repost from March 14, 2009

This is a cut and paste job from something I wrote on a listserve but I wanted to keep it.

Also within our tradition is the understanding of the two ages. I call them the age of decay and the age to come. These two ages are marked by an antithesis, but not quite in the way expressed by our cousins who are obsessed by what they call “the antithesis”. The antithesis that divides the two ages flows out of kind of a magnetic alignment between the poles of myself and the other. In the age of decay the ethos of empire reigns supreme: “my wellbeing at your expense”. In the age to come, life on earth as it is in heaven, the magnetic field runs in the other direction: “your wellbeing at my expense.” The emblematic expression of this is of course the cross and its vindication and first fruits undoing of the age of decay is the resurrection.

This antithesis must be born witness to in the midst of the age of decay by the antithetical display in the areas of money, sex and power. When money, sex and power flow in the magnetic direction consistent with empire (my wellbeing at your expense) there is no witness to the age to come.

How can such a thing be sustained in the midst of the age of decay? Kingdom antithetical directional living will yield a cruciform lifestyle in this age. There is little pragmatic payoff for living out “your wellbeing at my expense”. Such living gets you exactly what Jesus got, abused, stripped, killed. However, it also gets you resurrection, which is the power that draws you through the costly present amidst the age of decay and into the renewed future.

Our tradition has talked a lot about transformation but I think we have tried to get there on the cheap, which means by circumventing the cross and it can’t be done. Instead of pursing resurrection through the cross we have settled for a surface upgrade via Max Factor.