Tag Archive - violence

Kingdom of Abundance

October 2, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 9 Comments

The feeding narratives were supposed to tell the disciples everything they needed to know about Jesus’ identity–and their participation with him in the coming of the kingdom.

At least, that seems to be what Mark wants us to think.

Jesus feeds 5,000, and then when the disciples freak out at his coming to them on the water, this is ascribed to their “not understanding about the loaves, but their heart was hardened.”

Jesus feeds 4,000, and then in a boat with insufficient food, Jesus warns about the yeast of the Pharisees and of Herod. They think he’s talking about bread.

He rebukes them: don’t you remember how much food you gathered? Are your eyes blind, your ears deaf, your hearts hard? Beware of the leaven of the bad guys!

What have we seen in these feeding narratives?

We have seen abundance come from nothing. We have seen banquets set in the wilderness.

More than this, we have seen that the setting of the banquets was not just the work of Jesus–it was the work of Jesus who gave to his disciples who, in turn, gave to the crowds.

The disciples are active agents in the coming of the kingdom of abundance. They take hold of the world’s scarcity and distribute it far beyond its capacity.

The abundance of Herod is different.

In his banquet hall, filled with food, he is shown to be weak and impressionable. Herod’s feast is, finally, a feast of death–John’s head served on a platter.

Where is death? In the wilderness, without adequate food–but a good shepherd? Or in the halls of apparent abundance–with a failure of a would-be king?

Herod has not enacted death alone. The Pharisees have also plotted with the Herodians to kill Jesus.

There is a kingdom economy of the Herod and the Pharisees–where the apparent abundance of power and possession leads to death.

And there is an alternate kingdom economy of Jesus–where apparent nothingness and death and deprivation leads to fulness.

Embracing the kingdom of abundance, however, means seeing abundance, by faith, in the face of nothing.

How is the kingdom of abundance, power, and glory seen? It is like the smallest mustard seed.

Sow it in faith and see what happens.

Violence and Power

January 12, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 11 Comments

Since The Shooting this weekend folks have been engaged in the standard question-asking, finger-pointing, and blame shifting. We always want to blame someone.

One of the most common concerns, and one that I share in part, is the connection between the shooting and the inflamed political rhetoric of our day.

But I wonder if the appropriate response of the church isn’t to start thinking more constructively about what it means to be a peaceable and peace-making people more generally. I can hear my pacifist fans cheering and yes, I can see you, my “just war theory” reader, through your computer’s camera, folding your hands across your chest and scowling at the screen.

But stay with me.

Cross(hairs)


What I want to suggest here is about more than putting away our guns (personal or national). The problem of violence is more wide-spread than this. Violence arises any time we attempt to gain control of a situation through the use of power.

What this means is that it’s not enough for a church to agitate for the U.S. to pursue peace rather than war. We need to start at home.

It’s easy as a parent to use force to control situations. But when we interject the power of our voice (or hands) into a situation where our kids are fighting with each other, have we managed to keep them from the way of violence? Or are we showing them instead that there will always be someone with more power and the destiny they should pursue is to acquire as much of it as possible?

Our churches become hotbeds of power-grabbing. For many, this is the place where we are most involved, and perhaps have the most control over the destiny of an organization. And this becomes a place where we practice the tactics of power assertion, politics, and manipulation to work our will.

The church has not created within itself the counter-culture of peace that should serve as a witness against the ultimate futility of violence employed by the world around us.

We can and should react to such horrific events as we saw this past weekend with all due revulsion. But until we as followers of Jesus have managed to form communities of the cross rather than communities of the crucifiers we have no place either for self-righteousness nor, in the end, for surprise.

Our calling has been to extend the call for a better way to the world around us. But failing to be that better way, we have failed to call others to that better way–and they wouldn’t listen even if we did.

(post script: Along these lines, you should check out this post on our need for new heros by Broderick Greer.)

Violence, Sports, & Gospel Redux (pt. 2)

February 9, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 5 Comments

Before I digressed, I was talking about “Sports Fanatics: How Christians have succumbed to the sports culture–and what might be done about it” from the latest Christianity Today.

The article makes some very good points about the dilemmas posed by professional sports. Of course, none of the data or incidents pointed up in the article will surprise us.

In the U.S. we glory most in a sport (football) notorious for leaving its competitors in chronic pain for the rest of their lives, and for the lingering brain damage left by hard hits leading to concussions.

The business demands victory at any cost, such that the baseball doping scandals and video taping of opponents’ sidelines are little more than the assumed consequences of sport. (Did you notice how the SF Giants held onto Barry Bonds just long enough to milk his historic run, then dropped him like a hot potato–and how MLB did nothing about his obvious dependence on performance enhancing drugs while he was making it money hand over fist? This from the sanctimonious people who won’t have anything to do with Pete Rose?!)

Whether it’s violence, money, or the debaucherous lifestyles of athletes that we fund not only by our consumption of their talents but also through our hanging on every aspect of their lives through sports journalism, sports culture creates a counter-narrative to the gospel that we too often simply consume rather than subjecting to redemption or rereading in light of the gospel. This is the point that the article makes with great clarity.

Here’s the paragraph I’m thinking of:

Variously described by those inside and outside as narcissistic, materialistic, violent, sensationalist, coarse, racist, sexist, brazen, raunchy, hedonistic, body-destroying, and militaristic, big-time sports culture lifts up values in sharp contrast with what Christians for centuries have understood as the embodiment of the gospel. There are simply no easy, straight-faced, intellectually respectable answers for how evangelicals can model the Christian narrative—with its emphases on servanthood, generosity, and self-subordination—while immersed in a culture that thrives on cut-throat competition, partisanship, and Darwinian struggle.

I don’t think that there are easy answers here. I’m not in favor of withdrawing from society simply because society offers a powerful counter-narrative to the gospel of Christ crucified.

But neither do I buy the arguments of the rejoinders. One rejoinder indicated that the article was in danger of gnosticism in its denial of the body and its participation in sport. I think that the danger is actually quite the opposite: we  show a gnostic tendency in our willing participation in body (and soul!) destroying sports because we evangelicals tend to think that the body is inconsequential to a person’s relationship with God (so long as you’re not having sex with anyone other than your spouse).

What might it look like to renarrate the story of sports such that it participates in the narrative of the world turned upside down by the saving work of Jesus (rather than renarrating what it means to be a Christian so that we can consume what our neighbors are consuming without thinking twice about it)? That’s a real question. I’d love any thoughts you have. Or maybe you don’t think that such a retelling of the culture’s sports story is necessary at all?

Violence, Sports, & Gospel Redux

February 8, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 3 Comments

Last week’s conversation about Ultimate Fighting and the gospel came as an interesting prelude to a few other things that went down this weekend: (1) I got to Christianity Today’s February cover story, “Sports Fanatics: How Christians have succumbed to the sports culture–and what might be done about it“; (2) this was, of course, Super Bowl weekend; and (3) we just finished season 7 of 24 on DVD.

The article, by Shirl James Hoffman, raises all the right questions. In short: have Christians been baptized into the narrative of sports culture rather than critically assessing where it might stand in need of redemption?

Aside: last week I talked about “baptizing” something that I perceived as sub-Christian [Constantinain "Christian" rule] and someone asked, perceptively, whether we aren’t, in fact, called to baptize things that are outside so as to bring them in. I think there’s something to that. But as commonly used, “baptizing” something means “embracing” it rather than “redeeming” it. When we say that something has been “baptized”, I think that what we’re really saying, often, is that it has baptized us. Baptism is to be about being written into the story of God’s work in Christ, but we use the phrase when Christ’s name is written on the byeline of someone else’s story.

So, yes, we should be “baptizing” sports culture, business culture, art culture but that would mean redeeming it, rereading it, transforming it in light of the narrative that we know to be ultimately true of the world [God's self-giving love in Christ] rather than simply inserting “For God’s glory” into the extant narratives of each.

Ok, so the aside took up a whole post. Sorry about that. Next time: what sorts of questions does Hoffman raise about sports that we might need to think more seriously about if we’re to baptize sports culture rather than be baptized by it?