walking the emmaus road

Institution And a Movement

2010-04-11T20:56:00.001-06:00

From David Bosch:
"We cannot have it both ways, then: purely and exclusively a religious movement, yet at the same time something that will survive the centuries and continue to exercise dynamic influence. Our main point of censure should therefore not be that the movement became an institution but that, when this happened, it also lost much of its verve. Its white-hot convictions, poured into the hearts of the first adherets, cooled down and became crystallized codes, solidified institutions, and petrified dogmas. The prophet became a priest of the establishment, charisma became office, and love became routine. The horizon was no longer the world but the boundaries of the local parish. The impetus missionary torrent of earlier years was tamed into a still-flowing rivulet and eventually into a stationary pond. It is this development that we have to deplore. Institution and movement may never be mutually exclusive categories; neither may church and mission".

From, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, pg 53
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Life-Giving Fear

2010-03-01T07:27:00.001-07:00

I recently read this fine piece from Barbara Brown Taylor. It is an excellent Lenten meditation.

by Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor teaches at Piedmont College in Demorest, Ga. This article appeared in the Christian Century, March 4, 1998, page 229; copyright by the Christian Century Foundation and used by permission. Current articles and subscription information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.
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When I was a hospital chaplain, the calls I dreaded most did not come from the emergency room, the psychiatric ward or even the morgue. They came from the pediatric floor, where little babies lay in cribs with bandages covering half their heads and sweet-faced children pushed IV poles down the hall. One day I received a call to come sit with a mother while her five-year-old daughter was in surgery. Earlier in the week, the girl had been playing with a friend when her head began to hurt. By the time she found her mother, she could no longer see. At the hospital, a CAT scan confirmed that a large tumor was pressing on the girl's optic nerve, and she was scheduled for surgery as soon as possible.

On the day of the operation, I found her mother sitting under the fluorescent lights in the waiting room beside an ashtray full of cigarette butts. She smelled as if she had puffed every one of them, although she was not smoking when I got there. She was staring at a patch of carpet in front of her, with her eyebrows raised in that half-hypnotized look that warned me to move slowly. I sat down beside her. She came to, and after some small talk she told me just how awful it was. She even told me why it had happened.

"It's my punishment," she said, "for smoking these damned cigarettes. God couldn't get my attention any other way, so he made my baby sick." Then she started crying so hard that what she said next came out like a siren: "Now I'm supposed to stop, but I can't stop. I'm going to kill my own child!"

This was hard for me to hear. I decided to forego reflective listening and concentrate on remedial theology instead. "I don't believe in a God like that," I said. "The God I know wouldn't do something like that." The only problem with my response was that it messed with the mother's worldview at the very moment she needed it most. However miserable it made her, she preferred a punishing God to an absent or capricious one. I may have been able to reconcile a loving God with her daughter's brain tumor, but at the moment she could not: If there was something wrong with her daughter, then there had to be a reason. She was even willing to be the reason. At least that way she could get a grip on the catastrophe.

Even those of us who claim to know better react the same way. Calamity strikes and we wonder what we did wrong. We scrutinize our behavior, our relationships, our diets, our beliefs. We hunt for some cause to explain the effect in hopes that we can stop causing it. What this tells us is that we are less interested in truth than consequences. What we crave, above all, is control over the chaos of our lives.

Luke does not divulge the motive of those who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices. The implication is that those who died deserved what they got, or at least that is the question Jesus intuited. "Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?"

It is a tempting equation that solves a lot of problems. (1) It answers the riddle of why bad things happen to good people: they don't. Bad things only happen to bad people. (2) It punishes sinners right out in the open as a warning to everyone. (3) It gives us a God who obeys the laws of physics. For every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. Any questions?

It is a tempting equation, but Jesus won't go there. "No," he tells the crowd, "but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did." In the South, this is what we call giving with one hand and taking away with the other. No, Jesus says, there is no connection between the suffering and the sin. Whew. But unless you repent, you are going to lose some blood too. Oh.

There is no sense spending too much time trying to decipher this piece of the good news. As far as I can tell, it is meant not to aid reason but to disarm it. In an intervention aimed below his listeners' heads, Jesus touches the panic they have inside of them about all the awful things that are happening around them. They are terrified by those things -- for good reason. They have searched their hearts for any bait that might bring disaster sniffing their way. They have lain awake at night making lists of their mistakes.

While Jesus does not honor their illusion that they can protect themselves in this way, he does seem to honor the vulnerability that their fright has opened up in them. It is not a bad thing for them to feel the full fragility of their lives. It is not a bad thing for them to count their breaths in the dark -- not if it makes them turn toward the light.

It is that turning he wants for them, which is why he tweaks their fear. Don't worry about Pilate and all the other things that can come crashing down on your heads, he tells them. Terrible things happen, and you are not always to blame. But don't let that stop you from doing what you are doing. That torn place your fear has opened up inside of you is a holy place. Look around while you are there. Pay attention to what you feel. It may hurt you to stay there and it may hurt you to see, but it is not the kind of hurt that leads to death. It is the kind that leads to life.

Depending on what you want from God, this may not sound like good news. I doubt that it would have sounded like good news to the mother in the waiting room. But for those of us who have discovered that we cannot make life safe nor God tame, it is gospel enough. What we can do is turn our faces to the light. That way, whatever befalls us, we will fall the right way.
Sent from my Blackberry, in other words, I'm out and about wandering in the wild world...

Epiphany 3C

2010-01-23T17:29:00.002-07:00

the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it...
John 1.5

This past week, Debbie Blue wrote:

"We believe the community gathered around the gospel is always dismantling devotion to culturally constructed practices of power. We are disciples of another way. We are dissenters—disrupting, disturbing, disarming. People will become cooperative dismembers…."

Thus, at her church, rather than having a membership campaign, they are I the midst of a dismembership campaign.

Disconnect to Connect
Recently in a mediation on the beatitude, "Blessed are the poor in spirit," I contemplated on our need to disengage, to let go of things. The poverty in the Matthew's text is not exclusively a poverty of material wealth, but also one of perspective. In a world that still oddly ("oddly" after the Great Recession, we've been going through globally) believes that "you can have it all." But we cannot have it all. It is impossible to even try. When we choose relationships, we let go of independence, when we choose to have children we let go of assurance (and sanity), when we choose Christ, we let go or our life. No, we cannot have it all. But even more important, much of what we presently have actually has us. We are sucked into political arguments, cultural assumptions, material possessions, unhealthy relationships, and mix of idolatrous allegiances. So much of becoming united to each other in Christ requires that we disconnect, that we dismember ourselves, from others that seek or claim our devotion.

This week's epistle reading for the third week of Epiphany (I Cor 12:12-31) tells us that, contrary to many examples to the contrary, we are members of one another:

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. ¹³For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

Perhaps this shared membership is not always evident. Of course we live at a distance from others. Our schedules don't often correspond well. Frequently on matters of import, we disagree. Nonetheless, we profess a unity that goes underground. That lay hidden, but is no less real. While there may be pressures and forces to pull apart the body of Christ (and to reattach us to "culturally constructed practices of power"), it is in our power to be stewards of what God has created. How might we give fuller and deeper expression to the levels of connection through the Spirit of God that we have to one another and to others who follow Christ in different settings? Epiphany is about light, about things becoming visible. It is about awareness and hidden or misunderstood things coming to light. The text from I Corinthians 12 brings to light, makes us aware of the unity that exists in Christ, not of our own doing, but as a gift from the Holy Spirit.

A Query

How might I, in the week to come, express unity with others in the Body of Christ? How have I felt this unity in the past? Are there ways in which I might be able to welcome others to dismember themselves from destructive connections and find new community in Christ?

Epiphany

2010-01-06T12:35:00.005-07:00

the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it...
John 1.5

Some things just can't be hidden - and shouldn't be hidden.

A Google search on the phrase, "hide your light" came up with many explaining the idiom, "don't hide your light under a bushel." So far, so good. But the first 5 attempts of individuals to explain the idiom were all failures. Don't be shy, don't lack confidence in your abilities and talents, and become powerful and assertive were the tone and tenor of these attempted explanations. It was all about self, about one's own self-manifested luminescence.

The idiom comes from Matthew 5: 14ff:

You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.

The light we shine, me be ours to share, but it is not a light that emerges from within us. It is a mandate, an imperative command to provide that which was provided to us through Christ. Jesus said, "you are the light of the world." It is because God spoke it into being through Jesus that it could be so.

Epiphany is about letting the appearance of Christ to continue to shine forth. Not ending with the Magi and shepherds, but radiating outward, infinitely. The word "epiphany" comes from the Koine Greek, ἐπιφάνεια "appearance", "manifestation." This is an appearance, that over the weeks of Epiphany radiates like light moving outward. As we reflect on the stories of Christ's appearance, and the appearance of God among women and men, we have a fresh opportunity to consider where the light of Christ in us is shining.

Each week of Epiphany, I will provide a weekly query. In the Friends tradition, queries are questions for reflection to encourage us to live out the convictions we share.

For this, the first week of Epiphany:

Do you, as the way opens, share the principles of Christian faith with non-believers in simple, clear words? Do you witness to your Christian/Mennonite faith by letting your life speak (letting your light shine)? Can you help to make non-Christians feel welcome and a sense of belonging in your meetings for worship?

Let the light of Christ shine!

Buried Under the Rubble

2010-01-03T16:54:00.002-07:00

Today's scripture from the lectionary asked us to envision "grace upon grace." Meditating on this phrase led me to think of being buried under grace. Grace so thick - there's no escape.

Karla reminded me of a movie that we had finally gotten around to seeing, Henry Poole is Here. Interstingly, the climatic moment comes as Henry Poole is buried under the rubble of a wall that collapsed. A wall that he tore at with a sledge hammer.

While people may still be in the Christmas spirit, check out this movie.

Yellow Feels Like Summer

2010-01-01T11:52:00.000-07:00

Sent from my Blackberry, in other words, I'm out and about wandering in the wild world...