Baptist preacher Clarence Jordan became convinced that the Gospel was not just about a personal encounter with the living Jesus – which Jordan had himself at the start of his Christian journey, and very much believed in. It was also about social transformation and about reconciling all people as one. Influenced by early Christian progressives like Walter Rauschenbusch, Jordan began to preach that our faith was as much about the Kingdom of God as it was about a personal experience of Jesus through “being saved” or “being born again”.
Rauschenbusch pointed out that Jesus preached more about the Kingdom of God than personal experiences of God, with most of his sermons being parables of this Kingdom. What is the Kingdom? It is
the energy of God realizing itself in human life … [ to affect] the redemption of social life from the cramping influence of religious bigotry, from the repression of self-assertion in the relation of upper and lower classes, and from forms of slavery in which humans are treated as mere means to serve the ends of others… [It is] the redemption of society from political autocracies and economic ogliarchies; the substitution of redemptive for vindictive [forms of justice]; the abolition of constraint through hunger as a part of the industrial system; and the abolition of war as the supreme expression of hate and the completest cessation of freedom. (A Theology for the Social Gospel)
In short it is about answering the prayer of Jesus “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as in heaven”. Jordan looked around at the Jim Crow south divided by very stark differences of rich and poor and of black and white, and knew it needed a witness to the call to the kingdom Jesus gave, a call to transform society into a place where all are welcomed as equal, with equal access to the table, and equal voice regardless of background, class, or race.
Image by ESO/A. Fitzsimmons. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.
This quote is reblogged from a transcript of episode 40 of Chip August’s podcast, Sex, Love, and Intimacy. The episode is called ‘Brian Swimme: Love in the Cosmos’
So what I’d like you to do is go out some night but get a blanket and lie down under the stars. So you’re lying there on your back and you’re looking up. It’s great to have a child with you because they’re freer than we are in our adult consciousness. So there you are, you’re looking up and if it’s a clear night, you’d see these thousands of stars. The cultural conditioning is that we’re looking up.
But what I want you to do with your imagination is just put yourself on the bottom of the planet. So imagine that you’re looking down because wherever you are can be the bottom of the planet and in this cultural convention is what’s up and what’s down. Then as you’re looking down; looking down, down, down, I want you to realize that all of those stars you see are drawing you toward them. Then if the earth could be made to disappear, you would just be drawn right down toward them.
You’d fall, you would fall down into the stars and the only reason you weren’t there is because the earth is drawing you to itself. Now, what’s important to realize is that we kind of think that we’re lying there on the ground, we’re thinking that it’s a wait but actually you have to realize that wait is a relationship. It’s a relationship between you and the earth. If you can make the earth disappear, you have no weight whatsoever. So you can even feel your weight as the way your body is experiencing the earth’s attraction of you.
So simultaneously, this moment comes when you make that switch and you realize, “Wow! I’m looking down at the stars and the only reason I’m here, suspended in space is because the earth is attracted to me.” The moment can come and may not come the first time, but when it comes, it’s really an ecstatic experience.
Just a few months ago, I read Brian Swimme’s excellent book, Journey of the Universe, written with Mary Evelyn Tucker. I highly recommend it.
Just this morning, I read an article on NPR.org, written by Adam Frank, that reminded me of this exercise. Here is an excerpt:
There is no up or down and you are not a resident of some city, some state or even some nation. You are not a Democrat or a Republican, a dockworker or a doctor. Right now, right at this very moment, you are a free agent hurtling through the midst of a vast city of stars, an all-encompassing architecture of suns.
The Rich Fool by Rembrandt (1627). Retrieved from Wikipedia.
Grief is an unpredictable thing. It tends to bring out the best or the worst in people. Everyone grieves a loss differently, so it’s not up to anyone else to tell another person how they should or shouldn’t cope with a loss. Some people want to laugh and reminisce about the best and favorite memories of their loved one while others might need to just be sad and have a good cry; some folks need to keep busy while others need to stop and sit down; some might need to be alone while others crave human contact. All of these are good ways to grieve and the best thing to do whenever someone you care about is grieving is to let that person deal with their loss in whatever way they feel they need to. You don’t have to say or do anything in particular, just be there for them, hug or give space as needed, and listen when they speak. After all is said and done, they probably won’t remember what you say, they’ll just remember that you were there for them.
The only exception to this, the only time that grief can go wrong or turn tragic, is when a person allows the pain drive a wedge between those who are left behind. This can happen in lots of unfortunate ways. In cases of sudden or early death, someone might start pointing the finger of blame at others, believing that the loss could have been avoided if only the situation had been handled differently. Even worse, some folks turn really nasty when it comes to dealing with estates and inheritances. I’ve seen tragic situations where siblings turn against one another over the distribution of property or money in the wake of a parent’s death. These are the only situations where I, as a pastor, want to intervene and suggest that they find another way to face the pain of loss.
In such situations, the issue at hand is rarely the money or the property itself. Most of the time, family members are simply overwhelmed with pain and are looking for some place toward which they can direct the energy of their sadness. In our culture, which glorifies strength and despises weakness, finding something to get angry over feels a lot easier and safer than just admitting that we’re feeling sad or lonely. So, we hide our grief behind fights over things and never really get to the bottom of what’s really going on in our hearts: the sadness we feel over losing a loved one. We’ve missed the point entirely and, in the process, damaged or sacrificed our relationships with the ones who might have helped us get through the pain and find our way toward healing together as a family.
The real trick in those moments is to stop, step back, and take stock of what’s really important and what life is really all about. Is fighting over money or stuff really going to bring back the dead or help us to deal with the pain of loss? No, not really. Life is not about getting money or stuff. In our better moments, we all know that. But we forget it sometimes when the pain becomes so great that we would rather think about anything other than the fact that we are hurting right now. I’ve seen this happen more than once and it breaks my heart every time.
In this morning’s gospel reading, the scene opens with just such a situation brewing. Two brothers have lost their father and a dispute over a contested will has arisen between them. We don’t know many of the details, but we get the basic outline of the situation as they bring their fight to the rabbi Jesus for a just resolution.
But Jesus, as usual, declines to answer directly the question he’s just been asked. He says, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” Once again, Jesus is not conforming to the role that would normally be expected of him as an itinerant rabbi traveling among rural villages. He continues, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”
I hear something deeper in Jesus’ words to these disgruntled siblings. I hear him saying, in effect, “What you are asking is not what you really need. You’ve missed the point entirely.”
The key phrase in his response, which is also the central phrase in this entire passage, is, “one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”
That one word, “life,” is super-important. Jesus isn’t just talking about life in the sense of biological survival, he’s talking about that rich, full, and meaningful (i.e. abundant) life that God intends for us as human beings. Jesus is talking about really living and not just getting by.
This is a particularly important (and particularly challenging) message for us to hear in 21st century America. We live in an extremely wealthy and powerful culture. Capitalism has given rise to consumerism in our post-industrial society. Our sole purpose on this earth, it seems, is to produce, buy, and consume products that keep our economy going and growing at any cost. The American dream is an ideal of security through economic prosperity. We dream of having a white picket fence and a car in every garage. We are inundated with literally thousands of advertisements every week, each one insisting that their product is the key to achieving true happiness in life.
Yet, one needs only look at those who occupy the top spots in the heap of consumption. Celebrity gossip columns give a regular indication that those who “have it all” are NOT actually any happier than the rest of us. They keep on spending their millions in the “pursuit of happiness,” only to discover that there are some things that money really just can’t buy. Or, as Jesus put it, “one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”
For those of us who live in this consumerist society, I think Jesus wants to extract us from the cult of MORE and initiate us into the church of ENOUGH. And the first step in this process is to step back and really look at who we are and what we’re doing. The meditation teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn calls this an “orthogonal shift.” That word, “orthogonal,” comes from geometry, where it refers to a set of lines that run perpendicular to one another. In the sense that Kabat-Zinn means it, an orthogonal shift is one where we step back and shift perspective in order to get a different point of view on our lives. Kabat-Zinn says this is like moving from a two-dimensional to a three-dimensional point of view: we rise above the flat level of everyday existence, survival, and concern in order to get a clearer view of the whole chessboard on which our lives are laid out.
This, in a general sense, is what we do every week here in church (and hopefully every day in our private devotional lives): we take an hour to remove ourselves from our culture’s rat race of constant production and consumption and we remind ourselves of where it is that true life, abundant life, is really to be found. We remember that life is so much more than stuff.
The first thing we realize when we step back, make that orthogonal shift and get a three-dimensional perspective on our two-dimensional world is that we live on a planet of tremendous blessing and abundance. We are all already spilling over the brim with “enough-ness”. Most scientists believe that Earth has more than enough resources to safely support life for the number of people who live here, so there’s no real reason why anyone should have to experience starvation. I won’t bore you with the statistics, but I’ll just encourage you to take your spirituality outside with you.
I mean that literally: take a hike, sit by a river, fish, hunt, or even sit on a park bench for a while. Just get out there and appreciate the free gifts that Earth has to offer. From what I’ve seen, those who do so come back with a much deeper sense of gratitude and appreciation for just how lush and green life can be. That’s one way to make that orthogonal shift and get some perspective.
Another way is to keep a financial journal. This is a great exercise, and it’s an easy one too, if you’re used to keeping good records. The thing to do is keep track of every single penny that comes in and goes out of your bank account for a month. And I don’t just mean balancing your checkbook, I mean really take stock of where and how you spend your money. At the end of the month, add everything up according to category: rent, food, utilities, entertainment, charity, etc. Where does your money actually go? And here’s the hard question: how does that match up with the values you claim to hold as a Christian? Are you meeting your needs before satisfying your wants? Would a stranger, looking at this record of your earning and spending, be able to tell what your most deeply held beliefs and values really are?
Both of these exercises can be ways in which Jesus is able to lead us to that point of shifting our habitual perspectives and reminding ourselves that “one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”
Really living, according to Jesus, is about so much more than that.
One of the interesting things about this gospel passage is that Jesus doesn’t spell out the answer for us. For example, with those two grieving brothers, Jesus doesn’t explain to them what their problem is or how to fix it. He simply refuses to get involved in their dispute. Instead, he challenges them (almost dares them) to make that shift in perspective themselves and see that the real source of their conflict is grief over the loss of their parent that has been misdirected as anger toward each other.
Jesus, in this situation, is drawing the brothers’ attention to the questions they didn’t even think to ask, initially. He tells a story about a greedy farmer with the same problem. This farmer had a huge bumper crop one year, but instead of looking to share the wealth, devised ways to build bigger barns to store keep his own massive profits to himself. This farmer never stops to think about his wider community. His focus is solely on “my money, my property, and my needs.” Once again, Jesus doesn’t spell out the answer, but says more in his silence than most people do in a thousand words.
The implication, which would have been crystal clear to Jesus’ audience of hungry peasants and should have been clear to the farmer in the story, is that an abundance of blessing is meant to be shared. We have a moral and spiritual obligation to care for one another, not just through taxes and donations to social programs, but with our own time, energy, and resources. That, Jesus implies, is where life, real life, can really be found.
St. Martin’s Cross, Iona Abbey. Image by Colin Smith. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.
Friends and commentators from all over the theological spectrum have mentioned that I don’t seem to have given susbstitutionary atonement theory its due in my post from earlier this week, The Wrath of God and the Presbyterian Hymnal.
In that post, I leaned heavily on presenting substitutionary atonement as “cosmic child abuse” (an excellent turn of phrase I’m borrowing from Sarah Sanderson-Doughty). I wrote:
…penal substitution sets up a scenario where Jesus saves humanity from the rage (not the wrath) of an out-of-control, abusive parent. When all is said and done, the church gathers around a crucifix and hears, “This is your fault. Look at what you made God do. You are so bad and dirty that God had to torture and kill this beautiful, innocent person so that he wouldn’t do the same thing to you. Therefore, you’d better shape up and be thankful or else God will change his mind and torture you for all eternity. And don’t forget: this is Good News and God loves you.” If any human parent did that, he or she would be rightly incarcerated, even if the innocent victim was willing. If that’s what Christianity is, then you can count me out.
Sadly, this (admittedly extreme) depiction accurately portrays substitutionary atonement as it was presented to me by fundamentalist pastors and teachers I encountered in high school and college.
However, I realize that thoughtful evangelicals and catholics will cringe at my presentation, since they accept the theory, but not in its “cosmic child abuse” form. For them, it represents the epitome of love and sacrifice. I remember seeing an art project made by a teenager that showed one person pushing another out of the path of an oncoming car with John 15:13 written across the top: “Greater love hath no man (sic) than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” For them, substitutionary atonement is precisely the opposite of child abuse: it is the ultimate standard of loving sacrifice, established by Jesus himself, to which every parent, spouse, and friend should aspire.
I understand and respect this angle, but I suspect that many of these more informed and compassionate evangelicals and catholics may not realize what is being propagated in their name. The heresy of “cosmic child abuse” is alive and well in traditional, orthodox congregations and parishes the world over. Curious outsiders and wounded insiders are being exposed to violent, hateful theology and end up rejecting Christianity at large based on this misrepresentation. That’s why I think it is incumbent upon liberals, evangelicals, and catholics alike to think well about what their atonement theology does mean to them and then speak up (loud and often) to counterbalance the voices of violence and hate that dominate public media in Jesus’ name.
With that in mind, I thought I might revisit the subject of substitutionary atonement today and present what I think are some of the more positive contributions it might make to the Christian theological project, writ large. Sections of this article have been lifted and adapted from my reply to a comment on the previous post.
Many of the New Testament passages dealing with substitutionary atonement center around interpreting the significance of Jesus’ crucifixion through the lens of sacrificial worship in Second Temple Judaism. The use of such a schema made total sense as an apologetic strategy in that time and place (much like Anselm’s strategy made sense in feudal Britain).
Jesus, of course, is presented as the priest and the sacrifice that supersede the Temple cult. The temple authorities claimed exclusive access to God through their rituals and institution. The early Christians, on the other hand, used this priest/sacrifice imagery to legitimate their own Christocentric practice while demonstrating its continuity with traditional Judaism. The language of temple, priest, and sacrifice would have helped the gospel make sense to a first century Jewish mind. Obviously, the strategy worked: Christians and Pharisees were the only forms of Judaism to survive the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. This interpretive schema gave Christians the framework they needed to survive without a standing Temple.
The Pharisees, for their part, had the Torah, the synagogue, and the family home as centers for their faith-practice. They went on to complete the Talmuds and form the basis for modern rabbinic Judaism as we know it today. The Sadducees, Essenes, and Zealots all pretty much died out as movements by the end of the second century.
Substitutionary atonement, understood within the cultural context of Second Temple Judaism, makes total sense as a first century apologetic strategy. It’s actually rather brilliant and obviously effective, given the lasting impact it’s had on the development of Christian atonement theory. The scholastic Anselm further developed the idea susbstitutionary atonement in the 11th century as part of his own brilliant and timely apologetic effort.
My only problem with it is when it is used as the primary or only legitimate atonement theory in our day. Such a narrow focus ignores the multiple other models for salvation presented by scripture and tradition. I fear that a one-sided emphasis on individual guilt and forgiveness through substitutionary atonement is unnecessarily handcuffing our evangelistic efforts by ignoring the many ways in which the gospel might be interpreted, preached, understood, and received by people today.
In addition to priest and purifying sacrifice, Christ can also be embraced as a physician for the sick, a liberator for the oppressed, a light in the darkness, food and drink for hungry souls, or a friend for the lonely. My hope is that Christians today might let these many images take root in our imaginations so that we might be inspired to become more faithful and effective witnesses of Christ in word and deed.
Rene Girard is one writer whose work presents, in my opinion, some rich possibilities for understanding the crucifixion of Jesus as a substitutionary sacrifice. A Roman Catholic scholar of mythology, Girard identifies patterns of mimetic violence at work in the development of religions and societies.
From birth, human beings are presented with models that we are meant to imitate. This happens on a primal level with one’s parents and siblings. As societies grow, our caches of models will grow as well. Post-industrial consumer capitalism in the Information Age presents us with a greater supply of models than any other culture in the history of the planet.
As imitators of models, we compete with one another. Over time, our competition grows fierce. The “war of all against all” (thank you, Hobbes) threatens to unravel the fabric of society and return us to primal chaos.
At this point, according to Girard, a scapegoat is chosen: someone at whom the rest of society can redirect the energy of their internal conflict and self-hatred. The scapegoat is made to bear the blame for this conflict and is summarily sacrificed.
In the wake of the sacrifice, the mimetic conflict is temporarily relieved and the community enjoys a period of relative peace and stability. Previously blamed for the violence, the scapegoat is now credited as the source of the temporary peace and is deified as a god. Girard’s theory is that this is how the deities of classical mythology received their identities. The cycle of violence then resets and repeats itself.
Applying his theory of mimetic violence to his own Roman Catholic theology, Girard presents Jesus as the willing scapegoat. Jesus deliberately enters into the cycle of mimetic violence with the intention of stopping it. He is aware of what is involved in that process and embraces the role of scapegoat.
According to this reading of the atonement, Jesus is still “sacrificed for our sins” but the wrath he is appeasing is not the wrath of God, but the rage of sinful, selfish humans. He substitutes himself in the place of all other scapegoats who endure the unjust violence of society.
In the resurrection, God intervenes to vindicate the scapegoat, unmasking and disarming the patterns of mimetic violence. Christians, as followers of Jesus the willing and vindicated scapegoat, are called to side with all future scapegoats and end the cycles of violence and exclusion, even if it means being crucified ourselves.
Rene Girard’s theory presents us with a way of unserstanding susbtitutionary atonement that can redeem it as a viable apologetic strategy in this consumer capitalist society, just as Anselm of Canterbury and the New Testament authors used it in their respective eras.
In this Girardian sense, I am able to reclaim substitutionary atonement and “cling to the old rugged cross”. I see in Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection the end of all hate and violence. I look forward to a time when all humanity will “exchange [the old rugged cross] one day for a crown” as cycles of mimetic violence come to an end.
The number one rule of the internet is: “Don’t feed the trolls.”
Hopefully, I’m not about to violate it, but we’ll see.
I came across an article this morning that got my kettle boiling (more than it usually is). It came from an online publication called The Blaze. I’m not familiar with this one, but they seem to have an affinity for conservative ideas, so far as I can tell from a cursory scan of their website.
First of all, the song wasn’t “banned” from our hymnal, it was voted out. The Committee on Congregational Song, after much discussion and discernment, democratically decided (9 to 6) not to include it. Such was the case with many other suggested songs. In Christ Alone is not prohibited from being sung in PC(USA) congregations. I have done so on several occasions. The choir even sang it as a special anthem at my ordination service. Songs that mention God’s wrath were not targeted for exclusion by the committee. They included Awesome God by Rich Mullins, which sings about “the judgment and wrath He poured out on Sodom”.
Second, the PC(USA) is not “liberal” or “leftist”. I should know: I am liberal. I sometimes wish the PC(USA) were more so, but it isn’t.
In reality, our church is extremely diverse in its theology and politics. We have evangelicals and progressives, Democrats and Republicans, folks who like traditional liturgy and folks who like contemporary worship. We’re a mixed bag of people who dare to believe that our differences can make us stronger and more faithful to Christ, if we let them. If anything, our leaders for the past half-century or so have been largely influenced by the Neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the Niebuhr brothers. You can see this in several of our more recently added confessional statements: the Barmen Declaration, the Confession of 1967, and the Brief Statement of Faith. These statements reflect a theological middle ground between fundamentalist and liberal perspectives. You can call us equal opportunity offenders. Purists, fanatics, and extremists of all stripes tend to be equally frustrated with the Presbyterian Church (USA). We are what we are… deal with it.
Third, the problem with the original wording of In Christ Alone has nothing to do with liberalism or squeamishness at the idea of God’s wrath. The controversial line in the song goes like this:
“Till on that cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied.”
I have big problems with that line and I agree with the committee’s decision to axe the hymn based on the authors’ refusal to allow them to change the words to “the love of God was magnified.” I reject outright the idea that God’s wrath put Jesus on the cross or kept him there. It was the all-too-human selfishness and violence of religious and political powers-that-be that put Jesus on the cross. It was Jesus’ commitment to nonviolence and his tremendous love that kept him there.
The original wording in the song is based on the theory of atonement called penal substitution, famously developed by St. Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century. Anselm’s delineation of the theory depends greatly on its assumption of feudal notions of justice which we no longer hold. In that society, the severity of a crime was measured by the relative social positions of perpetrator and victim. Crimes against the nobility were punished more harshly than crimes against the peasantry. In Anselm’s mind, any crime against an infinitely holy God must necessarily be punished eternally. Drawing upon priestly and sacrificial language from the New Testament, Anselm presented Jesus as the perfect solution to the problem of justice: fully divine, fully human, morally stainless. His voluntary substitution of himself resolves the problem presented by the feudal theory of justice. Anselm’s use of this model was more apologetic than ontological. He was simply trying to make the gospel recognizable to people in his own place and time, just as we are called to do. However, we who no longer accept the feudal theory of justice are likewise not bound to accept penal substitution as the one and only interpretation of the significance of Calvary.
Here are my problems with penal substitution as a viable atonement theory:
First, penal substitution sets up a scenario where Jesus saves humanity from the rage (not the wrath) of an out-of-control, abusive parent. When all is said and done, the church gathers around a crucifix and hears, “This is your fault. Look at what you made God do. You are so bad and dirty that God had to torture and kill this beautiful, innocent person so that he wouldn’t do the same thing to you. Therefore, you’d better shape up and be thankful or else God will change his mind and torture you for all eternity. And don’t forget: this is Good News and God loves you.” If any human parent did that, he or she would be rightly incarcerated, even if the innocent victim was willing. If that’s what Christianity is, then you can count me out.
Second, penal substitution renders both the life and the resurrection of Christ unnecessary. If Jesus simply “came to die”, then we can conveniently ignore all those pesky red letters in our Bibles. We also might as well sleep in on Easter Sunday because the real work was done on Good Friday. God just tacked on the resurrection so that the story would have a happy ending. It’s little more than icing on the cake of atonement.
The atonement theory toward which I gravitate bears more resemblance to the Christus Victor model. According to Christus Victor, the powers of evil threw everything they had at Jesus to oppose and silence him. They did their worst, as they always do: dealing death to anything that challenges their power. To paraphrase biblical scholar Marcus Borg: the crucifixion was the world’s “No” to Jesus, but the resurrection is God’s “Yes”.
And God’s Yes trumps the world’s No every single time. God rejects the world’s rejection of God.
The miracle of the atonement wasn’t in Jesus’ blood shed on the cross. That’s just the world doing what the world does best: Killing. The miracle of the atonement is in the resurrection of Christ: the triumph and vindication of a Love, stronger than death, that endured the very worst that the world had to offer and kept on loving anyway.
This, my friends, is the love that wilt not let us go.
This is the Good News of salvation in Christ that I am called to preach.
There, on that cross, as Jesus died, the love of God was magnified.
I believe those words with all my heart.
I respect the authors’ decision not to have their lyrics altered, but I also respect the committee’s decision to set this hymn aside because of its deficient atonement theology.
If you want some actual information on the committee’s theology and use of language, visit the Committee Statements page on their website.
In closing, here are the words of Chelsea Stern, one of the committee members, about what they know, pray, and hope in relation to the new hymnal (taken from the Hymnal Sampler, p.5-6):
This we know:
We know this hymnal will change lives.
We know this hymnal will inspire the church.
We know these songs will enliven worship in powerful ways.
We know the familiar songs will sing anew.
We know the new songs will speak truth.
This we pray:
We pray that as we sing together from this hymnal we will come to have a deeper sense of unity in the body of Christ.
We pray that the Holy Spirit will bring surprises and breathe new life into our churches through this hymnal.
This we hope:
We hope the cover imprint fades from greasy fingers.
We hope the pages become wrinkled and torn from constant use.
We hope our kids will sing from this hymnal – we hope our grandkids will too.
We praise!
We praise God for this collection of song and give God the glory!
For those who aren’t familiar with that term, it means that someone I love committed suicide. It was my college roommate, Rob De Toro (1980-2001). I’ve spent years dealing with it. The mark it leaves on your soul is permanent. For about five years after his death, I would panic whenever a friend disappeared for more than a day or so.
I’ve made progress since then, the wound isn’t still bleeding, but the scar is permanent.
Here’s a link to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline:
Loved this. Can’t believe it’s actually from Cracked…
Naturally, Dietrich Bonhoeffer comes in at #1…
The downside of being a man of God in a military setting is that there really is a cap on how much ass-kicking you can do. Sure, a priest can give last rights and counsel the troubled while the battle rages in the background, but it’s not the sort of thing they make video games about.
But maybe they should, damn it. Especially when history is full of stories like …
The Notorious RHE has done it again: hit the nail squarely on the head, Jesus style.
I wouldn’t consider myself a fan and I don’t regularly follow her blog, but just about everything she’s written that’s come my way has struck me as insightful and cutting to the core. I predict that she’ll be one of the primary voices from my generation that gets remembered and quoted for decades, if not longer. In short: she’s good.
In this particular piece, I felt like she had a tape recorder going inside my head. Like her, I exist on the chronological borderline between Gen X and Millennial. To all you pastors, parents, teachers, and church members who desperately want to know how to attract people my age (33) and younger: THIS IS YOUR ANSWER. Read it and read it well.
Let me say it again in no uncertain terms, just so we’re clear: This is what we’re thinking. This is what we’re looking for. If you really, actually want us in your church (and not just to stroke your ego and pad your pews, but because you’re interested in actually doing ministry with us), then these are the values you need to learn and internalize. Here are the highlight’s from RHE’s article…
Reblogged from CNN
By Rachel Held Evans
Many of us, myself included, are finding ourselves increasingly drawn to high church traditions– Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, the Episcopal Church, etc. – precisely because the ancient forms of liturgy seem so unpretentious, so unconcerned with being “cool,” and we find that refreshingly authentic.
What millennials really want from the church is not a change in style but a change in substance.
We want an end to the culture wars. We want a truce between science and faith. We want to be known for what we stand for, not what we are against.
We want to ask questions that don’t have predetermined answers.
We want churches that emphasize an allegiance to the kingdom of God over an allegiance to a single political party or a single nation.
We want our LGBT friends to feel truly welcome in our faith communities.
We want to be challenged to live lives of holiness, not only when it comes to sex, but also when it comes to living simply, caring for the poor and oppressed, pursuing reconciliation, engaging in creation care and becoming peacemakers.
You can’t hand us a latte and then go about business as usual and expect us to stick around. We’re not leaving the church because we don’t find the cool factor there; we’re leaving the church because we don’t find Jesus there.
The emphasis added on that last sentence is mine because that’s ultimately what it comes down to, not just for us, but for every generation. This is the perennial problem and I’d bet dollars to pesos that you once said the same thing about the church in your parents’ generation and I’m going to hear that same complaint from my own kids one day…
I chuckle to myself sometimes when I drive around and I see bumper stickers and billboards with hokey slogans like “Jesus is the Answer” because that phrase makes me want to say something snarky like, “Could you repeat the question?”
I find that folks who resort to one-liners like that are too quick to boil down the deep, rich complexity of two thousand years of Christian tradition to a cheap, one-sided formula and I just don’t think you can honestly do that if you actually read the Bible and wrestle with the things it says. When I think about the person Jesus of Nazareth and the kinds of things he said and did, I’m frankly puzzled and disturbed more often than not. One of the things that keeps me engaged with Jesus as my Lord and Savior is the way that he challenges me time and time again to grow as person and to break out of old, destructive ways of thinking and living. Most often, he does this by telling stories and asking questions of his audience. So yeah, I laugh when I see signs that say “Jesus is the answer” because, frankly, the one I want to slap on the back of my car would have to say, “Jesus is the problem.”
Jesus is a problem. If you actually read the gospels, you’ll see he’s that perpetual, prophetic pebble in the shoe to those who think they hold all power and know all the answers to every question ever asked. It’s literally impossible to hang around Jesus for any length of time and not get your worldview seriously knocked off-balance in some kind of significant way.
And in today’s gospel reading, Jesus is once again doing just that: knocking things off-balance as usual.
Today’s reading is all about Jesus’ teaching on the subject of prayer. What he has to say about it challenged people in his time and continues to challenge us in our own time, although in a slightly different way.
In the ancient world, the story Jesus tells about one friend begging bread from another friend in the middle of the night would have been heard, not as a story about prayer, but as a story about public protest.
In this story, a friend shows up at his friend’s house in the middle of the night, asking for bread, “Friend,” he says, “lend me three loaves of bread; for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.” And the other friend says, “Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.”
But, according to Jesus, this conflict is preordained to end in the first friend’s favor because “even though [the second friend] will not get up and give [the first one] anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.”
Now, the key word in that last sentence is persistence. In some older translations, the word they used was importunity. But the original Greek word here is anaideian, which literally means “shamelessness”. By behaving so shamelessly in public, in the middle of the night, the first friend is demonstrating the abject desperation of his situation and appealing directly to his friend’s moral character. The second friend, on the other hand, is now honor-bound to respond because refusing to do so would cost him respect in the eyes of the village, and remember that respect in the ancient world was at least as valuable as money. So, in the end, Jesus’ parable is really all about the character of the one being asked for bread. Taken as a metaphor for prayer, this parable is about God’s character as the one being prayed to by believers. The question ultimately being asked here is not, “How do I get my prayers answered?” but rather “Who is God?”
Among the religious authorities in that part of the ancient world, they believed that God answered prayer based on a kind of merit system in relation to the Jewish Torah. Only decent, established leaders with proper pedigrees and credentials would dare to approach the almighty God with a request. Jesus, on the other hand, is turning that cultural expectation on its head. He’s saying that it’s not the character of the person that determines God’s willingness to hear prayer, but the character of God. God, according to Jesus, is not a bean-counting judge who’s “making a list and checking it twice” before deciding whether someone’s prayers are worth hearing. Rather, the God that Jesus believes in is a generous, loving presence whose office door is perpetually open to any and every broken heart that comes knocking in the middle of the night, looking for some sign that they matter and they are loved. God doesn’t care whether you have the right beliefs or the right morals. It doesn’t matter whether or not you deserve love, you get it anyway because that’s just who God is. God is love. Full stop. End of sentence. Nothing else matters. There’s nothing you can do about it. Deal with it.
So that’s what the parable means in the ancient world: prayer is about shameless audacity. Prayer is not about the worthiness of the one who is asking, but the character the one who is asked.
Here in the modern world, Jesus’ parable on prayer has just as many challenging things to say to us, although in a different way. Unlike the world of the ancient Middle East, our culture has been shaped by two centuries of industrial capitalism. Our main question when it comes to prayer is, “Does it work?”
We’re obsessed with things working in the modern world. We define reality by what we can observe and measure. If you can’t see it or attach a number to it in some way, then it must not be real. We are the only culture in the history of the human race to think this way. Shouldn’t that strike us as odd? Every other human civilization has left room open in their worldview for some kind of transcendent mystery. Some parts of reality just can’t be measured. Everybody else seems to get that but us. So, statistically speaking, I think we enlightened, evolved westerners should at least ask ourselves the question: Could it be possible that we are actually the ones with the problem?
There can be no doubt that our means-ends rationality has taken us far. We have made unparalleled leaps in the fields of science, technology, medicine, communication, travel, and exploration. The modern mind has obviously been a blessing. But we’ve also caused more death, extinction, pollution, annihilation, and oppression than any other culture in history, so we can’t stay high up on our pedestal for very long. Without an overarching sense of meaning and mystery, we’ve managed to do a lot without knowing what it’s all for. So I ask again: maybe ours is the culture with the problem.
When it comes to prayer, modern westerners have repeatedly come back to that rational question: Does it work? And they’ve typically presented one of two possible answers.
On the one hand, you have some believers arguing that it absolutely does. They say that prayer is like magic. If you pray to the right person in the right way, you will get what you want. If you don’t get the result you want, then you forgot to pray, or you didn’t do it right, or you didn’t have enough faith. This is the ultimate form of “blaming the victim” when it comes to spirituality and suffering. Needless to say, I think this “prayer is magic” philosophy is a pile of baloney.
On the other hand, there are lots of other modern folks who say that prayer is just a placebo: a psychological self-help exercise that just comforts people and brings communities together without making a real difference in the world. I have to say that this perspective makes me just as uncomfortable as the “prayer is magic” approach because it too neatly divides reality into the material and the spiritual, with the material being regarded as the only part that’s really real. In the five years that I’ve been a pastor, I’ve walked with people and families through some really hard times. I’ve seen some amazing things for which I have no logical explanation. One might even call them miraculous. On the other hand, I’ve seen good, devout people face unimaginable tragedy with seemingly unanswered prayers. I’ve seen innocent children suffer and die under the deafening silence of heaven. So, when it comes to the observable, measurable effectiveness of prayer, I don’t have a one-size-fits-all direct answer. It’s ambiguous.
The place I come to when I hear Jesus’ teaching on prayer is that getting things done is not the point. If we’re stuck in that place where we’re asking, “Does prayer work?” then we’re asking the wrong question.
Just like the friend in Jesus’ parable, the question comes down to this: Who is God? Prayer draws our attention to that same loving, open presence that envelopes us all, whether we deserve it or not, whether we believe in it or not. Prayer is not about you and it’s not about getting things done. Prayer changes us, regardless of whether or not it changes our circumstances. Prayer gets us out of our narrow-minded, modern rationality and helps us to grow in our awareness of the great mystery within around us. Prayer opens our hearts and minds to hear and to trust in that silent, inner voice that continually calls out to us, saying, “I love you, God loves you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
James Luther Adams (1901-1994) was a prominent Unitarian Universalist Christian whose theology shaped (and continues to shape) the liberal religious tradition.
In honor of the anniversary of his passing today, the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship posted one of his sermons on their website, from which the following was excerpted:
The liberal Christian outlook is directed to a Power that is living, that is active in a love seeking concrete manifestation, and that finds decisive response in the living posture and gesture of Jesus of Nazareth. In a world that has with some conscientiousness turned against this kind of witness and its vocabulary, the effect of this witness will in a special way depend upon the quality of its costingness in concrete action and upon its relevance to the history that is in the making. To say this is only to say that the truly reliable God is the Lord of history and also that our sins will find us out. Yet, this Lord of history has given us a world in which the possibility of new beginnings is ever present along with the judgment that is always upon us. To this Lord of history Jesus responded with his message and demonstration of hope in concert with sacrifice.
Hopping Hadrian's Wall 