“The only way to live in any true security is to live so close to the bottom that when you fall you do not have far to drop, you do not have much to lose.” -Dorthy Day

This quote is so very pertinent to my life right now…why am I trying to climb? Why am I so concerned with my own security? Simplicity, until recently, has been little more to me than an idea. I have been so concerned with my financial situation that I have placed “being responsible” over following Christ. Though my situation is very different from “climbing the corporate ladder” or trying to “get ahead,” there is a very real sense that I am perusing security and it has taken up residence in my mind and has begun to transform my mind without my permission.

I think I see why so many people go to college and build a very noble value system only to abandon it for the “real world.” I see why people lose sight of the things that are really important to them. It’s as though they learn truth and beauty and then they enter into this strange new world where those things are seen as unrealistic. They don’t really know what they’re doing in this world so they just listen to the people around them who think they’ve got it figured out. They hear the voices that say, “taking care of the poor is ok, but you’ve got to take care of yourself” and since they feel a little lost they readily accept any advice they can get, slowly conforming to the patterns of this world. The voices around them take their minds and their imagination captive and they exchange truth and beauty for cynicism and complacency.

“I just found out there’s no such thing as the real world, Just a lie you’ve got to rise above” -John Mayer from the song No Such Thing

I have only recently entered this world and all the ideas I have about living simply and creatively seeking God’s Kingdom above security, wealth, and comfort have slowly begun to seem impractical and out of reach. Thus Romans 12 has taken on new meaning for me.

“Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.”

If we do not seek transformation from Christ, if we do not take Christ as our example and take that example seriously to the most serious level, then we will be transformed by the world with or without our permission. You see, it’s quite impossible to discern God’s good, pleasing, and perfect will if money and comfort take up residence in our minds because God’s will has literally nothing to do with those things. In our confusion and in our vulnerability our love for others dims and our concern for trying to “make it” in this world brightens. Seeking first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness/Justice (Matthew 6:33) means not working for “the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life” (John 6:26-27). Seeking Christ, seeking to be transformed by the renewing of mind means selling all we have, selling out on our concern for self, selling… if only to get them out of our minds… our values for wealth and comfort. Following Christ means giving up on worrying about tomorrow for tomorrow has enough trouble of it’s own (Matthew 6:34). Following Jesus means remembering that “we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it” (1 Timothy 6:7). Is not following Jesus about emptying yourself of selfishness?

“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter— when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?” (Isaiah 58:6-7).

Following Jesus and seeking first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness means trusting and praising “God from whom all blessings flow” (this is why we sing the song after we give offerings and tithes) rather than trusting and praising the advise of the world from which only counterfeit blessing flows. Seeking this God’s kingdom means actually taking the imagination of God and the simplicity of Jesus Christ into the strangeness of the “real world” just as folks like Saint Francis, John Wesley, Mother Teresa, and Shane Claiborne have done throughout our family history… and it means creatively doing so in whatever capacity and in whatever setting we may find ourselves.

I feel called today to rediscover the passion I have not yet completely lost and to start again now in seeking first the Kingdom of God in all its simplicity and peace.

“But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs” (1 Timothy 6:6-10)

And that’s when I got to thinking…

Why do people believe in the literal “mark of the beast,” not to mention all the other problematic images in Revelation? Is it really because they read scripture and that was the most obvious interpretation (I’ll save questioning their hermeneutics for later)? Is it really only because that’s what’s been passed down to them (I’m sure this is often it!)? Or is it because it makes for very effective scare tactics?

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that dispensationalist literalism makes for very powerful conservative propaganda. I believe that this is part of the reason it is so alive and well in our world. While George W. Bush was in office, dispensationalism was used as propaganda for people to support war in Iraq and to give up on peace making in the middle east. Now that we have Barack Obama in office, it’s the mark of the beast language that scares people into looking negatively upon anything the president does or says. Whatever the situation, dispensationalism is good at twisting current events, no matter how horrific they are or how really good they really may be, and adapting itself so that everything is secret knowledge for the conservative dispensationalist. So the question is, do dispensationalists believe their outlandish interpretations because they’re being honest with the text or is it because it conveniently fits into their conservative bias and fear mongering? Is the literal and future mark of the beast expectation a reasonable interpretation or is it just a convenient scare tactic?

This past Sunday morning our little community of Christ followers prayed that prayer. In some profound way, as I prayed, I felt that I was praying something deeply controversial and subtly subversive of the kind of Christianity we’re often sold in American culture… “Do you know where you’re going when you die? If you were to die today do you know for certain where you would spend eternity?” is their sales pitch and these questions seem to be the mantra of American evangelicalism. Although these questions are almost incoherent to the ears of emerging culture, they are still alive and well in Christianity today because the idea that Christianity is primarily about “where you are going”, about certainty thereof, and about what happens to you when you die, is still alive and well in Christianity today. The shadow of a doubt pertaining to the destination is seen as heresy and a lack of faith. But this is not the attitude of faith, this is the attitude of spiritual arrogance with a hint of ignorance.

In response to a question about destination, a question about entering God’s kingdom, Jesus said, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). There is a beautiful uncertainty about true faith and following Jesus. Christ called his disciples to follow him without revealing any sort of destination but only by promising a sort of becoming, by inviting them on a kind of journey, “Come follow me… I will make you fishers of men” (Mark 1:17). He called them to “ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden and through perils unknown” and spoke much more of the following itself than he ever did about any kind of destination, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). Never did he talk of being certain of the destination and yet that has become the center-piece of American Christianity, even to the point where Christians often overlook actually following Jesus and taking up their cross because they’ve come to see everything on Earth as secondary to their heavenly destination. For Christ, the world and the here and now were primary, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son” NOT “for God so loved heaven that made sure that people could know they were going there.”

God calls us to follow him because of what we might become NOT because of where we are headed. The destination may indeed be uncertain, the path may well be “untrodden,” but we go with faith because the way of the cross is ironically the best possible way to live. In this uncertain path we may find life that is truly life. In these “ventures of which we cannot see the ending” where we are called to see all we have and give it to the poor we will discover “in this present age homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—and with them, persecutions” (Mark 10:30). May we live in uncertainty so that when the path takes the unexpected turn toward the cross of Christ we will not abandon him for another destination but faithfully take up our cross and follow the crucified Jesus to become resurrected people.

As I prayed that prayer I felt indescribably free and I felt a sense of new life, empowered to live today in the uncertainty of tomorrow guiltless and with the hope of God’s leading love here with me now.

Let our faith not be defined by where we are going but let it be defined by the one who is taking us there, that our destination will not become our god but that the tortured and crucified Son of God would be the One God of our wandering hearts. May God lead us on paths of justice and mercy here, now, and always.

Wesley Ellis
from Living in the Kingdom

Walter Brueggemann spoke about in The Prophetic Imagination.  He said that the Empire of control and competition, is constantly co-opting people’s revolutions.  In other words, when was the last time a revolutionary didn’t eventually become Emperor?  Think Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler…but maybe even more unfortunate are those true believers like the French revolutionaries whose ideas of liberty and equality eventually turned into a reign of terror.  Why?  Brueggemann points out that it is because those revolutions and revolutionaries bought into a critical deception.  The immediacy of their hope.  Anytime, he comments, the hope is too “here and now” it becomes prime real estate for imperial control.  The tangible, touchable, manageable realities of linear thought and rational process are Their domain.  Finally he councils us not to be Managers of change but rather to be Imaginers…  Poets, provocateurs, singers of songs, artists, prophets, painters, sculptors, wordsmiths, etc… Envision a new world, live into that new reality…but don’t necessarily engage in the dangerous assumption that CHANGE is the end all solution.

Brittian specifically is talking about the new ‘green revolution’ that seems to be taking place and how the same big companies are changing their marketing tactics to market to this target audience.  Rob Bell and Don Golden say someting similiar about the oppressed becoming the oppressors from Egypt to Jerusalem in their new book Jesus Wants to Save Christians (44-45):

God gives power and blessing so that justice and righteousness will be upheld for those who are denied them…

To forget this, to fail to hear the cry, to preserve prosperity at the expense of the powerless, is to miss what God had in mind…

Exile is when you forget your story

Exile isn’t just about location; exile is about the state of your soul.

Exile is when you fail to convert your blessings into blessings for others.

Exile is when you’re a stranger to the purposes of God

We have to be careful that we do not buy into ‘change’ as an idea simply as a cool ‘alternative.’  Otherwise, when things ‘change’ we will somehow believe we have reached our goal.  This new green revolution has become ‘the norm’ and the world has begun capitalizing off the label.  Ryan Bolger has a good graphic that I would like to borrow.  The image is a table of the difference between the ‘green’ revolution and the way that perhaps we should respond as Christians (labeled as ‘blue’).

He asks the important question, does the church need a color?  Over at Jesus Manifesto as well there has been an important discussion going on about language.  Who are we leaving out and who are we including based on our language?  It is easier than people sometimes think to learn a cultural language or a certain theological bent and to extol that theological bent to your congregation, but the danger is that the theology begins trumping Jesus Christ and the particular plan and revelation of God throughout time and space–the one that transcends cultures.  It is actually very easy for big companies to read this “cultural language” and create products which they can capitalize off of to “co-opt” the revolution (as Brittian said earlier).

The questions then are large: How does Christianity stay focused on Christianity and avoid being eaten up into a larger mass culture created by the media and big business?  How do we deal with the major environmental movements in a way that is true the particularity of Christ?  Which direction is the church going and is it the right direction? Are we following Christ or are we following culture?  If we are following culture, to what extent to we dwelve into it?  Over at emergent village one person argues that almost nothing is off limits.  Do you agree that Christians can go anywhere and do anything in the name of Christ?  Are there limits on our freedom as Paul often talked about, for the sake of our brothers?

I sat at a light on the way to work and a group of five stood on the corner.

Another sign said, honk if you support prop. 9. Prop 9 is a proposed law that would make it illegal for homosexuals to be married in California.

Coming into work I say hi to one of the girls.

“Did you see the people on the corner?” I ask.

“No,” she said. “What is going on?”

“There are all these people protesting prop. 9. You know the one about homosexuality and legalizing it.”

“Oh. I think it’s dumb,” she said.

“What?”

“That people are so upset about it.  I mean, homosexuals are people too.  You can’t legislate morality.  They are going to be together whether the law says so or not.”

“Who are you going to vote for?” I ask not really responding to what she said.

“Probably Obama,” she said. “I like Obama.”

(UPDATED): Want more on this subject?  An interesting line of logic is used here.

Andrea talks about whether or not pastors are abusing their exemption from taxes.

Justin wonders if Obama is really a socialist.

Andre talks about how another Christian president might not be the answer.

In an especially interesting article, Kelly talks about why she is not totally happy with Shane Claiborne.

I recently found a site that gives a good overview for further resources and blogs on the emergent church and thought I would share it with my readers.

While you’re at, you might also visits Seth’s blog and read his thoughts on consumerism and how it relates to my former post on the financial crisis.  Bob Poole, over at his blog as well, talks abut the true nature of graditude using some of Seth’s thoughts in his blog as well.

In his article, Reynolds attempts to show God never really acts outsides the cultural norms of their country.  He is not-like Stalin or Robespierre-a revolutionary in the sense of radical change.  In fact, God can only communicate “with people in language and concepts available to them, if He is to allow them to mature. Even attempting to describe the inner workings of the atom to a tribal people would be useless, since they lack the mental vocabulary to make sense of the message. Of course, God could directly reveal all this to humanity, but this would not allow for a natural cultural development.”  Cultural development is important to Reynolds because “if a culture does not learn for itself what is good, true, and beautiful then it will not be an adult culture. It will depend forever on priestcraft and develop a magical, instead of rational, understanding of reality.”

It is at this point that I must digress with Reynolds.  Reynolds first admits that “Abraham was not an American,” but then swings the other way suggesting that cultures must move beyond “magical” to the “rational” to be “an adult culture.”  Rationality, as it has been defined by contemporary society, really is the totality of American culture in its finest clothes.  If Abraham is not an America, then, why does he need rationality?  He needs rationality because this is seen by Americans as the ultimate good-a life freed from passions, the supernatural, and the spiritual world.

Reynolds goes onto the note that the Bible is “the story of the education of mankind.”  In other words, Israel was kind of a baby, Israel in exile was a kind of teenager in adolescent years, and Israel finally grew up to understand “truth” at the time of Christ in their early adult years, but even life at the time of Jesus was not perfect.  Slavery was still in full swing, the understanding between men and women was incomplete, and the understandings of community and rationality would not be fully realized until the renaissance.  But this begs a question, are we any better than the ancient Israelites?  Is outsourced slavery still generally allowed by American companies to make the maximum profit?  Are woman still treated like second-class citizens in most of the world?  Do most nations still hold somewhat of a tribal entity?  Shawn at lo-fi Tribe notes that:

“The consumer driven church of North America is largely a suburban movement. It is a suburban movement driven by upper/middle class economics and mobility. Seriously, would you even be a consumer if you had no money? Would you even be superimposing a consumer mentality over Christ’s Church if you had not already forged such a mentality in three-cart-wide isles of choice-filled shopping malls? That said, there is nothing at all wrong with upper/middle class economics! If only we all could live in such realities (with a better sense of stewardship, of course)! The problem or difficulty arises when we strap the way we actually “do” church to an upper/middle class sensibility and limit the Gospel to expressions born therein. The problem becomes a monster when those limited sensibilities are confused with ministry philosophy and our way “doing” church becomes an extension of the suburban church movement, in spite of context.”

As Shawn points out so well, we are still connected to a context and we are hard pressed to get out of it.  Reynolds goes on to note that in the Bible God had to “tolerate enormous crudities and barbarisms” and that “it is easy for the critic, at the far end of centuries of mostly Christian cultural development to be critical of the Patriarchs and of the Mosaic Law. They forget how stunning and difficult the very idea of a universal law was when God revealed it to Moses. It took hundreds of years for even one people group, the Jews, to grasp the ramifications of a law that applied equally to king and commoner.”  One only had to watch CNN last night to hear Lou Dobbs complaining about the Bear Stearns fiasco to note that the rules that apply to individuals do not necessarily apply to larger companies.  We are still struggling with many of the same issues.  To say otherwise makes it seems like we are morally superior to our Jewish predecessors of faith.

All of this leads up to Reynolds thoughts on “the conquest of Canaan by Joshua…[where Go commands] the ‘genocide’ of the Canaanites.”  It is interesting how Reynolds puts the words genocide in peculiar quotes as if killing a whole group of people then was different than killing whole groups of people now.  He notes that much secular genocide has happened in the past 100 years, so the problem is not peculiar to Christianity, but he goes on saying “the difficulty for the skeptic is that he is applying modern categories of morality, often based on centuries of Jewish and Christian thought, to ancient men. They had no language of justice and no concept of ‘non-combatants.’ Primitive man was . . . primitive. He thought in terms of tribe and battled with tribal ferocity.”

This is where I must again disagree with Reynolds interpretation of history.  The word “primitive” is a loaded word to show a loaded principle.  In what ways was Israel primitive?  That they fought wars based on nationalistic fears of losing their territory?  That is still happening today in America.  Is that that we do not kill all the people that we fight?  Well, we have found better economic uses for such people.  We are not blind altruists.  We realize that a living Iraqi is better than a dead Iraqi to create a better economy to influence the world trade market positively when their oil reserves become operational.  If we were truly altruistic, we might help the situation in Tibet.  I simply cannot agree that we are more “advanced” than the Jews in that sense-only more efficient.  I would like to here more about why Reynolds believes we are not-in many senses-still a primitive people.

I have many more qualms, but I would like to keep this post short for any responses people might have to this.

He begins the paper by discussing one of the “most persistent professions of the faith of the church…that there is ‘one God, the Father, the Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.’” Although the doctrine has been “carved into the stone of an institution, it is easy to forget that at one time it was warm and supple and alive…[but] has often been reduced to a proposition to be made.” He notes that Augustine, rather than accepting creation ex nihilo on philosophical grounds, accepted the doctrine because “the church that teaches it has proven to have authority to declare such truths…[Augustine knows] the church…is a people constituted by the grace of an elusive God who keeps them moving on a journey of hope.”

Dr. Keen argues that, “As metaphysically alluring as the doctrine of creation might seem, thinkers of universal truths must contend with the no doubt faithful reading that the Old Testament tells ‘a particular story about a particular people and their particular God’…we learn in Genesis 12 that God comes ‘to bless’ these nations by turning to one nation, to Abraham, Sarah, and their descendants.” Dr. Keen shows how this particularism is carried on throughout the Bible through both Isaiah and Paul. Isaiah is noted (45:14) saying that “God is with you [Israel] alone.” Keen goes on to note “though in their ignorant economic and military might they [the oppressive nations during the exile] presume otherwise, it is through Israel that the nations, too, will be saved.”

But why did God choose such a people? Did he, by an means, need to? Dr. Keen does not believe so. Rather, “God need not have come alongside Israel, but God is alongside them (cf. Deuteronomy 7:6-8). Thus it has come to pass that these people know the holy God. Their neighbors do not…[but it is] a word that may be withdrawn (cf. Psalm 28:1)…They are what they are, only because God has spoken. Even their learning into God’s word entails their holiness only secondarily, only as an obedience which refuses to take credit…The the holiness of Israel is a gift and a command…It is no mean task to be a holy people, step by step in everything to depend on the freely electing God, to live a life of purity, justice, wisdom, and hospitality. Not only might one fall prey to faithlessness; even under the best of circumstances encounters with the holy God may in fact be profoundly hazardous.”

Keen goes on reminding us that “in bondage to an overwhelming alien power, threatened by despair, the Hebrew children are tempted to run to the gods of Babylon who had so effectively swept them into its tight grip…It is the audacious hope, woven as it is upon an audacious memory, that the prophet cries out that Yahweh–the God who elected the slave forbears of these slaves–is creator…all others are sham Gods…Such a God has sovereignty against which no king, no military power, no empire, no chaos can prevail…It is in the face of obviously irresistible necessity that the political resistance literature of creation emerges among an oppressed people. Could there ever be a more excessively radical doctrine?”

Keen finishes his essay reminding us that “without explicit reference to the creation of the universe, Paul sternly counsels members of the Corinthian church engaging in factionalism, closed circles jockeying for positions of superiority over one another…[that] God chose what is low and despised in the world…to reduce the things that are…Jesus, the elect of the elect of God, was–the definiteness of the past tense must not lose force–was reduced to nothing…This is a dense and grave event. The living body that had healed the sick and raised the dead was annihilated on the cross, the dead weight of a lifeless corpse hung limply in its place. The entombed carcass of Jesus was not a latent potency waiting to be drawn into some proper entelechy. It was devoid of all ‘can” in relation to the living Jesus a pure nothing. What comes out of the tomb on Easter Sunday morning is not Jesus-revived, but a new creation, out of nothing.”

Witherington is especially critical of Ray Vanderlaan and his Follow the Rabbi site.  Witherington also roundly denounces Bell’s views on homosexuality as “unhelpful.” Commenting on the post, Michael Spencer of the blog internet monk agreed saying: “While I am basically optimistic and supportive regarding the emerging church, I have not been able to extend that optimism to Bell. Zondervan sees some star quality and is overlooking some serious problems. I appreciate Bell’s heart, but posing as an “expert” on the Judaism of Jesus is over Rob’s head. And your critique of his approach to sexual ethics is also on target. I join Rob in much of what he is feeling, but that is a problem with how we love and respect people. It’s NOT a problem with the Bible’s clarity on sexual ethics. It’s Hebrews 13:4.”