Jesus also goes where he’s no longer welcome

Posted on October 8, 2010 by PaulVK

I love Philip Yancey’s books and I love Matt’s blog “The Church of No People” and so when Matt did an interview with Yancey I ate it up. I especially love the line by Yancey that “God goes where he’s wanted” which I think is very true. Its also true, however, that Jesus goes even where he isn’t.

I’ve been working through Luke 18 and 19 in my preaching and really enjoying the chapters. There are so many links in these chapters and great stories and Kenneth Bailey chimes in with some terrific stuff as well. (I just realized that my nutty learning disability kicked in and I substituted Jerusalem for Jericho. ugh.)

Anyway, in Jesus’ journey through Jericho (which pre-echoes his upcoming entry into Jerusalem) Jesus enters the city as a hero and brings the praise to a crescendo by healing poor blind Bartimeaus, the son of filth. Jesus disappoints the crowd that is primed with Messianic expectations by not allowing them to extend him hospitality and not honoring them with his presence at the banquet that was quite likely anticipated.  Undoubtedly the town of Jericho was filled with those who eagerly hoped for a powerful overthrow of Rome’s occupation in the manner that Yhwh overthrew Pharaoh’s hold on the children of Israel. Jesus, however, who was more than welcome after he healing declined to stay and journeyed out of the city.

As you know from the story, on his way out of town who does he meet but Zacchaeus up in a tree, hiding from the loyalist Jewish crowd. Zacchaeus understood the danger of being short and in a crowd that considered him the chief collaborator of the Roman occupational forces.

To the delight of Zacchaeus and to the dismay of the crowd Jesus invites himself BACK to town to stay at Zacchaeus’ home. Undoubtedly there was a prominent, upstanding, observant but perhaps slightly less wealthy man in town who had hoped to host this feast and offer Jesus a place to spend the night. He was slighted and this chief of sinners was given the honor. So Jesus now turns his entourage around and marches them, now with his new friend Zacchaeus under his arm back into the trailing hostile crowd and back towards town to sit as the special guest of Zacchaeus and likely the only kinds of people that would associate with him, probably tax collectors and prostitutes. Jesus will break bread with that group.

Jesus was wanted by the upright of the town as he entered, but likely as he turned to re-enter the town from the other side any potential invitation was likely rescinded.

 

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Ecclesiastes and CS Lewis

Posted on October 8, 2010 by PaulVK

Disappointment with church runs through the post-christendom emergent movement. It is the response to the can-do seeker movement where going through the seven steps or running the bases led to predicable results of Biblical wisdom combined with American financial/psychological know-how. The book of ecclesiastes is one of the most awkward inclusions in the canon. One of my small group members said to me “it’s a depressing book!”

I pastor a church where a core group of people who were in their early 60s when I came are not in their mid seventies with all of the symptoms any insurance actuary reliably predicts. Some in this group have been successful in life according to the terms of our culture. Others less so but the theft of the age of decay takes it toll on all.

This morning I am preaching in a different congregation in the Bay area. I’m early so I stopped to get a small bottle of juice while I decompress from the drive down. In this shopping mall on a Sunday AM well put together people driving nice cars are getting their starbucks and noah bagels. Their stylish exercise outfits, purebred dogs and confident gates express a mastery of this world that few in its history have accomplished.

Many in the emergent movement know how shallow the veneer of our accomplishment is. I also witnessed a child handoff. Mom dropping off two sons not looking too happy to dad. Time for the weekend exchange so Dad gets his time with the boys. Off they go to join the parade hoping no one sees too closely.

Ecclesiastes meets CS Lewis here when we see that regardless of our mastery of the considerable blessings of planet earth they always fall short. Something in us was designed for a place we recognize through the manifest glory even of this age but cannot fully be satisfied.

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Kenneth Bailey on Jesus’ Journey Through Jericho

Posted on September 14, 2010 by PaulVK

This from Kenneth Bailey’s “Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes”.

Bailey sees the union of the story of Jesus healing the blind man with the story of Jesus inviting himself to Zacchaeus’ house. He sees the crowd’s initial irritation at the blind man turn into their approval of Jesus for lifting up and healing the oppressed.

Jesus does not stay in town but instead continues to pass through until the incident with Zacchaeus. Bailey here imagines what the crowd WANTED to hear from Jesus, instead of what they did hear.

Naturally, Jesus is expected to support the oppressed (as he did with the blind man) and to address Zacchaeus with something like the following:

Zacchaeus, you are a collaborator! You are an oppressor of these good people. You have drained the economic lifeblood of your people and given it to the imperialists. You have betrayed your country and your God. This community’s hatred of you is fully justified. You must quit your job, repent, journey to Jerusalem for ceremonial purification, return to Jericho and apply yourself to keeping the law. If you are willing to do these things, on my next trip to Jericho I will enter your newly purified house and offer my congratulations.

Such a speech would have provoked long and enthusiastic applause. Instead, having signaled that he does not intend to spend the night in their town, Jesus changes his mind and invites himself into the house of the town collaborator!

wow. This Jesus both brings justice and gently overcomes evil with love. Amazing. pvk

Posted in Quotations, Understanding the Bible | 1 Comment

How I use Twitter

Posted on September 14, 2010 by PaulVK

I’ve written about this before but I want something that I can repeatedly post to Twitter as a kind of disclaimer to my tweets.

My primary use for me posting on twitter is that of an archivist. Twitter is a fantastic, omnipresent tool for making small notes (often with links) to articles I want to or may want to read, re-read or cite at a later date. Why do I want to be clear about this? Because there is a lot more out there that I find helpful, interesting, or even just that I might want to find again in the future than what I necessarily agree with.

How do I keep my tweets in a searchable fashion? This is an important question because it is a serious failure in Twitter that actually Google’s Buzz has remedied. I used to capture all of my tweets on my blog when I was using wordpress.org but when I switched to the free .com version I needed a new way. You can use Buzz to pick up your tweets and they stored and searchable just like your gmail.

I think the most common use case for Twitter is either self-promotion or promotion of an idea or brand or favorite thing. There are times that I too use Twitter this way, but that isn’t my primary usage for it. Part of the reason it isn’t is because I don’t think Twitter is actually AS GOOD of a promotional tool as it is hyped to be. Certainly it does work that way and some use it effectively for that purpose, but I think Leo Laporte’s experience when his Buzz can Tweet got stopped up and nobody missed him is common. Twitter is a lot more talking than listening.

Why don’t I just switch to Buzz? I’m still considering it. At this point this is why I keep up with Twitter:

1. I do read what others tweet and link to via twitter. I don’t read everything tweeted. To me it’s kind of like reading the newspaper. I don’t read back issues or read every article. I skim and dip into things that catch my eye.

2. Twitter is more popular than Buzz and there are more and better tools for it. I have now taken to tweeting from my Kindle which is a very cool way to highlight and create notes.

3. Twitter has more value than Buzz for the limited promotional purpose I use it for.

So for now I keep using Twitter. I just want to be clear on why I tweet what I tweet.

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Understanding Colossians 1:24 through Luke 18:31-34

Posted on September 11, 2010 by PaulVK

Got a question on Voices about Colossians 1:24 and decided to write a treatment of it through my text for this week’s sermon, Luke 18:31-34.

Luke 18:31-34 (NRSV)
Then he took the twelve aside and said to them, “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be handed over to the Gentiles; and he will be mocked and insulted and spat upon. After they have flogged him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise again.” But they understood nothing about all these things; in fact, what he said was hidden from them, and they did not grasp what was said.

What does that have to do with Col 1:24? I think a lot.

The letter starts out in a typical way for Paul, lots of prayer and thanksgiving and praise. That’s important because it reveals how the Christian life flows from gratitude more than admonition and duty (contra moralism which banks on carrots and sticks to get people to comply). This of course is the central rubric of the Heidelberg Catechism: Misery, Deliverance, Gratitude.

The key to understanding 1:24 is of course the context and what a context it is! The song that begins in 1:15 and goes through 1:20 is one of the most beautiful in scripture. It’s worth spending some time figuring out what that song is about and why it is structured the way it is. It is clearly a song about Creation 1.0 and Creation 2.0. It speaks of Jesus as the ikon of the invisible God, he himself the author of Creation 1.0, even the spiritual forces that govern it. “in him all things hold together.”

In verse 18 we shift to creation 2.0, he is the “firstborn from the dead”, Apparently Creation 2.0 is being born out of death in creation 1.0. CS Lewis rightly notes that nothing can arise that has not first died. Paul makes this point in other places. What’s more, the rebellion of Creation 1.0 is intimated here as is the defeat of that rebellion. The rightful supremacy of the author of creation 1.0 is re-established by the very flesh of the body of Jesus in the resurrection. What’s more the insurrection is put down not by the use of the sword (the only power that those of us fully immersed in the age of decay imagine “works”) but rather by his voluntary sacrifice on behalf of the guilty. He’s full embrace of the life of the age to come, the relational polarity of the age to come “your wellbeing at my expense” (also sometimes called ‘grace’) in the midst of the age of decay that earns him this supremacy in full view of all of the powers of creation (see Phil 2:5-11). He makes peace through the blood of the cross.

In Col 1:21-23 he contextualizes this for his Colossian audience. Jesus accomplishes this in his fleshly body through death. We could spend a lot of time here but I’ll press on.

Paul speaks as he does in 1:24 on other occasions as well, but not in exactly the same way. See Romans 5:3 Romans 8:18 2 Corinthians 4:7-18, 2 Cor 7:4.

It’s clear for Paul that the sufferings we endure are not only for our benefit, but also for the benefit of the broader body. Jesus’ sufferings were in one sense not like ours (destroying grip and the claim of the powers and principalities upon us) but our sufferings can be like his if they are part of the cruciform path behind him. How else can we understand his admonition that we “take up our cross and follow him”. Certainly this doesn’t mean that we are earning or securing something, but we are indeed participating in what he has done as the firstborn from the dead who reconciles all things to himself whether on heaven or earth and taking first place in everything.

What Paul’s sufferings do is bring specific application of Christ’s sufferings for and to the church. The emphasis isn’t on the inadequacy of the sufferings of Jesus but rather the completion of the work of the sufferings of Jesus as the rest of the body of Christ follows him in his journey of reconciliation and renewal of all things.

How is this done? It is done by walking behind Jesus, doing what he says, believing him, and living the way he lives. Again, I’ll draw my scheme to you of the two ages and what I call the relational polarity of each age.

First there is the age of decay in which we live. The creation is not evil (contra Greek dualism or implicit Gnosticism), it is subject to frustration and decay (Romans 8). The relational polarity (how one relates to the other) is lived out “my wellbeing at your expense”. This is the power of the sword. Everything in the age of decay is energized by this polarity.

CS Lewis calls the life of Jesus the life of God, the image (ikon) of the invisible God. That relational polarity is opposite the first one: “your wellbeing at my expense”. We see this all the time in Jesus’ admonitions: turn the other cheek, give to those who ask, sell all you have and give to the poor (the previous story from my Luke text), deny yourself, etc. God does this and he does it most dramatically and clearly in Jesus himself.

Jesus regularly exhorts his follows to live the way of the age to come (the kingdom of God, eternal life) even while they are located in the age of decay. This kind of living is exactly what Jesus does and this kind of living is what energizes Jesus in his journey to Jerusalem. He fully discloses to his disciples what will happen (“the third time” in Luke 18:31-34) and makes the bold claim that all of these gory sufferings he accurately predicts will lead to its intended outcome, resurrection. This of course makes no sense to those of us who live in the age of decay and have been thoroughly shaped by it. It is lunacy, stupidity, non-sense. But Jesus is the revelation of this very open “secret”.

In Colossians 1:24 Paul is simply shining the light on this in the context of his witness and ministry to the church. Jesus did this fully before the eyes of his witnesses who only see it AFTER they see the suffering. Read Luke 24. You can see it in the whole Road to Emmaus story, and the following story, most clearly noted in 24:45.

Jesus is the key to understanding Israel’s history. Israel couldn’t understand her apparent defeat and subjugation by the Gentiles and were looking for their Messiah to free them. Jesus did, but not in the way they imagined. In fact Jesus shows that Jesus’ story is Israel’s story, and Paul shows that the Colossians themselves enter into this story as well. Paul’s sufferings on display before them for their sake help them see Jesus’ sufferings and help them also see the way of the path from our bondage within the age of decay into the age to come. The path will always be cruciform but will give birth to Creation 2.0.

We Americans imagine that “witness” to Jesus is some attractive person telling lots of great stories about how Jesus “works” to make their life the kind of life that Americans think they always want. I don’t see it. The stories that in fact draw us to him powerfully enough are those stories of suffering where one freely gives their life for their friend. Think of Les Miserables, Tale of Two Cities, and on and on we go. Think of the kind of quiet, faithful, painful, life robbing sufferings freely embraced out of love for another. Every mother can be this, as can every father and many do. Faithful Christians who labor out of love, freely, not out of compulsion for the benefit of others. “Your wellbeing at my expense.” In the midst of the age of decay this will inevitably cost them everything, but Jesus (and Paul and all who follow afterwards) show that in fact they lose what they cannot keep so that they can keep what they cannot lose. It’s well worth it says Paul.

Col 1:24 sounds strange, but it’s just another exposition of the Christian life. Like the disciples who just don’t get it in Luke 18:34 it seems to make no sense, but in the light of the cross, the empty tomb, and the broken resurrected body of our Lord, it can make all the sense in the world. pvk

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3 Doctrinal emphases essential to both liberalism and the Mormon world view

Posted on September 4, 2010 by PaulVK

This from Richard Mouw’s lecture given at the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the founding of the CRC. He found this comment from a Mormon scholar who was complaining that recently some Mormon scholars were beginning to sound a lot like Calvinists rather than good Mormons.

“He observed that early Mormonism in spite of its unique teachings held some views that were very similar to the Protestant liberalism that was also emerging in the 19th century. He singled out these three doctrinal emphases that he considered to be essential to both liberalism and the Mormon worldview:

1. A finite god

2. The human capacity for self-perfectibility

3. Salvation by works

and he warned against the drift by three very different emphases of the Calvinist Reformation namely

1. A sovereign god

2. An absolute dependence of human beings on the mercy of God

3. Salvation by grace alone

‘Mormonism must make a choice. The two systems of thought stand in radical opposition to each other.'”

In reflecting lately on civil religion Bill Harris on CRC Voices drew the connection between liberalism and the kind of civil religion that Glenn Beck exemplified at his show on the Lincoln Memorial. Mormonism I think is the quintessential American religion because it so clearly exemplifies these three traits as does American Civil Religion on both the right and the left.

Posted in Culture commentary, Quotations, theological | Tagged | 2 Comments

Guiding Beliefs of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

Posted on September 4, 2010 by PaulVK

I’ve written about this before, but once just isn’t enough. This is from the book Almost Christian by Kenda Creasy Dean following Christian Smith’s fine work.

1. A god exists who created and orders the world and watches over life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God is not involved in my life except when I need God to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die. (– Kindle location 267-276).

Kenda’s words are bracing, straightforward and clear. Well done. I’ll have additional thoughts on how to address this beast later, but getting this parasite clear in the microscope is very helpful.

Posted in Culture commentary | 21 Comments

Discussing House Churches

Posted on September 2, 2010 by PaulVK

JRD Kirk responded to a post by John Armstrong on the upsides and downsides of house churches. I think this is a very important discussion for the church to have. As I wrote in the comment I see house churches attracting both the young and those disaffected by the institutional church who wish to still practice their faith in the context of a community.

Here is the comment I left on Daniel’s blog:

Good topic. I don’t know if I should comment or write a blog response. The issues that both you and John raise are good and I think our context needs to do more work on house churches and that model.

I could certainly hear the pain of past wounds in your post here. I work with church planters and nearly every good one I know says “sure it can be better than what I’ve seen…” and that’s usually true. It is also the case in nearly every case that whatever solution they sought to address the problems they saw came with their own set of challenges.

There was a time in my ministry when I was very attracted to the model. I had worked with very small churches in the Dominican Republic which were practically house churches. The model address a number of problems inherent in the American church, but some of John Armstrong’s “yeah buts” also resonated with me.

Institutions tend to do one thing well, stabilize and preserve. I tend to find house churches unstable when you start to consider decades, not years. They require a lot of their members, often more than members can sustain over the decades. Many people have periods in their lives when they have a lot to give, and other periods when they tend to coast and rest. There isn’t a lot of room in house churches for both movements.
I also think currently two groups are attracted to house churches: those who have been hurt by the institutional church but aren’t ready to give up on the faith, and those who are idealistic (often the young) about finding the “true” way to do church. When these two groups are happy about how things are going everything is dandy. How will they do when conflict sets in (in a small group there is no place to hide for better or worse) and something ugly happens?

The worst thing about the American system of church is that it is easy to walk away from each other rather than do the hard work of working through conflict. I don’t really see house churches as addressing this even though many say it does. You can leave a house church as easy as a B&M church.

The relationship between the church as organism and the church as institution is always a complex one. The problem of institutions is the problem of wineskins. Institutions both help us travel through time but are always worn down by the age of decay and the accumulation of the residue of our sinful actions.

Perhaps I am thinking of the difference between a snail and a slug. A snail has a shell that it develops. Slugs are just out there in the open.

I think we will probably have house churches with us always, but I also tend to think that what we see out there right now is there for good reasons. The church keeps developing institutions because I think it needs them.

I recall good friends of mine in the cluster when they started their church. They were pursuing a meta-church model which was promoted by Carl George. There is a lot to say for that model. They were developing a network of cell groups which were basically similar to house churches. No matter how much they talked about their little groups being “the church” they continued to be asked by participants, especially those with the least church background, “but when are we really going to start doing church.” They finally broke down, started a worship service. Today the group continues to have a vital small group ministry but it’s pretty much a regular “church”.

I remember reading Ralph Neighbor’s “Where do we go from here” for the first time. It blew me away and I was all geeked about his vision. It made so much sense, seemed so clear, so right. I think it still is, but I haven’t seen it really work out in practice.

House churches in a way run against the current of at least 1700 years of doing church and a lot of stuff in that current isn’t good. At the same time existence at times is its own justification and I so signs of the bulk of the church shedding the encumbrance of institution. pvk

Link to JRD Kirk’s post #2 on the subject.

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Self-sufficiency in church work and church planting

Posted on August 30, 2010 by PaulVK

This is an area that I’ve wrestled with for a long time with populations far poorer (in one sense) than any we find in North America. My definition of “self-sustaining” is rather nuanced for this reason. The difficulty I tend to have is with both words. What is the “self” for a local congregation? What does it mean to “sustain”? These words derive their meaning by understanding the boundaries around the works.

In the DR I worked with illegal Haitian immigrants that when they worked made between $50 and $100 a month. As a mission we refused to pay pastor wages, something that the nationals felt very differently about. Right before I came to the field the pastors when “on strike” against the mission. That moment in the history of the DR field was a curious one but illuminating one. In that moment lots of relationships and assumptions became apparent and in my mind it raise more questions than I can ever answer. The nations quite rightly saw that North Americans could easily afford to provide salaries to national pastors who often lived on the desperate level of survival even for the very basics. Sick pastors would got to the doctor and the doctor would recommend “more food”. It was that basic. At the same time the missionaries understood that creating the expectation of permanent dependent subsidy for the most basic level of church existence is long term poison for the church. This is a learning that the church has had to relearn many many times throughout the centuries. If CRWM offered salaries of $100 a month to pastors it would have destroyed the ICRRD (Iglesia Cristiana Reformada de la Republica Dominicana). One of the learnings I’ve come away from my experience in the DR with was that the money itself isn’t really the issue, it’s how we think about it and the value we invest into it and the kinds of relationships it creates.

What I look for in terms of “self-sufficiency” in a work is that their leadership (which hopefully in time goes from the missionary to a local leadership group) has the initiative and responsibility to acquire for itself the funding it needs for sustainability and future growth. To me that means that while not all of the dollars needs to come from the pockets of the people who are benefiting directly from the local ministry (although some of that very much has to happen) but that the sphere of those who benefit is broader than the local ministry. There can be external funding partners or donors who can sustain a ministry long term but in a sense that local ministry also finds a way to minister to the donors through their partnership. I think that this kind of understanding helps develop healthy ministries and helps reduce unhealthy dependency as well as resource sharing between communities and individuals of different financial resources.

Culturally we are very comfortable with market metaphors. I think that markets can be very helpful and powerful but that they aren’t God. Markets and ministries in fact don’t always produce the best results. Classis and other ecclesiastical structures can provide a helpful, added layer here. Some leaders are natural fund raises either by giftedness or by virtue of more affluent networks they were simply born into. That’s a wonderful things, but unless we have other structures that invest financial resources outside of natural networks we will tend to perpetuate the “haves and have-nots” situations and not make progress in seeking the Jerusalem-Acts standard of “no poor among them”.

What I am looking for is a layered approach that uses natural networks and also intentional leadership networks (which is what a classis is) to do a better job of supporting diverse ministries in a diversity of economic communities. We want to do this in a way where we see churches among the affluent and churches among the poor and where in a sense all are “equal” in that they are self-sustaining even if money is flowing between them in a healthy way. The broader body of Christ is blessed when the financially wealthy and financially poor can make contributions of whatever it is they have been blessed with for the benefit of the whole body of Christ.

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Archiving my Twitter Feed in Buzz

Posted on August 30, 2010 by PaulVK

Twitter doesn’t promise to backup and keep accessible or searchable your tweets. You should know that about twitter. The library of congress is doing it, but not twitter. That limits the value of twitter for an archivist which is my basic use for the service.

Since I moved from a self-hosted wordpress.org account to the wordpress.com account I haven’t had a reliable way of archiving my twitter feed. I used to use the nice widget available for the wordpress.org software which gave a daily record of my tweets on my blog. That gave nice searchable, storage for all my tweets which I use as a personal library for links I find on the web so that I can go back and easily search and find articles that I thought I might like to use at some point for something. When I switched to wordpress.com I knew I had lost that way of archiving my tweets but since I have my google reader account also following my tweets I figured I could use that. Unfortunately trying some searches in my google reader revealed that it wasn’t a very reliable way of permanently archiving my tweets in a searchable fashion. I tried searching for keywords that I knew I had in my archive and Google Reader search didn’t find them.

Buzz came out under Gmail in a dramatically inconsiderate way a while ago and played with it for a while but decided that Twitter seemed to continue to meet my needs better than Buzz so I pretty much abandoned it. I did figure out, however, the Google does archive those “Buzzes” (guess that’s what you call them) and they were searchable so now I’m going to send my tweets into Buzz and that will be a way to archive them and be able to search them. Google also has their “data liberation front” initiative that is designed to make all your Google data portable. That’s a very comforting commitment so that if for some reason Buzz fails to work out in the future I can at least take my archive out of it and keep it in some other way.

Tweets no longer appear on the blog which is a mixed blessing. On one hand they don’t clutter up the stream, on the other hand I have my stuff now in multiple places so unless I figure out some funky command line for Google doing a quick search for a past thought or article will take two searches. For now, however, buzz seems the way to go. pvk

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