve seen God’s faithful provision for Elijah already--meat in the desert, bread from the widow. God is taking care of his prophet. Surely Elijah has all the confidence in Yahweh that he needs to go and confront Ahab. But there is more going on than just the story of Elijah.

This is the story of Yahweh who wants a faithful people. We might want to follow Ahab in a religious arithmetic where God’s provision is connected to bloodline or occupation--Elijah is an Israelite, Elijah is a prophet; of course he is blessed! But Yahweh shows faithful love to all those who depend solely on him and who obey his commands. God is not limited by our sectarian boundaries or our theological lines in the sand. God is looking for people, any people, all people, who trust God alone and follow God’s instruction.

There is an interesting pattern in the three stories we’ve heard this morning. In the first, at the creek, Yahweh provides for his prophet. In the second, Yahweh’s love provides for his prophet and for an obedient widow from Sidon. In this last story, Yahweh shows faithful love to the widow--not for Elijah’s sake, but for her own. Yahweh heals the boy, and the woman exclaims to Elijah, “Now I know that you are a prophet and that Yahweh really does speak through you.” Yahweh’s faithful love moves out from those with ethnic claims on his love to all those who trust and obey him.

Jesus noticed this pattern. In a well-loved passage in Luke 4, Jesus walks into a synagogue, takes the Isaiah scroll and reads, “The Spirit of Yahweh is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and the regaining of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of Yahweh’s favor.” I suspect this is a familiar passage to many of us. But listen to what happens next: As the crowd sits confused about the meaning of this manifesto, Jesus exclaims, “No doubt you’ll want to know why these things aren’t happening here in your town.” He continues, “In truth I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s days, when the sky was shut up three and a half years, and there was a great famine over all the land. Yet Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to a woman who was a widow at Zarephath in Sidon” (Lk 4.24-26). What Jesus is getting at is that Yahweh’s faithful love comes not to those who can claim it by birthright or ethnicity. Instead, Yahweh is looking for a faithful people, and Yahweh shows faithful love to all people who will depend on him alone and obey his commands--to people who love him.

For Elijah and for the larger story of 1 and 2 Kings, this means that Yahweh will eventually reject his faithless people, judging them with the very nations whose religious outlook they have emulated. Israel will be devastated and finally dispersed into the Assyrian empire. A faithless people have no claim on Yahweh’s love. But Yahweh’s quest for a faithful people also open the possibility to outsiders, like the Sidonian widow, to anyone and everyone who will love and obey Yahweh.

We at this church are a collection of outsiders. We have no claim on Yahweh’s love by birthright anymore than Ahab and Israel did. We cannot hold up our occupations, our theologies, our work for social justice, our family heritage as rights, in and of themselves, to God’s loving provision. Merely saying that we are “Christian” will not win us a sure claim on divine blessing anymore than Ahab’s profession to be “Israelite.”

No. Yahweh is looking for a faithful and obedient people. “If you love me, you will obey my commands,” Jesus said. Only when we depend completely on Yahweh--revealed to us in Jesus--only when we own that Jesus alone is sufficient for our needs, when we cease from trying to hedge our bets by relying on others schemes and powers, only when we faithfully and loyally follow in the pattern Jesus has left for us, obeying his commands and living in the new life he has won for us--only then do we find out how loyal, faithful, true, reliable, dependable, loving our God is.

Review :: Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions :: Dan Brennan

2010-06-16T21:27:00.001-06:00

Lately I've been thinking about love, beauty, and limits. We know that there is no limit to beauty (God is unendingly beautiful). But beauty, as always a manifestation of love, exists because of limits, within limits. My life is beautiful not when I can escape from my workaday schedule, not when I ignore the demands of friends and lovers, not only when I attempt the superhuman. In other days I might call the interplay of beauty and limits balance (that is, before the term was emptied of meaning by the abuse of pop psychology).

There's another theory of beauty: beauty as excess, beauty as transgression. Sometimes this aesthetics claims a corner on the market for beauty as transcendent, but I won't buy into this monopoly. Beauty is what we make of our limitations, not just our escape from them. Phrased differently, we see beauty when we see the truth of our limitations, see them in a different light, see them in light of the resurrection.

One way of describing Dan Brennan's Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions: Engaging the Mystery of Friendship between Men and Women is to say it locates friendship (specifically cross-sex friendships) within these competing dynamics of beauty. On the first page Brennan writes,

This book makes a simple claim: stories of paired cross-sex friendship love are journeys toward communion with God and our neighbor in the Christian story. In the new creation, men and women are not limited to stark contrasts where we must choose between romantic passion in marriage or inappropriate sex/infidelity. Chaste, but powerfully close friendships between the sexes stir our curiosity and resist formulaic gender roles in marriage, friendship, and society.

Beautiful cross-sex relationships, he argues, should not be bounded by the aesthetic ideology of excess. Relational beauty, it turns out, is a matter of balance, not sheerly of orgasm or roses and candy hearts.

Brennan points to Freud as marking the tipping point where sexuality became utterly genitalized and the romantic myth gained decisive ascendancy in Western culture. The romantic myth, Brennan asserts, is the consequence of "idealizing romantic passion as the unique, one-and-only, exclusive form of love between a man and woman." Every relationship is on a trajectory toward nookie, and only in a sustained and actively sexual relationship can a human person hope to find true fulfilment.

Evangelical churches uphold this metanarrative, even if in mirror reverse of wider culture. Through staff policies enforcing strict boundaries on mingling with the opposite sex and church singles mixers--even through battles for a constitutional definition of marriage--Evangelicaldom enshrines the paired and exclusive romantic male-female relationship as constitutive of Christian blessedness. In large part, the book as a whole emerges as a reaction and response to these narrow parameters of "appropriate behaviour."

If Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions remained only a theoretical/theological reflection on friendship in what strikes me as a Cappadocian key, it would be a decent book. Brennan's blog, Faith Dance, would lead me to expect nothing less than this from him. But where this book shines most is in its extended discussions of cross-sex friendships throughout church history and of Jesus' example in cross-sex relationships.

As I read the first forty or fifty pages, I nodded along with Brennan's critique of the culture's and the church's reduction of cross-sex relationship to parts and hormones, their exclusion of legitimate friendships. But hints and comments about tracing the church's history--its other history--of cross-sex friendships left me eager for chapters to come. They were well worth the wait.

Highlights: a long meditation on Jesus' friendship with Mary Magdalene and the significance of the first resurrection appearance in John 20; a similarly lengthy chunk of text devoted to the woman who anoints and kisses Jesus' feet in Luke 7. The book may be worth reading if only for these two discussions (though the whole is well worth a read).

Brennan makes a provocative case for Jesus as a forerunner in deep, embodied, and chastely sexual cross-sex friendships. This option has been suppressed in church history and named repressed by contemporary church and culture, but we can still find beautiful female-male friendships among those who follow Jesus' example.

I am praising Brennan's Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions pretty highly, but I have my critiques. I'll voice two:

1) While Brennan's argument is compelling, it is poorly strung together. The book could have used a bit more editing, time spent shaping a succession of brilliant paragraphs and strings of citations into the clear and concise development of an unfolding thesis. There were more than a few moments when I had to re-read a page to puzzle out its contribution to the book's thesis. This said, I would not hesitate to assign this text for a reflection essay in a seminary course on pastoral practice or Christian discipleship. If the argument is hard to trace, it remains well worth the energy expended to do so.

2) Brennan leaves wholly unaddressed questions and implications for friendship in a cultural space of diverse sexual orientations. What does it mean for me to be close friends with someone identifying as gay? How should those within the LGBTQ community understand same-sex and cross-sex friendships? Surely we can't just invert the book, substituting same-sex for cross-sex where the romantic metanarrative is told differently. But how do we locate faithful friendship and subversive cultural praxis in our cultural and ecclesial moment?

Perhaps Brennan felt this book would already make enough waves in Evangelical circles, that opening to a discussion of sexuality as such might capsize the vessel. Perhaps. It's not good manners to criticize a book for what it fails to do. However, there are times when a fault of omission speaks nearly as loudly as one of commission. This is one such instance.

In Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions, Dan Brennan opens a space for regarding cross-sex friendships as masterpieces of balance rather than as moments in a work of romantic excess. By doing so, the field is cleared for cross-sex friendship as an end-in-itself (or, we might say, cross-sex friendship's own meaning in the truth of the resurrection).

I like this. It neither chucks the Christian system of sexual ethics as a whole (by writing friendship as a field of excess) nor capitulates to a reductive field for friendship (by demarcating its limits with rules and policies).

To say this differently: On my kitchen table I have this week's yield from a local CSA. There is zucchni and new potatoes and something I thought was celery but that a friend informed was swiss chard. Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions is like community-supported agriculture. It does not give up the fight for a more just food system, resigning itself to push the cart through the big-box grocery store's "Fresh Produce" section. Yet, unlike some of my anarcho-primitivist friends, it does not demand a secession from contemporary society and reversion to hunting and gathering. Instead it opts for a third way: close, deep, embodied and spiritual, sexual yet chaste cross-sex friendships. That is beautiful.

The May 8s :: Blogs

2010-06-11T08:34:00.002-06:00

The May 8s :: Blogs - The most thought-provoking and world-opening blog posts I've stumbled on in the month of May

1) "25 Years and Still Lovin' It" (Tall Skinny Kiwi / May 24, 2010)

What's the secret to sticking with one of the world's most poorly paid and most despised professions?

[Why? Are you thinking of becoming a missionary also???]

Well. I would say that for me, its being sure that this is God's path for me and finding joy and energy in that knowledge. I love a challenge and I get bored easily. I try to challenge myself continually to prevent boredom. For example, I never preach the same message, ever, but always create unique situations for God to speak and act in each unique setting.

2) "Our Fix-It Faith and the Oil Spill" (Elisabeth Rosenthal, The New York Times / May 28, 2010)

Americans have long had an unswerving belief that technology will save us — it is the cavalry coming over the hill, just as we are about to lose the battle. And yet, as Americans watched scientists struggle to plug the undersea well over the past month, it became apparent that our great belief in technology was perhaps misplaced.

3) "House Churches Have No Sex Appeal" (Tall Skinny Kiwi / July 02, 2004)

For most of the world, starting new churches means cleaning up before the living room fills up with people. Millions of churches around the word are starting this way and millions more are needed.

. . . But the following gripes are actual real-life insufficiencies that need to be addressed if house church evangelists are to offer a viable alternative to people leaving the Pyramids Of Egypt for The Good Land Flowing With Milk And Coffee.

. . . 1. Name is Misleading.

The label needs to change from house church to something that better describes it.

. . . 2. Authentication is Delayed.

House churches are not yet recognised by the mainstream. Sometimes they are reactionary to the establishment and find identity in the chasm. Other times they are not respected.

. . . 3. Orientation is Backwards.

The focus needs to change from "our house" to "their house."

. . . 4. Support is Minimal

House churches are the cookie dough of the new ecclesiology. They are tasty and soft and very tempting. But they have not yet hardened into something permanent. We might be 5 years away from seeing a complete ecosystem of organic ministries that work together to enable a healthy, reproducing, movement of house churches.

. . . 5. Integration is Absent.

House Church Utopia is still painted as being pure and contaminant-free. As if you leave one model of church and adopt another with no reference to what you came out of. The truth is that there is compromise. There is modularity in our new forms. There is re:mixing, compositing.

4) "Holy Spirit Movement: We need a miracle" (Tall Skinny Kiwi / April 26, 2010)

Question: How do you know the Holy Spirit is at work and not just your own adrenaline, or the timely implentation of your ministry plan.

In a word, a miracle.

. . . In my experience, the most successful church plants could all point to a moment in time when something beyond the church planter's control happened - a miracle of sorts - and that gave them the confidence that God was at work, that what they were building was part of a Holy Spirit movement, and more than just a great idea.

5) "War as the New Normal: an Interview with Andrew Bacevich" (Chris Keller, The Other Journal / May 11, 2010)

AB: The effect on our psyche puzzles me. Americans have all but accepted perpetual war as the new norm. They are numb to its significance.

TOJ: So how is this numbness new compared to, say, the Vietnam War era or World War II?

AB: It’s quite different. Americans in World War II didn’t see war as perpetual—their aim was to win as quickly as possible in order to return things to normal. Many Americans during the Vietnam War feared that war might be becoming perpetual—and they protested mightily against that prospect.

TOJ: In The Limits of Power, you mention that war during the ’80s and ’90s was remarketed as “more precise, more discriminating, and potentially more humane.” How is such an illusion preserved by the U.S. government, and how are U.S. citizens complicit in this illusion?

AB: The vision of war as precise, discriminating, and humane grew out of the way people in Washington chose to interpret events such as Operation Desert Storm and the 1999 Kosovo War. The whole thing was bogus, as we learned to our sadness in Iraq and continue to learn in Afghanistan.

6) "Posts on the Church, Apocalyptic, and Mission" (Inhabitatio Dei / May 19, 2010)

(This is an area I'm incredibly interested. A good introduction to the subject is Nathan Kerr's Christ, History, and Apocalyptic.)

7) "The Emerging Church Brand: the Good, the Bad, and the Messy" (Shane Claiborne, God's Politics / April 13, 2010)

A decade or so ago, a bunch of young, mostly white evangelicals started seeing similar conversations beginning to spark all over the place about the reshaping of evangelicalism, the rethinking of missions, and reimagining what it really means to be the church. Language of “the emerging church” connected many of the dots, which remained primarily white evangelical men, many of whom had great ideas and led vibrant communities and organizations. Nonetheless it has always been evident that this is not the whole conversation or renewal happening in the church — and the fact that the dozens of books and cover stories done on the “emerging church” hailed mostly faces of white men shows the many forces of colonialism, privilege, and all the other principalities and powers that still threaten to hold our faith captive. Entire movements of hip-hop church and missional communities overseas and indigenous movements of first nation Christians have also been stirring up all
over the world, though they do not get the same air time or book deals.

Eventually, books and brands began identifying as “emerging church” or “emergent.” So it got a little messy. In my opinion, “the movement” became a bit narcissistic, and often became little more than theological masturbation: feels good but doesn’t give birth to much. It’s one thing to talk about theology. It’s another thing to talk about talking about theology. There is some sloppy theology out there. Some “emerging church” folks have repeated some of the mistakes of fundamentalism (only with more tattoos), and others have repeated the mistakes of liberalism (only with more wit). Meanwhile, there are many folks who seem to know exactly what “emerging church” is and think it is the anti-Christ. However, neither of these, I am convinced, represents the silent majority of young evangelicals of all colors of skin who love Jesus with all that they are and are not willing to use our faith as simply a ticket to heaven and ignore the hells of the world around us. There is a new evangelicalism that loves Jesus and wants to change the world.

8) "Emerging or Converging" (Julie Clawson, God's Politics / April 19, 2010)

Our globalized world has forced a new understanding of how we conceive of our emerging faith. It is harder to deliberately ignore the diversity of voices speaking into this thing we call Christianity. While some might still proclaim the other to be wrong simply for being other, it is impossible to deny that the other exists. This isn’t about being open-minded or being politically correct; it is simply a necessary reaction to the nature of the world we live in. Other theologies, other voices, other ways of reading scripture exist (other always being relative to one’s vantage point). We are too interconnected to ignore them or pretend they don’t matter. They are simply part of the air we breathe as Christians which is becoming increasingly impossible to not acknowledge.

. . . The world has been blatantly thrust in front of our eyes, and even the church can no longer resist this emerging consciousness. What stories get told and whose theology gets privileged can no longer be determined out of ignorance. In our interconnected world, the voices of womanist and feminist theologians, the cries of the liberation and postcolonial theologies, and the narrative understandings of scripture that focus on exile, family, and oppression are accessible to even the average Christian. The church is far bigger than some of us might have once believed, we just had to be forced to open our eyes and see it.

u.a.c.

Review :: Start Here :: Alex Harris & Brett Harris

2010-06-07T23:35:00.000-06:00

I was twenty-one once. It seems like a long time ago, but it was only a handful (or two) of years ago. When I was twenty-one, I felt bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, befuddled by the responsibility of adulthood, that immense weight of making one's way in the world.

Alex and Brett Harris are twenty-one. (They are also, in fact, twin brothers and the younger siblings of Josh Harris--yes, that Josh Harris.) At twenty-one, they stand as my spiritual mentors of the moment. I find Start Here, their book, a challenge, the straight talk and the practical how-to suggestions to follow Jesus doing hard things in a big and often-overwhelming world.

Admittedly, I'm not their target audience. The Rebelution is about "a teenage rebellion against low expectations," not about guys pushing thirty finally owning up to Jesus' call to real world discipleship. Alex and Brett started TheRebelution.com when they were sixteen to inspire fellow teenagers to Do Hard Things (incidentally the title of their first book, published when they were nineteen).

In Start Here, Alex and Brett speak often of the "myth of adolescence," the lie that "the teen years are a time to goof off and have fun before 'real life' starts." It's this critical edge that catches me. They pick up on the insidious lies so big and institutionalized that most of us spend our teens and our twenties wandering around within their borders without even knowing these lies stretch out around us. Alex and Brett have seen something else, of Jesus and the kingdom life he brings, and up against it they can name the cardboard cutout substitutions we cling to.

Start Here takes up the practical and pastoral fall out of teens trying to Do Hard Things (a book I haven't read but hope to soon). Alex and Brett weave easygoing advice around stories, emails, and forum posts (from TheRebelution.com) by real live teens doing hard things. They walk through the challenges of where to start, what to do when things get hard, what to do with success, and how to maintain healthy relationships (with friends, family, and God) while doing hard things. These are, in honesty, questions I ask a lot. Where do I even start? Okay, so what now? How can I keep up this pace without having my marriage [friendships, spiritual life, fill in the blank] fall apart? Alex and Brett offer good advice, advice that I'm personally taking to heart.

Start Here also tugs at the youth pastor parts of my heart (I generally try to keep those heart parts segregated off from the rest of my heart because jr. highers are rambunctious and tend to make a mess). Start Here is written for teenagers, and it's a book they would read. Plus, it has good group discussion questions in an appendix. I plan to use this (along with Do Hard Things) as youth curriculum in the coming years.

Alex and Brett write a practical, pastoral, spiritual, challenging book. But they do right from a particular cultural vantage point. They are keenly socially attuned, relating stories of teens crocheting hundreds of hats for orphans or raising money to drill wells for villages in Africa. But some of the stories bear a particular political and cultural bent (starting a petition to censor sexual art on display at a high school; holding an anti-abortion event; etc.; many of the stories take place in Texas). All in all, though, their cultural interpretations of what God wants done in the world does not overwhelm or even taint the strong and clear challenge they offer to those of us stuck in adolescence.

Christocentrism vs. Christology

2010-05-19T22:08:00.000-06:00

Stumbling toward an anti-theology . . .

When we compare the Christocentric Anabaptist approach with the Reformers' methodology, we can appreciate the distinctive nature of the Anabaptists' approach. The Reformers' hermeneutics can faily be described, explicitly or implicitly, as Christological. Jesus Christ is the supreme revelation of God to humankind, and his death, resurrection, and ascension are God's central acts in history. The biblical message was that through these events salvation was available to those who would believe. The whole of Scripture testified to this central truth. With this Anabaptists heartily agreed. However, the Reformers' emphasis was less on Jesus himself and more on his salvific acts and the doctrine of justification by faith. In this sense, we might describe the Reformers' hermeneutics as soteriological: their understanding of salvation provided the hermeneutical key to Scripture

Anabaptist hermeneutics, however, were not only Christological but Christocentric in the sense of focusing on Jesus himself instead of on a doctrine describing the effects of his redeeming work. For Anabaptists, he was not only their redeemer but also the example they were to imitate and the teacher they were to learn from. Their Christocentrism was tied more firmly to the human Jesus than was the Reformers' Christological approach, and their interpretations of the rest of Scripture were significantly different as a result, making their hermeneutics distinctive in the Reformation context. . . .

Luther's main interest was in Christ as redeemer and the doctrine of justification by faith. He subordinated the life, teaching, and ministry of Jesus to a minor role, even suggesting that to know nothing of these would not be a catastrophic loss. For Anabaptists, such a divorce between the human Jesus and the Christ of faith was untenable. To them, Luther's approach might have been Christological but it was not Christocentric, and they felt it dishonoured Christ. They feared the Reformers had lost sight of Jesus as a person and were left only with a theological principle. (Stuart Murray, Biblical Interpretation in the Anabaptist Tradition, 84-85)

Love and Metaphor

2010-05-05T09:46:00.003-06:00

The lover speaks out of a keen awareness of the power of figurative language to break open closed frames of reference and make us see things with a shock of new recognition. (Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry, 193)

(Alter may be writing about the speaker of Songs 1, but can anyone blame us for feeling for the outer limits of what sort of lover this may be?)

The Psychology of Stuff (from Salon.com)

2010-04-28T09:09:00.007-06:00

Salon.com's Thomas Rogers posted an interview with Randy O. Frost, one of the authors of Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things. Frost, while providing a compassionate exposé of the beauty and neuroses of compulsive hoarders, strikes on an attitude in American culture that seems much more pervasive.

Frost is quick to distinguish compulsive hoarding from plain-and-simple materialism. When Rogers asks, "Different cultures have different attitudes toward objects. Can we blame hoarding behavior on American materialism?", Frost replies,

"I think it might make it worse, but it’s clearly not a major component. If you take someone who's highly materialistic, who buys cars as a part of their identity, these are outward signs to the world saying, 'This is who I am.' In hoarding, the interest is not to show the world who you are, but to experience the objects."

Identity vs. experience. Who really has the neurosis? Stop and think about this. Frost's distinction normalizes the incorporation of possessions into personal identity while making the enjoyment of possessions for use-value or experience-value suspect. There is something morally backward in this outlook, yet this paradigm rings true to the way we live our everyday lives. It is normal to guard your MacBook as part of your identity (at least to protect against identity fraud!)--more normal than enjoying the aesthetics of a bottle cap collection.

This is not to say that hoarding is healthy. No, hoarding is destructive. But I think Frost names the sickness poorly, improperly. When Rogers asks how to distinguish between "somebody who is simply attached to things" and somebody who is a compulsive hoarder, Frost responds,

"It all boils down to the level of distress that the person or people around them experience. If you can’t eat at your table, if you can’t sit on your couch, if you can’t sleep on your bed, then those things are all impairments that occur as a result of hoarding, and that’s the tipping point, from when it’s just a set of behaviors and eccentricities to where it’s a disorder that needs some attention."

To my ears, this sounds like saying, "Cancer's okay, at least until you're dying of it." Instead, we need to open up the heart, the affections, and search out a more basic misdirection of desire. We need to find the lump before it metastasizes. How are our affections attaching themselves to things in sickly ways?

Frost locates one of the impulses to hoard in a "sense of intense responsibility for objects and an unwillingness to waste them." I can relate to this. My Protestant ethic keeps my desk and closets full of things I just can't stomach throwing away. They might be useful later. Maybe that unmatched sock or stack of college notes will be just what I need down the road.

Frost also talks about possessions as opportunities. "One of the hoarders in the book," he relates, "compares her hoarding to a 'river of possibilities,' because each object is a world of possibility for her."

Stewardship, beauty, hope, identity. Normal people would never locate these completely in their stuff. Of course not.

Possessions, according to Frost, are magic. The things in our drawers, on our shelves, lining bookcases, displayed atop the mantel--they are fantastic nodes of connection, imbued with memories, hopes, dreams. Frost explains that possessions "connect people to the world."

Our possessions, whether we are hoarders or just people who like something new every once in a while, are fundamentally relational. We might even say romantic. Like the reappearance of the 19th century muse, stuff (say, an iPad) is my better self, the self who still remembers the faces in all the high school photos in the bottom of the shoebox. A self who makes the best of every opportunity. A self who lives every moment to the fullest, who takes in the beauty of the experience. I don't think an iPad (or any other thing) should be able to do quite all this. Why do we hope that stuff can?

Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (James K. A. Smith)

2010-04-27T14:44:00.008-06:00

I've just read through the first 182 pages of the 230 pages in James K. A. Smith's 2009 Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. This pages are well worth the read, and I'm looking forward to finishing the last chapter and a half over the weekend. Very well done.

In Desiring the Kingdom Smith (who also coordinates the Church and Pomo blog) puts the Body back into the Church, or, perhaps better put, put the Church back into embodied experience. The years following the Reformation and the Enlightenment witnessed a seismic fracture in the life and practice of Christians. Somewhere (Scholasticism? Protestant Orthodoxy? Pietism?) the Church entered in on a long out-of-body experience; faith became about the mind's beliefs rather than a full-bodied discipleship after Jesus. Desiring the Kingdom first problematizes this breakage and then proposes practices that can re-anchor faith in the body.

Toward the end of the Introduction, Smith briefly summarizes the project of Desiring the Kingdom:

Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather it's a matter of being the kind of person who loves rightly--who loves God and neighbor and is oriented to the world by the primacy of that love. We are to be such people by our immersion in the material practices of Christian worship--through affective impact, over time, of sights and smell in water and wine. (32-33)

I like reading Smith. Desiring the Kingdom is approachable; it's funny. Smith sneaks in jabs and oneliners--referencing Old Navy fashion faux-pas and R.E.M. lyrics. Excurses on 1990s films (Moulin Rouge being the best) and the Catholic modern novel (I'm convince to pick up a copy of Walker Percy's Love In the Ruins) give the book a pleasant topography.

Perhaps more importantly than style, Smith parallels the way embodied liturgy ("faith as a form of life," 134) shapes Christian desire within the church with the way embodied practices without the church (what we might call secular liturgies) shape desire. The mall, the cinema, the university--what is the vision of the kingdom (the good life) that these want us to want?

Smith maintains that Desiring the Kingdom can be understood as a "theology of culture" (ecclesial and otherwise) that

-Understands human persons as embodied actors rather than merely thinking things
-Prioritizes practices rather than ideas as the site of challenge and resistance.
-Looks at cultural practices and institutions through the lens of worship or liturgy.
-Retains a robust sense of antithesis without being simply "anti-cultural." (35)

In short, the last time I was this excited about a book was when I read Nathan Kerr's Christ, History, and Apocalyptic (with Charles Taylor's A Secular Age previous to that, itself preceded by Graham Ward's Cities of God). Desiring the Kingdom is a book I plan read and re-read. Very well done.

Mother's Day Movement

2010-04-25T19:27:00.003-06:00

via Tall Skinny Kiwi and The Work of the People

A radical interpretation (in other words, getting at the root) of Mother's Day and its origins. This is good stuff.

The Naked Anabaptist: The Bare Essentials of a Radical Faith

2010-04-13T20:45:00.003-06:00

This book from the Anabaptist Network looks to be well worth a read (if only Amazon would ship me one by mistake . . .).

A review by Alan Kreider over at Jesus Radicals sums up the force of the book:

The book is both modest in tone (we don’t have all the answers; we need other Christian traditions) and bold in content. The heart of book is an exposition of the “bare essentials” of Anabaptism, the seven core convictions that have emerged from lengthy conversations among members of the Anabaptist Network. I reproduce them below in a shortened form because they serve as a taster for the book. If you resonate with these convictions and are interested in a clear, earthy, undefensive discussion of them, and think that Anabaptism might have something to contribute to followers of Jesus today,The Naked Anabaptist could be an important book.
The Core Convictions of the Anabaptist Network (UK)
Jesus is our example, teacher, friend, redeemer and Lord.
Jesus is the focal point of God’s revelation.
Western culture is slowly emerging from the Christendom era when church and state jointly presided over a society in which almost all were assumed to be Christian.
The frequent association of the church with status, wealth and force is inappropriate for followers of Jesus and damages our witness.
Churches are called to be committed communities of discipleship and mission, places of friendship, mutual accountability and multi-voiced worship.
Spirituality and economics are inter-connected.
Peace is at the heart of the gospel.
The Naked Anabaptist: The Bare Essentials of a Radical Faith
Posted using ShareThis