 |
Samples from The Way of Jesus
Excerpt from the first chapter From The Way of Jesus:Re-Forming Spiritual Communities Ch.1 - A New Approach to Theology …This is why I am convinced that Christian communities in the future will approach the theological enterprise in a completely different, much more humble way. They will begin by recognizing that all theology is “a calculated verbal idolatry,” as a friend’s former professor once put it. Any time we try to speak of God, we run the risk of creating another golden calf, an idol, a man-made representation of God in words. And even our very best verbal attempts to say something - anything - about God are imperfect and to some extent untrue the moment the words come out of our mouths. As Emergent scholar and spokesperson Tony Jones has said, “Theology is temporary . . . To assume that our convictions about God are somehow timeless is the deepest arrogance, and it establishes an imperialistic attitude that has a chilling effect on the honest conversation that’s needed for theology to progress.” Barbara Brown Taylor articulated this same danger in her recent work, An Altar in the World. “No matter how hard I try to say something true about God, the reality of God will eclipse my best words.” While this doesn’t mean we should stop trying to articulate who we think God is and what we believe about God, it does mean we should be extremely humble and reticent about constructing hard and fast doctrines or dogmas. Contemporary theologian and mega-church pastor Rob Bell sees the theological enterprise like painting a work of art. No single work of art brings about the necessity for other artists to cease the artistic enterprise. Likewise, the art of theology is ongoing, never ending, and all of us, Bell believes, are encouraged to pick up a brush. I saw the very approach to theology I’m advocating at a wonderful, spiritual community in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago, Wicker Park Grace (WPG). This fledgling community of thirty-five to forty participants (they don’t call themselves members for reasons which should become obvious) meets for sacred meals, theology pubs, book groups, art projects, and fellowship. During a sacred meal and celebration of the Lord’s Supper in mid-April of 2009, Pastor Nanette Sawyer began the gathering by reminding the group of the recently celebrated events of Holy Week, using them to set the context for the evening’s theme: atonement. She outlined the various atonement theories that have emerged through the centuries, as Christians struggled to make sense of the cross and its meaning for them. She gave everyone a handout with the five most famous atonement theories. Each was presented in a very open, respectful way, noting the century in which each theory seems to have emerged and the person or persons most responsible for espousing each interpretation. She accomplished this in a few minutes. She then shared a personal story regarding the particular atonement theory she had been brought up with in her church. “I was about 10 and I remember my pastor telling me that ‘Jesus died to pay for my sins’ and that I ‘needed to believe that to be a Christian.’ I told him that ‘I must not be a Christian’ and stopped going to church.” Sawyer’s openness about her own struggles with atonement gave us all the freedom to enter the ensuing discussion with no pressure to agree, conform, or even arrive at an answer. Her introductory remarks ended with an invitation for us all to participate in this ongoing theological process, “adding our voices to the dynamic conversation engaging this mystery.” We broke into small groups, where we each shared the atonement theory we had grown up with, along with the one that made the most sense to us currently. We were also invited to share whatever questions we still had. The discussion in my group was wonderfully vibrant and genuinely open. Here are just a few of the remarks I recorded: I grew up with the four spiritual laws and that whole emphasis on our depravity. I was hammered with the notion that someone had to pay for my wickedness. That was the purpose of the cross, I guess. It never really worked for me because I just don’t see us as so evil. Where’s the grace in that? The problem I have with all these (atonement theories) is that they focus so much on Jesus’ death that they wind up trivializing his life. They also trivialize the resurrection by reducing it to some magic trick instead of the end result of a life lived for God, to better the world. I think before we can buy into any of these theories we need to ask what sin is. If sin is breaking some law of God, then I guess a legal, punitive understanding of the cross like the Penal Substitution theory makes the most sense. But if my sin is brokenness or addiction, then it seems the Eastern Orthodox notion of Theosis or the Subjective Transformation theories are more helpful. For me, the discussion was on or even above the level of those I had at Princeton Seminary during my M.Div training. But the beauty of the discussion at Wicker Park Grace is that it didn’t end in some move toward uniformity or agreement. The whole group sensed that this was a conversation that had no end and no definitive answer. Thanks to Nanette’s leadership and genuinely open approach, we all had been treated to a helpful introduction to the five most influential atonement theories, along with the invitation to develop our own thinking about them as well. From The Gospel According to Rock An Excerpt from the Introduction... It was 1977 and I was 15 years old. I had barricaded myself in the basement and was playing the Beatles White album backwards, over and over, with the volume up as loud as it could go. It was a retaliatory gesture aimed at my mother, who had come home from Bible study that day and confiscated my Kiss Alive II album, because our pastor had convinced her that KISS stood for “Knights in Satan’s Service.” If allowed to listen to this “devil’s music,” mom parroted, it was only a matter of time before I’d be biting off the heads of bats and contemplating suicide. My mom wasn’t the only person freaked out about rock’s corrupting capability. I remember when Black Sabbath was blamed for the suicide of a teen they didn’t even know, and when Alice Cooper was accused of conducting satanic animal sacrifices on stage. These ‘real life’ events, when combined with both the hedonistic lifestyle of so many rock and roll artists and their “explicit,” often profane lyrics, have led millions of fearful parents and religious fanatics to associate everything rock with the devil himself. But despite these protestations, rock hasn’t gone away. As Neil Young put it, “Hey, hey, my, my/ Rock-n-roll will never die!” and he was right. My mother’s rash act only increased my appetite for rock-n- roll. Thirty-three years later, I’m not only still listening to rock, I’m performing it in bars and clubs all over northern Michigan. I know more than 500 of the greatest rock lyrics by heart, and while I am certainly willing to concede that plenty of rock songs convey negative and even harmful messages, far more of them do precisely the opposite. History has now proven that the rock artists at Woodstock were closer to the truth about Vietnam than were the politicians in Washington. In the late 70’s and early 80’s, it was rock led projects like “USA for Africa” and “Artists Against Apartheid” that awakened America’s conscience, along with my own, to famines, AIDS, and the rampant injustices our African brothers and sisters were enduring. I have a profound respect for the deep spirituality of many rock songwriters and their so-called ‘secular’ music. In fact, rock-n-roll music has done two things to me that my mother never imagined: it has helped me hear the very voice of God, and it has influenced me to become a pastor. An excerpt from Chapter 9… Caring for the Environment “We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” “Woodstock” – Joni Mitchell I remember being in my friend’s tree fort when I was 11, listening to am radio, when Cat Stevens’ “Where do the Children Play” came on. While I didn’t grasp all of the song’s richness during that first hearing, I do remember being saddened by his depiction of a future where all the good, green, open play space had been turned into concrete. Stevens envisioned a world with no place left to build but up, “higher and higher,” until “scrapers fill the air” and “there’s no more room up there.” Thirty-five years later, I live in that world Stevens foresaw, the cluttered, concrete world where my own children have no place left to play. When Vice President Al Gore presented an award at the 2007 Grammy’s, he began by thanking all the musicians for always being at the forefront of the environmental movement. And that is where rock artists have been, certainly through all of my life. I’ve heard and learned more about the environment from rock-n-roll musicians than I ever have from pastors and church leaders. In most local churches, we’re lucky if we get the obligatory Earth Day sermon once a year in mid-April. Other than that our only hope is that there might be some hippie in Birkenstocks urging the ladies in the fellowship hall to use real coffee cups instead of styrofoam at the coffee hour. But by and large, the Christian church has been conspicuously silent when it comes to taking care of the earth, the one they insist that God created… …Rockers have done much more than simply condemn our mistreatment of the earth. They have called us to a more responsible stewardship of the planet and to an awareness of the effects our polluting behavior will have on future generations. Kenny Loggins, in “Conviction of the Heart,” asks “How long must we all wait to change?” We’ve already created “air that’s too angry to breath,” and “water our children can’t drink.” Loggins’ conviction is that we are all one “with the earth, with the sky, with everything in life,” and he calls us to act with conviction, so that we might leave our children a safe, clean, sustainable world. Graham Nash’s “Clear Blue Skies” begins asking a question about the skies and the shape they are in. He then moves to water, posing the question of whether it’s too much to ask of us that we leave our children and grandchildren clean water. He closes the tune asking if all these vital sources of life that were here when we came “will be here when we’re gone?” Perhaps nowhere is rock’s environmental call so clear, so profound, and so blatantly biblical as in the aforementioned “Woodstock” by Joni Mitchell. “We are stardust, we are golden…and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” The reference to Eden is obvious and indisputable. Mitchell understands all too well the created order, God’s gracious plan and provisions, and the human abandonment of God’s intended harmony between man and nature. Mitchell calls us back to garden living, to harmony with one another and with nature, and an entire generation resonated with her call. The Apostle Paul put it this way: “For the whole creation waits in eager expectation…the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” (Romans 5:19, 22) Paul’s double emphasis on “the whole creation” is targeted to all those who assume that Christ came only to redeem and save people. Biblical salvation is interested in much more than personal salvation. It is a salvation for the very earth itself and for all that God created, for it all needs saving. Why have the proponents of Christianity in particular been so uninterested and under involved in the environmental movement? A huge and enduring error in biblical interpretation is, at least in part, to blame. I call it the heresy of heaven, and it is the long-standing notion that God’s people are only temporarily visiting this planet, that their true home and eventual place of residence is elsewhere – out there, up there, far away from here. Evangelical Christians rely exclusively on this heresy in their narrow-minded campaign to win souls for God’s kingdom. They ask everyone, from total strangers on the street to their own relatives, the same single question: “If you were to die tonight, would you be certain that you’d be admitted to heaven?” Their false and highly individualistic understanding of salvation has reduced Jesus to a ticket-master outlet, whose sole purpose is to provide backstage passes to heaven. Only those carrying the right spiritual currency will be allowed in to the kingdom. Once salvation and Jesus’ purpose gets reduced to the after life, it’s only a matter of time until life here and now - and the environment that sustains it – becomes utterly unimportant. The implications of this heretical reductionism are far-reaching and horrifying, and we’re feeling their effects every day. The Edge, guitarist for U2, put it this way: “The reliance on the fairy tale pie in the sky when you die aspect of religion is dangerous, because it excuses so much…Our stance as a band is that we believe in heaven, but we live as if we didn’t.” (U2 by U2, p.299) An except from Chapter 14… Compassion “Come mothers and fathers throughout the land And don’t criticize what you can’t understand.” “The times, they are a’changin’” – Bob Dylan Michael was my small group leader in college, when we were both involved in Campus Crusade for Christ. We shared a house with a few other guys the year after I graduated. One night he asked me to take a walk, and I could tell he was deeply troubled. On the walk, Michael shared with me a long-term, tenacious struggle he’d been having with his own sexuality. He said, “I’m afraid I might be gay…I don’t want to be gay. I know it’s wrong, and for the last few years I’ve prayed about it and fought my same-sex impulses with everything I’ve got. But it feels like it’s just something I am, no matter how hard I try.” He cried and I cried with him… …Twenty-five years later, serving as a pastor in a church, I get asked all the time for my ‘stand’ on the ‘issue’ of homosexuality. I think of Michael; I don’t see sexual orientation as an ‘issue,’ nor do I see my role as taking a ‘stand’ on other people’s lives. It seems to me that our individual and collective ‘stands’ or ‘positions’ on these so-called ‘issues’ are dividing us. Where we stand on homosexuality, abortion, immigration, the war in Iraq, world hunger, and poverty is ripping us apart – nation from nation, political party from political party, brother from sister, and Christian brother from Christian sister. As our society grows more and more politicized every day, we are dividing ourselves – our families, our communities, our churches, our nations, and our world – over things that we really don’t know a whole lot about. That’s why we need to listen to what some of the thoughtful, sensitive rock-n-roll artists have to say about compassion. For decades they have been reminding us of a vital spiritual truth – that until we walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, we have no idea what that person’s life is like. Everlast’s smash hit “What It’s Like” is perhaps rock’s most profound treatment of compassion. Their song tells the stories of three pitiable characters: a homeless beggar, a pregnant teen, and an armed drug dealer. After chronicling the horrors and inhumane treatment that each of these people endures, Everlast keeps coming back to the line “God forbid you ever had to walk a mile in his shoes, 'Cause then you really might know what it's like to sing the blues.” The second verse about the pregnant teen took me back to the late 70’s, when the pastor of my family’s church in Bay Village, Ohio said one of the most important things I’ve ever heard about abortion. He said, “You can say whatever you want about your stand on abortion. But until your 16-year-old daughter comes home pregnant, you don’t really know where you stand.” Our political and religious leaders are all-too-willing to spout off about their particular stands on this ‘issue.” But abortion isn’t an ‘issue;’ it’s people – real people with real feelings, real families, and, yes, even real faith! This was my pastor’s point nearly 30 years ago. When we take stands on issues, we depersonalize and dehumanize our brothers and sisters involved in real life struggles. Sadly, it's been my experience, both in and out of the church, that rock-n-rollers have been more compassionate in their treatment of these real life, real people situations than religious and political leaders have. Think of Crash Test Dummies’ “Mm-mm-mm” song, where they tell the story of a “girl who wouldn’t go with the girls in the change room” until the teachers and administrators “finally made her.” It was then that they found the marks of abuse all over her body. Think of James Taylor’s “Millworker,” in which he tells the story of a young mother whose drunken husband leaves her with “three faces to feed.” So she goes to the mill where “it’s me and my machine for the rest of the morning, the rest of the afternoon, and the rest of my life.” Dozens of Bruce Springsteen’s songs are written out of a profound compassion, and if we listen, really listen, to what he’s saying, his songs evoke waves of compassion in us as well. “Born in the U.S.A.” is an overwhelmingly compassionate look at a young man who “got in a hometown jam,” and was sent…to “go kill the yellow man.” When this Vietnam veteran returns, he is an unwelcome stranger, even in his hometown. The local refinery won’t hire him, and even the V.A. man assigned to his case offers him no help… … I've come to believe that the compassion of rock musicians like Springsteen, J.T., Everlast, Crash Test Dummies, and many others has a lot to do with why today’s kids and young adults spend so little time in church and so much time and money listening to and downloading rock-n-roll music. When was the last time you heard a pastor, imam, or rabbi talk about abortion even half as sensitively as Ben Folds does in “Brick?” Folds deals with this story – his own true story, by the way - in the first person. He, himself, is the boyfriend who got his girlfriend pregnant. He, himself, drives his lover to the clinic, waits outside, buys her flowers, and later endures the long, silent ride home, where, though the two are in the same car, “she’s alone and I’m alone, now I know it.” Folds, like so many of his fellow rockers, doesn’t waste his time (or ours) articulating a stand on abortion. He and his girlfriend don’t have that luxury. At the point at which he picks up the story, the couple is in the thick of the situation, and the situation couldn’t be more real or more gut-wrenching. Folds simply tells the story, as if to say, ‘this is how it was for me and my girlfriend.’ There’s no preaching or moralizing; there is no stand-taking; there is only his compassion, and his hope that his listeners might learn to be a little more compassionate as well…
|
 |