Jubilee

this sunday i began my career as a jr. high sunday school co-leader. i slipped into the role unexpectedly when i was playing foursquare with some neighbor kids at our church’s vbs kick-off block party. the red ball had bounced into the gutter full of street-juice, so after i grabbed it i went to the gatorade cooler to wash the sewage stench off my hands with some ice water. that’s when our church’s christian ed director pulled me aside: “josh, i was just hoping to get a chance to talk to you…” turns out summertime is a break not just for school kids but also for the regular sunday school teachers. i was happy to get a chance to hang out with some of the coolest, if not a little adolescently awkward, people in the church.

but it’s a heavy responsibility. helping anyone follow Jesus is, but all the more so when the people are young and influence-able. but it’s not an accountability i share alone; i have a very cool and like-minded co-conspirator taking on this responsibility with me. i’ve been playing with how best to get the kids to buy-in to the group for the summer, despite all the seasonal distractions (vacations, nice weather, being twelve, etc.). whatever their finished, pithy form, i’ve settled on a few goals for what i’d like to see happen in the group: i want the kids to dig deeper into the spiritual side of following Jesus; i want them to explore their emerging, christian identities; i want them to talk with our church-community about what they’re learning; and i want them to live out what they’re learning in loving service and proclamation. basically, i want us together to become more like Jesus in how we think, feel, and act.

but this is far harder to accomplish in a forty-five minute class than on paper. take this week’s lesson for example: the assigned texts (for the whole church–we’re doing a churchwide curriculum to foster conversation around dinnertables; this summer’s curriculum is built around the theme “things that make for peace”) were leviticus 25.8-55 and luke 4.16-21, the laws instituting the jubilee year and Jesus’ proclamation of jubilee. after a quick walk to our local dunkin donuts (a great way to win the hearts of six pre-teens!), we sat down, me with my coffee, them with their donuts and cool-lattas and croissant, to explore the passage.

Concerning Denominations

Last night i woke up around 3:30 am. I haven’t installed the new-to-us air conditioning unit in the bedroom window as of yet and yesterday was the first day in the chicago summer to feel like it spiked ninety degrees. So i was up in the not-yet-grey hours of the morning, dehydrated and unable to fall back to sleep.

Naturally, i turned to Karl Barth to keep me company while I drank a cup of decaf chocolate-hazelnut tea (good stuff) and sat next to the window. As I struggled through Church Dogmatics‘ thick prose, the distance between Barth’s germanic-reformed meaning of evangelical and my own rocky mountain, non-denominational take on the word kept pushing its way to the fore of my mind.

Swords to Plowshares and the Rest of the Story

At church on Sunday we sang a song that has been running through my mind ever since then. It’s a folk-gospel-influenced tune written, if i’m not mistaken, by a couple in the church. The lyrics basically follow the first few verses of Isaiah 2.

We tend to gravitate there:

In the last days the mountain of Yahweh’s temple will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills and all nations will stream to it.
Many peoples will come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of Yahweh, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths.”
The law will go out from Zion, the word of Yahweh from Jerusalem.
He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.
Come, O house of Jacob, let us walk in the light of Yahweh.

Perhaps rightly so. We discover ourselves in a world brimming over with violence, with self-interest erupting into the clash of nation-states and the clash of spouses, friends, coworkers. A future emptied of these painful altercations, where that energy is redirected to productive creativity rather than sharp-edged retorts and piercing statements (or, to switch fields, rather than to the military-technological complex)–what more could we request?

But perhaps it is more testament of our haggard, world-weary souls than to the warm-and-fuzzy character of God’s eschatological intervention. A close look at the text will begin to point us in this direction; setting the text in its broader context drives this point home with unsettling insistence.

True Religion

on reflection, i think the basic is christian stance is one of confusion. if we identify with the disciples more than anyone else (perhaps after Jesus), then confusion is our fundamental response to God's revelation of himself.

when i read the Gospels, i can't help but be caught by how strange Jesus seems to act. picture the night of the last supper as narrated by john. the guys are at a party, eating some good food, telling stories, nudging each other in the ribs at private jokes. suddenly Jesus starts speaking about leaving them. what a mood killer. just a day or two ago he rode into jerusalem with the crowds fronting him as a political revolutionary. now he's talking about leaving. but it fits, a little, cuz Jesus has been talking about death. he's been a sort of funk this entire trip to jerusalem. like he's paranoid of the other establishment religious leaders. but he's the miracleworker. he's the one with the big ideas. so they go with it.

the disciples must be so confused. they must cringe at the moment to moment fear of having their feet knocked out from under them. you never know what to expect with Jesus.

i sometimes think that when i'm most disoriented feeling, when i don't know quite what God is doing in my life, only that he is actively surgically altering something or other within me, then i am closest to true religion. similarly, when i'm "caring for the orphan, the alien, and the widow"--however poorly my attempts at it go--i am often quite certain that i have no clue what i'm doing. all my actions seem inconsequential; if God is present here--if Christ is present here--i can't see how. and that confusion is, perhaps, the holy presence of God.

Some Thoughts about Change

some thoughts about change:

things are bad the way the are now. we can all agree to that. amen? and the gospel is about change, about love and about redemption. so what does this mean?

part of being the church (that's you and me, fellow christian) is working for change in the bad situation. it's part of being Jesus for the world, part of incarnating God's love and our love for God (how's that for construing a generative, greek friends?). yet there's a second, nasty, part. Jesus assures us (and history does as well) that all our efforts at initiating change will fail. we our born (again) failures. this is where faith factors in. faith is the commitment to continue in this effort of change despite the miserable outcomes. faith is trusting that changing the bad situation is the endgame of God's plan for the world.

to get really, honestly theological about this whole matter, we need to bring in "the kingdom" vocabulary. nothing concerned Jesus more than the kingdom of God. most of his preaching, his parables, and his prophesying had the kingdom or the coming of the kingdom as their content.