Consuming Jesus: A Sermon on Being Church

Well, here is my first consecutive sermon, or first sermon to have preached directly after preaching another. This last Sunday the student ministry at First led us in worship and we ended in Communion. You can listen to the sermon from last week or yesterday on our website or download fbcaustin's podcast.

The US & Torture

The power of torture is not so much that it gathers info or intel for the CIA. Rather the true power is that it creates a viewpoint within the American nation. Torture is the power of imagining ourselves as so righteous that we must allow our leaders to do the dirty work of torture to uphold our rightness, democracy, and exceptionalism ( or "the last great hope of the world"-Obama). Torture also creates enemies. Of course these aren't your run of the mill bad guys either for torture allows us to imagine that the enemies are so vile they must deserve it, subhuman. This of course leaks down to the power of punishing innocents (which has been widely the practice and mostly the case in the "enhanced interogation methods" used in the War on Terror), so we believe that if they are being tortured or treated so inhumanly, they must be guilty.

Torture is disugsting in every form. The solution?
Absorb it through the Eucharist or in other words allow the sacrifice or torture of Christ to become the once for all declaration that we all sinful, that we are all loved, and in Christ we are all redeemed. Or as William Cavanaugh says,

If the Eucharist is a participation in the sacrifice of Christ, if we become the Body of Christ, then we too are called not just to minister to the victims of this world but to identify with them. The opposition of them and us, friend and enemy, even victim and helper, is overcome. Violence against the enemy is unthinkable, because we are the enemy. Raniero Cantalamessa says “the modern debate on violence and the sacred thus helps us to accept a new dimension of the Eucharist,” thanks to which “God’s absolute ‘no’ to violence, pronounced on the cross, is kept alive through the centuries. The Eucharist is the sacrament of non-violence!

Check out Cavanaugh's entire article at the Other Journal, the journal of Mars Hill Graduate School.

The Slow Church & Spirit Time

RealLivePreacher has written a wonderful post about Slow Church. He opens with the Carthusian monks at the Grande Chartreuse monastery in France who allowed themselves to be filmed for the documentary: Into Great Silence. Of course, it only took them 16 years to get an answer back to the director.

I can remember in seminary that I was frustrated, frustrated beyond belief. The world was changing and the church was dragging its feet to catch up. Everyone knows that the culture, technology, ideology of the church is at least ten years behind if not a few centuries. Change couldn't come soon enough. Shortfalls are the easiest to spot in almost every scenario and belief, thus I wanted to change all things that I didn't like about the church. Certainly some of things were more noble than others. Certainly the church does need to change. But at the same time, I can't help but wonder if there is something right about slow change.

It could be that my frustration grew out of my own postmodern expediencies for instant change and the unsatiable desire for the new. Of course who wouldn't living in a culture full of instant meals, coffee, community (internet), and artificial desires created by marketing geniuses to trick us into simpy wanting the new car, house, phone, book series, shoes, etc)

I wonder if the many friends I have who are in that same place of frustration with the church are there because of the culture we live in. Certainly I believe they, as I did and still do, had good if not the best intentions for the church, the gospel, and engaging the world, but often our best intentions go awry due to the impervious nature of being honest and truthful with ourselves.

We live in a culture of instant change and insatiable desire for the new. It could be best that the church operates on a different timeline. Communities of faith, theology lived and believed, and transformation are all best served over time.

Here are some quotes from RLP that were beautiful in proving the rightness of the Slow Church:

People tell me that the average stay for a pastor in an American church is 18 months. That astounds me. We might have a stack of rocks on our back porch for 18 months while we talk about what we should do with them. Most of our best stories span 5 or 6 years at least. It takes about a decade just to figure out what’s going on at our church.

If you are thinking we don’t get anything done, nothing could be further from the truth. We do things. We just do them slowly. With time as no burden or constraint, we find we can do a lot with our bare hands. Children built our rock-lined path through the woods. Children working with their hands the last Sunday morning of each month. It took 2 years, but why should that matter? I watched a lot of the construction process. The man who guided them was in no hurry and didn’t mind if they lengthened the path only a few feet a month. The children were laughing. They had fun. And they built something our community loves.

Things are settled into the ground and beautiful. These things exist because we’ve chosen to live our lives slowly and deliberately in this community. We’re living on Spirit time, not clock time.

Don't hear me as swinging the pendulum as if the church doesn't need to change some things, certainly it must to survive and to communicate in the 21st Century. What needs to change along with the church though is our expectations for change. The new life so many of my frustrated friends, including myself, occurs within the slowing moving structures of the established and institutionalized, but it seems to me that too often we pull out of the farming business thinking it a failure long before seasons of harvest arise.

Patience is a virtue my momma always told me. Indeed, patience is essential for meaningful life in the church.

Googling the Bible- De-Signs of the Times

In staff meeting a few days ago, we were talking about the lectionary reading for the fourth Sunday in Lent, which contains John 3:16. So I shared the story about Tim Tebow, the QB for the national champions Florida who put John 3:16 under his eyes, and that day "John 3:16" was the top Google search. Check it out yourself here and here. The implications being that enough people, in fact several thousand people didn't know and had to google John 3:16 to find out what it means. Yes, the staple verse that every person slightly familiar with the church knows had to be googled.

I think I was more surprised that the staff was surprised that so many people didn't know what John 3:16 means. I posted a few days ago about this study which revealed the fastest growing religious population in the USA are the "Nones" (see CNN"s coverage here).. Via Alan Hirsch's blog post on this subject, I was tuned into some interesting thoughts by a missional leader:

In sum, the findings show or lead to the conclusion that:
1) Religion and Christianity are on the decline in the US;
2) Protestantism is doing worse than Catholicism due to Catholic immigrants;
3) Mormonism is keeping up with population growth, and Islam and New Age/Wicca are exceeding it;
4) Atheism, while still a small percentage of the population, is on the rise; and
5) "Spirituality,"--or non-organized belief in God--is still vibrant in the US.

What implications does this have for the church in the US?
- Attractional methods alone will have decreasing effectiveness, though they will reach some.-
- Not only theologically, but pragmatically, we must make the structure of the church be missional in nature and make dramatic changes in how we allocate our resources. This might mean moving all "Bible studies" off site, in coffee shops, Starbucks, homes, schools, etc.to meet people where they are. With antagonism and apathy towards religion, fewer will show up because we have better programs. And those that do will already be Christians.
- We need to train our members in knowledge of other faiths and resurgent atheism and methods to reach these adherents.

We must make dramatic changes. Sadly, however, most churches will do almost nothing to respond to these cultural changes. Those that do respond will respond incrementally only. With a shrinking pool of Christians, there will be an increasing competition amongst churches for members. This will, ironically, put more pressure upon church leaders to shore up "programs" to attract church members to shore up the decreasing member base.

In the midst of all of this, it is unbelievable to me that our fellowship is consumed on all sides with "doctrinal issues"--meanwhile our nation is hopelessly lost. And the resistance to making practical, methodological changes, such as replacing Sunday night worship or Wed. night classes with outreach and service, moving "classes" off site, planting new churches, changing times, making budgets missional, etc., is quite simply, absurd.

What do you think of these findings? How should the church respond to the changing (a)religious landscape of the US so that we can reach people today?

These are great thoughts and questions to ponder honestly in our cultural climate of religious change. There are doctrinal issues that are important, like how we read the Bible when dealing with women or homosexuals; but the church must start asking questions about true change. Yet, I wonder as I reflect upon my experience in staff meeting, if the church is capable of asking these questions. It seems, at least in my context, that the anomalies are just arising and when anomalies first pop their ugly heads our paradigms and plausibility structures have ways of ignoring them. What are the methodological, ecclesiological, budget, staff, small group, community development, worship, discipleship...what are the changes you see that we need to make?

Oh, and here are some other good thoughts on this article.

Who's the Fastest Growing Religious Group in the US?

Would you have guessed Mormons?

Mormons have increased in numbers enough to hold their own proportionally, at 1.4 percent of the population.

What about Muslims?

The Muslim proportion of the population continues to grow, from .3 percent in 1990 to .5 percent in 2001 to .6 percent in 2008.

Baptists, of course?

Baptists, who constitute the largest non-Catholic Christian tradition, have increased their numbers by two million since 2001, but continue to decline as a proportion of the population.

Then it must be the New Age folks, like the Wiccans?

Adherents of New Religious movements, inc luding Wiccans and self-described pagans, have grown faster this decade than in the 1990s.

“The percentage of Americans claiming no religion, which jumped from 8.2 in 1990 to 14.2 in 2001, has now increased to 15 percent. Given the estimated growth of the American adult population since the last census from 207 million to 228 million, that reflects an additional 4.7 million ‘Nones.’ Northern New England has now taken over from the Pacific Northwest as the least religious section of the country, with Vermont, at 34 percent ‘Nones,’ leading all other states by a full 9 points.

‘Many people thought our 2001 finding was an anomaly,’ [Ariela] Keysar said. We now know it wasn’t. The ‘Nones’ are the only group to have grown in every state of the Union.’”

The Nones? Yes, that's right, the Nones according to the American Religious Identification Survey from only a few days ago . So it could be very possible that:

"It looks like the two-party system of American Protestantism--mainline versus evangelical--is collapsing," said Mark Silk, director of the Public Values Program. "A generic form of evangelicalism is emerging as the normative form of non-Catholic Christianity in the United State s."

What to do in the flood of change, abandon the sinking ship, repair the ship, or build something else that'll float in the flood waters?

Current Retreat 2009: McLaren, Butler, Yee

Tomorrow after worship at First Baptist, my fellowship and faith family, my beautiful wife and I fly out to Orlando to spend 3 or so days at the Current Retreat. Current is a young leaders retreat put on annually for Baptists by Baptists...Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. I'm excited about the keynote speaker, Brian McLaren as well as Amy Butler (pastor of Calvary Baptist in D.C) and Joy Yee (from San Fran's 19th Ave. Bapt.).

I'm pretty pumped about simply getting away to have this intentional time to be with young leaders...I'll finally get to meet the many other residents in the CBF pastoral resident program I'm in...and to be with Charlotte for a few days. Plus, CBF put us up in a hotel in down town Orlando. I won't be able to tell if I'm excited about Brian too much, until I figure out what he's speaking on. There are some things I'm sure he'll bring up, but hopefully he'll have some fresh perspectives and there will be oppurtunities for good dialogue.

Depending on wifi access at the church Current is being hosted at, I may or may not be blogging through McLaren's, Yee's, and Butler's presentations.

And by the way, FBC now has a blog.

Shenk & a missional ecclesiology

Wilbert Shenk asks, “What can we say are the main features of a missional ecclesiology? At least five things will characterize a missional church:
• The missional church is intensely aware that its priority is to witness to the kingdom of God so that people are being liberated from the oppressive power of idols. The church is consciously discerning and naming the idols.
• The church is deeply committed to the world but is not controlled by the world. In other words, the church knows that it has been placed in the world but is never to be subservient to the world. The absence of this tension indicates that the church has made its peace with the world.
• Mission is patterned after the example of Jesus the Messiah; that is, mission is cruciform. The vision of Isaiah 53 is being fulfilled as God’s people serve and witness. The cross is central.
• The missional church has a keen awareness of the eschaton. In Jesus Christ the kingdom has been inaugurated, but the people of God eagerly await the consummation of the kingdom.
• Church structures will serve and support its mission to the world. Human cultures inevitably change over time. The church must stay abreast of its changing cultural context, which will require the dismantling of archaic forms that impede missionary witness and the devising of new structures that support the mission
New Wineskins for New Wine: Toward a Post-Christendom Ecclesiology
via.

The Emerging Commodification of the Church

I do have my hang ups with how much time, energy, resources, thought, and planning goes into a single day of the week, Sunday. I've been brooding over this fact for some time now, but haven't come to any real conclusions about how I feel. In the "emerging missional church (EMC)" conversation, attractional vs. missional battle lines have been drawn and Sunday morning has become a topic often battered by a dualistic perspective that paints a strawman for the burning.

David Fitch, who has constantly been a helpful voice in this EMC conversation, recently wrote a good post on this issue referencing to Zizek's "decaffeinated belief:"

Zizek argues that when we say “I enjoy my religion” this implies that I don’t take it TOO seriously. For we really don’t want to take it too seriously (this is what the fundamentalists do according to Zizek). We keep it at a distance so to appear to be a Christian with all of it comforts and accoutrements yet not requiring any great disruption to a comfortable way of life. This distance, between the subject and the Symbolic Order, is what allows the subject’s Christianity (or religion) to be subsumed by the existing order.

The existing order that controls Western culture is the power of the spectacle produced by consumer culture. We commodify everything including our faith. Sunday becomes about receiving religious goods. Pastors are recognizing this growing trend and

…agree that a growing number of worshipers are talking or sitting through the congregational singing writing notes during the special music, showing up 10-15 minutes late, not worried about interrupting anything or anyone. One pastor shared that a congregant stopped attending worship opting to stay home and worship with a church on television. When asked about this, the congregant responded, “Why does it matter where I watch the service?” Another pastor commented that people treat everything in the service as if it were a movie preview and it is not until the feature presentation (the sermon) that people really start paying attention. Or in other churches with a more contemporary style of worship a pastor stated, “Once the ‘concert’ is over, they just settle in waiting for a sermon.”

Most church plants are in the business of Christian reconfiguration, they steal Christians from churches in the area instead of leading people to faith (and this is NOT an overstatement). My growing concern for the "emerging church" is that it preys on the sensabilities of its consumer culture, thus utilizing culture uncritically or being used by culture.

The power of consumer culture and the commodification of everything is that religious seekers can take objects, beliefs, and pieces of traditions and lift them out of their context to be used in whatever way they like. They can have their cake and eat it too, because they simply cut off the baggage from where those traditions arose.

In some respects, I believe this weakens the ability of emerging churches to form people for Kingdom work, because the main tool for combatting commodification is immersion in a religious community who emphasizes its deep religious tradition (baggage and all) for the formation of disciples. I know this is a generalization, but emerging churches are heavily influences by the culture of consumerism because they tend to be planted by those on the cutting edge of consumer culture.

Of course, I've excluded from this conversation "seeker churches," who attract people to church Sunday mornings by having a great rock show and a funny preacher (because I'm sympathetic to EMC). Sunday morning should be about formation:

I think this is a mistake. For the missional church communities require a regular practice for the shaping and forming of a people into the Life with God, the Mission of God. Missional people do not grow on trees. If then we would see people formed into the Missio Dei we must order our worship so as to be encountered by the living God. We must learn how to preach not as information but as proclamation and invite people into the Mission. The real presence at the Table must be the center of our gathering, our lives and our community. If we would see people formed into the Missio Dei, our gatherings must take on liturgical shape, a way of inviting people into the prayers, confessions and affirmations of the alive relationship we have with the living God of Mission. We must learn how to listen, interpret Scripture for what God is doing among us and in the world, hear God and then respond to God. This should be the character of our Sunday morning gatherings.

This kind of gathering should be both easier and harder to plan than any kind of programming approach we have hitherto been used to. It should be simpler and less focused on excellence of performance. It should not cost near as much in time, resourses and planning. It should be able to be done in a living room with three to thirty people or in a larger sanctuary with 200. Yet this kind of gathering takes more discernment of the Spirit, theological wisdom, historical sensitivity than we have been used to in the protestant church of our evangelical past (we haven’t paid attention to theology of worship in evangelical church). This way can lead us out of the wilderness of decaffeinated worship.

Deep traditions like lectio divina, intentional community, monastic practices, authenticity, and vulnerability are all very important, but so are the communities, traditions, and histories they have grown up in. Much of the EMC conversation is reactionary and deconstructive (which is fine, I understand), but there is something unhealthy about simply cutting ties with communities of faith that tend to have baggage because they've been around for 50, 100, or 150 years. Of course, this critique works in the inverse. Communities with baggage need to be listening to churches who are concerned about doing and being church differently.

My main concern though, is that churches critically engage culture so that contextualization is healthy (meaning the gospel doesn't get subsumed or overpowered by the culture). Our culture is a product of late capitalism, consumerism, and commodification; so we need traditions and narratives that will equip us to live counterculturally. We need Sunday mornings baggage and all to be unenjoyable, uncomfortable, and formative.


If you've made it this far, you might also be interested in Fitch's conversation over the epistemology of missiology and ecclesiology.

Church, Mission, & Transformation

A wonderful quote from a friend, Ashley:

The collective blessed ones, the people of God, are known as the church. The mission cannot be separated from the identity of God’s people. Mission is who the church is, not what the church does. It is God’s mission, however, and not the church’s mission. The mission of church is to actively and faithfully bear witness to who they are and to their God. God has a church for his mission, and not a mission for the church. Through the participation in God’s redemptive and restorative mission, both the church and the world are changed. via.

Not Business as Usual

I have really appreciated Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch who have co-wrote and individually wrote a few books worth your perusal. The Shaping, ReJesus, Forgotten, & Exiles. Check out Frost's defintion of "missional below."



Oh yes, that good old buzzward, "missional." I have interestingly enough found a strang dictohomy within my church. We are a moderate/progressive (and liberal at times) church as far as theological thought and intent, but still very ecclesiologically conversative. What I mean is that much of our thought and life is very experientially driven and the theology that backs it is experientially driven (liberationist, feminist, activist, progressivist theology). So we are progressive in thought about how we read Scripture, view women, gays, etc. But, we still "do" church. Church is still the building that we come to and church is what we do when we're together.

I'm not assigning positive or negative remarks about this, because honestly I'm not sure if they are there to be assigned. I am though pointing out that where our theology has been and is traditionally experientially base, that experience has not lead the congregation away from an attractional, business like institution to a more missional institution.

Yet, I feel that the experience is leading us toward an inkling, a desire for something new and that something I believe will be a reorganization, restructuring, and reformation around mission.

Generosity that Converts the Church

What does it mean to give, when everything we need is given to us?

Real generosity occurs when the gift leaves not a hand of joy, but a hand of heartache. The joyous giver is loved by God, but the one who gives in the midst of pain, tears, and heartache reflects God's love. The cross reveals this reality.

We give not to build nor restore. Our gifts in the machinations of the church do not reflect the Kingdom movement of love, rather the Kingdom movement of love makes possible the radical conversion of the machine by our generosity and love, a transformation of the microcosm, alternative people named church by the Gift(s) already received.

If the church is to be Christ this holiday season despite its budgets and buildings, it must allow Christ to convert it by accepting the gift. Salvation, life, justice, love. All gifts, all free.

It's time to trust and by trusting we make ourselves vulnerable to the capacities of generosity so that we give not to build nor restore, but to convert the church and find that God is not done with us no matter how done we are with ourselves as if a building, budget,program, or ministry means that we have arrived.

When we are generous we gather up within ourselves the ability to share our lives and the things we love with others, thus making ourselves richer then any amount of money. But when we are greedy, we close off ourselves to others for fear that what we love will be diminished and thus become poorer then any homeless person.

What if Starbucks Marketed like a Church? A Parable.

Be Careful What You Wish For

“He who loves the dream of a Christian community more than the community itself, often does great damage to that community, no matter how well-intentioned he might be.”

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, quoted in David Bosch, Transforming Mission, 387. via.

My Sermons

I preached tonight at our alternative worship service. I broke it down into two shorter sermons. The first introduced the theme on loving your neighbor and the second is my rehashing of Matt. 25:31-46. Check them out below. I really enjoyed preaching these sermons. The night went well overall except for some minor technical difficulties. Worship was lead by the frontman of Austin's The Infinite Partials. Also, Ann created a great responsive reading from an Arundhati Roy's quote:

"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget."

Love is learning to see GOD in people

We all know what love is. Love is the central tenet of Christianity, the very ethic the church is built on. Love is the goal. You’ve probably recently been in a class, listened to a sermon, and even talked about the importance, and need for love.

For love is all the rage right now. We are to be a loving church. We are to love our spouses. Love is the remedy to the ills of our culture, to war, to hate, to racism. Love your friends, love your enemies. Love. Love. Love. Certainly if the Beatles sang about it then we must need it. We all know how good, how right, and how loving love is. For God so loved the world, love your neighbor, God loves you, Jesus loves you.

The fact is, we love to love love.

But enough with that nonsense.

Jesus boils down all the commands into two laws: love God and love your neighbor. But we like to take these commands and make them sequential. First I’ll learn to love God and spend all my time doing the things that I think are loving to God: spending time in church, praying, reading my Bible. Then I’ll learn to love my neighbor and maybe spend some time doing it.

So we often get bogged down in the steps of love, spending our time not in the actual doing of love, but in the study of it. For anyone who has made themselves vulnerable in love or sacrificed time and comfort for the sake of love knows that it’s much easier to talk about and ask questions who are neighbors are then to be a neighbor. We do this because the idea of love is much prettier and romantic then the reality.

I’ve seen this point more clearly in my own life recently. Charlotte and I thought for a while that we’d move to East Austin, so we could live a life of love where we resided. So we could live in a place of real need and share our lives with those different from us.

A few weeks ago we began looking for a new rent place. A couple times in our search we talked about being in a neighborhood with need, but in the end we found a place where the niceness of the rent home and the convenience of its location won out to any preconceived ideal we had. When it comes to the actual work of love, it seems life and reality get messy.

The reason I believe Jesus places these two commands together as he does, is because they are inseparable from one another.

I’ve heard it said that “the way we love others is the way we love God.” The writer of 1 Jn says that if “we say we love God , but hate our brothers and sisters then we are liars.” I like to reword Jesus’ commands to read:

"Love God with all you have, and love your neighbor as if they are all you have.”

We simply cannot separate our love for God and our love for others. There is simply no separation between love we get to study and think about and love we get to live out.

Jesus reveals this fact with a story in Matt. 25:31-46, where he tells about when he will return and judge the nations, including us. In this story, Jesus separated the crowd not based on what they believed about love, but how they practiced it. And in practicing love for the prisoner, the hungry, the poor, the outcast of their society, the sheep were actually practicing love toward God but didn’t even realize it.

By loving the most unlovable, the sheep were getting to know and spend time with their Creator, their redeemer, with Jesus himself.

Now I don’t mean for this sermon to be a guilt trip or to make us feel bad for how much we don’t love,
But rather awaken us to the truth that love lives not in our Sunday school rooms, but in our, offices, and jobs and classrooms;
not in our thoughts and dreams, but in our daily routines,
and not simply in our study but how we live towards our enemy.

If living out love were easy, then Christ had no need to die for the love’s sake, but exactly because God suffered and took on our burden, he has made the life of love a real possibility.

Matthew 25:31-46 Remixed: Martha the Goat, Mary the Sheep

Allow me to share this experience I had with a few weeks ago visiting Martha and Mary.

Now let me tell you, these two woman are from worlds separate. Martha a southern bell spent her entire life working in the ministry. Martha’s presence was like you would expect it to be, warm and welcoming. I found conversation with Martha easy for she knew the religious jargon well and could spin a story with the best of them.

Mary on the other hand, well, let’s just say she was a little rough around the edges. She spent most of her adult life working with people that our society had long ago forgotten.

When she coughed the entire room shook so hard that I thought an earthquake had hit. Direct and to the point, this northerner told me all about her life working with prostitutes, inmates, the homeless, HIV/AIDS victims, and the dying. Although uncomfortable in her presence, I was awestruck by her life and stories.

Now to the unbelievable part. I feel like I have to prepare you, because of what both of these women shared with me. Mary called it a parousia experience. Martha, being southerner said it was a par-oui-sia. Either way, both of them told me that, get this, Jesus had visited them.

While visiting Martha the minister, I would have never of guessed it though. Upon crossing the threshold into her home I was overwhelmed by this sense of darkness. The outside of her house was gorgeous, and the inside even more beautiful. Her kitchen table sat overwhelmed with a feast, untouched and unchanged since it had been set. Gray engulfed the entire home though.

I don’t remember her home being like that the first time I had visited her.

I found Martha’s demeanor morose. You would’ve never been able to tell she was surrounded by such beauty by the way she moped around, dragging her feet as if the entire world sat upon her shoulders

She told me that she was broken hearted, surrounded by such goodness but unable to enjoy it.

I myself was utterly confused,

“what happened” I investigated.

Apparently, a man came to visit her, and upon his arrival everything around and in her experienced a renewal. Martha herself was in rapture over it all, until the man came closer. She said she slightly recognized his face, “uncomely and dirty” she put it.

There was no placing it though, for all she knew, he could have been the street beggar she walked past every day on her way to church. He might have even been the child who she had given money to through a compassion ministry. The closer the man got to Martha, she said the more confused and uncomfortable she felt.

When the man finally spoke, the cloud was lifted from her eyes.
“Are you?” she muttered,
“I am.”

With those words, the realization sprung forth of who this man was. Martha’s head fell into her hands. She was ashamed she couldn’t recognize and in actuality felt at unease in the presence of the Son of Man. Her entire life devoted to understanding him, but never being with him it seems, so in the end, come to find out, she hardly knew Jesus.

She told me she struggled to find conversation and to even look at Jesus, because he felt like such a stranger to her, she told me she felt like,…I think it was… a goat or an ass.

I left Martha’s home overwhelmed with a sense of dread. It felt as if that place would have been better burnt to the ground then to sit in such hellish despair despite its beauty.

In the midst of trying to think through Martha’s story, I decided to go see Mary.

Her place too though, seemed oddly different. It was as if Extreme Makeover had taken Mary’s home and made it glorious. Unlike Martha’s, the door to Mary’s home was open so I just welcomed myself in.

I was taken a bit off guard by the party and the noise coming from the kitchen. People of all kinds sat around her table feasting on the bounty. One would have thought Thanksgiving had come early

Mary, in her direct way came over to me and simply told me, “he had come.”
“I’m sorry,” I retorted, “ who had come.”

“Well at first, I wasn’t sure. I thought it was Ed from down at the HIV clinic. Then I just knew it had to Jacky, my friend who lives underneath I35. But, I assure you, he wasn’t either, and he was both.”

She went on, “and as surely as you are confused by that, well, I know it was Jesus. “





“When I first saw him, I started making all kinds of noise thinking I was yelling out to one of my friends, but the closer he got the more I felt like I knew him, but not quite. You know I had seen and talked to him everyday on the streets of this city, so when he told me his name was Jesus, well I just figured that it was Jacky…see because she thinks she’s the Messiah.”

“You should have seen us, there I was talking to about 4 different people I thought I knew from off the streets and just couldn’t place it…and there Jesus was trying to convince me that he wasn’t really any of those people, and yet he was.”

Well, it wasn’t until I realized that I hadn’t coughed since the man showed up, that I began to notice what had happened. See, these old bones and this old house took on a new life. And with that revelation, well, I just believed. Jesus had visited me.”

I myself, still don’t know what to think of all this, but I do wonder if I would recognize the face of God if he begged for my attention.

Is this your church?

World Communion Sunday

This morning, churches across the world celebrated communion as part of World Communion Sunday. I love this symbol and idea that Christians gather not around dogma and doctrine, likeness and homogeneity, but the broken body and blood of our servant and Lord.

I had the opportunity this morning to share with my faith community, a new way of envisioning the elements and ritual of the Lord's Supper. While in India this summer, we practiced communion using a very Hindu/Indian form: the coconut. The use of the coconut by Hindu Christ followers comes from a Hindu practice of sacrifice, where a person takes a coconut to a Brahman at a temple where it is broken for that persons sins. Also, not only is bread and wine a foreign element, but pretty scarce.

So this morning, I took a coconut and broke it open during worship. The imagery brought a fresh and engaging perspective to a very important ritual within the church. The rough outer skin representing not only the human form that Christ took on in his descension from heaven, but also the sin and brokenness of the world that he took on when nailed to the cross. Then I took a hammer and with some loud cracks to the coconut, the milk poured out into a bowl, representing the shed blood.

This is such a powerful image and a great way to re-envision communion.

With that I leave you with a clip from Arandhna, contextual sitar musicians we met at the ReThinking Forum before heading to India.

Rizone Communities, Theological Education for Postmoderns

I really enjoyed this article by Carl Raschke (author of the forthcoming book GloboChrist and The Next Reformation), where he unpacks what theological education means in our "post-churched" culture. Here's a few quotes, but go and read the article in its entirety.

The crisis of theological education ultimately stems from Christians who aim to become professional leaders in a world where Christianity itself is increasingly deinstitutionalized, and its leaders are rapidly becoming deprofessionalized.

A postmodern theological education is both relevant and irrelevant in the same breath. Or to put the matter more mischievously, it has to steep itself in its own irrelevant classical particularities in such a strategic manner that it is able to engage, critique, and transform the culture in a way that is genuinely relevant.

Theological education is comparable to what in the computer business is known as network engineering. A network engineer needs to understand how the guts of a computer work, but even more importantly, she or he is required to design and implement novel, creative architectures for sharing and processing complex configurations of information with different spatial distributions and topographies. Similarly, someone with a seminary degree needs to know how to read and interpret the Bible (even in its original languages), to be familiar with the history of Christianity, and to have facility in the kind of faith-based intellectual reflection we know as theology. But more importantly, they should understand how to begin to deploy those base competencies in a multitude of interpenetrable contexts.

Jesus said “go and make disciples of all nations,” not “go find a good location to start churches.” The difference is not all that subtle. As disciple-making disciples we need to be gearing our theological studies toward becoming makeover artists in redesigning our Father’s house, not plodding toward one day becoming junior partners in the management of his firm.

the Whole Church Should Get Drunk

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