Christian Agnostics?
Kent Hayden, M.Div (Princeton) on The Case for Christian Agnosticism:
There is no poetry in the accumulation of answers. Poetry, and truth along with it, comes from an encounter with those corners of life which have not yet been filled with language. It comes from entering into our ignorance with the honest courage to question. It comes from a willingness to shake up the mental sediment in which we have hidden our secrets.
On the cross, Jesus was an agnostic. He was willing to face death with a why on his lips. Sometimes, in the comfort of a sunny afternoon, when much less is at stake, I have found the strength to entertain such questions myself. And when my belief is stirred by the gusts of doubt, and my knowledge is silhouetted against the beauty of mystery, I feel the uneasy presence of something beyond my capacity to speak, and I am grateful for all I don’t know.
People are often surprised to learn that Mother Theresa secretly harbored significant doubt. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising. The most difficult questions we ask of God are those that arise out of suffering and in the face of evil - precisely the intersection in which Mother Theresa lived and worked and prayed. It was in the face of unimaginable suffering, personal and intimate and real, that Jesus asked, “My God, my God - why have you forsaken me?”
I don’t think we can ever know God in the same way that we can ‘know’ a formula, a definition, a specification or measurement. We can, however, experience God. This is a very different way of ‘knowing’. The first way - the way of measurement and observation - suggests God exists wholly outside of ourselves. The second - the way of personal experience - suggests he exists within us. Jesus’ words in Luke 17 are ambiguous; various translations state that the kingdom of God is ‘within’ and ‘among’ you. ‘Within’ indicates a personal and individual experience of the Kingdom of God while ‘among’ can refer only to an experience shared in community. In either case, Jesus’ reply to the Pharisees is unequivocal: it can’t be identified through a rational process. The Kingdom of God can only be experienced and part of that experience might include doubt, questioning and uncertainty.
Press in to God. Do not give up, do not despair, do not walk away. Press in. P.U.S.H - Pray Until Something Happens. This requires considerable effort. It means clearing the decks of all that is irrelevant, time wasting, distracting to our search. No, you probably can’t quit your job, but you can not watch television for two or three hours a day, you can take time from other activities, you can open time in your schedule. You can pray for three or four hours a day - you just have to figure out how. Get up in God’s grill. Hang on. Do not let go. Holler, bellow and wail, plead, beg and cajole. But press in, and keep pressing in, until you hear from God.
To live in the mystery of God is one thing. To reconcile yourself to the questions that cannot be answered is another, and Dr. Hayden suggests he has found a way of living with both. To live in abject doubt, though, is to aimlessly wander the corridors of a peculiar kind of living hell. Trust me on this, it’s awful. I hate it.
Press in. P.U.S.H. My experience has been that I’ve never received the answer I was looking for. Almost inevitably God bypasses the question altogether. But I have always gotten the answer I needed.
P.U.S.H.
Stability vs. Risk
Business Guru Seth Godin on Exploration and the Risk of Failure:
People seem to be in one of two categories:
Those who seek stability, affiliation, work worth doing and the assurance it (whatever it is) will be okay.
Those who explore, need to know that failure is an option and quest to make a dent in the universe.
Think about this in terms of churches. Where would you put Third Space on this grid? Which one sounds most like us? Which one sounds most like the Kingdom of God? Why?
Could you make a case for the ‘other option’ as well?
And what does living out our faith look like when failure is absolutely not an option… and what does it look like when it is a perfectly acceptable outcome?
What exactly are the risks, anyway?
The Summoned Church
David Brooks, writing in the New York Times on two ways of understanding life:
The person leading the Well-Planned Life emphasizes individual agency, and asks, “What should I do?” The person leading the Summoned Life emphasizes the context, and asks, “What are my circumstances asking me to do?”
There are some points on which I might question the article. “A 24-year-old,” Brooks says, “can’t sit down and define the purpose of life in the manner of a school exercise because she is not yet deep enough into the landscape to know herself or her purpose.” I’m not sure that’s true. More realistic, I think, is to understand that your ‘life purpose’ at 24 is often very different than it might be at 44. The essay from which the Brooks article is derived is a long but - if you’re the same kind of geek as me - fascinating.
For a church, I think, being driven by a mission statement seems like the logical -and easy - thing to do. Get everybody on the same page, work together, achieve common goals, make an difference. Very few, I’ve found, actually live up to the promise - once the ‘visioning’ process is done it’s business as usual, again. Being a summoned church means that we become rooted in a time and a place - a nighbourhood - and ask, how can we become Christ here, now…It means that we respond to needs that are presented to us and, in doing so, sometimes become vulnerable. It means there’s not always a clear plan of what to do next. It means that we must place huge amounts of trust in the Spirit to lead us. It means we have no visible markers of success. Making a plan and doing a bunch of stuff sounds a lot easier, sounds a lot safer, a lot better.
But is it easier? Is it safer? Better? I’m not sure it’s any of those things. And I’m not sure, if we’re trying to become Christ in our world, that any of those things should be on the agenda in the first place. The fact that they are on the agenda… well, that’s the real problem, isn’t it?
Questions
From Relevant Magazine - Cameron Conant on Why We Need Unanswered Questions:
And so as I sleep in a queen-sized bed by myself tonight—the same bed my wife and I once shared—simply knowing that God is there is enough for me, too. It has to be. Of course, I still have questions for God, but I’ve become comfortable with the tension of not knowing, the tension that comes from embracing a faith that cannot be fully deciphered, parsed, chopped up and dissected. Some things are mysterious—especially God. Yes, He can be known, but how can an infinite being who has no beginning and no end ever fully be known by us: clumsy humans who stumble along in the dark, groping for meaning and truth and answers?
I have questions, too. The older I get - and the more I search for answers - the more questions I have. But I’m not comfortable with ‘the tension of not knowing’. In fact, my faith journey over the last five to ten years has been characterized by a slowly increasing discomfort. Very few Christians can comprehend the possibility that God has led me into doubt, into questioning, into this wilderness. For most people, it simply does not compute. But I believe God has done just that. Sometimes I hate where I’m at. Sometimes I get tired of waking up every morning and searching for belief. Mostly, though, I can’t imagine living any other way. It’s the most honest, truthful way of life I know. But it’s incredibly difficult and soul-tiring.
Without doubt faith cannot grow. There is no other way - we must go through doubt, fear and uncertainty in order to experience the faithfulness of God. We cannot learn to trust until we have first learned to doubt. Sometimes this is doubt is purely an intellectual and emotional state, arising out of meditation on God’s word, on God, life, the universe and everything. Sometimes, as in Conan’s case, it is the result of an external crisis that is thrust upon us. The end result is the same - all our sheltering beliefs are broken, pulled down and hauled away. Sometimes all we’re left with is God - and sometimes, in the midst of an almost unbearable crisis, God is absent, silent, distant.
I feel so privileged to be able to open the bible and guide this faith community deeper into its truths each Sunday morning. But I also believe that one of the reasons why Third Space matters is because this is the one place where Christians can say - where I can say - ‘I don’t know, I don’t understand, I don’t have that figured out yet…’ There are times when it takes a great deal of courage to be able to say that. But - take it from me - those words are like life itself when someone is struggling with doubt, fear, uncertainty and deep, painful questions. Most people in the midst of such struggles aren’t looking for answers. They’re looking for someone who hears the cry of their hearts.
Community
when we moved here i had big ideas about neighbours and community. i had pictures in my head of the kind of neighbour i wanted to be. the kind of neighbourhood I wanted to be a part of creating. i wanted to be in a neighbourhood where we knew each others names. i wanted to borrow sugar and lend butter. i wanted to share plants from our gardens, and our harvests in the fall. i wanted to feel like i was a part of something good.
at first i felt hopeful. i made more conversations. i put more effort in. we invited people over. we stopped and said hi.
after a couple of years, however, i started to give up.
A must read - Don’t miss it.
Jesus Says Fraud is Okay by Him…
Or so it seems. Ah yes, the parable of the ’shrewd’ manager. The enigmatic parable of the shrewd manager. The one in which Jesus praises a guy for taking advantage of his boss.
Take a few minutes and read the story. Think about. What’s really going on here? Jesus ends up praising the man for trashing his boss’ business - to benefit himself? How does that work?
We’re going to be talking about it on Sunday. We’re going to break into groups, ask some simple questions, try to get a handle on what’s really going on here. I suspect there will be more than one take on this. And you know, that’s part of what makes Third Space unique - we’re willing to hash this stuff out together, knowing that we might not all land on the same square, understanding that it’s okay.
Messy, but beautiful. I love it.
Questioning Faith, Accepting Doubt
I’ve got questions about God, about Jesus, the Holy Spirit. I’ve got questions about the bible, about how we got it, about what it says and doesn’t say. They’re real questions. They’re not going away.
Over the last year or so I’ve found myself increasingly disturbed as I pursue these questions. What unsettles me, far more than the questions themselves, is the way Christians seem to respond to them. No one ever says, ‘yes, I’ve wondered about that too,” or, ‘I’ve really struggled with that issue as well’. No-one has ever said to me, ‘I don’t know’. Instead? Simple, one-size-fits-all answers. I’m so sick of that kind of Christianity. I hate it.
Let me be clear that it’s not the mind-numbingly simple answers to complex questions that bothers me. Not so much. Not any more. What bothers me most is that the struggle isn’t acknowledged or understood. For most Christians, they’ve never wrestled through their beliefs; they been handed a list of pre-approved doctrines and accepted them wholesale. I know this is the case, because I used to be one of those Christians. I have an atheist friend who says that if you haven’t come to your faith without some kind of struggle then what you have isn’t faith. Most of us, however, treat doubt as the spiritual equivalent of a small fire in the kitchen. Kill it - fast, clean up the mess, make damn sure it doesn’t happen again.
That’s just wrong.
This week we’re looking at the testimony of John the Baptist about Jesus. “I must decrease,” he said, “so that He can increase”. So let me ask - how is it that Jesus increases and we decrease? How does that happen? You know what i think? I think if you’ve never heard that question before, and you can answer it in less than three days, you haven’t thought about it. No, really. Three days.
Here’s another possibility - because that’s what thinking for three days does, it opens possibilities. What if it’s just something John said? It meant to apply to him, in his role as a prophet, that he was talking about his ministry fading into the background as Jesus’ fame grew? Nothing more than that. Most of us evangelical types have been taught - our whole lives - that being a Christian means growing to be more and more like Christ and less and less like us. He increases. We decrease. If that’s not what John’s talking about - at all - then a tantalizing vision for a new way of life emerges. What if we’re not supposed to submerge our humanity below the surface of Christ, but to fully live out our humanity? Is it possible that we might be fully human, fully alive in this world and fully present in Christ at the same time? Is this not the ultimate triumph over sin and death entering into the world - the ultimate redemption of humanity in the redemption of our humanness?
How do we live like that - fully human and fully present in Christ, as he is present in us? What does that mean for our everyday lives?
Wait - don’t answer that.
Caesar, Moses, Jesus and Wet
The Apenine Mountains run like a high, ridged seam down the center of Italy’s boot. The Rubicon river, flowing down out of the mountains to the eastern coast, neatly divides the map into northern and southern regions. In the ancient world it was illegal for a Roman general to cross the river with his troops - the punishment was death. But in 49 BCE Julius Caesar did exactly that, marching his troops across the the Rubicon and initiating a civil war that would eventually see him in control of the Republic and, indeed, preside over the expanding Roman empire. As a result, the phrase “crossing the Rubicon” has entered our vocabulary, representing a decision that takes us to a point of ‘no-return’.
When the waters of the Red Sea closed behind Moses and the Israelites - and drowned the Egyptian army - they also reached a point of ‘no-return’. They were fully committed to the way ahead and, though they might not have fully grasped the significance of it - their die was cast into God’s lap. I suppose it’s indicative of how pervasive the influence of Greek and Roman culture is for us Christians (as oppossed to the Hebraic culture of the biblical world) that the phrase in our language is ‘crossing the Rubicon’ and not, ‘crossing the Red Sea’.
In the New Testament a pretty clear connection is made between the Israelites crossing the Red Sea and Christians being baptized into Christ. The narrative arc of God’s story of redemption, reconciliation and ‘Shalom’ is arcing outward through our lives to the generations yet to come. In the midst of following the Exodus story we’re going to stop for a moment and look at this weird Christian practice called ‘Baptism’. How did we get it? What does it mean? Why do we do it?
Sooner or later, in all our lives, comes a Red Sea decision. Caesar crossed the Rubicon in an act of naked aggression and hostility, initiating a civil war that would see him seize power over the Roman Republic and expand its empire. Moses took God’s people across the Red Sea so that they could find freedom from oppression and enter into the promised land of God. Both men were fully committed to their path, but these were very different paths, taken for very different reasons. On Sunday I want to ask you a very simple question: What journey are you fully committed to? This ritual we call baptism - that has its origins in a story thousands of years old - is a public declaration of who you are and what your life is about. When you make this very public declaration of baptism you’ve crossed your own point of ‘no-return’. It’s an act that places us in the middle of a story - and a family - that spans thousands of generations, and it can’t be undone.
Yes, you believe in Jesus Christ. You’re following him the best you can. But this is something different. Baptism is a transformative moment in the life of a Christ follower - it’s a moment where you publicly declare what your life is about in front of your friends, your family and your community. No, you don’t need to baptized so that your friends and family know you’re a Christian.
You need to be baptized so that you know you’re a Christian.
Splitting the Scene
Sometimes the bible’s lack of detail is maddening. The entire book of Exodus - from a the Pharaoh who knew not Joseph, to the baby Moses in the reeds, through all the plagues and the Passover - leads to one, climactic moment in which the Jews flee Egypt in the middle of the night. After all this build-up the story says little more than, “they left in a hurry.’ Really? That’s it? Did they leave in a big column, marching shoulder to shoulder? Who organized them? How? Were babies and children crying or was all silent save for the shuffling feet? Were the people jubilant or apprehensive or afraid? Where was Moses when all this was going on? What was going through his mind?
It’s almost as if this is not the climactic moment in the story and, really, it may not be. From a writer’s perspective it’s not clear that there’s a single, defining scene in the narrative, but rather several. The Passover is one, the Exodus another, the parting of the Red Sea, the Ten Commandments and the golden calf - all are plot-line peaks. It’s a much larger story - so large, in fact, that the climax is well beyond the lives all its characters.
We’re going to look at what this story means in a much fuller, broader context on Sunday morning. I don’t think we can fully grasp the Exodus story without seeing it in light of the person and work of Christ. The Israelites, as they flee Egypt by moonlight, are embarking on a great journey - a journey that takes all of us from Pharaoh’s court to the squalor and misery of the cross and brings us face to face with a God who is bigger than all of our imaginings could ever dream.
And after all the shoutin’ is done we’re going to have a pot luck with the folks from Peterborough Free Methodist. Oh my, how I love a party!
Change vs. Transformation
Poker players look for a ‘tell’ on the faces around the table - a twitch, a gesture, a mannerism - that hints at what the player is hiding in their hand. in the Exodus story Moses tries to bargain with Pharaoh to secure the release of the Jews and the result is disastrous. As a result, he offers us a fascinating little ‘tell’ that shows what he’s really thinking. That tell is obvious when you realize Moses lied to the Pharaoh.
At the burning bush God told him to display miracles in front of Pharaoh. Instead, he tries to strike a bargain. Let us go to the desert to worship, he says, if you don’t God will kill us. In other words, lose us for a few days, or lose us for ever. God, of course, never said any such thing. God gave Moses the tools he needed - the miraculous staff, the healed hand - but Moses simply didn’t believe they would work. Moses was more afraid of Pharaoh than he was of God so he cooks up a story to move things along. At the end of the 5th chapter of Exodus, however, Moses is a completely different cat. Now he’s up in God’s face, angry, frustrated, making some pretty strong accusations about God sitting on the sidelines. There’s no doubt now about what Moses believes. Now he’s fully in. Now he’s demanding that God act.
Change happens everywhere, all the time, to everyone. There’s no escaping it. Every change process has, I believe, a transformational moment. It’s like diving off a bridge - you reach a point at which there’s no going back. You’re posture changes from standing to diving and your body from dry to wet. Your emotional state changes from apprehensive to afraid and then exhilarated. But, as a result of that one dive into the river, your inner self might be transformed from being timid and shy to being courageous and outgoing. In Moses’ case, it was his failure that resulted in a profound change in his understanding of his situation and a subsequent transformation of his inner character to become fully committed to God. Contrast this with Pharaoh, who changes his mind a dozen times but never experiences a transformation.
The plagues that God brings next precipitate a change in Egyptian history. But I really think they were necessary not just to make the Pharaoh change his mind but to make the Jewish people want to leave, also. It would take a long time in the wilderness - an entire generation would have to die - before the Israelites were ready to fight their war to take the land. They’re situation changed, but it would take more than forty years and a speech by Joshua before they were transformed from cowed, subservient slaves to confidently freed men and women.
I think we’re in the middle of a ‘transformational’ time at Third Space. We’ve been through a lot of changes in the last couple of years and I, for one, am ready to stop trying to negotiate with change. Like Moses before Pharaoh, I don’t think we can simply tweak the way things are anymore. I don’t think we can make a deal with the powers that are holding us back. We need to be transformed. We’re going to talk about this on Sunday. It’s not a Sunday morning that’s going to fill in a lot of blanks or answer a lot of questions. It will be food for thought instead, manna for the mind. It’s time.
Church, get ready. God’s about to do a new thing.
Out of the Frying Pan…
What happens when things don’t work out the way we had hoped? Where do we turn when the worst case scenario becomes the very thing we must live through? When there’s no explanation for our suffering, how can we go on? And what if - and this may be the most difficult question of all - there’s no answer to the question, ‘why?’
The 5th chapter of Exodus presents just such a scenario. Moses follows God’s instructions and things start going very, very wrong. The Pharaoh gets angry and increases the workload of the Jewish slaves. In short order the Pharaoh is angry, the Jewish Foreman are angry and the people suffer, terribly - all because Moses did as he was told. There’s a couple of things we have to keep in mind when reading this story. The first is that it plays out over a time-line that was a lot longer than a ‘made for tv movie’. The Jewish people endured real hardship and suffering while this story played out over weeks - if not months. The second is that we read this knowing how the story ends. This is not the case with Moses, the Pharaoh, the Jewish people or anyone else at the time, and their actions look very different when seen from this perspective. They can’t answer the ‘why’ question. They don’t know what happens next. A God they’ve only just been introduced to - “I Am That I Am” - appears impotent and they must pay the price for the foolishness of Moses.
We’re going to try and walk through some of this on Sunday morning. Frankly, the passage raises a lot more questions than it does answers and not all of them are questions we want to ask. It’s easy for us to discuss those questions in a coolly detached way in church but it’s quite another to find ourselves trying to live through them. Sometimes, an answer to the question ‘why’ simply isn’t possible. How can we live without the answers that matter most?
Image: Moses in front of Pharaoh by Haydar Hatemi, Persian Artist. Public Domai
Arguing With God
This Sunday we’re going to be walking through a rather long - and rather curious passage of scripture. This is the story of Moses encountering God in the burning bush and the difficult conversation he has with God. Difficult? Oh yeah - no question about it. God has considerable difficulty with Moses - and Moses has some trouble with God, also. In a nutshell, God asks Moses to lead the Jews out of bondage and slavery and Moses says ‘no’.
Not the story we’re used to hearing, is it? Moses puts up a lengthy argument and his final word to God was
“Lord, please! Send anyone else.” (vs. 13) God, we are told, became angry, and sent Moses’ brother Aaron to help him. With that Moses - and God - both reluctantly relent of their argument. It seems to me that neither one really got what they wanted. Moses took on a job he didn’t want and God took on a less than enthusiastic servant - and then added Aaron to the mix, something he (apparently) hadn’t already planned on. As the Exodus story progresses we see that their relationship doesn’t improve much.
God has no trouble with any aspect of creation. Thunder and lightening, storms out to sea, the Coney in the rocky crags - none of it is a problem for God. People? That’s another story. But I can also understand where Moses is coming from - he’s settled down now among the Midianites, has a wife and young family and now, suddenly, God is asking him to go back to Egypt and… then what? For Moses, the outcome is hardly clear; God has not provided enough information on which to build a plan.
This Sunday we’re going to look at the dialogue between Moses and God. It’s far too easy to fault Moses for doubting God . This becomes an entirely different story when we read it from Moses perspective. The story becomes even more powerful when we consider it from our own perspective in relation to our encounters with God.
The image above is a Russian icon of Moses and the burning bush from the 18th C. [via About.Com]
Wild World
Yesterday AndyMac sang for us and this was one of the songs he chose. He talked about how sometimes God lets us make our decisions - he lets us go our own way, even when he knows the outcome is not what his heart desires. Sometimes, AndyMac said, God lets us go, and this song expresses what he must be feeling at such times. I was deeply affected by what he said and by the songs he chose. I’ll never hear this song the same way again.
24 Things That Make Me Happy
“A happy heart,” the bible says, “makes the face cheerful, but heartache crushes the spirit.” (Proverbs 15:13). I’m trying to practice joyfulness. At first that might sound a bit odd but I’ve learned that happiness isn’t something that happens to us - it’s something we create. It’s a conscious acknowledgment that this life God has given us is worth living. I’m down with that.
Since this is my May Two-Four Weekend I’ve decided to write a list of 24 things that make me happy.
1. Sunshine and cool breezes. Together.
2. A cold glass of milk.
3. Listening to the oldies on the radio while driving in my car with the windows down.
4. Driving in my car with the windows down.
5. Dinner on a sidewalk patio with the Resident Love Goddess.
6. Dinner in the backyard with friends.
7. Breakfast with the guys.
8. A cat, a piece of string and nothing else to do for half an hour.
9. Stopping work to go stand in the door and watch a sudden summer downpour.
10. The way the air feels after a sudden summer downpour.
11. The beach.
12. A perfectly sharpened pencil
13. The first page of a new journal.
14. Lilacs in bloom.
15. The smell of charcoal in the barbecue down the street.
16. New sneakers.
17. Walking barefoot in the grass.
18. Old Spice.
19. Poking around in the campfire with a stick.
20. Swimming in the lake.
21. Ice cream cake.
22. Bob Marley’s ‘Legend’ Album.
23. Yahtzee!
24. ‘Ladies on verse two’ and ‘men on verse three’.
What’s on your list?
This Sunday? Oh, just another miraculous healing.
In the lectionary readings for this week is a curious story about Jesus healing a man. There was a pool in Jerusalem that, every once in a while, had the waters stirred up by an angel. The first person who got into the water when the angel stirred it up was healed of their ailments. Naturally, this attracted a crowd, most of whom probably lived there, waiting day and night for the angel to roil up the water. This was not some freaky thing on the outskirts of town - a kind of holy roller tent meeting for the ancient world. A terrace had been built, columns, a roof. As you can see from the model in the picture, it was pretty hard to miss.
So Jesus comes along, strides into the middle of the crowd, picks out one guy and say, ‘hey, buddy, pick up your mat and go on home’. And he does. A few minutes later the religious leaders of the day see him carrying his mat and ask him who he thinks he is, carrying a mat like that on the sabbath. He offers that the guy who healed him said to do it. Later Jesus finds the guy in the temple and says quit sinning, or something worse might happen.
Okay, so this story raises far more questions than it answers. Above all else, I think, it serves to illustrate that Jesus has the power to heal. And that is precisely where the questions arise. Why this man? Why not someone - anyone - else? The man didn’t ask to be healed, didn’t even know who Jesus was. This is quite unlike any other healing we see in the gospels. What’s with Jesus saying ‘quit sinning, or something worse might happen to you’. What are we to make of that?
And what are we to make of this whole healing business, anyway? What do we know about healing? What do we not know? What do we believe? What do we know that we’ve learned from real world experience?
Yeah, let’s talk about that on Sunday morning.
One Love
Or, as Elvis Costello once asked… “what’s so wrong with peace, love and understanding.” ‘One Love’ - our Sunday morning opening statement…
Broken and Beautiful
Last Sunday morning we smashed old plates and tiles with a hammer. Then we took the pieces and made this table. I think it’s a pretty vivid illustration of how God can take something broken or imperfect - like us - and make something beautiful. And it reminds me of how all of us, like the individual pieces of pottery and china, are broken and yet, together, form something beautiful and vibrant and resilient and useful: community.
We’re beginning a new series where we look at all the difficult things Jesus asked us to do - like ‘love your enemy’. It’s easy to say and, sometimes, seems simplistic and almost naive, perhaps. But who is the enemy? An ex spouse, fighting for custody of the kids? A competing business whose advertising targets my business? A co-worker with political views at the opposite end of the spectrum from my own? The Taliban? Osama Bin Laden? And what does it mean to love my enemy, exactly? And isn’t this something that we all know we should do but none of actually do?
Michael’s going to help us unpack this - it should be an interesting Sunday morning.
Peter, Pottery and Hope
This Sunday we’re smashing crockery, smearing some paste-like substance over a small table top and then, well, sticking bits of smashed china into the paste.
It’s all a part of our continuing fascination with Peter, the disciple who always seemed to have his foot in his mouth while his heart was in exactly the right place. On the night of Jesus’ arrest Peter denied knowing him three times, exactly as Jesus predicted. After the resurrection, however, Jesus and Peter have a conversation over an early morning fish fry and Peter is asked, point blank, “Do you love me?” Three times Peter says yes, and three times Jesus commands him to “Feed my sheep”. It represents a turning point in Peter’s life as he, amidst his brokenness and pain, is given grace and love for the days ahead. At the time in Peter’s life when he might feel most unworthy, Jesus commissions him for the days ahead. Hard not to love a story like that.
Interesting bit of trivia: Peter’s named was originally “Simon” which is a derivative of “Shimon”, meaning, ‘heard’, or ‘God heard’. Jesus changes his name to ‘Cephas’, which means ‘Rock’ and we know him as Peter, derived from the Latin for rock which is ‘Petra’. “On this [Petra], Jesus’ is reported to have said, “I will build my church.” We know more about Peter than any other of the 12 disciples and what we see most in his life story is… transformation. Even his name, it seems, shows us how much he’s changed.
Brunch
If you were part of our first 1st Annual Easter Sunday brunch this morning - thank you! We had a really wonderful time together. The food was terrific, and so were you. I even tried my hand at Kendama, but was more than a little clumsy. Ted rocks at Kendama, and Jordan’s pretty good too. Me? Not so much.
And to those of you who were participating in Lent… you may now return to your cigars and chocolate. You know who you are.
Easter Brunch
Easter is the most important day on the church calendar, marking one of the most profound events in human history. As we celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus during this weekend we, quite naturally, want to make this into a big event, a spectacle, a presentation befitting the events we commemorate this weekend.
We’re taking a different approach this Sunday. No big stage show. No band. No lights, no song and dance. Which is easy for us, because we don’t have any of those things anyway. Instead, we’re having a pot luck brunch. Join us at 10 AM for a wonderful time of just being together as a community. Sitting down, having a meal together. Sharing this one aspect of our lives, together. We’re going to quietly and gently read the Easter story, trusting the scriptures to speak for themselves.
Everyone hungers for food, companionship and God. The dinner table is the only place where all three of those needs can be met at the same time. Or in our case, the brunch table.
Come, have brunch with us. It’s going to be lovely.
Regional Gathering
Have just returned from a regional gathering of churches in our tribe - the Free Methodist Church in Canada. Some random thoughts - in no particular order of importance…
1-) Bishop Keith talked this morning about welcoming everyone to the table in Christ. He was talking about ‘multiculturalism’ - though he never once used the word - and radically changed my definition of the term. And yes, he did it in… a sermon.
2-) We met in smaller groups and talked about what was going on in our various churches. Our group had a church planted by Haitian Christians in Quebec, a small rural church, urban churches, a big city church with multi-ethnic congregation. It was really an important conversation for me personally. I was encouraged to learn that other churches are struggling with the same things we are while others, completely devoid of our particular challenges, have their own.
3-) Problem+Opportunity=Problemtunity. My new word of the day.
4-) We often speak of ‘open doors’ as a way of discerning God’s will. Today I heard the story of a church that was founded because of a Saturday night snowstorm. On Sunday morning the man and his wife couldn’t open their door. They said, ‘if we can’t go to church - let’s worship here…’ Incredible picture, isn’t it - a church created by a closed door.
5-) Quote of the day from one of our Haitian brothers: “We don’t have money, we don’t have anything. But we have the Word. As long as we have the Word we will be all right.” Oh yeah, that’s right… it’s the sound of inspiration.
Had a tuna melt at the pub with Ian, Seabass and Edward. Good times.
Enlarging the Story
It’s a problem that I’ve been seeing more and more of lately. It’s everywhere. I first encountered it when reading a book called “How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth.” The authors divide the bible into the various genres of writing - historical, poetic, apocalyptic, prophetic and so on. Each genre has to be interpreted according to its own unique quality - we can’t read the psalms in the same way we read the book of Acts. Okay, fair enough. But I soon discovered that this way of reading the bible divorced the Psalms from Acts and the connections between the two were lost. If there’s a narrative arc to the bible - if what Paul says in Romans is connected to what Adam did in Eden, and it is, then dividing the book into genres serves to break that arc and, in so doing, the story God is telling is lost. Instead we get, as the authors suggest, a book of rules and regulations, a book that is to “be read, understood and obeyed.” (their phrase).
Dividing the bible into an Old and New Testament, or even chapters and verses might do exactly the same thing. But we also have this incredibly common - some would say essential - part of our church life called a ’sermon’. In a sermon the preacher studies a passage of scripture and then makes a speech, from which the rest of us download information. In this process, however, we isolate a text and, as a result, draw conclusions that often simply aren’t supported by the larger context. I used to read the story of the three servants and their talents as a call to evangelism - we must not hide our faith, we must enlarge the Master’s Kingdom. The parable of the 10 virgins was an eschatological admonition to be ready for the return of Jesus. The story of the servants who worked in the vineyard for a day getting paid the same as those who worked for an hour was about all of us sharing in our heavenly reward equally. But in reading through Matthew this year I’ve come to recognize that these stories are connected to the sheep and the goats judgment of Matthew 25. When seen as a whole, and when connected to the sheep and goats Judgment it becomes immediately apparent that these stories are about economic justice. Why did the virgins not share their oil? Why couldn’t they share one or two lamps and make sure there was enough oil to last the night? Instead, they sent the others, selfishly, away. Why did the two wise, confident servants not help the frightened one with his investments? Why did they not pool their resources? Clearly, this is a case of the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer. And in the story of the vineyard workers it appears that in the Kingdom of God the community is larger than the self, that we understand economic justice as what benefits us while God desires to distribute prosperity equally throughout the community. When we start connecting to the sheep and goats judgment the Sermon on the Mount becomes a document new and alien to our world; the house on the rock and the house on the sand take on a whole new meaning as well. Yes, as we travel through the book of Matthew we see a dozen other things going on as well. That’s pretty much my point.
Every devotional, every bible study, every commentary I’ve ever read does exactly the same thing - subdivides the bible and thus, necessarily, fails us. But here’s the thing: every sermon we’ve ever heard, and every sermon I’ve ever preached, has done exactly the same thing. The limitations of the form require it. And there’s an awful, terrible, frightening truth in that. Maybe we’ve been going at this all wrong - and some of us have dedicated our entire lives to this pursuit.
We need a new way to teach the bible. A way that allows for a long, long time to be spent dwelling in the text. Years, decades. A way that allows for long discussions and digressions. A way that places it within the hands of the community instead of a priestly caste of pastors and theologians so that the Holy Spirit may speak among us, and through us, without the filter that is one person at the front of the room. And my fear is that none of this can be done within the frame of church as we know it. In fact, this single belief - that the scripture must dwell within the community, and the community within the scripture - challenges everything we know and understand about the role of a pastor, the nature and organization of church, our way of being the body of Christ together. The fear this engenders is enormous. And this new way has not yet come to be in our evangelical tradition. It may never come to be. But I think somewhere, somehow, someone should at least try, someone should begin.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. on the Gospel
Rosewater was on the next bed, reading, and Billy drew him into the conversation, asked him what he was reading this time.
So Rosewater told him. It was the Gospel from Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space, shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian, by the way. The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He suppsed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.
But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. So it goes.
The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again, “Oh, boy - they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!” And that thought had a brother: “There are right people to lynch?”
The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.
So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn’t possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.
And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!
[From "Slaughterhous 5 by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.]