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>When demons are not really or only demons (Friday follow up to Jesus and Pigs)

>Jimmy and Joe  had interesting insights about “political” readings of the Bible. Here was my response.

– Let me just throw out a wild idea.  What if… just what if Jesus was primarily political.  Or if you don’t like “primarily” then how about even “significantly” political?

Then a century or two later, the Imperial powers play down his message and influence by breaking them into categories like “spiritual” and “political” that Jesus as a Jewish person would not have had?

It would benefit the Imperial power a great deal to have Christians NOT be radical, counter-cultural or prophetic.  It is much better if they are obedient, passive, understanding, and (best of all) focused on the world to come.

It was better for Rome.  It was better for the Europe of Christendom. and it is better for America when it is acting with unilateral power or cutting parts of the budget that expose the most vulnerable of it’s citizens while increasing the military budget.

IF I am right (and that is a big if) then even passages like Galatians 3:28 “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female”  is a political stance.  If you knew about Roman civilization and the VERY present ‘household codes’ (called pater familias) then statements like Paul’s in Gal 3:28 are radically political.

but we don’t know about the pater familias so… it becomes ‘spiritual’

– on FaceBook Mhoira Lauer-Patterson said “Contextuality is the key”. I agreed and added

 This is about doing in our culture what Jesus did in that culture… NOT simply us repeating Jesus in our culture as if it were the same as that culture!

– On the issue of demons being more than demons or not demons at all:

We are looking for a 3rd way. So instead of my saying ‘the story of Legion’ is NOT about what it appears to be – and you insisting that it is ONLY what it appears to be… 

I am willing to say that , in the story, the demons are MORE than demons and you can say that they may not be ONLY demons.

– Holly: Thanks, Bo. I appreciate all three readings. I am coming to believe that as human beings are so incredibly diverse, although our political, social, individual problems are universal, that we need the freedom to read scripture in the way that is the most empowering, the most liberating, the most freeing. 🙂

Me: 

I, of course, agree with what your saying – for I see that AS the message OF Scripture from the Exodus to the Revelation and everywhere between. (everywhere might be overdoing it but … it is prevalent)



Now – it would be good to admit, as a point of contrast, those who are more concerned with CONSERVing the old ways of reading certain texts, would disagree. One of the reason I am OK with this is because the more we know about the 1st century, the more empowered we will be to read those texts in the 21st century. 

That is my positive way to say it! here is the negative.

The reality is that some of the most popular readings of the past 300 years in N. America have been in complete absence of knowledge about the 1st century. They are ahististorical readings and they are somewhere between damaging and devastating – depending on who is doing the reading and who it is aimed at.

0

>Jesus and Pigs

>

There is a problem when it comes to reading the Bible in the modern world.  It’s not that big of a problem – unless we don’t deal with it and then it becomes a huge giant nightmare.

Let me say something positive first. I am a fan of everyone having the Bible in their own language and in their own hand. I am a proud Protestant. I would not want to live in an era where everyone did not have access to the Bible in their language.  I like this aspect of the world and era that I live in.

We read the Bible. Not reading the Bible is not our problem. Sometimes preachers get on people for not reading their Bibles enough. I disagree.  I think that people are generally reading the Bible enough. That is not our problem. (I know these are generalities – just go with me for a second)


I do, however, think that there are two problems when it comes to reading the Bible.

  1. The first is that  we don’t know enough about the first century.
  2. The second is that we don’t know enough about the genres that the books of Scripture are written in.


It is difficult for me to express how important this issue is in our contemporary situation.
It would be overstating it to say that we don’t know how to read the Bible.  
It would be understating it to say that we just need to read it more.  One might even go as far as to say that if we are reading it wrong, then reading that way more will just create more of a problem!

This is what I want to address over the next 4 weeks with this conversation.

I will start with a story that illustrates both the points (about the 1st Century and about the genres).

The story of Jesus and ‘Legion’ (you can go read this is  Mark 5 and Luke 8)

Here are three readings of that story:  modern-Literal, Political, and Post-Colonial

In the modern-Literal reading, Jesus goes over to this region called the Decapolis which is primarily inhabited by gentiles. He finds this guy chained up because he is being tormented by a large number of demons and had become a danger to himself and to the town folk. Jesus comes over – the only time he was ever in that area on that side of the sea – and he casts out the demons. But the demons make a deal with Jesus and so he casts them into a herd of pigs – which immediately run down the hill into the sea and drown. The townspeople are not happy with Jesus for wrecking their economic livelihood and agricultural income.  They ask Jesus to leave. The guy – now freed from his torment – asks to come with Jesus and Jesus tells him to go back into town and testify.
It is not said if he wanted to leave because a) he was mad at the people for chaining him out there or b) the people would be mad at the guy for what happened to the pigs.

This is a straight forward reading and when one does not know much about the first century … it is probably the reading that you would go with. The story is about demons, pigs, and people. And that is about all.   The application is that Jesus loves this one guy more than a bunch of livestock and is concerned with the well–being of a single person more than the livelihood of an entire town.

In a political reading, the lens of first century politics gives the story a different look. Jesus goes into a Roman occupied territory (think about the name Decapolis). He encounters a man tormented by a foreign occupier with a Roman name (Legion is a military term) and frees this man who is bound by casting out the alien presence into pigs – which are unclean to the Hebrew mind.  It is also notable that a pig had been sacrificed in the Jerusalem Temple in the time between the Hebrew (older) Testament and the beginning of our newer (christian) Testament.
The story that we get Hanukkah from is found in the Maccabean revolt. This uprising was ultimately set off by the sacrifice of a pig (called the abomination of desolation) in the Temple.
But in our story,  what to do with the pigs drowning is water?  I have heard two good explanations.The first revolves around the Egyptian army drowning in the Exodus and so drawing of the imagery of Jesus (as a Moses character) liberating his people out of captivity.  The second has to do with Shamanism (both ancient and modern) which puts extracted bad things (tumors, spirits, venom, etc.) into water to neutralize them.

Either way – knowing about the Political landscape of the 1st Century makes it possible to say maybe demons aren’t demons and pigs aren’t pigs in this sense.   

Of course the obvious thing  is to say “Well, can’t it be both?” that Jesus really did cast out the demons but that the way Luke told the story allows them to be not JUST demons.  This way, pigs are pigs but they are not just pigs. Demons, likewise, are real demons who are really cast out … but they are not just demons – there is another implication to them.

Here is my point though! You can not have the possibility of pigs not being pigs or pigs being more than pigs unless you know something about the politics of the 1st century!   Otherwise pigs are only pigs and nothing more.   In that case, we may be missing more than half the message of Jesus or at the message as it was portrayed by the Gospel writer.

Added Bonus:
After I had already written this post, I heard another take on this passage. At Big Tent Christianity last week, Anthony Smith (the Postmodern Negro) and Tripp Fuller (of Homebrewed Christianity) had a dialogue about post-colonial Pentecostalism and race.

In this lens the reading of this passage takes on a very different look. The story becomes a model or a type of parable that is recreated over and over again.

The man is in chains (slavery) and the free culture keeps him outside. Jesus finds him and Jesus frees him. This exposes the disgraceful treatment of this man by those who are free. The liberation comes at great price (the pigs) and collateral damage (the economy). The man wants to flee and go with Jesus but Jesus asks him to stay and testify to those that who had bound him – to be an uncomfortable presence for them and to not simply be an “out of sight – out of mind” part of their past .

A post-colonial reading talks of liberation, of exposing the shameful treatment of ‘the other’, and of speaking truth to power.  This is a powerful reading that places Jesus squarely in our midst again and allows the Gospel to speak with real power to our real situations.

It is important to note that post-colonial readings are not merely allegories or metaphors – they are read as real events that really impact our real world… but they are not simply literalistic one-dimensional readings like the our first model (modern-literal).

There are many more interpretations that merit to be in the conversation – I simply wanted to introduce these three in order to say that A) what was happening in the first century matters to how we read the newer Testament  B) what genre a text is written in matters to how we read it.

The post-colonial reading introduces a third:
C) that the world we live in is both a lens and a light through which we read and view the text. That is called interpretation and that is our focus for next week.  

9

>We believe in Hope

>I was reading a book the other day and I stumbled onto an interesting idea.  It comes from the great contemporary theologian Miroslav Volf.

I am headed to Big Tent Christianity this week and next week will start a series of post on reading the Bible. Here is something to think (and talk) about

Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. As Christians we will assert this as the truth. But we cannot assert it as absolute knowledge, we can not assert as the final truth. Short of becoming God, humans cannot possess the final truth… All Christian beliefs are our beliefs, human beliefs and as such always provisional beliefs. We assert that they are true; but we make this assertion provisionally. I called this provisional certitude. There is, if you want, an absoluteness about our beliefs: We cannot relinquish our standpoint but rather assert that it is true. So the ground on which we stand as we act and reflect his firm. Yet we assert our standpoint as true in a provisional way: we believe our beliefs are true. This hinders us from becoming arrogant and oppressive.



This is a fascinating idea for the 21st Century.  I think it holds something for us.

 Later he takes it up even another notch when he adds “if we understand our views as provisionally true, we will have to understand the views of others as possibly true.”

Now that is some epistemic humility for ya  !!    That might take some getting used to.

1

>Powerful in a different way

>When it come to power, there is no doubt the something has happened to God.  I contend that it is a different kind of power, most go with other explanations.

I need to say up front here that I believe in ‘more than you can see’.  Admittedly I am not a big fan of the phrase “supernatural” because of the worldview that it comes from (as if the power of prayer was not the most natural thing in the world and the way that Jesus worked with nature and wants us to as well).

I need to say that at the beginning because if you did not know it, there will be points in this blog where someone could think that I do not believe in ‘more than you can see’.

Something about God – or a gap in how the Bible talks about power and what we see in our world –  has changed and there are so many ways that people have attempted to deal with it.

  • Enlightenment liberals often take the line of reasoning that God would never break the rules that God originally set up (such as physics). So the change must have been that the ancients only thought that Jesus walked on water  –  or that they were actually talking allegorically or poetically when they talked about such things.  Bottom Line : in this view those kind of miraculous things don’t happen anymore and probably never did.
  • Charismatic or Pentecostals, obviously, DO believe that miracles and acts of power still do – or can – happen. When they don’t  (and often they don’t) then reasons are looked for: not enough faith, not enough prayer, those who pray are not holy or dedicated enough. Bottom Line: This view says that the world works the same way it did in Bible times and God doesn’t change so if we are not seeing God’s power like they did – it must be on our end.
  • Dispensational folks say that God works differently in different periods in history (called dispensations) and after the Apostolic Age ( in the Book of Acts) we moved into the Church Age and miracles are not a part of our age. Bottom Line: in this view, God can do powerful things, has in the past, and will in the future… just not right now.
  • Even Barth (Karl Barth and those who like him) runs into the problem with a lack of power (like miracles). The explanation that developed in the last half of the 20th century is that because God’s fullest revelation was done in Christ then God has no need to do those kind of things since it was a ‘once for all’ revelation. Bottom Line: in this view the only thing that God would do (like in the Book of Acts) is to validate that original revelation. 
  • There are those voices that talk of the Death of God. You understand why this carried so much weight in the 20th century with the two world wars, atomic bombs, death camps, all the way the Bosnian war and Africa’s post-colonial realities (to name just a few). 

Bottom Line: for both the Barthians and the Death of God crew is that outside of emotional worship services or crusades… it was tough for many people to see how or where God was at. God seemed absent when things mattered most and some were left to reason that this supposedly ‘all powerful being’ either didn’t care, was not as powerful as advertised or was dead.

If you study history you can begin to see that something is definitely different.  Either the Ancients were under false illusions, or it is all some sort of Medieval superstition being exposed or there has been a death of ‘god’ power or  that God is choosing to do something a little different because these are the last days and this is all part of the plan. Whichever one you go with, you have some followup questions to deal with.

Fun Example: 
I love talking with Charismatic-Pentecostal believers who focus on the fact the demons and miracles are still a part of pre-Industrial (non-developed) parts of the world. They point to Africa and South America where stuff still happens like it did in the Book of Acts.
The question I ask is “so do demons lose their power when people have electricity ?”

I have had some really fun conversations around this!  It is a fascinating place to launch a dialogue. The most interesting response I have ever heard was by one of my best friends who told me that since believers have been binding demons by the power of the Holy Sprit for 2,000 years – that there just are not as many demons on the earth as there used to be.  I asked if they then congregate in places like rural Africa? After that the conversation got wild…

At the end of the day, however, I think that what all these approaches are addressing is more important that how they address it.  What they are addressing is that there is a gap between how the ancients perceived God and talked about power and what we have seen and experienced in our own world.   Something has changed.

Act 2: here is where I am at on this.  I think that we have a bad understanding of power and how it is that God works in the world.  I am not interested in discrediting people of the past – but neither am i interested in dogmatically clinging to a cosmology and meta-physics from a pre-scientific era. I want to deal with the world as it is. Not as I was taught that it should be and not as people used to think that it was… I am interested in an optimistic (hopeful) Christian realism.

I have bought into a school of thought that says God is in the process with us and that reality is relational. It’s interesting that I believe so many of the same things as I used to but that I think so radically differently about them. 

One example is of God’s power. I believe that God is powerful and I also believe that God is at work in the world.  The difference is that I now conceive of God’s power a little differently. I believe that God’s power is non-coercive. It is more seductive than unilateral. God works with what is. This view of power is more persuasive than coercive.

My favorite way of introducing this idea is a story that Marjorie Suchocki tells.

One day the Sun and the Wind were watching a man walk and decided to have a competition. The Wind challenged the Sun to see who could get the hat off of the man’s head. The man was walking and the wind began to blow and blow in an attempt to knock the hat off of the man’s head by sheer force.
The result was that the man placed his hand on his hat and pressed down with all his strength. In fact, the more the wind blew, the more the wind blew the harder the man resisted and worked to keep the hat on his head.
The Sun decided to go a different direction. The Sun was concerned with heloing the man to want to take his hat off – not simply doing it to the man but wanting to work with the man by helping him to desire for his hat to come off.
The Sun began to shine with great intensity and increased the temperature to such a point that the man became uncomfortable with how hot is was and willing reached up with his hand and took the hat off.

If the wind had succeeded – the man would have viewed it as a bad and undesirable thing. He had worked against it and would have tried to correct it.
The sun succeeded and the man perceived it as a good thing and even participate in bringing it about. The man may not have even been aware of the role that the environment played on his desires – thinking that it was his idea all along!

God is not the wind trying to knock the hat off our head with power.

God is the sun, influencing our environment in order to change our desires – so that God is not doing things to us but is working with us to bring about the greater good (also called the will of God).  

Act 3:  Paul Knitter talks about it in terms of the sail on a boat. Our will is not like a motor but an organized cloth that is anchored at strategic points. We put up our sail in order to harness that which is already at work (available). We can not manufacture it. We do not generate it. We do not direct it so much as harness and navigate it.

The everyday implication for these ideas is that we reframe how we talk about God’s power. The idea of the Puppet master pulling strings from behind the curtain and the unilateral coercion are relics of the past.  I just don’t see how we continue with that language in the 21st century.  I prefer to talk about the Weakness of God (1 Cor. 1:15)  [I have blogged about it here].  God’s power is a different sort of power. God is powerful but it is not a unilateral power. It is not a coercive power. It is a persuasive (more seductive) power. It works with our desires and it begins with what is.

This is why I want to speak in ways that reflect the way things are.

7

>Friday Follow up: Mashing Christmas into Easter

>Just a couple of reflections on this week’s conversations, posts, and emails:

1) The biggest response was to the idea that “Christmas reminds of this every year: live in the place, speak the language, love the people, and show the way.  It’s called incarnation and it is how God works in the world.” I am always intrigued by what draws the most responses and this one really got me thinking. I wrote my Master Thesis on this topic and so it is an everyday aspect of my thought life… but it dawned on me that I have not said or done much here with the idea.  I will have to build this into more of the posts down the road – since it is the thing that I care the most about in real life!

2) Mashing things together is a real problem.  several examples surfaced this week after the Pod was recorded.
– Like saying “worship” and meaning what happens on Sunday morning when we are together and singing.  That is such a shallow definition of worship.
 Worship is a whole life response to God’s gracious love and lordship.  Trees worship on Tuesday nights as much as I do when I sing on Sunday morning. A nursing baby worships in the early hours of morning with her mother – who is also worshipping in the same act of offering. The mechanic worships when he does an honest estimate for a transmission repair.

Thank God for honest mechanics and nursing mothers and trees as the grow toward heaven.

– When we say things like  “God showed up”… I know what we are after but,  it is such a bad understanding!  God was already there and at work long before you showed up , in fact – it might be WHY you showed up.  God was calling.  SO to say that we did this, sang this, prayed this and then God showed up is bad language and worse theology.

3) Incarnation is HOW god works.  I agree with John Cobb when he says : I think that is it a BAD understanding of power to say that God does whatever he wants in the world and however it is is how God wanted it. 

  Saying that the world is the way that God wants it is not true.  God is not that kind of powerful.. God is a different kind of powerful. I say that God is weak. Some people do not like that I say that.
Some say that God self-limits (I get what they are doing with that).
Some say that God is persuasive rather than coercive (I agree).
Others say that God is sovereign like a King is sovereign – unable to control every move and decision of every member of their Kingdom… but in charge of it (I like this).
Still others say that God is storing up his judgment for the End (I worry that they might be disapointed with how gracious God is in the end).

However you come at this, I think you have to admit three things:
a) God does not do whatever God wants
b) The world is not the way that God wants it
c) as Christians, we should look to Jesus as our model when we look at God’s methods

4) This is why I keep saying that it is almost as if Jesus did not come!  When Christian ministers, theologians and lay people talk about power or love – it is almost as if this was done without reading the Gospels of Jesus Christ.  Most of the definitions are about some ancient conception of God or some philosophical assertion about God – but what they clearly are NOT, is reflective of the revelation of God in Jesus.

I know that it is probably too cynical to say that Jesus came into a world where the Powerful reigned, he presented a vision of humility, and then the Powerful co-opted Jesus and went back to being Powerful only now it is in Jesus name.

I look at organized religion and think to myself “it is almost as if Jesus never came”… when you look at Priest centered – Temple worship and then Roman power structures, it is tough to see sometimes what difference Jesus makes.

Sure – the TOPICS are changed and the SUBJECT is different, but the motives, the methods and the models are almost unchanged… but like I said , that is too cynical.

OK  until next Tuesday – I hope that you have a wonderful weekend and I pray that you are safe in your travels this Holiday season!

0

>Amazed by Mary

>As I go through advent, every year I am amazed again by the faith of Mary. Her confession “may it be unto me as you have said” (Luke 1:38) is breath-taking in its simplicity and profound in it’s content. The place of faith that she must have been coming from astounds me  – and challenges me.

I am especially taken back when I put her within the narrative context of scripture. I don’t know if you have ever thought about, but women don’t fair so well in the Bible on the whole. I’m not even talking about the parts where they are told to  ‘remain silent’ or the ‘submit to your husband’ stuff. I mean the actual characters in the narrative (both in the Hebrew and Christian testaments).

There are a lot of nameless women in the Hebrew Scripture (that’s what we used to call the Old Testament) and it generally does not go too well for them.

There are lots of examples of nameless women: Lots’s wife, Lot’s daughters, Potiphar’s wife, Jephthah’s daughter (Judges 11:34), or the concubine of Judges 19, not to mention the “witch” of Endor (in 1 Samuel 28) . If you took just these examples you would get the picture that women are (in no particular order): powerless, short-sighted, faithless, seductive, deceptive, duplicitous, mischievous, and spiritually dangerous.

Even the women that are named are usually not in positions of power  – though they do fare a little better. Tamar, Ruth, Esther, Bathsheba, and Rahab are named and each plays an important part in God’s plan.

  • Tamar is prostituted by her Father-in-law then almost burned for it (this is Genesis 38 – not to be confused with the later Tamar that is raped by her brother and then despised for it in 2 Samuel 13).
  • Ruth is poor and gleaning crops with her mother-in-law from the edges of fields – a type of welfare system set up by God in scripture.
  • Esther wins a primitive (some would say perverse) form of a beauty contest with the grand prize of entering a harem.
  • Bathsheba gets spied on while she is bathing (all the men were suppose to be out of the city), she is brought into adultery, she becomes pregnant, and her husband (Uriah) is assassinated by the man who committed adultery with her (King David).
  • Rahab is an actual prostitute.

Tamar, Ruth, and Rahab all make it into Jesus’ genealogy that appears in the prologue to the Gospel of Matthew!  Unfortunately Bathsheba, for all her troubles, is referenced only as Uriah’s wife (not David’s mistress or by her real name). But that is how it goes for women in the Bible sometimes…

This is what is so amazing to me about Mary. By all accounts she would not have been rich (to say the least), she was young and her situation was scandalous. Poor, young, and disgraced is quite a predicament for a girl. Then she comes out with these amazing declarations of faith!

You have to keep in mind that this happened during a time in history when women’s testimony were not even valid in court!  Which just puts a whole wild spin on the fact that God chose for the women at the tomb to be the witnesses – and to testify to the male disciples (who did not believe right away) about the resurrected Christ!

With that in mind, Mary was asked to be more than a witness! She was to be the container of the uncontainable; the womb of the uncreated. YIKES.

That is why it hits me so hard when I hear her ‘Magnificat’ declaration in Luke 1:46 – 55:

“My soul glorifies the Lord 
 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, 
for he has been mindful 
   of the humble state of his servant. 
From now on all generations will call me blessed, 
  for the Mighty One has done great things for me— 
   holy is his name. 
His mercy extends to those who fear him, 
   from generation to generation. 
He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; 
   he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. 

 He has brought down rulers from their thrones 
   but has lifted up the humble. 
 He has filled the hungry with good things 
   but has sent the rich away empty. 
He has helped his servant Israel, 
   remembering to be merciful 
to Abraham and his descendants forever, 
   just as he promised our ancestors.”

I hear this and I am stopped in my tracks. What kind of world did Mary think that God wanted to make? What did Mary expect God to do with this kid she was to carry?

Is this what the Hebrew prophet was looking forward to in Isaiah 40 ?

Comfort, comfort my people,

   says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

   and proclaim to her

that her hard service has been completed,

   that her sin has been paid for,

that she has received from the LORD’s hand

   double for all her sins.

 A voice of one calling:

“In the wilderness prepare

   the way for the LORD[a];

make straight in the desert

   a highway for our God.[b]

Every valley shall be raised up, 

   every mountain and hill made low; 

the rough ground shall become level, 

   the rugged places a plain. 

And the glory of the LORD will be revealed,

   and all people will see it together.

            For the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”

Is this what Jesus meant when he said “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” in John 10:10 ?

Is this what the Letter writer was saying with passages like 1 John 3:8 ” The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work”?

I am also struck by two things that weigh me down:

  1. If some poet or prophet or preacher was to put this out now, it would most likely be disregarded as a John Lennon style “Imagine” daydream, or dismissed as socialist utopian propaganda or even disparaged as a Liberal agenda.  When you think about the relationship that Jesus had with the priests of his day and the relationship that those priests had with the poor, the immigrant and the outsider – and compare that to the relationship that Jesus had with that same crowd… you can clearly see the he was Mary’s boy!!
  2. I listen to the Religious Media that is so powerfully broadcast on Christian radio and preached on TV by preachers at big churches with big followings and I am haunted by the suspicion that what calls itself Christianity in capitalistic and consumeristic North America is not quite what Mary’s song pointed toward. I am dismayed so often by the conservative Christianity I encounter. It is almost as if Jesus never came.   Even in a ‘Christian Nation’,  Priest, politics, and power …  well , let’s just say it this way:  I would love to hear the kind of things that Mary said coming through the radio and from the pulpit.

This is why Mary mesmerizes me. She ‘got’ something – she knew something – she saw something that allowed her to say something that radically changes the way we look at Jesus and continues to impact the vision of  people who are suppose to speak for Jesus.

Mary challenges us. She inspires us. Her vision projects a world that has yet to materialize fully. Her words frame our expectation.

I think about her words.  I pray that I may see what she called for. I thank God for her and the standard that she sets.  I call her ‘blessed’.

Merry Christmas everyone – today is truly the day of the Lord’s visitation.
The Lord is among us!

to listen to Podcast click [HERE]

3

>Friday Follow up – Jesus was not violent

>

The conversation has been wild this week – both on the Blog and on Facebook (which I could not be in on this week). I wanted to thank all of those who contributed so much. I appreciate the full table when everybody brings something to share!
I wanted to tell a story and go back over some basic stuff. First the story:








When I was first a pastor we only had Saturday night services.  We didn’t have a building and so we rented a space on Saturday night. Sundays I would meet with people or ‘sabbath’.  One Sunday my beloved Chicago Bears football team was playing a big game and I did not have a TV. So I went down to the sports bar to watch the game which had a 4pm kick EST. I got down there to get a good seat only to find the bar full as many of the NFL games start at 1pm. 
I found a seat in view of the TV that the waitress said the Bears would be on when it was time. As I sat there, I noticed that there was a group of guys a couple of tables away who were quite rowdy. I think that they had been drinking quite a bit for quite a while and … it showed. One of these guys, a big muscular guy with a crew cut had his team’s jersey on (a team that was losing pretty bad at the time) and he was starring at me pretty good. Now, I have been around long enough to know that stare – he wasn’t attracted to me, he wasn’t thinking about being my friend – he was figuring out how to start something with me. 


This went on for a little bit and I thought to myself “ how am I going to explain to my congregation that their new Sr. Pastor was in a bar fight on a Sunday !” I also had recently come into a conviction of non-violent resistance.  SO I had to think of something. You only get so much time with these things. When a guy is building up courage… you either play chicken, you leave, or you fight. 
I knew that violence was not an option , it was off the table, so I prayed a little internal prayer and an idea come to me. I thought to myself, it is too bad that men do this puffed up- tough guy – peacock- poser thing , because under different circumstances this guy and me would be good friends. 
 I went up to the bar and ordered a beer. Walked over to his table, put the beer down in front of him and said “If a fight breaks out in here today – you are I are tag team partners- I think that we could clear this whole place.”  He huffed at me , half in disgust (I think) and half in surprise. He told me where to go and what to do to myself. I put my hands in the air as if to surrender, turned my head to the side, and said “It’s a standing offer”. I went back to my table. 
He drank the beer. Their game ended. They left. I enjoyed watching the Bears win in peace. 
I think that when we hold violence as an option – even a last resort – we may not have enough energy to overcome the inertia that is required to put all of our energy into creative non-violent solutions. 
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I once heard a young man who went to a famous church, quote his famous pastor as saying “The only way to bring peace is to prepare for war”.   I do not believe that is true.
That seems very Roman to me. The saying in Jesus’ day was “The Romans make a desert and call it peace.”  Welcome to Pax Romana.   What we have in Jesus is a different kind of peace. The Prince of Peace brings in a Kingdom of Peace.  
Caesar had his legions, minions, and battalions.  Jesus has you and me. 
____
Here is one of the responses I had this week that I wanted to  adapted for the Friday Follow up  (because I know that many people do not follow all of the comments but only read the main post – so I wanted to bring them up to speed on something). 
Four things  🙂
1) There is much agreement on 80% of this violence issue. Most, I would guess, agree that Jesus was not violent, that we are lead by the Spirit who is at work in the world, that we would should have a gracious posture to others and many other things. We simply part ways on that final 20%. For instance: I don’t want endorse religious leaders (of any stripe) that say that “god told them” to be aggressive/violent.  I think that pastors (like the one in Seattle) aren’t just getting a detail wrong (like Revelations 19) they get Jesus wrong, are preaching a false gospel, which makes the world a worse place by enforcing that violent status quo. I know that not everyone will agree on that final 20%. 
2) By saying that I don’t want to support religious leaders who say that “god told them” to be aggressive/violent. I don’t think that I am being UN-gracious. I think that I am being very gracious in saying that I want to make a sharp break with the violence of Church History since 300. I think that it is all-too-ordinary-human violence just baptized in Jesus name and that we need to STEP AWAY from that as an act of repentance and take it OFF the table in order to see what God’s Holy Spirit can do that we can not do in our own power.  
3) I just want to make sure that when we talk about  ‘receiving things in personal prayer” that we are not speaking as an Enlightenment Individual. This is not YOU doing what “God” is laying on YOUR heart. I am convinced that what we need is a community discernment where there is both accountability and faithfulness to what God has already revealed in the 10 commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. That would be my suggestion. Not just you being you (Rambo style) and calling it “being undignified” or a ‘jesus freak” or “on fire”. 
In my defense: 
I have been clear from day one about my conviction that we will need a VERY different theology for the next 500 years than what we have had for the past 500 years. I have never apologized for that. That should not be surprising. It could not be more clear about what I am up to.
have a great weekend! see you next Tuesday for “Breaking the Bell Curve”
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>Jesus is not Violent

> When we talk about God as Christians we are not talking about a generic conception of God. As Christians we believe in a very specific concept of God, one that was most fully revealed in the person and work of Jesus Christ. 

 For people that believe in Jesus and call themselves Christians, I think that it is important that we get something strait: Jesus was not violent. That is the first proposition. The second theory flows out of that: since Jesus was not violent, maybe his people should not be violent either. 


I know that there are those who will object. Some of them will even point to verses in Scripture. I will try to look at each of the objections that I hear as best I can as quickly as I can.
Old Testament
I think that it is important to recognize that we are not GOD-ians, or Spirit-ians. We are Christians.We would take our cue from Christ.

Here is my concern: Every time some Christian wants to be violent and can not find a way in Christ to justify it – they reach back into the Old Testament in order to do so. This is a bad way to read the Bible.  Sometimes, when christian ministers speak, it almost comes across as if Jesus never came.  When I say “Jesus was not violent” you can’t just jump backward and say “In the Old Testament God…” That is not the right way to do it.

Turning over table in the Temple
Whenever I say that Jesus was not violent, almost without exception the first thing someone says is “what about when he cleared the Temple?”  In passages like John 2:15, Jesus makes quite a ruckus in the Temple – driving out the animals that were for sale and turning over the tables of the money changers. 
I would just point out three things: A) it was the only time that he did something like this. It was an exception. B) he did not harm any human or living thing. He cracked a whip and turned over tables. C) this act was in protest of those who had made religion big business, profiting from the vulnerability of others. 
So often I hear this verse used to justify supporting violence and ironically it is by those who have made the christian religion big business and make a handsome profit off of it. That should tell you something.
The Book of Revelation

in chapter 19 of John’s Revelation you hear this: 

11 I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and wages war. 12 His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. 13 He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God. 14 The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. 15 Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. “He will rule them with an iron scepter.” He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. 16 On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written:  KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS

Somehow this becomes permission to be violent to other countries and to people of different backgrounds or persuasions. 
The error is threefold:


1. To derive doctrine from apocalyptic literature in difficult at best. The very nature of the genre is poetic, fantastic, and explosive. It really should not be read like the rest of scripture. I am firmly convinced that each genre should be read in ways that are appropriate to the nature of that genre. The Histories of the Hebrew Testament, the Psalms, the Prophets, the Gospels, the Epistles (or letters) and the Apocalyptic all need to be read in distinct ways.     


2. To miss that his sword is a non-sword – it is his Word !  I call this “the problem of jesuSword”  and though it can be confusing, it’s important to see that it is not Jesu’s Sword  but Jesus’ Word !!   What brings the nations to submission is not a sword but Jesus’ Word – or the word of the Word (if you prefer). To miss this is to miss the point all together. It is to think that the Romans did the right thing is nailing Jesus to the cross. It is to miss that Jesus was killed unjustly and the injustice pains the heart of God.  There is poetry in that Jesus told Peter to “put away” his sword (jJohn 18:11) and said that if his kingdom was of this world that his followers “would fight” (John 18:36). The implication is that his kingdom’s power does not originate with this world* and therefor his followers will not fight. 


3. Some people justify violence by saying “Jesus even said that he came to bring a sword”   but think about the whole sentence… what did he say? 

Matthew 10:34 “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to turn “‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—   37 Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. 38 Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39 Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.

 Here is the important thing: swords were meant to guard families. To protect me, my things, and those close to me! Jesus says that his sword it to divide up families – and I think he was being ironic !!  Because  in his day swords were actually for defending one’s family – for guarding me and mine. In this sense, Jesus’ “sword” is an un-sword… or an anti-sword. It does the opposite of what human swords are used for.  Jesus’ sword is not for defending family but for dividing family. Jesus did not come with a human sword but the opposite!! 

The Kingdom suffers violence
In Matthew 11:12 Jesus says that the Kingdom “suffers violence” and that the violent “try to take it by force”.  I know that this is a tricky passage. Some people see it as saying “you have to be aggressive to enter the kingdom” but I think it is more appropriate to read it as “violent men try to seize to use for their own purposes”.  Regardless, either reading does not give us permission to be be violent and advance the kingdom of Christ “by the sword”. 
Clarification
I am not a pacifist.  I am not passive.  I am actively and passionately non-violent.  I believe that violence begets more violence. Sometime – a person who wants permission to be violent in Jesus’ name will pull out the big two examples and ask me either “what about the Nazis” or “what if some guy broke into you house and was going to rape your wife”?   These are always the big two and I will deal with them next week in “Breaking the Bell Curve”.  Suffice to say – barring those two examples, most of what we are talking about with burning heretics, Godly nationalism, and militarized violence does not primarily fall into those two famous categories. They are just all too normal human violence baptized in Jesus’ name. 
Example
Let me get down to the heart of the matter. Here is an example of exactly what I am talking about. There is nationally known pastor in Seattle, Washington who is famously quoted as saying “Jesus is a cage fighter with a tattoo on his thigh and a sword in his hand, determined to make someone bleed”. He said this in reference to the fact that he “could not worship somebody that he could beat up.” 
Some people dismiss statements like this and chalk it up to testosterone fueled, overly inflated, pumped up hyper-masculinity.  I think that there is something much deeper and much more sinister involved. I think that it is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of God and the interpretation of Christian scripture. 
What is noteworthy is that in Revelation 19, the sword is not in Jesus’ hand but it comes out of Jesus’ mouth. That seems important in the poetic nature of Revelation. This sword is not your average sword. It is not in Jesus’ hand and that makes you wonder if the way in which this sword “strike down” the nations is not in bloody violence but in a kind of destruction that would happen as a result of a sword that proceeds from the mouth of God?  Let’s ask ourselves “is there something that comes from the mouth of God that radically impacts or consumes peoples and nations?”  Is there something sharp that comes from the mouth of God … something sharper than any two edged sword? 
_____
I am suggesting that we need to be open to consider at least three ideas:
1. that since that time in church history when the church rose to Roman power and began to kill people (burn, hang, and behead) what we often call Christianity has been very different than the initial vision of Jesus and the precedent set by the early church when Jesus was killed by Romans and the church suffered violence. 
2. that when groups of nationals are invaded by violent foreigners who mix commerce and religion with genocide and ethnic cleansing, that maybe the rejection by the indigenous population of the alien religion can not be called a rejection of christianity. Maybe when groups like the Native American tribes who were assaulted by European invasion were not actually rejecting what you and I would know as the gospel of Jesus Christ. 
3. that when preachers get stuff like this wrong, that it essentially changes the message and thus the addition of violence to the gospel makes it a different enough message that they are not preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ anymore but a different gospel. Maybe he doesn’t just quote this passage wrong, maybe he has Jesus all wrong.
Now usually people say “no no it is not a different gospel – it is just an adding of something to the gospel.” It is the gospel plus violence. 
But I would ask, if the example and model of Jesus and the apostles is essentially and fundamentally  non-violent, and one adds violence to it… does it then essentially and fundamentally transform the gospel into something that is then not the gospel of Jesus Christ. 
But is it possible that this preacher did not just get a detail wrong but is actually portraying Jesus wrong. That he is not just adding something to the gospel but is preaching a different gospel and thus is not preaching the gospel? 
I guess a fun example would be : if I write a book about how English is the best language and how everyone should speak English. Then someone translates that my book into French… that would be complicated. But what if they then appropriated the message and said that French was the best language and everyone should speak French… would that then be a different message?   Even if it were based on my original book, had the same title and used all the same stuff – it would be a different message.
I think that they would not just have translated my message but would have changed my message. Essentially and fundamentally they would be saying something different than I was.  They would not be promoting my same message. 
This is the exact situation that I think we often have. People use Jesus’ name, read from the Holy Book and even put crosses on the outside of their building and on their stage. It has all the markers of a Christian message. Here is the problem – it has a fundamentally different message and motives than Jesus did. It uses Roman models and methods and thus it is not in keeping with the Spirit of Christ. 
Jesus was not violent. jesuSword is not Jesu’s sword but Jesus’ word. It’s not a sword – it is an un-sword or an anti-sword.  When we miss this detail, we miss the message.
* the phrase “not of this world” does not mean that Jesus power has nothing to do with this world, but that it does not originate with this world (unlike Herod’s or Pilate’s). It definitely impacts the world and is for the world. “Not of this world” does not mean that it has nothing to do with this world and is for a “world that is to come”. It means that it is fully IN the world but that the source of its power is not OF the world.  

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>Relational Religion

> There are three significant implications for reading the Bible relationally. 

The first has to do with prayer. 
The second has to do with the original sin. 
The third has to do with Pentecost.                  by Bo Sanders
Prayer
Prayer is a relational thing. We pray for people that we know. This is a good thing. That is how it is suppose to work. We need to be praying for the people that we know.
It is tough to pray for someone you don’t know. Let’s take two examples: letters in the mail and hiring a pastor.  


When a church wants to hire a pastor, they do not hold a prayer meeting and ‘discern’ a name and phone number out of thin air and then call that person and say “God told us that you are suppose to be our next pastor”.  That is not how it works. They look over resumes, they do phone interviews, they call the person in for the weekend to candidate and then ‘discern’ based on relational cues. 

When god lays on somebody’s heart to write an encouraging note, send a gift, or to make a phone call, it is always to somebody that we know. God works in and through relationship. If you want to send a check for $100 to help someone out, you don’t write a random name on an envelope and make up (or pray and discern) an address and then put it in the mail. You send it to someone you know – someone that you are in a relationship with. That is what God leads us to do. 
Can you imagine writing a check to Jackson Bolaliber, making out the envelope to 765 Kings Highway in Jacksonville Kansas and then making up a zip code (98126) and putting it in the mail?  I don’t even know if this person exists. I don’t know if Kansas has a town called Jacksonville. I don’t know if that zip code is even for Kansas or if it exists anywhere.
That is not how it works. That is not how God works. God works in relationship. God lays on our hearts to send encouragement notes to people that we know. To dial phone numbers that belong to people that we are in relationship with. 
Have you ever said “God give me 10 single-digits that make up a phone number of somebody that you want me to call and encourage.”  No.  You call somebody that you know and encourage them. You may even be led to call them because you know of something going on in their life and that they need encouragement.
I’ve said this before, when we pray for the people of Haiti, we are not asking God to fix the situation “from Heaven” – we are a) asking God to send the people that will fix the situation and b) making ourselves available to God for whatever situation God might want to use us in. 
Prayer prepares our hearts to participate with God in God’s world and work. God is relational. Therefore God’s work is relational. And thus, prayer is relational. 
The original sin
I believe in the original sin.  I do not believe in Original Sin. I believe in the original sin, but I do not believe in what has been the dogmatic teaching that children are born full of sin – that the cells of the body are corrupted or depraved and that unless they pray a prayer to Jesus or are baptized by a priest or belong to the right church (which is sanctioned by the State) they are “fallen” and will not go to heaven. I do not believe in that kind of original sin. 
The concern over Substance (corrupted) and Status (fallen) are not the concerns of the Bible and come to us via Greek philosophy (both Platonism and Aristotelean thought).
The concern of the Bible is relationship. That is the power of the original sin – that it broke relationship.  There were three types of broken relationship in the Garden of Eden narrative.  
But before we get to that … and while were are on the subject –  there is no such thing as the fall.   Look it up. The Bible never talks about a fall.  Adam and Eve did not fall.  Humans are not fallen.  If you look up ‘Fall’ in most biblical concordances you will see six verses listed. Not one of them uses the word fall.  It was a concept – a construct- that was added later – because of philosophy.
What happened in Eden is not a fall. It is a breaking of relationship, and it impacted three things. 
The first relationship that was broken was between God and humanity. They were afraid of God and they hid. The relationship was broken. 
The second relationship that was broken was between between humans – some focus on the split between the genders, some on the relationship between husband and wife, I prefer to look at the simple  human to human brokenness. 
The story of Cain and Able illustrated the brokeness of both of these first two levels – with God and between each other. 
The third relationship that was broken was between humans and the earth. It changed from a care – partnership – providing connection to a hostility (the earth to us) and domination (us to the earth). 
Good News: This is what Jesus comes to restore! Jesus heals our broken relationship with God. Jesus enables us to have restored relationships with other humans around us. And Jesus brings us into a new awareness of the earth beneath us.
I draw it this way: the Circle was broken in Eden. Three circles were broken in Eden. Living in Jesus restores those broken circles – repairs the brokeness and reconnects the unity of the circle. 
Living in Jesus connects the circle above us in a restored unity with God. It also connects us to those around us in the circle of community. Lastly, it connects us to the earth below so that we have restored appreciation and partnership with the dust from which we came and to which we will return. 
This is the idea of Shalom. It is peace-restoration-connection-wholeness. Living in Shalom is a circle running North-South above and below and another circle running east-west connecting us to those around.  This is healthy connection, mutual care and edification.
There was an original sin but there is no Original Sin. There was no Fall but there is restored relationship and connection.*
Pentecost
     As long as I am laying it all out I might as well say this: reading the Bible relationally changes everything.  Look at it this way – the Incarnation was Jesus taking on flesh and opening a new way for humanity to to relate to God. Jesus gives us a new relationship with God.
Many people that I know who self-identify as Christian live as if Jesus never came – reverting to a set of rules, regulations, and religious rituals. 
When Jesus dies, the veil in the temple is torn in two. God’s presence comes out into the world. God is no longer kept behind closed doors and God no longer lives in buildings built by human hands.  The Religious presence of God had come out into the world where the Natural presence of God had always been – but this was now in a new way. 
This move came to its culmination at Pentecost and God’s spirit – the Spirit of Christ – who is Holy Spirit now indwells us as the people of God. In the Hebrew Testament God’s Spirit would fill one person at a time (like a Judge or a Prophet) for one task or a specific time. Now, after Pentecost God’s spirit resides in every believer for all time.
God is with us. God is here among us. Christ’s Spirit is at work in the world and is with you – to guide you and use you and change you. 
God wants to guide you. 
God wants to use you. 
God wants to change you. 
This is why God gave Holy Spirit to the world as a gift. We are the people of God. We are the House of God. God dwells in us each of us and among us as a community. 
Conclusion
When you pray, you are not projecting your voice past the heavens and trying to get the attention of a God who lives on the other side of curtain – begging and pleading for God to ‘come down’.  God already came down – and died on a cross – that is when the veil was torn in two and God’s presence came out into the world. God is here with us now. God is at work among us. 
God didn’t write a best-selling book and then retire to the far corner of the universe leaving it all up to us to do what was said in the book. That book is not an instruction manual or a constitution or a rule book. It is a story. In that story God gives his own Son who dies for the world – to repair a broken set of relationship and restore us to right relationship – three new relationships. Then God gives his Spirit to the world as a gift so that we may have a new connection (Shalom) with God, a new connection (Community) with those around us, and new connection (edification) with the world that we inhabit.  
* My mentor Randy Woodley has given me a wonderful understanding of Shalom and he did his Doctoral Dissertation on the Harmony Way understanding of this concept by native American communities. 
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