The Psalmist writes, “O God, our God, how majestic is your name over all creation!” as book-ends for a psalm that beholds the wonders of the universe, the stars above and the flocks beneath, and in wonder and delight is moved to glorify God. My father was walking home from a Boy Scout meeting late one evening and, beholding the canopy of creation over his head, the heavens in all their glory, felt that oceanic oneness and described this experience as his call to professional ministry. Growing up in a Christian Scientist household, he had little experience of clergy yet this mystic encounter convinced him to become one.
“Why not a scientist?” I asked him. “Why not an astronomer or astrophysicist and study those stars in the midnight sky?” But it was not that kind of reasonable, rational experience; it was more experiential than intellectual. He felt called, compelled to a spiritual pursuit based upon this physical, tangible experience. I think modern science is, or at least can be, a divine revelation and an opportunity to experience the divine in contemporary ways. God may be encountered in telescope or microscope, in petri dish or specimen slide as readily as in any sacred text, any holy canon. One of the biblical images of God and nature is that all the universe is but the garb that God wears, worn not to conceal but to reveal God’s divine presence in, with and through all of God’s creation. In my studies of Celtic spirituality I am reminded that the Christian Celts regarded the created order as God’s first revelation and any text on a page or written manuscript as a secondary revelation. Even according to those written words, God’s first spoken words were “Let there be!” and there was, as God in Genesis speaks creation into being. In my book Creation in Contemporary Experience I include introductory chapters on scripture and doctrine, but the meat of the book is in modern science as contemporary revelations and experiences of the divine. Evolutionary biology and morphic field theory, the big bang as God’s “Let there be,” quantum mechanics as the dance of the cosmos, chaos theory as allowing free will, Christ as an event of spiritual singularity. I believe that the God who loves us, forms us, frees us and fills us, desires to be known and experienced by us, wants to be at one with us in our atonement, and therefore continues to reveal God’s presence, purpose and promise to us through our study of all creation, from quarks to quasars, from electron probability fields to black holes. I believe that scientists of all stripes can join with mystics and theologians, declaring “O God, our God, how majestic is your name in all creation!”
When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest.Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God.
The God of Israel recognized the reality of poverty. God was well aware that poverty is more often the result of accident and misfortune than laziness. As the Hebraic scriptures, or Old Testament, constantly asserts, God hears the cries of the poor. Abraham Joshua Heschel described God’s relationship to the world in terms of “pathos,” God’s passionate care for the vulnerable, grounded in God’s experience of their pain. God is not aloof, but our companion every step of the way. Passionate for justice, the details of life matter to God, as can be seen from Hebraic laws and prophetic critiques. God is concerned that the scales for weighing be exact, that farms be maintained by owners and not foreclosed, that lending be a matter of ethics and not profit, and that every child be fed. Gleaning, or what we would describe as the “social safety net,” was not optional nor was it a matter of generosity. It was law! God’s law, and it was required of landowners and institutions. The divine passion inspired prophets to cry out against the injustice of economic inequality and the dissonance of poverty in the midst of plenty. Everything is personal to God, and this means business and government as well as individual relationships. The Book of Ruth is more than a pretty love story. Now, I must confess that I like the happy endings of Hallmark movies. I delight in performing weddings and celebrating at wedding receptions. The Book of Ruth is often invoked in weddings and the relationship of Ruth and Boaz is often seen as purely romantic. But, it was also a matter of economic survival and the welcoming of a foreign women into the Jewish community. Ruth can be read as immigration story, as a reminder that strangers have a place in our communities because they are God’s children, too! Ruth can also be read as an argument for a strong social net provided by government and business as well as personal generosity. Worried about their survival, Ruth goes to the wheat fields to gather food, the leftovers at the edges, and perhaps to catch the eye Boaz, who will provide economic security for this mixed race family. As scripture notes: “And Ruth the Moabite said to Naomi, ‘Let me go to the fields and pick up the leftover grain behind anyone in whose eyes I find favor.’” Ruth had a right to glean in the fields. She was poor and she was a foreigner and God’s law mandated that Boaz provide out of his largesse for the well-being of the power. All’s well that ends well. Ruth marries Boaz, bears a child, and becomes the great-grandmother of King David, Israel’s greatest king. Dig deeper, the greatest king was the descendant of a foreigner, an immigrant, and a welfare recipient. Although she was single and childless at the time, Ruth’s experience is similar to today’s single parents, the working poor, doing their best to support a family on a minimum wage job. Ruth’s experiences is also mirrored in the couple, both of whom work in the service industry, perhaps serving our lunches or cleaning our rooms, who barely scrape by, who receive no sick leave from their employers and must go to work or not be paid or lose their job, and who live from paycheck to paycheck and must depend on government services for health care and child care. (For more on Ruth, see Ruth and Esther: Women of Agency and Adventure.) In the midst of the election cycle, the Book of Ruth challenges any form of “dog whistle” politics that asserts that the poor are lazy and undeserving, and highlights “welfare queens” (with the implication that these are people of color) while neglecting our nation’s subsidies of corporations, many of whose employees must receive their health care from the government, our tax dollars, because wealthy corporates often fail to give benefits or a living wage to their employees. In today’s world, the practice of gleaning was a tax. It was God’s requirement, codified in Hebraic law. Generosity was encouraged in Israel, but generosity is always optional and arbitrary. Law is a requirement. Those who call themselves Christians would do well to look at the principle of gleaning, as well as the sabbatical and jubilee years, as a reminder that we have a social responsibility for the poor and vulnerable and that governmental support for vulnerable people is a necessity and not a luxury in securing the protection and the common good of the nation. This means fair taxes for the wealthy and corporations, who gain the most from our economic and governmental systems. Christians would do well to challenge candidates for whom lower taxes are an idol and who want to “starve the beast” and in so doing, starve our families and children. To God, it’s never just business or public policy or profit, its people and their joy and pain. God rejoices when the city streets are safe, children are laughing, everyone has enough to eat, and families are secure. God delights in just such public policies and governments that care for the least of these.
By Rev. Dr. Robert R. LaRochelle Anyone who has been following the 2016 Presidential campaign, even on the most elementary level, has been exposed to what can be politely described as a high level of nastiness. For a variety of reasons, the animosity involved in our political discourse has intensified over these past few years and, in my view, has reached, if not an all-time low, definitely a modern one. Name calling, derisiveness toward opponents, supporters of one candidate screaming at and engaging in fisticuffs with supporters of another, have become part and parcel of our current political situation. I also have to say that if one need not be a liberal Democrat to express profound moral concern about the way the presumptive Republican nominee has treated his opponents in this campaign and has created a climate whereby divisive and racist language has become acceptable and even normative to many, including our young.
Even in writing this, my concern right now is that because I have pointed out my concerns about the way in which a particular candidate has campaigned, as a result, many people reading this will be immediately turned off and dismiss my comments because of what they may assume would be my political leanings, an assumption, I would suggest, that one could not necessarily glean from my comments above. After all, notable Republicans such as John Kasich and Jeb Bush as well as his brother, the former President, and the 2012 GOP nominee, Mitt Romney, (and many more) have expressed the same concerns.
Here is my issue: Those of us who profess that we are seeking to be followers of Jesus are disciples of the One who teaches us this about God: God is compassionate, loving, forgiving and engaged in drawing us human beings into a recognition of the inherent value of one another. Jesus was one who broke barriers, who really sought to tear down walls between people who had been divided from one another- Jew and Samaritan, man and woman, righteous from unrighteous. Jesus’ prayer as He approached imminent death was ‘ That they may all be one‘. It is this sense of oneness– the inherent unity of all that God has created, which is a fundamental tenet of Christian understanding.
Quite honestly, this approach toward life is antithetical to much of the tone of this campaign. Sadly, the tone of the campaign has made it easier for so many, including our young, to be nasty, prejudicial and downright mean, derisive toward others who are perceived as ‘ Other.’ One would like to think that with all of the horrific examples we know of in the history of the world, we as a society would be well beyond this. Yet, we are not, and instead are at a very perilous point.
Yet, as always, the message of Jesus presents us with a necessary corrective and with a vision of God that has significant practical implications in our daily lives.
In a world which needs the bold proclamation of an inclusive Gospel vision of justice, peace and hospitality, it is important that Catholics and Protestants work together both to understand the ‘ecumenical center’ they share and to live out its implications as Christian witness to the bigger and wider world. In doing so, those in this ecumenical center are poised to provide the kind of Christian witness which stands as a necessary corrective to those who have portrayed Christian faith as antithetical to science, reason, and to the bold proclamation that the grace of God is meant for ALL! (Crossing the Street, 193)
Divisiveness has been too dominant a force in the history of the world and, sadly, within the Christian church. It is the unnecessary tension caused by religious differences among people who love each other, spouses, parents and children, brothers and sisters, and long-term friends that motivated me to try to help people find positive ways of communicating about their religious differences.
When I speak of a home united, yes, I am speaking as a Christian, but I am also speaking in a pluralistic world wherein organized religion has often contributed to the very opposite of unity and love. I am asking you, the reader, to live lives of love with those to whom you are committed. I am saying this with the conviction I find in my Scripture that, in the very act of real love, the love I profess was made incarnate in Jesus, in that very act of loving those whom we can see, we are loving the God we think we can’t! (A Home United, 65)
What is it going to take to move beyond this sad and absurd current climate? It seems to me that you will find people of faith who affiliate as Democrats, Republicans and Independents. It would be nice if those of us whose faith serves as the underpinning and foundation of our lives could allow it to motivate our political discourse. And, while I have pretty strong opinions about a lot of political issues, I will also affirm with that great bumper sticker distributed by Sojourners that “God is NOT a Republican…or a Democrat.” God is God … the source of unity, love and compassion. Created in God’s image, may we strive to be so as well!!!
Many Christians have been duped into believing that we must somehow compartmentalize our faith. Therefore, we have a compartmentalized view that allows us to express faith and values in church but then divorces that same faith and values from the civil arena. The teachings of the Bible reject this compartmentalized approach to life. We are called to be salt and light in all areas of life. We must not hide our light under a bowl. And what we are seeing today is that indeed, our history demonstrates that for generations Christians embraced a viewpoint that we must assert the principles of Christ in all facets of life.
I had occasion the other day to ride through a cemetery. The trip was neither business nor pleasure. Not the business many preachers know as conducting a funeral. Nor was there some unique pleasure of learning about forebears or history. I was taking a shortcut. Very few people take shortcuts through cemeteries. Most are there for the long haul… part of the residential program.
I live in one of the biggest tourist areas east of the Mississippi. Sevier County—which contains Sevierville, Pigeon Forge, and Gatlinburg, Tennessee—is within one day’s drive for 75% of our nation’s population. Our county is adjacent to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the most visited National Park in the United States. This is significant because most of the Park’s 11-14 million annual visitors stay and play in Sevier County. And they drive on our roads.
Imagine, if you will, dropping an extra 70,000 or so people into your little town for the weekend. Or the month. Or the summer. Or the summer and the fall. Maybe now you can imagine why I would be willing to take a shortcut through a cemetery.
My local church meets in a building on Sugar Hollow Road in Pigeon Forge. If I stay off the main drag (the Parkway), I can cut through Shiloh Cemetery, get onto Sharp Hollow which leads to Goose Gap then Clear Fork and Hatcher Top Roads. Perhaps that’s bewildering to you. But it saves me about thirty-two minutes of a fifteen minute drive. That’s probably just a blink of God’s eye. But the older I get, the more aware I am of how much every blink counts. Which brings me back to the cemetery.
Tombstones tell very little about the persons whose remains occupy the graves. The text on the markers normally includes the name, year of birth and year of death. And of course, there’s the ever-present dash separating those years.
That dash is not really a straight line. It’s a series of moments meshed together, a continuum of time, events, experiences and relationships that form someone’s history—a history that only God knows.
You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed. – Psalm 139:16 (NLT)
We often think of what happens to us as random, unrelated incidents. From time-to-time we seem to be able to connect the dots, but unless we are trusting in Father’s providence, we see our lives as scrambled, tangled messes. And we begin to label and define ourselves by our failures and our sins rather than our successes.
You, as well as I, have probably called yourself a “failure”—especially if you have found yourself stuck in a cycle of repetitive sin. All the while your heart’s desire was to be one of those “overcomers.” But no matter how hard you tried, every setback or moment of defeat moved you closer to hopelessness. Dejection latched onto you like a blood-starved leach sucking away hope and life by the bucket full. Once again you uttered a self-proclaimed epithet, “I am such a failure.”
If this scenario is replayed enough times, these moments begin to shape your identity. You lose sight of the fact that just because you have experienced failure, the experience does not mean that you are a failure.
After such a moment of failure, I often have felt like I was destined to live in defeat. I fought recurring battles with pornography since my early teens. After becoming a follower of Jesus as a young adult, many things changed in my life. But the episodic battles with porn continued. Each time I fell, I repeated the “I am a failure” phrase. Moment piled upon moment until I believed that my destiny would never change. I would live the rest of my life like a hamster on its treadmill—running like crazy but never making any progress distancing myself from the demons which plagued me.
Would I go to Heaven? I was convinced that God’s grace and forgiveness would still work… even for me. 1 John 1:8-9 were forever true. But the cycle of being stuck in repetitive sin was my destiny. I was just too broken, too uniquely flawed to ever be whole. Or holy.
But praise be to the King Almighty, Invisible, Immortal, the Only Wise God! All that changed in an encounter I had with the Holy Spirit during a conference in St. Louis twenty years ago. (You can read the story of my deliverance in the book, When God Strikes The Match.)
Three weeks ago, my good friend Tony Roberts made the following statement during a sermon: “The devil isn’t after a moment. He’s after your destiny.”
My memory immediately flashed through various moments—events of failure that, at the time, seemed to be the culmination of some demonic tactic to keep me living in defeat. But I now believe that the moments of defeat were not the objective. These moments were battles intended to demoralize me and cause me to forget my identity as a child of God. And if I forget or lose my identity, I move from being a victor to a victim.
As a Holy Spirit filled, born again believer in Jesus Christ, I am a child of a loving Father. The same power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead lives within me! I am not just victorious, but I am more than a conqueror through him who loved me.
I am not a hopeless, hapless failure. I am holy through the cleansing of His blood. He is able to keep me from falling and present me faultless before his glorious presence…and with great joy (Jude 24-25). He is able to cause all things to work together for good because I love him and am called according to his purpose.
I know how easy it is to get stuck in those failure moments and lose sight of my identity. Been there. Done that.
Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. – Hebrews 12:1-3 ESV
Moments will pass. But my destiny is forever.
In other words, your race is a dash… the one between those dates that will be on your tombstone. Sure, there will be moments. But above all, there is a destiny that awaits you as a son or daughter of God.
I always enjoy hearing from our foreign missionaries. They all hold in common a belief that God always precedes their arrival at the mission field, and prepares the way. This notion is fraught with theological insights. Not the least of these is that God is with people whom we may consider “lost,” yet, there God is. With charity, we can call this a relationship.
A human characteristic we all share is the tendency to regard our culture superior to all others. This would include our religions. In America, we regard democracy as the best form of government and actively seek to democratize the rest of the (backward) world. This is certainly true for most adherents of Christianity—we want the whole world to adopt our faith.
This is, of course, an extension into the modern world of ancient tribalism. Not only do we find the presupposition of “We are the best,” but also the accompanying fear of those who aren’t like us. Couple this with the capitalistic notion of “win or lose” and you have the recipe for constant and continuing strife among the religions and peoples of the world.
What’s to be done about this? If you are a hardcore tribalist, you will insist on winning over all. “We have the truth and you must come to us for salvation,” is the rallying cry. Nothing will change if this predisposition dominates, and it dominates throughout the world. I find it ironic, if not humorous, that those who most exemplify this attitude are the very ones most upset when they find it in others. “Radical fundamentalist Muslims” deplore evangelistic Christianity. Fundamentalist Christians deplore “radical Muslims.” They are two sides of the same coin.
It has been said often that the only hope for world peace is that people give up exclusive claims about their own religion and accept that they are not the only ones with the truth. This is surely at least partially true. Religious strife is as ancient as Cain and Abel (the proper way to sacrifice), and as recent as ISIL. Yet it is an impractical solution; it will never happen, at least for the foreseeable future. But this doesn’t mean that the adherents of these religions can’t take this step.
Gandhi is reputed to have said, “Be the change you want to see.” If you feel that the answer to world peace is acknowledging the value of other’s truths, at least for themselves if not for you, then by living this out, there is one less person in the world agitating for division. Who knows? It might catch on.
When I read in the Bhagavad Gita, for instance, “They alone see truly who see the Lord the same in every creature, who see the deathless in the hearts of all that die. Seeing the same Lord everywhere, they do not harm themselves or others. Thus they attain the supreme goal,” I marvel at the truth therein, and my soul is enlarged. I love meeting people of other Books, and often find my own self failing in comparison to their lives and loves.
Now I know the objections to this approach are many. “The Bible says…” and “We have been given the Great Commission,” just to name two. Fundamentalists will never abandon these “truths.” It’s true that the Great Faiths are not teaching the same thing, but I believe that they are capable of producing the same kind of person—loving, considerate of the earth, peaceful—and that is the point, after all, isn’t it? In fact, if Christianity produces hateful people, willing to kill others for its “truth”, who condemn all who disagree, and hold them in contempt, why bother with it?
If I must go into all the world and preach the gospel, I will affirm that God loves all people, that God wants all people to love each other, and that God supports all who obey the Great Commandments regardless of where it is found or who said it. And you know what? God will already be there ahead of me, teaching the world in its own way the Truth.
As a child I had a classmate who remained seated as the rest of us stood to say the “Pledge of Allegiance.” While we pledged our allegiance to the nation symbolized by the flag, thinking nothing of the religious implications of our act, my classmate, who happened to be a Jehovah’s Witness, had been taught that to stand and recite the pledge would break one of the Ten Commandments—the one about having no graven images. At the time I didn’t understand why he refused to stand and say this innocuous statement, but when I think about it now it does give me pause. While his religious community refuses to acknowledge any government besides God’s kingdom (they don’t vote or serve in the military either), most of us live with a Constantinian vision.
Most Christians don’t see anything wrong with pledging allegiance to the symbol of our national identity. In fact, many American Christians have equated their Christianity with their national loyalty. After all, isn’t the United States a “Christian Nation”? Yes, God and Country go together! The Scouts even have a badge you can earn that celebrates this. Of course, other nations have felt the same way. In fact, they have assumed that God was on their side during serious conflicts. The German Christian movement even reconfigured the Christian faith to fit its ideology. I wonder if we do the same? Do we discount the teachings of Jesus when they come into conflict with our national aspirations?
Symbols are important. So, if you go into many churches, including my own, you will find an American flag placed somewhere in the sanctuary. I must confess my own unease with the presence of the flag, but thus far I’ve not made an issue of it. Fortunately, our flag sits at the back of the sanctuary and not in the chancel. What I find more puzzling are the churches that choose to fly large American flags out in front of their buildings. More often than not the American flag stands above the “Christian” flag (I’ve always wondered who decided this flag, with its red cross on a blue field in the corner of an otherwise white flag, should represent Christians, or at least Protestants). It seems to me that when we make the flag such a prominent symbol, we give pride of place to nation over the realm of God. I know that my Jehovah’s Witness classmate all those years ago would find all of this befuddling.
When we say the pledge of allegiance we are expressing our loyalty to the nation in which we hold citizenship. I really don’t have a major problem with this. I’m quite happy with my American citizenship, at least to a point. I think we can have a variety of allegiances. I am, for instance, a life-long San Francisco Giants fan. When it comes to baseball, they have my allegiance. My family has my allegiance as well. I made a covenant with Cheryl some thirty plus years ago to be her husband. But, having said that, none of these allegiances is ultimate.
For those of us who continue to recite the Lord’s Prayer on a regular basis (my congregation continues to say this prayer each week), I believe this prayer which we believe Jesus gave us is our pledge of ultimate allegiance. With this prayer offered up to God whose name is hallowed, we ask that God’s kingdom would come and God’s will would be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” There is an expectation present in this prayer that God would be engaged in something transformative, and that we’re agreeing to be part of God’s work. Yes, when we offer this prayer, we are making a statement of loyalty to God’s vision and offering ourselves as agents of that vision. It isn’t that we will bring the realm of God into existence, but we make ourselves available to God’s realm.
I realize that some might find this affirmation of God’s realm a bit disconcerting. They might think that I’m recommending some kind of theocracy. In a way, I am, but not in the usual way of thinking. This isn’t a divine government imposed by an earthly realm. This is instead a recognition that our ultimate loyalty belongs to God, and when loyalties conflict, and they will, we must choose the realm of God. The church is called to be an expression of that realm on earth as a reflection of God’s realm in heaven. So, no I’m not advocating making the United States a Christian nation. I’m advocating that we recognize that God’s realm is present on earth as in heaven!
In my book on the paradoxical teachings of Jesus, there are three questions that prompted my quest for answers and shaped the course of all fifteen meditations on the sayings of Jesus. “What did Jesus say?”, “What did Jesus mean?”, and “What would Jesus do?” Although, that’s the most helpful order to deal with the questions, most often that is not the way these questions are experienced. Usually, I find that most of us proceed the other way around. We begin with “What would Jesus do?” Then turn to “What did Jesus mean?”
And finally arrive at the most basic one, “What did Jesus say?” Maybe, because the most common approach appears to begin with the most obvious and least difficult. For my part, there’s enough obscurity and difficulty all along the way. However, in these three posts, I have decided to begin with the usual experience of the action question, “What would Jesus do?”
Not too long ago, it was very popular in many Christian circles to wear a little wrist band with the initials, WWJD. As a pastor, I remember seeing many young people in my congregation with these bracelets. Also, around the same time, there were visible yellow wrists bands with the words, LIVE STRONG, a promotion of Lance Armstrong, when he was at his best and highest in popularity. These are two approaches to living the good life. One, a call to reflection, and the other, an admonition to perfection. Neither of these approaches provides a concrete answer or program on how exactly one is to go about this. The best thing about both of these approaches is that they leave the specific outcome up to the person wearing the bracelet. We all know what happened to Lance Armstrong, and I haven’t seen many of those bracelets around recently. For that matter, I haven’t seen a WWJD wrist band in a long while either. Still as a Christian pastor, I think that these approaches are not altogether off the beaten track to good ethical living.
But looking for a definitive answer from Jesus can be quite challenging. For many times, it’s not all that clear what Jesus would do, and often times it gets down to “it all depends.” Take for instance, the matter of the response to Jesus’ healings. One time Jesus tells a man cured of leprosy not to tell anyone about what has happened (Mark 4) However, at another time, Jesus seems perfectly content to let another cured man go and spread the good news (Mark 5). What are we to make of this? It just so happens that the first man is a Jew in Jewish territory, and it is early in Jesus’ ministry, and Jesus is trying to be on good terms with the authorities. To the other cured man, a Gentile in “the Gerasenes”, Jesus seems to be saying that the man can speak his piece, because at the moment the environment is receptive to what Jesus is about.
What would Jesus do? And what would Jesus do today in the 21st century? It all depends. But one thing is clear. There is always an appropriate response, but it may differ under specific circumstances.
Next time: What did Jesus mean?
And now, for a continuation on a previous post regarding a theology of mission. Specifically, I invite you to reconsider the stereotypical notion of the church as a “place.” I get it, you say. The church is not a building, the church is not a steeple…the church is the people. Hand motions are optional.
Most of us get the idea, but reality is another matter. What is the consequence of failing to execute the practice of church and settling for the mere existence of place?
In his work The Missional Church: A Sending of the Church in North America, Darrell Guder explains that
This perception of the church gives little attention to the church as a communal entity or presence, and it stresses even less the community’s role as the bearer of missional responsibility throughout the world, both near and far away. ‘Church’ is conceived in this view as the place where a Christianized civilization gathers for worship, and the place where the Christian character of a society is cultivated. Increasingly, this view of the church as ‘a place where certain things happen’ located the church’s self-identity in its organizational forms and its professional class, the clergy who perform the church’s authoritative activities. Popular grammar captures it well: you ‘go to church’ much the same way that you might got to the store. You ‘attend’ a church, the way you attend a school or theater. You ‘belong to a church’ as you would a service club with its programs and activities. (p. 80)
It should be noted that the missionary movement of the nineteenth century did little to alter the western churches’ self-conception that the church was primarily a place. As David Bosch went on to say, it was not until the twentieth century that this self-perception gave way to a new understanding of the church as a body of people sent on a mission.
Again from Guder,
Unlike the previous notion of the church as an entity located in a facility or in an institutional organization and its activities, the church is being reconceived as a community, a gathered people, brought together by a common calling and vocation to be a sent people….From the mid-twentieth century on, biblical and theological foundations for such a communal and missional view of the church have blossomed…A now global church recognized that the church of any place bears missional calling and responsibility for its own place as well as for distant places. The church of every place, it realized, is a mission-sending church, and the place of every church is a mission-receiving place. (p. 81, italics mine).
I am struck by Guder’s influence here, as evident in my own work Out of This World. There, I examine this missional mindset through the lenses of John Wesley and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The task, if I may borrow a line from John’s little brother Charles, is to reassess what must be done “to serve this present age, our calling to fulfill.”
What would it mean for us to be the “church of every place”? What change would be necessary?
To what degree are we both a mission-sending and mission-receiving church?
In John 14:27 Jesus says, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” (ESV) The promise of peace is common in the Bible but it is rare in the lives of Christians. In fact, I’d say the opposite is true. We not only don’t have peace in our lives, but there is a veritable epidemic of anxiety among Christians.
Why don’t Christians have peace in this world?
Interestingly, and I’m speaking almost entirely from personal experience, persecuted Christians have a greater sense of peace than Christians in the west. From conversations with friends of mine who work with persecuted churches around the world, those Christians have a depth of presence of God that we seldom see among American Christians.
Very poor Christians in Haiti, where I minister and have many Christian friends, tend to have a kind of depth of faith in God I seldom see in America. As a Pastor I can attest to the frequency of counsel I provide for followers of Jesus who follow Him while wringing their hands, clenching their teeth, and pausing occasionally to take their anxiety and blood pressure medications. Something is very wrong.
I’m convinced that at least a part of the problem, and maybe even its foundation, is the reality that a significant part of our hearts’ affection has been stolen by Caesar. We have forfeited peace for political influence. We have traded a contended heart for angst over the next election. The world asked for the Church’s hand in marriage and we said, “Sure, as long as you’ll give me a place at the table of political influence.”
In my book, Rendering Unto Caesar, I wrote, “We decry society for taking Christ out of Christmas but we have removed Him from Christian discipleship. We condemn the immorality common in the world instead of living holy lives as a people apart from the world. We are filled with anxiety because we are filled every kind of care of this world. Caesar has taken something that is not his – our affections – and consequently, we are filled with anxiety.” (Page 36)
Today’s Conservative Christian spends more time in the voting booth than in the prayer closet. We lack peace because we are filled with concern over the world’s problems rather than the presence of the only one who solves problems.
John Wesley said it this way, “My soul, thou canst not be fully comforted, nor have perfect delight but in God, the comforter of the poor, and the helper of the humble. Wait a while, O my soul, wait the Divine promise, and thou shalt have abundance of all good things. Use temporal things, desire eternal.” (John Wesley, The Christian’s Pattern (Salem, OHIO: Schmul Publishers, 1975), 67.)
We will never have peace so long as we wrestle in this world with problems that will never cease, instead of resting in the One who has already given us eternal answers to our eternal problems.
The Psalmist writes, “O God, our God, how majestic is your name over all creation!” as book-ends for a psalm that beholds the wonders of the universe, the stars above and the flocks beneath, and in wonder and delight is moved to glorify God.
The Book of Ruth is more than a pretty love story. Now, I must confess that I like the happy endings of Hallmark movies. I delight in performing weddings and celebrating at wedding receptions. The Book of Ruth is often invoked in weddings and the relationship of Ruth and Boaz is often seen as purely romantic. But, it was also a matter of economic survival and the welcoming of a foreign women into the Jewish community.
Anyone who has been following the 2016 Presidential campaign, even on the most elementary level, has been exposed to what can be politely described as a high level of nastiness. For a variety of reasons, the animosity involved in our political discourse has intensified over these past few years and, in my view, has reached, if not an all-time low, definitely a modern one. Name calling, derisiveness toward opponents, supporters of one candidate screaming at and engaging in fisticuffs with supporters of another, have become part and parcel of our current political situation. I also have to say that if one need not be a liberal Democrat to express profound moral concern about the way the presumptive Republican nominee has treated his opponents in this campaign and has created a climate whereby divisive and racist language has become acceptable and even normative to many, including our young.
by Dr. Harvey Brown, Energion Publications Author
I always enjoy hearing from our foreign missionaries. They all hold in common a belief that God always precedes their arrival at the mission field, and prepares the way. This notion is fraught with theological insights. Not the least of these is that God is with people whom we may consider “lost,” yet, there God is. With charity, we can call this a relationship.
As a child I had a classmate who remained seated as the rest of us stood to say the “Pledge of Allegiance.” While we pledged our allegiance to the nation symbolized by the flag, thinking nothing of the religious implications of our act, my classmate, who happened to be a Jehovah’s Witness, had been taught that to stand and recite the pledge would break one of the Ten Commandments—the one about having no graven images. At the time I didn’t understand why he refused to stand and say this innocuous statement, but when I think about it now it does give me pause. While his religious community refuses to acknowledge any government besides God’s kingdom (they don’t vote or serve in the military either), most of us live with a Constantinian vision.
In my book on the paradoxical teachings of Jesus, there are three questions that prompted my quest for answers and shaped the course of all fifteen meditations on the sayings of Jesus. “What did Jesus say?”, “What did Jesus mean?”, and “What would Jesus do?” Although, that’s the most helpful order to deal with the questions, most often that is not the way these questions are experienced. Usually, I find that most of us proceed the other way around. We begin with “What would Jesus do?” Then turn to “What did Jesus mean?”
And now, for a continuation on a previous post regarding a theology of mission. Specifically, I invite you to reconsider the stereotypical notion of the church as a “place.” I get it, you say. The church is not a building, the church is not a steeple…the church is the people. Hand motions are optional.
In John 14:27 Jesus says, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” (ESV) The promise of peace is common in the Bible but it is rare in the lives of Christians. In fact, I’d say the opposite is true. We not only don’t have peace in our lives, but there is a veritable epidemic of anxiety among Christians.
