And How ABOUT That Holy Spirit?

Having been raised in various Pentecostal churches, and attending an Assemblies of God church into my mid-twenties, it seems ironic that the theology of the Holy Spirit seems so foreign and unfamiliar to me.  Growing up, language about “the Holy Ghost” and “the Holy Spirit” was nearly as commonplace as references to Jesus.  But the implications of those references were limited and vague.  “What does the Holy Spirit do?”  The Holy Spirit speaks to us, tells us how to live and what choices to make, and “it” blesses us with gifts like glossolalia, prophesy and healing. “Who is the Holy Spirit?”  That question was a little more complicated.  We didn’t pray to the Holy Spirit… I don’t even think I prayed to Jesus, come to think of it.  I prayed to God the Father.  Implicit even in this was the hierarchical dominance of the Father as the “head” of the Trinity.  “Father” in many ways was synonymous with God, while Jesus was the Son of God, and the Spirit was… something else.

Stanley Grenz’s book Created for Community discussed in depth the function of the Spirit as it empowers the social nature of the Trinity.  But this does not deal specifically with who the Holy Spirit is. Clark Pinnock explains we must “begin with the identity of the Spirit as a divine Person in a social Trinity and with the sheer liveliness of God… We start with the identity of the triune God and with the face of the Spirit within this community as the ecstasy of life.”[1] Pinnock points out, however, that contemporary theologians often fail to make such meaning intelligible to lay Christians, or pragmatic to the Christian life.

inuity with more traditional, orthodox denominations.[3]

Pentecostalism represents a grassroots spiritual movement rather than a novel theological construction.  It has not so much produced new theology as a new kind of spirituality and aggressive evangelism methods.  Therefore, it has provoked controversy at almost every stage of its development.[4]

Without a firm theological construct to explain and locate itself within a broader Christian context, such spirituality can too easily become a destabilizing force.  Just as important: without strong foundations in Trinitarian orthodoxy, understanding of the Holy Spirit’s connection to the Father/Mother/Creator can be manipulated for modern cultural agendas.  Kevin Giles explains, “the contemporary conservative evangelical case for the permanent subordination

of women frequently asserts that the Son is eternally subordinated to the Father.”[5] Giles’ argument extends into the parallel relationship between Father and Spirit.  Rather than a prisoner to normative culture, Giles explains that the Spirit transcends fleeting human morals, and proceeds forward, powering an evolving awareness of God’s love:

On the matter of slavery, virtually all contemporary evangelicals deny the tradition… They begin with the altogether modern idea that slavery is an evil.  If slavery is evil, they conclude, it cannot be endorsed in the Bible because the Bible cannot legitimate what is evil.  The problem is that the tradition gives no support to such an idea.  Until the latter half of the eighteenth century, virtually every theologian held that the Bible regulated and legitimated slavery… It was only when cultural values changed as God’s work in history moved forward that human beings for the first time came to see that slavery must be rejected and opposed.  In this new social context teaching hitherto passed over in Scripture came to the fore: all people are made in the image of God, all are loved by God, all are to be set free in Christ.  As a result, this change in culture led to a change in theology.  The tradition was rejected and new ways of interpreting relevant biblical passages emerged.[6]

Reading Giles’ book, it is easy to continually make parallels between the culturally-informed subordination of black slaves and women, and the contemporary marginalization of LGBT people today.  As cultural values change (as God’s work in history moves forward) human beings have begun to see that the condemnation and marginalization of homosexuals must be rejected and opposed.  To use Giles’ words, such tradition should be rejected, and new ways of interpreting relevant biblical passages must emerge. In many denominations worldwide, including my own United Church of Christ, this has occurred.  We affirm and even ordain LGBTQ people, along with the ELCA Lutheran Church, the Episcopal Church, and the PCUSA Presbyterian Church, among others.  Yet Giles makes a seemingly impassioned d

efense against such an association at the end of his book, explaining why he doesn’t make the logical jump to human sexuali

ty. His defense appears much more political than theological, as he seems compelled to measure and limit the implications of the previous 270 pages he’s written.  I’m reminded of the ways Martin Luther opposed and undermined the movement he began, when they crossed the lines of what he deemed “acceptable” protest against Roman Catholic teaching and praxis.  T

hat opposition even led to his affirmation of the persecution and murder of countless “Protestant” peasants of Luther’s day.  Luther wanted to heed the Spirit’s call for change, but only the change he personally recognized as relevant and necessary.  Still, the Holy Spirit proceeded forth.

It’s impossible to be certain of the Holy Spirit’s specific direction and prophetic manifestation, as so many Christians and so many “prophets” oppose each other’s conclusions.  But I believe now, more than ever, that the Holy Spirit is present and active in the world, and working to reconcile all things to God’s self.

My favorite explanation of the Holy Spirit is from Denis Edwards, who describes the Holy Spirit as the Breath of God:

[The Spirit] can be thought of as breathing life into the universe in all its stages: into its laws and initial conditions, its origin and its evolution… The Spirit enables the emergence of the new at
every stage from the first nuclei of hydrogen and helium, to atoms, galaxies, the Sun, bacterial forms of life, complex cells the wonderfully diverse forms of life on Earth, and human beings who can think and love and praise.[7]

There is frustrating mystery and ambiguity as we explore the nature of God, Spirit and Trinity.  Even more frustrating: the manipulation and power-grabbing that too often comes with this endeavor.  May we all continue evolving together, by the transcendent and immanent power of the Holy Spirit.

[2] Veli-Matti Karkkainen, Pneumatology: The Holy Spirit in Ecumenical, International and Contextual Perspective (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002), 67.

[3] Vatican II marked a turn in the Roman Catholic Church’s pneumatology and spiritual praxis, leading to the Charismatic Renewal of the 1960s.  That renewal has been affirmed by three contemporary popes, but it remains a minority movement within the broader church.

[4] Karkkainen, Pneumatology, 90.

[5] Kevin Giles, Trinity and Subordinationism: The Doctrine of God and the Contemporary Gender Debate (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 23.

[6] Giles, Trinity and Subordinationism, 8.

[7] Denis Edwards, Breath of Life: A Theology of the Creator Spirit (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2004), 43-44.

What Do I Do With the Atonement?

Clearly I haven’t been up to much on this blog, but my wheels are still spinning (albeit, much slower than a few years ago)… I’m struggling through concepts of the Atonement in Seminary.

As many of my seminary class discussions reveal, it’s difficult for Evangelicals to “part” with the idea of an angry God that has become so culturally-implicit in our conceptions of Christ’s atonement.  Regardless of the specific theory of atonement, we have collectively canonized our models, often without significant biblical support.  The language of “atonement” itself creates challenges, as it expresses the need for humanity to be reconciled to God.  We read “punishment” into reconciliation, and like Paul the Apostle, we employ legal paradigms to articulate divine love and forgiveness, as if our legal system is capable of such feats.

Gregory Boyd and Paul Eddy write, “For Christians, however, Jesus’ death and resurrection are nothing less than the centerpieces of world history.”[1]

The three classic views – recapitulation, ransom, and Christus Victor – understand sin primarily as enslavement under evil powers… Salvation is a deliverance of humanity from bondage through participation in the death and resurrection of the incarnate Christ.[2]

My definitions here are brief.  The recapitulation theory illustrates how Christ succeeds where Adam failed, undoing the errors of Eden, and the subsequent curses on humanity.  Just as all of creation “fell” with Adam, redemption through recapitulation anticipates the deliverance and restoration of all creation.[3]

The ransom theory of atonement, an earlier incarnation of the satisfaction theory, posits God as a wronged subject, owed reparation for those wrongs.  Either humanity would have to pay, or God would have to pay.  By becoming a man and offering himself as sacrifice, God paid his own debt.[4] This easily transitions into the penal substitution view, which utilizes a courtroom scene to describe the immovable demands of justice and retribution in the face sin.

Of the classic views, the Christus Victor theory is my favorite, but that only takes me so far.  Rather than God’s wrath over sin, it is Christ’s victory in truth and love that redeems and frees us.  “Christ is the cosmic champion who overcomes the evil forces that hold humanity in bondage.”[5]

As my personal theology has developed and evolved over my years at seminary, I’ve come to believe that it is the birth and life (still living) that Christianity and the salvation of creation rest on.  I have been inspired and deeply moved by the Wesleyan concept of relational theology, and I’ve found it pastorally instructive – particularly in a liberal mainline church where language of sin is difficult to even engage.  I find spiritual growth and connection in the idea that sin is anything that disrupts our relationship with God, and being in right relationship with us is God’s deepest desire.  I can envision how the Incarnation facilitates, exemplifies, and empowers our relationship with God.  Still, I struggle with the idea that “our relationship with God and our eternal destiny depend on what Jesus did when he died and rose again…”[6]

Boyd and Eddy assert that “all Christians have always agreed” on that dependence on Christ’s death and resurrection, but this is not entirely accurate.  For example, there have been strains of universalism throughout Christianity’s two thousand years.  Some universalism still relies on a traditional atonement model for its articulation of universal salvation for all.  However, other Christian traditions have defined a process of temporal, systemic, corporeal salvation modeled in the life and teachings of Jesus (even Jesus Christ, the son of God) which actively mirrors pre-existent salvation for all of creation, not dissimilar in concept to the inner light George Fox recognized in all of humanity.  By following and imitating Christ, we participate in salvation, we ourselves become saved, and we save others.  This ethos quickly aligns with a theology of liberation that values orthopraxis over orthodoxy.[7] As Leonardo and Clodovis Boff wrote:

Liberation theology maintains a stance of criticism.  For example, the Scholastic theology of the eleventh to the fourteenth century made undeniable contributions to the precise and systematic presentation of Christian truth, but liberation theology criticizes it for its overbearing tendency to theoreticism…[8]

While liberation theology does not uniformly reject eternal damnation, not all theological models of salvation are predicated on a literal hell, or on a differentiation between saved and unsaved “souls.”  As Rob Bell illustrates in Love Wins, there is already plenty of hell on earth for our theological fodder.

An argument critical of traditional atonement models does not necessitate undermining the significance of Christ’s death and resurrection.  The crucifixion demonstrates what John Caputo refers to as the weakness of God.  “The God of forgiveness, mercy and compassion shines like a white light on the hypocrisy of those who, under the cover of God, oppress the most defenseless people in society.”[9] Caputo argues that God did not demonstrate might or power, but forgiveness and protest against injustice.  In this model, the crucifixion is not a transaction, earning God’s forgiveness or even making us acceptable to God.  Rather, it is fully realized, fully incarnated evidence of God’s already-active forgiveness.  The Incarnation, at every stage of Jesus’ life, demonstrates the inherent nature of God. My conclusion-to-date (shaky, ill-formed, and still evolving) is that God did not demand the crucifixion for creation to be saved; the crucifixion was an inevitability, demonstrating the natural response of fallen creation to perfect love.  Brokenness begets brokenness, and though forgiven, we are still in need of saving.  These are separate concepts.  In the same vein as the crucifixion, resurrection is an equal inevitability, demonstrating the powerlessness of sin and death over perfect love.

Evangelical Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002), 114.

[2] R. Larry Shelton, Cross and Covenant: Interpreting the Atonement for 21^st Century

Mission (Tyrone: Paternoster, 2006), 160.

[3] Ibid., 164-165.

[4] Gregory A. Boyd and Paul R. Eddy, Across the Spectrum: Understanding Issues in Evangelical Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002), 114.

[5] R. Larry Shelton, Cross and Covenant: Interpreting the Atonement for 21^st Century Mission (Tyrone: Paternoster, 2006), 167.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Colin J. D. Greene, Christology in Cultural Perspective: Marking Out the Horizons (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003), 200.

[8] Leonardo and Clodovis Boff, Introducing Liberation Theology (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2008), 36.

[9] John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?  The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 83.

My first e-book contribution: ‘Renew 52′ (free!)

Hey everybody,
I contributed to a project some months back, and it’s now available for download HERE!

Renew 52: 50+ Ideas to Revitalize Your Congregation from Leaders under 50 is a free e-book, edited by David J. Lose, that features short essays from 54 Christian leaders in 15 different traditions. The authors are guided by the conviction that congregations are the primary place where the Spirit is at work for the renewal of the church. Pick one or read them all—and revitalize your congregation.

The Spirit is moving in exciting ways. We are on the cusp of exciting, if unpredictable, renewal. In spite of the well-documented story of mainline decline, there is a lot of growth, a lot of potential, and a lot of hope in our congregations as well.

Christian Piatt, Pete Rollins, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Roger Nam (George Fox shoutout!) and Tony Jones are all contributors as well.

I’m actually pretty happy with my little piece (which is rare by the time publication rolls around) so download it for free and check it out!

The Pale Blue Dot…

A good buddy of mine sent me this the other day, and I found it really moving.  I think I’ve read it before, but wanted to share…

In his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, astronomer Carl Sagan related his thoughts on a deeper meaning of the photograph:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Sorry Google, I Blog Pro-Violence…

I don’t really have the time or energy to argue this.  I don’t need the couple of bucks I’ve made off of them.  It’s just obnoxious

Sermon: Asleep in the Stern

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been two-and-a-half months since I’ve posted.  I had the privilege of guest-preaching again in June, and wanted to share the text:

There’s a popular Christian book from a few years back called If You Want to Walk on Water, You’ve Got to Get Out of the Boat. It epitomizes the faith of Peter, who stepped out of the boat to reach Jesus on the lake, and it’s a response to the protectionist, Noah’s Ark-kind-of-Christianity that values safety above all else.

That’s a good thing, in many ways.  Jesus was always saying, “Go out!”

“Go out to Judea!  Go out to Samaria!  Go out to the uttermost ends of the earth!”  And he went out, and took his followers with him, to all those places that were dangerous, uncomfortable and disreputable in polite society.

In contrast to “GO OUT,” too much of the Christian church today keeps saying, “COME IN!”

Come in!  The coffee’s hot!

Come in!  The seats are comfy!

Come in!  The music is top notch…

Come in!  It’s safe inside.  It’s clean inside.  You’re life will be better and you can live the American dream!  We won’t stretch you or present any theology that makes you uncomfortable.  Flame-broiled with cheese! It’s just the way you want church to be!

This is called “attractional Christianity,” and it’s the sort of ethos that megachurches are built on.  What does it take to go from 500 to 5,000?  An espresso bar helps.  So does TV advertising, best-selling self-help books written by your pastor, and giant flat screen monitors everywhere you look!  There are formulas for this stuff.

Strangely, for its prominence in Christian psyche, Matthew is the only Gospel where Peter goes out to meet Jesus and walk on water.  In all four Gospels, Jesus walks on water, but in the other three, he just gets back into the boat.  Peter stays put.  So while I completely agree with the “go out and live dangerously” mentality, I probably wouldn’t build my case on Peter.  He’s not the most reliable subject.

Today’s other boat-narrative is from Mark, and it’s found in Matthew and Luke as well, but for its prominence, I can’t find any popular Christian literature encouraging us to go to sleep below deck. That sort of thing doesn’t sell books.  And maybe it shouldn’t – I know a lot of people who don’t need encouragement to rest and relax more…

But some of us do – particularly when that encouragement grates against all of our sensibilities and responsibilities. It becomes the sort of upside-down logic that makes Jesus so frustrating.

* * *

From what I can tell over the past year or so of attendance, this is a “missional” church.  Missional is the opposite of attractional.  We don’t base our faith in big performances or flashy promises of how Christianity will make your life more prosperous.  We don’t spend a lot of time talking about saving souls… our aim is loftier, isn’t it?  We want to save the world! All of creation!  We care about justice, peace, care for the environment, care for the poor… these are exciting aims.  They are reasons I’m so proud to be a member of this church.  But sometimes that missional focus outward can cause us to lose sight of our foundation / our anchor / even ourselves – which sounds a little unspiritual to say.  Almost selfish, right?  I mean, Jesus gave everything.

But he also took a nap in the stern of a boat.  And on the seventh day, God rested.

What are your limits?  At what point does your mission get in the way of your identity?  When does it become your identity?  When do you forget yourself in the midst of your work?  At what point does service compromise community?

These are tough questions – questions that do sound selfish, or even impious, to ask.  Because – as followers of Christ – we have the model of THAT (cross) to live up to, right?  We say, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead!”  But maybe that’s not the point.  Maybe we get things backward when we put mission before being.  Sort of like the cart and the horse; the cause and the effect…

The message of Christ IS upside-down.  It confounds our sensibilities.
So when was the last time you took a nap in the stern of the boat?

* * *

This isn’t the sermon I planned to preach.  In some ways, it feels mundane, and I’d prefer to be controversial.  But this keeps bubbling up and emerging in my notes, as I’ve tried to prepare something else, so I have a hunch there’s a message here that at least a few of us need to hear…

* * *

One of the dangers within the culture of philanthropy – religious and secular – is that our charity giving automatically differentiates us from those we give to.  By giving to someone, we unavoidably identify ourselves as “benefactor,” and them as “needy.”  Even if we’d never say that out loud.  And we can do the same thing in church, can’t we?  We rightly identify areas of pressing need, and focus our attention there… but sometimes, it’s to the detriment of ourselves and each other, because it separates and invalidates some of our experiences that fundamentally make us the same as those we serve.

Henri Nouwen wrote:

Our culture has become most sophisticated in the avoidance of pain, not only our physical pain, but our emotional and mental pain as well.  We not only bury our dead as if they were still alive, but we also bury our pains as if they were not really there.  We have become so used to this state of anesthesia, that we panic when there is nothing or nobody left to distract us.  When we have no project to finish, no friend to visit, no book to read, no television to watch or no record to play, and when we are left all alone by ourselves we are brought so close to the revelation of our basic human aloneness and are so afraid of experiencing an all-pervasive sense of loneliness that we will do anything to get busy again…

How many of you have said, “What right do I have to feel this way, when so many others are so much less fortunate”?  How dare I feel bad, if someone else feels worse? Right?

But all of us are needy.  Sometimes we give to prove that we’re not!  Sometimes we give to avoid thinking about our own neediness.  But we are needy.  We are grieving, or sick, or in despair, or just weary, and no amount of privilege can cover our wounds.

Last month, while Jen was at her conference at the Buddhist Monastery in New York, I took my own personal retreat to the Benedictine Monastery in Mt. Angel.  It wasn’t my first time there, but I find each time I go how true Nouwen’s words are, and how difficult – painfully difficult – it is to be alone with myself and my thoughts.  I use all sorts of busyness to avoid the pain of silence: work, school, entertainment… all of it distracting me from the internal work I need to be healthy.

What surprised me most, the first time I went to the monastery, was how much I needed to sleep.  I got there, was assigned my little room, and planned to unpack, explore the campus, the gardens, and walk the Stations of the Cross.  Instead, I laid down on the bed and quickly went to sleep.  I woke to the church bells ringing a few hours later.  I got up and prayed, but found I could not stay up.  I laid back down and slept.  When I woke again, my brain still seemed to be praying, I was in that “mode,” so I laid silently and continued to listen to the voices in my head that prayed for peace and for faith, while simultaneously clamoring over the life and work that waited for me at home.  Then I slept again.

I continued this cycle the entire first day – waking and sleeping, waking and sleeping.  My mind somehow trying to pray in the spaces, in-between.  I felt guilty at first.  I hadn’t come to the monastery to relax, I’d come to “be spiritual!”  This was serious business, and I was wasting time…

Last month, when I went again, I experienced much the same thing.  It wasn’t only my body that needed rest – my soul seemed to need it even more.

In Mark 4 we read:

On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, ‘Let us go across to the other side.’ And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great gale arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, ‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’

There are infinite messages we can extract from today’s text, but what strikes me most is the Son of God, sleeping on a pillow in the midst of a storm.  Some commentaries allude to “the power of Christ:” the Son of God would not be afraid of a storm! So with nothing to worry about, he could sleep.  Others suggest Jesus planned an intentional lesson: to demonstrate the meaning of faith and peace through his ill-timed nap. After all, these are seasoned fishermen.  Seasoned sailors.  They’ve been in storms before.  Why do they panic so quickly?

Just a few verses prior, Jesus has been teaching a great multitude.  He shares parables about the sower, the lamp under a bushel, and the mustard seed.  He spent the day preaching, surrounded by needy, desperate people pushing in at every side.

The most profound thing about the text, to me, is the exhaustion of the Son of God.  And the fact that he doesn’t apologize for it.  Instead, he berates both the disciples – and the sea – for interrupting him.

If we apply the same sort of detached benevolence to Jesus that we often subject ourselves to, Jesus falling asleep in the boat isn’t profound – it’s lazy.  It’s outrageous.  The Incarnate God wasted time with self-care!  But this attitude presumes Jesus was different – “other” – from those he served.  In fact, Jesus was the same: born frail and vulnerable, just like everybody else.

The tragedy of Christian compassion – and Christian mission – today, is that we fail to recognize the link between compassion for ourselves, and compassion for others.  We don’t give ourselves – or each other – permission to grieve, to be broken, or to rest when we are tired.  Maybe it’s that unshakeable Protestant Work Ethic, but for all its accomplishments, it’s left us exhausted, wounded… and unable to admit it.

This message isn’t just a feel good message: you need to take better care of yourselves; you’ve been working really hard; don’t you need a break? Even though some of that may be true.  This is a message of responsibility and solidarity.  As people committed to Christian community, to discipleship and the way of Jesus, we have a responsibility to BE. To be healthy.  To be authentic.  To be brave and active, yes! But also to recognize our limitations.  Because if we take on the role of “hero” or “benefactor,” we separate ourselves from our sisters and brothers who need us to be sisters and brothers more than they need us to be heroes and philanthropists.

Jesus identified with the people around him because he experienced the fullness of humanity.  And each of us does.

Maybe this church is a fishing boat, like Jesus’ – fishing for people.  Maybe it’s a rescue boat, looking for individuals capsized and drowning.  I hope no one here idealizes the ark, which simply keeps us alive and… procreating.

But no matter what kind of boat it is, we can’t sail it if we only have a small portion of the crew who responsible.  In fact, when we refuse to recognize our human limitations, we put other crewmembers in danger.

There is no “us” and “them” paradigm in the Kingdom of God.  In the Kingdom, it is all “we.” When we serve others, we must allow ourselves to be served. This is the upside-down way of Jesus.  We have to let our feet be washed.

“But someone else needs it more than I do!”

That’s probably true.  And if we’re paying attention, we’ll be able to serve those folks as well.  Only we won’t be detached, exhausted or in denial when we get there.  We’ll know ourselves, and we’ll know each other, and we’ll be ready to say, “you’re tired?  Me too. Let’s walk together.”

There is no room for heroes in the Kingdom of God.  In one of my favorite “books of the Bible,” The Tao Te Ching, verse 43 reads:

The most yielding of all things overcomes the hardest of all things.

That which has no substance enters where there is no crevice.

Hence, I know the value of action without striving.

Few things under heaven bring more benefit than the lessons learned from silence and the actions taken without striving.

In Mark 4 verse 39, Jesus rebukes the wind and the waves, saying: “Quiet!  Be still!”  Maybe we aren’t the panicking disciples in this story…  Perhaps we’ve gotten confused, and become the wind and the waves.

May we hear the voice of Jesus.  May we be quiet, and still.

Amen.

God is Upside Down – An Invocation

I got to lead our church in this invocation several weeks ago.  I’m the worship leader tomorrow morning, and remembered it while working on a new one…

God, who walks among us, and through us,

We come to you begging for blessings…

You tell us, instead, to bless our neighbors.

We come to you in search of comfort…

You bid us comfort one another.

We come to you in hopes of unconditional love…

You demand we love our enemies.

We come to you, pleading that you feed us…

You command us to be the ones who feed.

God, in every way, you shock us,

devastating our expectations

And reminding us we are your Body, created to act for your kingdom.

May we continue to take joy in this good news:

That you are among us, living through us,

Confounding our sensibilities,

But never disappointing us as we see glimpses of your grace

And hope

And love

In the faces of those we serve.

Amen.

Ah… There I am…

Sometimes we go through periods of wearing blinders (or perhaps ear muffs) to ourselves and the world around us.  It doesn’t mean we don’t experience happiness, sadness – the full spectrum of human existence – but we do it in a way somehow disconnected from who we are and who we have been.  Self may seem like a moving target, difficult to grasp, but I’m convinced each of us has a core that is older and truer than the day-to-day.

Tonight I went for a run.  My knees started hurting years ago, but lately I’ve been taking glucosamine and going small distances to start with, and slowly I’m building stamina.  Typically I wear my iPod and listen to Nas and Kanye and 2Pac, and Rufus Wainwright and the Bee Gees (I know).  As I came to the final stretch of my run – the last half mile or so – I took out the ear buds and slowed to a walk.  It wasn’t quite dark at 8:45, so orange and purple still hung in the sky.  It already smells like summer on these warm spring nights, and the temperature was still near 70.

I realized suddenly that for the first time in maybe a year, I could remember myself.

Nostalgia is a powerful thing.  Since middle school I’ve been jogging through the neighborhood, huffing and puffing on warm summer nights, hearing crickets, smelling mowed lawns and barbecue smoke, and dreaming dreams.  High school, college, after college…Those runs were a part of me and a part of my hopes, as I pushed myself to my own limits night after night.  Nostalgia can be a longing for the past, which takes us nowhere, or it can be a memory of ourselves and who we have always been, which leads us toward deeper integration.

Tonight nostalgia snapped me awake, as if a part of me had been hibernating.  I saw myself.

“Ah!  There I am!”

Do you see yourself?  I’m thankful I took out the earbuds and turned off the iPod.  It’s hard to hear anything through such self-inflicted racket…

The Gardener

I’ve been meaning to post the text from a wonderful sermon piece my wife Jen delivered on Easter Sunday. She and our senior pastor took turns, each providing two vignettes for Easter’s depiction in the four Gospels.  I love the focus on the “gardener,” and confess I’d never really thought about it before…

Reflection #1 {Mary Magdalene}

The first way into Easter that resonates with me is the story of a garden and a woman who experiences the risen Christ. There are three things in the story that I think are especially significant. The first is Mary’s action of turning, the second is that she mistakes Jesus for the gardener, and the third is what happens when he calls her name.

She comes to Easter faith through actions of turning toward something – first, pain and suffering as she seeks the body of the one she loves, persisting in the search, unwilling to disown the pain. Later, she will turn toward the face of the one she seeks, mistaking him for the gardener. Which is perhaps, not a mistake at all.

The God of the Christian faith has always been rooted in earthiness. The first time humanity experienced the Divine was in a garden. In spite of being revered as a spiritual savior, the ministry of Jesus was profoundly connected with the earth and the body: think of all the parables referencing seeds and harvest, vineyards and weeds, rains and sunsets, sheep and birds. He told stories of the beauty of the wildflowers, and mourned the death of sparrows. Christianity is an earthy faith, and it was no coincidence that Mary turned, and thought she saw the gardener.

Mary turned toward Life and the Living One, but not without struggle, not without the grief and agony of watching her teacher die, crucified on a cross. Like Mary, our ‘turning toward’ God will not be free of struggle.

Part of the reason Mary doesn’t recognize the living one when she first turns toward him is because she was looking for a dead man, and corpses don’t stand outside of their tombs. She doesn’t recognize Jesus until he speaks her name.

Each of us will probably walk alongside Mary someday, on the road to bury Jesus. It’s what happens on a spiritual journey – at some point, the Jesus we thought we knew disappears and something new emerges.

But if we can let Jesus die, if we can face the darkness of the tomb, then we can let the resurrected Jesus come to us. We can give up our preconceived notion of who he is, and the fear of not knowing what we’ll find in the tomb.

Who is Jesus, really? What does he look like in our lives? Probably less like we would expect a resurrected Christ to look, and more like a gardener.

Mark Driscoll: In his own words…

For all the hipsters out there who keep defending Mark Driscoll:

“In conjunction with the rhythm method of birth control, it is possible to use anal sex as an option.”[1]

“Jesus Christ commands you to [perform oral sex on your husband]….What I would say to you as well, ladies, I probably shouldn’t, that most of your husbands wake up in the morning with an erection, and so rather than setting the alarm, if this was the way that you helped to awaken them, they would have a great day. Amen? I’m actually saying these things. Some of you are sitting here going, “Is this happening? Is this really happening?” Yes it is. [Laughter from audience.]…And he says that, “Your vagina is a garden.” It has wonderful smells and it has wonderful tastes. It’s a garden. . . . He talks about how much he loves her vagina. Many women feel awkward about this. The husband needs to tell the wife, “It’s beautiful. It tastes well. It smells well. You keep yourself well. I enjoy it. It’s a garden to me.”[2]

————–
[1] Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship and Life Together by Mark and Grace Driscoll, p 186

[2] Mark Driscoll – “Sex, a Study of the Good Bits from Song of Solomon” preached in Edinburgh, Scotland on a Sunday morning [at a 12:00 service] on November 18, 2007 http://www.destinyedinburgh.com/Sermons/Sex,_a_study_of_the_good_bits_from_Song_of_Solomon.aspx

[3]John MacArthur, The Rape of Solomon’s Song Part 1, Apr 14, 2009 http://media.sermonaudio.com/mediapdf/417091244255.pdf