ethans feet

Maybe its because i have been watching too much news (seriously, is there anything else going on in the world?) but I am surprised to admit that i am a little sad about Michael Jackson.

Although, really, I have felt a little sad about him for a long time now. I watched an old video of his last night and he was such a handsome young man, talented and even seemed, I don’t know, happy. But then, well you know what happened then.

(watching his life play out has been like a scene in an Indian Jones movie where someones dissolves into ash, or melts into a puddle of goo, only we’ve been watching it happen for like 30 years now)

And honestly, I can’t help but feel like its my fault some how. I mean not MINE, but ours, all of ours. I feel like MJ was, at least in part, a monster of our making.

So what if we began a conversation, now, after his death, about how this happens to our celebrities, who is it happening to now (Britney Spears anyone?) and how we can prevent it? Or if we even can?

Or maybe I just have an overinflated sense of responsibility, i am a pastor after all.

I know its shocking, but I came up against a story of Peter’s with a message I want to resist.

Its a story about a group of early Christians who leave Jerusalem on the Saturday between the cross and the resurrection.  They live as Christians (really good Christians) for a thousand years before a missionary reaches them and tells them the “Good News” of the resurrection.  But the leader of the little community is sad and not happy, because he says, (I’m paraphrasing here) “up til now we have been living a life of emulating Christ out of sheer love for Christ, with no hope of reward.  But with this news of the resurrection I fear we will begin to follow Christ out of the hope of a heavenly reward, a resurrection”.

And in Peter’s commentary on the story he says that the life of this alternative Christians community in its love for “the Least, the Last, and the Lost” (my terminology, but you get what I mean) you see the true resurrection of Christ.

But, i don’t know, i think that that rings untrue to me.  The resurrection is important to me not because it means I too will be resurrected (though, I have to admit, I am happy about that) but because I believe the whole world will be.  If I didn’t believe that the whole world would ultimately be resurrected by God and put to rights i don’t think i could try.  In fact I think that without the promise that in the end God Wins, the demands of Christ would be, almost, oppressive.

Ethics without faith is like guilt without hope.

And though I hate to use this terminology because it is so often unhelpful, but this, it seems to me is exactly the kind of thing that the liberal church has tried and has found ultimately unsustainable.  I’m not calling Rollins a liberal, because he isn’t, and I’m not saying that everything the liberal church believes is bad, because it isn’t.  But I do think that this idea of a resurrection people without the actual resurrection is a liberal idea “par excelance” and though it can lead to great reform movements like King and others it can also lead to a dead faith and empty churches.

I hope someone out there will disagree with me here and show me where I am thinking too narrowly about what Peter is saying, because i feel like i have more to learn form this story but i’m just not seeing it.

I have been thinking lately about how difficult it is for me to be content. I don’t know if its just me, or if its my culture, my gender, religion, or simply being human (or some Molotov cocktail of all of those) but something in me is constantly yearning for whats next — forever discontent with life as it is.

But really, when I am clear headed, I know that the following is true (pretty much every day):

A little Pete Rollins to wet your appetite (an excerpt from The Fidelity of Betrayal):

In opposition to these attempts (Conservative and Liberal) at closing over the unspeakable rupture, a truly devotional reading of the text involves encouraging this mystery to be made manifest as a mystery and exploring how we are to celebrate, invite and affirm that mystery.  The theologian here acts as a type of anti-theologian (here he goes again) for instead of placing God (theos) into language (logos), the theologian can help us to dive into the great abyss of that mystery and cherish its transformative power…

God’s word is thus testified to indirectly by the parallactical (something that reveals a mystery) nature of the text itself, being communicated by the rich, weaving web of wounded words that testify to the happening of a Devinne event.

In short his point is that if we beleive that the Bible bears witness to the Word of God we should expect it to be “wounded words” affected by the “volcanic revelation” of God’s presence in the text.

Chew on that for a while!

I “wrote” these micro-stories on my way to the airport to pick up my folks the other night.  Maybe this paints a picture of the scatter-shot way my brain is working through things at any given moment.  And maybe you will all want to commit me after reading them but oh well, that’s what blogging is for, right?  Showing that we all deserve to be committed a little bit.

Love

A young girl asked her father, a song writer, “daddy, when you gunna put me in a song?”

“Honey” the man replied, looking her square in the face, “you’re in every song I’ve ever written.”

Jesus at the Temple

One day, when Jesus was walking with his disciples, he walked into the temple pulled out a dagger and slit the chief priest’s throat.

While the man was dying Jesus said, “That’s for all the children who have died for want of the food that is in your store house”.

—

Ok, so i debated for a day about posting this and i’ve decided that i only have the courage to do it if i explain what I am trying to get at with the second story, forgive me.

Often when i am having a conversation with someone about Jesus’ overall message of pacificism they will bring up the story about Jesus overturning the money changers tables and using a whip to drive out the animals (yes, i beleive Jesus was a pacifist, I’m not, because my faith isn’t as strong as Jesus’, but that’s another post).  And the point I am trying to make in my story is that what Jesus does in the biblical  story is not violence.  It was vandalism, intimidation, revolt maybe, but not violence.  Violence brings death.  Jesus did nothing in his life that did anything other then fight against the forces of death.  And i bring up the starving children just to say that Jesus had every reason to be violently mad about what he was fighting for — we all do, in fact.  The reason why we most of us don’t take up arms is not because of our holiness, but because of our complicancy.

Any of you who are Dave Mathews Band fans i highly recommend the new album, Big Wiskey And the GrooGrux King.  its easily their best album since Busted Stuff.  And for all my fellow preachers out there, here’s some lyrics for you to chew on:

Save your sermons for someone whose afraid to love.  I’ll be right here, lying in the hands of God.

Beauty.

Lately I have been falling more and more for Irish theologian Pete Rollins.  To get a flavor for Pete (though you should really check out his books) read this interview in Christian Century.  I find his thoughts to be totally compelling, particularly his thoughts on “community” as laid out in that interview.  Community is a buzz word in the emerging church as important as post-modern or anything else.  Lately, though, I have been feeling like the idea of community  can become as much an idol we worship and/or a millstone around our neck as any old church building or stubborn board of directors.

In fact, if I could sum up all that my brain has imagined from reading Pete I would sum it up in the following phrase: for the church(A) to be the church(B) there needs to be no church(C).

What I mean is that for the people of God (church, definition A) to start behaving like the distinct community of the Kingdom of God (church definition B) then maybe there needs to be nowhere that they can go where someone else or some institution (church, definition C) will do it/be it for them.

Now I am not saying that we don’t have a church/institution “C” (that would be career suicide!) but rather that the primary job of the church/institution is to refuse to be for the church/people “A”  the church/KOG “B”.

You come to church seeking community?  Reach out and love somebody.  You come to church seeking praise?  Stand up and praise God in front of everybody.  You come to church seeking truth?  Ask somebody a question.  You come to church to serve the poor?  Go out and make friends with someone whose poor and brig ‘em to church!

I’m not saying… I’m just saying.