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Into the Mystery

Last night I finished reading Out of the Question...Into the Mystery by Leonard Sweet.  This book definitely surpassed my expectations and I would recommend it to anyone.  Sweet's introductory question, "Where did we miss the person and get the point instead?" pretty much sums up the material the book covers and the problem that most of us, as 21st century Christians face.  Whether liberal or conservative, evangelical or mainline, Catholic or Protestant, we share a common problem.  Our Modern propensity for propositions has taken us outside the purpose of the gospel.  Jesus came on the scene 2,000 years ago and announced a kingdom.  What we don't often realize is that kingdom is embodied in the person of Jesus Christ.  To be in the kingdom, to be a part of God's plan, is to be in a relationship with that person.  At Christmas, we celebrate the incarnation—the ultimate move toward the close relationship that God desires to have with us.  Jesus didn't come to give us a new set of rules or instructions, he came to show us the "way, the truth and the life."

This might sound like a bunch of obvious stuff.  We've been there, done that for quite awhile.  We talk quite a bit about Christianity being a relationship.  But Leonard Sweet shows through this book just how much we really don't get what that entails.  He has really opened my eyes and helped me to clarify some things that I may have already pondered somewhat. 

Here's a quote from the last chapter:

"We see that it is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery.  God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder."  (Quoted in The Mystery of the Incarnation by Cardinal Basil Hume, p.66)

I am grateful for the changes God is working in my life, particularly through the pages of this book.  I find that I am experiencing a new sense of hope as I move "into the mystery!"

C.S. Lewis on Time

"The Screwtape Letters," by C.S. Lewis, has some thoughts on the subject of time that I found to be helpful and encouraging. These have to do with comparisons of eternity to the past, present, and future.

The Present: What God would have us focus on most. This is the "point at which time touches eternity."

The Past: Can be a distraction. We certainly tend to dwell on the repurcussions of our own pasts, don't we? Depending on your view of God's influence on the future, you might say that the past resembles eternity in that it is already determined.

The Future: Perhaps what God would least like us to dwell on. According to the demon Screwtape, "the future is the era of time least like eternity." And earlier: "It is unknown to them. By making them think about it, we make them think of unrealities."

This was helpful to me because my problem of late has been too much dwelling on, or maybe I should say dreading, the future. I worry about a future that I have no way of predicting. God wants me to dwell much more on today.

Lewis is not suggesting that God doesn't want us to care about the future, by the way. Screwtape says that God "wants them to think about it only as much as is necessary for planning the acts of justice or charity which will be their duty tomorrow."

No More Missionaries?

"Theology is the church on a mission reflecting on its message, its identity, its meaning." (A Generous Orthodoxy by Brian McLaren, p.105)

McLaren says that missiologists such as David Bosch, Lesslie Newbigin, and Vincent Donovan have reversed the categories of missiology and theology. Instead of thinking of missiology as a subsection of theology, "theology is actually a discipline within Christian mission." (p.105) Not being familiar with the sources, perhaps I'm missing some subtle semantic here. To me these are simply categories and the old system still makes sense.

McLaren goes to some length to diagram the difference between a Christianity where the focus is on the individual and where the focus is on the world. That all makes sense to me (I think). He says that this different approach "gets rid of distinctions like ministry (what we do in the church) and mission (what we do outside of it), since ministry is for mission from the start." (p.108) Okay, but okay but in my faith tradition the term mission has been used in a more specific way. It has been used to denote people who go out from our own little community to reach "the ends of the earth." And yes, we've always said that everyone is a missionary. So is this anything new? It probably is. Again, I'm not sure the subtle differentiations McLaren is trying to make are coming through in this short treatment.

What really got me wondering is the following single-sentence paragraph:

"It also gets rid of terms like missionary and mission field, since now every Christian is a missionary and every place is a mission field." (p.109)

Okay. Again, it should be stressed that mission is not just for "them" out "there." But is McLaren saying there is no longer a need to send people out? People who are specifically trained to reach out to another culture? A people group who perhaps have never even heard of Christ (or have heard little of him)?

I can even understand McLaren's problem with the term missionary being connected with colonialism. I'm not so sure, however, that there's anything wrong with having a term for someone who goes out into another people group—someone, as I said, who is specifically trained to carry out such a mission within the broader mission of the community of God. Does anyone else understand my questions?

Can Preaching Transform?

"By imagination, I mean very simply the human capacity to picture, portray, receive, and practice the world in ways other than it appears to be at first glance when seen through a dominant, habitual, unexamined lens." (Texts Under Negotiation by Walter Brueggemann, p.13)

Ask yourself this: What kind of lenses have you been wearing? How about your church culture? How about American culture? Brueggemann asks us to move beyond those sometimes limiting perspectives.

Here's a possible answer to the WWJD question: He would imagine things not as they are, but as they should be. This is the task of the preacher, not only to imagine such things, but to convey them to a group of people. Brueggemann suggests that this task may not be accomplished in quite the same way we've been trying to accomplish it. He makes some startling (to me anyway) assertions:

1. Your metanarrative will not change people.

Trying to come up with a "grand scheme" by which people can change their lives will not be affective. Instead, we must concentrate on "voicing a lot of little pieces out of which people can put life together in fresh configurations." (p.20) We should not try so hard to fit a given text into a systematic theology. We should instead revel in a text that is filled with "memories and narratives and visions and images and metaphors that are not easily domesticated or co-opted." (p.22)

2. Your intellectualism will not change people.

"People do not change, or change much, because of doctrinal argument or sheer cognitive appeal." (p.24)

3. Your moral apeals will not change people.

This is what Bruggemann suggests instead:

"Transformation is the slow, steady process of inviting each other into a counterstory about God, world neighbor, and self." (p.24-25)

What he's saying is that people have to be able to imagine the alternative. This is what Jesus would do (does) and what we are called to do also. The Bible informs this creative process. The idea is that it doesn't tell us what to think so much as it shows us how to think.

So what do you think? (And don't think this post doesn't apply to you if you haven't ever been a "preacher." All of us have been preached to plenty of times!)

The Medieval World is Collapsing!

Imagine you are René Descartes, a student living in 17th century France. King Henry IV of Navarre is going to be made king of France. His reign, you hope, will end all of the fighting over religion. Peace will come at last. And then, he is assassinated. The people cut out his heart and keep it as a relic. It travels all over France as the people grieve. And then it comes to its final resting place: your school.

I just started reading Walter Brueggemann's "Texts Under Negotiation" the other day. His first chapter describes the situation we find ourselves in. One of his sources, "Cosmopolis" by Stephen Toulmin, describes the scene above.

Another source, Susan Bordo's "The Flight to Objectivity," talks about the "enormous and profound anxiety" Descartes must have felt "as the medieval world collapsed." (Brueggemann, p.3) Maybe you've felt some of the anxiety that accompanies the impending collapse of an era. I think that I have...at least a little.

Descarte's response was to retreat inside himself. "I think, therefore I am." His reference point is himself, not an outside authority. He "permitted the self to generate its own certitude." (Bruggemann, p.4) This new certitude relied on a supposedly "detached, disinterested, disembodied mind." (p.5) It also relied on empirical observation—truth things can be observed and proven through experimentation. This was a "desperate maneuver to cope with anxiety. Thus 'objectivity' emerged as a way to fend off ominous chaos." (p.5)

I find all of that very interesting. Again, I wonder about the parallels to our day and age. There is a certain chaos that is ensuing. It is of a different sort. The ultimate doom of modernity has been heralded and there have been many different reactions. How will we deal with the anxiety? Will we turn inward?

The premise of Brueggemann's book is that regardless of our view of postmodernity, it is a reality that we must deal with. There may be dangers involved with this new reality, but there are also newfound freedoms: freedom from the nullification of tradition, freedom from thinking we can know it all, freedom from the hegemony of white, male, Western, colonialism that has been disguised by the word "objectivity." Brueggemann asks us to react with a postmodern, evangelical (that's a little "e") sense of imagination. More on what that entails in the next post.

Mystic in Motion (pt.2)

In "A Generous Orthodoxy," Brian McLaren points out the unfortunate hesitancy people such as myself have in using the word "mystic" to describe ourselves. He says that to some people, "mystical is still a debased word, sub-rational, maybe a little crazed." (p.149)

Here are a few of the words McLaren shares from "Orthodoxy" by G.K. Chesterton:

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite...The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. (p.149)

And this is the real killer:

As long as you have the mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. (p.149)

That's a good word for my mood lately—morbidity. I have begun to seriously question the possibility of having a "personal relationship" with Jesus. We evangelicals throw that phrase around a lot, but what do we mean by it? Can I really have the kind of metaphorical marriage the Bible talks about? What is it meant to be like? The un-mystical side of me doubts that this is really possible. Should anyone be shocked? I was raised in an environment that fears "charismania" and adores rationalistic apologetics. People still question the validity of clapping, for heaven's sake, forget about raising your hands or actually dancing!

Anyway, I'm starting to realize where all of this morbidity is coming from. Part of it is all the skepticism that seems to go hand-in-hand with so much of conservative Christianity. Part of it is the very scary prospect of letting God out of the little box I thought he belonged in. I think he's still in there, but I'm beginning to suspect he's sneaking out when I'm not looking. I think he might be going to the movies, or even worse, hanging out at the local bar! I'm just beginning to learn how to look for him in the world around me. I think he may be lurking in such unlikely places as TV commercials and fashion runways. (You've got to read "A Matrix of Meanings" by Craig Detweiler and Barry Taylor.)

I call this blog "poet in motion" because I want to be on a journey toward the kind of creativity I believe God can unleash in me. I want that creativity to be salvific, if I can use that term in this way. I want Jesus to work through me so that people can be saved from the absence of the mystical in life that I've suffered from.

Mystic in Motion

Chapter nine of "A Generous Orthodoxy," by Brian McLaren, is so important to me. I probably need to write a few posts about it. The chapter is entitled "Why I Am Mystical/Poetic." It really gets into the meaning behind my blog's name and the journey that I am on.

Here's a great quote from Walter Brueggemann:

To address the issue of a truth greatly reduced requires us to be poets that speak against a prose world. The terms of that phrase are readily misunderstood. By prose I refer to a world that is organized in settled formulae, so that even pastoral prayers and love letters sound like memos. By poetry, I do not mean rhyme, rhythm, or meter, but language that moves like Bob Gibson's fastball, that jumps at the right moment, that breaks open old worlds with suprise, abrasion, and pace. Poetic speech is the only proclamation worth doing in a situation of reductionism... (Finally Comes the Poet, as quoted in McLaren, p.146)

This describes the kind of proclamation I want to make, both in words and in the way I live my life. I am learning so much about the place of metaphor and the mystic in the Christian life. I faintly see glimmerings of beauty and awe in the Bible now. But I am still so hopelessly rationalistic. I am supernaturally-challenged. My brain is oriented toward a logic that is all but dead in the waters of doubt and criticism.

But I'm in motion. God is not giving me a one-time miraculous healing of my couch-potato spirituality, but he is giving me hope. Or is that a random misfiring in my brain? Or is it the opiate of the masses? Nah, couldn't be.

I want to believe in the mystical. I attended a lecture by sociologist George Ritzer (and John Drane) recently, and one of the things he said that really grabbed me was that the world is becoming increasingly disenchanted. I think God wants to save us from that trend. I think he might want me to help. I think God wants us to have the "dangerous wonder" Mike Yaconelli wrote about. (I haven't read the book, but I like the title!) I don't think God wants us to just trudge through life, making sure our get-out-of-hell free card is safe in our back pocket. But you already know that, right?

More thoughts on being a mystic in motion tomorrow...

This Protestant Mess

I read chapter seven of "A Generous Orthodoxy" last night. It's definitely getting better.

Part One is entitled "Why I Am A Christian." It didn't do much for me. That's probably just me. But now, in Part Two, he's finally getting down to the nitty gritty.

Just one comment about Chapter 5: "Why I Am Missional": It seems to me that in decrying all those who see salvation as just fire insurance McLaren has forgotten that the afterlife, heaven, etc. are, after all, important topics. The old saying, "You're so heavenly minded that you're no earthly good" is misinformed, in my opinion. I think we need to truly understand heaven...be so heavenly minded that we are earthly good. Don't get me wrong, I agree with a lot of what McLaren says in this chapter. It just sounds like he's decided the "after death" part of salvation doesn't matter.

Okay, that was my one comment about chapter 5. Sorry, my counting skills are not too great. Now for chapter seven. Chapter seven was an epiphany for me. It was one of those epiphanies that you wonder how you never had it before. McLaren talks about three negative effects of the Reformation:

1. "After protesting Catholic excesses, Protestants started protesting each other...the race was on: who could out-protest everyone else?" (p.125)

This is so true. It suddenly occured to me why we have so much division among protestants...why we have all of these denominations that won't talk to each other.

2. "This protest frenzy created a kind of market for religion, where religion was commodified...each group legitimized its own existence by downgrading others and proclaiming its superiority..." (p.125)

No wonder we have so much in-fighting. We have built our entire church culture around it.

3. "Protestants have paid more attention to the Bible than any other group, but sadly, much of their Bible study was undertaken to fuel their efforts to prove themselves right and others wrong (and therefore worthy of protest." (p.126)

This is totally the experience of my childhood faith. It is so much a part of my church, my family, and even my political party. I truthfully have not bothered with most of the Republican convention, but I'd be willing to bet a lot of what is being said is based on protesting what the other side is saying or doing. You can correct me if I'm wrong. This seems childish to me. Is that too self-righteous for me to say? Oh well.

It's not like any of this is new to me. It's been growing on me for awhile. This chapter just suddenly flipped on the light switch...created some synapses that hadn't quite been there before in my sometimes too-random brain. This book is important because McLaren is trying to suggest ways to move beyond protest mode. I commend him for his efforts.

And chapter eight is even better, by the way...

A Generous Amount of Thoughts About a Generous Orthodoxy

Okay, folks. Get ready to hear a lot about Brian McLaren's new book, "A Generous Orthodoxy." I'm a hundred pages into it and thinking..."Eh."

I expect it to get better, though. I got through all the self-deprecation and warnings about how controversial the book's going to be. Here's one of the funniest bits:

"...you risk guilt by association just by being seen in public with this book. If you must proceed, trade dust jackets with another more respectable book so no one will know what you're reading." (p.37)

So far, McLaren is making me wonder if a lot of what we sneer at in the evangelical church is not quite so easily stereotyped. When I read a lot of what he says I think, "Well, that would be bad, but the people at my church don't exactly look at it that way." My little family of God is not exactly what you would call progressive. We still owe a lot of our present day hang-ups to fundamentalism, as a matter of fact. But there's some balance there. We have some moderation. A lot of what he decries in conservative protestant churches seems a little too caricatured. Maybe. Maybe not.

Anyway, I'm still just getting into it, so I do expect it to get better. Don't worry, you'll be hearing generous amounts of thoughts about it!

Chillin' With the Samsons

Val, Liam and I had a great time this week with Will, Lisa, Tyler, Jake, and Gwynnie. We shopped, talked, operated on a malfunctioning DVD player, ate some great food, and even managed to watch a movie—Secret Window. Please don't bother watching that one...take it from me.

Will introduced me to Bloglines:

Bloglines is a FREE online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content. With Bloglines, there is no software to download or install -- simply register as a new user and you can instantly begin accessing your account any time, from any computer or mobile device. And it's FREE!

Sorry about the brief commercial break, just thought some of you might be as slow as me and not know about this stuff. It's really cool because you can type in the address for all of your favorite blogs and whenever you visit their site, you can see who has posted something new. You can also get a button (see the bottom right hand corner of my blog) that will allow others to subscribe to your blog automatically.

We also discussed trackback, which I have decided no one really understands. In fact, I think it's just a conspiracy to keep bloggers from thinking they know too much. As one of the pastors I used to work with liked to say, "It is a great mystery."

As we drove home, Val and I talked about the nice week we had. The word that came to my mind was "affirming." These folks are related, but they are much more than that. They have helped us in so many ways that I won't begin to count them. They have supported, encouraged, and laughed with us. They make us feel like celebrities.

Speaking of celebrities, my aunt the fabulous, Christy-award-winning author of "Songbird" (only five left in stock—order soon) is putting up a new website. You can find her current website here. I'm assuming the new one will occupy the same domain soon (is that the right nerd word?) Anyway, I had the pleasure of taking some photographs of her for the new site and I am excited about how it's going to look. I'm really getting into this portraiture thing. I will be posting some more of my work in my "Portraits" photo album soon. For now, I'll include one of my favorites of Lisa below.