Emerging Conversations

May 31, 2012 in Church with 7 Comments

This is how I assess interviews (whether they’re for a job or for some media outlet or for a book proposal or, well, basically anything): if in the course of the interview I find myself talking passionately about the things I care most about, it was a good interview.

And, if this happens, it’s usually because the person or people I’m speaking with are a natural “fit” with my work.

Though it wasn’t an interview, my conversation with the Charlotte Emerging Church Discussion Group was one of those moments. We had great conversation because there was a common well of experience. And this is what I’ve found, often, when I’ve been in emerging church conversations:

Often, the thing that holds us together is that we have all experienced that traditional church, traditional structure, traditional authority, do not work. We have all experienced that these traditions are upheld by traditional ways of handling the Bible and of handling people. And most of us are somewhere on the spectrum of putting things back together.

That spectrum is quite broad: from “I guess I still want to believe in some sort of God” to “I’m at a different kind of church now, and following Jesus, but at every step of the way trying to figure out how to put the pieces back in place.”

For those folks, the claim I’ve been developing over the past couple years resonated deeply:

As a people whose story is largely understood by reading a Book, how we read that book, how we understand our identity, and how we believe we are supposed to act are inseparable.

In other words, identity, hermeneutics, and ethics will be mutually reinforcing.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation that I continue to mull:

Embracing the Bible as narrative makes the Bible a much less controllable entity. People tell, read, and embrace stories differently from one another. And, the stories we have in the Bible are not all told the same way. Matthew had something to say, and he changed Mark to make his point.

I’m not a fan of hierarchy, but I do believe that leadership is important. Something I’ve mulled quite a bit is what the impact of the biblical call to cruciformity means for church leadership. I don’t think that you can institutionalize cruciformity. But anyone in a position of leadership should see such self-giving service as their primary vocation.

I don’t have a great answer to the question of sexuality in the Kingdom of God. Steve Knight probed this question a bit in our conversation. The easy answer is that Jesus indicates in Mark 12 that in the coming Kingdom humans will be asexual (neither marrying nor given in marriage).

But what would it mean to claim this while we also say, “The Kingdom has come near?” What would it mean to make such a confession when we are, generally speaking, called to take hold of our eschatological future and bring it to bear on the present?

Great questions.

Finally, I was reminded how much of my theologizing happens from the luxurious place of privilege. It’s a luxury to talk about “surprise” in the Bible–a luxury that the African American church doesn’t have, because life may hold a grim “surprise” any time you walk out the door. The church has become a counter-cultural place by becoming a place of certainty. Upsetting that applecart has significant consequences that it might not have in a white church.

Even the issues we care about highlight our privilege. Why does the Twitter feed and Facebook timeline overflow with cries about the injustice and/or necessity of forbidding same-sex marriage, while it is entirely silent about the African American high school graduation rate that sits below 50%?

It’s a perpetual challenge for even the postmodern church to embrace multiple perspectives that transcend our own ethnic, racial, and class distinctions.

Finally, it was pointed out that normal church people are not only capable of having robust theological conversations, but that the church’s attempt to “protect” people from difficult questions has, itself, led to theological anemia and dying congregations.

That’s, perhaps, the shared perspective that lay behind everything and enabled the fruitful dialogue:

Implicit in the critiques of where many had come from was simply this: stop trying to handle your congregations with kid gloves; stop trying to hide difficult issues; you are killing us with your “kindness.”

My Dennis Year

May 29, 2012 in Me with 1 Comment

My Dennis year officially begins… Now!

Unifying Spirit

May 29, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 117 Comments

Last week I tied together some reflections on Pentecost with the ongoing discussions about women in ministry.

I got questions from two different sides but pushing on the same point of my exposition. Some saw the passage in Acts, or my reading of it, as an indication that we shouldn’t ordain anyone others that we should ordain everyone.

Or, to paraphrase a Facebook comment: “Every good complementarian thinks that women can have the Spiritual gift of prophecy, you haven’t made any argument for women’s ordination yet.”

So how is it that the gift of the Spirit to all, and the gifts of speaking for God in particular being given to all, constitutes an argument for women’s ordination. Why should we be willing to ordain anyone we baptize?

The argument that reception of the Spirit, and being baptized into Christ, delineates the boundaries of who might serve in pastoral or other leadership capacities, becomes compelling as we recognize the place that this reception of the Spirit and baptism into Christ holds in Paul’s arguments in Galatians and 1 Corinthians (in particular).

In both Galatians and 1 Corinthians, common reception of the Spirit and common baptism into Christ disclose the gospel-denying implications of discriminating within the Body of Christ.

In Galatians, Paul is confronting the idea that Gentiles, outsiders to the Jewish story, have to become Jewish in order to become fully part of the people of God. Sure, they can be in as Gentiles, but they are not treated equally.

Paul appeals to the common reception of the Spirit: you received the Spirit already, so why turn to something else as though it will make you perfect?

But here’s the thing: we have too little realized that Galatians is not merely about “soteriology,” how we are saved in Jesus. It is about this.

But it is about soteriology because Paul wants to convince them that their ecclesial practice must be different.

Paul is not trying to get the Galatians to change their theology only. He is working over their theology to show them that they are making evil, destructive distinctions among themselves.

To receive the Spirit is to be equal within the body. And if we, in our churches, make distinctions in our practices and positions based on anything other than the Spirit’s initiation, gifting, and calling, we are denying the Gospel.

The indicative of how we enter (baptism into Christ by the Spirit) determines the imperative of how we act (discriminating what people may do solely by the Spirit’s gifting).

In 1 Corinthians these dynamics are even clearer. The church is falling from its confession of the crucified Christ by perpetuating society’s differentiations and hierarchies in the body.

And make no mistake: in the ancient world, gender was not merely a question of differentiation, it was also a question of hierarchy. Men were regarded as better than women.

Paul deconstructs the Corinthians’ practice (ecclesiology) by extended appeals to the gospel and how they are saved (soteriology) as well as the way that the Spirit works among them (pneumatology).

In short, when we uphold the differentiations of society, rather than embracing the unity of the Spirit, we deny the work of God, the judgment of God, and the gospel itself.

Why is Pentecost significant?

Not because it tells us who we should ordain.

It is significant because it shows us that the gift of the Spirit is a democratizing, unifying, and transcending bestowal. God judges all as members of the body, and gives to each, as the Spirit will, or as the Lord Jesus will (Eph 4) according to his good pleasure.

If we demand that the gifting and calling fall along the lines of differentiation that demarcate first creation, if we say that only men can teach or preach, only men can lead and rule, we cling to societal differentiations that the Spirit of God has transcended.

We deny the work of the Spirit, and misjudge the body of Christ.

The Story of the church is always supposed to narrate what is most true about us as God’s people: not only that we are God’s in Christ, but how we are God’s in Christ (we live a cruciform life as a cross-saved people); not only that we are one in Christ, but how we are one in Christ (the Spirit poured out on all irrespective of gender, ethnicity, social status).

We faithfully live our our story when we display in our practice the reality of who we are at the core of our identity. As those marked by the Spirit without regard to gender, we must also faithfully steward the gifts Christ by the Spirit has given to the church without regard to gender.

Memorial Day

May 28, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, Culture with 29 Comments

This is Memorial Day in the United States.

It’s a great day to be an American. And a dangerous day to be a Christian.

It’s the sort of national holiday that creates remembrance of freedom, celebration of democracy, a reificiation of our identity as A People–A People willing to die (and to kill) in the name of liberty and justice for all.

Well, at least, liberty and justice as we define it for all whom we deem worthy to receive it (and some, against their will).

Image(s): FreeDigitalPhotos.net

As Christians in the United States, we should be careful not to take for granted our share in this freedom. None of us worries about being killed on Sunday morning for joining in public worship.

But this gratitude has its own danger.

We might begin to believe that true freedom is gained by the shedding of the blood of our fallen soldiers. We might forget that no, the freedom we enjoy has been gained by us making the other guy shed more of his blood than we have shed of our own.

“No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country.
He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”
–General George S. Patton

This is the story of America. This is the story of Memorial Day.

And it is, at heart, the antithesis to the Christian story. And that’s the danger.

This story of making the other bastard die for his country is precisely the story that the disciples wanted Jesus to play out before them. It was the story Peter was demanding of Jesus when he rebuked Jesus for predicting the way of the cross.

And it is precisely the story which Jesus rejects by telling Peter, “Get behind me, Satan.”

Between the American story of freedom through our fallen (simply because they could not make the other person fall first!) and the Christian story of salvation through the self-giving love of Jesus, there could not be a wider gulf.

Our Memorial Day is celebrated every time we take the bread and pass the cup:

Do this in remembrance of me.

When we take the bread together we remember that our freedom was not a death in war, but a true surrender:

This is my body, given for you.

We remember that we are made a people in covenant with God by blood that refused to be spilled on a battlefield, by the blood of one who would not shed the blood of another:

This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Let’s be careful how we remember today. Let’s be careful what we remember today. There is freedom that is bought with the price of precious blood.

And it could never be gained by the swords, or guns, of war.

The Spirit of Easter

May 27, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 5 Comments

It’s still Easter.

Easter is when the Spirit of God exerted the greatest power of all. A person dead for days was raised up to new life.

If Christians have a life-giving Spirit, it is only because the Spirit we have first gave life to the crucified Christ.

Because the Spirit is the Spirit of the Resurrected One, it is the Spirit who can make us sons and daughters of God. The Spirit’s first great son-making act was when it raised Jesus, enthroning him at God’s right hand as God’s Son (Rom 1:4).

This was a recreation of humanity as God’s sons and daughters, so that all who, by the Spirit, are in Christ are being transformed into that new image of God. And we all have a foretaste of our coming resurrection, in which we will be God’s adopted children (Rom 8:23), because the Spirit has made us such children even now (Rom 8:14).

It is Easter so long as God has children who cry out to God as Father upon the earth. Because our cry is the overflow of the resurrection life of Christ, poured out on us all by the Spirit.

It is Easter so long as God has children who obey God as Father upon the earth. Because our obedience is the fruit of newness of life that makes possible what was previously impossible. And this new life is the life of the resurrected Christ, poured out on us by the Spirit who raised him from the dead.

It is Easter so long as God has children who hope in God upon the Earth. Because our hope is the sure expectation that what has begun in Christ is not yet complete, and will not be and cannot be complete, until we fully participate in it. And this hope is stirred up within us by the Spirit who was sent to make good Jesus’ own hope when he was faithful to death, even death on the cross.

It is Easter so long as God’s children experience the Spirit upon the earth. Because the Spirit is the promise received by the resurrected Christ and poured out by the Risen One on the church. And this Spirit is the one who directs us all to confess that Jesus is the resurrected Lord.

Knowledge and Power

May 25, 2012 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 6 Comments

“How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”

“Why are you wasting your time speculating on a useless question?”–John Calvin

O.k., so that was more paraphrase than direct quotation. But it’s close enough. For all that Calvinism is accused of undue speculation into the secret things of God, the best of Calvin’s own writing was marked by an unwillingness to engage in useless speculations into things sub-divine.

“If God can do anything, can God make a mountain so big that God can’t move it?”

“You wouldn’t ask that question if you realized that you’re talking about the power of God rather than power (full stop).”–Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics §31.2

Ok, I’m paraphrasing again. But in his talk about God, Barth consistently returns to this: we are talking about the God who has revealed himself in Christ, and it is this God who exercises power, this God who knows, that himself determines the definitions of knowledge and of power.

There is no abstract “all-powerfulness” by which God is measured.

We confess the God who has revealed himself as all-powerful, and thus the definition of “omnipotent” is what God can and will do.

God’s power is the real power that God exercises over all things. This includes the bestowal of freedom on people to act in accordance with God’s power and knowledge and love or in attempted rejection of them.

In so connecting God’s power and knowledge with the actuality of God’s acting, Barth is able to hold together certain foreknowledge and predestination with human freedom; he is able to affirm God’s power without entailing God in willing evil.

In other words, Barth operates firmly within the Reformed tradition without so clinging to God’s “absolute” sovereignty as to make God (as God so often appears in more popular and less well-nuanced versions) one who wills evil or fatalistically determines human destinies.

“If a person sins, this is not because God knew, as He certainly did from eternity, that the person would sin. For the object of the divine foreknowledge was not a fatum or fortuna, but the person who sinned of the person’s own will.”

There are times when I read this doctrine of God material and worry that we are still in the land of speculation. However, Barth continues to resonate with me because he is relentlessly building his theology from below: the God who has revealed Godself, and the humanity that knows itself in light of God’s self-revelation, are the determining factors about who God is and how God is at work in the world.

For Barth, the story is the thing. The reality we experience as free agents is part of that story, as is God’s declaration that God is powerful over all things, as is the actual world over which God has (and, seemingly at times, hasn’t fully) displayed God’s power.

These realities, rather than our ideals, are the means by which God is known, even in the midst of an imperfect world.

Narrative Preaching

May 23, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 4 Comments

What does storied theology have to do with preaching and teaching?

I get asked that question from time to time, especially by students who are preparing to preach. I think about it sometimes when I’m writing a sermon myself, as I’m doing this week. I got asked it during a webinar I did yesterday with a bunch of preacher-types.

Photo: Preacher by SeaDave

To my mind, how we preach is inseparable from what we think the Bible is and what, then, we’re supposed to do with it.

Three point sermons are great ways to talk through theology texts. Or instruction manuals. How good are they for plotting people within a narrative? Sometimes better, sometimes worse.

Communicating the gospel is telling the story of the Crucified Christ such that those who hear are drawn to recognize that his story is our story.

As Protestants, and as evangelicals, we do well telling and interpreting the story of Jesus as something that is “for” us. But we have not as often done a great job of telling it as our own–not our possession that we distribute through speaking, but the narrative that is to be enacted by the people of God.

Too often, our sermonizing entails a certain disconnect between who we are and what we are supposed to do: “God redeemed you in Christ. Therefore, obey because you’re thankful. Now go to Zimbabwe.”

But when the story is the thing, the connection becomes much closer: Jesus ate with the hookers and told the faithful who knew better that they didn’t have a clue. You are the body of Christ. Go and do likewise.

Jesus saved by his death, you have the same mind of humility in yourself, considering one another better than yourselves. Lay aside your own “glory” so that others may live. And then you will have treasure in heaven.

But more than particular stories with a particular story to be lived, what it means to preach the story of the crucified Christ is probably something along the lines of a long-term vision for conversion of the imagination.

As humans, we are inherently storytellers. We tell stories to understand and interpret the world.

Narrative preaching is hammering on the story to such an extent that we actually begin to hear the story of The Crucified as our own, and thus, in hearing it, to know that it shapes our identity–including what it means to act faithfully as followers of Jesus.

History, Memory, Story

May 22, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 5 Comments

“Those who don’t learn from history are bound to repeat its mistakes.”

At times I’ve liked the sound of that, but I’ve often struggled to know what it meant. What are the mistakes? How can I not repeat them?

Perhaps part of the problem is that history is, in fact, written by the winners. Not only that, history is taught by the winners. This leaves little by way of “mistakes” to learn from.

Except, of course, for the mistake of taking the part of the losers, the defeated, the killed, the heretics.

But history is important. Increasingly, scholars from diverse fields are recognizing the importance of story telling for identity formation. The ways we think about and talk about the past contribute to who we think we are now, and thus provide guides for attaining the future we aspire to (and, indeed, what we would aspire to in the first place).

All of this is coalescing for me as I prepare to preach over Memorial Day weekend. Nationally, Memorial Day is a day that we set aside to “remember”–a remembrance that shapes our national identity as United Statesians.

Image: FreeFoto.com

But we need to be careful how we remember. We need to be careful “what” we remember. Because memory is part of story. And story shapes our lives.

As Christians, the history, the memory that defines us is our remembrance of the crucified Christ. “Do this in remembrance of me” marks our weekly memorial day.

It is a history that tells us that ours is the part of those whom history has conquered, even as Rome conquered Jesus on the cross.

It is a history that tells us that ours is the part of those whom history would dub mistakes and failures, even as Jesus’ little movement dubbed their following of Jesus to Jerusalem a mistake and failure and fled at his arrest.

It is a history that tells us that the way in which God gives life is a bestowal upon those who readily forfeit it for Christ’s sake and the gospel.

Yes, we must learn our history, or we will repeat its mistakes.

But if we don’t remember rightly, we might just find ourselves avoiding the very mistakes that define us as the people of The Crucified.

Spirit of Pentecost

May 21, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 26 Comments

Joshua wasn’t sure how far things should go. He liked that Moses led. He liked standing guard while Moses entered the tent and served as mediator.

He didn’t like it when Moses’ ground was encroached upon. But Moses had a different vision:

A young man ran and told Moses, “Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp.” Joshua, Nun’s son and Moses’ assistant since his youth, responded, “My master Moses, stop them!” Moses said to him, “Are you jealous for my sake? If only all the LORD ’s people were prophets with the LORD placing his spirit on them!” (Numbers 11:27-29, CEB)

Moses’ vision was the vision of Joel, the reality of Pentecost:

Peter stood with the other eleven apostles. He raised his voice and declared, “Judeans and everyone living in Jerusalem! Know this! Listen carefully to my words! These people aren’t drunk, as you suspect; after all, it’s only nine o’clock in the morning! Rather, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

In the last days, God says,
I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy.
Your young will see visions.
Your elders will dream dreams.
Even upon my servants, men and women,
I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
and they will prophesy. (Acts 2:14-18, CEB)

On Pentecost, Peter declares, the day has come in which the wish of Moses is realized. There is no stinginess in the outpouring of the Spirit.

Nor is it sequestered to one part of the community.

In particular, this passage in Joel emphasizes twice that the gift is not only for all the men of Israel, but for all the women as well.

Not only sons, but daughters.

Not only manservants, but maidservants.

In the past month I have seen both a button and a bumper sticker that read:

If you’re not going to ordain women, stop baptizing them!

The logic is impeccable.

The end of Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 culminates with: repent and be baptized, for the promise is for you and yours… What promise? The promise of the Spirit.

Baptism in water is they physical representation of baptism by the Spirit into the body of Christ. The same Spirit by which we are baptized, represented in the waters of baptism, is the Spirit who is poured out on all, so that all may prophesy, all may dream dreams for the people of God.

The same Spirit poured out in fulfillment of Moses’ wish and Joel’s promise is the one who, baptizing us into Christ, provides each a gift according to God’s good pleasure.

At its core, the failure to open up every aspect of the ministry of the church to women is an admission that we do not believe that preaching, teaching, and leading are gifts of the Spirit.

The Spirit who sees to it that in Christ there is no Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, is the same Spirit who enables people to speak on God’s behalf. All of us, male and female, who have been baptized into Christ have clothed ourselves with Christ, are God’s sons in Christ, and Abraham’s seed.

Pentecost is when we all receive the Spirit of the freedom of the sons of God: so that all may participate in the Body according to God’s giving of the gifts, and that all may inherit all the promises–even Joel’s.

Apocalypse and Hope

May 20, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 6 Comments

This week I was listening to Philip Clayton debrief his book, The Predicament of Belief: Science, Philosophy, and Faith on the Homebrewed Christianity Podcast. Clayton is a progressive, Process theologian who refuses to give up on resurrection.

Real resurrection, it seems. Not the sort of “redefine resurrection such that happy things are happening in your heart” kind of resurrection.

In the podcast he says, in essence, that he can’t let go of resurrection because that would be to let go of justice. There is hope for true justice, true rectification, for the poor and oppressed.

This is what caused resurrection expectations to flower in the first place, and Clayton won’t give up on it.

It just so happened that the day I was listening to this podcast, I was also teaching on Mark 13. The chapter that begins, innocently enough, with Jesus’ prediction of the Temple’s destruction ends with the darkening of the sun and stars and the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, sending his messengers out to the four corners of the world to gather the elect.

In between?

Lots of bad stuff.

Wars and earthquakes, yes. But more significantly: persecution. Persecution as of such a kind as has never been seen before.

The story that begins with earthly calamity resolves with some sort of heavenly intervention, a intervention of divine glory through the person of the Son of Man.

Scholars have debated how much this passage intends to refer to A.D. 70 and how much it intends to refer to a future, coming arrival of Jesus. N. T. Wright, for one, has argued that the destruction of Jerusalem is a final act of vindication for Jesus, the prophet, and that this coming on the clouds is his enthronement.

Traditionally, of course, this language has been read as referring to Jesus’ return–perhaps to judge the world, definitely to set all things to rights.

Scholars who do not agree with Wright will sometimes argue that the entire speech of Mark 13 is a subject shift: an answer to the question about the end of the age, without tying that answer to the destruction of the Temple.

The context clues, however, are far too strong for this. Jesus is talking about the destruction of Jerusalem that was looming in the years when Mark was written.

And, Jesus’ vindication as a true prophet is tied up with this judgment on the “vineyard keepers” (Mark 12:1ff.).

And, I would not be at all surprised to hear that those who were wrapped up in the horrors of that war anticipated that the culmination of their time of trial would be a revelation that their pains were climactic labor pains, giving birth to the age to come.

In the face of suffering and injustice, we must not only work for justice (for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven), but also hope that this injustice will be reversed through the power of God who gives life to the dead.

Again and again we will find that no one knows the hour: not the angels or people or even the son. But we cannot give up on the hope.

Suffering cannot overcome hope.

Tears must be dried.

We continue to believe in resurrection, in final eschatological reversal, because we believe in the God who has bound Himself to the story in which all things are set to rights.

The God who authors this story, the God who stars in this story, will see to it that the story is brought to its promised culmination.

Even if that culmination, and its timing, surprise us all.

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