Who is our standard?

I've been writing 2 very different blogs for a while, but life and death have intervened with completing them. So, a few thoughts about what I've encountered along the way, recently.

Jonathan Edwards wrote: "Resolved...that all men would live for the glory of God. Resolved, second...that if nobody else does, I will."
It seems that humans, in general, respond to the second phrase in actions that reveal, "Resolved, second...that if nobody else does, I won't either." or "Resolved, second...that if nobody else does, I'll make them."
Am I being cynical, or realistic about our power to deceive ourselves in our hearts? hmmmm...

Oswald Chambers wrote:
"We say that there ought to be no sorrow, but there is sorrow, and we have to accept and receive ourselves in its fires. If we try to evade sorrow, refusing to deal with it, we are foolish. Sorrow is one of the biggest facts in life, and there is no use in saying it should not be. Sin, sorrow, and suffering are, and it is not for us to say that God has made a mistake in allowing them."
It is really difficult to face, daily, my ability to sin and to cause sorrow and suffering. Repenting is ongoing, confessing is ongoing, grieving is ongoing, facing my sin is necessary to discerning how to love others and to live the truth of God's redemption to them in the midst of their brokenness.

We really, really, really, REALLY, want everyone else to be as dirty and broken as we act and perceive ourselves to be. When confronted with a person who has behaved righteously, we seek to drag them down into our own unrighteousness. We call them "holier than thou" when what we're really saying is, "Your life seems to be lived on a higher plane than mine. Who do you think you are, anyway???" If we see that other people are destructive or critical or abusive toward that person, we rationalize that it must be his/her fault. We will join in with the mob who destroys rather than risk ourselves and our reputations in the face of the opprobrium of the group, to participate in redemption of that person. It seems not to enter into the minds of those in the mob that a righteous person could actually be blamed, ostracized, demeaned, and slandered, much less die, simply for being righteous. It seems not to enter into the minds of those in the mob that, even if the person is unrighteous, we ourselves have become unrighteousness by our participation in their destruction. We neglect to face the harsh truth about ourselves that we will crucify even God's Son. The righteousness of Jesus and the Prophets will make us SO uncomfortable about ourselves that we become the killers of others, including the killers of the prophets and the Righteous One. "Yeah, but," we may say, "we can see that those historical people killed righteous people, but we've never done that!" Do we hear the echo of Jesus' voice speaking to the powerful in Matthew 23:29-36?

Rather, as Christians, we are called to crucify ourselves that Christ may live within us. Will you sacrifice yourself to love another person, today, however "unworthy" in the world's eyes? Will I?

That’s not my “religion”

From Merriam-Webster, here's the primary definition of "straw man." 1 : a weak or imaginary opposition (as an argument or adversary) set up only to be easily confuted.

Here are M-W's definitions of "religion":

1 a: the state of a religious <a nun in her 20th year of religion> b (1): the service and worship of God or the supernatural (2): commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance 2 : a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices 3 archaic
: scrupulous conformity : conscientiousness 4 : a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith.

That's not my "religion"!

I wonder if it's sacrilegious to disagree with the dictionary's definition of religion? Is it indicative of my ignorance and gullibility that I disagree with Bill Maher's take on religion in his movie, Religulous, and find his questions rooted in a modernistic understanding of religion, related to the dictionary's definition? If his assumption is that religion consists of perceiving the supernatural and its intersection with the natural, in addition to "worship" as seen only in the singing, talking or following a particular set of rites, then his foundation for his documentary is understandable. However, he never offered viewers the definition of "religion" on which his questions were based. Thus, the questions he asked of religious adherents seem unanswerable in anything other than a way that elicits superiority and mockery of the respondent.

The arguments over the airwaves, internet and between people, today, seem to be efforts to control what other people think, as distinct from celebrating or decrying how people treat one another, their families, their communities, strangers, and themselves. It seems as if the predominant modus operandi for both religious and irreligious is to mock the other side, to demean the persons whose thoughts are different than their thoughts, to denigrate the literature which supports that system (whether ancient literature or modern scientific material), and to distance themselves from those whose belief systems don't make sense in their own subjective understanding.

That's not my "religion"!

My conviction is that humans reveal their true "religion" in the content of our own and one another's lives, long before we hear it out of mouths or read it in words. (For those who don't know me, our natural and self-protective tendencies to judge before knowing and loving one another, patiently, kindly, with encouragement and grace, may actually obstruct your view of my "religion.") If we won't listen to one another as living documents of our "religion", then the underlying justification and rationale of that religion may sound patently ridiculous. When we tell one another, "I don't want to hear it", are we really saying, "knowing you, why you do what you do, or make the choices you make is irrelevant to my life"? If loving one another is irrelevant, have we devalued the other person's worth in our world? Beyond that unwillingness to know the other, are we questioning whether the others' lives may challenge our own actions, words and choices? How will we respond to those challenges others' lives pose? Will we continue to seek truth, or will we fight against them with weapons of opposition, such as distance, alienation, gossip, slander, or self-justification?

Our culture speaks of human rights rather than human worth. The former language seems more oriented toward the individual ego, and the latter toward the gift of humanity. Most of us simply do not see the people we encounter in our families and our communities, much less outsiders, as gifts. We treat them as obstacles in our own paths, battles to be fought, and challenges to our own self-images.

So, I try to live out this (biblical) definition of religion: The religion of living in a way that sees the others around me, seeks their good, listens to their stories, believes in their intrinsic human worth (God-created in God's image), encourages them through my gifts of valuing them and hearing them, embraces their God-given uniqueness, experiences and gifts, chooses to "die" to my own interests rather than ride rough-shod over their understanding, defines life through being with others rather than in opposition or separation from others, refuses to condemn, demean or mock them even when they've "crucified" me in words, lies, ostracism, or declarations of ignorance, discerns and interprets without judgment (see my blog on judgment v. discernment for the difference) the ramifications of their lived religion, pays attention to the challenge others pose to my lived "religion," remains alongside those who differ from me as long as my presence is not interpreted as condoning harmful behavior to self or community, and ultimately believes in God's power to resurrect me from the grave of silence and denial of worth in which many would place strangers to their personal systems.

Thus, this re-definition of "religion" is not verbal but actual. What do we do? How do we treat the stranger, the brother or sister, the mother or father, the child, the neighbor, the other gender, the other race, another ethnicity or family? Do we divorce those we disagree with or continue to include them in our fellowship? Each of us has a single body, and that single body is a "book of law" which is governed by the unique combination of gender, experiences, love/unlove, culture, education, status and places that body has been.

Some questions to ask ourselves about our "religion": Do we "crucify" others according to our law (verbally, emotionally, physically)? Do we love and remain with others? Does our love nurture, teach and maintain healthy boundaries for self and those who've been entrusted to us? Do we invade another's personhood with verbal, emotional, spiritual or physical violence? Do we seek to dominate or manipulate others through intellect, "religion", words, the oppressive power of a group of people, fear, threats, or force? Do we defend another's personhood against such violence? Do we discriminate and treat with partiality one person/family/tribe over another, educated over uneducated, like-minded over diverse peoples, rich over poor, our race or ethnicity over others?

Mikhail Bahktin wrote: The very being of man … is deepest communion. To be means to communicate. Absolute death (non-being) is that state of being unheard, unrecognized, unremembered. To be means to be for another, and through the other, for oneself. A person has no internal sovereignty, he is wholly and always on the boundary; looking inside of himself, he looks into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another.

I trust God to bring people into my life who will help me grow in love, grace, and wisdom – even those who seek to harm. This radical religion acts with love and in communion with humanity.

Working in the World

Most of the adults in churches on Sunday have 9 to 5 jobs during the week. It is difficult for pastors to bridge the gap from Sunday morning to everyday life in a way that gets to the heart of issues that employees face on a daily basis. How does an employee perceive his/her faith in the crisis of being berated for some mistake they made? A deadline missed? An oversight? Or worse, blamed for a problem someone else caused? How do you handle the promotion of another less-qualified person ahead of you because of his/her abilities to schmooze the bosses, while shirking their own responsibilities or shifting them onto others? Or because of race, gender, weight, age or natural affinity?

It may be the easiest path in the world to profess our faith with our mouths on Sunday in worship songs, creeds recited, and "amen!" to the sermon – that God created all things, that God loves all creatures, that God is light, grace, and truth, and that we, as members of the Body of Christ, are called to be bearers of the Holy Spirit to these very people. It certainly is the most difficult path to give grace and speak truth in darkness to the schmoozers, the shirkers, the liars, the back-stabbers, idea-stealers, and the duped, agenda-ridden or vindictive bosses, or to face the facts that we, ourselves, may be perceived as these things by others because of our own faithless choices. We try to navigate our way through the quagmire of office politics, pettiness, offensive and defensive reactions, office/cubicle placements, and work assignments. Most of us try to rely on our own perceptions and our own abilities to dodge this bullet, to avoid that trouble-maker, to keep our mouths shut or open them at the "right" time.

While not negating some folks' natural instincts that carry them well through these dark warrens of politics, God's ways are not ours. The facts speak loudly: many of these very activities go on in church offices, denominational authorities, church judicatories, pastors' groups, and mission organizations every day, too. Church leaders frequently are wiser in the world's ways than they are mature in Christ, too!

We need to read Scripture about handling people and situations "in Christ", and learn how to trust God in the human darkness we face daily.

God is the one who we call on. The Psalms contain the laments of people getting shafted for doing or seeking to do righteousness in their relationships to other people. This morning, I was re-reading a favorite of mine, memorized long ago in another translation. It is so easy not to believe who will give us ongoing employment and take care of our needs. The obvious "who" are the ones we see in front of us: the bosses, the people who make up the company, those people whose hoops we have to jump through to get the contract or close the deal. Our natural tendencies are to please these people so that we may be rewarded with paying work. Our natural methodologies are to skirt the truth – if "necessary", lie – if "necessary", over-promise the impossible – if "necessary", and under-estimate the costs – if "necessary."

None of that behavior reveals any faith in God. We need to face this about ourselves and those around us.

Our worship is clearly seen in our choices at these moments. Our faith is in the Almighty God who alone ensures the value and enduring quality of our work here and now, as we are faithful and righteous to others and to Godself, bearing grace and truth to others God has placed around us:

Psalm 90

¹¹    Who considers the power of your anger?

    Your wrath is as great as the fear that is due you.

¹²    So teach us to count our days

    that we may gain a wise heart.

¹³    Turn, O LORD! How long?

    Have compassion on your servants!

¹⁴    Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,

    so that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.

¹⁵    Make us glad as many days as you have afflicted us,

    and as many years as we have seen evil.

¹⁶    Let your work be manifest to your servants,

    and your glorious power to their children.

¹⁷    Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,

    and prosper for us the work of our hands—

    O prosper the work of our hands!

 

Trusting in the unseen God reveals the God we trust to those around us through our faithful and righteous actions. We may look like and feel like fools, but we're revealing Someone to those who long for God when we have integrity.

1 Corinthians 4

¹⁰We are fools for Christ's sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute. ¹¹To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are ill-clad and buffeted and homeless, ¹²and we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; ¹³when slandered, we try to conciliate; we have become, and are now, as the refuse of the world, the offscouring of all things.

We are all "sent out" by God into the world, wherever that may be, whatever office or factory floor or street may be our place of work. May we show those around us what it means to be a fool for Christ to their blessing and hope, to be gracious and forgiving empowered by the Holy Spirit, to reveal the strength in eternal love for others who deserve God's wrath as much as do we ourselves.

Culture, Context and Biblical Interpretation

RJS at Jesus Creed asked this question [The Bible and Knowledge 1 (RJS)]:
How much of our view of scripture - our interpretation of scripture - is determined by our cultural context - and how much of our view of scripture is inherent to the viability, the truth content, of the Christian faith?

This statement seems to me to inform the question:
The battle between traditional Christian faith and rational enlightenment thinking was intense and gave rise to many of the conflicts we see and suffer from today.

I think what I've found most valuable about my own work and studies of Scripture, Pauline theology and James is that it's clear that the Church (and churches and denominations) have frequently missed something that seems central in both OT and NT. I think some theologians are moving in a direction that is more true to both Judeo-Christian tradition and the text. The New Perspective on Paul and Scot McKnight's blogs on James seem to me to help re-frame our understanding of the Christian journey as "doing as we become." I'd hope that new focus is true to Paul's mission to the Romans, as one having received "grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience that comes from faith."

Because the mission is clearly cross-cultural as stated by Jesus, Paul, Luke and Peter, e.g., it's also evident that theologically from God's view our cultural context is superceded by God's Word, but from humanity's standpoint our context (cultural, gendered, racial, economic, wounded, broken, etc.) cannot help but frame our interpretation - as clear in the different facets of Paul's epistles to different communities.

So, the point about modernism which has the battle between "traditional Christian faith and rational enlightenment thinking" seems to me to mark human pride - a premature pretense of understanding. There is no such rational, intellectual and bodily-detached abstraction in the Scriptural understanding of Christian faith. "Knowing" in Scripture does not precede "doing" but increases with the "doing" of the Word in our bodies. (IMHO, this is exemplified in our children saying "I know!" to our reminders to do the right things, and then not doing them! cf. Matt. 21:28-ff.) Further, the "doing" requires receiving God's love in Christ, the Spirit's empowering of us to be crucified with Christ first in all of our contexts (no slave or free, male or female, barbarian or Jew or Greek, etc.) in order to love the others whom God has placed in our lives. Only then does faith begin to be knowledgeable of God and to hear the Word. If we cannot die to ourselves, truly hear the neighbor next to us, we cannot hear Godself.

This isn't works-based obedience to the Law, but love-inspired obedience to God-in-Christ. We should welcome everyone who comes to us, whatever their culture and context, hearing them as bearers of God's image, yet discerning through love where their context and bodily deeds chain them still, and listening to them through love to hear where our own context and "doing" also chain us in "this body of death."

Thus, my answer to the question is that IF our context (cultural or otherwise) is interpreting Scripture, we're not dead enough yet! And Yes! cultural context will inevitably affect interpretation, which is absolutely, positively why we need the Body of Christ in all its members to hear the voice of God.

May we have eyes that see and ears that hear the One Lord and each other!

Object Exercise in Missing the Point

This series of photos came from an email circulating the internet right now. What's so remarkable to me is the number of ways the conversation on these signs miss the point about Christianity, relationships between God and between one another, heaven, etc., etc.

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin anyway?

@ Dan: LOL! Yes, it's just another internet farce! (see Snopes regarding how it was done: http://www.snopes.com/photos/signs/dogheaven.asp ) However, I still thought them illustrative of what we too often do - talk past one another and engage in arguments for the sake of "winning" [but not winning friends!]. I appreciated the internet monk's posting on this subject, too, the other day:
http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/you-need-to-get-rid-of-some-of-your-theology

The Fulfilling of the Law

Love does no wrong to a neighbor, therefore,
the fullness of the law = love (Rom. 13:10).

Christ is the end of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes... (telos, in the Greek, has the meaning of "end" and "goal toward which movement is directed"). (Rom. 10:4)

We pour our hearts out. Sometimes, we revealed our hearts to those who didn't hold our inner person caringly and with love. Pouring our hearts out to God in prayer, lament, praise and mourning is safe. Our hearts are not safe in the hands of most people we encounter in our daily lives, our workplaces, and sadly, our hearts may be in danger within churches and our own families, too.

If we know we're not safe, how can we plumb the depths of our souls' pain and the outcomes of our wounding? If we can never meet our brokenness with courage, we can never know the fullness of the healing of Christ.

There seems to be connections: the more time spent in the presence of God, the more carefully held the outpouring of others' hearts, and the more others pour out their hearts, spontaneously.

I wonder if a pastor needs to stay constantly in touch with the awareness of how people are sharing with him/her as a barometer to others' sense of the Holy Spirit's tenderness within the pastor's heart. I'm not talking about that which is easily shared, but the heartaches, the disappointments, the losses, and the need for God's touch. Then, a pastor may not use that heartache for anything other than prayer and intercession before the Father. The righteousness is met in the tender caring of relationship which permitted the outpouring.

If the members of the church aren't safe with one another, then we've failed in being the true Body of Christ and the fulfilling of the law in love. Each of us needs time in God's presence so that we will hold another's heart with love and care. Only God can enable that love, and only God can empower that sacrifice when betraying or turning against the other is easier than facing our own brokenness.

Touchstones in Reality

This photo was taken by a friend, Andy Larsen, at the Disney Concert Hall in LA.** It seemed to me to give a metaphorical image of how our perceptions of ourselves, others, and our experiences need balanced and faithful interpreters and interpretation.

There was a person who fought, "won" and lost in a war, lost buddies, ministered to fellows having similar journeys, then suffered greater losses still: almost life (in thoughts of an ending, and then twice accidentally - not counting the long-ago war), memories, connections, part of a limb, and most frightening of all, a sense of self and identity in this world and before God. “Who am I?”

Picture yourself in the middle of this photo's disorienting scene. However, imagine that you have no exterior streets or plumb lines to balance your person, your perspective, or even the knowledge of which direction gravity is taking to keep your feet on any one surface.

There are times when our lives resemble this photographic metaphor. You don't know who tells the truth and who lies, who believes the truth and who believes the lies. The surface of a relationship, or relationships, which had seemed solid and sane suddenly curves out from underneath you and falls away. What is truth, anyway? The lying ones and the credulous ones assert their certainty over you, and you find one image of yourself impaled by a jagged edge you hadn't seen before from your vantage point. You cry out with no voice: Who am I? Why am I here? Why don't I leave this pain behind? Can I stand up, can I escape, or is it safer to crouch as if paralyzed, my back to any surface?

Losing one's sense of self is like going back to the garden, after the fall, before the mercy. Cold, naked and ashamed, a grey day, on that metallic reflective - but not truly reflecting - surface. You cannot trust the blurred "image" you see of yourself in the metal. You understand you're here - wherever "here" really is – perhaps in part due to your own choices, in part due to external forces, and you can't get your bearings. Imagining yourself covered with your own waste, you slip and fall again and again. Is this a nightmare, a hallucination, the process of dying, a real experience, part of a real experience, or all of the above? You don't know.

You have no control. You're immobilized within scene that moves with you but without your direction, volition or control.

You become aware that some persons' presences have entered your disorienting and disoriented world. One laughs incessantly, the sound bouncing back and forth across the metal surfaces that encompass you, and you don't know whether the laughter is directed at you because the surfaces change the directionality of the sound.

Yet another presence, like an angel, stoops to pick you up off the cold, metal surface, cleans you, and gently places you on cushions that both soothe and warm you. You're relieved, but you feel still out of control, as one stuck in an endless loop of the same scene. You fall back to the cold surface. The laughter continues to reverberate around you. Another presence assists the angelic one, and they pull you back up to the safety of the soft clean, warm surface. You survive, scarred, but as one continuing to question what is real, "Who am I?"

Who are the faithful ones? Who is the Body of Christ entering into your brokenness, cold, waste and shame? Who are the faithful interpreters of this distorted reality? Where are the touchstones which orient you rather than disorient you still more, leaving you more confused and ashamed?

We believe that our answer is God-with-us, God entering our world of nakedness, shame, filth and cold, through the Body of Christ then and now. The bodies of Christ are the ones not judging the contours of and events in your world as indicative of your worth or necessarily attributable to your own action. God listens and remains as you discern the how of the shapes around you, the actors and the acted upon, and then gives you back the choice of "what now?" "Go and sin no more." You step out of the endless, controlling and uncontrollable loop. You find a true orientation in the midst of the disorientation through maintaining contact with those around you who remain true and stable. Your vision becomes fixed on a horizon outside your warped world which keeps you centered and straight. You become a touchstone, too, to others who seek the True, though you know the world around each of you remains broken, warped and distorted. You point out the horizon to one another, reminding one another, steadying one another, and sharing strength.

Bodies of the Body, touchstones connected to the Rock, the caring hands when the world falls away around us, the arms that lift the injured from the ditches along the way, the parts mirroring the Perfect, the ones being known by the One Knowing, the “we are” of the “I AM.” This is who we are to one another, reconciled and reconciling, faithfully remaining in Christ Jesus.

**(http://www.flickr.com/photos/papalars/3465101920/ with some rights reserved per http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/deed.en)