All That To Say...

Meaning: The Thin or Thick of It

2011-11-29T06:23:00.000-08:00

In teaching freshman about the Bible, I am constantly made aware of how odd Scripture is to them. This is true not only of the high number of students who have little experience with the Bible, but also with the "Sunday School" kids. The distance, in many cases, between their world and the world of Scripture, makes it difficult for them to make sense of what they are reading. This "gap" might be characterized many ways. The sheer size of the historical gap between text and reader means negotiating significant cultural, cosmological, literary, and theological differences--not to mention spiritual ones.

Readers of the Bible have tried many strategies to overcome these differences. Most recent "critical" strategies for interpreting Scripture have emphasized the historical gap. How do we understand a document written thousands of years ago? This is a fair question. The answer given by the majority of biblical scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries began with limiting the amount of light shed on the text from our side of the historical divide. We needed, through the use of an objective, "scientific" method, to free our readings from our own prejudices. These prejudices came not only from our own personal biases, but also from the tradition-laden readings we inherited along the way. Alexander Campbell captured this commitment when he wrote that he hoped to read Scripture as if no one else had read it before.

Now, there are all kinds of ways to critique this reading impulse. I want to note here only one. It collapses the encounter of the text with the contemporary reader. The question, what is the text saying to me, is postponed in favor of the question, what was the author saying to the original audience. Now, this business of an author and original audience has its place. I am interested in that question and the answers revealed can be revolutionary in producing understanding. It is not a question we should abandon.

Still, there are problems inherent in the question. We have no direct access either to the intention of the author or the original audience. This move to focus on the world that produced the text, the world of author-original audience, was hoped to provide a foundation--an objective place-- for assessing the enduring meaning of a text (usually expressed as an idea). The irony is that it threw us into a largely hypothetical world of historical reconstruction. For some issues of interpretation, this is a fairly productive preoccupation. But for others, not so much.

I have been reading a draft of my friend, Sara Barton's, forthcoming book (which is very good) on her struggle as a woman to find a place for certain public gifts she believes are given to her by God. She has to contend with texts that seem on their face to speak against her being able to exercise those gifts. Often in the book, she has taken up issues related to the world that produced the text. And while her readings find support in the world of historical-critical scholarship, the fact is a dozen other equally plausible readings could be offered. We know a fair amount about the world of Corinth (not nearly as much as we do with more literate cultures, however), for instance, but not enough it seems to reconstruct with exact certainty the situations being addressed. We are left with a seemingly endless set of hypotheticals. Helpful, but falling short of the standard of objective or foundational.

And as Paul Ricouer and others have pointed out, this business of authorial intention is extremely problematic, and at several levels. What we have once the ink is dry is a text and not an author. And while our best clues about the author's intentions, especially one dead for 2000 years, is the text itself, what we have is the text, not the author.

Again, I want to be careful here. I think its important to ask what the author is up to, even if we can't know for sure. And I also think that the text is the best place to get after that, rather than through elaborate historical reconstructions. (See Richard Hays on this point).

So, what's my problem? Good question. Here's how I want to say it now. This business of isolating meaning in relation to the original intention of the author possesses a strong view of the author, a weak view of the text, and a weak view of the reader. It places the weight bearing load of interpretation on the beam least capable of supporting such a load--the hypothetical world of authorial intention. I don't want to jettison this line of pursuit. I want to mitigate its headlock on our understandings of how meaning is created in this mosh-pit of author-text-reader. (Sorry about the metaphor overload). I want the mosh-pit.

To switch the image, this way of understanding interpretation is a thin strategy. It reduces the world of significance making by at least half, locating it in the world that produced the text rather than in the world being created in front of the text. And the biggest thing here from my point of view is that this is simply a naive way of understanding understanding. Making meaning is a thick enterprise--always. And especially when it happens between persons or perspectives without shared cultural perspectives.

Finally, I think this thin strategy fails precisely at the place it matters most--saying how it is that a text, in all of its textiness, could be connected to a living God. And when I figure out how to say this part well, we'll have another blog post.

Richard Beck on Brueggemann

2011-11-18T07:58:00.000-08:00

Check out the promo videos, including this one where Beck talks about Brueggemann's influence on his book, Unclean. Beck on Brueggemann

We are going to have an outstanding conference at Streaming 2012: Mercy, Not Sacrifice. Help us get the word out. Bloggers, help us.

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A Non-Reducible Text in the Service of a Non-Reducible God

2011-11-16T13:06:00.000-08:00

Texts do different things. And because they do different things, they have different characteristics. The stop sign around the corner from my house only works if it is not open to interpretation.It always comes in the same shape, size, font and color. We don't want anything subject to the whims of the reader. This text needs to be reduced to one meaning and one meaning only.

The thing about a stop sign, though, is that I never imagine a person behind the text.I don't think of an author or it doesn't make me ponder the meaning of my life in relation to the person who authorized it. I doubt this is a maxim related to texts, but their might be some sort of correlation here--the more reducible a text, the less relational it is.

So, I'm thinking that a text designed for relationship, especially a relationship over time and space, has to be more porous to meaning than a stop sign.And this might especially be true if a text were hoping to serve relationships across time and space. In other words, certain texts have the ability to communicate beyond their immediate circumstances. My grocery list from Monday is a perishable text and fairly reducible in meaning. No one will be reading it tomorrow, much less 2000 years from now, even though as grocery lists go it's a pretty good one. For a text to continue to speak to new audiences, it has to be fairly open or porous to meaning. And this might especially be true if the relationship to be secured by the text has as its subject a non-reducible subject. Like God.

Now, its conceivable that a text speaking for God might serve the same kind of purpose as a stop sign--to get people to obey certain signs.Then we might want a reducible text. But if the text speaking for God was primarily interested in sustaining across time and space relationship with a holy God, a non-reducible God, then that text might have to be fairly porous, open, interpretable, relational, or dynamic in its capacity to make meanings.

I would submit that this is what we have with the Bible: a non-reducible text in the service of relationship with a holy God.

This is not, however, how many of us have been taught to regard or use or study the Bible. Ironically, we have thought that for it to speak for God it has to be reducible to one meaning, to one interpretation. We think it has to be like a stop sign. I have a spate of books on my bookshelf dedicated to the pursuit of making the Bible hold still. I think this says more about us, particularly those of us conditioned by the modern story of human mastery, than it does about the Bible.

So, I'm trying to rethink all of this without overreacting, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater, without reducing things to an either/or approach. Stay tuned.

More on Religion and Spirituality

2011-11-12T06:12:00.000-08:00

A few posts ago (which was a long, long time ago), I suggested that given a choice between claiming to religious or spiritual, I would choose religious. I admitted in the piece that this was something of a false choice, that I could likely put these two together in a satisfying way. I was commenting more on how the option is often presented with religion as the big, bad wolf and spirituality as the deep choice for deep people.

Harvey, Shannon and others properly pointed out that this should be a both/and. Yes, clearly you are right. And let's not drop our objections to religion gone amuck. And again, I say "amen." Tyler brought up Bonhoeffer and his notion of a religionless Christianity being picked up now by Rollins, asking how I would square what I'm saying with that. So, just a post to respond to Tyler briefly.

I don't know.

I'm not a Bonhoeffer expert. So, I don't want to wade into that blindly. But I would say that he would have to go a ways to convince me that there is such a thing.

I think our lives are irreducibly religious. By this I mean that we are constantly embodying our beliefs in rituals and symbols. Even people who are protesting against religion do this. In fact, I would suggest that their protest would not be visible, recognizable as a protest, apart from some way of routinizing or ritualizing their behavior.

I have visited churches who have a stated a bias against "religion." They are just coming together as "Christ-followers." The irony to me is that I have felt more lost and excluded in their assemblies given the high degree of insider lingo and casual ritual (which favors the insider) than I do in more typically "religious" congregations. I say irony because most of these groups are lowering the formality and enhancing the intimacy all for the sake of being more welcoming, but I have found the opposite to be true.

I know Bonhoeffer and Rollins must have something more specific in mind than my broad, sociological definition of religion. I know both of them well enough to know that they would be both baptismal and eucharistic in their approach to Christianity. So, what do they mean by religion? Maybe they would distinguish between being religious and religion, or even doing religious things and religion. But I think its a terribly difficult distinction to make consistently.

To me the question is not whether or not religion. The question is good religion or bad.

PS, Harvey pointed me to a piece at Huffington Post with a similar rant to the one I wrote. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lillian-daniel/spiritual-but-not-religio_b_959216.html

Texts Don't Just Hold Meaning, They Create Meaning

2011-11-11T08:49:00.000-08:00

For awhile now, I have been a person of diminished appetites. Slowly, however, they have been returning. One of the last things to return has been interest in my blog. I've simply been uninterested in writing anything, in creating anything. I've thought about taking it down or starting something new. But mostly I've simply been searching for something worth writing.

So, this might be just for today, but here goes. A modest post, but one I think with big implications. Texts don't just hold meaning, they create it. And this is especially true for sacred texts. Surely part of what sets a sacred text apart from others is its capacity continually to create meaning.

Texts do hold meanings. 1 Peter, for instance, is a certain text. It is not another one. It has certain words and certain ideas presented in a certain order. It can't mean just anything. But it can create multiple meanings as well. As any author knows, a text also has a relationship with a reader or group of readers, and not just the original readers. It's meanings are not limited to the intention of the author or the circumstances of the first readers. 1 Peter spoke powerfully to me when I was in 7th grade, and it spoke to me in the particularity of my circumstances that were simply not anticipated by the author. 1 Peter created meaning for me. It spoke into my life. It has a living voice.

I'll simply say at this point that I wasn't taught to think about the Bible this way. I was taught to isolate one meaning of the text, to trap it and make it hold still, to make it say only what the author intended for it to say, to curtail its ability to make meaning. And this, I think, was wrong.

Dylan on a Sunday: Blood on the Tracks

2011-08-14T16:31:00.000-07:00

Back to underwhelming demand, a little Dylan on a Sunday post. Truthfully, what started out as a one week idea, a modest one for even that, turned into something a lot more. Seems there's virtually no end to the kinds of posts you can write when you start with Dylan. You can even write posts on what its like to write about Dylan.

But this one's simple. A music one. I listened several times this week to Blood on the Tracks. I have said often that I like the later Dylan stuff the best. I'm not a big folkie. I would never listen to Peter, Paul, and Mary or Woody Guthrie. I'm fine that Dylan plugged in, happy even. And I think his smoke damaged pipes fit his music better these days, especially on Time Out of Mind. But I have to admit, I really like Blood on the Tracks. It's acoustic and has the big looping, sliding, whooping lyric style of the early Dylan. In fact, I think its kind of the height of his vocal "stylings" in this regard. When people are imitating Dylan, its Blood on the Tracks Dylan, especially in songs like Tangled Up in Blue and Simple Twist of Fate.

We've moved on here from the "movement" songs like "Blowin in the Wind," and "Masters of War." These are songs of love and loss and need. They resonate at a more personal level. And in this season of my life, that fit the bill this week.

My favorite track? Tough to beat Tangled Up in Blue, but this week I'll take Shelter from the Storm.

I was in another lifetime one of toil and blood
When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud
I came in from the wilderness a creature void of form
"Come in" she said
"I'll give you shelter from the storm".

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

In a little hilltop village they gambled for my clothes
I bargained for salvation and they gave me a lethal dose
I offered up my innocence and got repaid with scorn
"Come in" she said"I'll give you shelter from the storm".

Well I'm living in a foreign country but I'm bound to cross the line
Beauty walks a razor's edge someday I'll make it mine
If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born
"Come in" she said
"I'll give you shelter from the storm".

Mercy, Not Sacrifice: Brueggemann Comes to Rochester College

2011-08-13T05:55:00.000-07:00

When I was just beginning in ministry, I received the book, The Land, by Walter Brueggemann as a Christmas present. I had a big chair in the corner of my office that was my reading spot. I got comfortable, opened the book, and didn't move until I was finished.

Now, that's quite a statement coming from a guy like me given my tendencies toward attention deficit. But I read the book through in one sitting. I was deeply moved. At various points, tears came to my eyes. I was moved by several things. I was moved by this vision of God and his relationship with Israel. I was moved by the way Brueggemann allowed the biblical text to speak directly to our world. I was moved by the prose, by his writing, by the passion that moved through the ink on the page into my heart and mind.

After reading the land, I quickly bought David's Truth, the Prophetic Imagination, and Hopeful Imagination (my favorite). I probably have over twenty Brueggemann titles on my bookshelves. No biblical scholar has impacted me more. When I was preaching in Oregon, I had a member approach me after a sermon. He asked, "Is this Brueggemann guy available so that we could just cut out the middle man?" Yeah, I'm that guy when it come to Brueggemann.

So, I'm thrilled that I received an email from Walter Brueggemann yesterday accepting an invitation to be our featured speaker at Streaming: Biblical Conversations from the Missional Frontier, June 18-20, 2012, at Rochester College. Our theme for the conference will be "I Desire Mercy, Not Sacrifice."

The following sentences were part of the invitation I extended. I hope they will entice you to attend as well.

This coming year’s theme will be “I Desire Mercy, Not Sacrifice.” We can think of no one better to address this theme than you. In your work you have emphasized the tensions between justice and purity traditions in Israel’s response to Yahweh. You not only demonstrate the priority of the justice or mercy strand, but you do so without jettisoning the purity dimension as an ordering response to “an unsettled residue of ache.”

This work has been picked up by many in fruitful ways beyond the areas of biblical interpretation. One recent work is Richard Beck’s fascinating study, Unclean. Beck is an experimental psychologist who is particularly interested in the psychological dimensions of disgust, contagion and their relation to mortality. He proposes a radical notion of hospitality as a response to our tendencies toward socio-moral disgust. Along the way, he dialogues with theologians including Volf, Heim, and yourself.

This large conversation related to justice and purity is very important to the emerging missional church conversation. This literature encourages a new engagement for congregations within Western cultures—an engagement not beholden to the powers that sponsor a life defined primarily by economic interests related to consumption. Churches that serve the broader society as “vendors of religious goods and services” do so at the cost of a reduced significance. The missional impulse, in contrast, invites the church to consider its life once again from the margins, as a people sent, or as an outpost for the reign of God. This move to the margins is impossible apart from a searching and probing conversation on the tensions between justice and purity—a conversation that has not yet appeared prominently in the missional church literature.

I'm Religious, Not Spiritual, and I Like it That Way

2011-08-04T11:44:00.000-07:00

I know, it's usually said the other way. It's pretty fashionable these days to claim spirituality, not religion. Spiritual is deep. Religion is mechanical and superficial. Spiritual is authentic. Religion is foppery. Spiritual is of God. Religion is a human creation. I get it.

There certainly is a critique to be made concerning religion. There is such a thing as bad religion and plenty of examples to go around. I would even say that there are few things more dangerous than bad religion. The fact that most acts of terror are done under the shade of some religious tree is nearly enough for me to quit the whole thing.

But there's also such a thing as bad spirituality. And the examples are plentiful here as well. When someone tells me that they are spiritual, but not religious, I usually suspect some sort of idiosyncratic and wildly syncretistic view of what that means, and I'm often not disappointed. My experience in congregational ministry has been that the most difficult people are often the ones who present themselves just a little ahead of everyone else on the spirituality scale.

Let me be quick to say that there are good spiritualities. This is less a complaint about spirituality and more a way of commending religion. Religion can be good as well. And given its power, evident in the easy targets of our scorn, it seems to me that it is particularly important not to give up on religion.

Jesus didn't. True, he attacked bad religion. But he also encouraged the saying of a set prayer, taught his followers to fast and give alms appropriately, and to keep the law as an expression of God's good ordering of life. We could probably find this kind of understanding of religion throughout the New Testament. I will simply add that James had a definition of good religion--to care for widows and orphans in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world. Too often, I find this definition of pure and undefiled religion missing from the lives of self-styled spiritualists.

I know this is not what most people have in mind when they critique religion. When they claim being spiritual over being religious, they are often being critical of the "formal" aspects of religion--liturgies, especially set liturgies, that suffer from lack of spontaneity or feeling. So, I want to say a good word for religion here as well.

Religion says my experience of God is mediated. It doesn't begin and end with me. Religion says that my relationship with God requires others. It requires words that aren't my own, and times and spaces that I don't designate. It involves a story that didn't originate with me, that is being passed down to me.

What passes for spirituality often says just the opposite. Spirituality says my relationship with God is direct and unmediated. Its just about me and God. This is why I don't need a religious community or times of worship or sacraments. Or if I do, they are only necessary to the extent that they support my personal relationship with God. Spirituality, in this sense, deepens the very thing we need to overcome--the conviction that the world begins and ends with me.

Now, I think I could define religion and spirituality in ways so that they are seen as complimentary and not as things that could be divided into choices. But if you had to push me into a choice, am I religious or spiritual, I think I'd go for religious.

Dylan on a Sunday

2011-05-15T10:20:00.000-07:00

Dylan's website posted a note this week from Bob chiding the press for getting so many things wrong. This is one of Dylan's favorite themes. I'm pretty sure Dylan has a member of the press in mind in the song, "Ballad of a Thin Man." "There's something going on around here, but you don't know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?" This post let us know the myriad of ways the press got the stories about his recent trip to China wrong.

At the bottom of his post was the following:
"Everybody knows by now that there's a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I'm encouraging anybody who's ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book. You never know, somebody might have a great book in them."

I've decided to take Dylan up on this. Forget the dissertation. I might have a great book in me and it will only take some scribbling. And I qualify as one of the groups he is encouraging as I have seen him in concert. Maybe just a compendium of my posts here would do the trick! I might already be done! I think I need an agent.

Dylan on a Sunday

2011-05-01T13:19:00.000-07:00

This quote from Dylan from Douglas Brinkley's 2009 article in Rolling Stone.

As far as I know, no one else plays this way. Today, yesterday, and probably tomorrow. I don't think you'll hear what I do ever again. It took a while to find this thing. But then again, I believe things are handed to you when you're ready to make use of them. You wouldn't recognize them unless you've come through certain experiences.

I love this quote. There's the audacity of it. No one has ever played this way and no one ever will. I don't know how to explain, musically speaking, Dylan's current musical style. He claims its a mathematical thing that he's discovered. I know what it feels like to me. It rolls. It's got a big engine and big wheels and its moving over smooth pavement. And if the band didn't stop the song at some point, it would roll forever out of its own power. It is its own source.

But the better part of this quote is the business about things being handed to you when you're ready to make use of them. Maybe things are offered to you before you're ready to make use of them and you just don't notice. But I do think there is something loose in the world--inspiration--that finds us when we're ready to use it.

This is not an age thing. Inspiration is not simply the accumulation of your experiences. But inspiration is conditioned by experience. It matters what has come before, but more, it matters what is happening now. And its not that it comes apart from work or effort, or even seeking. It's more that when it appears, regardless of the work or effort, you know it was given.

Maybe not everyone experiences this. And certainly the donation is greater for some than for others. But it points to grace. It suggests that there's something other than karma at work in the world. And the name for that is hope.

Good Friday Playlist

2011-04-22T11:04:00.000-07:00

I have certain rhythms that keep my life in check. It's kind of like having my own little personal liturgical calendar--a way ritually to mark the world according to certain realities. Since I'm more of a Good Friday guy than an Easter guy, I started a few years ago a tradition of making a playlist on Good Friday to mark a year in music. Its my way of saying that no matter what life's circumstances might be, joy is always possible. Music happens. And so today I mark the end of a good year in music to make room for a new one.

Making a playlist is a very important skill. It's not enough just to pick good songs, you have to put them together in a way that makes the listening a satisfying experience. I like my playlist for this year. It's full of joy in a kind of subversive way. Nice hooks, but with just enough edge to gritty things up a bit. Some heartache along the way, but a hopeful ending. So, without further ado, here goes.

1. Angel Dance--Robert Plant. You have to start well. You can't hear the first few notes and wonder whether or not you're in the mood for this. I always smile when this song starts. It sounds like an angel dance.

2. Down by the Water--The Decemberists. For a good second song, you have to match something of the mood in the previous song, take it down a notch, but not too far. Great drum opening keeps the tempo where we want it. Then a great melody/lyric/harmony song. "Down by the water, down by the old main drag..."

3. Real Love--Lucinda Williams. Lucinda evidently has found love. But there's always a bit of a snarl to her, even when the song is all sweetness. We've kept the tempo here, but taken a little risk by going more straight ahead rock and roll. But I think it works. "C'mon baby, we really got something. It's a soul connection, you're changing my world...It's a real love, It's a real love."

4. I Should Have Known It--Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. While we've got the electric guitars out, we'll let the Heartbreakers have a go. Great, great guitar licks. "It's the last time you're going to hurt me."

5. She's Long Gone--The Black Keys. And so we stay with a killer guitar lick, but take it down a notch in terms of the sonic wall. Blues moves. Distortion. "She's long, long gone..."

6. Sick of You--Cake. We stay in heartbreak alley a little with the happiest, dreariest song I know. Great groove on this one. "I'm so sick of you, so sick of me, I don't want to be with you."

7. White Blank Page--Mumford and Sons. We stay with the theme, but we've dropped back into acoustic mode. Great cd. Great song. "You did not think when you sent me to the brink. You desired my attention, but denied my affections."

8. Calamity Song--The Decemberists. We stay in the folk rock mode. With these guys, you always get great melodies. And here some great apocalyptic lyrics. "You and me and the war of the end times..."

9. The Cave--Mumford and Sons. These guys are after something serious. And you can feel it in the intensity of the music. It takes me to the limit of my banjo tolerance, but in this case it fits the intensity of the song. "But I will hold on hope. And I won't let you choke on the noose around your neck."

10. Holy Rollers for Love--Jakob Dylan. This cd started the year in music for me. Jacob Dylan with T. Bone Burnett is a pretty great combo. And I got to see him in concert in Portland this past summer. This is my favorite song on the cd. Great lyric. "World is crazy or maybe just holy rollers for love.

11. The King Knows How--Over the Rhine. I don't think this is as good as some of their earlier cd's. But this song is so much fun. Karen Berquist has such a great voice, smoky and full of texture. "I'm thinking it might be time so slide on over, slide on over."

12. Are We Really Through--Ray LaMontagne. We stay with a smoky voice, and bring it way down. Just an acoustic guitar and Ray's voice. This song hooks you in that gray place of real hurt and its memory. At the very least, you know you're alive. "Get so tired staring at the walls, weight so heavy and that mountain so tall. Is there no one there to catch me if I fall?"

13. Days Like This--Over the Rhine. Now we have to start thinking about the big finish.We can't let Ray have the last word. But we can't get there too fast. So, we go with OTR's cover of Kim Taylor's song, Days Like This. We keep the tempo down and stay with the acoustic feel, but bring the outlook up a bit. Longing to be sure, but hopeful. "All I wanna do is live life honestly. I just wanna wake up and see your face next to me. Every regret I have I will go set it free. And it will be good for me. It will be good for me."

14. Nothing but the Whole Wide World--Jakob Dylan. We're back in hopeful mode and Jakob keeps us there, without less of the longing. "Nothin but the whole wide world to gain. Nothin. Nothin. Nothin but the whole wide world to gain."

15. Everlasting Light--The Black Keys. I love this song. We're back to the blues riffs, but with this crazy falsetto lyric. It's as happy as songs like this can be. It's a funky, fun way to end a very satisfying 57.5 minutes of music. "Let me be your everlasting life. A train going away from pain. Love is the coal that makes this train roll. Let me be your everlasting light."

Synchroblog: Missional theology and Churches of Christ

2011-04-21T05:49:00.000-07:00

I was thinking last night (as I tossed and turned without sleep) about other challenges Churches of Christ face in light of missional impulses. Most are not unique to us. We have very little sense of what it means to be church on someone else's home turf. And the days of if we build they will come are largely over. But again, this is true across ecclesial traditions.

So, is there something uniquely challenging to Churches of Christ? Probably several things. I will note one here. Missional church begins with theology. We're after the missio Dei (mission of God), which means we are immediately into the questions of God. And we have not paid much attention to these questions over the years.

Specifically, we have avoided any kind of explicit Trinitarian theology. And since the World Wars, we have been pretty much devoid of any meaningful eschatology. Trinity and eschatology form the heart of missional theology, so at the very least we have some catching up to do (and many thankfully are taking up these conversations among us).

The problems, however, go beyond just needing to be conversant in certain theological themes. Our theology, or lack thereof, sponsors a certain view of the world. In our worship, evangelism, community service, and the like we are enacting our theology in many ways. Apart from changing our imagination about God and God's relationship with the world, missional will only be a call to more busyness doing good. And I think that's one of the things that's killing our churches now.

Synchroblog: Missional Challenges to the Churches of Christ

2011-04-20T18:24:00.000-07:00

One brief point tonight related to our blog topic for the day.

Historically speaking, church has been topic number one for Churches of Christ. It has been important for use to identify "marks" of the church that would allow us to stand in one-to-one comparison with New Testament churches. The idea of the missional church pretty much blows this kind of approach out of the water.

First, the missional church assumes that the church serves the mission of God, not the other way around. A missional maxim that I like goes like this: It's not the church has a mission, but rather that the mission has a church. To make the shift from being church-centered to mission-centered is no small shift. Because I've done it this way, I know that an extraordinary amount of energy goes into furthering the institutional concerns of the church. The church, its programs, numbers, members, etc, become the point. Our structures, forms, programs, leadership styles are all the product of a church centered imagination. We're not alone in this. All congregations that have defined themselves in the broad wake of Christendom have tended to imagine things this way. But we have kind of specialized in this kind of approach to thing. The missional impulse significantly challenges that way of thinking.

Synchroblog--The Missional Conversation and Churches of Christ

2011-04-18T07:27:00.000-07:00

Michael Hanegan, a student in our missional leadership program at Rochester College, has invited several of us to synchronize our blogposts this week to topics related to the missional church. And since I have a missional church lunch box, I feel it is my duty to participate. So, today, some reflections on why the missional church conversation is important to Churches of Christ.

When I was young, I used to hear preachers say things like, "the New Testament is a seed, that when cultivated in any soil produces the same plant." This was our way of saying we had restored the NT church. To do that, we had to flatten both the Bible and our understandings of culture. The cultural soil made no difference in what kind of plant was produced, either in the NT or in the contemporary world.

Beyond the massive naivete concerning the ways even this reading of the NT is culturally conditioned, this approach yields a bucketload of problems when it comes to mission. For now, let's just point out that it makes the tasks of reading and responding to cultures a fairly insignificant enterprise. And if I'm convinced of anything these days, it is that we live in a time of rapid and discontinuous cultural change. A church that marginalizes cultural engagement is setting its feet in concrete.

So, the missional church conversation is important for Churches of Christ because it takes seriously the need for a new and ongoing cultural engagement. Now, the missional church folks are not the only ones who are sounding the "cultural" bell, but I think they are doing it in ways that are not only theologically informed, but that also line up with our best lights in Churches of Christ. And here are three reasons why I think that.

First, it pursues a robust ecclesiology. In other words, the missional church conversation is serious about the church. And for better or worse, we've been very interested in the church. I found the missional church literature when the seeker movement was really booming. That "renewal" movement, like many evangelical impulses, runs thin on understandings of the church. In most evangelical theology, all the freight runs through the encounter between God and the autonomous individual. If this is your starting place, then cultural engagement will always look like a consumer science. By emphasizing the church, the missional conversation has the potential of charting a real alternative that nevertheless takes the various cultures in which we move seriously.

Second, when the church is emphasized, so are the Lord's Supper and baptism. In a tradition that has little in the way of theological scaffolding (we have no formal creeds, confessions, etc), practices serve as placeholders for theological reflection. And baptism and the Lord's Supper keep us close to a potential theology of the cross. I'm for any renewal impulse that would strengthen these emphases.

Finally, this missional church conversation is about social location. While other conversations, e.g. the emerging church, emphasize postmodernity, the missional church conversation is focused on post-Christendom. This makes a pretty big difference, and again points us back to our best lights in Churches of Christ. What's the difference? Discussions about postmodernity focus on how we know things (epistemology), which in turn tends to move the conversation toward aesthetics, usually related to worship styles. When you start with the issue of post-Christendom, the churches social location comes into view. If we're no longer in charge, and clearly in most places we're not, then what is our appropriate social location? This question holds the possible answer that we will identify with those who are not in positions of privilege or power--that we will learn to be culturally relevant by finding the Kingdom of God with the "least of these."

I'm a big fan of that part of our tradition. Call it the old Nashville strain or whatever. But it brought together the Kingdom of God, eschatology, grace, and ministry with the poor. We are quickly losing that part of our story. My Lutheran friend, Pat Keifert, who admires us in many ways, used to say when he would drive onto ACU's campus, "Humility didn't build this campus." He wasn't saying that we didn't have persons of humility. He was noticing that we had crossed the tracks culturally, that we were pointing to where we were headed culturally, not where we had come from. The missional church conversation has a chance to at least give pause to this enticing way of imagining ourselves.

So, the missional church conversation holds the promise of both continuity and discontinuity. By overcoming our naive understandings of gospel and cultures, it can point us to a new future. But it can do that without stripping us of important and life-giving aspects from our past.

Dylan on a Sunday--Top Ten Songs

2011-04-10T13:10:00.000-07:00

This will actually be read tomorrow by more than my faithful Dylan on a Sunday crowd (is two readers a crowd). Mike Cope asked me to do this for his blog tomorrow. People actually read his blog. But, for my faithful readers, you can say you saw it a day before everyone else.

I agreed to write a post on the top ten Bob Dylan songs before I stopped to think what a daunting task might be. I quickly googled other top 10 Dylan lists (there were lots of them), and this relieved my fears a bit. They vary widely. This is in part due to the massive catalog of songs to choose from, but it also depends on your criteria. This list is for me the top ten Dylan songs I can’t do without. Partly favorites, partly essentials. Some of them for the lyrics, some for the music, some of them for what they have meant and continue to mean culturally, and some for what they mean to me. So, knowing that your list would be different, here goes:

10. Lay, Lady Lay. This song wouldn’t have made my top 10 based only on the original version. But I heard Dylan sing this a few years ago live. It works better for me now with his retrograde pipes and smokin’ band. And it’s a great lyric.

Stay, lady, stay. Stay with your man awhile…

His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean

And you’re the best thing he’s ever seen.

9. Cold Irons Bound. This song stands in for me for a lot of Dylan’s most recent stuff. Hard to choose one and harder to list them all. Love Sick, Spirit on the Water, Workingman’s Blues, Beyond Here Lies Nothing. All great songs from his recent catalog. But if I had to choose, I’d go with Cold Irons Bound. You can almost smell the nicotine.

8. Ballad of a Thin Man. This song scratches an itch for me. It’s the perfect song about that guy who is missing his feedback loop. You know the one. The one who thinks he’s on top of it all, but hasn’t got a clue about what is really going on. More than anything else, I don’t want to be that guy. One of the great characters ever developed in a Dylan song. (And another song that sounds great with his new band).

Something is happening here

But you don’t know what it is

Do you, Mr. Jones?

7. Masters of War. This should probably be rated higher. But you can’t listen to this song that often, it’s so powerful and raw. It’s just as relevant today as it was when Dylan first performed it in the 60’s. Others have covered this with some effect (Pearl Jam, for instance), but Dylan’s howl of this song is without comparison.

You might say that I'm young

You might say I'm unlearned

But there's one thing I know

Though I'm younger than you

That even Jesus would never

Forgive what you do.

6. Make You Feel My Love. Probably one of Dylan’s most covered songs recently. Garth Brooks made it big and currently Adele has a pretty great version of it. But it’s a Dylan song, and in my opinion best delivered with some of the pretty knocked off of it. Definitely higher on the list if this is just a list of my favorites. And, definitely, my favorite love song lyrics.

I’d go hungry, I’d go black and blue

I’d go crawling down the avenue

There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do

To make you feel my love

5. Things Have Changed. This song doesn’t show up on many top 10 lists, but its one of my favorites. Such a great groove. This is classic Dylan. Tongue in check critique. A little personal apocalypticism. I’m down with this.

People are crazy and times are strange

I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range

I used to care, but things have changed

4. Just Like a Woman. I’m not saying that Dylan understands women, but a few of my female friends who listen to Dylan list this song as one of their favorites. Dylan’s vocal, the melody, the lyrics—they all come together on this one.

3. Most of the Time. You can’t be a great artist unless you have a great post-breakup song, and this is the best of all-time. I found it on the High Fidelity soundtrack (my favorite movie) and then later on Dylan’s album, Oh, Mercy (my favorite Dylan album). Some people you just never get over.

Most of the time…

I can smile in the face of mankind

Don’t even remember what her lips feel like on mine

Most of the time

2. The Times They are a Changin’. If you believe in the Kingdom of God, you have to like this song. I’ve always said that the one thing that ties all of Dylan’s work together is an apocalyptic thread. The current world is doomed and a new age is emerging. You can’t be a part of the old and participate in the new. That’s gospel. And it was the anthem for a very important generation. Huge song.

1. Like a Rolling Stone. Part of the soundtrack of the 60’s. And here’s the thing that makes this the quintessential Dylan song. Lots and lots of Dylan songs get covered, and often times we know the cover better than the Dylan version—All Along the Watchtower, Blowin’ in the Wind, Make You Feel My Love, Knocking on Heaven’s Door—you get the idea. Others have covered this song as well, but Dylan’s version is the definitive one. You don’t think of anyone else when you hear this song. It’s Dylan’s, and it’s a classic.

How does it feeee-ul?

Salvation, Archie Marshall, and Larry Brown

2011-04-09T14:30:00.000-07:00

Larry Brown, my favorite basketball coach of all-time, led the Kansas Jayhawks to the national championship in 1988. That team featured Danny Manning and a few key supporting players, including guards Kevin Pritchard and Archie Marshall. Brown is a coaching vagabond, and he left Kansas immediately following the championship to coach in the NBA with the San Antonio Spurs.

Archie Marshall had ended his Kansas season with a career-ending knee injury. This was back when an ACL tear was pretty much it for a basketball player. In Brown's first draft with the Spurs, he took Marshall in the third round even though he knew Marshall would never step on the floor. Class move on Brown's part. But I've often thought about how Marshall must have felt. I imagine it was bittersweet.

I think this because if Marshall was passionate about the game, it would not be enough to have the draft status of being an NBA player. The only satisfying thing would be to have stepped on the court to face Michael Jordan or Larry Bird, to actually play the game at the highest level.

I think about this story when I think about the meaning of salvation. Some views of salvation seem to think that being saved is being drafted even if you have no way of ever getting on the floor. What matters is being pronounced righteous, even though you're not. Salvation is about your status, and Brown's drafting Marshall even though he was not good enough to play gave him the status of being an NBA player.

But salvation is about more than status. It;s about getting on the floor and playing. Salvation in this sense would mean Marshall's knee becoming better than new. Salvation would mean lacing up the sneakers and getting on the floor, participating in the game at the highest level. And I think this is how salvation is conceived in the Bible. It is not salvation to simply be proclaimed righteous, but salvation actually involves becoming righteous. As Paul says, Christ became sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God.

Now when I say things like this, people think I've let loose of salvation by grace. But I don't think I have. In fact, I think I have a stronger view of grace than the view that salvation is only about being pronounced righteous. Let's see if I can walk you through that in future posts.

Opening Day. Amen.

2011-03-31T13:18:00.000-07:00

I'm one of those persons who feels a little religious on the opening day of baseball. It wasn't my best sport as a kid. I cared much more passionately about basketball. But baseball holds a reverence in my heart unrivaled by any other sport. It feels ancient and substantial, and I think this is in part because it is so ritually enacted. It has to be ancient to have developed such ritual drama. The way a batter prepares for each pitch. The way a pitcher looks in for a sign, while a base coach crosses himself. The dance between base runner and pitcher. The way the ump calls out strikes. The agreed upon ways a manager and ump argue calls. There are a thousand gestures in baseball and they all bear significance. For the initiated, they bespeak reverence. This is not to mention the high church aspects: first pitch, national anthem, Take Me Out to the Ballgame, Sweet Caroline.

Some of my thickest memories of life are connected to baseball. I love David James Duncan's short story, "The Mickey Mantle Koan." It beautifully describes Duncan's experience of playing long toss with his brother who died young from cancer. It is a moving, moving story, and the connection made between ball, gloves, and brothers is a big part of all of that.

In a similar way, baseball is attached to big memories I have of life with my dad. When I was 11, dad was working on a doctorate at a seminary in the San Francisco area. His program required residencies only every other summer. So, our family of four lived in a 15 foot trailer in a nearby trailer park during these summers, our permanent home being in Portland, OR. We went to Giants and A's games as we could. The Giants had Willie Mays, McCovey, Bobby Bonds, Juan Marichal. The A's featured Reggie Jackson, Sal Bando, Joe Rudi, Bert Campenaris, and a rookie flamethrower who won 27 games, Vida Blue.

But the best part of that summer was the afternoons when my dad would come home from classes or the library. He would grab the bat and ball and I would grab by Dick McAullife autographed fielder's glove (which means more now that I live in Detroit), and he would hit me fly balls. He'd hit some in front of me. He'd hit some over my head. I would catch everything he hit. The ball, bat, and glove tied us together. My dad and I connect on several levels in life, but none more viscerally real than the time he spent hitting me fly balls. I know guys whose relationship with their fathers is less ideal. But playing catch or chasing fungos could cover a multitude of sins. Or make priceless what was already rich.

I played my last year of Little League in the Skyline league in Wilshire Park in Portland, Oregon. I walked the diamond a few years ago when I was visiting Portland. Such thick, thick memories. I played for Frederick's Grain. I played mostly center field and shortstop when the coach's son wasn't there. I could go get the ball, but I couldn't hit much.

So, one of the greatest memories of my life is the day I hit one over the fence against a red headed lefty named David Nelson. I can still feel the connection in my hands when the ball connected with my 32 oz wooden Louisville Slugger. There is no feeling like that. No vibration. Sweet spot. Like the bat gave into the ball before it trampolined it into space. You don't even have to look. You know you tagged it. The ball sailed over the fence the moment my foot hit the first base bag. My legs turned to rubber. I had hit the ball over the fence! No one else was needed on that play. Just the pitcher and me. And now the singular moment of being the only one playing as I touched each base. I didn't need the fireworks or the playing of the music from The Natural to feel that way as I rounded for home. Pure euphoria. And my teammates, stunned by this unlikely event, were waiting to mob me at home plate. I can still feel the sun on my neck as I ran down the third base line, and the stings on my back as my teammates pounded me with congratulations. For the next few games I hit fifth in our order until reality dropped me back into the eight hole.

If I could choose a moment of my life to relive, that one would be high on the list of candidates.

So, opening day is a religious day, steeped in the ritual thickness of the game itself, and heightened by the mythological experience of dad and son, of wood and leather, of teammates and achievement. Play ball!

Dylan on a Sunday

2011-03-20T19:26:00.000-07:00

Tonight I went to hear a youth chorus sing hosted by the congregation for which I preach. This is one of those concerts where if you know some of the kids its far more enjoyable. I didn't. I'm not saying that for a bunch of teenagers they weren't good, but they have to be your teenagers for them to completely hold your interest for a few hours.

But despite my lack of natural enthusiasm for the event, I found myself deeply moved, even to tears at a few points. It's not that the musical experience was moving. This was no Spoon concert. It was the earnestness of the faces on these teens. Not the boys. Teenage boys are still becoming recognizable as humans. But the girls faces were so open and full of...of...of earnestness. I'm not sure if they believed deeply everything they were singing--that's a bit much to expect of teenagers. But they believed in what they were doing, and they're faces showed it. And it moved me.

It moved me probably because I veer a little toward the cynical--ok, maybe a lot toward the cynical. What human activity is there that is really deserving of this kind of belief? At the same time, however, I think there is this kind of grandparental thing happening in me that wants a world full of hope and belief for those coming after me. I'm not sure what to make of this change in me, but I think its a good thing overall.

What does this have to with Dylan? Not much. But it did make me think about the Christmas album he released two years ago. My friend and fellow Dylan devotee, John Ogren, is convinced that Dylan is on the up and up. That he is singing in earnest, full of the spirit of the season. It's not a slam dunk case. It's hard not to laugh out loud when you hear Bob singing, "Must be Santa," or "Silver Bells," and not to imagine Bob laughing right along all the way to the bank. But maybe its the grandparental thing in him as well. Cynical, yet strangely sentimental.

Dylan on a Sunday

2011-03-13T15:15:00.000-07:00

Most of the time, the ear buds provide the background music while I write in the coffee shop. The lyrics to songs whistle somewhere over my head. But for some reason today the lyrics were present to me, more so than usual. And they were certainly more present than the words I was looking for--the words I was hoping to write. And so what can you do? You have to pay attention. And because its Sunday and two of you hope I can sustain this habit of mine, I was paying attention to Dylan. Here are some of the lyrics that grabbed me today.

From "Things Have Changed"

I've been walking forty miles of bad road 

If the bible is right, the world will explode 

I've been trying to get as far away from myself as I can 

Some things are too hot to touch 

The human mind can only stand so much 

You can't win with a losing hand

This song is just flat great. It would definitely make my top ten Dylan tunes (but don't make me list them). I like this bit for the first three lines. I like that its forty miles of bad road. That's just biblical. And he follows that up with my favorite part, namely that his response to the fact that the world might explode is to get away from himself as far as he can. I can't tell you why or how, but I think I know exactly what he means.

From "Million Miles"

Rock me, pretty baby, rock me ’til everything gets real 

Rock me for a little while, rock me ’til there’s nothing left to feel 

And I’ll rock you too 

I’m tryin’ to get closer but I’m still a million miles from you

I like the refrain in this song. Closer, but never close enough. Still a million miles from you. And mostly the song is despairing. But in this stanza we're rocking it until it gets real.

From "Positively Fourth Street"

I wish that for just one time 

You could stand inside my shoes 

And just for that one moment 

I could be you

Yes, I wish that for just one time 

You could stand inside my shoes 

You’d know what a drag it is 

To see you

Some of Dylan's best songs are when he sees through the pretense. Like in "Ballad of a Thin Man" where the one guy who thinks he gets it is the most clueless. This song has some of that going for it. And I smile every time he sings "you'd know what a drag it is to see you."

From "Summer Days"

I got eight carburetors, boys I’m using ’em all Well,

I got eight carburetors and boys, I’m using ’em all 

I’m short on gas, my motor’s starting to stall

My dogs are barking, there must be someone around 

I got my hammer ringin’, pretty baby, but the nails ain’t goin’ down

This song plays well right now. We've been living beyond our means and on borrowed time. But summer's almost over (a nod to the prophet Jeremiah?) and burning eight carburetors has left us out of gas. But I love the last line, "I got my hammer ringin', pretty baby, but the nails ain't going down."

Finally, my favorite Dylan lyric of all time from "Make You Feel My Love."

I'd go hungry, I'd go black and blue

I'd go crawling down the avenue

No, there’s nothing that I wouldn’t do

To make you feel my love

Allah, Identity, and Open Structures

2011-03-12T14:21:00.000-08:00

I'm nearly through Miroslav Volf's book, Allah: A Christian Response. I have one big observation among the several I could make from this rich text. BIG OBSERVATION: The stance one takes with regard to issues of identity determines to a large extent how one will evaluate or understand commonalities and differences--in this case, differences between Christians and Musliums.

I think the most important section in Volf's book might actually be a little three page vignette in which he states his overall stance regarding commonalities and differences. The big question for Volf in determining the Christian response to Muslims is whether or not we worship the same God. While the starting place in asking this question might not be wholly determinative, Volf starts with those things that we have in common. (This he believes leads to the inescapable conclusion that we worship the same God).

In defending this approach he writes, "the way persons of faith see themselves in relation to others shapes how they approach the question of commonalities and differences between religions." Volf insists that a Christian approach to other religions begins with "a discerning generosity toward others" which requires one to begin with commonalities. To begin with differences, Volf suggests, is to take an approach that "rejoices in wrongdoing." In contrast, those who begin with a "commonalities" approach "are a bit like those who rejoice in the truth." This does not mean that anything goes, but "concentrating on what is common and keeping an alert eye to critical differences are but two aspects of 'rejoicing in the truth.'"

This week I'm preaching on the end of Matthew 5, the part that features the formula, "you have heard that it was said...but I say to you..." Here, Jesus' approach to the law and righteousness stands in contrast to other approaches on display in Matthew's gospel. I think Jesus is critiquing an approach to the law that would secure distinctiveness and identity by limiting its scope. In other words, if those parts of the law that make us distinctive from others can be defined and then observed, identity is secure. Jesus' approach is the opposite. He doesn't want to build a fence around the law so that it is manageable. He wants to knock the fences down and throw us ever deeper into the realities of God and neighbor. "You have heard it said, but I say to you" is a way of forming identity in relation to more, a surpassing righteousness, and by extension forming identity in relation to the other. We have our identity, not by holding on to our life or securing it, but precisely through losing it for the sake of the Kingdom.

The righteousness of God in Matthew is open range. There is always more and greater. There is always love of God and love of neighbor drawing us deeper into the ways of mercy. The Kingdom of Heaven is always coming, never fully arrived on this side of the eschaton. And this way of naming identity--through an open structure--is important to the mission of God. After all, in Matthew Jesus is not interested only in a distinctive people, but a people who can make disciples of all nations.

Volf's commonalities approach is open range, to my thinking. He identifies it more as an inclusivist approach as opposed to an exclusivist approach (though he knows that all approaches to faith have both inclusive and exclusive aspects). By this he is not suggesting that everyone is the same or that differences do not matter. Rather, he's identifying a stance that is more open to the other and that honors a God who is love.

As I read back through this, there is much to clarify here. But this is a blog, not a research paper, so I will continue to clarify if you will continue to read. All that to say...

Dylan on a Sunday-Birthday-Eve

2011-03-06T18:14:00.000-08:00

I'll be 51 tomorrow. Holy smokes, if you got em. I'm at that stage in life where they buy you the actual numbers/as/candles to put on your cake, if you get cake at all (something with less processed flour and sugar and more dietary fiber is what's called for at this stage in my life). But just because I'm beyond the candle phase of birthdays doesn't mean I should be done making wishes.

So, this year I'm wishing for a private Dylan concert for my birthday. Surely, that's not too much to ask. I'm sure my faithful blogging has blown some fresh wind into his career sails. He owes me. And I have some requests. He should, of course, pick a few songs that he thinks of when he thinks of my birthday. I'll leave those up to him. But I have some I want played as well. They're not necessarily my favorites, though some of them definitely are, but songs that would make for a great party.

We'd start with some older tunes that would get us in a party/dancing mood

   Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 (how else? this is how he started the concert I attended)
   Highway 61 Revisited (complete with the whistle)

We keep the mood going with some more recent rollers

   Things Have Changed (I play the Robert Downey Jr bit in this one)
   Jolene (not a fave, but we would definitely be dancing)
   Shake, Shake Mama (same as the previous song)

Then the lights come down a bit, and we let Bob serenade us

   Lay, Lady, Lay (the way his band plays it now)
   Just Like a Woman (One of Dylan's most poignant songs to my mind)
   What Good Am I? (I love this song)
   Most of the Time (One of Dylan's best songs, period)

And then to finish things, Bob brings me on stage and asks me to play guitar on the last two.

   Make You Feel My Love (we play my version, but he sings. None of this Garth Brooks stuff)
   Spirit on the Water (perfect ending)

He has such a good time that he stays for my friends and takes requests. Call em out friends. It's my birthday.

Allah, Rob Bell, Miroslav Volf and the Way We Treat Each Other

2011-03-05T10:28:00.000-08:00

I am reading Miroslav Volf's new book, Allah: A Christian Response, in anticipation of his speaking at Streaming, Rochester College's ministry event, May 16-18. Volf will be presenting from his other new book, Captive to the Word of God, at Streaming, but we will also feature as part of the program a round table discussion on Allah. So, I want to make sure I have this important book read in advance of the event. Surely, there are few issues more pressing in our world than the relations between Christians and Muslims.

I'm reading this book also in the wake of the bluster abounding related to Rob Bell's forthcoming book, Love Wins. It has been the target of a lot inflammatory rhetoric from Bell detractors who have not read the book but are nevertheless convinced that Bell espouses universalism in the book's pages. Gasp. (See Greg Boyd's informed response. He's actually read the book).

I thought of the Rob Bell stuff when I read these lines from Volf's introduction:

"Sometimes when I observe contemporary U.S. culture, with its hard fronts and nasty culture wars, I have a strange sense that I've seen something like it before--in the Communist and semitotalitarian state in which I grew up. The issues and positions are very different, but the spirit is strangely familiar. In all public discussion, there was a party line that people had to toe; if you diverged, you were deemed disloyal and suspected of betraying the cause. I sense a similar spirit today among progressives and conservatives in the United States when it comes to many hot-button issues, including Islam."

Volf proposes a political theology in this book. That is, part of our understandings of God will determine our public actions especially in response to those who differ from us. Much is at stake in this for Volf as both Christianity and Islam project growth in the years to come. Moreover, as democracy emerges in more places in the world, Christians and Muslims will both have certain freedoms and rights in the public square. How will we live together? Volf says we won't if the spirit he identifies in the quote above leads the way.

I'm a fan of Volf's and sympathetic with his thesis as stated in the introduction to the book. When I state convictions like Volf's to others, they sometimes assume that I'm saying that ideas don't matter, or that somehow I've given up on the notion of Truth. I would just point out here that Volf believes it down the line. He's an orthodox Christian, and he's committed to truth. In fact, it is precisely his understanding of truth revealed in Jesus Christ that informs his openness toward others (openness is not the same as endorsement or agreement). As he puts it:

"Ever since I lived under the dead hand of a semitotalitarian regime, I have resisted toeing the party line. I know that the boundary separating truth and falsehood is not the same as the boundary between political parties or ideological combatants. I want the truth, not politically expedient or ideologically "correct" positions. And, as a follower of Christ, I want the truth seen with the eyes of inviting and reconciling love, not the truth born of cold indifference or simmering hatred."

Blessed by Lucinda Williams

2011-03-03T14:22:00.000-08:00

I've been listening today to Lucinda Williams new one. I can't listen to her everyday, but on gray days like this her voice and attitude are perfect. If you buy the itunes deluxe version you get the rough recordings of the songs--the kitchen tapes. Mostly her strumming chords and singing. Her voice is particularly striking over the light guitar strumming. And the song that jumped out the most is called "Blessed." Beautiful lyrics.

Here are some of my favorite phrases:

We were blessed by the poor man who said heaven was in reach

We were blessed by the neglected child who knew how to forgive

We were blessed by the lawyer who didn't need to win

We were blessed by the blind man who could see for miles and miles

We were blessed by the mystic who turned water into wine

We were blessed by the wounded man who felt no pain

We were blessed by the wayfaring stranger who knew our name

We were blessed by the homeless man who showed us the way home

We were blessed by the forlorn, forsaken, and abused

We were blessed
Yeah we were blessed
Yeah we were blessed
We were blessed

To which, I say "Amen."

Tony Jones, Miroslav Volf, Scot McKnight and Me

2011-03-02T17:54:00.000-08:00

Tony Jones gave our May 16-18 conference, Streaming, a very nice plug on his blog yesterday. http://blog.tonyj.net/2011/03/join-miroslav-volf-and-scot-mcknight-and-me/.

Tony, and his partner Doug Pagit, are helping us with the conference. They fit in nicely with our first rate group of presenters. You know Miroslav Volf and Scot McKnight, but the "undercard" is just as solid. We will have some great preaching. David Fleer is my favorite preacher and Katy Hays could be. With Katy, think Barbara Brown Taylor and you'll be on the right track.

I don't have a brighter, more insightful friend than Jannie Swart. Jannie was the pastor for the largest Dutch Reformed congregation in Johannesburg, South Africa. I have a friend who has led prayer at Nelson Mandela's birthday party. His ministry there was courageous and impacting. He's brilliant and a great communicator. Josh Graves is one of Rochester College's own. He is the minister for the Otter Creek Church of Christ in Nashville, TN. Josh is a bright light, full of passion and insight. These are some of the leading voices that will draw us into conversation on what it means to read Scripture in light of the mission of God.

One change from the schedule listed on our website is the choice of book that we will feature in our last roundtable discussion. Volf has a new book hot off the press, Allah: A Christian Response. I can't think of a more timely topic. Make sure you register early. http://www.rc.edu/pages/streaming/

Dylan on a Sunday

2011-02-13T20:11:00.000-08:00

Today was a pretty great day for someone who writes a regular blog called Dylan on a Sunday. He performed on the Grammy awards. It wasn't the greatest performance. He croaked out a quick version of Maggie's Farm. What made it a great night was that he performed with two newer groups that I really like--Mumford and Sons and the Avett Brothers. An inspired grouping. But back to this in a minute.

I feared I wouldn't be home in time to see them perform because I spent the early evening watching the Portland Trailblazers play the Detroit Pistons live in Auburn Hills. I'm a huge Blazer fan, have been since their expansion year, 1970. Who else knows that their original starting five were Rick Adleman, Geoff Petrie, Gary McGregor, Jim "Crazy Legs" Barnett, and Leroy Ellis? So, I'd go to see the Blazers any chance I get.

But it was even better to watch them tonight, because the Pistons honored my friend, Garth Pleasant. Garth is retiring after 38 years of coaching at Rochester College. They gave Garth courtside seats right next to the Blazers bench and I sat with him for warm-ups and the entire first quarter. There's nothing like it. The game is so powerful when you see it from that level. And it was so great to be that close to the players on the bench as the play developed--to see their reactions, the way they root for each other and laugh at each other. I was within feet of Lamarcus Aldridge, Brandon Roy, Nate McMillan, and Buck Williams. I know its ridiculous, but I was on cloud nine.

Rudy Fernandez, the Blazers back-up guard, nearly jumped out of his skin when the Pistons introduced their starters. The Pistons use these massive flame throwers at either end of the court to announce each player. Its loud and produces amazingly intense heat. Rudy was not prepared for the first blast and his teammates had great fun at his expense. I like that I was part of that. I was struck by other things I would never have necessarily known. This team loves Joel Pryzbilla, the back-up center who is just coming back from a serious leg injury. And Andre Miller, their aging, slowish point guard gets massive respect from his teammates.

And the tribute to Garth was great. They gave him a framed Pistons jersey with his name on it. They interviewed him in front of the crowd. And they had him shoot free throws for charity. I groaned a bit when he bricked the first one and banked the second one in. But from there on, he was money. Nothing but net. Lots of money for charity. Way to go Garth.

The Blazers won. So, I would have been happy with my choice even if it meant that I would miss Dylan and company. I walked into the house and turned on the television just in time for the first note of Mumford and Sons. Perfect. And they just killed it. They performed with such power and passion. They made the Avett Brothers look tame, which is no small feat. Both bands performed well. So, Dylan was just the cherry on top.

They had reported on Paste's website beforehand what songs Mumord and Avett were doing, but they didn't know what Dylan would do. Given the folk-ish flavor of his playing partners, I thought it would be something from his early stuff, and I swear I thought about Maggie's Farm being the perfect choice. Full of attitude, energy, protest. I've decided for myself, I'm not gonna work on Maggie's farm anymore. So, when he started croaking out the words, I just smiled.

He looked and sounded old next to his playing mates. His shirt was tucked in like an old man's with his pants kind of hiked up around his waist. His voice was a croak. He wasn't playing a guitar or his keyboard, so he looked a little awkward just standing there "singing." But the whole thing was worth it just to see how much Mumford and Sons and the Avett Brothers were into it. They played with Bob Dylan. It would be a little like what it was like for me being in the Blazers' huddle tonight, only a thousand times better.

The days that all the tumblers fall together are rare. Many days things like awe and wonder and thankfulness are practices. We have to remember to keep them alive through disciplines. But some days they wait for us, stalk us, pry us open. Today is one of those days for me, and I think it is likely also one for Mumford and Sons and the Avett Brothers. And it is linked to those other days that have been like that for me. Thick with sensory memory. Perfect.

Baptism and Rene Descartes

2011-02-09T10:47:00.000-08:00

This past Sunday marked my last sermon in a series on the "five-finger" exercise. That meant a sermon on baptism--the big enchilada where Churches of Christ are concerned. If you're interested in the entire sermon, you can find it (give it a few days) at http://lochurchofchrist.org/content.cfm?id=213.

Here, I just want to talk about one point I made in the sermon. The idea that being a Christian without the experience of baptism is a fairly recent phenomenon. To my knowledge, it is only a recent development (within the last 150 years?) that baptism has been seen as optional or even unnecessary. Before that, people argued about the mode or proper subject of baptism, but not about its necessity. So, why this recent development.

As with all problems I experience in life, I blame Rene Descartes. I am kidding, mostly. It's not Descartes himself, but a legacy that exalts the interior of the individual as the place of ultimate reality. Decartes' dictum, "I think, therefore, I am," captures a prevalent impulse that locates what is most real within the individual conscience. The real action takes place, not external to me or even involving my body, but within me. So, we say things like "baptism is the outward sign of an inward reality." What's important here? The interior of the individual. And who am I as an individual? The sum of my thoughts and feelings. Baptism is only important as it relates to those, which means sometimes it is not important at all.

This exalting of the interior of the individual corresponds to understandings of language, symbols, and rituals that also characterize the Enlightenment and certain "modern" notions. Symbols only point to reality, they don't participate in it. Words only point to what is real. Rituals, like baptism, are "mere rituals" or "only symbolic" of greater realities. And because all the real action happens inside me, what's real doesn't need to be mediated to me through a sign or language or ritual, it comes to me directly.

It is not surprising, in light of this, that evangelicalism in North America, the reigning champion of this view of the individual, would diminish the importance of baptism. Lest we are too hard on evangelicals, however, it is important for those of us within Churches of Christ to recognize our own affinity with this view of life and the sideways way we attached it to baptism. The same impulse, for instance, that privileges the interior of the individual in relation to baptism also allows an individual to feel justified in switching congregations if they are personally dissatisfied. Or, this impulse is present in the primary ways we evaluate worship. "I enjoyed that today." Or, "That didn't connect with me at all." We spend an inordinate amount of time and energy thinking about how our worship will connect with the interiors of individuals.

Part of the Enlightenment impulse related to the individual also had to do with notions of progress and self-mastery. The appeal of baptism for many early Stone-Campbell leaders was precisely because it was something we could do to guarantee our salvation. Ironically, it was a way to guarantee our standing before God apart from tradition--a naked (no, not literally) encounter between the individual and God.

I want to put baptism in a different light. Like all things, if it is saving, baptism is something God does through the mediation of others--community, water, Spirit, death and resurrection of Jesus, etc. Second, symbols and rituals do not only mimic or point to realities, they help to create them. They are not simply substitutes for something more real. They accomplish something in ways that other, perhaps more straightforward, accounts of things can't. Baptism does something real that is greater than whatever it is going on inside of us. Finally, the measure of all things is not the interior life of the individual. We are persons and have identities not because we are self-conscious, but precisely because we are conscious of the other. As individuals, we are not the measure of the meaning of life. The saving work of God on our behalf comes through our bodily participation in a community called into the realities of the work of Jesus. Baptism enacts this very reality.

Dylan on a Super Sunday

2011-02-06T13:48:00.000-08:00

Today we get the Black Eyed Peas for our Super Bowl entertainment. I'm good with that. I like watching them perform. And its a bit of a switch up from recent performers. The past few years have gone more the living legend route--The Who, Paul McCartney, Tom Petty. They've needed acts that don't give them any wardrobe malfunction worries.

So, I say why not Dylan. No wardrobe malfunction worries here. (You're shaking yourself, aren't you). This got me to thinking what the set list might be for a Dylan Super Bowl. What three songs would he do?

Before I give you my lists, I think its worth noting that a recent Dylan tour was of minor league baseball parks. There's something classic about that, something pure. And the Super Bowl, in contrast, has become the most silicone-enhanced, over-hyped, steroid-ridden celebration of consumption we experience in American culture. So, wardrobe malfunction safe aside, Dylan would be an ironic choice.

Given the nature of the Super Bowl and my own Dylan favorites, I'd choose the following:

Things Have Changed--One of my favorite Dylan songs. This song is up-beat enough to get the crowd moving. And the jaded lyrics would be the perfect counter to Super Bowl hype--"I used to care, but things have changed."

Beyond Here Lies Nothin'--In the same vein, and off the most recent cd. I'd go with Cold Irons Bound in this place, but its just too long. Beyond Here Lies Nothin' rolls. It's shorter. And it would again suggest that this "super" thing might have gotten a little out of control.

Highway 61 Revisited--I would love to hear Dylan's current band get after this classic. It's a fun Dylan song, a great one to end on and would again send the message that people will watch nearly anything if you set up grandstands. "Now the rovin gambler...was trying to create the next world war. He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor...He said I think it can be easily done. We'll just put some bleachers in the sun out on Highway 61."

I'm thinking though, that he'd have to go with more familiar tunes. Old standards that everyone would recognize. So, a more realistic playlist would be as follows:

Like a Rolling Stone. This would get the crowd going. How does it fee-ul?

But then we dim the stadium lights and bring the mood down. We give everyone something da-glo to waive. Dylan sings Knockin on Heaven's Door. And the 20-something nudges his dad and says, "He's doing Guns and Roses!"

We end with an updated The Times They are a Changin'. The band rocks it out. There are pictures of Egypt on the big screen. We'll end by remembering that the Super Bowl is just a game. "Your sons and your daughters are beyond your control..."

Either list, I'm good.

N. T. Wright's Surprised by Hope

2011-02-05T17:11:00.000-08:00

I'm cruising through N. T. Wright's recent book, Surprised by Hope, (on my mother's ipad--don't get me started) marking quotes. Part of Wright's thesis in this book, close to the work in my dissertation, is that our truncated views of salvation also truncate our understandings of mission. I read Wright's stuff about hope and I think, "amen." But it dawned on me as I read that some of what he's saying many Christians would find shocking. Do these shock you?

"It comes as something of a shock, in fact, when people are told what is in fact the case: that there is very little in the Bible about "going to heaven when you die" and not a lot about a postmortem hell either."

"The wonderful description in Rev 4 and 5 of the 24 elders casting their crowns before the throne of God and the lamb, beside the sea of glass, is not, despite Charles Wesley's great hymns, a picture of the last day, with all the redeemed in heaven at last. It is a picture of present reality, the heavenly dimension of our present life."

Wright finds troubling the view of the future in these classic hymn lryics.

"Till in the ocean of thy love
We lost ourselves in heaven above."

"Heaven's morning breaks and earth's vain shadows flee..."

He writes, "Some of the hymns in the revivalist and charismatic traditions slip easy into the mistake, cognate as we shall see with misleading views of the "second coming," of suggesting that Jesus will return to take his people away from earth and "home" to heaven. Thus declares that wonderful hymn, "How Great Thou Art," in its final stanza, declares:
When Christ shall come, with shout of acclimation,
And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart.
The second line might better read, "And heal this world, what joy shall fill my heart."

Wright points out that in the climactic scene in Revelation, the saints are not taken up into heaven, but the new Jerusalem comes down to earth. Moreover, he suggests that our preoccupation with heaven as a home owes much to a spiritualizing tendency (Platonic?) that simply doesn't appear in the NT, and with consequences.

"English evangelicals gave up believing in the urgent imperative to improve society (such as we find with Wilberforce in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) about the same time that they gave up believing robustly in the resurrection and settled for a disembodied heaven instead."

"Much Christian and sub-Christian tradition has assumed that we do all indeed have souls that need saving, and that the soul, if saved, will be the part of us that goes to heaven when we die. All this, however, finds minimal support in the New Testament, including the teaching of Jesus, where the word soul, though rare, reflects ...what we would call the whole person..."

"Resurrection meant bodies. We cannot emphasize this enough, not least because much modern writing continues, most misleadingly, to use the word as a synonym for life after death in the popular sense."

"The early Christians hold firmly to a two-step belief about the future: first, death and whatever lies immediately beyond; second, a new bodily existence in a newly remade world."

"Only in the late second century, a good 150 years after the time of Jesus, do we find people using the word resurrection to mean something quite different than what it meant in Judaism and early Christianity, namely (what people came to believe later), a spiritual experience in the present leading to a disembodied hope in the future."

Enough? To be fair to Wright, I've lifted these out of context. The blows are likely easier to take in context, Still, he does mess with most of our understandings of the future, but only because he thinks there's something more promising in the biblical understanding. So, read the book to get the full picture.

p.s., for those of view looking for an alternative to marcus borg, et al, this is a good place to go.

Black on a Sabbath

2011-01-30T10:35:00.000-08:00

I have a new playlist this week, inspired by the most recent Black Keys cd. It's simply titled "Black," and it has a mix of songs from groups with the word "Black" in their band name. Now, I teased you with the Black Sabbath reference in the title. Truth is, I don't own any Black Sabbath music. But I do own quite a bit of Black Crowes, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and Black Keys music. And I'm a big fan of all three groups. So, I made a playlist of about 25 songs to aid my dissertation writing.

All three bands are blues-rock oriented. This might explain in part their common choice of the word "Black." Your song choices are somewhat limited when your band performs under the term black. No Barry Manilow covers here.There's a certain grittiness to what they do. All of them feature great guitar work and soulful vocals. All of its great played very loud.

A few years ago, in my previous job, I asked an English prof who had taken a sabbatical to study the blues to do a presentation on the gospel and the blues at our annual Bible lectureship. He not only made a presentation, he brought the best blues players in the region together to play live. We hosted the session in the commons area of the library. Yes, the library. The windows were rattling. I had students write letters of complaint about the old dudes who were rocking the library and keeping them from studying. It was one of my prouder moments as the Bible lectureship director.

The English prof made a pretty big point that the blues never really make the turn to good news. This is what makes them the blues. Their power was precisely in their ability to capture in unvarnished form the underside of life.

This might very well be right. It is certainly the most valuable contribution the blues make with regard to truth telling in the world. And I would add that this capacity to come alongside the sufferer, not to talk them out of their suffering, but to join them and to name it, is part of the redeeming work of God in the world.

Which is why I hesitate a little with the assessment that the blues, if they are the blues, never make the gospel turn. There is no question, for instance, that the music of the Black Crowes dips into the musical genre of gospel if not its content. And nearly the entire cd, Howl, by BRMC is devoted to not only a gospel feel, but gospel lyrics. When you listen to BRMC, you get the sense that they have positioned themselves on the razor's edge. They have placed themselves on the faultline between light and dark and for them it could go either way. For them, the black is black. It's the other side of light, not simply the color of the leather they wear as a biker band. It is the place of struggle, the place from which light must shine if light is to be any good at all.

So, I am attracted to these bands musically. They are good. They make my head bob, even though I know how dorky that looks. But I am also appreciative of the worlds they evoke. As I write, I am listening to my playlist. BRMC: "It's the weight of the world I know as I struggle to be whole. It is the weight of the world I know..."

Five Finger Sermons

2011-01-27T13:08:00.000-08:00

Some of you have asked if you can hear the sermons in my series on the "five finger exercise" that I've been blogging about for the past few weeks. You can hear them, all except the first one which for some reason did not record (which is a shame, because its my favorite in the series). But you can listen to Believe, Confess, and Repent at the following link: http://lochurchofchrist.org/content.cfm?id=213

Of course, that leaves us minus the sermon on baptism. I've decided not to do that one. Just kidding. I'll be gone this Sunday, so I will preach the one on baptism on Feb 6 and it should be online sometime after that.

I offer this link with some trepidation. I hate listening to my sermons. Do I really sound like that? Do I really talk that slow? Am I chewing on something? Why did I leave that part out? Why doesn't that make sense? So, I have chosen to believe that I am much better live than on tape or cd. This only applies to preaching. I am a much better friend on paper, or on facebook, than in real life. And I'm a much better basketball player when I talk about it than I am when I actually step foot on the court. But preaching? So much better live. You have to trust me on this.

The Circumstances of Allegiance

2011-01-24T18:36:00.000-08:00

I would not be a Dallas Cowboys fan today if I hadn't become one when I was six years old. Jerry Jones would make me absolutely sick (because he turns my stomach fairly frequently as it is) if it weren't for Mel Renfro, Bob Hayes, Bob Lilly, Chuck Howley, Cornell Green, Don Perkins, Lee Roy Jordan, and so on. Jerry world, with its enormous grandiosity, second only to Jerry's own overgrown sense of himself, should make me root for the Redskins. But Don Meredith and Craig Morton and Jerry Rhome...

I teased my Auburn friends that they only won the national championship over my Ducks by using "professional" players. But truth be told, any team that benefitted from Nike's largesse as much as the Ducks do would put them automatically on my root against list, except for the fact that they are the Ducks. And that means Dan Fouts, Bobby Moore (aka, Ahmad Rashad), Russ Francis, Bobby Newland, and the memories of the afternoon sunshine on my face as I sat in the endzone at Autzen stadium as a boy. So, I'm hoping that Nike continues to pump massive amounts of money into the program that produced Dave Wilcox and Norm Van Brocklin.

So, this might be an essay on how loyal I am, the facts be damned. I will admit to believing bandwagon fans to be a lower species of human life. As a sports fan, I mate for life. But what really got me thinking about this was the way the word missional gets thrown around these days. It's almost like Jerry Jones owns the word now. But I've been down with missional long before it became the buzz word. I wish I could separate the word from its use, get the Cowboys a different owner, make the Ducks respectable without the Nike money printing press. Given that I can be a grumpy purist, its possible that I might be one of those guys fighting against the word (gasp) if it weren't for the fact that I found it when I did.

I've tried to learn to live constructively with my new circumstances. I've adapted the way I talk about things over time. I try not to use the term "missional church" so much now. And I try not to use it as a catch-all adjective meaning "good." "This lunch is so missional." I try to use it these days to talk about a new missional era. And I'm convinced that its use is still worth all the trouble. It refers to something that is with us, and will be for the unforeseeable future. More, change comes through new language, and the irritating aspects of the word can serve processes of transformation. Still, its become harder to be a fan. So I guess what you want is that when you think of missional and me, think Tom Landry, not Jimmy Johnson.

Cake on a Sunday: I'm So Sick...

2011-01-23T13:25:00.000-08:00

I'm so sick of you
So sick of me
I don't want to be with you

So go the lyrics to the catchiest tune on the new Cake cd. I would listen to the song regardless of the lyrics. It's infectious. Great beat. Thumping bass line. Great guitar work. Pleasing melody. I can't help but tap my foot and smile when the song begins. It's so happy. Except for these lyrics.

The bridge is done in semi-rap style and sets the theme of the song deeper.

Every shiny toy
That at first brings you joy
Will always start to cloy and annoy

Every camera every phone
All the music that you own
Won't change the fact you're all alone (All alone!)

Every piece of land
every city that you plan
will crumble into tiny grains of sand

This message is hardly new, though seldom is it packaged with such a catchy beat. It sounds like an Ecclesiastes update. All is vanity, even your ipad. There is nothing, it seems, free from the inevitable loss of shine, from an erosion of meaning and significance, from a going to seed.

Of all the wisdom books, I'm down most with Ecclesiastes. If one of your favorite Bible verses is from Proverbs, I'm likely to avoid you at parties or take you out in the yard and rub your face in the world. My own experience is closer to cloy and annoy. Even things that are good and have provided meaning over time can lose their ability to sustain you.

This "all things are vanity" take is not the part of the song that makes me despair. I think that this is not only a reality, but necessary for faith to avoid the clutches of idolatry. The troubling part of the song to me is the line, "won't change the fact that you're alone." That's the zinger. Nothing worse.

So, I found comfort watching the video. It's shot in front of an abandoned building. And there are a number of requisite images to convey the less than uplifting tone of the song. But it is still performed by a band. And that is the most striking image of the video. These guys playing together. I have so often wanted to know the feeling of playing in a rock band. It is a joyful "being with." It appears on this side of things to be a way of being connected to others--in time, in space, in melody--that very little else can match. So, the song itself in all of its catchiness says to me more than the lyrics.

"I'm so sick of you, so sick of me..." Catchy, huh?

The Good News of Repentance

2011-01-20T08:23:00.000-08:00

My hunch is that few of us have had someone say, "Repent!" and received that as a positive thing. It sounds like scolding and none of us enjoy being scolded. But when Jesus announces the nearness of the Kingdom of God in Mark 1:15, the word repent is tied to the word gospel, or good news. "The time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is near; repent and believe the gospel."

I typically hear the word repent a little like the old song, "Santa Claus is Coming to Town." "You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, I'm telling you why..." We receive it as a warning related to bad behavior. And when John the Baptist calls for repentance, its often attached to his dire warnings for the religious leaders who come to observe what is going on in the desert.

But I would point out precisely here that there were many who gladly received John's baptism of repentence. For them repentence was good news, and I think not because they felt particularly guilty about this or that sin. Rather, the appearance of an Elijah-type figure in the wilderness preaching baptism and forgiveness of sins signaled that the Kingdom of God might be finally coming. And that when the Kingdom of God comes, there might be a reversal of fortunes. The winners might be declared losers and the losers winners.

Jesus' announcement that the time is fulfilled and the Kingdom is near would certainly match this expectation. This announcement holds out the possibility that life might now be lived under different management. That regime change might be afoot. Those who benefit from the current power arrangements won't be happy, but those willing to turn their lives in the direction of the coming Kingdom of God will find themselves suddenly on the right side of history.

The Kingdom of God is not simply an improvement of conditions on the ground. The Kingdom of God is an alternative to those conditions. To belong to a new regime that exists as an alternative to all other power arrangements requires an entirely new set of commitments. To belong to the new age coming in the fullness of time necessitates more than change--it necessitates a turning, a reversal. One simply cannot stay the same and welcome the Kingdom of God.

So, repentance is the opportunity to align our lives with the interests of the coming reign of God. And to the extent that we believe that the Kingdom of God is peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, then the call to repentance will be received as good news. Repent and believe the good news.

Dylan on a Sunday

2011-01-16T19:18:00.000-08:00

So, what to do about those pesky "Christian" albums that Dylan produced in the 80's. Most assessments of Dylan pan these years as a low point in his career. While his soul might have been saved, he was lost musically. He sold out, became preachy, turned his back on his previous work and his audience. You get the picture.

But I've read in the past few weeks a few reassessments of these years from Dylan devotees who had once been in that group that held that the Christian years were the low point for Dylan. Truth is, these reappraisals go, when taken now in relation to the overall body of his work, the Christian albums aren't really that much of an anomaly. In fact, some of his most interesting songs, musically speaking, are on these albums. And no one denies that Dylan is vitally engaged with the music in these works. If he's lost, no one told Dylan. And his concerts, these writers admit, were nothing if not passionate. From that standpoint, this may have actually been Dylan at his best.

So, as a theologian, it might seem that my take on this might be "told you so." I am glad if the knee-jerk because-its-Christian-it-must-be-artistically-inferior days might be waning. But that's less because I'm a theologian and more because everyone's work should be taken on its merits, Christian or not. Truthfully, as a theologian these are not his most interesting albums to me. I'm not sure what Dylan's personal beliefs are these days, but his current work is still shot through with biblical allusions and theological themes that are more interesting to me than his particular brand of theology in the "Christian" albums.

But what does interest me in this reappraisal is the issue of passion. In fact, its this characterization that makes me want to listen more deeply to these albums. I am convinced that the best art is done from the inside out, that passion communicates, that passion embodied conveys authenticity. And that passion comes and goes, or at least those times when everything is shot through with it.

I think this is true for artists, but also for being Christian. I don't think its unusual for there to be seasons when we're set on fire, completely sold-out, animated by some source of passion beyond ourselves. These are days to cherish. But I don't think it unusual for that to be only for a time. When your hair is burning, its tempting to think this is the way things should always be and that this is how everyone should be. This is understandable, and maybe we need people who are on fire to believe that so that we can remember what that's like too even if it feels a little condescending. But I think that these days mostly live on through something that burns on a little lower flame, one that doesn't flame out.

I think Dylan's recent stuff is his best, most interesting. And I don't think we get these last few cd's apart from his "Christian" period. So, here's to passion and its lingering genius.

Speaking Salvation

2011-01-15T13:27:00.000-08:00

The day I was baptized in the cold waters of the Yamhill River, I made the "good confession." I placed myself in a line of many before me who had confessed Jesus as the Son of God as a part of my baptismal experience. My dad, who baptized me, made me repeat the confession, not just affirm it with a yes response to a question. I felt at the time that this was part of the burden of being a preacher's kid. I had a little extra duty to perform. I said after him, "I believe...that Jesus is the Christ...the Son of God." Of course, in my tradition, the really important thing came next--the baptism itself. The confession was merely the prerequisite for the thing that counted.

But I've reevaluated that moment over time. The confession, like all confessions, brought about a new state of affairs. I have a greater appreciation for Paul's statement in Romans 10, "with the heart we believe and so are justified, but with the mouth we confess and so are saved." Confession, I am convinced, does not just point to realities (though it does that for sure), but is part of what brings those realities into being. My confession that afternoon brought about a new state of affairs.

This, I realize, is a very strong view of language. I think I'm justified in this from both a philosophical and theological point of view. It will suffice here to say that in a faith that believes God speaks the world into existence, it is not too far a distance to affirm that what we say or speak participates in this larger work of creation.

From that perspective, it is not surprising to notice the numerous confessions that sprinkle the pages of the NT (and OT for that matter). Or to be struck by the pastoral epistles' insistence that Timothy and Titus focus on "healthy words" (sound doctrine) in contrast to the words of others "that eat away like gangrene." When we confess certain things, we participate in bringing about certain realities.

And this is salvation--participation in an alternative reality, in a new state of affairs. So, with the heart we believe and so are justified, and with the mouth we confess and so are saved.

I Love it When a Plan Comes Together

2011-01-14T12:28:00.000-08:00

Today I sent students back to their primary classrooms--their ministry settings. For a week, we dwelled in Scripture, read books, talked together, laughed together, shared food, and enjoyed each other here in Rochester, Michigan. In particular, we spent the week discussing ministry issues surrounding gospel and cultures. Our time together in these intensive weeks is important and formative. But theses students do the bulk of their learning in our graduate program by being together in online community while they discern the work of God in their ministry contexts.

This group has in less than a year become an amazing learning community. They were together as a group only once before--this past August. But they found each other this week as dear friends, joined by our common work. An ethnographer would have a field day in their presence. Their community is already thickly construed, dense with stories, inside jokes, rituals, and roles. I marveled as I watched them this week.

This week, and others like them over the past year and a half, have been confirmation that we have created a powerful learning environment. We are producing missional leaders in a collaborative, collegial community. Our students live full time in Michigan, Texas, California, Oregon, Washington, Ohio, Tennessee, Illinois, and even Brazil. Yet we have a well defined, common learning space in the rhythm of intensives and online interaction. And the actual practice of ministry sets the agenda. Our conversations move more often than not from the congregation and its immediate context to the readings or course materials, not just the other way around.

I think the design of our degree has attracted a particular kind of student. And this type of student is a motivated learner who knows the stakes in play in the day-in-day-out of ministry. They are bright, ignited by theological depth. And they are interested in the frontiers of ministry, willing to take risks for the sake of the Kingdom. They are preachers, elders, youth ministers, church planters, campus ministers, church volunteers, etc. And all of them are explorers who have little patience for MWF at 9:00 am while the world is spinning around them.

My second year students, a different group, spent the week in Durham, NC. Part of that time they spent with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and the "new monastic" community with which he is involved. I have received email from some of those students telling me what a rich week of learning this has been for them. And I also received today a note from Jonathan.

Mark,

I wanted to write and let you know how much I (and the community here) enjoyed your group of students last weekend. Higher education is changing, and I suspect the sort of cohort model you're developing will become more and more important within the academy. But it is now and always has been good news for the church to put action and reflection on the ground, together in the same place. Was glad to be part of it and wanted to celebrate both your vision and the work you've put in to make it happen.

Peace and all good to you,

Jonathan

So, today I am thankful. Thankful for Rochester College who had the vision for this, especially for John Barton and Rubel Shelly who have encouraged me every step of the way. For the outstanding faculty who have been more than willing to stretch themselves, work past their familiar landmarks, and learn new ways of engaging students. And I am particularly thankful for these courageous cohorts of students who have established the validity of our vision.

Dylan on a Sunday

2011-01-09T19:49:00.000-08:00

I opened my Dylan playlist today like I would a fortune cookie. What would rise to the top in random mode? Would my faith in fortune cookies be bolstered by Bob's ability to name my reality? What was I hoping for? Something like "The Times, They are a Changing." Today, I would have even taken "Rainy Day Women." But no, I got "Cry Awhile."

I like this song. There are days when its good to hear that its someone else's time to cry.

I'm on the fringes of the night, fighting back tears that I can't control

Some people they ain't human, they got no heart or soul

Well, I'm crying to The Lord - I'm tryin' to be meek and mild

Yes, I cried for you - now it's your turn, you can cry awhile

Well, there's preachers in the pulpits and babies in the cribs

I'm longin' for that sweet fat that sticks to your ribs

I'm gonna buy me a barrel of whiskey - I'll die before I turn senile

Well, I cried for you - now it's your turn, you can cry awhile

Well, you bet on a horse and it ran on the wrong way

I always said you'd be sorry and today could be the day

I might need a good lawyer, could be your funeral, my trial

Well, I cried for you, now it's your turn, you can cry awhile

Your funeral. My trial. I know the sentiment. But I wasn't willing for that to be today's fortune. So, I hit random again. Like a Rolling Stone? Ring Them Bells? Shake, Shake Momma? Nope. I got Most of the Time.

Now, this is absolutely one of the greatest Dylan tunes ever. It's easily one of my top two or three favorites. But its not the most uplifting song. Here Dylan's trying to convince himself he's over the woman he loved. Why he hardly thinks of her at all, "most of the time." Which is this sad song's way of saying "all of the time."

Most of the time my head is on straight
Most of the time I'm strong enough not to hate
I don't build up illusion 'til it makes me sick
I ain't afraid of confusion no matter how thick
I can smile in the face of mankind
Don't even remember what her lips felt like on mine
Most of the time.

OK, one more try to wrest a happy fortune from Dylan. Hit the random play again and get "When the Deal Goes Down." A touching song to be sure. But I was hoping for something more uplifting than death. Good thing I don't believe in fortune cookies.

So, I thought about changing artists, just for this Sunday, to come up with something a little brighter. Unfortunately, my itunes seems to be missing artists who are uplifting. This explains a lot. It made me think of the opening lines from the movie High Fidelity:

"What came first? Music or the misery? We worry about kids playing with guns or some kind of violent videos where a culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs, about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listen to pop music?"

Top Ten Covers

2011-01-06T08:38:00.000-08:00

Just playing around yesterday, wondering if I could come up with the top ten covers in my itunes library. It was hard. Even with a fairly high standard for consideration, I had over 25 songs in my first cut. And I've left a lot of really good ones on the cutting floor to get down to ten. Johnny Cash's covers of Hurt and Personal Jesus, Lenny Kravitz's cover of American Woman, Sheryl Crow's Sweet Child of Mine, Antony's cover of Knockin on Heaven's Door. You get the idea.

But here are my current favorite 10.

10. Sweet Jane, Cowboy Junkies. Two Velvet Underground songs make my list. You know you have a good cover when its kind of the definitive take on the song. And I think the Cowboy Junkies's version is the definitive one.

9. Ain't No Sunshine, Tyrone Wells. Stripped down. Peel the paint of the wall vocal. And a live recording. I get goose bumps every time I listen to it.

8. Masters of War, Pearl Jam. This is a stunning cover of the Dylan classic. They played it live after the beginning of the Iraq war. Vedder's vocals, the great guitar work, the moment in which they performed it. Awesome.

7. Oh! Sweet Nuthin', My Morning Jacket. I love how versatile these guys are. This was from their Bonaroo performance. Some covers are great because they do something new with an old standard. This one's great because they capture something of the original. Again, Velvet Underground.

6. Ain't that a Shame, Cheap Trick. I know, how could I leave off Johnny Cash and keep Cheap Trick. But I love this version of the old Fats Domino song. The guitars are so good, the build up so powerful, the vocals so cheeky. I always want to dance when I hear it.

5. She Said, She Said, Black Keys. The distortion they add to the Beatles' familiar guitar riff makes this a different song. And I like it. I can never just hear this once.

4. One, Johnny Cash. The emotion and gravity in his voice make this great song feel even more important. Johnny Cash doing U2. Pretty great.

3. Ramble On, Train. Who would've thought. Train covering Zeppelin. But I love, love this cover. I think I might like it better than Zeppelin's version. Great voice. Great guitars. Pretty straightforward cover. It's on the Knight's Tale soundtrack.

2. Hard to Handle, The Black Crowes. I would not advise anyone to cover Otis Redding. But they do, and this is the definitive version of this song. Great guitar riffs and amazing vocal. Just a fun, fun song.

1. Rusty Cage, Johnny Cash. Cash does Soundgarden. Go figure. These are amazing lyrics and Johnny Cash was meant to sing them. "You wired me awake and hit me with a hand of broken nails. You tied my lead and pulled my chain to watch my blood begin to boil...When the forest burns along the road like God's eyes in my headlights, when the dogs are looking for their bones and ice picks are raining on your steel shores..." And the Rick Rubin arrangement is great. I love this song.

Believe

2011-01-05T08:46:00.000-08:00

In Mark's gospel, Jesus comes proclaiming the "gospel of God," saying, "the time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is near; repent and believe the gospel." The last three words in this statement have always stood out to me. Most good news I am predisposed to believe. I think that this is because most of what I consider good news already conforms to what I value or believe. But this good news is connected to the word "repent," which indicates that believing might require me to see the world differently. Belief might require quite a risk, and seeing this announcement as good news might fight against my natural inclinations.

Whether or not you believe that this announcement of Jesus constitutes good news, the truth is there is no hope for anything beyond the way things are now unless there is some announcement of a reality that requires us to see things differently. And in the New Testament, the thing to believe to make a difference is often the resurrection.

Paul says in Romans 10, "if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord, and believe with your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." So, here's a reflection on "believe with your heart" and "you will be saved" in anticipation of Sunday's sermon.

I am convinced that "believe" in the New Testament means more than just intellectual assent. Believe here is something rooted in the heart, in our will and imagination. I want to be careful here not to make belief a quantifiable, a measurement by which we are thrown into perpetual anxiety about whether or not we truly believe. For instance, I think it is possible to "believe with your heart" and still entertain doubt, to still have moments of despair. What I think Paul has in mind here is the notion that the belief in the resurrection of Jesus (not the belief in resurrection in general, but belief in the specific person Jesus and what his life represents--that God honors this particular existence) evokes an entirely different world of possibility with an entirely new set of commitments and practices. And its not hard to tell if your life is oriented in a different direction in anticipation of a different reality even if we lack purity or consistency.

The most obvious difference here is that we no longer set our affections in life as if death has the final word. And this sets in motions all kinds of other commitments. We reckon time differently. It would be hard to prove from my life perhaps, but I think it would make mid-life less of a crisis. It would change what counts for progress or success and change our evaluations around words like strong and weak. And these kinds of changes are important in embracing the particular life to which Jesus calls people. The life of the Kingdom of God is full of risk. It requires us to love enemies, to turn the other cheek, to go the other mile, to always forgive. These kinds of commitments are unsustainable, and have been deemed by many Christians impractical and unrealistic, apart from a belief in the heart that God raised the one who lived like this from the dead. It is belief in the resurrection that makes sense of language like "whoever would save their life will lose it, but those who lose their life for my sake and the sake of the Kingdom will save it." This life is never wasted. God always honors it.

And this is what saves us. It's not simply checking the box "true" next to the statement "God raised Jesus from the dead." "Saved" is the actual lived existence of people who have chosen to live in a life framed by the world imagined by the reality of the resurrection of Jesus.

On a personal note, I frequently despair here. I often find myself living within a different frame of reference that suggests that I am the only one that can guarantee the kind of life I want or deserve or need. And I have from time to time serious doubts about the possibility of an actual resurrection in the first place. I think "believe in the heart" has to combine both the intellectual and practical side of this equation (notice here that I am not contrasting head and heart, intellect and emotion). There are times when my practice fails to point to my belief in this reality. In times like that, my understanding keeps me in the game. And in those times when my understanding fails, my commitments to practicing a particular way of life keeps me in the game. And all of this under the prayer, "Lord, I believe, help my unbelief."

Shame on Me

2011-01-03T15:51:00.000-08:00

I got a letter today. It's one of those letters. I keep them and read them every now again to remind myself not to take myself too seriously.

"Mark Love. You are destroying the church all for your fifty pieces of silver. Shame on you."

That was it. Unsigned. You would think someone with this kind of literary skill would want to take credit for the work.

I have some notion of where it came from. I have been informing congregations in Ontario and Eastern Michigan (at their invitation) about participating in Partnership for Missional Church, and one congregation in particular has some very dedicated members who have taken to sending me discouraging email. This person, if I am correct, has never met me, heard me speak, etc. I'm afraid if they knew me, they'd be a little disappointed.

When I receive mail like this, and I have received my share, I always wonder what they imagine my response might be. I doubt they even think about it. It's not really about me, clearly, but about whatever need they have to respond to fears of their world under siege. I imagine, though, that they might be disappointed to know that these just make me smile.

I chuckled the most with the attempt to shame at the end. I wondered whose mother they were trying to evoke, mine or theirs?

I think I'm rather impressive in this letter. I am a colossus, wrecking the church, evidently worse than even Judas himself since my pay is twenty pieces of silver greater. It makes me wonder if I'm working the wrong side of this, from a monetary point of view.

Dylan on a Sunday

2011-01-02T14:38:00.000-08:00

Sean Wilentz, in his new book Dylan in America, writes the following: "Anyone interested in Dylan’s body of work must face the challenge of owning its paradoxical combination of tradition and defiance." I love this statement, especially the "paradoxical combination of tradition and defiance" bit. As I noted in my last post on preaching, a vivid, living voice always combines both strong elements of continuity and discontinuity. There has to be both traditional and subversive elements. I like Wilentz's choice of the word defiance in this regard.

We have no choice about the tradition part. None of us are born free of the moments or movements that come before us. Some of us live under the illusion of being the first human (e.g. Alexander Campbell's desire to read Scripture as if no one had ever read it before), but I would argue that those persons who are tagged with the adjective "original" are often those most acutely aware of how they stand in relation to what has come before. In fact, what is new is often not the evasion or usurping of the old, but the fusing of various traditions.

What we do have some say about is our relationship to the traditions we receive given our level of awareness. Some of us are content to stay within the smooth banks of what has been handed to us. Though even this represents some form of change, since we never do the same thing in the exact same situation--we never wade into the same stream, it is always moving. The meaning of the event, even for those content with simply mimicking, is therefore never the same. One can never go home.

Using some of the same logic, the decision to be subversive or "defiant" is also ironically what keeps a tradition vital and alive. Subversiveness extends the life of a category. And Dylan does this well. Even when Dylan "plugged in," he still saw himself extending the musical influences that had brought him to that moment. According to Wiletz, he is acutely aware of himself as a minstrel, a vaudevillean, a troubador. He is keeping these traditions alive by blending them, bending them, and even defying them. He is original precisely because he is so vitally aware of various historical streams.

So, here's my hypothesis: the more thickly construed one's sense of the world inherited, the more articulated that sense is, the greater the possibilities for creativity, for newness, for originality. More, the greater we understand how we have been thrown into the reality we now occupy, the more likely our acts of defiance and subversion will be life giving.

Reflections on Preaching, Ministry, and the Five Finger Exercise

2010-12-31T09:16:00.000-08:00

This week I start a new sermon series. I'm ususally a "let the text pick me" kind of preacher, either sticking to the lectionary or preaching through a block of texts related to some sense of a balanced, biblical diet. So, it usually takes a pretty good reason to bounce me off of this. Sunday's sermon is the start of a series on what people in Churches of Christ, if they've been around awhile know as the five finger exercise, or the five steps to salvation.

This might come as a surprise to many. I'm not exactly known as a straight down the line Church of Christ preacher. I once had a member tell me that I would make a good BAPTIST preacher. He didn't see that as a compliment (and neither did I, but for very different reasons). I have from time to time made what sound like strange sounds to Church of Christ orthodoxy. Some of my friends might suppose that this is a series thrust opon me by a group of nervous elders. Not, so. This was my idea, and I think I was fully present and in charge of my mental faculties.

For those of you not of CoC pedigree, or of a more recent vintage, the five finger exercise has a large place in CoC lore. Walter Scott, a 19th century evangelist and colleague of Alexander Campbell, is said to have travelled the Western Reserve in Ohio and Pennsylvania preaching a rather Arminian form of the gospel. When he would ride into a town, he would gather school children and teach them the five steps to salvation--one for each finger. It is often said that if humans had six fingers per had, there would have been six steps. Children would go home, tell their parents, many of whom were not sure if they showed the requisite marks of regeneration to be counted among the elect, who would in turn receive with gratitude (on occasion) a simple message of assurance related to salvation.

By the time the steps to salvation reached my generation, they had morphed a bit from Scott's original list. I learned them as hear, believe, confess, repent, and be baptized. Any Church of Christ member worth their salt could reproduce this list along with the requisite prooftexts. The list provided me and countless others what it provided Calvinists on the Westerm Reserve--assurance. And that's no small thing.

The power of the five steps lies in its simplicity, and this is increasingly an important goal to me in preaching and in life in general. Simplicity, however, is often the gateway to simplistic. And the five steps approach is certainly open to that charge. I simply do not understand salvation in the way it is arranged and presented in this little exercise. So, why would I propose a series on this?

Let me say right up front that I am not doing this series as an exercise in deconstruction. I am not hoping to turn the five fingers into a fist with which to beat poor, unsuspecting members of the congregation. I happen to think that hearing, believing, confessing, repenting, and being baptized are pretty important things. I am doing this series, in part, because I believe that if these things could be lived into as more than just a list, we would be producing some health in our congregation. I am not looking to suspend these categories, but to enlarge them.

But there are other reasons as well, central to how I view ministry in general. Our congregation has gone through a series of pretty rapid shifts in the past few months, one of which was to invite me to preach 20 Sundays per year. I was not a member of this congregation at the time. I only within the last year moved to the area to teach ministry at a local Church of Christ college. This is my first gig east of the Mississippi River, which is a fairly significant boundary in Churches of Christ. I have preached in Texas and in Oregon, and these places are not Michigan. Things are simply different here. As one example, it is striking how much of church politics here relates to how Catholic the area is. These things are simply not issues in Gresham, Oregon and Arlington, Texas. So, they have taken as a congregation several significant risks in the past year, one of which was to invite a little-known foreigner to stand in their pulpit for roughly half the Sundays a year.

I will say one more thing about this. My sermons are an aquired taste. It's not obvious to listeners what exactly they are at first. When I first preached at for the congregation in Oregon, the first few weeks the notetakers eagerly pulled their spiral notebooks from their purses (yes, they were all women) and look at me expectantly for the first part of the sermon, only to put away their notebooks 10 minutes into the sermon with looks of clear disappointment. It wasn't until about two years later that the notebooks came out again. They has discovered some of the rhythm of my preaching and now knew where to anticipate the thumps and rim shots that make up the take-aways of many sermons. My current listeners are still in that bewildered state. Their faces are twisted in question marks. I am hoping they give me about two years.

So, I represent change in many ways whether I want to or not. I am not business as usual. And part of ministry is the capacity to interpret oneself in light of the congregation's narrative and expectations. I have symbolic value that is in surplus of my own self-understanding or intentions. And effective symbols do two things.They orient and disorient. They have to do both to have any kind of dynamic staying power, or for a congregation to utilize them for continuing life. Anderson and Foley, in their outstanding book, Mighty Stories, Dangerous Rituals, talk about the mythic and parabolic functions of symbols and rituals. The mythic provides orientation, the parabolic upsets equilibrium for the sake of new understandings.

My sense is that I am primarily now a parabolic symbol. That has positive value. It represents the possibility of growth and newness. But it also introduces a sense of instability and uncertainty. The positive aspects of parabolic function, I am convinced, can only be realized if people feel sufficiently oriented. Put another way, people are more willing to take the necessary risks associated with newness (discontinuity) if they feel adequately moored in what they already know (continuity). Good ministry knows how to manage or engage various moments of continuity and discontinuity.

So, in this large moment of discontinuity, I am hoping to find some rich places of continuity. I am hoping someone will accuse me of being a good Church of Christ preacher.This week--Hear!

My Eastern Bloc Haircut

2010-11-06T11:33:00.000-07:00

The hardest part of moving is finding someone to cut my hair. I'm happy that this is still a problem for me. A lot of guys my age are not so lucky. In fact, I never get my hair cut without a comment about how thick my hair is. It's the one sure plus gene that I have.

My haircut history, however, is dotted with trauma. When I was about 8 or 9, my mom bought this ronco haircut "comb." Just drag it through your hair, and voila. Dang, that was a bad next day at school. We moved to Portland a few years later and my dad would walk me down to the barber college for haircuts. College is a very generous word for this place. Barber primary school? Barber I-can't-do-anything-else-why-not-this school? The walks home were often teary-eyed. I carry the scars deeply.

I have found people through the years who gave me good haircuts. Typically, I just followed Nancy to whomever she found. Friends would tell me, usually female friends, "just find a friend whose hair you like and ask him where he gets his hair cut." I understand the logic of that sentence, but the first clause is existentially incomprehensible. What would it be like to look at another guy and think, "dude, nice hair cut." I have no frame of reference. I tried it, but seriously never once thought "that's the haircut I want." So, I would overpay a woman in a trendy salon to cut my hair and wax between my eyebrows.

So, what to do once I moved to Rochester? Nancy was growing her hair out when we got here and didn't like the first few haircuts she got. I held out for trips back to Abilene or St. Paul and made sure I got haircuts there. But you can't do that indefinitely. So, I decided to be brave and just see what happened. I had visions of barber college in my fearful brain.

I saw a sign in the window that said "Men's haircuts, $15." It was under a sign that read Beauty and the Beast. I'm neither, waxed eyebrows notwithstanding. Still, something drew me in. (I get my hair cut in a place called Beauty and the Beast. Seriously.). And I've been going back ever since.

This is not a place where you have to have an appointment. The same woman cuts my hair every time, and I have yet to wait except for her to stop chewing whatever it is she's snacking on. I've always been the only "beast" in the place, and always the youngest person by at least 20 years. It's not a place that inspires confidence.

She's an older woman. And she's Romanian. And she's never happy. And she cuts my hair in about four minutes, even through her complaints about how much hair I have and how her son is bald. I'm pretty sure communists taught her to cut hair. Her approach is very marshall. No fine movements here. Large whacking strokes. Whack, whack, whack. She's done. I've got myself a worker's haircut. She always forgets how low my hairline is and she complains about having to get the clippers out again to shave my neck. But all in all, its a haircut I can live with and I feel like I'm living out my missional commitments by crossing ethnic, cultural, ideological, and political boundaries.

It's not a perfect haircut. She never gets my sideburns right. I always have to do a little scissor work of my own between haircuts (and it shows). I ask her every time to cut it a little shorter on the sides and she nods and gives me the same haircut. I've endured worse. I had a woman in Texas who could cut an arc around my left ear, but only a jag around my right. It's like I had one vulcan ear that she had to cut around. But I endured it because its traumatic to find someone new.

I'd be open to someone new here. I know there's a better haircut out there, but its $15, no waiting and no trauma. And it fills that space in me that thinks my life is too soft, absent hardship, or military discipline.

Night Without Vision

2010-10-26T07:47:00.000-07:00

I've been hanging out in the book of Micah the past few weeks. There are some stunning pictures there. All of us know, "do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your God." But there are several other striking oracles found in this "minor" prophet.

Last week I preached on Micah's warning against prophets, those who cry "peace" when their bellies are full, but declare war against those who put no food in their mouths. For these pray-for-pay prophets, it will be night without vision. The point is bigger than this for Micah. It's the refusal to see some things, mainly injustice, that makes us blind to everything. Worse, sometimes worship can be precisely the thing that keeps us from seeing what God is up to in the world. It can be our refuge from God, not our refuge in God. We can use the talk of God or the things of God precisely as a hedge from doing what God requires of us. My fear, as someone who gets his bread from being a professional theologian, is not that someday it will be for me night without vision, but that this might already be the case.

The realities of globalization mean that I can't buy a piece of fruit or fill my tank with gas or fund my ira or max out my credit cards without participating in a system of decisions, policies, trade agreements, labor practices, etc, that are largely invisible to me. They are invisible to me because they are pervasive and complex. I cannot simply excuse myself from them, nor can I get at their complexity. And so, I turn a blind eye and go to worship. And here's the thing--most of these structures and systems and policies in the main do not favor the least of these. Night without vision.

This week, I'm in this ironic little hope oracle in Micah 2. Things are desperate in Jerusalem. The Assyrians have the place surrounded. The walls of Jerusalem, the very thing Judah depended on to keep them safe, has become their prison. But God knows what to do in situations like these--he tears down the walls. It's the last thing we'd expect. These walls represent for us the very promises of God. We can't imagine that God could be present apart from them, or that there would be meaningful life apart from them. But Micah knows that it is absolutely the case that the things we trust for our security can become our prison. And God is gracious to tear them down, even if it means using Assyrians. That's grace I can usually live without.

So, do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly.

Dylan on a Sunday

2010-10-24T17:29:00.000-07:00

There are two new books out on Dylan and I'm trying to create the space and money to read them both. I don't read everything on Dylan. I've been given books on Dylan on the mistaken assumption that I am as obsessed as the person who gave the book to me, and I haven't read them. But I'm anxious to read these books. The reason is a great interview with both of the authors that I found last week.

Greil Marcus, Bob Dylan, is a critic who has followed Dylan closely and written a lot about him through the years. Sean Wilentz is a historian who has written something of a cultural history, Bob Dylan in America. Wilentz claims to have become a writer because he became a fan of Dylan's. "I was never interested in figuring out what the songs meant. I was interested in figuring out my response to them, and other people's responses. I wanted to get closer to the music than I could by listening to it—I wanted to get inside of it, behind it, and writing about it, through it, inside of it, behind it, was my way of doing that."

I love the interview because both talk about things that in which I am interested in my other life--the way words and performances create worlds, and the way an artistic imagination works and is funded. For both, the song is the medium that allows Dylan to capture multiple, stray worlds in a single place. They know his world, the literary references, the folk history, Dylan's own notions of historical consciousness. They hear the echoes, recognize the allusions, and know just how large the imaginative landscape is from which Dylan performs. And I'm interested in that. So, over time, I will buy and read these books.

But the interview is great as well. Here are a few of my favorite excerpts:

SW: One of the marks of Dylan's genius is the ability to shuffle time and space like a deck of cards. He can make the past sound like the present and the present sound like the past. In doing this, he is a great, great historian, like Greil says. But Dylan also does something that historians can't do, which is to actually commingle the past and the present in ways that are astonishing.

GM: So it's that sense that there are so many worlds behind and within the songs to discover and live in, but also this sense of empathy for the people who appear in his songs. Dylan once said, maybe sarcastically, that all of his songs really ended with "Good luck." But that may be what he says to the people in his songs.

SW: In the liner notes to World Gone Wrong, he talks about how virtual reality has taken over, or is taking over—he calls it "hegemony"—and people are just not able to write songs like the ones that he is singing for the dead and out of the dead; they can't write those kinds of songs any more. He makes it pretty clear that, in some ways, all he can do to battle this hegemony, as he calls it, is to sing those songs, and to continue to write his own songs out of that tradition, out of those traditions, the many traditions, not just one. It's not exactly the attitude of a big rock star who thinks he's all powerful; this is a guy who feels like he and the world are up against forces that are so complex and so overpowering that singing these songs is all that he can do.

SW: You're up against a lot in this world, and you may be up against more now than you were in 1961. But as he says, he finds his lexicon in the songs, and in the songs he can find a measure of hope to battle against it. But that means more than just protesting; it's not about protesting. Well, maybe it is always about protesting—all of his songs are protest songs. But it's really about exploring realms of human imagination that he finds being flattened out in this virtual reality in which we live.

I hope my work is in some measure is recognizable in light of that last sentence.

Thoughts on Hipster Christianity

2010-10-20T08:40:00.000-07:00

A recent book by Brett McCracken has brought a new term onto the scene--"hipster Christianity." McCracken's book and his notions of hipster Christianity (which I should note I have not read) have gotten a lot of play in places like Christianity Today and even the Wall Street Journal. If you google the phrase now you'll find all kinds of sites noting the phenomenon from one perspective or another. There's even a quiz you can take to discover whether or not you're a hipster Christian. Turns out, I'm borderline hipster. Who knew?

Who does McCracken have in mind? Young evangelicals rebelling from the evangelical sub-culture that created them. A hipster, Christ-following leader might do the following:

Get the church involved in social justice and creation care.

Show clips from R-rated Coen Brothers films (e.g., No Country for Old Men,Fargo) during services.
Sponsor church outings to microbreweries.
Put a worship pastor onstage decked in clothes from American Apparel.
Be okay with cussing.
Print bulletins only on recycled cardstock.
Use Helvetica fonts as much as possible.

So, I recognize myself a little in this list. I'm definitely a beer snob, though I doubt I would ever sponsor a church outing to a microbrewery. I've hosted Christian coffee houses where we've featured music from Arcade Fire and clips from Cohen brothers films--though Nick Hornby and recent Clint Eastwood films are more my speed. And I've never in my life voted for a Republican presidential candidate.

But I'm definitely not young, not evangelical. I would rather worship in a pew with a kneeling bench than on a sofa in a room full of sofas next to someone texting on their iphone (I don't own an iphone, but I do own a Mac). I don't have any clothes from American Apparel and still believe passionately in preaching as an indispensable aspect of a healthy worship ecology.

The biggest evidence I have that I might not be a hipster Christian is that when I'm around them, I don't feel cool. I do feel cool in most groups of ministers I encounter, but that's typically a very low standard.

I was with two of the "hipster" leaders that McCracken has in mind just a few days after the Wall Street Journal piece came out. Tony Jones was kind enough to host some of our graduate students for a week in Minneapolis to talk about Christian practices of hospitality, and part of that time we spent at Solomon's Porch with Doug Pagitt. They were having great fun with McCracken's book (at the expense of?), though neither were particularly convinced that McCracken had an argument. We spent much of the week identifying the ways we were not hipster. Hipster was the most used word during our time together.

But here's the thing. This whole discussion has me thinking about belonging in Christian community. It's so easy to think of church as a place where flourishing occurs for people like me. Tony said as much about Solomon's Porch. It's not a particularly diverse group. In some ways, they are very hospitable. But they've created a particular way of being church in which some move more easily than others.

This is not a rant against the emerging church movement or a congregation like Solomon's Porch. I could point this critique just as easily at the congregations that I have served, or at the fairly traditional congregation with whom I now worship, or at church movements like the Vineyard. The forms we choose, the aesthetics we create through language, music, art--all of this tends to invite some and exclude others. I suppose some of this is unavoidable and we should even celebrate the fact that the Christian movement is not a mono-culture, that it can be expressed in so many ways. I'm sure, I know beyond a doubt, that there are some serious, practicing Christians at Solomon's Porch who would not be if the Porch didn't exist in its unique configuration.

But I don't want that to be the last word on this subject. I do think the measure of a congregation, its particular cultural relevance, should always be that persons who have a hard time flourishing anywhere else can flourish in Christian community. One big measure of a church should be how it functions for the least of these. Put another way, how high is the bar set for cultural competence? Can only those particularly adept at a fairly complex set of cultural practices flourish? Or more properly, can only those who can produce and appreciate certain cultural forms find a home among us?

Finally, I am concerned about the category "cool" in this regard. Cool is a very high bar in terms of cultural competence. I know that no congregation would say that its aspiration is to be cool. But congregations and their leaders are always setting cultural markers that determine what it means to really belong, and some of those markers tend to be more exclusive than others.

Out of Practice

2010-10-12T11:08:00.000-07:00

I've recently agreed to a semi-regular preaching gig. In many ways, I'm excited about this. I think in terms of my craft, I'm still improving. And I'd like to see what that looks like on a more regular basis.

But in other ways, I realize I'm out of practice. Sermons aren't just speeches. They come from what Barbara Brown Taylor calls the preaching life. It is more than just reading a text and finding something to say. Sermons come from life as much as they come from the Bible--and they come from a particular kind of engagement with life. And I think I might have a little rust in this regard.

For instance, I used to be in the habit of having two kinds of books going all the time--a novel and a biography. I wasn't surfing for sermon illustrations. I was widening my interpretative horizons by listening to other stories and other lives. I can't tell you the last biography I read (maybe Dylan's, Chronicles) and the only novels I've read recently were the Harry Potter books I read from Thanksgiving to New Year's last year (yes, I read all of them straight through). I've been reading other kinds of books the past few years. And while they have changed me, deepened, me, challenged me, they haven't done what stories of other lives do. (I've decided that getting a PhD is reading the same 10 books over and over for four years. I'm ready to read some different books).

I refer to this kind of reading as funding the imagination. The more thickly textured your imagination, the more you have to say about things. There's more raw material lying around that allows a spark to become a fire.

I'm more and more convinced that really interesting people read across diverse literatures. They know more than one thing, and because of that, they are able to draw inferences and make connections in ways that surprise us and leave us wanting more. I think this is the genius of my friend, Richard Beck, whose blog is never dull. And I never see Richard when he doesn't have a book in his hand, and not just a psychology book. He reads broadly in diverse literatures. Good preachers do the same thing. And I will need to find a rhythm again for this kind of life.

And please don't tell Richard I think he's interesting. He's insufferable already.

Dylan on a Sunday

2010-10-10T19:15:00.000-07:00

Though I write here frequently about Bob Dylan, the truth is I listen to him much less than I listen to other artists. I don't have a Pandora station for Bob Dylan, (though I'm more likely to listen to the channels I've created where he is likely to pop up now and then). Dylan songs are sprinkled throughout my itunes playlists, but none of them appear in my top 25 played songs list. Don't get me wrong, there are times when I could spend the whole day listening to Dylan, especially his later stuff (I seldom listen to an entire album of his early songs), but these days come along only occasionally.

I'm not exactly sure what mood it is that makes Dylan the appropriate musical companion. I know there are musical moods for which Dylan is not particularly useful. Joy, for instance. If I want ridiculously happy music, better said, music that makes me ridiculously happy, Dylan's not the choice. If I need background music, something to stay comfortably in the background, Bob's not the guy. And, somewhat surprisingly, he wouldn't be a choice for a broken heart. I mean, Dylan sings about the gritty moments of life, and broken hearts are certainly on that side of life. Dylan's songs know about broken hearts, but not in an overly sentimental way. Everyone's heart gets broken. That's the deal. Move on. Dylan knows love, and he knows love disappointed, but he doesn't linger there.

The possible exception might be, Till I fell in Love With You.

Well my nerves are exploding and my body's tense
I feel like the whole world got me pinned up against the fence
I've been hit too hard; I've seen too much
Nothing can heal me now, but your touch
I don't know what I'm gonna do
I was all right 'til I fell in love with you

It's not so much that his heart has been broken, but life is hard enough without the burden of love, or worse the loss of love's safe harbor. It's the absence of love that makes the other stuff, the bad stuff, harder to bear.

Still, Dylan is no Sarah McLachlan, nursing love's pain for all its worth. Or Elvis Costello for that matter. They'll hand you the stinking kleenex. Dylan, not so much. And I like that about Dylan.

So, here's a few stabs at what kind of day would send me to Dylan. An ironic day. A thoughtful day, but in a whimsical kind of way. A look the world in the eye kind of day in order to wink. Or a day to remember things deeply. I hope I have one soon.

Because Some Days You Can See It

2010-10-05T13:40:00.000-07:00

Today is one of those days--one of those days when it seems worth it all.

I work in one of those jobs that is more about planting seeds than bringing in the harvest. It's not always obvious that you're accomplishing anything. Somedays its invisible. It's just grading papers and going to meetings and hearing yourself talk.

But today Wayne Beason came by my office. He's just accepted a job to work with InterVarsity as a campus minister in Chicago. He gave me his spiel (he has to raise support), and it was good. He's taken some of what he's gotten in our new degree in missional leadership and made it sing. He sees the differences. He's choosing some things and not others. He's exercising critical judgment in impressive ways--ways that will definitely make a difference.

I put Wayne in contact with Mark Willis, a young, gifted, imaginative church planter in Chicago. And I thought about how many of those kinds of guys I know. The people who are willing to venture onto ministry frontiers, like my new monastic friends Ryan Woods and the Allelon house (featuring my son, Josh). Or a guy like Travis Stanley who is a community organizer in New Orleans. Or a woman like Cheryl Russell who along with her husband Tim is making courageous decisions about her life in ministry to the city. Or a woman like Jen Christy who is directing student ministries at Pepperdine University.

After Wayne left my office, I read a facebook notification from a group, Half the Church, that is taking concrete steps toward addressing gender issues in Churches of Christ. I certainly don't think of Stephen Johnson, one of the leaders of this group, as a student of mine because he's always been a peer and has surpassed me in so many ways (though I did have the privilege of chairing his DMin thesis). He is, however, working with former students like Laura Clark and Olivia Hodges. I can't tell you how proud I am of what they're doing and how hopeful I am that their efforts will make a difference.

So, I've spent the better part of the day giving thanks for all the outstanding young church leaders I know because of the fact that I've been fortunate enough to hang out at places like ACU and Rochester College--guys like Ben Ries and Aaron Metcalf, Jarrod Robinson and Collin Packer, Josh Ross and Richard Maddeaux, to name but a few. I am having a thankful day.

I should be quick to point out (am I too late?) that I'm not taking credit for who they are and what directions they've taken. Many of them are doing things I don't have the first idea about. And they have certainly had many outstanding teachers and significant influences. With some of these I've mentioned, I have had only passing interaction. But I've been a part of this enterprise--the seed planting enterprise--this business of calling them, along with many other seed planters, to something bigger than themselves. And they have delighted me. They are the dirt under my fingernails (in the best possible sense), the proof that I have real dealings with the world. And I know that the best I've given some of them is to not get in their way. And maybe for others to say what little I know with conviction. But they have passed across my life like fireworks. And so today, I'm glad that I get to do what I do.

Band of Joy on a Sunday

2010-10-03T14:37:00.000-07:00

Before Robert Plant was the front man for Led Zeppelin, he sang for Band of Joy, a group backed by Zepp drummer John Bonham. Band of Joy is also the name of Plant's new cd. The question might be, is the name a tribute to his past or a nod to a certain continuity that marks all of Plant's work?

Plant's body of work since Zeppelin has certainly been diverse. He's done everything from cover old 50's rock and roll classics to his recent T-Bone Burnett produced collaboration with Allison Kraus. He has been at the very least musically adventurous.

I really like this new offering. It's mostly covers from a diverse catalog, everyone from Los Lobos, to Richard Thompson and Townes Van Zandt. There is still a Nashville feel to the cd, but its sweatier and bluesier. There's feedback and distortion, a swirling bit of tremolo. Alison Kraus has been replaced with Patti Griffin and there are accents of the Delta and the Mediterranean reminiscent of his previous cd, Mighty Rearranger. I love the songs Silver Rider, Can't Buy My Love, and Angel Dance.

The darker arrangements make the title Band of Joy seem out of place. But the cd does deliver joy. It's not a giggly kind of joy, but a belly laugh kind of joy. Though the settings are dark and rolling, Plant's voice hovers above it all. Because whatever a Plant cd should be, it should be about his voice, the one thing that marks the continuity in Plant's music. And against these settings, his voice is the light, blond as his hair. Blond joy. And not a cheap joy. It's dancing after you've admitted the worst and still find cause for celebrating. And if the gospel aspires to anything, it should be this brand of joy.

Greg Boyd on Driscoll's Tough Guy Jesus

2010-09-30T15:46:00.000-07:00

There is a way, evidently, to read the Bible and come away with the idea that God's answer to violence is more violence, only bigger. God's biggest virtue here is that he is big. Mark Driscoll is the leading voice in the tough-God arena, claiming that he can't worship any God that he could beat up. Even those who think Driscoll goes too far say we should pay attention because of the feminization of Christianity. Maybe. But my problem is with the way this is a serious distortion of the gospel and a reading of Scripture.

So, I was happy to find Greg Boyd's post on the book of Revelation where he takes on Driscoll's impressionistic reading. My favorite line: "I frankly have trouble understanding how a follower of Jesus could find himself unable to worship a guy he could “beat up” when he already crucified him."

Dylan on a Sunday

2010-09-26T16:07:00.000-07:00

Dylan came to me in a dream last night. Veeery vivid. And I think the only time I've ever dreamed of Dylan. Certainly, the only one I remember.

He was short and slight and soft-spoken, (looked like he does in the Oh, Mercy days) and amazingly reassuring. He was there for me, not the other way around. He said hello to me and I was dumbstruck. All I could think to say was, "I saw this guy named Jakob Dylan in concert recently." I thought he would walk away. Maybe they don't talk, or he's behind on child support. Or worse, it's just so horribly obvious and not cool. But despite my clear inability to say something meaningful, he smiled at me and asked, "was he any good?" I assured him that he was very good.

Then he looked at me and said, "It's gonna be alright. Your tremor makes you a better guitar player." (I have this tremor in my hands that is increasingly making my life a challenge and definitely doesn't make me a better guitar player). Then I told him I needed to go to bed, and he said he did too and could he stay at my place. And so he did, in an orange sleeping bag in a guest room I didn't recognize.

I'm sure this all means something bizarre, and I know I haven't eaten healthy foods the last few days, and that the orange sleeping bag probably means I will die in the near future or lose all my toenails or something. But today I'm leaning on the words, "it's gonna be alright." And I think if an angel appeared to me in a dream, Dylan would be the necessary visage to make me listen. And I've thought today that maybe he's my spirit-animal, like in a Native American sort of way. And that's pretty cool too. You can have an owl or a badger or a trout. I've got Dylan. And that's nice.

Freshman and the Bible

2010-09-24T11:38:00.000-07:00

I teach at a small liberal arts, Christian college. Most of my work is with graduate students, but this semester I have the privilege of teaching a freshman section of Introduction to the Bible. Rochester is a school affiliated with Churches of Christ, but my guess is that only about 10 of my 50 students are CoC kids. This is a very diverse group, many of them only nominally Christian, and it has been an exciting challenge to get them all into a meaningful conversation about Scripture.

Their first assignment was to write a two-page essay describing their relationship to Scripture to this point in their life. Wow, did I learn a lot.

First, the most common story I heard went something like this: "I attended church when I was younger, not so much when I got to be a teenager. I have very little idea what Christianity is all about, and even less what the Bible is all about." A lot of these kids were Catholic, although it was also reported among Presbyterians, Batpists, and Church of Christ students, etc.

Second, most reported finding the Bible odd, too hard to read and understand, and unrelated to their life. This was true of the Sunday school kids and those who didn't attend.

Third, the single biggest factor in a student having a close relationship with Scripture had to do with its use in the home. It had very little to do with church attendance. If parents dragged their kids to church, but had no relationship with Scripture themselves, their kids were unlikely to as well.

Fourth, the most moving and compelling stories of student relationships with Scripture came from people who'd seen some hard times in life. Prison, drug rehab, divorce, the death of a sibling, a child with a psychosis--these were the people who relied on Scripture in ways that no one else spoke of. Scripture for these students was a daily companion.

There were more than a few students who wrote about how boring church was for them until they found a youth group in a large community church. They still don't know much about Scripture, but these experiences kept the possibility of faith alive. And that's not nothing.

Finally, I've been trying to get them to make some sense of the phenomenon of Scripture on Scripture's own terms. Yesterday, we talked about Galileo and the trouble he got in for having a heliocentric view of things. It wasn't hard to see that the Bible has a geocentric perspective. And it also wasn't hard getting students to agree that Galileo was right. They all raised their hands in the affirmative when asked if they sided with Galileo. The next question I asked was, "is it fair to say then that in some things, like astronomy, you might be willing to say that Galileo is a more trustworthy authority than the Bible?" Some of the Sunday school kids turned pale. But the non-Sunday school students had little problem seeing that the Bible was written within an ancient worldview, but still might be the authority on God. They had no problem affirming that Scripture might not hold up well if we expected it to be a modern science or history book, but could still be a God-inspired book.

I want all of these students to come away with a high view of Scripture. I want them to see my own commitment to the Bible. The things I expose them to are not designed to show them supposed problems with the Bible. Just the opposite. The Bible, taken on its own terms, says some powerful things about God and how he relates to human communities. In fact, it is precisely my contention that a fundamentalist view of Scripture makes it a smaller book, locks it into a narrow interpretative framework that limits its relevance to life in cultures different than first-century Palestine. I want their relationship with the Bible to come on Scripture's own terms so that they can develop a life-long relationship with the God who stands behind the Bible.

Half the Church

2010-09-23T06:54:00.000-07:00

I practice the presence of God within a tradition that has limited the public gifts of leadership by women in most of our congregations. This grieves me. I am the son of a mother who has enormous public leadership gifts. Her life is marked by bravery and humility in ways that I will never be pressed to. I have several female students, both current and former, who have extraordinary gifts and who believe with all their hearts that God has placed a call on their lives. You can't hear their stories, know the character of their lives, observe their gifts and believe otherwise.

So, I am thankful for my friend Stephen Johnson who is collecting their stories. He has put some of them online for us to hear. You owe it them and to your congregations to listen and to invite others to listen as well. I am particularly proud to listen to Naomi and Olivia tell their stories. Naomi is an alum of Rochester College and was starting the MDiv at Abilene Christian University in my last year or two there. I had Olivia as an undergrad Biblical studies major at ACU and have watched with great interest and pride as she has moved through the MDiv program there.

Please listen.

Streaming: Biblical Conversations from the Missional Frontier

2010-09-22T14:12:00.000-07:00

My main exposure to Rochester College before I became a faculty member here was the Sermon Seminary they used to host every May, directed by my friend David Fleer. It was a first rate event, bringing together the best in the areas of biblical scholarship and preaching (homiletics). My favorite year was the year Walter Brueggemann and Paul Scott Wilson presented on preaching from the Psalms.

Well, in my duties as Director of the Resource Center for Missional Leadership, I have been asked to revive the May (16-18) seminar, though with a different focus. Instead of preaching, we will be bringing the best of biblical scholarship into dialogue with missional leadership. We are calling the event, Streaming: Biblical Conversations from the Missional Frontier.

Before I explain the name of the event, let me tell you who we've lined up thus far to be on the program. You have to start with Miroslav Volf. Volf is the Henry V. Wright professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School. He is without a doubt one of today's most important theological voices. His book, Exclusion and Embrace, is a profound theological reflection on human identity born out of his own experience with the Balkan conflicts. He will be presenting material from his forthcoming book on reading Scripture theologically.

We also have Scot McKnight coming. He teaches New Testament at North Park Seminary in Chicago and has become a widely read author on a number of important issues. He has been particularly involved in conversations related to the Emerging Church movement. His recent book on Scripture, The Blue Parakeet, is a delightful and accessible read. He will be presenting material from his forthcoming commentary on the Book of James.

We will have several others on the program, but we are particularly pleased to have Volf and McKnight kick off the renewal of our May seminar.

But what about this name? Well, naming an event is no easy thing. And naming it with a participle is a bold move, if I say so myself. Streaming. But we have five things in mind that come together in one image.

First, streaming is a commonplace word in the world of digital communication. Events are "streamed" live across the internet. It gives us some cultural cache, if you will, and in a way that we like. It says live and dynamic. It says participatory and communicative. So, there's that.

Second, we want to use the term in an unconventional way to suggest the activity of navigating a stream. If we are in a new missional era, then we need images related to frontiers or adventure. So, we have in mind here a group of adventurers "streaming" through whitewater.

Third, we like the fact that stream is moving. You never step into the same steam twice. It comes from someplace and it is going somewhere. It is a temporal image, connoting both a past and a future. It's a nice way to think about the relationship between God, scripture, and the world.

Fourth, streams gifure fairly prominently in Scripture. You can hardly open your Bible without getting wet. And a stream in Scripture is a refreshing thing--life giving.

Fifth, streaming also evokes a picture of pilgrimage--a journey together toward sacred space, like the OT images of the nations streaming to Zion.

My friends have already pointed out to me less-than-helpful ways that streaming might be understood. My friends are philistines. And so we will limit our imaging to the five things I've listed above.

So, anyway, I'm thrilled about our new event and hope some of you will make plans to join us this coming May. Hopefully, we'll have a new webpage up soon with more detailed info on the event.

By Way of Clarification: Generosity of Spirit

2010-09-16T06:47:00.000-07:00

Friends, in an attempt to live into the spirit of my own words, a word of clarification about my first paragraph in the last post. My words could have been more generous. Ouch! I hate when that happens. Truth is, I like Dallas Willard books and would eagerly look forward to attending a conference featuring him as a speaker. I think prayer is a good thing. And I have been in the habit of walking labyrinths myself. And in the scheme of things, one of the most profound experiences I have had that I consider coming from God came at the center of a labyrinth. And I think that in doing these things you are more likely to find a path toward generosity of spirit than if you don't. And I learn a lot about the generous life from people who consistently walk these paths.So, I would ask that you read my previous blog in light of these statements and hug a contemplative today. Clearly, I am still on the journey toward generosity of spirit.

Generosity of Spirit

2010-09-15T07:45:00.000-07:00

This is the ballgame for me. Don't tell me how many times you pray. Don't tell me what amazing spiritual experiences you are having. Don't tell me how many Dallas Willard seminars you've been to or labyrinths you've walked. Like any human activity, these kinds of activities can be the quickest way to self-justification. As the prophets knew well, some take up spiritual pursuits precisely as a hedge against God.

I want to see fruit, a manner of life. And not manner of life in some kind of puritanic, holier-than-thou kind of way. I want to see a manner of life that is open to others--that keeps the opportunity of life open. And I've come to call this generosity of spirit.

A person who is generous of spirit sees the other. And by this, I mean the capacity to see the other with some empathetic depth. Most people don't have as a life ambition to become pains-in-the-rear (Resisting my "those who aspire to be elders" jokes). And many of us would resign from this position once we got there if we knew how. And all of us carry around unfinished business, some pain or scar or exclusion or disappointment that frames what we see and keeps getting in our way. And some of us didn't win the genetic lottery, and so we struggle with things that other people make look easy. It all starts with the capacity to see this way.

And so it also means having the capacity to love someone for who they are, not for who they could be or for who you want them to be. And love here is not how you feel about someone. Love is the capacity to act on behalf of the other. Love is not a reward, something we extend or withhold, some quid-pro-quo related to good or bad behavior. It is the condition of acceptance that honors the fact that we are all creatures, none of us having spun our own lives out of whole cloth, all of us dependent on something that came before us, all of us products of some prior grace.

And of course it means the refusal of judgment, and its flipside, the offer of the benefit of the doubt, the refusal to assign the worst to another even if the evidence points that way. It is this capacity that allows people to come back from the dead, to have another chance, to begin again. So often, we seek to play situations to our advantage by trapping others in a mistake they made, or by pronouncing a verdict or by labeling them, or by refusing to forgive them. The generous of spirit make every effort to keep second acts alive.They don't nurse grudges or vilify their enemy or fill their thoughts like a war-chest with arguments or counter arguments.

The generous of spirit are able to reflect on their own lives. All of the above require the capacity for self-reflection. The refusal of judgment comes from someone who knows their own brokenness. The capcity to forgive comes from someone who knows how much they need forgiveness. So, the generous of spirit are able to name their weaknesses, to claim limited perspective, to own their part. They are open to being wrong and know what to apologize for. They are willing to say that their account of things is their account of things and that this is likely not exactly what happened. And so they are open to the perspective of the other, even when it disagrees with their own.And they refuse to present themselves only as a victim. All of these perspectives keep new possibility open. They are generous.

And of course, this would carry over into so many other things. The offer of our time, our resources, our bodies, our stories.

If you show me these things, I will assume they're from God one way or another. Some people, I am convinced, are genetically predisposed this way. It's naturally easier for some than for others. Since they came this way, I'm willing to say that's a gift from God. Others learned this way from their environment. Because they learned it from someplace else, I'm willing to say that it came from God's involvement in the world. Others come to it through the direct intervention of the Holy Spirit. Whatever the source, generosity of spirit marks you with grace.

Now, I should be clear here. I don't think any of us completely embody what I'm calling generosity of spirit. I certainly don't. In so many ways, I have failed to be who I want to be. I am having a particularly tough time right now being generous in light of a perceived injustice. But even to the extent that I do live in these ways, this capacity was given to me. It is not a source of boasting or pride. And I've noticed that the people who are most generous of spirit are often those who have a hard time beliving in God or praying or devoting themselves to spiritual practices. But this I believe about that--God believes in them.

Dylan on a Sunday

2010-09-12T05:32:00.000-07:00

VH1 has been airing a series of shows under the banner, "The Greatest." They compile votes to determine the top 100 in various categories. One category is greatest artist, and by artist they mean musical. Dylan came in at number five behind only (in ascending order) Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, and the Beatles. Not bad company.

Asked for a comment, Dylan said he was going for a walk.

No, not really. But I imagine if he knows at all, he shrugged. This is because I have only an imaginary relationship with Bob (or Zim, which is what he lets me call him), and I want to project certain values of mine on him. And I don't want this top five thing to matter to him.

And part of that is because I don't want this kind of stuff to matter to me. Not where Dylan stands, but where I stand. I know that all of us are prone to comparing ourselves to others, and sometimes this gets in the way of being an authentic person. People who have a certain public-ness though are more susceptible than others, I think, to this temptation. And I have a modest amount of public-ness.

How do my speeches measure up? My publishing? My programs? My blog? My hair? My guitar playing/songwriting vis-a-vis other theologian/wannabe rockstars? These are demons I beat back on a regular basis. (But seriously, for an olding dude, I have great hair).

I have a John Updike quote taped above my desk that I try to believe in. "One can either see, or be seen." I'm trying to see, but wouldn't mind being seen in the process. I want Updike's quote to be true. And I want it to be true of me. Which means I also have to believe things like, "if you want to save your life, you must lose it." I know for some people its the resurrection that presses credulity. For me its this losing and saving business. More than anything else, I want this one to be true.

So, I hope Dylan shrugged.

Things that Matter

2010-09-11T09:08:00.000-07:00

I went to the Tigers game last night with my friends, Garth Pleasant and Randy Harris. The game itself was of little consequence. Two out-of-the-running teams playing out the string. But it was live baseball in a beautiful park with good friends. I was happy to go.

At one point in the game, Johnny Damon had his bat shattered by a pitch, shards of wood flying across the infield. The bat boy sprinted from the Tigers' dugout after the play ended collecting the various pieces of wood. And of all the things I noticed that night, the picture of him sprinting effortlessly around the diamond struck me. It struck me, because I know he takes for granted the ability to run effortlessly. This is not a luxury I enjoy anymore.

My left knee simply doesn't work the way it once did. And since knee surgery a few years ago, my leg strength has simply not returned to what it once was. When I run, I pray for pain free, not effortless. I walk a lot these days, most days around four miles. And my hips are sore and stiff as a result. When I sit for awhile, the first few steps make me wonder if I'll ever walk normal again.

I'm doing all the right things. I'm taking the glucosamine-condroitin tablets (though I fear I'll choke to death on them) and I stretch, wear good shoes, etc. The truth is, whatever I do I simply will not be able to run effortlessly across the infield collecting Johnny Damon's bat fragments.

Now, this is not a feel sorry for Mark blog. That's the thing. I'm different, not just in my physical limitations. Different things matter to me these days, and this overall is an improvement.

I think of how sports-obsessed I was for most of my life. I lived and died with the morning sports page. I learned to read a box score about the time I learned to tie my shoes. And some of the most romantic aspects of my boyhood are related to sports. Seeing Lew Alcindor play. Stomping my feet on the Heyward Field bleachers in cadence to Steve Prefontaine's footfalls. Sitting in the end zone of Autzen stadium to see Dan Fouts, Bobby Moore, and Russ Francis lose to O. J. Simpson or Gary Beban or Jim Plunkett. Watching Jim Ryun beat Marty Liquori, or Kenny Moore outduel Gerry Lindgren. I lived and died with the Cardinals and Red Sox, the Celtics and Trailblazers, the Cowboys and Ducks.

I'm still a fan, but I know the names of the '68 Tigers or '77 Sixers more than I do their current lineups. And the best part of the game last night was being there with Garth and Randy. Telling stories and laughing and eating overpriced food. I know that this shift might also be accompanied by wearing shorts and black socks. This might just be a part of getting older, my life adjusting to the fact that I'm closer to the end than the beginning. I recognize it in others, so it has to be true for me as well. But I like the fact that now I want to read the editorials before I read the sports page. That when others are caught up in the worship and vilification of this team or that, or this player or that, I just don't care--at least not like I used to.

Some days I think about just giving in. Let the waistline go. Buy some adjustable pants and Hawaiian shirts. Get some velcro walking shoes. I'm not there yet (and hopefully never will be). I still try to run through the pain and lift weights and stay in my skinny jeans. But I'm ok with the fact that I'll never again run 10k in 40 minutes or even 50. I'll let someone else chase the bat splinters and hate Kobe or Rex Ryan (I still despise Buddy Ryan) or USC. I'll let my passion burn for other things. And that's the thing. It's not that I care less about life. It's that I care differently, and in some ways more deeply. Some things still make my heart pump faster. And all-in-all, I'm good with that.

Dylan on a Sunday

2010-09-05T13:53:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday, Bob Dylan was in concert at McMenamin's Edgefield in Troutdale, OR. And I was stuck here in Michigan.

I'm reticent to see Dylan in concert these days. I've only seen him once, a few years ago in Dallas, and it was perfect. And I know from many who have seen him several times that this is not always the case with Dylan. So, I'm reluctant to mess with that. But to see him at Edgefield...

I worked for eleven years for a congregation located about three miles from Edgefield. It's simply one of my favorite places in the world. Edgefield, like Dylan, has been many different things in its existence. It started as a New Deal poor farm and later did a stint as a home for the mentally ill. Now the McMenamin brothers, known for their brewpubs throughout the Northwest, have turned it into a hotel/vineyard/winery/artisan hangout/pitch and putt golf course/brewpub/lush gardens/fine dining/billiards room/music venue extravaganza.

When I have the chance to introduce friends to Portland, the greatest city on the planet, I always take them to Edgefield. (Those of you who read Richard Beck's blog should ask him about Edgefield. Ask him what "any flat surface will do" means). Nancy and I have stayed often in the hotel. In fact, I celebrated my last birthday there--the big five-o--with several of my favorite people. It's just a great place.

They only started doing concerts outdoors at Edgefield in the last five years or so, so I've never been to a concert there. They have started to attract great bands--Wilco, The Black Crowes, Avett Brothers, and now Dylan (who shared his two days there with John Mellencamp). I would love to see a concert there.

Edgefield makes me feel connected--connected to the earth, to people, to art, to my body, to pleasure. And this is increasingly important to me spiritually. I consider myself a theologian of the cross. It is my one theme. Too often, however, the cross is only seen as punishment or suffering or enduring. But it is more to me. It is God's complete identification with creaturely existence. It is God going to weddings, eating with tax collectors and sinners, welcoming children, and enduring death. God on the cross is full contact life. It is joy and sorrow, love and grief. It is life fully embodied and embraced. I go to Edgefield because it is good to be reminded often of how delicious life can be.

I can't say for sure that I would have risked the one great taste of Dylan live that I have. But I can say that seeing him at Edgefield would surely have tempted me.

Be Subject to One Another

2010-09-02T08:49:00.000-07:00

Today I begin a course for undergraduates, mostly freshman, "Introduction to the Bible." I am anxious to begin.

I suspect I will have students (55 of them) along a continuum of experience with a Bible. Some will have owned a Bible since birth, been to Sunday school all their lives, etc. Some will never have opened the book at all. But I'm kind of assuming one thing for all of them. They will not have encountered Scripture as a phenomenon. I think I will be able to show all of them the Bible in ways they've never seen it before, and on the Bible's own terms.

But I also want them to know that the culture they live in has been shaped in some pretty important ways by Scripture. Even if they've never read Scripture, they've encountered it--in a song, a TV show or movie, a book, a well-worn phrase. Though its influence is not what it once was, we still have a lot of Scripture and its echoes sounding down the chambers of our culture.

I will show them this clip this afternoon. It's from one of my favorite all-time TV shows, The West Wing. And it features President and Mrs. Bartlett quarreling over church, and specifically a sermon from Eph 5:21. It's pretty stunning. My students will be asked to find three cultural artifacts like this during the semester. Maybe you have some suggestions of where to look.

We See in a Glass Darkly

2010-09-01T09:40:00.000-07:00

So, what's my dissertation about? Thanks for asking. And I'll try to tell you without your eyes rolling back in your head.

First, its about theology, or how we think and talk about God. If God is living and active, engaging the world, then there should be some evidence of that. From this perspective, theology is about God, not just the history of ideas about God. And if this is the case, then theology should be done in the world and for the world, not just in a library. That's one thing my dissertation is about.

Second, its about salvation. God's engagement with the world, from a Christian perspective, is a saving engagement. Thinking of salvation this way requires a larger view than what we typically have, and in my estimation it requires a more biblical view. Salvation in the Bible is bigger than an individual's status or eternal destiny. If we expand our view, then we will look at what God is up to differently. That's another thing my dissertation is about.

Third, its about what counts as data. Talk of God's involvement in the world is tricky business and much harm is done in the endeavor. An earthquake in Haiti or a hurricane in the gulf or the prosperity of a particular person or group are too casually assigned to God's agency in the world. We have, for a long time now, been conditioned to think of the world in relation to strict causation. If "a," then "b." This is a good way to think about some things, but not everything, and especially not complex things. As Paul says, we see in a glass darkly and need to develop both a particular perception and some modesty about our claims. How we attend to the world conditions what understandings we develop. I am suggesting that Paul's phrase "being saved" represents a particular way of engaging the world that produces a unique wisdom. It represents a particular type of practical reasoning that both uncovers and enacts a particular way of being with God in the world. This is another thing my dissertation is about.

Fourth, congregations are not typically good at this. Other kinds of practical reasoning tend to dominate congregational life--like problem solving or strategic planning. And these get in the way of an imagination rooted in God's saving engagement with the world. How would congregations actually develop competence in this way of viewing the world? So, my dissertation is about the work I'm actually doing with two congregations as we kind of experiment along these lines together. This is another thing my dissertation is about.

How's that sound? Thanks for asking.

Scene from a Checkout Line

2010-08-30T20:31:00.000-07:00

Today I found the shortest line at the grocery store, like I always do, like everyone does. George Clooney's character in Up in the Air knows which security line at the airport to choose by profiling the passengers. There is no virtue in getting stuck in the slowest line.

I had four items: cherry tomatoes, two kinds of lunch meat, and cheese. Easy in, easy out.

I clearly don't profile as well as Clooney. The line I chose was the shortest, but I was there for a long time. There was a group of four in front of me. An older woman, a pregnant young woman, her younger sister (about 12 years old) and a baby boy, the son of the pregnant young woman. Each of the women wore head coverings and long skirts. Only the young girl spoke English.

The check out lady was tired--tired of working, tired of problem customers, tired of life. And she didn't pay attention as the young girl tried to explain that she needed to swipe their wic card before she rang up their groceries. She had done this before, often. But the checkout lady ignored her and when the wic card was finally swiped at the end, there was a remaining balance of $25, and our family of four had no money. The young woman said they would have to give back what was not covered on the card. Evidently, this was not clear by simply looking at the receipt.

By this time there were several other customers behind me in line. This would not be pretty. The woman directly behind me saw the trouble clearly. She was immediately exasperated, clearly disgusted with the way this family was slowing us all down. She scooped up her items and looked for another line. The cashier told us all that this could take awhile and that we should find another place to check out.

My eyes were on the young girl. She had been in this situation before. She was stuck between her older companions speaking her native language and an overtired cashier who clearly wished that her family had selected another check out line. I decided to stay and was determined to be patient.

The young girl was amazing. She calmly showed another receipt that itemized what they could purchase with their wic card. Calmly, she pointed out to the cashier where the mistakes had been made, but the cashier was confused and in little mood to help. The girl looked up at me and calmly said, "this could take awhile, maybe you should find another line." I smiled at her and said I was in no hurry. I wanted there to be one non-anxious person in the middle of all of this for her.

A manager came to help and after listening to the cashier's incoherent account of the episode, finally turned her attention to the girl who again flawlessly explained the predicament. The manager went through each item on the receipt. People lined up behind me and left, lined up and left, lined up and left while this unfolded. There were sighs and frowns. The girl looked at me again as if to say, please find another line so I won't feel bad about slowing you down. The old woman looked at me curiously. I smiled at them both.

I considered just paying the difference for them, sending us all on our way more quickly. But I wanted this young girl to experience victory and I was willing to wait. The manager quickly lost patience working through the register tape. The credit card swipe on the line next to us was not working and that cashier was asking for help. She voided the entire transaction in our line, which meant this family would have to start checking out all over again.

The girl looked at me and said, "you should go to another line." "I'm not in a hurry, it's fine," I told her. "These things can be complicated and you're doing your best." I could see her shoulders shrink, the tension ease. The manager took a long time at the other register. Finally, the girl asked the cashier, "why can't you check this man's groceries while you're waiting." The cashier had clearly not considered this. "I guess that would be ok." And she checked me through.

I was so impressed with this young girl. She stood straight, head high, hands on her hips. She was confident, persistent, patient, insistent, and smart. And all of this in a young girl's costume, a cheap dress and scuffed shoes. As I walked past the family, I looked in the old woman's face and told her, "you have a very smart girl here." The old woman smiled, though I'm sure she didn't know what I said. The girl looked at the ground.

We were all caught in this snarl. A snarl of impatience and bureaucracy and bigotry and poverty, and all of this was caught on the shoulders of this girl. And I thought about how often this must happen for her, how seldom it happens to me. The powers are aligned for me, but not for her. And patience seems like a small gesture over against it all. But today, it was what I had.

Dylan on a Sunday

2010-08-29T13:38:00.000-07:00

Satellite radio this morning. Listened to the station, The Loft. First song, Van Morrison. Second song, Bob Dylan. That's already a good morning. The Dylan song was "When I Paint My Masterpiece."

Masterpiece. That's a tall word. And not one you want lurking around when you're writing a dissertation. It's hard enough to put one word after another without them having to be so many sparkling bits of glass for a stained glass window.

Honestly, most days I'm writing to finish. If I happen to put things together in an interesting or compelling way, so much the better. But there are days when I think to myself, "dang, this could be something." These are dangerous thoughts.

Its words like masterpiece that keeps dissertations from getting written. After all, its often the first great album that keeps the second one from coming out, or that keeps Pet Sounds from being released for years (Brian Wilson's rumored "masterpiece").

I believe in masterpieces, though perhaps not for me. But I also believe they are mysterious. They're as much lightning in a bottle as they are sweat and toil (though I do believe they also require sweat and toil). I think Dylan, who has had a few in his career, knows this. Life is what happens while you're waiting for your masterpiece. So, I'm going to find the best ordinary words I have, string them together as quickly as possible, and live my life.

Missional Musing: We're Not Afraid of Strangers

2010-08-27T07:43:00.000-07:00

My friend, Cheryl, in talking about the missional journey of her congregation says, "we're no longer afraid of strangers." This is the mark of a community in mission.

One of my favorite ways to distinguish missional churches from others is that they're learning to ask a different question about others. Instead of asking the question, "how can we get others to belong to us?", missional communities are forming their life around the question, "how in Jesus' name do we belong to our neighbors?"

The first question tends to sort "prospects" around their fit with the members who are already there. We tend to look for people who will be attracted to who we already are. The rub here is that if they're already like us without being a part of our church, why would they need to belong to our church? Or, it requires people not like us to do all the adjusting.

In contrast, the question of to whom do we belong puts the "other" in the place of priority. And it requires on my part the challenge of boundary crossing. And this is the Christian story, that Christ gave up the security of heaven for our sake. And if there are Christian gifts of the Spirit, boundary crossing surely must be a part of that.

Cheryl's church is now two years into a commitment to being with strangers on their terms. They have found people of peace, developed new skills, found new partnerships in the mission of God. And in the process, they are no longer afraid of their neighbors. This is the beginning of missional wisdom.

Morning in Minnesota: A Reflection on Language and Sight

2010-08-26T06:47:00.000-07:00

I am in Northern Minnesota at a cabin sandwiched between a lake and a swamp. It is beautiful. And this morning I took a walk and wrote the following in my journal:

This is beautiful. I don't have the words to describe what I am looking at this morning. And I worry that with the lack of language, I will be unable to see all that is before me. Yesterday, Ryan talked about an article he read about a study on language. People with only one word for blue lacked the capacity to distinguish between shades of blue. They couldn't see a difference.

But, this is what I can say. I am sitting on a moss-covered log among ferns wilted with a glistening, morning dew, overlooking a swamp lined with rushes. Still, still water, without expression. So still, that things are allowed to grow on it, like a layer of dust, like doilies on a glass table.

And low-angled light cuts through the trees and illumines the underside of sleepy, morning leaves, and makes visible the rise of misty spirits that walk the bog.

And I am still, absorbed into what I see.

So, reflection on my reflection. Our host, Tony, could have described the scene in much greater detail. The kinds of rushes, ferns, trees, algae (or whatever grows on the water). And this undoubtedly would have created a larger space of articulation, undoubtedly deepened my reflection. But with the words I had, common words, lacking any real descriptive precision, I was still able to get at what I was seeing.

My sense of fit between what I was seeing and what I wrote was enabled by metaphor, by what Ricouer calls a predicative impertinence. By employing language beyond its normal semantic field, I was able to evoke what I could not otherwise describe. This is the power of poetic structures.

One more reflection. The more I described, the more I saw. The effort to describe, the attention given to bringing to words, brought out things of which I was not immediately aware. It was, for instance, only in describing the peacefulness of the scene that the light became apparent to me.

I am committed to this practice. To a reflective attentiveness, to writing a world into view.

Missional Musing: Narrating the Transformation

2010-08-24T05:57:00.000-07:00

In working with over 20 congregations over the past few years, I've been thinking a lot about why some of them experience "missional" transformation, and why others go through the process we offer and stay roughly the same. There are no doubt many factors, and none of them in and of themselves guarantee a shift in congregational imagination. Still, there are some things that seem to be predictive.

Here's one: congregations that have someone who can faithfully narrate a coherent story in the midst of the confusion of change fare better than others.

I think there are several reasons for this. Venturing a narrative with plot and characters brings a congregation closer to naming God as an actor in their midst. This is huge. The act of narrating also brings together a useable past with a promised future. If there is no narrative, then the past is simply a mistake, something to be discarded, and people need to hold on to aspects of their past to be able to imagine a habitable future. One more. A faithful narrative has to ring true. All narratives are selective, some details highlighted, others repressed. The ring of truth comes when the worst can be admitted out loud without foreclosing on the future. Hope.

This kind of work is an art. I am wondering whether it can be taught.

Dylan on a Sunday

2010-08-01T07:12:00.000-07:00

If you ever go to Houston, better walk right

Keep your hands in your pockets and your gun belts tied

If you're asking for drama, if you're looking for a fight

If you ever go to Houston, boy you better walk right

These lyrics are from Dylan's latest cd, Together Through Life, which drips with Southwestern culture. I listened to it Saturday as I drove from Dallas to Houston (long story). The cd (good, but not one of my favorites) is at home on the river walk or in a taqueria or in a seedy honky-tonk with a neon lone star bottle, half burned out, shining in the window. It sweats like a hot and humid hill country night. And this might be why its not my favorite Dylan work.

Of all possible weather conditions, hot and humid is for me the worst. If hell is a dry heat, I would prefer that to Houston. So, if you want to scare me righteous, the line would be "if you lie, you'll go to Houston." After two Minnesota winters and one in Michigan, I can say with a chest full of conviction that I prefer a northern winter to a south Texas summer. Which is to say, I'd rather thaw my eye balls than endure sweaty underwear all day. (Too much information?). I simply don't understand people who hold the opposite view.

Which is why I'm so puzzled that my friends who either live there, or who have in the past, love Houston. They love it. Last Fall, I spent an evening with my son and some of his friends in downtown Houston, and I have to admit I had a lot of fun. My friends who like it find the cultural life energizing. There's stuff to do, great food, museums, concerts, night life. And for them, sweating, horrendous traffic and sharing a city with George H W Bush is not enough to overwhelm the benefits.

I will say this. Both Houston and Dallas seem pretentious to me (unlike P0rtland or Minneapolis), but at least Houston can pull it off. Pretentious in Dallas is posing. Houston wears it more comfortably. One more thing, and this is big to me, diversity in Dallas plays only as a threat. Houston embraces its cosmopolitan-ism. I am at this moment sitting in a Starbucks near the Galleria, and its one of the most ethnically diverse rooms I've ever had coffee in.

None of Dylan's songs are about a Starbucks in Houston. He's going for belt buckles, wildcatters, accordions, pentecostal manliness, and sweaty, serial romance. And that he delivers. I'll listen to it again as I drive today from Houston to the Dallas airport (long story). But at this point I'm happy that Texas and I are not Together Through Life.

Dylan on a Sunday

2010-07-18T15:43:00.000-07:00

I started this day in Federal Way, WA. My friend, Jerry, drove me to the airport in his Toyota pick-up at 6 am. I took a commuter flight from Seattle to Portland on a prop plane manufactured in Canada. I got a shuttle from the airport to my hotel room for this evening where they let me check in early. I dumped my stuff in my room and walked to the nearest light rail stop (the Max), changed to the Gresham line at the Gateway transit center and rode it all the way to the end. That left me about a mile and a half from the East County Church of Christ, where I ministered for eleven years. I walked and arrived just in time for the opening song. After services, I walked about a mile to Edgefield, one of my favorite places in all the world, a kind of constant carnival of music, good food and beverage, golf, glass blowing, gardens, etc.

There should be a song in all of that, or two, or three.

I thought about that as I walked to Edgefield. I walked past a long stand of blackberry vines, which are omnipresent in Western Oregon and a nuisance. Except for this time of year, when they have ripe berries. And the best part of that is the smell. I used to run along trails in this area and the smell of the blackberries on the breeze made the run immensely more enjoyable.

Anyways, as I was walking past and smelling the blackberries, I thought this is the kind of thing that would show up in a Dylan song. While the song wouldn't be about it, (or if it were, only in an oblique way) a line about berries on the wind could very well make it into a song. The power of his observations are often what make his lyrics so great.

I am not always the most observant person in the world. Some things simply evade me. So when a particular smell opens up a fist-full of memories, I want to be a poet. I want the few things that I deeply observe to have a mark on the world, to linger, to have a shared existence. And I wish most of all that I could combine that with melody, and a great middle eight, and a chorus with a subtle, but memorable hook. Today will be content with a blog post, oh underachieving today.

Dylan on a Sunday

2010-07-11T18:25:00.000-07:00

I visited my Aunt Dorothy today (my mom's aunt, actually). She's in hospice care and so this may very well be the last time I visit with her. She's been a presence in my life. She was my 4th grade Sunday School teacher. During worship, she sat on the aisle on the second row opposite my mother on the other side of the aisle. I have told people that I learned the gospel by paying attention when Dorothy and my mother would nod during my father's sermons.

When I preached for the East County Church in Gresham, OR, Dorothy and her husband, Jess, sat on the second row as I preached. They were always dressed to the nines and became fixtures in our congregation. There was simply no one like them, especially Dorothy.

Dorothy is a Guild, one of my grandfather's younger sisters. And all of them are strong-willed, outspoken, insightful women with a more than a little bit of cantankerous mixed in. My favorite Dorothy story consists of an encounter she had with a famous Church of Christ preacher who had retired and attended the congregation she attended. He had a peculiar view of the Holy Spirit. He couldn't deny that the Bible talked about a personal indwelling of the Spirit, but he maintained that the Spirit was only active in relationship to Scripture, kind of a modified word-only position for those of you CoC'ers.

So, to demonstrate how ridiculous this position was, she bought a necktie, wrapped in in a gift box and gave it to him one Sunday after church. Once he opened it, she told him that she never wanted him to wear it. He protested. "Why would you give me a gift and expect me not to use it!" "Exactly!" she pounced. "Why would God give us the Holy Spirit and not expect us to use it."

Classic Dorothy.

I talked to her husband, Jess, yesterday on the phone. He promised Dorothy he would never put her in a home. And a few months ago, it looked like Dorothy's decline would be fast and final. But she's a tough old boot and is hanging in there. She's improved. And this could go on now indefinitely. And even thought the hospice workers come to their home periodically, along with other helpers, Jess is exhausted. He's 84, and while he's in good health, this is an ordeal.

He told me yesterday that he has fought in the war, been shot at, and had other difficulties in his life, but that this was by far the most difficult thing he's ever done. "I think I can do it, though, see it through, if I could just get a little rest."

I admire Jess. He's been married to Dorothy for 60 years and she is the more dominant figure in their relationship. I'm thinking not everything has gone his way, that he's had to swallow a few things here and there. But here he is, serving Dorothy, beyond his endurance and stamina allows. He wants more than anything to see it through to the end.

So, for Jess today, Dylan on a Sunday is When the Deal Goes Down.

In the still of the night, in the world's ancient light
Where wisdom grows up in strife
My bewildering brain, toils in vain
Through the darkness on the pathways of life
Each invisible prayer is like a cloud in the air
Tomorrow keeps turning around
We live and we die, we know not why
But I'll be with you when the deal goes down

We eat and we drink, we feel and we think
Far down the street we stray
I laugh and I cry and I'm haunted by
Things I never meant nor wished to say
The midnight rain follows the train
We all wear the same thorny crown
Soul to soul, our shadows roll
And I'll be with you when the deal goes down

Well, the moon gives light and it shines by night
When I scarcely feel the glow
We learn to live and then we forgive
O'r the road we're bound to go
More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours
That keep us so tightly bound
You come to my eyes like a vision from the skies
And I'll be with you when the deal goes down

Well, I picked up a rose and it poked through my clothes
I followed the winding stream
I heard the deafening noise, I felt transient joys
I know they're not what they seem
In this earthly domain, full of disappointment and pain
You'll never see me frown
I owe my heart to you, and that's sayin' it true
And I'll be with you when the deal goes down

Dylan on a Sunday

2010-07-04T09:04:00.000-07:00

I noticed that Brandi Carlile is playing the White House on the 4th of July. That's got to feel like a pretty big honor. I hope she'll do her cover of "Fortunate Son." That would set them on their ears.

That got me to thinking about what Dylan would do on the 4th of July (mostly because I write this blog). As I write this, he's about to go on stage in Ireland. I doubt he'll sing America the Beautiful, but I could be wrong. I imagine Dylan at this point avoiding anything that would seem like a statement, even if he thought not singing America the Beautiful would be a statement. He might play the White House on the 4th of July, but he would gloss the day, give no indication of its significance. Not make it a big deal, one way or another. At least, that's what I imagine.

One consistent thing about Dylan's music, at least his recent stuff, is that he brooks no idolatries. He writes from inside the details of life these days, not from a stance above it that would allow him some universalizing critique. There are no ideologies or utopias. There is nothing in life that doesn't have another side to it. Dylan is not likely to sermonize. He's more likely to undo you with irony, to let your project fall by its own weight.

I'm more comfortable with this view of life. I missed the patriotic gene somewhere. It's not that I'm not thankful for the life I have, and I know a big part of that is because I live in an impressive country that's gotten a lot of things right. I'm under no pretense that somehow I've earned or deserve the prosperity I enjoy. I've traveled enough to know how much I take for granted. I'm no America basher (though two weeks in Uganda is more than enough to sponsor some real Western guilt).

But I'll also have to admit that Toby Keith turns my stomach and you'll never catch me mouthing the words to a Lee Greenwood song. And if you want to get under my skin at church, talk about America as a Christian nation. I've only rarely enjoyed fireworks (I know, this is kind of grinchy), and parades make me very, very tired. I'm just not constitutionally cut out to be patriotic.

But I'm also wary of hyper-patriotism. I think it is one of the easiest places to set up idolatries, to use God's name for our own aspirations, especially when you're the most "powerful" nation in the world. I hope President Obama prays before he commits troops. But I also hopes he keeps that to himself, lest someone confuse our cause with God's.

I do plan on watching fireworks tonight. And I will give thanks for what we share as a nation. And if I hear Brandi Carlile sing, America the Beautiful, I imagine it will even deliver a goose bump, for which I'll be thankful.

Music to Write By

2010-06-20T15:13:00.000-07:00

I wrote my master's thesis in the Summer of 1984 in a dark library cubicle. I wrote in long hand. The fingernail on my right index finger still bears a slight deformity from the ordeal. I would spend entire days alone writing, my only company a cassette player and head phones. I had four sides of music that got me through the thesis. Steely Dan, James Taylor, Supertramp, and Pat Benatar (yes, Pat Benatar).

Supertramp and Benatar were opposite sides of the same cassette, and they were particularly helpful in keeping me writing. Clearly, they were different. Supertramp was better when I needed to formulate an argument. Early in the day stuff. Even in The Quietest Moments, Can't Stop the Loverboy, Long Way Home. But when I had the argument and just needed to crank, it was Benatar. To the beats of Never Wanna Leave You, Heartbreaker, and Hit Me With Your Best Shot, I wrote about Elias Smith and post-revolutionary American Christianity.

So, as I prepare to drop into a concentrated dissertation mode, I ritually prepared by making three playlists. I needed some new music, something that would keep me interested enough to sit on one place for awhile. So, playlist one consists of a mix of some of my new favorites from their most recent cd's--DMB, Avett Brothers, Jakob Dylan, Wilco, Pearl Jam. The second playlist is the muse cd, when I'm searching for the writing line. It's soothing stuff, and as it turns out all female voices. Sarah McLachlan, Rachael Yamagata, Kim Taylor, Over the Rhine, Lucinda Williams, Brandi Carlile. And then there's the rocker, the get it done, crank it outm finish the footnotes, cd. Tom Petty, Kings of Leon, Gov't Mule, Raconteurs, M. Ward, Spoon, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. And for a touch with the summer of '84, Benatar's, Never Gonna Leave You and Supertramp's, Give a Little Bit, made the lists.

So, now that I have avoided actual dissertation work by writing about my playlists, back to congregational soteriological imagination.

Over the Rhine on a Sunday

2010-06-06T13:44:00.001-07:00

I spent the better part of this week in Nashville for the Christian Scholar's Conference at Lipscomb University. It started several years ago as a conference primarily for biblical scholars in Church of Christ affiliated universities. It had fallen on lean times until revived a few years ago (with a big effort on the part of my friend, David Fleer). The revival has included a broader emphasis both academically and ecumenically. Natural scientists, humanities professors, social scientists, etc, now form sessions where papers are presented, books reviewed, and the like. And plenary sessions now find a common focus and typically feature top scholars in their field regardless of denominational affiliation.

This year's focus was on the Arts and Christian faith. The plenary speakers were outstanding. And there were real examples of Christian art, including a performance of the play "Doubt" (also a Meryl Streep movie). But my favorite event of the weekend was the Friday evening performance of Tokens. Tokens is a live radio-show in the spirit of Prairie Home Companion with a definite Nashville flavor and an explicit theological emphasis.

Lee Camp, a theology prof at Lipscomb, is the genius behind Tokens. He narrates the evening, ala Garrison Keillor. There's a blue-grass band of first rate Nashville session mucisians, a radio troupe of actors, and guest musicians. Camp also did interviews, one with the investigative reporter whose work led to the conviction of the murderer in Medgar Evers' civil rights case, and another with Rodney Clapp, a Christian publisher who has just written a book on Johnny Cash. Tokens is first class in every respect. And that includes the theology. It's not in any way preachy, but at the same time it is relevant and poignant. Much of it is carried by the sketches and the music, and so sneaks up on you over the course of the evening until Camp brings more fully into view through his artful commentary. (Way to go Lee!)

My favorite part of the evening was the music of Over the Rhine. I had never heard of them and didn't know any of their music. They are a husband-wife team, Linford Detweiler (piano) and Karin Bergquist (guitar and vocals), from Ohio who have been making music for over 15 years. Itunes classifies their music alternately as pop or rock, indicating the difficulty of placing them in a niche. Detweiler is an accomplished pianist, his beautiful playing ranging from a classical feel, to torch music, to jazz. Detweiler's voice is equally impressive. She takes charge of a song, whether its honky-tonk, jazz, or ballad. She's got range, both vocally and emotionally.

The description of her voice on their website is perfect. "Bergquist’s torchy, devil-may-care voice, brimming with Midwestern soul, unafraid to lay bare every emotional resonance. And again, there’s the life-and-death commitment dripping from her every word. 'I’m either into it or I’m not, because there’s no faking it with me,' Bergquist notes. 'Life’s way too short for that.'”

I was overwhelmed by their last song of the evening, The Trumpet Child. Detweiler's jazz piano and Bergquist's gripping vocal left me no place to go. I was inside every note. There's nothing like live music, and truly nothing like a great live performance, which this one was. The lyrics are outstanding.

The trumpet he will use to blow
Is being fashioned out of fire
The mouthpiece is a glowing coal
The bell a burst of wild desire

The trumpet child will riff on love
Thelonious notes from up above
He’ll improvise a kingdom come
Accompanied by a different drum

The trumpet child will banquet here
Until the lost are truly found
A thousand days, a thousand years
Nobody knows for sure how long

Kingdom sentiments in the language of jazz. This is how I like my theology in music. Poetic, evocative, surprising. Again, I like how their website says it: "'Believe me, we don’t want to waste anybody’s time,' elaborates Detweiler. 'When we stop believing we’re doing our best work, we’re done. Every song has to be good, every record has to be great, every concert has to have some spiritual significance—something that we can’t quantify, something bigger than all of us.'”

Today I bought this song and their cd, The Drunkard's Prayer. My first favorite is "Little Did I Know."

Little did I know
That I almost let you go
Until I caught a glimpse of life
without you

Little did I know
How deep these roots had grown
Until I felt the earth quake here
without you

And this ache is gonna break me love
Until you come back home
Right or wrong
There is no home without you

And these eyes are never gonna dry
I never knew how I could cry
Until I thought I'd really lost you

Little did I know that I almost let you go
Until I caught a glimpse of life

without you

Thoughts on Scripture: A Stranger Among Us

2010-06-01T08:50:00.000-07:00

"The Bible, this ubiquitous, persistent black chunk of a bestseller, is a chink--often the only chink--through which winds howl. It is a singularity, a black hole into which our rich and multiple worlds strays and vanishes. We crack open its pages at our peril. Many educated, urbane, and flourishing experts in every aspect of business, culture, and science have felt pulled by this anachronistic, semibarbaric mass of antique laws and fabulous tales from far away; they entered it queer, strait gates and were lost. Eyes open, heads high, in full possession of their critical minds, they obeyed the high, inaudible whistle, and let the gates close behind them."

These wonderful words are Annie Dillard's from her essay, "The Gospel of Luke." I call them wonderful because they get at something that's important for me: they capture the distance between the world imagined in Scripture and the world we construe for ourselves every day.

Now, I'm the first to admit that some things in Scripture are more than problematic. If I were voting, there would certainly be stories I would toss. I'm with Jesus and many other biblical figures/writers. Not all Scripture is created equal. And part of a critical approach to Scripture is making sense of the diversity of witnesses to God's work in the world found under one cover.

The temptation in this critical task, however, is to domesticate Scripture, to make it all seem accessible or sensible. To make it our next door neighbor or best friend. To think of the Bible as we do a pair of old slippers. When we lose the "queer, strait gates" sense of Scripture, we are at risk of losing God as well.

As Brueggemann puts this, "I propose the stories must be kept in their embarrassing ancientness, for along with the refusal of modernity comes God as a vital and key character in this account of our lives. It is not, so it seems, to modernize the narratives without losing the primitiveness of this character who must be kept as the focal point of 'the news.' The ancient stories of the Bible are indeed sense-making midst our pervasive 'non-sense.'"

Let me be clear. I am not suggesting that Scripture does not need to be interpreted in relation to our setting. I am not advocating for a literalist reading of Scripture. Far from it. Again, I am offended by some of what I find in Scripture and part of faithful interpretation is struggling with this offense. I am suggesting that the foreign-ness of Scripture is necessary for us to keep from over-identifying our own sensibility with God's. That the strange parts keep us from nesting too quickly. Taken together, they keep the possibility of a God who evades our grasp alive. And this is our only hope.

I think we assume that the first readers of Scripture found it all familiar, given their cultural proximity to its production. But I think otherwise. I think it has always been a strange book. How could it be otherwise and make any pretense as Sacred?

Finally, it seems to me that many modern approaches to Scripture of both the liberal and fundamentalist variety are to make it familiar. Views of inerrancy, for instance, are attempts to make the Bible explainable, stable, neighborly. They may provide some sense of stability, but at the expense of God as a character, and ironically at the expense of Scripture itself.

I am teaching an introduction to the Bible course for undergrads this summer. I will have students for whom the Bible is strange indeed, and students who think the Bible is their neighbor. While I'm hoping to make Scripture a little less strange, I don't want to do that at the expense of the great Stranger who calls us to inhabit a different world.

Dylan on a Sunday

2010-05-23T12:36:00.000-07:00

The preacher quoted Dylan today. That's what he called him. "Dylan." I moved to the edge of my seat. "Dylan got it right," he said. Finally, something interesting! What would the quote be. I was hoping for obscure, clever, ironic, because these kinds of things hold the possibility of meaning. Obvious is nearly always a disappointment, a cliche, a belly-laugh thief.

And I got obvious. Dang. Church ought to be, but seldom is, the place where you should get something other than obvious. If the world was in good shape, then God should be obvious. If not, then God has to be a surprise, something between the lines, a cure for hiccups.

I got, "You gotta serve somebody." The best thing about this song is the back-up singers. It's not that its bad, exactly. It's not bad. It's just so obvious. And it's an easy dualism. This or that. And those don't go down well with me. I like it all just a bit more complex.

Now, I didn't really expect anything different. I was shocked to hear Dylan's name at all. If I hadn't been so shocked in the first place, I would've guessed "Serve Somebody" or something old like "Blowin in the Wind." No chance it could have been, "Not Dark Yet," or "What was it You Wanted," or even something like "Highway 61 Revisited."

After my Pepperdine presentation, someone who evidently reads this blog (sorry can't remember who), expressed mock surprise that I didn't quote Dylan in my sermon. And I'm pretty sure that I never have. I don't think we have that kind of relationship. I've quoted the Rolling Stones, Heart, U2, Pink Floyd, but never Dylan.

And today's experience convinced me that no one should. The Dylan stuff that would fit in a sermon, at least most sermons, is not his best stuff. And his best stuff doesn't go with anything else. The world of a Dylan song is incommensurate with other worlds. And so is the world of a good sermon. You don't just casually shuffle those kinds of things together.

So, Dylan on a Sunday is always a good thing. But maybe not in a sermon.

Are You Calling Me a Relativist?

2010-05-19T10:55:00.000-07:00

I was with a group of Christians in Toronto this past weekend and I introduced them to a practice called, "Dwelling in the Word." I often describe this process as group lectio divina. It is a more passive approach to Scripture that refuses to turn the text into an "object" to dissect, and treats it more like a living voice that resonates throughout the perceptive abilities of practicing communities of faith. Phew, that's a mouthful.

Dwelling in the Word is not the only way to approach Scripture. Nor is it a refutation of more "objective" strategies seated in a certain expertise or competence in history and languages. It is an augmenting, a necessary one, that allows Scripture to shape a communal consciousness.

When I introduce this to a new group, I am not surprised to be challenged by someone who thinks this is simply a practice in shared ignorance, a way of making the Scriptures mean just anything. Everyone's interpretation is just as valid as another's. In short, I am susceptible to the charge of being a relativist. Gasp!

This past week, a very thoughtful participant contrasted this approach with that advocated by Fee and Stuart in their influential book on reading Scripture. They make the strong claim that Scripture cannot mean anything other than what the author intended. This kind of approach to Scripture would frown on a practice like Dwelling in the Word. They attempt to fix meaning in terms of the original context (one that we have to reconstruct from a massive historical distance, usually with considerable conjecture) and guarantee our access to this through an exacting process. Anything else, it is implied, is playing fast and loose with the text, leaving it open to abuse.

I simply don't agree with Fee and Stuart at several places (though I do use many of the reading strategies they advocate). The Bible itself reveals that texts can mean something other than what they originally meant. Biblical writers use and reuse texts in ways that change their meaning. In some instances, the very same text quoted in two different texts can mean very, very different things in their new context. In fact, I would argue that it is precisely a text's ability to speak across times in new ways that allows us to recognize it as sacred. All texts have a dynamic range of meanings, and this might be even more true for particularly powerful texts.

I also disagree with Fee and Stuart related to their implied confidence that localizing a text in relation to the intentions of the author can produce a single meaning. In other words, methodology (in this case, historical-critical) is often not strong enough to overcome the existing commitments of the readers of Scripture. In other words, it is not only possible but likely that two interpreters using exactly the same methodology will still produce two different readings of the text, much less its context.

This, however, does not leave us to the perilous pit of relativism, of all interpretations being equal, etc. Though a text can mean different things, it can't mean anything. And some interpretations are clearly more viable than others. Moreover, certain rigorous or critical readings of Scripture can shed enormous light and prove extremely fruitful in discerning better readings. So, however, can reading in a community. My big point here is that letting go of confidence in an exacting methodology does not leave us only with relativism.

I ran across this statement by a philosopher of science (Feyerabend) that I think says it well.

"The real issue is not between people who think one view is as good as another and people who do not. It is between those who think our culture, or intuitions, cannot be supported except conversationally, and people who still hope for other sorts of support."

In other words, the only option beyond a methodological positivism is not relativism. Those bogeymen simply aren't out there. The practice of Dwelling in the Word, alongside other approaches, is a commitment to the long conversation about the dynamic meaning of Scripture by a historical community of committed readers.

Missional Worship, 4

2010-05-18T05:20:00.000-07:00

Haven't been here for awhile. Other things got in the way. But one more post in this line of thought.

A missional impulse for worship would make clearer the connections between God, church, and world. As we've seen in worship practices like the Lord's Supper, worship enacts God's care for the world through hospitality. This rehearsal, this anticipatory dinner, is also the way Christians learn their vocation in the world. The same hospitality they receive in worship, they extend to their neighbors.

So, there is not a wide gulf between what happens in worship on Sunday and the kind of life we live on Monday. To the contrary, there is a seamlessness. The way we are in worship is precisely the life to be lived among others.

This includes the way we speak in worship. We praise God not only because praise is due him, but also to learn praiseworthy speech. We bless to learn to bless. You get the idea.

Christianity is a Word religion. God creates through his word. Jesus is a Word incarnate. The Holy Spirit provides for us the words we use with others. God creates, sustains, and transforms his world through speech. What Christians bring the world is a gospel--a speech-act, that brings new worlds into view.

It is striking to me how often speech ethics are the focus of the biblical writers. The psalmist tells us that the throats of those who oppose God are "open graves," while the righteous have the fruit of praise continuously on their lips. Ethical sections in New Testament letters are peppered with admonitions about speech. We are to put away boasting, slander, gossip, unwholesome talk, etc, and instead to speak the truth to one another in love.

I am struck in 2 Corinthians how often Paul's self-identification with the death and resurrection of Jesus is coupled with a statement about his speech. Because he has experienced the power of death and resurrection, he speaks differently. "We have behaved in the world," he writes, "with frankness and godly sincerity." Or, "we are not peddler's of God's word..., but in Christ we speak as persons of sincerity." Again, "We have renounced the shameful things one hides; we refure to practice cunning or to falsify God's word; but by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God." These statements could be multiplied. The point is, Paul's encounter with the God who raised Jesus from the dead has changed the way he speaks to others.

We learn this way of speaking in worship, or at least should. This is one thing I like about highly liturgical traditions. We speak to one another in worship. The words of Scripture are not simply the set-up for the sermon. They become the church's dialogue. We say them to one another and we respond in certain ways when we hear them spoken to us. We have blessings spoken over us and we respond in kind. We are learning to listen to one another, and speak in ways that offer life.

It is true that the significance of this is often lost on parishioners. I think this is due in part to the fact that we have thought of worship as space and time separated from the world. The world is not present to us in worship in any kind of constructive way. We are often told in worship to leave the world and its cares behind so that we can focus on God, as if God only shows up in the world when we gather to worship, as if God is uninvolved in the cares of this world.

Missional thinking would recover the public horizon of Christian worship, and in turn heighten our awareness of how the various things we do in worship form us for vocation in the world.

Dylan on a Monday

2010-05-17T08:16:00.001-07:00

The past two Sundays have been travel days for me, so no new Dylan posts. Yesterday, I was driving back from Toronto in my boss Dodge Caravan rental hoping that no one would recognize me. I felt a little like Clark Griswold.

On the upside, it had a sirius satellite radio and I stumbled across the Theme Time radio show by none other than Bob Dylan. I knew of the show, but not having a sirius radio, had never heard it. Dylan has produced 100 episodes to great reviews, though it appears Theme Time's run is over.

I heard two episodes, and they were great. The first episode featured songs, stories, quips, and non-sequitors around the theme "fruit." He told fruit stories and played songs about fruit. Everything from Strawberry Fields Forever to The Banana Boat Song. Some of the tracks were obscure, other well-known. Dylan told the back story on many of the songs. And he had a running gag through the show on which fruit was #1; bananas according to Dylan. The second show featured songs about roads, avenues, lanes, boulevards, etc. It featured everything from Dylan reading Scripture after the song "Straight Street," to telling stories about route 66, to playing Green Day's Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

It was funny and witty and interesting. And you could tell Dylan was having great fun doing it. Dylan's narration is not conversational. It's poetry or schtick or whimsy or something. It's definitely performance. He's in a rhythm. The phrasing is as important as the words. This is different than his conversational tone in interviews, for instance. This is the same voice that lines out the phrase, "how does it feel?"

The place where I laughed the hardest was when Dylan volunteered his voice for a car's navigation system, and he gave an example of what that would sound like. Can you imagine having Dylan tell you when to turn right.

So, this is performance art for Dylan. This is different that VH1's story teller series where we get up close with the performers. Still, even in this performance, you come away with a greater sense of what Dylan is about. The different medium reveals another edge to his creativity, and you get a different sense about how his mind works, how things come together for him. The little allusions he drops along the way, the kind of details he's interested in, the kind of songs he knows about--all of it provides a thick enough backdrop that meanings and resonances become more clear with respect to his other work. This despite the fact that Dylan never intentionally gives us much of himself directly.

Those of you who follow me around a bit know that I'm fully invested in this notion of understanding. How do we come to understand one another and the world around us? Thick description. Understanding does not come only through science given over totally to critical methodologies. Understanding comes through use, through layers of experience, through the fruitfulness of prior assumptions, and through the encounter with new horizons.

Lucinda Williams on a Sunday

2010-05-02T14:30:00.000-07:00

These days, I'm particularly interested in persons who are on top of their game past the age of 50. Not sure why. Really, I have no clue.

But that rules out all professional athletes. Favre won't be playing in nine years. Fred Couples had a nice Masters a few weeks ago, but no one thought he could actually win. I'm sure there's a Latin American baseball player who is really 63 years old, but his birth certificate says 38, so that really doesn't help me.

I know there are ceo's and such on top of their game past 50. But I'm hoping to be on top of my game without wearing soft pants and a tie. (Um, not that this about me).

Which leaves me with musicians. The field here is thinning. All the big hair bands of the 80's are turning 50 these days and there's nothing appealing about a White Snake or Poison reunion tour. It's hard enough to watch the Who at the Super Bowl.

But there's nothing embarrassing about Lucinda Williams these days. She's tough and tender (though always through a sneer), a rocker and a balladeer. Her voice isn't pretty, so age isn't an issue. But her voice is piercing and what age it shows adds weight to her performance. And you get a sense that at this point in her life, she's not recording music for anyone but herself. And that kind of freedom can often times translate into authenticity and range.

So today, I've been writing while listening to Lucinda Williams', Little Honey. It's her latest and its a ride. There's country and punk and rock and ballads. There's a tune with Elvis Costello, a perfect pairing (wish it was a better song). It was great creative companionship.

Two favorites:

Honey Bee (An old rocker, with silly lyrics that sound somehow not silly when she sings them)

Oh, my little honey bee
I'm so glad you stung me
You've become my weakness
Now I've got your sweetness

Knowing (A ballad with great lyrics)

I didn't know what love meant before
I didn't know what you had waiting for me in store
I didn't know that I'd be finding out so much more
About the knowing and the knowing is all there is

About yes and yes, this is it
I didn't know

I didn't know what precious time would make
I didn't know how fragile a kiss could seem
I didn't know that finally all of dawn is trained
About the knowing and the knowing is all there is

About yes and yes, this is it
I didn't know

I didn't know I'd never look at life the same
I didn't know until I walked with you in the rain
I didn't know until I found out you felt the same
About the knowing and the knowing is all there is

About yes and yes, this is it
I didn't know

I didn't know until together we lay
I didn't know until you touched my soul that day
I didn't know that you would teach me in your own way
About the knowing and the knowing is all there is

About yes and yes, this is it
I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know

Preaching Imagination, Acts 2

2010-05-01T05:57:00.000-07:00

I am four days away from the Acts 2 sermon at the Pepperdine Bible lectures. This one has not appeared willingly. But I'm at a place now where I'm confident that its going to show up. The sermon is now writing itself. One choice leads to another. One image builds on another and forms a circle with others, both reflecting and anticipating.

I have my text memorized. I have the first two moves in draft form. The third move is sketched. And I know the basic shape and thrust of the final move. I will end the sermon with a series of refrains that ends, "but, God raised him up." The salvation offered in the text is that God still pours out his Spirit on those who unwittingly find themselves resisting his work in the world. This was true for the devout Jews in Jerusalem. It's true for us as well.

That's where we'll end. And I hope it is a cascading moment. That the momentum of the sermon launches us into the final phrasings. It's a little like ski jumping. You don't always hit the perfect place to soar, but when you do...

But before we get there, I want to bring us back to some of the themes put in play in the earlier moves. The sermon starts with the hope of Israel. I want to end going to all the world. The sermon begins with the longing of Simeon and Anna. I want to end with our longings for more. The sermon begins with our relationship in Churches of Christ with Acts 2. I want the sermon to end with the possibility of a new relationship with Acts 2.

That's a lot of plates to spin. The risk here is to be so scattered that all the energy of the sermon spills and is dissipated. But I think I have a way into the move that will allow the pieces to fall neatly together. We'll see.

Sermon endings are the hardest part of preaching for me. I much prefer the anticipation, the building, the development. I like working in commas, not periods or exclamation points. But this sermon deserves some exclamation points.

So, if you're helping me with some good sermon mojo, pray for clarity and courage.

I want to have the sermon written by Sunday evening. I will fly to Malibu on Monday, giving me all day Tuesday to rehearse. I will write a manuscript, which is not my usual practice, and I will likely take it up to the podium with me. But I plan to have the sermon orally manuscripted, which means I've said it aloud enough that I no longer need to read it. It is another way of internalizing, of conforming, of preaching from the inside out. It's not memorizing proper. But its pretty close.

The rehearsing is so important. The more I've done this, the more I realize how important my actual voice is, how important cadence and rhythm is. And I've learned how what I hear in my head is not what others hear as I preach. I'm slower than I think. I need to think constantly about energy. And its important for me to actually preach it, not just memorize it, for me to feel the sermon, to bodily anticipate the next moves.

Which brings me to one last observation. Preaching, at least for me, is a full contact sport. That is, I'm realizing how physical my preaching is. Even beyond the fact that I don't stand behind the podium (although I'm not a pacer), there is a sense in which preaching starts in your toes and involves concentrated effort, a projection of yourself for 25-30 minutes (the typical length of a lectureship sermon). And I am now 50. And while I don't think I have one foot in the grave, I know that I'm no longer the person I once was. And in particular, I have a benign essential tremor that used to only show up in my hands, but now I can feel throughout my body, especially when I'm coursing with adrenaline. And I will be coursing with adrenaline. And when its bad, my voice has a tremor and gets thin and reedy. And all of that robs me of a feeling of power, or projection, or connection, or incarnation, or something. And so, I'm anxious about that.

Thanks for those of you who have traveled through this preparation with me. I am taking several conversation partners with me into this moment.

Master's in Missional Leadership

2010-04-30T07:07:00.000-07:00

I usually don't use my blog as a place to hock my wares, so to speak. But I direct a graduate degree in Missional Leadership at Rochester College. We begin with the assumption that the best place to learn missional leadership is in your existing context. This degree doesn't extract you from that learning environment for the four walls of a classroom in Rochester, Michigan, but delivers the learning to you in a variety of ways, including online courses.

We are recruiting our cohort for this Fall and I am in the nose counting phase so that I can assign scholarship dollars. We still have spots available, however, and this is a shout out for all of you hoping to become more effective leaders for congregations in mission. If you want more info, you might visit our Ning site, http://rcmlrc.ning.com, and check out the older blogs which have a lot of info about the degree.

I will also be at the Pepperdine Bible Lectures this year and we will be having a Rochester College luncheon on Friday. I will be speaking on the challenges of ministry in a missional era. If you're planning to be there, come and find us.

Regardless of your own personal interest, I appreciate your willingness to help me spread the word about the degree.

Dylan on a Sunday

2010-04-25T10:53:00.000-07:00

Joni Mitchell was interviewed recently and had some unkind things to say about Dylan. To wit.

"Bob is not authentic at all. He's a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I."

Dude.

I'm not a Dylan can do no wrong kind of guy. I write about Dylan, not because I think he's the greatest, but because he's interesting and provides the occasion for commentary on so many different topics.

One of those topics is identity and self. Who is Bob Dylan? Is he the real deal, or a fiction? Is that really the way he sings, or was this simply the stylings of an opportunist? Is he a prophet of conscience or a social chameleon, trying on positions like socks? Joni's not the first one to take the side of "fake" in the great Dylan debate.

These ways of framing the discussion, however, miss the point for me. There's not one of us who don't live in relation to some narrative, some account of ourselves, that is a selective telling. This is a complex enterprise, especially at the level of authorship. We are co-authors of that narrative, but make no mistake, all of us author an account of ourselves that we in turn perform.

It's possible to play a role that doesn't correspond at all to the facts on the ground, and thereby to betray trust in others who depend on our authentic performance. And to the extent that authenticity has to do with the capacity to integrate more and more details of our life, the good and the bad, it is possible to label a performance inauthentic that radically compartmentalizes, etc. But Dylan has been doing this long enough now in relation to others that this is who he is. This isn't Miley Cyrus being Hannah Montana. The former Robert Zimmerman is Bob Dylan.

But beyond all that, why would Joni Mitchell feel the need to say something like this? Even if she believed it, why would she say it? It is so un-generous. And that's a big deal to me, especially from someone like Mitchell who has enough accolades of her own to be generous with others without any fear of diminishment.

This is not a defense of Dylan. Maybe Mitchell is right. Maybe he killed her cat at some point and this is evening the score. Maybe we all need to be protected from Dylan's pernicious fiction. She's merely being a thoughtful public servant. And maybe this need is so great that she is willing to take the hit for appearing petty and mean-spirited so that we might all be better. Perhaps.

This is the thing for me. Having just turned 50, I am thinking a lot about who I want to be at 60 and 70. And I want to be generous. While I want to be discerning and insightful, I want to make sure that I'm making room even in the categories I choose as interpretative lenses. I want to honor the miracle of the ordinary, that people make meaning out of the simplest things and even out of poorest performances. I want to be better when I'm older.

I'm afraid I couldn't tell a very convincing narrative that this is who I've been to this point. But I've seen it in others. I know what generous of spirit looks like. And I think I'm beginning to see how that might be me as well.

Preaching Imagination, Acts 2

2010-04-24T09:11:00.000-07:00

My sermon in eleven days (gasp) is finding a certain form, some momentum of its own. It has begun to write itself. Things are coming together. Images are overlapping. Focus is emerging.

This state of affairs is one reason I resist those notions of preaching that begin with guiding statements. The focus of this sermon is... The function of this sermon is... In my experience, those things come with the process, somewhere in the middle or toward the end. Sometimes, alas, not at all.

I'm beginning to like this sermon. That doesn't always happen. My liking it doesn't guarantee a good sermon, but it certainly influences my energy and sense of anticipation.

This sermon will consist in four "moves." I know what each of them consists of. I don't have yet the exact language, but I know what each of the moves is doing and how they fit together. The third move is huge and I sketched it today. The inspiration hit me in the middle of a conference I am attending. I scribbled it on a scratch pad in the middle of someone's powerpoint presentation. Hopefully, they thought I was taking furious notes.

My wife, Nancy, has lovingly cautioned me about putting too much of my sermon on my blog. Like that would ruin it for both people who read my blog. And with this move, she is right. It needs to come out of the blue, be a little bit surprising.

I'm writing today only to leave some hint of an instinct I have, an issue that I have to negotiate often in preaching. And this issue has several layers. It has to do with the listener's proximity to the text and to the sermon. The first two moves that I have written about previously allow the listener some emotional distance. I am talking about someone else. Simeon, Anna, the community in Jerusalem, God. They have a certain space or distance from the sermon. I hope that they will begin to see themselves through empathy with Simeon and Anna. But I don't press that identification in the opening move. I allow them the distance of empathy without too much identification. I want them to sense longing without asking them directly to touch their own (that will come in the final move).

This third move, however, I need them to see themselves in the sermon, to place themselves in the text. And I want them to do that in a way that runs contrary to their typical ways of identifying with the story. In other words, I want them to see themselves not standing with Peter and the eleven, but with the crowd who says, "brothers, what shall we do."

This is tricky. I can't do this baldly or in a heavy-handed or moralistic kind of way. If I say it directly, they will easily wriggle away. I still need them to have the distance of observation--to talk about someone else--in such a way that they recognize themselves. And that needs to be obvious enough that they don't miss the implication. It needs to be simultaneously indirect and implicating.

One way to do this, the way I have chosen in this sermon, is to narrate the experience of the "devout Jews" in terms that are both ancient and contemporary. I will be talking about the devout Jews of the text, but my use of anachronisms will make it clear I am also talking about us. I am figuring them, but I am aimed at us. The occasion of pilgrimage, both to Passover and Pentecost, and to the Pepperdine Bible Lectures, provides the necessary overlap of figures. I hope, in ways that are both playful and poignant, to have them experience the "uh-oh" of the text.

This is hard. It requires a certain pace, a patience with the implications. It requires a parallel structuring so that the images can be interpreted easily, but not obviously. If I do this move well, everything I say in the final move has a chance. If I don't, if I'm careless or clumsy or korny or too obvious, the final move of the sermon may be clear but lack poignance.

I love this. This is one of the things about preaching that makes it challenging, rewarding, and fulfilling.

Dylan on a Sunday

2010-04-18T17:11:00.000-07:00

I have spent a lot of time with Oh, Mercy these last few weeks. Today I looked for youtube versions, to hear what the songs sounded like live. There are a lot of great tunes on this cd. What Good Am I might be my favorite. And this is a pretty good quality video. So, this is today's Dylan on a Sunday.

Preaching Imagination, Acts 2

2010-04-17T07:40:00.000-07:00

Here are today's reflections. This is the theological heart of the sermon, the next move. These are impressions, not yet sermon words, though many of these impressions will make the final cut. I'm interested in what they inspire in you, where they send you, what images and impressions they evoke.

God raised Israel's messiah from the dead. This that you see and hear is the work of God, the result of raising this Jesus from the dead, seating him at the right hand of God in glory and handing over to him the kingdom. God has made Israel's messiah, Lord of all, giving him the authority to pour out the Spirit, the effective power of the Kingdom of God.

This that you see and hear is God's keeping his promise to Abraham, that through Abraham all the nations of the earth will be blessed. It's what Mary and Zechariah sang about under the influence of the Holy Spirit,

he has shown mercy promised to our ancestors, and has remembered his holy covenant, the oath he swore to our ancestor Abraham.

This is God guaranteeing the world's future through Israel's messiah. Through Jesus, who pours the Spirit out on the 12, on Peter and James and John--and Mathhias, the freshly minted apostle, completer of the 12, the newest representative of the new Israel.

Jesus, pouring out the Spirit in Jerusalem, the city of David, Zion, God's holy mountain--not in Rome or Alexandria or Abilene or Searcy. Jerusalem. (more here)

And this has happened in the presence of devout Jews--devout Jews from every nation under heaven. Parthians, Medes, Elamites, oh my! God has placed devout Jews, people like Simeon and Anna in every corner of the globe, so that through Israel and the announcement of Israel's messiah, every nation on earth will be blessed.

This is God keeping this improbable story alive. This is God keeping faithfulness, breathing life in a story left for dead, raising it up, bringing it back to life, time and time again.

And here in a decisive way, in a way that leaves no doubt. In Israel's worst moment, putting to death God's annointed, the one attested by God through signs, deeds, wonders, in this lowest moment, God's greatest affirmation. He raised Israel's messiah from the dead and enthroned him forever, securing once and for all Israel's central role in the promise of God for all the world. Once and for all consoling Israel, redeeming Jerusalem, and through this, saving all nations.

This is the day that Simeon and Anna longed for, a line drawn by the Holy Spirit directly from their hearts to Pentecost. This is God's emphatic "yes" to all human longing for more, for fuller, for poured out, for extravagant mercy, for life without the threat of death, for the great and glorious day of the Lord.

Preaching Imagination, Acts 2

2010-04-15T18:04:00.000-07:00

So, here are the rough, initial stabs at the opening of a sermon. There are places where the language needs to be fuller, where I am still looking for images. Maybe you can help.

Recite the text.

The word of the Lord.

And as far as words of the Lord go, not too shabby. If texts are mountains, this is a Himalaya no matter how you measure it. And fortunately for us, this is one of our texts. It’s the text, after all, that we list on our birth certificate in Churches of Christ. It says on the cornerstone, “This building erected 1954, this church established 33 AD.” Acts 2. It’s our text. We are, proudly and for good reason, Acts 2 Christians.

I saw you mouthing the words when we got to verse 38. Brothers, what shall we do. Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized”…and some other stuff…"and 3,000 were added that day to the church.”

So great. Doesn’t that make you want more? Create some longing for a day like that, for some Pentecost? Gotta get me some Pentecost.

Repent and be baptized. These words are so central to this chapter. What else is there to do in the wake of the appearing of the great and glorious day of the Lord? Repent. Which is different than, “Be your best self now!” This is “turn!” A new world has arrived, one spinning in a different direction that the world afforded us by other Lords. There’s simply no way to continue in the same direction and welcome this new world. Repent.

And make no mistake about it, the appearing of a new world is what this day is all about. These men aren’t drunk. This is God’s word through the prophet Joel come to life. The great and glorious day of the Lord. The pouring out of power from on high—the same power that raised Jesus from the dead poured out on sons and daughters, young and old, slaves both male and female (in case you missed it). And with it a new dispensation of speech. A day when the gospel becomes the universal language of the whole world, when everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

And this day has lived in the hearts of some for a long time. Lived in their hearts like an ache. Like a key change. Like … (help me here)

People like Simeon, whose old, watery eyes were looking for the consolation of Israel. It was revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would see God’s anointed one—the one who would end their long humiliation at the hands of other powers, and bring Israel back to the center of God’s redemptive purposes for all nations. Listen to him. You can hear the weight of his longing, “My eyes have seen your salvation! A light for revelation to the Gentiles, and glory to your people Israel.”

Or Simeon’s counterpart Anna. A prophet, Luke calls her, of great age, living in the temple, praising God and preaching to anyone who will listen about the redemption of Jerusalem. 84 years of anticipation for the day when Jerusalem would rise above every hill and become the mountain of the Lord’s instruction for the nations. Her eyes creased with the wrinkles of a life spent fasting and praying night and day out of a hunger to sing with full throat, “Zion, o glorious Zion!”

Simeon and Anna, filled with the Holy Spirit, living, breathing billboards for the future, forerunners of Pentecost, a prophesying son and daughter, harbingers of a new day, desire set deep in their hearts for more, for more—a new day bursting with all the promise of God.

Dylan (Jakob) on a Saturday

2010-04-10T06:04:00.000-07:00

Traveling tomorrow, so a little note before I go on Jakob Dylan's new cd, Women and Country. I haven't quite absorbed it yet, but so far I like it, and I think better than his previous solo album, Seeing Things. That's already saying something.

Seeing Things was produced by Rick Rubin, a great choice. Women and Country by T Bone Burnett, another great choice. The differences are striking even though both works fall in the acoustic/folk camp. Seeing Things is spare. Women and Country more lush. Seeing things is about Dylan's voice, not so much the songs. Women and Country is about the songs, the setting. And there's plenty of Burnett atmosphere here. The songs are great, a good fit for their settings.

The most striking thing about the setting is the presence of Neko Case's voice on backing vocals. In fact, three of the songs are performed by Dylan and Case (with a few others) on NPR's, All Music Considered. And they're great, especially Holy Rollers for Love. (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125475688).

In an interview with Paste magazine, Dylan talks about the new cd and the collaborative process with Burnett. It fascinates me when artists talk about process and the meaning of their work. Dylan hasn't fallen far from the proverbial tree. It's not hard to hear Bob's own sentiments in many places. But Jakob talked about his music in one way that nailed it for me--the thing in his mixture that makes it stand out. Hope.

"I demand to put hope forward. I think there’s always been hope in my songs. Even if it was just a sliver. I wouldn’t know how to write otherwise—there’d just be too much darkness. It’d be too daunting. I think that’s the interesting stuff—I don’t overthink it, it’s music. But I do want hope in my music—when I’m talking to you or to myself, I don’t want to hear that there isn’t any hope. You talk to people all the time, you’re probably overwhelmed with how positive some people are, seeing brightness in everything. There are very few opportunities where you couldn’t find hope."

Dylan's music is clear evidence that hope isn't the same as being naive. Jakob doesn't duck the darkness. But the thing that lasts even in the darkness is hope. And so today, hope is the word.

"The world is crazy, or maybe just holy rollers for love."

Elizabeth Gilbert on Creativity

2010-04-09T07:27:00.000-07:00

I don't surf youtube, so am unaware of many great things that are out there. So, thanks to Casey for directing me to this presentation.

Dylan on a Sunday

2010-04-04T06:58:00.000-07:00

I'm a big believer in voice. That your most powerful self is the most authentic self. And I believe that voice, in this sense, is elusive, subject to various temptations of mimicry.

Which brings me back to the documentary about Dylan's music in the 80's. The 80's saw more than just Dylan's "Christian trilogy," they also saw the release of what many consider Dylan's worst efforts: e.g. Empire Burlesque, Knocked Out Loaded. Disco beats, synth effects, Don Johnson wardrobe covers. Even Dylan was susceptible to the corrosive pop pressures of America in the Reagan years.

Commentators say Dylan was lost. And they point to his performances at LiveAid and on the song "We are the World," as prime exhibits. (There's a hilarious clip on the documentary of Stevie Wonder coaching Dylan on how to sing his lines for the song. Stevie does a dead on Dylan). By the end of the 80's, with the help of Daniel Lanois, and the release of Oh, Mercy, Dylan had found his voice again. Or so the story goes.

Voice.

I taught preaching for awhile. And the big thing in homiletics (the science of preaching) during this period was naming different approaches to the preaching. This is how you preach a deductive sermon. This is how you preach an inductive sermon. The emphasis was on the surface structure of the sermon. After working with young preachers, I totally scrapped distinguishing between various sermon strategies. The reason? Voice.

The "aha" moment came one afternoon when an African-American student preached an inductive sermon in class. It was well designed. Thoughtful. But it lacked life. This lack of life was more striking in an African-American student, I think, because they have such a strong preaching voice in their churches. This emphasis on a surface structure completely rubbed out this student's own voice. From that point on, I wanted my students to focus on saying something meaningful in a voice--their voice--they would discover over time in relationship to the biblical text. The student sermons got much better.

This is not true only for preaching. I think something like this is true for aspects of life that don't have to do with speaking, singing, etc. There are habits, practices, professions, that over time provide a vehicle for "voice." And I think this happens the moment when we're no longer conscious of imitation (we never escape it), but move in a practice as if its our own. That's a powerful thing.

Dylan on a Sunday

2010-03-28T12:46:00.000-07:00

My friend, Lyndon, gave me a documentary done on Dylan in the 80's for my birthday a few weeks ago. I watched it yesterday. Pretty interesting stuff, notably because it features Dylan's so-called "Christian" years. There are a lot of really interesting aspects to this time period. Two stand out. I'll focus on one today.

The three Dylan albums dealing with explicitly Christian themes were different from his former albums in one very significant way. Previous albums depended on poetic allusion or metaphorical images. There's nothing hidden in these albums. The language is very direct. "It may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody."

This directness had at least two effects (my analysis). First, it came off as preachy, or as one Dylan expert interviewed suggested, didactic. It's not that Dylan's world was less black and white than his previous albums. Dylan has always painted the world in fairly stark terms, with good guys and bad guys. As I have noted elsewhere, what ties Dylan's body of work together from beginning to end is an apocalyptic perspective. The world is always teetering on the edge of destruction, and there are always culprits who bear the judgement for this set of circumstances. (One interviewee in the documentary also noted this continuity).

But in his previous work, listeners participated in Dylan's world indirectly through a poetic sensibility. The Christian trilogy created a different relationship with listeners. Dylan was less the poet and more the instructor. As didact, Dylan stands squarely on the side of his lyrics over/against the listener. And his listeners were highly offended. There was only way to be on Dylan's side in this music--agree with him, or go to hell.

This is the advantage of forms of speech like narrative, poetry, metaphor. They can create common space through a playful openness. What they lack in directness, they make up for in their ability to say things that bring singer and audience together in the openness of a new world. They are more hospitable. Notice here that Infidels, Dylan's next album after the "Christian" trilogy is still full of gospel themes and images, but is seen by his fans as a step back toward the classic Dylan. As one commentator put it, his art caught up with his themes. And it brought his audience back.

I've been teasing out the implications of this in my head, specifically regarding Christian speech. This should teach us something about speaking of God. Unless God can be captured in language and precise categories, these "open," more hospitable figures may be more amenable to the tasks of theology, and by extension, truth.

The Preaching Imagination, Acts 2...

2010-03-27T13:09:00.000-07:00

I've had the assignment on preaching from Acts 2, May 7, for about six months now. It's been hard to resist some sermon momentum. The first reading of the text introduced a set of images that immediately suggested a sermon. I've learned to admit these initial impressions, not suppress them. But I've also learned to question where they come from. These particular images centered on the relationship that Churches of Christ have had with Acts 2 through the years. It's a strong set of images and this still might be the way the sermon goes.

But it was obvious. And it was generated by a relationship outside the text, not so much from a dwelling in the text itself. So, I've been looking for other compelling images, other ways in.

This is important in relation to Acts 2 precisely because this text is familiar. There's not a person in Churches of Christ who can't quote Acts 2:38. And while this verse is huge in the scope of Peter's sermon, the larger setting is and rich and full and thinly interpreted in my opinion. I need something to jar listeners into a new reading.

So, I've been scrubbing the text to see what might fall loose. And I've been reading others who have read deeply as well. And today a new way in appeared.

It came while reading the quotation from Joel in Peter's sermon--a text I've read hundreds of times. But the question the apostles ask Jesus at the beginning of Acts has been framing my overall reading of this text in increasing measure. "Is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?" I am increasingly convinced that this is a crucial question in the narrative flow of Acts.

So, when I got to "your sons and daughters shall prophecy," two things hit me at once. Simeon and Anna are prophets, male and female. And they were looking for the "consolation of Israel" and the "redemption of Jerusalem" respectively. They are people of the Holy Spirit, living faithfully in expectation of the fulfillment of the promises made by God to Israel. They prefigure the Pentecost event. The same Spirit inspiring a specific hope in them is poured out by the risen Jesus on Pentecost.

Now, I know this might not sound like a lot. But suddenly my imagination started popping in two directions. First, it began to emerge like a golden thread from other familiar texts in Luke-Acts. Second, the significance of Simeon and Anna in light of Acts 2 for the self-understanding of the church today was immediately relevant and specific. I could identify Simeon and Annas. And I could tie them to the allusion that the twelve standing before the crowd were Galileans.

This may prove to be nothing but background to my sermon. But it might very well be a new way in. A surprise that brings the meaning of the event into different focus. This may prove to be only feeding that part of me that likes to be unique. But we'll see. I have time to play with it. Let's see where it goes.

The Preaching Imagination, Acts 2...

2010-03-26T10:47:00.000-07:00

One of the ticklish issues in NT interpretation is how to account for the relationship between Israel and the church. Witness the charge of anti-semitism leveled, rightly from my perspective, against Mel Gibson's take on the death of Jesus. The Jews crucified Jesus, according to this version of things, and God has rejected them.

Acts 2 is one of those dicey places regarding the relationship between Israel and the church. Peter addresses a Jewish audience in his big sermon, and the punchline of the sermon is pretty severe--"Let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified." Texts like this have led many to see the church as a replacement for Israel. That Acts can't wait to get out of Jerusalem and Judea so that the real action among the Gentiles--the future of the story--can commence.

A more careful reading of Acts, however, works in just the opposite direction. Luke is very concerned with the restoration of the "kingdom to Israel" (1:6). Jacob Jervell's very important work on Luke-Acts, Luke and the People of God, shows that the reports of mass conversions take place among Jews and God-fearers. The success of the Word does not occur apart from Jews, but precisely through them. There are no stories of mass conversions among Gentiles anywhere in Acts (Cornelius is described as a God-fearer). This is not a historical statement for Luke, but a theological one. God is being faithful to his promise that all nations will be blessed through the promise made to Abraham.

While the house of Israel crucified Jesus, God's covenant faithfulness is seen in the pouring out of the Holy Spirit on the very people who killed--this one God has made both Messiah and Lord. There is no visible Kingdom of God, which includes Gentiles, apart from the restoration of the kingdom of Israel. Here the prophetic continuity of Jesus and the twelve with Israel's prophets of old becomes a very important part of Luke's theological portrait.

This corrective reading of Acts is worth time in a sermon, and is certainly a big part of the scene at Pentecost, marked by the listing of all the nations represented in the crowd gathered by the sound made by the pouring out of the Spirit. Still, there are other arcs out of this text that beg for development in the sermon. The task, how can I set up the interrelationship of text and sermon so that this is plain without this becoming the focal point of the sermon?