Category Archives: Discipleship

The Truth about Love: A Resurrection Sermon

Posted by on March 31, 2013 4 comments

And now, after the end, now at the beginning, will shall speak, yet again of Love. Love eludes us. Only slightly more frequently and more intensely does love seize us, make us love’s own in the very moment when we find ourselves most lethargic, most unable to take another step. At the moment when we know nothing of love, love owns us, makes us transparent to the actions and call of love.

Love is implacable. It will be satisfied with nothing other than the complete consumption of our whole self, indeed of the very notion of self. Love cares not for our self-thought, cares not for our constant introspection. Love is movement, the movement that happens precisely as our bitterness, anger, sorrow, and rage seem to consume every fiber of our being. Love is the short-circuit that somehow breaks through, somehow catches hold when every element of our feelings are captive entirely to hate, cynicism, rage, futility, tears.

Love brings us to our knees, draws forth our hands, making them to reach out in both supplication, and in service, precisely at the moment when all that we are clenches our fists. Love brings us to tears when our eyes have never been more tightly shut. Love is an openness that flows nonsensically, from a frozen, cold, dead, unopenable heart.

Love is slavery. A slavery more mysterious, more nonsensical than any we have known till now. It is the slavery of joy, a joy that persists in the face of all sorrow. It is not taught. It cannot be learned. The slavery of love cannot be bought, obtained, trained for, or made real by any power or process we could devise. One never knows it until it happens, until it takes hold. When suddenly, in a moment that calls for nothing other than wisdom, for measured, well-thought out decision-making, there isn’t even the faintest hint of a decision to be made. In that moment all that stands before us is the inevitability of the call of love. The call that can only call forth in us the response of obedience: “Here am I! Send me!”

Love is freedom. It is a freedom that persists in the midst of grief. It is a liberation that persists, dwells, never forsakes those who suffer at the hands of its call. Love is the liberation of the traumatized, the forsaken, the forgotten. But more than that love is the liberation from our petty dramas unto a life of self-abandonment. It is a freedom that breaks every fetter, save for the fetter that it, itself is. It makes all else irrelevant, inconsequential, utterly bereft of power. The freedom of love is the freedom from being held back, even by one’s most deep-seated pathologies, sins, violences, lies, and dysfunctions. The freedom of love is liberation unto gift, mission, shouts of praise—amidst the fullness of lament, protest, rage, and yearning that this world might give way to the coming Kingdom.

Love is desperation. Love screams for the consummation of its promises. Love never ossifies. Love calls forth, unceasingly. Love demands that love alone remain. Love cannot be contained, cannot be limited, cannot be reasonably dispensed, cannot be orderly. Love, being love, can do nothing other than demand, proclaim, and scream for its sovereignty, its victory, its fullness.

Love is hope. Love believes a future when the foundations crumble and explode all around us. Love believes a future when we sit in dust and ashes. Love screams against any resignation that would see our present distress as the final word. Love is a senseless, stupid hope, a hope against hope that there yet is another Word, a dawning Kingdom, a New Creation, a making right that is coming, and that cannot be stopped.

Love is boldness. It is a boldness that remains in the face of insurmountable fatigue. It is that small, imperceptible movement, that unnoticeable gesture of a hand, raising itself in protest against death. It is a resolve that remains when all reasons for hope have vanished from memory and thought. Love believes all things.

Love suffers. Love that does not suffer is no love at all. Suffering is the mark of true love. All love that seeks to hold itself back from suffering is the most repulsive of lies, the most abominable of counterfeits. No, love is only as it places itself in the path of pain, only as it abandons its safety, its desires, its rights, its reasonable requests, it’s hopes for satisfaction, for respite, for being cared for in return. Love is love when all these things melt away in the sheer gravity of Love’s imperative. Love is love when it suffers freely, asking nothing in return, save only to be remembered.

Love dies. Power triumphs over love. Love is trampled underfoot. It is the destiny of love to be defeated. Love is love precisely in that it gives itself over to defeat rather than dominate another. Love that refuses death has nothing to do with love. Love comes to an end because its gaze always lies outside itself. Love cannot secure its own survival, indeed, love is nothing less than the rejection of survival as a thing to be pursued. Loved only pursues the other. Love lives only for them.

Love rises. Love triumphs over death, over power, over reason, over fairness, over hate, over nature, over logic. The love that suffers, the love that dies, that very love has complete victory. Love is the movement from an unimaginable, extinguished future to a confidence that nothing shall ever separate us. Love is resurrection. It is the cry for resurrection and the coming of resurrection. It is death and life, abandonment and salvation.

Love will never leave us alive. Love will kill us. To love is to die. To love is to lose. To love is to weep, scream, and yearn for a victory that we can never own, never produce, never anticipate. To love is to give ourselves up to death.

Love will leave no one among the dead. Love will not finish its work until death itself is defeated. Love is death’s death. To love is to rise. To love is to have nothing, yet possess everything. To love is to have one’s tears wiped away, to shout for joy, to rejoice in a victory that we never owned, did not produce, and did not anticipate. To love is to be caught up, inexplicably in an indestructible life.
To love is to die alone, forsaken by God and humans alike. To love is to be resurrected into a life beyond anything we could ask or think. To love is to share the ambiguity, suffering, death, and future of Jesus of Nazareth.

Love is never something we do, never a practice we perform, never a thing we learn, never a craft in which we become proficient. Love is an inexplicable, unconscionable, and immoral grace that we learn only by undergoing it. Love is what God does to us, for us, with us, in us, and on our behalf. Love is God’s robbing us over ourselves, our sin, our power, our narratives of success, of victimhood, of all forms of self-seeking.

Love is the suffering of God. Love is the power that lies beyond all powers. It is the power of God to abandon everything for the sake of the worthless, the rebellious, the sinners, the unclean. Love is God’s refusal to let go of even one of us wayward creatures. Love is what God puts Godself through so that we might never be separated from God.

Love finds us. The only thing more true than love’s elusiveness is its coming to us in power. We are those who have been seized be love. In spite of ourselves—and really, really, it is in spite of ourselves—we have been found by love. Oh how love could be dismissed as foolishness had it not so surely found us! Had it not stormed forth from the tomb, wounds and all and gone ahead of us to Galilee! How easy it would be to brush it off and move one with real life had we not been found, been seized, been transfigured, been redeemed, been unforgettably loved, and loved yet again! How easy it would have been!

But such easy paths are no longer possible for us. Something far more difficult, and infinitely more wonderful has happened to us. We have been found by love. Our bloodlines have been redrawn by the coming of Love. Our flesh, our bodies have been claimed by the fire of an unquenchable love. We are left in the wilderness of love. We are left clinging to each other as the death continues to rise up in our sinews and souls. We weep together, we bleed together, we die together, we live together, we laugh together, we sing together, we shout together. We are together. And this is the work of love. And this love will triumph, for in Jesus, it has.

We only know it will be love: A sermon on 1 John 3:1-7

Posted by on April 23, 2012 7 comments

Brothers and sisters, here is the amazing thing that we have to deal with, that is so hard for us to understand. That is even harder for the world to understand. The thing that trips us up, the thing we cannot catch up with, that we cannot ever grasp is how great, how singular, how unprecedented, how utterly surprising and evernew is the love that God the Father has given to us in Jesus Christ. Through his act of love, uninterrupted, untainted, unqualified love, God has made us, in him, to be God’s own children, God’s own family. Make no mistake about it, brothers and sisters, that is what we are. And we are that, only in, through, and by God’s radical act of love in Jesus Christ, the Nazarene, the one we crucified, the one that the Father raised up, and who came back to us again speaking peace to us. The thing we cannot catch up with, that we can never grasp, never fully understand, is that somehow, through some miracle, God has made us part of God’s own life. We are God’s children! That is what we are!

And that, brothers and sisters, is why the world is confused by us, why they do not understand us when we speak about the Gospel. They don’t recognize us because they did not recognize Jesus, the one who has made us what we now are. Brothers and sisters, this is the miracle, that we are God’s children now. And yet, there is so much about this that eludes us. It is so weighty, so much greater than we can know and comprehend, indeed we cannot understand it. What this all means, what it will be, how it will be revealed, how we will live forever in God, what God’s victory shall look like, and what the world made new will be, brothers and sisters, these things we do not know. We cannot possess them, catch hold of them, grasp them, explain them, and hand them out to others as if they were goods and services. All of this is too wonderful for us.

There is only one thing we can dare to say we know. We know that when Jesus is apocalypsed, when he is revealed, manifested, when his transfiguring kingdom breaks forth in its ultimate fullness, when all this comes to pass we know this: that we will be like him. We will see him as he truly is. We will see, with unveiled faces, the fullness of the singular, radical, uninterrupted, and evernew Love that Jesus is. And then, brothers and sisters, on that day, we will be like that. We will finally shed all that remains of our blindness and our self-deception, and we will see the Love, the so-great Love of God that Father that is Jesus. And when we see it, we will be transformed. We will be like that. We will be loosed from all our hidden shadows and darknesses and be transformed. We will live, without reserve in that one great Love.

This is our hope, brothers and sisters. And every one of us who hope in this find ourselves working. We work, we struggle, we cry out, we yearn together to be made single-mindedly devoted to this Love. We strive to unify our divided hearts so that we might love without interruption, just as Jesus loves without interruption. We work for this, we encourage one another in this, we pray for one another in this, we weep with one another when we fail in this, and we keep on going together in this. We search, we pray, we yearn, we work, we study, we listen—all so that we may grow up into the Love that Jesus is.

And when we sin, when anyone sins, we shy away from this undivided Love. We cease to let it be the one true thing, our one true “law”. We seek to be unmoored from single-minded devotion. We long to divide things up once again into secret spheres where we can rule our own lives. When sin we are guilty of the worst sort of anarchy, an irrational refusal to have our lives transformed in the glory of the single-minded, uninterrupted Love of God that is Jesus. Sin is the refusal of this Love. It is the refusal to make this Love our one and only “law”. Sin is lovelessness.

And you know that this is why Jesus came to us brothers and sisters! This is why Christ apocalyptically came on the scene: To take this lovelessness away! In him there is no hint of lovelessness, but only the Father’s uninterrupted act of Love, the love that brings life out of death, new creation out of the present evil age, hope out of despair, praise out of sorrow, shouts of joy out of cries of grief. This is the Love that Jesus is. There is no lovelessnes in Jesus, no hidden shadow, no dark side. He came for one reason only, to destroy lovelessness wherever it exists in this world.

This is why, brothers and sisters, that no one who has been made part of God’s family through this Love continues to live in lovelessness. Those who keep on embracing power, control, domination, fear, and death, they haven’t understood this Love. They haven’t seen it yet. They haven’t tasted and known it yet. And when you, my brothers and sisters, when we fall back into lovelessness, we forget, we cease to live as what we are: God’s children. We pull ourselves back from the Love that God is and stumble backwards into the darkness that Jesus came to take away. When we are living in the Love that Jesus is, there is no room left for lovelessness.

So brothers and sisters, don’t let anyone make you believe the lie. The lie that one can be righteous, be moral, have integrity, be worthy  without living totally by Love. Everyone who lives out this Love is living in righteousness. There is no other ground, there are no other standards. To be righteous is to live the Love that is Jesus. There is no other righteousness, no other virtue, no other integrity, no other morality, no other standard by which we can assess ourselves. The only righteousness that God honors, that God creates, that God shares is the righteousness of self-abandoning Love. The only righteousness is the righteousness of crucifixion and resurrection. This is the only place we can live, this is the only hope we can stand on, this is the only life worth giving ourselves to.

Some truths to embrace:

  • The world does not know Jesus. To the extent that they know us, that we make sense to the world, to its way of running, we are not living as what we are, the children of God.
  • Our only hope, the only thing we have, is that who Jesus is will be our future. We know nothing else, we must seek for nothing else.
  • When we really hope for the Love that is Jesus, we find ourselves working together to love better. When we really hope, we really work, and we can’t imagine not doing it.
  • Sin is refusing to allow Love, the Love that is Jesus, to be our one and only law, our one and only rule, our one and only criterion for life and hope.
  • It is more important to refuse to be deceived than to figure out everything that we should do, or how to answer every question. The radical “No” of God to all forms of lovelessness must always be before our eyes. Only when we let God’s “No” to lovelessness reign can we hear God’s resounding “Yes” of uninterrupted Love.
  • The definition of Love is Crucifixion and Resurrection.

 

The severity of hope

Posted by on January 5, 2012 13 comments

The reduction of hope is one of our greatest temptations. Hope, unlike optimism, nostalgia, or raw self-assertion speaks of a space in which all our abilities to “deal” with our situation have vanished. We have no raw data, resources, skills, or powers with which to get a handle on things, and are left only to hope. When have no reason or rationale to anticipate a resolution, we are left either to descend into despair, or somehow to inexplicably live in expectancy of a hope beyond our hopelessness, a Word that cannot be produced, but can only be cried out for, and if uttered, only received with thanks and praise.

The severity of hope is easy to close one’s eyes to precisely because it is so deeply severe. Allowing ourselves to live in expectant hope, when all the signs point to its irrationality and foolishness is supremely difficult and disarming. To venture into the realm of hope is come to the very edge of the void, to finally surrender one’s cleverness, resourcefulness, and courage and cry out for a salvation that is, quite simply impossible on the basis of all that is. As my friend Peter Kline has recently pointed out in his superb essay on Lady Gaga’s Marry the Night video:

The line between despair and hope is razor thin. Both face the future anxiously as a kind of empty darkness. The only difference is that whereas despair cowers before the darkness in fear, grasping for some-thing to stabilize the dizzying anxiety . . . hope leaps forward, dancing into the darkness with an inexplicable expectancy that love is present and that love will come. . . . Love is the impossible possibility of dancing the night away on the razor, treating it not as the precipice of despair, but as the edge of glory.

Walter Brueggemann makes some similarly helpful points in his essay “Faith at the Nullpunkt” in his The Word that Redescribes the World. Examining the crises of faith that Israel negotiates in the Old Testament, he speaks of the point of utter failure, in which the securities of Israel utterly break down in exile. It is precisely at this nullpunkt where the challenge of hope begins. In the face of hopelessness Israel is faced with the dual calling to, on the one hand “relinquish what is gone, to resist every denial and every act of nostalgia, to acknowledge and embrace what YHWH has ended”; and on the other hand “to receive what is inexplicably and inscrutably given by YHWH, to resist every measure of despair, to await and affirm what YHWH, beyond every quid pro quo, now gives.” But the crucial point in all this, the point at which we are all tempted tame and blunt the severity of hope is that we can assure and possess “no automatic move from relinquishment to reception; one does not follow necessarily from or after the other” (62).

The movement from despair to joy, from fissure to healing is not a movement that can be held in hand. We cannot anticipate or secure it. Rather, in the very depths of the darkness of the nullpunkt we can only cry out for it, only hope for it. Ultimately hope, if it is not to be reduced to a grasping for control, or a dishonest and self-possessed optimism, must be understood as that which

stakes everything on the unfettered “Thou” who is not in thrall to the reasonableness of any nullpunkt. All nullpunkt, in every sphere, have common properties. In the end what counts is the capacity of this “Thou” to intrude into the nullpunkt and override it. (Brueggemann, 71)

Hope, real genuine hope must not shy away from this bare point of hopelessness. If we are to avoid abandoning hope for nostalgia, self-assertion, or self-imposed blindness and despair we must not close our eyes to the point of dissolution, of emptiness and screaming in which the world, and all of us in it ultimately find ourselves.

The nullpunkt, in its many forms, is enough to evoke deep and raw fear. The exile offers a fear of abandonment. The pressure of chaos invites fear of obliteration. The immediacy of death bespeaks nullification and nonbeing. The nulpunkt carries the prospect of total nullification. Into that is spoken, “Do not fear.” The antidote seems modest in the face of the threat. Unless, of course, the antidote is uttered by one who is trustworthy. Everything depends upon that. The future always depends for Israel [and the church, the world, and ever human person] upon the trustworthiness of the One who characteristically hovers somewhere between the fear so palpably grounded and the faith so fragilely embraced. It is the pivot point of hope: “Do not fear!” (Bruegggemann, 71)

But this “Do not fear!” is not simply the assurance that there is nothing to fear. No, the word of grace which comes among us and tells us “Do not fear!”, the perfect love that casts out all fear (1 John 4:18) comes not before, but after and during the night of trembling in which blood is sweat from the brow of Jesus. The calling not to fear is spoken precisely into the face of that which is utterly and ultimately fearful. And this calling, this severe hope turns always and only on the one who speaks it. It can ultimately be true only if this one is indeed trustworthy and has and will overcome death forever. And it is this one, the Crucified Resurrected one who indeed speaks this to is, precisely on the precipice of hopelessness: ”Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hell” (Rev 1:17-18).

The irresistible devolution

Posted by on August 11, 2011 26 comments

One of the interesting things about the now old News Corp phone-hacking scandals is how evangelical and radical Christians who publish under their umbrella have gone about justifying their involvement with an entity that is demonstrably evil. For example, radical Christian and new monastic superstar Shane Claiborne is well known for his many books, including the bestselling book, The Irresistible Revolution which, as you are probably aware is published by Zondervan, a company own by News Corp.

For a radical Christian pacifist, who calls us to follow Jesus wholly, I found Claiborne’s response to questions about the approriateness of utilizing the News Corp to spread his message rather telling:

“I want to have the broadest readership possible,” Claiborne says by phone, “I don’t want to be someone who just speaks to the choir.” He says smaller publishers have their advantages but the books he has written for them cost “two or three times” more than what they would if Zondervan published them.

Claiborne, who has preached his message via Esquire, Fox News (also owned by News Corp), Al Jazeera and many others, says the key is to “protect the integrity of the message.” If he is convinced the medium won’t change the message, he will work with organizations despite not “[agreeing] with all of their approaches or decisions.”

But even if the message is protected, his work is being used to help enrich a rather well-maintained corner of empire. He feels “conflicted” about this. “I don’t think that the world exists in 100 percent pure and 100 percent impure options,” he says.

. . . . There’s good and bad in each of us, he says, “we are called to work on the log in our own eye, and I’m sure as heck trying to work on the compromises that I make so that those are minimal when it comes to integrity.”

His response, in other words is to oddly assert a sort of Niebuhrianism. Obviously in an ideal world we wouldn’t publish our radical Christian manifestos of hope with publishers who have no ethics and exist solely to produce profits, even at the cost of dehumanizing and oppressing others. But we live in the real world. In the real world sometimes we need to compromise with evil media empires in order to sell enough copies of our book. We may not feel good about this, but this abiguity is an unavoidable tension in which we must live if we wish to deal with “the real world.”

Of course this is exactly the sort of ethical logic that books like Claiborne’s constantly rail against, holding up by contrast the radical politics of Jesus. So when it comes to say, war, the answer is obvious: a complete and radical break with “the world” for the sake of faithfulness to the Gospel. But when it comes to money, and “soft violence”, the kind we don’t easily see, the kind that sustains corporate behemoths like News Corp, well then we have to learn to live in world where things aren’t so black and white. When it comes to “violence” (which always seems to mean simply an ethical disapproval of war) we must not shirk the duty of obedience and faithfulness. When it comes to money, influence, and success (even “good” influence and success in “good” ministries), well then we have to be ok with some compromises with the powers in order to get things done.

Of course one obvious difference between these two contradictory positions that folks like Claiborne tend to take is that simply saying “War is wrong” doesn’t exactly cost us anything or make us ask the hard questions about what violence really is and how it is happening all around us and in us. The reason money, influence, and success are so much harder to simply chuck under the bus of faithfulness and obedience is because we can’t do that without being self-implicating. And there’s the rub.

All of which seems to give further evidence to the fact that “war” and “violence” are not the preeminent capitulations the church has made to the powers. Indeed, arguing about why Christians must be anti-war may well distract us from the real issues, and indeed the real violence that the church consistently ignores for the sake of its own comfort and success.

Or to put an even finer point on the matter: What we really need to be able to do be honest about money. Nothing melts away faux radicalism faster than demanding the people talk about money and change how they relate to it concretely.

More on “place,” ideology, and incarnation

Posted by on June 7, 2011 14 comments

Some of this appears in the comment tread on yesterday’s post, but I thought it needed to be expanded into a post in its own right as well. As we consider what it means to think in terms of “place” and the church’s life, I want to be clear. My point is not that the church should not seek concretely dwell in and be concerned for its particular context. Rather my point is that we need to look not to “place” as a sort of cultural-theological category but rather need to ask “What place? Which spaces?” Inhabiting the culture of suburban affluence is not the same thing as inhabiting the culture of the urban ghetto, and we cannot include them both under the rubric of “place”, at least not if we are talking about how to avoid ideology.

In some of these discussions, as is often the case the language of “incarnation” has come up. If we relativize “place,” does that amount to a denial of the incarnation, in which God in Christ comes and dwells in a particular place and culture? If we are to be in the world as Christ himself was, does that not also mean that the church ought to enculturate itself, establishing rootedness, identity and longevity by stabilizing its life in a particular place, thus imitating and participating in Christ’s incarnation?

This use of “incarnation” I take to be an extremely widespread problem in a lot of contemporary ecclesiological and missional discourse and practice. It relies on an an unbiblical expansion of “incarnation” into a theological category that neglects the actual meaning of that doctrine in terms of the concrete history of Jesus Christ. That is to say, “incarnation” does not name a broad theological principle or metaphysical-ecclesiological quality. Rather it is a doctrine about Christ’s singular person and work that is derived from the radical event of his crucifixion and resurrection. “Incarnation” must be understood concretely in terms of Christ’s own history, his concrete story.

Taken in that light it becomes clear that the incarnation does not sanctify “place” (rootedness, cultural identity, etc.), though it continues to be taken that way. Rather we learn that the Word became flesh and tabernacled (skenoo) among us (John 1). Indeed when the Word comes to those who were “his own”, those who are his own people, those who concretely dwell in the land and the Holy Place of Jerusalem, it is precisely they who “did not receive him.” The mode of God’s “dwelling” is not that of rootedness, of Temple, but rather of Tabernacle, of sojourning without a secure “place.” And thus Jesus never “roots” his ministry anywhere but rather is found traversing all sorts of places, going to the Samaritans, Galilee of the Gentiles, and even to the houses of the Romans. He does indeed come to “the holy place” — only to be reject, driven out, and crucifed outside the city gate (more on this later). His ministry is not one of “inhabiting place” but rather of traversing place, venturing into abandoned spaces with the unclean and the marginalized. As such it is a profound theological mistake to jump from “incarnation” to a vision of rootedness, stability, a sanctifying of place. That is decidedly what Jesus does not do. Rather his whole ministry consists in the relativizing of “place”, especially the Temple, which of course was a major cause of his crucifixion.

Likewise, in the New Testament the incarnation never functions as a way of describing the scandal of the Gospel, rather it is an afterthought, a doctrine that is a mere consequence of the earth-shattering fact of the resurrection of the Crucified One. The notion that God would come and dwell with his people is not the scandal of the Gospel; that was Israel’s earliest hope as well attested throughout the Old Testament. The Scandal of the Gospel was that God would come among Israel as the Crucified One, the one cursed under Torah (Deut 21:23). It is Christ Crucified, not “Christ incarnated” that is the scandal of the Gospel. And it is always to crucifixion-resurrection, not “incarnation” that the Apostles call the church. That’s why I’m hesitant to allow “the incarnation” a sort of independent status to determine the nature of the church and its ministry. The pattern of the New Testament gospel is not from incarnation to “incarnational ministry”, but is rather from crucifixion-resurrection to cruciform self-abandonment. We need to understand “incarnation” from the cross, not the other way round.

Thus I must say again that the call to discipleship of the crucified leaves us in an unstable relationship with “place” and “rootedness” and “culture.” I’m haunted by statements like those in Hebrews: “Therefore Jesus also suffered outside the city gate in order to sanctify the people by his own blood. Let us then go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (Heb 12:13-14). Jesus comes among us, not as one who “inhabits place”, but as one who is driven out of the security and peace of “place”, rootedness, culture, etc. He is found outside the city gates, driven into the abandoned spaces along with the lepers, prostitutes, and the godforsaken. If, as Hebrews suggest, our calling is to “go to him outside the camp”, I think that should orient us, not towards the lure of stability, place, and culture, but towards the forgotten and hidden spaces in this world, the spaces that “place” crowds out and paves over, where the despised and the worthless of this world, “the poor of Jesus Christ” are abandoned, having no “place” to lay their head. That, it seems to me is where the church should be found, and towards which it should continually move.

“Place” and ideology

Posted by on June 6, 2011 133 comments

A while back David Fitch posted some thoughts on the power of “place” to overcome ideology in the life of the church. He states his argument, briefly as follows:

. . . it is only through “place” that we can break the cycle of ideological church. It is only through engaging in the practices of being the local expression of Christ’s body that we can break out of the entanglements of ideological cynicism. It is only in being the church of Jesus Christ, whose belief and practice is grounded in the Triune relation of God in the world, that we can avoid being ideologized. It is only in building communities that have their own internal integrity built in the on-the-ground participation in the Reign of Christ – that we can escape the ideologization of the church.  No longer dependent upon ideological structure – we can then discern – resist- participate in the world in non violent non-antagonistic ways. This of course (I would argue) is the nature of the incarnation and incarnational communities.

Now, I want to say at the outset that I understand that Fitch is emphasizing “place” (as many missional and new monastic folks do, including myself) in an attempt to combat certain elements of the contemporary evangelical church, such as suburban commuter churches in which the congregates don’t share much in the way of meaningful common life. In the face of churches whose members may live anywhere and not necessarily anywhere near one another, the call to “place” seems to make some sense. Certainly the church is not faithful if it construes itself as a sort of abstract meeting place that does not call us into common life and mission together.

However, I’ve grown increasingly less confident in the notion of “place” to do the sort of heavy lifting that is often asked of it. First of all, in contrast to what Fitch seems to suggest, I don’t see how its possible for us to construe “place” in and of itself as giving us a way to “break the cycle of ideological church.” “Place” speaks of location, stability, longevity, peoplehood, cultivation, it conjures up the images of land and home. But this seems to be part of the problem: Is not commitment to “place” the greatest source of ideology in human history? Are not wars fought precisely in the name of “place”? Is not the effort to carve out and secure “place” at the very center of ideological conflict? To speak of “place” is speak of establishment, and as such, far from becoming a site of resistance to ideology, it forms the place of its very birth. Could not the call to seize upon “place” have the exact opposite effect as Fitch intends? Might it not drive the church towards a territorialism, a possessiveness, that insists upon securing its own “internal integrity”?

We do well to remember that “place” is not neutral. “Places” are created by blood, by division, by violence. It is decidedly easy for the images of belonging and stability that “place” conjures up to imagine that it is simply benign and beautiful. But the truth is that it is not enough to call the church to embrace “place.” Rather the church must be called to critically question and act in response to the forces and powers that divide the world. It is not enough to say “place”; rather we must critically examine the nature of the different spaces in which we find ourselves. The “place” that is the urban ghetto is a decidedly different space than the suburbs or the uptown. They are not really “places” at all, but rather are spaces, created by various forces of social and political (and spiritual!) power. Embracing the “place” that is the urban ghetto is decidedly not the same thing as embracing the “place” that most middle class churches inhabit.

It seems to me that the more pertinent call to the church is not simply to embrace “place”, as if that were some overarching category. Rather the church must discern how different spaces are created in this world, how the principalities and powers seek to divide, enslave, and dehumanize those for whom Christ died and in whom he still suffers. It is into those spaces, the spaces claimed by the idolatrous powers that the church must be found if it is to be counted faithful to the Messiah who proclaimed salvation and restoration to “the least.” In entering these spaces we are not promised the security of “place.” Quite the opposite: “The Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” Discipleship calls us, I believe, not into the security of place, but into the insecurity of obedience, of suffering with and bringing the good news to those who are being ground under the oppressive wheel of the powers. It may be that “place” is not a gift we will always be able to claim or assume upon. It may be instead that we are called to die to the security of “place,” and be driven, by the Spirit to pour ourselves out as a drink offering with, for, and alongside those who are driven out of “place.”

The martyrdom of Stephen and narrative theology

Posted by on June 3, 2011 33 comments

In the last few weeks I’ve spent a good bit of time in Acts, and more than a little of it on the story of the martyrdom of Stephen (Acts 6-7). The more I read it, the more I’m struck by its profoundly explosive nature, and especially how it stands as a witness against what we commonly think of as “narrative theology.”

Stephen’s “defense” (a more profound misnomer I’m hard pressed to think of) recounts the whole story of Israel in a new way, a deeply offensive way. Indeed there is nothing defensive about his speech. His constant emphasis is that God’s people have consistently rejected God’s agents and God’s actions and have refused to obey. All this culminates in their rejection of Jesus, the presence of God himself. This is very crucial to see: Stephen tells the story of God’s people against themselves. He narrates their history as a history of their failure and refusal of God’s intentions and actions. In effect, his telling of the story of Israel is his own attempt to rob them of their assumed possession of that story.

It is a common tenet of most accounts of narrative theology that the telling of stories is crucial to how communities fashion and shape their life. We tell our stories as myths that support and sustain us; our telling of our story is a source of coherence, stability, and formation. Stories are meant to reinforce, strengthen, form us into a common identity, and that is how the church is directed to appropriate its Scriptures and traditions.

Interestingly, Stephen does the exact opposite of what we normally think of as “narrative theology.” He tells their story to literally “undo” them and all they have built themselves up to be. He claims that what God’s people have made of themselves is a failure so great that they have become the very murders of God come among them. He tells their story, not to shape, form, and maintain a community, but rather to blow the hinges off the doors that enclose this community (note that this whole conflict arises out of a controversy involving religious/cultural divisions, cf. 6:1). In his witness to the Gospel, Stephen explodes the very story that secures them, that binds them together. He is not building up, he is out to destroy. To destroy in the service of the new creation which the Gospel proclaims, to be sure, but this proclamation cannot simply be accepted (or “overaccepted”) into the existing narrative inscription, rather a break, a fracture must occur if the Gospel is to be truly spoken of and lived.

What Stephen’s opponents cannot see, and what they violently (cf. 7:54, 57) refuse to see or hear is the freedom that Stephen’s destructive narration has to offer them. The event of the resurrection, and the judgment it speaks is too much for them. They cannot accept anything other than the Old World run by Death, which is the weapon they choose to use against Stephen. And yet in the very event of wielding the power of death to try to silence his witness, the reality of the resurrection and its repetition in the martyr-witness of Stephen is made only too clear, as he dies willingly, with words of forgiveness for his killers, seeing and testifying to nothing other than the lordship of Jesus Christ, who stands at the right hand of the Father.

 

Good Friday

Posted by on April 22, 2011 1 comment

Ethics and religion and church all go in this direction: from the human to God. Christ, however, speaks only and exclusively of the line from God to human beings, not of some human path to God, but only of God’s own path to humans. Hence it is also fundamentally wrong to seek a new morality in Christianity. In actual practice, Christ offered hardly any ethical prescriptions not already attested among his contemporary Jewish rabbis or even in pagan literature. The essence of Christianity is found in its message about the sovereign God to whom alone, above the entire world, all honor is due; it is a message about the eternally other, the God removed from the world who from the primal ground of his being has loving compassion for those who render honor to him alone, the God who traverses the path to human beings in order to find there vessels of that honor precisely where human beings are nothing, where they fall silent, where they give space to God alone.

Here the light of eternity falls upon that which is eternally disregarded, the eternally insignificant, the weak, ignoble, unknown, the least of these, the oppressed and despised: here that light radiates out over the houses of the prostitutes and tax collectors . . . here that light pours out from eternity upon the working, toiling, sinning masses. The message of grace travels over the dull sultriness of the big cities but remains standing before the houses of those who spiritually speaking are satisfied, knowing, and possessing. It pronounces upon the death of people and nations its eternal: I have loved you from eternity; stay with me, and you will live. Christianity preaches the infinite worth of that which is seemingly worthless and the infinite worthlessness of that which is seemingly so valued. What is weak shall become strong through God, and what dies shall live.

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The Essence of Christianity.” In Barcelona, Berlin, New York: 1928-1931. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008. pp. 354-55.

The End of Ecumenism

Posted by on March 14, 2011 125 comments

By Halden Doerge and Ry Siggelkow

In recent discussions around here the issue of ecumenism has come up, and in particular the question has been raised about what we are to think theologically about the question of the church’s tangible disunity. In light of these discussions, my friend Ry Siggelkow and I spent some time working through what we think are some of the vital issues at stake in this important theological question, and to that end we offer these reflections in the hope that the cause of the church’s unity may in some small way be served.

That our concern is unity may not at once be obvious, as it is our contention that the most important way in which we can contribute to Christian unity and mission today is by actively working towards the end of ecumenism. Let us be quite clear about this, by “end” we do not mean “telos” or “goal.” We speak here not of working for the ultimate outworking and fruition of the project of ecumenism. Rather we are calling for the abandonment and termination of this project as such. Moreover it is our contention that this is necessary precisely for the sake of the unity of the church.

At the outset we must be clear what is meant by “ecumenism” as such. Certainly there are a variety of ways in which different churches and theologians have spoken of and pursued ecumenical endeavors, and there would be different lines of critique and engagement necessary in regard to many of the different forms that ecumenical impulse has taken in the history of the church. However, speaking broadly—but not, we contend, inaccurately—ecumenism can be properly understood as the effort of churches who, finding themselves not in fellowship with other churches, seek to bring about the unity that is lacking between them. Ecumenism speaks of the attempt, on the part of separated churches, to acknowledge and seek to address the reasons for their separation from one another.

What is important to see about the nature of ecumenism here is twofold. Ecumenism is fundamentally premised on the recognition of other churches as truly Christian, and on the recognition that, for various reasons, unity between these separated groups of Christians does not exist. Ecumenism involves the affirmation both of common belonging to Jesus Christ as Lord, and the affirmation that, despite this common belonging, we are not reconciled with one another for various reasons. The ecumenical problem, and its efforts to solve this problem are premised on this central conviction, that we are indeed brothers and sisters, but we are not reconciled and thus must work, through dialogue to become so reconciled.

As such, ecumenism inevitably takes the form of a sort of negotiation. Different communions, entering into dialogue with each other, learn to speak of the distinctives (theological, ethical, political, etc) that separate them so as to see if there might be a way beyond that division. Could it be that we are just misunderstanding each other? Or could we agree on a more basic compromise that would allow us to enter into full fellowship with one another? It is precisely these sorts of negotiations that make up ecumenism as we know it (a good example of this sort of effort can be seen in the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification by the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation).

Over the past thirty or forty years postliberals of all stripes (Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish) have sought to rethink the nature and purpose of ecumenism after “modernity.” The postliberals have rejected the traditional paradigm, with its concern for doctrinal propositions, as well as the old liberal paradigm that sought common ground on social and political fronts or in “religious experience” more generally. On the one hand there is no doubt that the unpopularity and rejection of these ecumenical visions has, at least to some extent, been bound up with the decline of mainline Protestantism. Yet, there has also been an acute sense felt among many that, although much headway has been made in official agreements and “declarations” between separated churches, this has failed to “trickle down” to the local, congregational level. Indeed, many have felt that too much ecumenical dialogue takes place among church leaders and officials at the expense of the interests and concerns of the laity and the local churches. The general trajectory of ecumenical dialogue in the postliberal vein has been a skepticism about “official” ecumenical dialogues toward a “local is better” approach.

Spurred on at least in part by George Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine ecumenical dialogue in a postliberal vein has made a distinct turn away from the “abstract” and “universal” toward the “concrete” and the “particular.” In this perspective, what is needed for ecumenical dialogue to move forward is to attend to the commitments of particular communities and their practices, and to do this within a “grassroots,” lay context. The postliberal critique of liberalism (e.g., MacIntyre and Hauerwas) has shed light on the traditioned and culturally-conditioned character of all practices and convictions, whether liturgical, political, or theological. In this view, unity must be sought from the ground up so to speak, not by way of formal doctrinal agreement but by worshipping and reading Scripture together. It is by attending to these common practices that some shared vision may arise organically. This view finds the liberal view of “tolerance” distasteful, or worse, as a veiled form of oppression, but it places a high degree of value on difference and honoring the particularity of traditions. The hope is for a kind of mutually-enriching interpenetration of the treasures of each particular faith tradition. To avoid a naïve “foundationalism” each tradition is often understood as kind of self-contained whole—a “culture” in its own right. Against an overly speculative or dogmatic approach to ecumenical dialogue this approach moves forward primarily at the “practical” level by way of learning one another’s “culture” and “language” and the practices that flow from it and that inform it. In this view, little attention is given to formal doctrinal agreements, but there is rather a hope that if we begin to speak each other’s languages and learn each other’s culture through a set of common practices (e.g., reading Scripture together) then something fruitful might come out of it—hopefully some form of unity.

Much is to be commended in the postliberal turn to the “concrete” and the “particular,” perhaps especially its skepticism of hierarchy and formal doctrinal agreements, as well as its positive emphasis on the involvement of the laity. However, we are convinced that postliberalism still operates within the form of ecumenism as negotiation. In part, the problem is that postliberalism is unable to decisively break with the old ecumenical paradigm. In its turn toward the community and traditional practices as the site of ecumenical conversation, like the liberal paradigm postliberalism still works within the framework of a fundamental immanence. In its turn toward the “concrete” and against the “abstract,” like the traditional paradigm postliberalism tends to drive a wedge between doctrine and practice. The disregard of doctrine has often led to a strictly sociological perspective on the church and its practices so that the church in its visible empirical form becomes self-grounding and self-justifying.

The central problem with ecumenical dialogue in all forms is that it begins with the assumption that the empirical reality of the divided churches has fundamental theological import and that such division is something that we are charged to fix. The problem with ecumenical dialogue is that it assumes that we are the agents that bring about Christian unity. Ecumenical dialogue is unfaithful insofar as it assumes that the church as a configuration of practices is the active subject in bringing about visible unity. It is unfaithful not on account of its reliance on human agency, but because of a fundamental lack of faith in what has decisively been accomplished in Jesus Christ.

Thus, if we are to speak of the unity of the church we must begin anew, and most importantly, begin theologically. We submit that, theologically speaking, the one and only question that matters in regard to the church’s unity is: Is any given division between Christians something that, in Christ, is real? In Christ—in his work of breaking down the dividing wall of hostility, of calling those who were far off, and those who were near—is the division between, say, Protestant and Catholic a reality? Or, to put the question more biblically, “Is Christ divided?” (1 Cor 1:13). This and this alone must be our question when we seek to address the unity of the church. The one and only question before our eyes must be the question of what, in Christ, is truly real. So therein lies the question: Is the division between Protestants and Catholics something that is real in Christ?

If our divisions are not real in Christ, then we have no business living as if they were. If, in Christ, we are in fact truly one, then any reason whatsoever that we might have for refusing full and unconditional fellowship with one another is illegitimate. The only way there could ever be a “legitimate” division between Christians would be if that division reflected something that is in fact a reality in Christ himself. This is precisely why the quest of ecumenism as negotiation must be abandoned. If anyone is in Christ, none of us can ever have a legitimate reason for being separate from one another. Any negotiation we might have cannot but be disobedience from the start if, in Christ, our divisions are not real. All such forms of ecumenism as negotiation, whether they admit it or not, ultimately proclaim that our divisions from one another are real. This is to speak against the Gospel. The Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is not that through his work we are now able to be at peace with one another, rather it is that “He is our peace” and that he, himself has “broken down the dividing wall of separation” (Eph 2:14). The Gospel is not that this reconciliation is a possibility that we may achieve, but rather that it is an actuality that we may joyfully affirm. Ecumenism as negotiation is a betrayal of this proclamation.

Where then, does this leave us? If we are to reject ecumenism as negotiation in all its forms, what then remains of the visible unity of the church? What is our task amidst the church’s radical and manifest brokenness and division? First and foremost our vocation is to name the situation truthfully, namely that all division between Christians is a betrayal of the Gospel and a refusal to acknowledge it as true. This of course is not proper ecumenical manners, but theologically it is imperative. All divisions must be acknowledged and confronted as refusals of the Gospel. They are our sinful and rebellious refusal to affirm the actuality of the reconciliation established in Christ. They are not, theologically speaking, conflicts of interpretation or misunderstanding. They are acts of rebellion (perhaps unintentional and ignorant rebellion, but rebellion nonetheless) against the Gospel and as such we must constantly test ourselves as to whether or not we are in the Faith (cf. 2 Cor 13:5).

Secondly, since all ecumenical negotiation is an exercise of refusing the Gospel, the next important step in living towards the reconciliation actualized in Christ is for us, as bodies of believers to cease to live under the regulations imposed by such ecumenical forms. The lines of division that are drawn and proclaimed between the churches are not something to be “resolved” through dialogue. Rather they are part of the form of this present world which, in Christ, is “passing away” (1 Cor 7:31). As they are not part of the new creation that is in Christ (2 Cor 5:17; Gal 6:15), we have no business acknowledging their power or seeking to appease it.

What is the upshot of this? It can mean nothing less than a call to all Christians and churches to “Welcome one another as God in Christ has welcomed you” (Rom 15:7). It means ignoring any pronounced wall of division that any person or community might seek to erect between Christians, no matter what its ecclesiastical source. It means we can never faithfully say “You are my sister or brother, but I cannot take eat with you for these reasons . . .” Such reasons are invalid in Christ. In Christ there is no longer any division and therefore any division that we acknowledge is to be counted among principalities and powers that crucified Jesus. To acknowledge them as legitimate is to betray the cross and the reconciliation it proclaims and effects.

The end of ecumenism is a risky proposition indeed. It calls us to attend first and foremost to the truth of Gospel, that in Christ, all our divisions, our violence, our alienation is done away with. And it calls us to cease living as if that were false; as if there were still some divisions that we need to negotiate our way through, as if there were still some alienations that Christ has not crucified in his own flesh. The end of ecumenism means the beginning of obedience, the obedience which refuses to say anything other than an unqualified Yes to fellowship, partnership, koinonia, indeed to living and dying with all those who follow after the Crucified One naming him as Lord.

Remember that you are dust

Posted by on March 14, 2011 6 comments

Last Wednesday I facilitated much of our church’s observance of Ash Wednesday, leading out in the reading of Scripture, confession, and the application of ashes. I have done this many years before and it has always been a profound time of mediation on the salvation of the Gospel, but this year it was unique. For the first time it was I alone who applied the ashes, meaning that I got to apply them to every person in the congregation (a mere 20 people, perhaps not a great feat by conventional counting standards, but still).

This meant not only applying the ashes and declaring to my loved ones (almost all of whom I’ve known deeply for years), “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return,” but helping many of them kneel and get back to their feet without falling down. In the time I’ve known so many people in my church I’ve seen people get much further along in years and watched their health change (and watched one sister die). Declaring their mortality to them as I supported their weight, clasping their arm to keep them from falling or slipping — that was a different experience. The proclamation of mortality was so much more deeply real, not because of anything in the liturgy, but because of the truly real, truly tangible presence of Christ to me in these concrete people with whom I am united.

Feeling the trembling hands and supporting the feeble knees of people I have known for years,  telling them that they are destined to return to dust, and that our sole hope lies in God’s utterly new act of resurrection from the dead, that was something beautiful and frightening to me. I knew as I applied the ashes and spoke those words that I would walk with these people through their deaths and visit their graves when they quite literally have returned to dust. I knew then, once again, how deeply vulnerable and defenseless we all are before the ravages of this broken world. And I knew then, once again, that in these broken vessels, in the process of returning to dust, was the light of Christ, the bringer of new creation, new life, and unlimited hope, a hope that is not seen.

Only the devil has an answer

Posted by on March 9, 2011 4 comments

Bonhoeffer’s discussion of Jesus’s encounter with the Rich Young Man seems to me to be a fitting post for Ash Wednesday indeed:

The young man’s question [of which commandments he ought to obey] shows him up for his true colours. He is — man under sin. The answer of Jesus completes his exposure. Jesus simply quotes the commandments of God as they are revealed in Scripture, and thus reaffirms them as the commandments of God. The young man is trapped once more. He had hoped to avoid committing himself to any definite moral obligations by forcing Jesus to discuss his spiritual problems. He had hoped Jesus would offer him a solution of his moral difficulties. But instead he finds Jesus attacking not his question but himself. The only answer to his difficulties is the very commandment of God, which challenges him to have done with academic discussion and get on with the task of obedience. Only the devil has an answer for our moral difficulties, and he says: “Keep on posing problems, and you will escape the necessity of obedience.” But Jesus is not interested in the young man’s problems; he is interested in the young man himself. He refuses to take those difficulties as seriously as the young man does. There is one thing only which Jesus takes seriously, and that is, that it is high time the young man began to hear the commandment and obey it. Where moral difficulties are taken so seriously, where they torment and enslave man, because they do not leave him open to the freeing activity of obedience, it is there that his total godlessness is revealed. All his difficulties are shown to be ungodly, frivolous, and the proof of sheer disobedience. The one thing that matters is practical obedience. That will solve his difficulties and make him (and all of us) free to become the child of God. Such is God’s diagnosis of man’s moral difficulties.

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 80-81.

*Apologies about using the old translation, it was all I had on hand at the time.

The solidarity of baptism

Posted by on March 8, 2011 9 comments

I’ve been thinking for a while about the whole issue of what it means to be united, one to another through our common baptism in the body of Christ. In light of the many discussions that have been had about the relevance of an apocalyptic conception of the church as mission, what then are we to say about the notion that, in baptism, Christians enter into a special sort of solidarity with one another, a solidarity that makes them uniquely a peoplehood, a family? If we conceive the church-as-mission, that is, if we hold that the church exists only as it gives itself to the world in kenotic service, what then does that leave of the notion that the members of the church share a unique sort of unity?

As I see it there is no dispensing with the “specialness” of baptism, if you will. To be baptized together is to be brought into unity with each other in a way that is irreducible and singular. But what sort of solidarity is this that we have with each other in baptism? If we understand our baptism in light of Christ’s baptism, whereby he is commissioned by the Father in the power of the Spirit to proclaim the kingdom of God in word and deed to the poor and oppressed, how can we understand our baptismal solidarity as anything other than being given over, together, to and for the world? Baptismal solidarity means we find ourselves, by virtue of God’s action, to be united together as partners in giving ourselves away to “the least of these.” To be united in baptism is not, then to share a unity that exists within borders, which draws lines, establishes “in” and “out.” Rather the unity of baptism is a solidarity in proclaiming and enacting the end of all such separations and divisions.

To be united in baptism is indeed to share a special unity, a unity that binds us together closer than any other form of human unity. But it does so not by establishing us as an “alternative” form of unity, rather it unites us precisely in the traversal of all walls of division wherever they might be. The solidarity of baptism is solidarity in self-giving unto the world which God loves and for whom God came in Jesus. When we proclaim that we are united, one to another in one body we are not claiming to be an alternative cultural matrix, rather we are proclaiming that, because of what Christ has done and continues to do, we have the joy of finding ourselves sent out together in God’s service, the service of giving our lives away, of dispensing with boundaries, divisions, and all forms of alienation. Baptismal solidarity is missionary solidarity. To be united in baptism is to be united, not towards ourselves, but towards all those for whom the kingdom of God is coming. Indeed, one might say that baptismal solidarity, by its very nature is a solidarity of being turned outward, of being sent out in Christ to follow him into the world in all its brokenness. Baptism, then, does not establish a new “inside” a new cultural seat of coherence and stability, rather it propels us — together! — out into the world which God loves, the world still in tragic, broken rebellion. We are baptized, not for ourselves, not for the church, but for the world, whose destiny it is to be transformed into the kingdom of God.

From text to Word

Posted by on March 7, 2011 25 comments

So much depends, I believe, on the current theological milieu (or the little corner of it in which I tend to find myself) coming to see Scripture once again not merely as “text” or “script” but as Word, that is as the living and active witness to the one Word of God, Jesus Christ. This is to be further understood as a deep and pressing need to move from an immanentist vision of Scripture, as the sort of cultural product of the church by which it authorizes and codifies its own life and practices, to a transcendent view of Scripture; or rather simply a view in which God is taken seriously as the free, living, and speaking Lord of the church. For too long Scripture has been cast in contemporary theology as an inert text, there to be subjected to the cultural-linguistic meditation of the self-sufficient (or, more prettily put, Spirit-imbued and thus, immanently authoritative) church. That Scripture might be a field in which God (conceived not as the church’s cultural aura, but as the Triune Lord who loves and speaks in freedom to, in, and beyond the church) truly speaks, in ways we do not expect or anticipate, is simply a notion not taken with much seriousness. It is brushed aside casually as a sort of primitive fundamentalist past that we have all hopefully outgrown.

The great error of all of this is that it effectively reduces God to — at best — an immanent force animating the church’s culture. Some will think this overstates the problem. Perhaps (though I’m not convinced). But still, we are left to wonder why there is so much skittishness in these theological circles to actually giving serious weight to the notion that God might really be active among us and beyond us. That God might really speak in a way that lays us bare and before which our prior conceptions, processes, and status quos (even our ecclesial ones) must simply bow.

This is how I continue to feel more and more convicted the more I am asked to preach, and the more I find myself reading Scripture. It was also stirred anew in me recently when Jason posted this excellent and challenging quote from John Webster on the nature of Scripture, which puts the matter better than I can:

. . . Scripture is a transcendent moment in the life of the church. Scripture is not the church’s book, something internal to the community’s discursive practices; what the church hears in Scripture is not its own voice. It is not a store of common meanings or a Christian cultural code – and if it engenders those things, it is only because Scripture is that in which Jesus Christ through the Spirit is pleased to utter the viva vox Dei. Consecrated by God for the purpose of Christ’s self-manifestation, Holy Scripture is always intrusive, in a deep sense alien, to the life of the church. All this is to say that the church assembles around the revelatory self-presence of God in Christ through the Spirit, borne to the communion of saints by the writings of the prophets and apostles. This divine revelation is “isolated” – that is, it is a self-generating and self-completing event’.

~ John Webster, Confessing God, 189.

Would we dare affirm this? That God really speaks, with God’s own voice, a voice that is not ultimately reducible to our own? An if not, why not? Anymore I don’t know what other hope I could possibly have.

Kingdom ecumenism

Posted by on March 2, 2011 18 comments

We are well accustomed to think of ecumenism in terms of how different denominations, communions, and systems of ecclesial organization and unity seek to come together in common. Ecumenism, as we have learned to understand and contribute to it involves churches (though the very name “church” is itself contested in the struggle) who are separated from each other by doctrine, practices, politics or some combination thereof. Ecumenical effort seeks to remedy this problem of inter-ecclesial division. Thus representatives of various ecclesial organizations meet and discuss their various theological, pastoral, and practical differences in a hope of finding ways to enter into communion with each other. What happens in ecumenism is a constant exercise of examining our differences and disagreements and seeing whether or not they are a sufficient obstacle, a truly relevant condition for us remaining separated from each other in fellowship (usually defined by taking the Lord’s Supper in common and acknowledging each other’s legitimacy in the ministry of the Gospel).

This, I think, is a fairly uncontroversial and commonly-held understanding of what Christian ecumenism is about. Ultimately ecumenism is about taking a look at the differences that separate Christians from one another and seeing if they can be resolved, or if they are really serious enough to keep us separate. This is ecumenism as usual.

Theologically speaking, however, I’ve come to find this understanding of ecumenism increasingly problematic. At the forefront of its problems is its fundamental lack of concern or regard for God, and in particular its willingness to proceed as if the triune God is not in fact a free and living Lord. If the proclamation of the Gospel truly requires the proclamation that “there is no ____ or _____, you are all one in Christ Jesus,” then our questions about unity must proceed, not on the basis discovering the legitimacy or non-legitimacy of our conditions of union with one another, but rather with the confession that all our conditions are illegitimate. It is precisely our conditions for receiving one another or refusing to do so that are nailed to the cross with Christ. What God has done in Christ and continues to enact ever anew by the Spirit is the abolition of all human reasons for not being at peace with one another. Christ has broken down, in his body of crucified, flesh any “legitimate reason” human beings might have for being separated from one another, from refusing to acknowledge one another as brothers and sisters adopted together with Christ.

If the Gospel really is true, if God in Christ has really acted and continues to act as our free and living Lord to save and transform the world into the kingdom of God, our question can never be “What is the condition of our unity with one another?” There is no legitimate condition for giving ourselves away in love to one another other than the triune declaration Cross and Resurrection. If Christ has been raised, and if, in him all humanity is transformed and made new, there is no reason, doctrinal, political, pastoral, sacramental, or otherwise for us to legitimately refuse to receive one another. For us to refuse this, or try to fudge it seems to me to be nothing more than a refusal of the Gospel which proclaims, not what we ought to do and the proper conditions for doing it, but what God in Christ has in fact done and continues to do.

Thus, it seems to me more and more that, if we are to go on talking about ecumenism it must proceed in a manner altogether different than what we have come to understand as ecumenism in the last century. What is needed today is not an ecumenism of ecclesiastical organization and negotiation, but a kingdom ecumenism in which our only question can be “What is the God revealed in Christ, and active in the Spirit doing in God’s mission to save and transform the world, and how do we say  ‘YES!’ to that in all situations?” Our ecumenism must become centered firmly on the inbreaking Kingdom of God, wherever that is to be found in our world. Our goal as true “ecumenists,” as those seeking to witness to and participate in God’s oikonomia is to say “Yes” to whatever God’s transforming Spirit, the Spirit of the Living and Risen Jesus is doing in this world.

This, I think is the ecumenism we see in the book of Acts, in which the Apostles and the earliest Christians slowly and falteringly learn, bit by bit, that any prior conditions for unity that they may have, but be set aside in light of the freedom of the Spirit of Christ. Just so Peter learned to proclaim “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” (Acts 10:47). Likewise we must learn to say “‘Can we withhold our fellowship, our table, our possessions, our friendship, partnership, and time from any of those in whom the Holy Spirit is active?” If our ecumenism is an ecumenism of the kingdom, in which our question can only be, “What is our free and living Lord doing in the world?” our answer must always be “No, we cannot withhold ourselves where the Spirit of Jesus is present in power!” An ecumenism of the kingdom means the end of insisting on our “legitimate reasons” for rejecting one another and calls us to “welcome one another as God in Christ has welcomed you” (Rom 15:7).

Either-Or

Posted by on February 3, 2011 7 comments

A Sermon by Nathan R. Kerr

Delivered at Trevecca Nazarene University Chapel Service, February 2, 2011

Isaiah 58:1-9a
Psalm 112:1-9
I Corinthians 2:1-12
Matthew 5:13-20

Dear Trevecca Community! We have gathered here, whether we realize or not, to hear the Gospel. We have heard the Word of God read and proclaimed; we have sung that Word and spoken it. And now, whether we like it or not, we are called upon to listen to it and respond. Of course, to listen and respond to the Word of God is a thing much more easily said than done. In fact, were we to be honest we’d be quite happy if we could respond by not having to do anything at all. Or, at least, we’d be quite happy if we could respond by not having to do or think anything that we have not been doing and thinking all along. We would be quite happy if we could politely nod and say, “Oh yes, that is what I have always thought and felt in my heart of hearts.” We would be quite happy if we could smile in approval and say, “Yes, that is a righteousness that I could live for; it fits very well with my own highest ideals, my own goals for life. And better yet, it hardly requires a single change in how I go about my day!” Well, let us be honest with ourselves for a moment. If that is what we want, it is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ but religion that we desire. It is not a God who calls us to repentance and service that we want, but a God who acts as an insurance agent charged with protecting and securing our highest dreams and ideals. What we want, in short, is what the bible calls a “false prophet.” What we want is a word from God that affirms our own human affairs, preferably in the form of a sound-byte that can be played in a loop as a piece of popular public opinion and political propaganda.

And yet, with our passages from Scripture today, we start to get the sense that things might not be as they seem. Especially with the passage from Matthew that we just read, we start to get the sense that the righteousness to which we are called, the righteousness of Jesus Christ himself, does not simply reaffirm our present life, but rather challenges and confronts our life, putting to us a question that calls for a decision—a real, direct Either-Or?! “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Either the self-justifying righteousness of the Pharisees, or the righteousness of the kingdom of heaven. Either the righteousness that serves your own interest and oppresses all your workers, or the righteousness that looses the bonds of injustice and lets the oppressed go free. Either the lofty words of your own human wisdom, or Jesus Christ, and him crucified. This is why the Gospel demands that we must make a decision—not only this hour of this day, but every day, and every hour of our lives. Any so-called “Christian faith” that does not begin each day and hour anew with the decision to repent and to follow after the righteousness of Christ is a dead-end, a cul-de-sac in which we are caught within the righteousness of our own making. Any so-called “Christian faith” of this kind is an outright denial of the Gospel itself.

So, we must ask: Just what is the Word of God calling us to today? Just what does it mean to decide against the earthly well-being and security of Pharisaical righteousness, and to decide for the kingdom of heaven that comes with the righteousness of Jesus Christ? To answer these questions we will need to take a second look at our text. We must begin by noting the relation of our passage to the central theme of the Sermon on the Mount and of Matthew’s gospels as a whole. For Matthew, that theme appears with Jesus’ announcement that the kingdom of God has drawn near. The whole world has been invaded by the reign and rule of Christ’s perfect, self-giving love. This reign and rule is at the heart of the Sermon from which our passage comes. All of life is to be directed towards obedience to and discipleship of the one who embodies this love in his own person and life—Jesus Christ. “Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well,” Jesus will say later in the sermon. And so this is the first point that we have to make: the kingdom of heaven has broken into this world in Jesus Christ and that kingdom demands of us our undivided surrender and service. The Sermon on the Mount is nothing if not a call to this undivided surrender and service to the kingdom—a call to follow in the righteousness of Jesus Christ.

But this leads us to a second point: The entire weight of the Sermon on the Mount rests on Jesus’ command to “Repent!” The whole sermon demands that we hear in the coming kingdom of Jesus Christ a call to repentance, a call to turn from every idol that this world has to offer and that separates from God, a call to turn to God in Christ, and a call to turn with Christ to love every neighbor that is condemned, outcast, hungering, and dying at the hands of this idolatrous world. In this sense, Jesus’ call to repentance at the heart of the kingdom is radically liberating; the kingdom comes as good news because the kingdom comes in such a way as to liberate us from our enslavement to the idolatrous compulsion to self-mastery, power, and control, and to set us free for the life of abandoned, self-giving love that is found in discipleship of the crucified Nazarene.

It is on this point that the whole of the difference between the righteousness of the law as understood by the scribes and Pharisees and the righteousness of the law as fulfilled by Jesus Christ is to be understood. You see, for the Pharisees, fulfillment of the law turned on the ideal of successful human performance. Righteousness for the Pharisees was understood in terms of the ways in which my actions, my religious sincerity, my pursuit of moral goodness secures for me a right position in regards to God and others. It is little wonder that Jesus will later criticize the Pharisees for their “hypocrisy.” The word “hypocrite” is not necessarily, as we think of it today, used to describe a person who does not mean what they say or does not intend what they do. The Pharisees were no doubt as serious as anyone about meaning and intending what they say and do. Rather, as the Greek word hupocrisis implies, the hypocrite is a kind of “play-actor” that constructs a false “self”; in the eyes of God the hypocrite is one who is deluded into thinking she can work to make herself good, when in reality such work is mere play-acting before God. In today’s world, we would look at such people and call them “pious” or “devout.” We might even say, in our delusion, that they’re “holy” or “sanctified.” But these do not enter the kingdom of heaven; their religion is their own reward. And so, the scribes and Pharisees are those who use the law to construct a religion and a religious life according to their interests and concerns. Naturally, such are those for whom “righteousness” and their own sense of personal “goodness” are one and the same. For the Pharisee is the one for whom the meaning, power, and comfort of the law depends upon the ways in which it accords with what she wishes to do and to think.

Now, let us be clear about what is going on here. Not only is the righteousness of the Pharisees a righteousness of their own making, but it is equally a righteousness that is impotent to challenge the injustices of this idolatrous and murderous world. The religion of the Pharisees is the religion of the status quo; and so it is no wonder that the greed and self-indulgence of the scribes will eventually lead them into collusion with the Roman Empire for the sake of bringing Christ to death. Their idolatrous concern for righteousness of self will lead them to an equally idolatrous concern for the powers of political convention and religious bureaucracy, a concern that deafens them to the cries of those who are oppressed and dying at the hands of these powers. “Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day,” the prophet Isaiah says, “and oppress all your workers.”

But let us also be clear about something else (and this will no doubt hit closer to home). This is not just the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees of Jesus’ day. If we are honest with ourselves, this is the righteousness of white, Middle class American Christianity. We may think that because all this concern for pious performance and religious devotion took place two millennia ago in a land far, far way away that it is not so directly relevant to us; surely Christianity has moved beyond such Pharisaical hypocrisy in 2,000 years! Well, if that is the case, we might as well slam the Bible shut. The truth is, our world today is every bit as obsessed with right performance, self-mastery, and control as the world of the Pharisees in Jesus’ day. And we have gotten just as good at constructing a Christianity that meets our own concerns and interests as any Pharisaical usage of the law ever did. We have gotten quite good at constructing a kind of piety and devotion that allows us to go on feeling good about ourselves even as we participate in the most destructive and abusive power structures that this idolatrous world has to offer.

How long, I say? How long will we continue to proclaim that in Jesus Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, while we continue to support racist legislation that makes it easier to imprison or deport blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims because of the perceived threat they pose to our comfortable middle class lives? How long will we continue to recite verses about hospitality and welcoming the stranger while supporting legislation that allows us to discriminate against the undocumented immigrant while profiting from their cheap labor? How long will we continue to proclaim that the kingdom of heaven is freedom and peace for all nations while blindly pledging allegiance to and flying in our churches the flag of a nation whose economic system depends upon the violent exploitation and rape of the third world’s workers and natural resources? How long will we confess with Paul that in Christ there is no longer male and female while continuing to allow patriarchal attitudes towards sexuality and gender to determine one’s fitness for Christian service? How long will we go on with such self-righteousness? How long, indeed?

But praise God, there is genuine good news! God in God’s mercy has not left us to our own religious devices? God in Christ has not left us to perform the law for ourselves, but in Christ has fulfilled that law, transforming the law from being a tool for self-mastery and religious and political control, and into being a way of freedom from ourselves and our own idolatrous compulsions, a way of freedom for loving, self-giving service to all God’s creatures. In this way, the law is not the means for our own religious self-righteousness, but is the lived expression of a greater righteousness, another kind of righteousness, the righteousness of Christ’s kingdom. Such righteousness comes not by blindly clinging to the letter of the law in concern for pious self-fulfillment. Such righteousness comes rather through repentance, the kind of repentance in which God’s grace frees me from the tyranny of religious and political achievement, and frees me for love of my neighbor, especially that neighbor that has been tyrannized and oppressed by my own concern for such achievement in the first place.

So what does this kind of righteousness look like? It decisively does not look like a kind of achieved human moral or spiritual heroism, the kind self-construction of the righteous person through successful human performance, the kind of “play-acting” which Jesus names straightforwardly as “hypocrisy”—the kind of righteousness whereby we are clearly in control. This “greater righteousness” looks precisely like the kind of indiscriminate love with which God first loved us in Christ; it looks precisely like the kind of life lived out of our control. It looks like the forgiveness of debt in the face of a world bent on achieving profit at all costs; it looks like the refusal of violence in the face of an enemy that knows only the language of warfare; it looks like a willingness to give, and to give again and again, when repayment and return are not only unexpected but impossible; it looks like welcoming the undocumented immigrant into your house and naming her a sister in Christ, when everyone around you seems hell-bent on expelling her from their homeland and naming her a stranger and alien. This is what it means today to “loose the bond of injustice,” “to let the oppressed go free,” to “share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house.” This is what it means to repent, to be set free from the idolatrous righteousness of religion, and to live according to the liberating righteousness of Christ’s love. To such a love we surely cannot expect the powers of this world to give their consent. But our passage for today does promise that such a love will be seen as a bright light; and it gives us hope that these powers might be given to see in this love an unexpected thanksgiving and delight, so that they too might, by some miracle, “give glory to the Father who is in heaven.”

And so, dear TNU community, today we have before us two kinds of righteousness. On the one hand, we have the righteousness of self-mastery and control, the righteousness of the religious and political status quo, the righteousness of humanly constructed integrity and self-justification. On the other hand, we have the righteousness of the kingdom of heaven, the righteousness of self-giving love, the righteousness of Christ, of a body broken and of a blood shed for the life of this world. We—You and I—must decide. It is one or the other, not both. The Gospel of Jesus Christ itself allows no middle ground. Here we are confronted with the starkest Either-Or! And so we—You and I—must decide! And if we—You and I—have been given ears to hear, if it is the Gospel that has indeed been heard, then we—You and I—must decide today, right here, right now.

Switch to our mobile site