Dylan on a Sunday (Featuring Jackson Browne)

I put Bob on genius this morning, starting with "Spirit on the Water." Genius (the itunes playlist generating tool) works fairly well with Dylan. It's hard to argue with a list that has Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Leon Russell, Wilco, Tom Petty, Bonni Raitt, and Ben Harper. The name that appeared the most on this genius list, however, was Jackson Browne.

Seeing Jackson Browne's name made me smile. A while back I posted about this guy who came to a Dylan presentation I made. He found such promise in me that he began sending me all of this Dylan stuff--books, dvd's, cd's. It was a nice little haul. One of the things he sent me was Jackson Browne's first cd, Late for the Sky. Seems many in the Dylan crowd were convinced that when Bob kind of disappeared for a bit that his successor might be Browne. Late for the Sky is a great cd, but as my friend pointed out, Browne ultimately proved to be a disappointment.

This is true of nearly anyone who had to make a living in music during the 80's. I've been listening to some old Rod Stewart lately. Great stuff. Maggie May, Stay With Me, etc. But the 80's ruined him. Maybe something like this happened to Jackson Browne.

But the thing that's always been true about Browne is that he is a great lyricist. And my favorite Browne song has great lyrics, Doctor My Eyes. So, today's song via Dylan through genius, asks "is this the prize for having learned how not to cry?"

Doctor, my eyes have seen the years
And the slow parade of fears without crying
Now I want to understand

I have done all that I could
To see the evil and the good without hiding
You must help me if you can

Doctor, my eyes
Tell me what is wrong
Was I unwise to leave them open for so long

cause I have wandered through this world
And as each moment has unfurled
Ive been waiting to awaken from these dreams
People go just where there will
I never noticed them until I got this feeling
That its later than it seems

Doctor, my eyes
Tell me what you see
I hear their cries
Just say if its too late for me

Doctor, my eyes
Cannot see the sky
Is this the prize for having learned how not to cry

The Relentless Politics of Generosity

There's this great line in the Ben Harper song, "Put it On Me." I think I have an idea of what he means when he sings, "the politics of generosity are making me weak." Sometimes, there's nothing more manipulative than kindness. And even if kindness is offered without strings, the burden of reciprocity still lingers in the one who received the kindness. The gift becomes something other than a gift. Some cultures, I have found, know how to kill you with kindness.

Don't get me wrong, generosity is a good thing. I'm always looking for persons who are generous of spirit, not small or provinical or who return evil for evil. But even good things, like the law, offered earnestly can end up enslaving us.

There's this great Gomer Pyle episode (and yes, I'm embarrassed) where Sgt. Carter saves his life only to receive in return Gomer's overwhelming gratitude, an unwelcome attention. Sgt. Carter decides that the only way to get Gomer out of his debt is to stage an opportunity for Gomer to save his life in return. Of course, Gomer messes it up and Sgt. Carter ends up having to save the both of them again, increasing Gomer's determination to smother Sgt. Carter with care. The politics of generosity can make us weak.

Several years ago there was a book on marriage entitled, His Needs, Her Needs. The book offered itself as a Christian recipe for a succesful marriage. Men and women, according to the author, have a hierarchy of needs, differing by gender. As long as you're meeting your spouse's highest needs, everything will be great. So, as long as a wife experiences affection, the husband will get sex, and vice versa. The author talked about a love bank, a place where you pile up credits that will come back to you in having your needs met. There are so many things wrong with this, I don't even know where to begin. I'm not saying that some people couldn't manage a happy marriage this way, but this establishes for many couples a viscious cycle of reciprocity. They beat each other up for the ways their needs aren't being met. As the old Heart song, "Even it Up," puts it, "I made you your breakfast in bed, now even it up, even it up, even it up." The politics of generosity is making me weak.

In the New Testament, Paul is very careful to root his relationships with churches in something other than reciprocity. He refuses, for instance, the patronage of the Corinthians precisely so that what he offers them will be experienced as free. In Philippians, he takes great pains to make sure that the gift they sent him while he was in prison is not seen as an obligation for him to return.

This is not because Paul does not want to be in service to others. He does. But he removes service from the human economy of generosity and reciprocity. He places his sense of security, not in the response of others, but in the resurrection of Jesus. Here love can remain a gift, something we do not manage or produce, but something that sustains us anyway. Gift. Love. Freedom. These things go together for Paul and allow a new way of human relating.

Some days I'm better at seeing this than others. I fall too easily out of thankfulness, or try to secure my own sense of well-being through generosity. And it makes me weak and I love poorly. So, today I am living in the confession "that the one who raised Jesus from the dead will raise us also with you..." Gift.

God, World, Church, 2

All of us have an imagination related to God, church, and world. That is, we have imagined a world that accounts for the relationships between these three realities and this imagination authorizes any number of practices. Paul Ricouer (a moment of genuine respect at the mention of his name) sees the imagination as a productive human capacity that mediates the relationship between beliefs and practices. And people like Graham Ward and Charles Taylor argue that this imagination is a social thing. It is something that communities share, a repertory of sorts, that makes us competent in a common life.

The question then is what elements are being tied together in our shared imagination. And here's the thing, the most powerful things in a shared imagination are the things we can take for granted, the things we can assume. For instance, I assumed that all the cars on the road today had a basic respect for red and green lights. It allows us all to function together. We simply assume it. Can you imagine how terrifying it would be to drive to work if you couldn't assume that shared repertory? And these assumed things tend to be the last things that we question.

So, as a theologian (I'm a certain kind of theologian), I'm interested in how our beliefs and practices are tied together in congregational imagination.

One of the beliefs I'm interested in is our functional understanding of God. A congregation's shared imagination is different from what its individual members might believe. There might be a 1,000 different understandings of God in a congregation, but there is a shared life that assumes a common understanding., or at least a range of understanding. So, the real theological question is what view of God best accounts for the practices of a congregation.

Much of a congregation's imagination is not deliberately cultivated, but inherited, and from many sources. It takes something of an archaeology, what cultural anthropologists call a thick description, to uncover the various layers of a congregational imagination. That's what I'm trying to do with regard to our understandings of God, world, and church. Here's the thing: once it rises into view, it can be addressed.

All that to say...

Our practices in mission are embedded in certain understandings of God, and those understandings have to do in part with how we view the relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit. And even if we have an allergy to the word Trinity in our congregations or rarely talk about it in our congregations, we have functional understandings that have been in the water of Western Christianity since Augustine.

Last time I mentioned that Western views of Trinity tended to emphasize God's oneness (the shared being between the three), while Eastern views tended to emphasize the three persons. Both emphases are susceptible to distortions. The Western view can turn into modalism where Father, Son, and Spirit are thought of as just different modes of the same single acting subject. The Eastern can so emphasize each person that you end up with three gods.

These are more than just ideas to fight about. These differences have practical implications and tend to form a different kind of imagination about things like mission. Western views of God tended to focus on the mode of sending. How do you describe the relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit? Mainly in relation to the activity of sending. The Father sends the Son, the Father and Son send the Spirit.

The Eastern views of God tended to focus on the relatedness of the three persons. They are one through an interpenetrating communion, what is referred to as perichoresis. God is less a series of movements, and more a model of social life.

At the risk of a massive oversimplification (which is what I do best), we can at least begin by observing that these traditions produced very different notions of salvation and mission. The history of mission in the West often falls under the word, "expansion." It's how we think about things. The church is on the side of God in a series of sending. We're conquering, expanding the borders of the Kingdom. Eastern mission was thought of more as getting people to church, to experience the mystery of communion.

I want to come back to both views in more detail, especially as the Eastern impulse has been further developed in more recent Trinitarian thought. But for now, I want to point out that in both views the view of the world is problematic. In Western mission, the world is just a target. It's simply on the receiving end of a series of sendings. It has little impact on God's relational identity and plays no positive role in the story of redemption. The church here is both enlarged and reduced. The church is on the side of God and the things of God in the sequence of sendings. It has all the goods. But the church is also reduced to an instrument of God, a way for God to get things done.

It is interesting in light of this to think about Protestant missions in the 19th and 20th centuries (well, maybe intersting is too strong of a word). Mission was thought of almost exclusively in terms of sending to preach to individual souls. The question of establishing congregations was clearly secondary. We've experienced this with crusade evangelism (think Billy Graham or Louis Palau). It's always been a problem to think about how these individuals who have welcomed Jesus into their hearts belong to a community of God's people. And for most mission endeavors in this period, mission was not done by congregations, but by mission societies. Mission was a mode of the church's existence that could actually be done better outside of the congregation by a mission society. Mission is not the church's relational identity to God and world. (Yeah, interesting is really too ambitious for this paragraph).

In Eastern Christianity, everything that counts happens within the mystery of communion and communion happens only within the church. The world can only observe. The gulf between God and world is so wide and massive, that God can only commune with the world in Jesus, and by extension through baptism, the eucharist, and the bishop.

What both of these views of God hold in common is a certain understanding of being itself, an ontology, that has a stake in keeping God safe from the imperfections of the world. This hasn't always been the case in Christian theology, and more recent explorations of Trinity have proceeded from different understandings of God and being. But that's for another day.

Ministry Maxim, 3

This is rather long to qualify as a maxim, but nevertheless, here it is.

There are two kind of unhealthy churches. The first has no sense whatsoever that God might be up to something in its midst. The second can tell you at any given moment exactly what God is up to.

My friend, Pat Keifert, often says that most congregations are functionally atheist. This does not mean that they do not believe in God. This means that they have a hard time using God as the subject in a sentence with an active verb. God is absent in the functional imagination of a congregation, trapped either in a distant heaven or a distant past.

The church here is a closed environment with little imagination beyond what it can produce in its own ability and power. These churches may grow, even be vibrant in many ways. (This is a maxim related to the word health, not size). But their lives are totally explainable by the sum of their parts. And most of the time this results in dreary.

Sometimes the lack of God talk is an absence of nerve, or even the result of humility, not wanting to claim for God things that do not belong to him. If, however, God raised Jesus from the dead, then the testimony to God's saving purposes must be contemporary. This is risky business, but in my estimation less of a risk than saying nothing at all. And if death and resurrection teaches us anything, it is that God abides risk.

Still, this business of God speech is tricky. Our awareness of God also makes us aware of our own limitations, our propensity to make a god out of the projection of our own desires. Here, God is so immanent that every detail of life is a "God-thing." This travels by two names in my book: triumphalism and idolatry. To talk of God so pervasively and confidently betrays an over-identification between God and church. These churches are often very big and dynamic. It is exciting, after all, to be a part of a movement where you know God is on your team. But it is unhealthy in many ways.

At the very least it is bad theology. It collapses the holiness of God. It refuses to acknowledge that the victory of God is hidden in a cross, the glory of God hidden in human suffering. These things are not always easy to see, especially by people whose perspectives are limited by circumstance and sin. I love Luke Johnson's little line in relation to discerning the will of God. We should always be "modest before the mystery."

So, we are left with the tricky deal of needing to talk about God without claiming too much, with being simultaneously bold and modest. And I think the deal here is punctuation. We speak in commas, not exclamation points. The process of discernment is never complete. It is ongoing, and we might have it wrong. We confess what we believe God is up to, subject to further review. I like the word confess here. It can be direct speech. God is love. But it is also our language about God. It is what we have come to believe. And as our language, it is provisional.

I am convinced that we can't know God apart from confessions like these. As Paul says in Romans, with our hearts we believe, with our mouths we confess unto salvation. Saying is a necessary part of testing the spirits, allowing the Word of God to continue to speak. But it must be done with modesty

A Missional Tale

In the constant quest to define missional, I offer the following:

Tonight I attended an inaugural ball in our neighborhood. Well, ball is a relative term. It wasn't gowns and tuxes or anything fancy. It was in our neighborhood community center with its requisite linoleum floor and fluorescent lights. There were coats and hats and gloves and puddles from the snow clinging to the bottoms of our boots. And there were children and potato chips and brownies and cold cuts. And there was a band. Not a Tommy Dorsey kind of band. But something closer to a jug band. An Appalachian folk music band with a caller to help us folk dance.

It was an introverts nightmare. I knew less than half the people there. And I was going to be "dancing" with them. But I was brave because of the joy of the day. I have friends who were in the grandstands at the inaugural in DC today. That made me feel closer to the event. Being at something where people were celebrating this momentous day was the right thing to do, even if it wasn't quite my thing.

Now here's the deal. There's something about traditional dances that bring people together. I admit that when we did it in seventh grade I thought it to be the worst idea in the history of human interaction. But in just minutes, we are all fumbling around together, linking arms, holding hands, and welcoming each other. You can't help but smile and feel a part. I've participated in traditional dances in Brazil, and nothing I have ever done has broken down barriers faster.

I wonder, given the boundary crossing nature of the gospel, why there aren't more stories of Christians dancing. Well, ok, I know why. I'm just saying that this was as sacramental as breaking bread. I happen to prefer the Brazilian folk dances to the Appalachian ones. They're just more fun. But they do the same thing. They create community.

My buddy, John Ogren, organized this thing. And if you know John, you know anything he's involved with will include prayer. So, we wrote prayers through the evening on brightly colored strips of cloth and hung them on a string that crossed the room. And after a good deal of dancing we paused for prayer. John had invited a young Muslim woman working on a Master's degree in Islamic studies to pray. She sang the first chapter of the Koran and then translated it for us. It was beautiful.

Then my friend Lucy, a PhD student in pastoral theology from Kenya (her study carel is right next to mine), prayed in Swahili, and then in English. And Lucy can pray. And she did, a prayer filled with scriptural allusions on behalf of America and all the world.

And then a Jewish woman prayed. She prayed from Scripture, first in English, then in Hebrew. And like the others, she prayed for the momentum of this occasion, that it would roll into a time of peace.

I was deeply moved by each prayer. (They were better, in my estimation, than either prayer at the inauguration. Let the Yellow be mellow? And that was the better of the two prayers). I have no idea the faith commitments, or lack thereof, represented in the room. But after you've do-sie-doed with someone, prayer isn't as threatening.

This was missional to me for several reasons. It was in public space, not a gathering or a club or like minded people behind socially bounded space. It was public, an ecclesia. It was a vision of the future of God when all will dance together to the sweet strains of heaven. It was joy filled, an event occasioned by good news. It required no expertise or pride of position to participate. We crossed boundaries, welcomed strangers, and practiced peace. It took our entire person to participate; heart, mind, and body. It was relentlessly ecumenical and respectful. And God was right in the thick of it. There was prayer.

My heart is full today. It is such a vibrant day. It is so hopeful. And I know other days will be darker and less full of promise. But today touched something rare, and I went to an inaugural ball I will always remember.

To Perform the World Beyond the Reach of Pharaoh

On of the benefits of sojourning at a seminary is that you get to hear the guys who write the books. Today, my favorite author on matters pertaining to Scripture (particularly the Old Testament) is on campus. Walter Brueggemann just spoke on Exodus at a conference on Engaging Scripture for the Sake of the World. WB never disappoints, and so I have a little theology geek buzz going.

I'll just mention one point that WB made today that presses some on what I've been blogging about of late. WB sees the decalogue (10 commandments) as counter commandments, standing in contrast to Pharaoh's commandments about production, bricks, and straw in Exodus 5. Against the insatiable culture of slave production under Pharaoh's control, the way of YHWH provides a coventantal neighborliness that allows acts of kindness toward others.

In the middle of this wonderful exposition of Scripture, Brueggemann made comments about God and the world. He was taught in seminary, he told us, that if you begin theology with God's initiative you're likely doing good theology (I was taught the same thing). Problem is, he said, the biblical writers weren't clued in to this little theological key. Brueggemann refers to the middle part of Exodus as the narrative of departure and noted today that it is human initiative that pushes the story along. Pharaoah produces a cry through oppression, Israel cries out againts Pharaoh's reach, and God responds to the cry of Israel.

The initiative of the Exodus is located in the cry of the slaves that move beyond Pharaoh's reach. The cry is the refusal of a dehumanizing way of life built around insatiable production. The one who is other than Pharaoh (the holy one of Israel), hears Israel's cry and calls them into the performance of a counter story.

I simply want to point out here that creation is active in the drama of redepmtion. The story of God-world is not just a story of God's initiative. God is moved by human initiative. This is not to say that humans can provide their own deliverance, or that God is not an initiator. It is to say that God's relationship with creation is ust that--a relationship. The world is not simply a passive recipient of God's irresistable plan. The world is a real participant in the drama of redemption.

This dynamic view of God suffers with the negotiations made by early Christian apologists with a Greek thinking world. Stan Grenz, and others, refer to the theology that emerges in this period as onto-theology. That is, thinking about God that is rooted in a certain notion of being, namely a substantialist perspective that divides the world into subjects and objects. And in this world, God only works if God is impassable, that is not affected by the world. God is a persisting subject--omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. In Trinitarian thought, great pains were made to shield the Father from the suffering of the Son.

We still live with much of this today. With regard to mission, we have used passages like Matthew 28 and the biblical language of sending to support a substantialist notion of God. God sends the Son, sends the Spirit (a point of contention between East and West), sends the church. The world is simply an object. The church simply an obedient instrument of God, on the side of God in a series of sendings. The result is a strategic view of mission rooted in a paternalism, often resulting in a heavy-handed imperialism or ethnocentrism parading as the kingdom of God.

The biblical story is not one of an impassable God, a persisting Subject, but of a God who is revealed in relation to human cries, whether of the cries of slaves in Egypt, or of the Son in the Garden of Gethsemane.

WB always raises the spectre of an unmanagable God who if faithful, consistent, precisely in response to human suffering. This, I believe, is the necessary starting place for "Engaging Scripture for the Sake of the World."

"Who Would Jesus Smackdown?"

I admit, I've typically been on the receiving end of the whole bully thing. And given what I start with, I don't have the full range of options that burlier, manly men have at their disposal. I do, however, still have a full head of hair. So, there's that. And that ain't nothing.

I'm just saying that I find the whole chest pumping, macho thing hard to relate to. I don't watch martial arts movies or Smackdown. And over the years, I have developed an understanding of God and companionship with Jesus that is decidedly non-violent. I gave up violence for Lent a few years ago, which included being a consumer of violence. Tough thing to do. I have no doubts that my biography has much to do with this. But I also don't have to look far in the Bible or the Christian tradition for support. I'm not saying its the only way to read the Bible or the tradition. But I'll take my verses over the others any day.

I bring this up because the NYTimes Magazine carried an article this past Sunday on Mark Driscoll, the pastor of Seattle's Mars Hill Church, sporting the great title, "Who Would Jesus Smackdown." It's a great article (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11punk-t.html?emc=eta1) outlining Driscoll's decidedly muscular approach to Christianity.

For those of you who don't know Driscoll, he grew up Roman Catholic, was converted to a fundamentalist/Calvinist strain of evangelical Christianity while a college student, and started the Mars Hill church, which is a multi-campus megachurch in the Seattle area. Driscoll was often listed as a leader in the early days of the Ermerging Church gang, though he has distanced himself from them and written particularly scathing remarks about other emerging leaders like Brian McLaren and Doug Pagitt.

His public remarks highlight Driscoll's style, unflinching, outspoken, never in doubt. He is not a conventional pastor to be sure. I visited Mars Hill for a week about six years ago and caught his gig. The website in those days featured young-ish "elders" (Driscoll being the alpha elder) who rock climbed, drank beer, dabbled in profanity and R rated movies, and talked straight about all issues. God is tough, demanding, and, at all costs, cool. To Mars Hill's credit, they were reaching people other churches simply don't care about, intentionally reaching out to a "postmodern" generation. I like the fact that Driscoll's church is also a critique of the seeker movement. His is not a "best life now" approach.

But make no mistake, Driscoll is no postmodern. He has wed two totalizing narratives, modern epistemology and hard core Calvinism. The Times piece, written by Molly Worthen, has some great descriptions of Driscoll's views.

"With his taste for vintage baseball caps and omnipresence on Facebook and iTunes, Driscoll, who is 38, is on the cutting edge of American pop culture. Yet his message seems radically unfashionable, even un-American: you are not captain of your soul or master of your fate but a depraved worm whose hard work and good deeds will get you nowhere, because God marked you for heaven or condemned you to hell before the beginning of time."

And she follows:

"New members can keep their taste in music, their retro T-shirts and their intimidating facial hair, but they had better abandon their feminism, premarital sex and any 'modern' interpretations of the Bible. Driscoll is adamantly not the 'weepy worship dude' he associates with liberal and mainstream evangelical churches, 'singing prom songs to a Jesus who is presented as a wuss who took a beating and spent a lot of time putting product in his long hair.'"

I love the smell of steroids in the morning.

Driscoll's world seems to be a binary world. Saved or damned. Right or wrong. And this kind of world needs an ever vigilant sense of authority accounting for all details, keeping all the boundary lines drawn and distinct. It is telling that in a dispute over the direction of Mars Hill, Driscoll put down the hammer, following the advice of a martial arts, ultimate fighter, a member at Mars Hill. Worthen writes:

In 2007, two elders protested a plan to reorganize the church that, according to critics, consolidated power in the hands of Driscoll and his closest aides. Driscoll told the congregation that he asked advice on how to handle stubborn subordinates from a 'mixed martial artist and Ultimate Fighter, good guy' who attends Mars Hill. 'His answer was brilliant,' Driscoll reported. “He said, ‘I break their nose.’ ” When one of the renegade elders refused to repent, the church leadership ordered members to shun him. One member complained on an online message board and instantly found his membership privileges suspended. 'They are sinning through questioning,' Driscoll preached. John Calvin couldn’t have said it better himself."

I have a friend in Portland who is a close friend of Driscoll's. Together they are putting together conferences that feature ultimate fighting as a kind of metaphor for Christianity. They have Christian ultimate fighters tell their audience how Jesus has changed their life. Then they beat the snot out of each other. Seriously. Totalizing narratives don't shy away from a little violence.

Driscoll, Worthen points out, is not alone. Other megachurch leaders, notably John Piper, espouse this rock-ribbed Calvinism and are finding an audience. And what seems to appeal to this audience is the never-in-doubt appeal. It has a certain pastoral attraction in a confusing, overwhelming world. Worthen quotes a young blogger at Mars Hill who sees a definite pastoral upside to a no holds barred view of God's sovreignty. “There are plenty of comfortable people who can say, ‘God’s on my side,’ ” he says. “But they couldn’t turn around and say, ‘God gave me cancer.’ ” Indeed. (A pause for the full, shuddering effect to take hold).

I sat in worship a few weeks ago next to a young man whose mother died suddenly of meningitis a few weeks earlier. She was at church one Sunday, seemingly fine, and two days later was dead. As I sat next to him we sang "Blessed be the Name," a song quoting Job. "He gives and takes away. My heart will choose to say, 'Blessed be your name.'" Now I get the comfort in this song (though it doesn't comfort me). We don't have to figure it out. It's all in God's hands. He's bigger than me. It all adds up in the end. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

I wondered that morning how my young friend might hear that song. I would hear it as God killing my mother. There are so many ways this theology goes bad. But at the heart of it, it posits an irresistable God who works his will through violence, through an unquestioned, unbending, authoritarian will.

The gospel way forward for me is not making God invulnerable, but precisely through the vulnerability of God in Jesus Christ. This is the real occasion for love, a demonstration of the power of heaven that overcomes the human tendency to maintain order through authority and violent control. In the thick of it, I'll take vulnerable love over smackdown any day.

If you'll excuse me, I have some hair care product to apply.