Nice quote from Sara Miles’ “Take This Bread”
Like most of my friends, my passionate left-wing sentiments about civil rights or the women’s movement or Third World poverty or colonialism were felt, not studied, and our grasp of history was shaky. pg 10.
It’s the morning after Easter Sunday for preachers and I’m in my office because I read my calendar wrong. 😦 Might as well get some work done.
Lots of “he is risen” yesterday, all well meant but part of me wants to say “so what?!” I don’t ask that irreverently, it is also well meant. All of the Christian life should flow out of that “so what” but we’re bad at it.
NT Wright’s magisterial work “The Resurrection of the Son of God” essentially makes the argument that the only reasonable accounting for the shape of the development of early Christianity could have been something as shocking and paradigm changing as the resurrection of Jesus Christ. How else would fervently monotheistic Jews (their monotheism burned into them by hundreds of years of exile and occupation and reinforced by the heavy handed teachers of the law who would have a part in demanding Jesus’ execution) begin to do the audacious thing of worshiping this Jesus of Nazareth. (Here is a article length summary of his argument.)
Paul of Tarsus in his letters clearly bases his radical notions of new life based on the resurrection. The resurrection simultaneously undercuts all legalisms and utilitarian “making-life-work” strategies. In the light of the resurrection these old ways are now atrophying body parts that should be amputated. (See a rough, amplified, noted translation of Colossians 3:5-17 for a Bible Study.) The recklessness with which Paul seemed to live his life seems to be based on this.
Jesus’ teachings too seem to bear an almost suicidal trajectory. I remember a Jon Stewart quip once about Jesus’ treaching, “have they ever read this guy?” meaning that actually doing the kinds of things he suggests are neither for the ordinary or the timid. Last week the Sacramento Bee thought a house group in the Bay Area to be noteworthy because they try to apply Jesus’ teachings without the institutional accouterments.
Jesus’ teachings are in fact enormously radical and if followed and are designed to lead explicitly to the kind of outcome he experienced: cross and resurrection. They include such things as loving enemies, turning cheeks, giving away possessions, and a host of other behaviors that are clearly antithetical to the kind of prosperity and pleasure it is naturally human to value. My best attempt to try to translate all of this is my working through the concepts of the age of decay and the age to come, the relational polarity of the age of decay (my wellbeing at your expense) and the relational polarity of the age to come (your wellbeing at my expense) or, as CS Lewis calls it “the life of God”.
It’s obviously far easier to put words on than to actually live it. We are culturally and biologically disposed to self-preservation and self-indulgence. It seems to me the only real way to live any of this is to have an enormously vibrant sense of the reality of the resurrection. This in fact is Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 1:17-23.
In attempting to convey this in my ministry I have been trying to flesh out “he is risen” in broader more applicable terms. My Easter sermon was yet another whack at it. As I’m in the home stretch in my Revelation Adult Sunday School class I’ve been able to talk about it in the context of the last chapters of the book of Revelation. What I’m learning is #1, I’m not much good at it and #2, we haven’t developed a sufficient conversation for it within the Christian community. We haven’t yet received all that Paul asked for in that Ephesians prayer.
Part of the difficulty we have is all of the slopping language floating around about “heaven”. Our notions are insufficiently grounded in the notion of seeing it as the fulfillment of the cultural mandate of Genesis 1:28. We are designed for culture making and our redemption is not merely for an escape from pain and frustration but is in fact designed for culture-making in the age to come. I believe if we can begin to lean into this it can breath some life into our desire for the age to come. I find in many people a very poor sense of excitement for the promises of God based on a practical theology that is overly gnostic and prudish. Our enjoyment of all of God’s good gifts in the age to come (the other side of the resurrection) will far outstrip our enjoyment of them today. Engineers will love that engineering far more than they do now. The same is true for musicians, chefs, artists, organizers, economists, writers, athletes, biologists, physicists, administrators, farmers, etc.
We naturally struggle with frame of reference issues in imagining the age to come. That’s OK. Our frame of reference should in fact not be clouds but rather soil, not ethereal floating but running, grasping, tasting, seeing. CS Lewis’ “The Last Battle” and “The Great Divorce” are helpful texts in feeding this imagination.
The primary reference is of course the only sample we have of the actual stuff of Creation 2.0 is the resurrected body of Jesus itself. NT Wright makes the comment about the sitings that the witnesses seem to struggle to capture it. He’s recognized by his scars but he’s been transformed in a way that they can’t quite comprehend. Matthew 28:17 is so refreshingly honest: “When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.”
I would like to see us do some more imagining of the age to come. Maybe along side “he is risen” we should say “and I am too”. That will both highlight how unrisen we act, think and live, but maybe it will connect us a bit which is of course exactly what Paul does. We have been buried with him in our baptism, we have been raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raise him from the dead. Our lives are hidden with Christ in God. (Col 2:12, 3:3)
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This is also from CRC-Voices and follows up in the discussion on posting http://leadingchurch.com/wordpress/?p=908
The golden rule is a good rule. It predates Jesus’ articulation of it and it is found in other religious traditions as well. It really doesn’t go far enough, however,
The real challenge is to love your enemy, the kind of “perfection” that Jesus describes of the Father in Matthew 4:43-48. It goes beyond simply doing what the other wants you to do. We all know that this can also mask neglect. We also know that using this as an excuse can also be an attempt to justify withholding love or controlling the other. Loving the other in a context of conflict is an enormously difficult thing that requires nothing short of divinely given wisdom.
I also think that to do so sacrificially, in the way that Jesus did it requires both a firm belief in God as Judge AND a firm belief in the resurrection. For Jesus to let himself be executed on a cross makes no sense without both of those elements. If there is no divine judgment then the sacrifice on the cross is an empty show, perhaps even grandstanding as well as robbing Jesus’ guiding and teaching presence from his disciples. With the ransom for sinners and the beginning of Creation 2.0 in the resurrection the cross is not pointless or vain but instrumental and generative.
Jesus is also very clear that as we follow him into his death we also follow him into his life which means that the kind of costly love that he displayed will be ours as well. He doesn’t take up the cross so that we can avoid cross bearing, and this of course is where we fall down along with the rest of the disciples on that night. The truth is that we are poor lovers who cling to our own supposed narrative of how we think things are supposed to unfold. In the service of that narrative we communicate anything but the kind of generosity displayed in Matthew 5 and instead wade in with imagined fixes that tell us that cross bearing is unnecessary for ourselves and impose burdens on the other that we are unwilling to shoulder ourselves.
The church in North America has grown soft and lazy as a majority culture, imagining that selectively applied past manifestations somehow can be activated to return to a righteous community. It is folly. The lack of cultural traction we now fret from is directly related to an avoidance of love and its costliness that no amount of selectively imposed legalism on others can mitigate even if it were possible.
The cheerful note is that we all get to start over and learn the basics of loving our enemies and loving those that bother us because there are more and more of them all the time. There seems no shortage of opportunities to love in the midst of our failures. pvk
What's behind the fashionable use of the word "bigot"
This is a response to a CRC-Voices discussion
So if you own a person on the basis of color you’re a bigot, but if you own them on the basis of debt you’re not? The use of the word “bigot” today is more or less a verbal hand grenade attempting to leverage the cultural moral weight of the civil rights movement in the service of the debate surrounding homosexuality.
Bigotry based on skin color was the result of a very long and complex social history. A fun quick read of the NYTimes review of “The History of White People” might raise a few eyebrows: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/books/review/Gordon-t.html?pagewanted=1
It is popular to construct a myth of progress narrative by which blacks, women, and now gays are emancipated from the bonds of cruel bigotry, with both sides finding justification in proof texting along the way or as is more popular today either throwing out the Bible or just getting very selective with it. You can only do this if you stick to a very broad, non-historical brush.
Slavery in Bible times had everything to do with debt and failure of your clan or people in warfare rather than skin color. That isn’t to say that skin color wasn’t an issue between groups, but rather that the issues didn’t relate to the specific history we connect with it. When groups are in conflict they will search for whatever is handy to use against their enemy: skin color, language, food, you name it. We do the same today. Ever hear ethnic slurs based on food or clothing? Were the Irish “darker” than the English? Using skin color or physical features in social combat is simply part of that warfare.
Today’s construct of gay and straight within the myth of progress is imagined to be “a given” but I believe will likely be overturned. Consider the following. In a culture that has fallen in love with the notion that everything around us is a social construct, yet the hard turn of the last decade or so on the “straight and gay” model has been to insist on a “baked in” orientation. “Sexual preference” has given way to “sexual orientation”. and a lot of the “God made me this way” language in a day when popular culture asserts that “God” outsourced all of his making to a long and complex string of evolutionary mechanisms.
We are more likely to see that expressions of human sexuality are conditioned by an enormous set of variables that include genetics, environmental factors (if industrial chemicals in the environment are impacting the sexual mechanics of frogs, fish, and other earth creatures are they not impacting us?), social factors, episodic factors, etc.
Recently an article noted that seniors are “coming out of the closet” after an opposite sex spouse has died. OK, but then the label thing comes into play. If someone lived 70 years in a heterosexual marriage and spent the last 10 seeking homosexual companionship on what basis do you derive the label? Which lifestyle was “the lie”? Right now the fashion is to label anyone who has had any history of same sex activity as “homosexual” often despite a history of opposite sex activity. To me how the label works in this fashion is a vestige of a history of strong bias against homosexual activity more than an actual descriptor or predictor of an ontological category that the person is participating within.
We hear it again and again that Ted Haggard is a gay man in denial. He might be, but do we know that or are our labels not quite the ontological givens our political conflicts need them to be?
This in a culture where increasingly identity is imagined to be a function of self expression rather than receipt. On nearly every other page of identity we are demanding the right to be episodic and expressive yet on this subject we assert sustainable ontological certainty. I doubt it will hold once the political pressure is off.
What we will likely see following the broader trend lines in the culture is a continuation of the larger theme of identity as self expression and therefore relationships continuing to be utilitarian and episodic. I connect with whomever works for me right now, of whatever gender I prefer or works for me in the moment. The broader cultural narrative will likely absorb the smaller conflict over sexuality.
In an interesting Salon interview on marriage therapy the interviewer dips his hand a bit in terms of his overall view of marriage:
I’m a 20-something gay man in New York, and I probably know more people in open relationships than in monogamous ones. To me, many of the marriages in the book sounded like torture, and as I was reading, my reaction was that they should either get a divorce, or figure out something more fluid that works.
See Andrew Cherlin’s comment on the difference between the gay rights struggle in Europe and America:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/books/20smit.html
This on contains this interesting line:
“Marriage is our battleground. Only in America, Mr. Cherlin says, are gay people campaigning so determinedly for the right to marry. Most gay men and lesbians in Europe, he maintains, view marriage as another oppressive heterosexual institution.”
So what does “bigotry” mean in this debate? It seems a word of convenience used to assault the other side and not much more. pvk