A bit of drama is good for a church's heart. I've read a few places that any good worship service should be dramatic, in one sense or another. Worship should tell a story--the story, if worship is good. And worship should tell this story in such a way that the events become present, after a manner, once more to those gathered. It's participatory theatre (or is it simply eucharistic?).
I believe scripture itself works a bit "eucharistically" or re-present-ationally. The latter stories of scripture retell or recapitulate the former.
So after weeks of retelling the Hebrew Bible's narrative of promise and purpose and another four weeks with that story enacted by the prophet Jonah, we told the story one more time (the final time? the ultimate time?) through a staged reading of John 18-19 on Good Friday.
I wasn't sure if the drama would get the enthusiastic participation telling the Good Friday story (= telling the promise & purpose story) would meet. But as our worship committee dove right in. One man built a rough-hewn, life-size cross out of cherry beams. Another woman dug through the dusty costumes in the church basement and her own sewing pile, while another collected various props. A contractor erected a beautiful empty door-frame. (Doors are very important in John's story!)
By rehearsal on Wednesday of Holy Week, our cast included nearly twenty people, ranging from their early seventies down to some girls in grade 3. We all were wrapped in bathrobes or old pillow cases. Some of us were comfortable with our lines. Some folks' hands and knees were shaking, nervous. As default director, I ran and jumped and shouted and waved my hands around, helping folks figure out when to enter, where to stand, or what my typo-ridden script was trying to communicate.
The performance on Friday morning was beautiful and appropriately tragic. Jesus was betrayed by friends and buried with strangers.
Beginning on the third day, we'd tell stories of resurrection (John offers plenty!). But on Friday morning, we left Jesus lying in the tomb while we went off to family gatherings or fasts.
The Bible begins with a promise. God says, "I love you and I will be with you." Jesus came restating that promise in his own words: "God's kingdom is arriving" and "a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth."
Along with that promise, humanity received a purpose. We were to image God, to care for everything that had been created just as God did. We refused that task, in the Garden and ever since. Jesus called us back to that purpose: "Repent and believe the Good News" and "whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst; indeed, the water I give him will become in a him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."
At Golgotha we rejected that promise, that purpose once more. But at Golgotha, Jesus accepted it for us all. I think it was Karl Barth who first got me thinking about how even while Jesus is God-with-us, Jesus is also us-with-God. Jesus is the perfect human, the first person to receive God's promise in complete joy and to cooperate wholly with God's purpose.
Jesus' obedience unto death, even death on a cross, gives us one concrete point in history to point to and say, "That's what working with God looks like." The cross surely shows us the extent of God's love for a lost and sin-sick humanity. It also shows what one person's love for God looks like when it is really true.
At our Good Friday service I didn't sermonize. We simply performed the story and sang a few songs. I trust that the Spirit-inspired story preaches much better than I do. I'm not sure what people took away from that morning. I trust though that God was at work there, speaking God's good promise to us and directing us out into mission.
Showing posts with label purpose. Show all posts
Showing posts with label purpose. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
The story of a Promise, a Prophet, and a Passion, Part 2
I enjoy flying, even with all the restrictions and even without much leg room. I enjoy flying because I get to look at the world from a new perspective. Through the airplane windows, I see the prairies or the mountains or the countless lakes spread out in every direction. (I like flying best when I get a window seat; otherwise, all my enjoyment leaves a crick in my neck.)
If we remember Jonah's story at all, we know that Jonah eventually admits his miscalculation (But does he admit his fault?) and is thrown into the raging waters. If the storm is one picture of God's ferocious love for us, the great fish is another. The fish saves Jonah from drowning.
The hymn Jonah sings in the fish shows that Jonah still understands himself to be part of God's chosen people. Even though Jonah rebels against God's reason for choosing a people, Jonah is still part of it. Yahweh is the God he calls to for help (Jnh 2.2). In the same way, even though Jeroboam set up idols to replace God's temple, he still understood the northern Israelites to be worshiping Yahweh.
(There's a lesson in this for us today: We worship Jesus in name, but is our worship the kind of worship God desires, the kind that Jesus lived and died and rose again to make possible, see Jn 4.21-24. There's a difference betweens sing about Jesus and singing with Jesus on the way.)
In ch 3, Jonah knows he can't escape God. He puts his hand over his mouth and complies with God's (wrong-headed, in his opinion) desire to warn the Assyrians about divine punishment. Jonah travels the 500 plus miles to Nineveh. When he preaches, the people amazingly repent.
This is perhaps the most profound wonder in the story! Why should the great and powerful Assyrians fear the wrath of a god who was once their vassal? Yet they do, with a fervor that sets them up as a model of repentance even for God's people. (Jonah is read in the afternoon prayer service in some synagogues on Yom Kippur.)
Jonah disappears from the story for a while. Strangely enough, when Jesus talks about the sign of Jonah in Lk 11.29-32, he singles out the repentance of the people of Nineveh. I've often heard that passage taught as drawing a parallel between Jonah's three days in the fish and Jesus' days in the tomb (which Jesus does mention in Mt 12). But here, the lesson for the sign-seekers seems lies in the repentance of the people of Nineveh. Whatever the Ninevehites learned from Jonah, that is what people in Jesus' day and in our day need to learn from Jesus.
Back in Jnh 4, the focus shifts to what Jonah failed to learn from Nineveh (and also from the storm, the sailors, and the fish). This is a lesson about God's mercy--something Jonah confesses quite orthodoxly in 4.2. Yahweh, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity, is something of a creedal statement in the Hebrew Bible (see Ex 34.6-7, Ps 145.8, Joel 2.13). Jonah gets his theology right, but he misunderstands his place in that theology.
If the OT is about God calling (anointing?) a chosen few to help God keep the original promise despite our rebellion, then Jonah stands as a foil, a counterexample that shows how we, then and now, so often misunderstand God's plans. God called and commissioned Abraham to be blessed and to be a blessing, that through his and Sarah's family, all the families of the world would be blessed. By the time we hear Jonah's story, the prophetic representative of the people balks at God's question, "Should I not have concern for the great city Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left--and also many animals?" (4.11).
The question for our band of believers whether we'll follow Jonah or Jesus. Jesus is the first shining narrative example in scripture of someone giving away every blessing they receive for the benefit of others. The Spirit is poured into Jesus as baptism, and after resurrection, he pours the Spirit out on his followers, telling them to pour out that same Spirit on all flesh (see Jn 20 and Acts 2). Jonah understood salvation and election to be a matter of personal gain; Jesus shows it to be one first and foremost of generosity and love, even love unto death.
That's where our fellowship went next: to Jesus's death and glorious reward.
Our three-week overview of the Hebrew Bible was like the view from a plane. We were able to see the topography of God's promise, our purpose, and our rebellion from our altitude. But to really know the story, you need to travel through it at a walking pace, maybe even more slowly. Only then do your surroundings become more than postcard-potential scenery. Only then does the dirt cling to your skin and the events seep into your blood.
So for the next four weeks, we slowed down. We camped out with a prophet. We journeyed with Jonah.
If you grew up in churches like I did, you heard the story of Jonah from early on. It's a story made for children's books: wonderful illustrations, a good moral (especially if we only mind the first three chapters). I think the moral my Sunday School teachers drew from the prophet's story was usually along the lines of "Obey God" or "Don't run away from God." These are fine takes on the story as far as they go, but if we listen a bit more closely, we'll find the story is much, much richer.
A lot of people get hung up on whether Jonah is a true story or not. Was the prophet actually swallowed by a huge fish? Did an Assyrian emperor ever reign from Nineveh? I think there are good, biblical cases to be made for both sides: Jonah, the book, may be a prophetic biography or a prophetic parable. Either way, it's true to what God intends it to be.
(There are also bad cases made for both sides. For example, the fact that being swallowed by a fish alive is unlikely or even impossible is not a good reason to reject the story as historically reliable. If God can raise a dead man to life, certainly God can preserve the life of a prophet within a fish. On the other hand, just because a book is in the canon, it doesn't mean it's a history book. No one looks askance at Jesus' parables because they're fictitious.)
I think Jonah's story parallels the story of the kingdom of Israel (where he worked, see 2 Ki 14.25) to an uncanny degree. Just like the Israelites corporately, Jonah was given a purpose by God (Jnh 1.2), and just like the Israelites, he rejected it because he thought he knew better than God.
Jonah, as we learn in 4.2, believed he knew more about who deserved punishment and blessing than God did. In 2 Ki 14.23-27, we hear that in Jonah's days, Israel was sitting pretty on the international scene because of God's blessing. A bit of historical digging (shout out to K. Lawson Younger, who taught me a lot about Jonah's context) turns up the fact that the world empire, Assyria, was in something of political recession. The kingdom of Urartu to the mountainous north of Nineveh, one of Assyria's powerhouse cities, was distracting the Assyrian emperor's empire-building troops from the backwaters of Israel and Judah. My guess is that Jonah the prophet interpreted these events as blessings for God's chosen and punishment on their oppressors. So when God's message came to warn Nineveh about it's impending judgment, Jonah thought God must be confused.
The Israelites made the same kind of high-handed judgments about God's purpose for them over and over again in their history. Even before the tribes split into competing kingdoms, David interpreted blessing on his reign as license to throw around kingly weight (skim the progression of events form 2 Sam ch 5 to ch 12; see also 2 Sam 24). It was this same ego/ethno-centric outlook that led to the split of the kingdoms. Rehoboam saw his father Solomon's wealth as proof that oppressive taxation, forced labor, and imperial aspirations were the way to go. With his announcement in 1 Ki 12.13-14 leads to mass rebellion and civil war. Similarly (and key to the northern Israel-ite Jonah's story), when the tribes of the agriculturally-rich north chose Jeroboam as rebel leader, fulfiling God's promise (1 Ki 11.26-40; 12.2, 20), Jeroboam took it as justification to shore up his political position by displacing the Jerusalem temple with two golden bulls as sites to worship Yahweh.
Everywhere in the Israelites' story we have see people thinking their plans are better than God's. And that's what Jonah does. Rather than traveling east to preach repentance to the Assyrians, he boards a ship headed west to the end of the earth.
But God doesn't simply let him go. Nor does God wipe him out. God sends a furious storm, but the storm never sinks the boat. Surely the God who split the Red Sea would have no trouble capsizing a ship.
No, instead God sends the storm as discipline, as a painful and costly reminder of Jonah's purpose in God's plans. This is a tactic we watch God employing over and over again, beginning in Judges. In Jdg 2.13-14, we hear,
[The Israelites] aroused Yahweh's anger because they forsook him and served Baal and the Ashtoreths. In his anger against Israel Yahweh gave them into the hands of raiders who plundered them. He sold them into the hands of their enemies all around, whom they were no longer able to resist.But as Heb 12.4-11 explains, discipline is not destruction. Discipline is the way a loving God calls us back to our senses. The letter to the Hebrews quotes Prov 3.11-12 in this passage: My son, do not despise Yahweh's discipline, and do not resent his rebuke, because Yahweh disciplines those he loves, as a father the son he delights in. Discipline for the Israelites was a sign of God's devotion to them, of God's refusal to let them walk away from their purpose. The storm, as surely as the fish, was a means of salvation for Jonah.
If we remember Jonah's story at all, we know that Jonah eventually admits his miscalculation (But does he admit his fault?) and is thrown into the raging waters. If the storm is one picture of God's ferocious love for us, the great fish is another. The fish saves Jonah from drowning.
The hymn Jonah sings in the fish shows that Jonah still understands himself to be part of God's chosen people. Even though Jonah rebels against God's reason for choosing a people, Jonah is still part of it. Yahweh is the God he calls to for help (Jnh 2.2). In the same way, even though Jeroboam set up idols to replace God's temple, he still understood the northern Israelites to be worshiping Yahweh.
(There's a lesson in this for us today: We worship Jesus in name, but is our worship the kind of worship God desires, the kind that Jesus lived and died and rose again to make possible, see Jn 4.21-24. There's a difference betweens sing about Jesus and singing with Jesus on the way.)
In ch 3, Jonah knows he can't escape God. He puts his hand over his mouth and complies with God's (wrong-headed, in his opinion) desire to warn the Assyrians about divine punishment. Jonah travels the 500 plus miles to Nineveh. When he preaches, the people amazingly repent.
This is perhaps the most profound wonder in the story! Why should the great and powerful Assyrians fear the wrath of a god who was once their vassal? Yet they do, with a fervor that sets them up as a model of repentance even for God's people. (Jonah is read in the afternoon prayer service in some synagogues on Yom Kippur.)
Jonah disappears from the story for a while. Strangely enough, when Jesus talks about the sign of Jonah in Lk 11.29-32, he singles out the repentance of the people of Nineveh. I've often heard that passage taught as drawing a parallel between Jonah's three days in the fish and Jesus' days in the tomb (which Jesus does mention in Mt 12). But here, the lesson for the sign-seekers seems lies in the repentance of the people of Nineveh. Whatever the Ninevehites learned from Jonah, that is what people in Jesus' day and in our day need to learn from Jesus.
Back in Jnh 4, the focus shifts to what Jonah failed to learn from Nineveh (and also from the storm, the sailors, and the fish). This is a lesson about God's mercy--something Jonah confesses quite orthodoxly in 4.2. Yahweh, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity, is something of a creedal statement in the Hebrew Bible (see Ex 34.6-7, Ps 145.8, Joel 2.13). Jonah gets his theology right, but he misunderstands his place in that theology.
If the OT is about God calling (anointing?) a chosen few to help God keep the original promise despite our rebellion, then Jonah stands as a foil, a counterexample that shows how we, then and now, so often misunderstand God's plans. God called and commissioned Abraham to be blessed and to be a blessing, that through his and Sarah's family, all the families of the world would be blessed. By the time we hear Jonah's story, the prophetic representative of the people balks at God's question, "Should I not have concern for the great city Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left--and also many animals?" (4.11).
The question for our band of believers whether we'll follow Jonah or Jesus. Jesus is the first shining narrative example in scripture of someone giving away every blessing they receive for the benefit of others. The Spirit is poured into Jesus as baptism, and after resurrection, he pours the Spirit out on his followers, telling them to pour out that same Spirit on all flesh (see Jn 20 and Acts 2). Jonah understood salvation and election to be a matter of personal gain; Jesus shows it to be one first and foremost of generosity and love, even love unto death.
That's where our fellowship went next: to Jesus's death and glorious reward.
Monday, April 15, 2013
The story of a Promise, a Prophet, and a Passion, Part 1
It's been a few silent months since Prayer Week! Life in our fellowship has been full, very full. Here's an update:
Weeks spent in prayer prayer, communion, and fasting brought me to one question: "How is God asking us to share in Christ’s self-sacrifice in order that we can share his love with our sisters, brothers, and neighbors?"
It's a question of purpose, a question about the mission God gave Jesus and Jesus passed on to us.
What better to begin looking for an answer than to return to the Scriptures that revealed Jesus' purpose. Starting in Genesis, our fellowship spent three weeks tracing out God's purpose for God's partner people in the Hebrew Bible.
(Daniel Erlander's Manna and Mercy offers a great starting point for a mission- or purpose-oriented way of reading the Israelites' story. I'm also thankful for the gift of Leslie Newbigin's The Open Secret from a dear friend in Chicago. Newbigin offers a second, fuller perspective on this question of purpose and scripture--though The Open Secret focuses much more on the New Testament.)
This story, in my view, begins with a promise: God promises to be with the world God created by means of the God's image in humanity (see Gen 1.26-28). God's instructions to rule/care for creation fill out the way imaging God mediates God's presence and love to all the world. (After our great rebellion, this mediating function gets passed first to a family/nation then to a tent/temple and finally to an individual person and, through him, back to a renewed humanity; where and when these transitions occur is difficult to pin down, but the dynamic is clearly present.)
As you can see, you can't talk about God's promise for any length of time without beginning to talk about the purpose for humanity that accompanies it. Right relationship with God always seems to be partnership.
We traced out what happened when humanity rebelled, disregarding God's project for the lure of choosing our own. ("You shall be like God. . ." said the snake.) Rejecting our role in God's good rule, we found out that there are other forces eager to hold sway over us: death, conflict, fear, sin, Satan. The first story after our exit from the Garden is about fear, jealousy, and death rupturing the relationship between brother and brother (see Gen 4). If we read on through to Gen 11, we hear story after story of the good things God gave us--like technology, dignity, sex, language--one by one turning against us, seeking to snuff out our life. God's good world has been turned upside-down!
Quickly it becomes clear that if God means to keep the promise about being with us and caring for us, God is going to need first to rescue us from the mess we've made. I suppose that God might of done this in a flash from the sky--a happier version of Noah's thunderstorm. But in the story that we have, God continues to work with the creation story logic of mediation: He calls a family, Abraham's family, to bring God's blessing back to the world. They will pick up and dust off the forgotten image of God, so to speak. They sign back on to the role of being God's partners, God's co-workers.
The story is long and complicated. The partner people themselves are soon overcome, first by famine and then by Egyptian slave-masters and warlords, always by their weak hearts. Abraham's descendants, the Israelites, are slaves to the false-god Pharaoh and the Egyptian pantheon.
God again sends a mediator of God's care, concern, and, now, salvation: Moses. Moses brings God's deliverance to the Israelites; now they're free to do God's will. God leads them to the holy mountain to give them instructions about how to live as a freedom people, as God's co-workers in liberation and love.
But, it turns out, the rebellious spirit of Adam and Eve is still alive and well in the hearts of even the partner people. While Moses takes down God's how-to manual, the people rebel and begin living by the old Egyptian logic of slave and master, greedy for power, bowing down to whatever so-called god would give them a leg up on the surrounding nations. (I think of the golden calf debacle, but Ex through Num is full of stories of rebellions and hankerings for the old Egyptian way of living.)
Unfortunately things don't get any better once the people finally make it Canaan. It could have been freedom land, but the Israelites reject God's plans and maintain it as the gameboard of competing (Canaanite then Israelite) warlords' power plays. We can already trace the pattern in Judges--the cycle of giving up God's ways for those of the warlord nations, God's discipline by invasion, the appeal for God's help, God's loving mercy to send yet another deliver, and a season of peace before again walking away. The cycle keeps spinning all the way through Samuel and Kings, even the lives of rulers who start out godly, like David, but end up taking wives and killing off competitors and amassing wealth and weapons just like any other warlord.
Through this all, God remains committed to God's promise and purpose. This shows up as discipline--the invasion of Philistines, the split of the Israelite kingdom, the conquest by Assyria and finally by Babylon. God is not willing to let the partner people walk away. God keeps calling them back to Godself. (Read Habakkuk.)
Over we three weeks I told this story to our fellowship, pausing to recount the tales of Bible characters who put tragic flesh on this skeleton of God's purpose and our rebellion. It's a rich story, full of sub-plots and foreshadowing and surprising reversals. It's a story that produced some beautiful poetry and sagely reflection in the Wisdom books. The Prophets often help point out the bones of God's promise and purpose, but they introduce their own complications as well. Telling this story is the work of lifetime; I had to skip a lot to condense it to three weeks.
To offer a taste of the richness of the story, we spent the next four weeks meditating on one character's story within this grand story, the story of a prophet. More on that next time . . .
Weeks spent in prayer prayer, communion, and fasting brought me to one question: "How is God asking us to share in Christ’s self-sacrifice in order that we can share his love with our sisters, brothers, and neighbors?"
It's a question of purpose, a question about the mission God gave Jesus and Jesus passed on to us.
What better to begin looking for an answer than to return to the Scriptures that revealed Jesus' purpose. Starting in Genesis, our fellowship spent three weeks tracing out God's purpose for God's partner people in the Hebrew Bible.
(Daniel Erlander's Manna and Mercy offers a great starting point for a mission- or purpose-oriented way of reading the Israelites' story. I'm also thankful for the gift of Leslie Newbigin's The Open Secret from a dear friend in Chicago. Newbigin offers a second, fuller perspective on this question of purpose and scripture--though The Open Secret focuses much more on the New Testament.)
This story, in my view, begins with a promise: God promises to be with the world God created by means of the God's image in humanity (see Gen 1.26-28). God's instructions to rule/care for creation fill out the way imaging God mediates God's presence and love to all the world. (After our great rebellion, this mediating function gets passed first to a family/nation then to a tent/temple and finally to an individual person and, through him, back to a renewed humanity; where and when these transitions occur is difficult to pin down, but the dynamic is clearly present.)
As you can see, you can't talk about God's promise for any length of time without beginning to talk about the purpose for humanity that accompanies it. Right relationship with God always seems to be partnership.
We traced out what happened when humanity rebelled, disregarding God's project for the lure of choosing our own. ("You shall be like God. . ." said the snake.) Rejecting our role in God's good rule, we found out that there are other forces eager to hold sway over us: death, conflict, fear, sin, Satan. The first story after our exit from the Garden is about fear, jealousy, and death rupturing the relationship between brother and brother (see Gen 4). If we read on through to Gen 11, we hear story after story of the good things God gave us--like technology, dignity, sex, language--one by one turning against us, seeking to snuff out our life. God's good world has been turned upside-down!
Quickly it becomes clear that if God means to keep the promise about being with us and caring for us, God is going to need first to rescue us from the mess we've made. I suppose that God might of done this in a flash from the sky--a happier version of Noah's thunderstorm. But in the story that we have, God continues to work with the creation story logic of mediation: He calls a family, Abraham's family, to bring God's blessing back to the world. They will pick up and dust off the forgotten image of God, so to speak. They sign back on to the role of being God's partners, God's co-workers.
The story is long and complicated. The partner people themselves are soon overcome, first by famine and then by Egyptian slave-masters and warlords, always by their weak hearts. Abraham's descendants, the Israelites, are slaves to the false-god Pharaoh and the Egyptian pantheon.
God again sends a mediator of God's care, concern, and, now, salvation: Moses. Moses brings God's deliverance to the Israelites; now they're free to do God's will. God leads them to the holy mountain to give them instructions about how to live as a freedom people, as God's co-workers in liberation and love.
But, it turns out, the rebellious spirit of Adam and Eve is still alive and well in the hearts of even the partner people. While Moses takes down God's how-to manual, the people rebel and begin living by the old Egyptian logic of slave and master, greedy for power, bowing down to whatever so-called god would give them a leg up on the surrounding nations. (I think of the golden calf debacle, but Ex through Num is full of stories of rebellions and hankerings for the old Egyptian way of living.)
Unfortunately things don't get any better once the people finally make it Canaan. It could have been freedom land, but the Israelites reject God's plans and maintain it as the gameboard of competing (Canaanite then Israelite) warlords' power plays. We can already trace the pattern in Judges--the cycle of giving up God's ways for those of the warlord nations, God's discipline by invasion, the appeal for God's help, God's loving mercy to send yet another deliver, and a season of peace before again walking away. The cycle keeps spinning all the way through Samuel and Kings, even the lives of rulers who start out godly, like David, but end up taking wives and killing off competitors and amassing wealth and weapons just like any other warlord.
Through this all, God remains committed to God's promise and purpose. This shows up as discipline--the invasion of Philistines, the split of the Israelite kingdom, the conquest by Assyria and finally by Babylon. God is not willing to let the partner people walk away. God keeps calling them back to Godself. (Read Habakkuk.)
Over we three weeks I told this story to our fellowship, pausing to recount the tales of Bible characters who put tragic flesh on this skeleton of God's purpose and our rebellion. It's a rich story, full of sub-plots and foreshadowing and surprising reversals. It's a story that produced some beautiful poetry and sagely reflection in the Wisdom books. The Prophets often help point out the bones of God's promise and purpose, but they introduce their own complications as well. Telling this story is the work of lifetime; I had to skip a lot to condense it to three weeks.
To offer a taste of the richness of the story, we spent the next four weeks meditating on one character's story within this grand story, the story of a prophet. More on that next time . . .
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