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>After Easter

He is risen!   …  now what?


Last week I was a part of two vigorous online conversations regarding the resurrection. Then I had a wonderful opportunity to celebrate Easter Sunday in a glorious way. I thought it might be good to recap the implications of last week’s conversations and celebrations as we turn the corner toward Pentecost. 



The next question seems to be “what do we do with this?” – also known as the so what question. People want to know because there are 3 key passages in the New Testament that say Jesus’ resurrection has consequences for what we as believers can expect after our death. 


Here are the 4 layers of thought that seem to come out of the Resurrection conversation.  
Continue reading “>After Easter” →

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>Resurrecting space for belief

It goes without saying, Easter is a big deal. I only have to mention the significance of passages like Paul’s claim in 1 Corinthians 15:13-15 (NIV) 

13 If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. 14 And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. 15 More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised.



As I a pastor I looked forward to Easter so much, but I knew that we would have  visitors, family members, and friends who would come to our services out of relational obligation or for social interest in the event. I knew that some of these would not believe in the literalness of the resurrection of Jesus’ body. 



I always had to think through how I was going to talk about this as a way that was both faithful in proclamation for us as a community of faith, while also attempting to be invitational and sensitive to potential objections or barriers from our guests. 


I have no interest in apologizing for what we believe as a faith community. But neither do I want to dogmatically push an ancient worldview that may, to the listener, be suspicious at best and incompatible at worst.  Continue reading “>Resurrecting space for belief” →

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>Prayer, Healing and Cancer

>

This Friday I want to talk about walking on water and other miracles in the Bible. Today I want to talk about praying for cancer and why some people are healed.
There are two quick things that I want say before we get into it. First, when we talk about healing, most of the time we start in the Bible and then transfer what we think about it forward to today.  I want to do the opposite. I want to start with how people are healed today and then go back and see if that may have been what was going on in the Bible. 
Second, since I came out last week that I do not believe in the supernatural I wanted to thank everyone who commented on this blog, facebook, and email. I really appreciate all the thoughtful responses. 
I don’t believe in the supernatural – but I do believe in prayer for healing.

People who were taught the supernatural view may hear that and think “that doesn’t make sense” or “that is contradictory”. This only exposes how little we have thought about all of this and how lazy our thinking can get when we think we have it all figured out. It has never dawned on some of us that there may be another way to think about spiritual and physical healing than the ‘super’ natural explanation. 

I would like to put forward an alternative explanation for your consideration:
Cancer is when cells of the body become disconnected from the function and purposes of rest of the body. They are separated from the story or narrative design of the body. Once disconnected, or out of line with the body, they actually begin to turn against the body and attack the body – multiplying at an unhealthy rate and ultimately eating the cells and organs of it’s host body. Cancer cells are separated from the purpose and story of the body that gives them life and begin to work against the body that gives them life. 
When we pray for someone who has cancer and they are ‘healed’, what do we think happened? I think that what happened is that we as a community surrounded them with our bodies (cells) and spirits (partnership with God) in order to make a place of openness for a “God who is at work among us” to reconnect those cells to the story (and purpose) of the body and bring them back in line to work with the body in a healthy way. 
What I don’t think happened is that a transcendent God reached through the veil of existence and magically touch only this person to take out the bad cells. 
I really do believe that God is here at work among us all the time and when we open up and participate with God’s will and purpose that it is possible that misaligned cells that are disconnected from body’s story can come back into alignment and participate with the body instead of against it. 
Doctors call it remission. We call it a miracle. It is natural and beautiful. What it is not is “super” natural. 
It is not dependent on praying hard enough, praying good enough, being good enough people to pray for this, etc.  It isn’t about looking for unbelief, or unconfessed sin, or some other flaw in the sick person or the pray-ers. It isn’t about a God who is “in control” or that “everything happens for a reason” or that everything will make sense in Heaven (after we die), or that God is sovereign and chooses who lives and who dies. 
I still believe in healing. But I now think that it happens for a different reason than I used to. I don’t believe in the supernatural.  I do believe that prayer is powerful and that sometimes people are healed from cancer. God has given us medicine which can be powerful. God has given us a community that prays and that can be powerful.  God has given us the presence of God’s Spirit who is at work among us. Being open to this can be very powerful. 


Let me know what you think… I am very interested in having a conversation about all of this. 

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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.

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>Friday Follow Up: the death of Job’s God

>What an amazing week of conversations on the Blog, Facebook and email!  Thank you all for your contributions.  I have much to think about.  Next week we will address the nature of Divine Power.

Here are the three things that I want to say: 

God is always being incarnated

God is always dying

God is always conquering death

in this sense:  there is a perpetual new life, there is a ongoing crucifixion, and there is constant resurrection.

We are always embodying God. We are forever dying to ourselves. We are continuing to rise (baptized) into a new life.

For the Christian, it is always Christmas, it is always Good Friday and it is always Easter Sunday.

Here are three exchanges I wanted to follow up on:

Dave:  Meister Eckart – “I pray that God would rid me of God”.

Me: This line of reasoning is SOOOOO explosive!

We love it when the Apostle Paul said “through the law I died to the law” in Galatians 2:19
but we may not like it as much as when a John Caputo says “through religion I died to religion” or something similar.

Sara: I’ve been thinking about this idea all day. Was wondering your thoughts on how this play out in our relationships, For instance because Christ died for me and my sins ( including the one where I felt he failed me) Did he not also die for the people in our lives that did not meet our expectations? And because they failed us we hold back our love. (conditional love). God does not conditionally love us so are we suppose to conditionally love other people?

Me: Here is how I would answer this.

1. Jesus died not just FOR our sins but BECAUSE of our sins. We are to blame too.
2. God loves us unconditionally. We are not God. We love conditionally.
3. In Christ (!) we move toward a MORE unconditional capacity to love. We grow, develop and mature in that direction. It is not a destination. It is not a pass/fail assignment. It is not a trick or a test… It is a direction that we move in Christ.

They fail us, we fail God, God forgives us, we forgive them. Let mercy flow, let justice reign, and let kindness ring all around!!

Philip: Gods die, or perhaps more to the point, Gods evolve. The Israelite god does this before our own eyes as we read scripture. But perhaps more interesting is that this evolution takes place in a particular narrative, and only evolves as the people telling the story change. This is interesting to me because it deals less with some ontological change in God and more of a change in us, the storyteller.

That isn’t some lazy excuse like: “god is the same yesterday, today and forever” that’s bull crap. God clearly changes, or at least, when you look at our account of god over a long period of time, you see a character that is not stagnate but incredibly dynamic in how he/she is portrayed. But that’s kind of my point, when we say “that is what God is like” we are using our language, which only makes sense in a certain social context to describe something rather profound. It is inevitable that the character would change as the storyteller changes.
Perhaps if we began to see god as truly “with us”, and not in the “like a best friend” kind of way, but in a way that connects us to god in a real and profound way that blurs the lines of distinction, then that might takes us down a road where our views and descriptions of god are not the process of uncovering the one true god, rather they are the process of expressing the god within and surrounding us (collectively and individually) and the interaction that takes place there.
           



Thanks Bo for the rich and nuanced take on this issue.
ps. I was talking to a older conservative family member who was shocked that I didn’t think God was in control of everything, because as he said ” it brings me great comfort to know that a tragic event happened for a reason” I replied more or less like this “That view of god doesn’t bring me comfort at all, rather that god makes me mad, if God had a reason for a 5 year old being raped then God is a mad man.” Needless to say that conversation didn’t go over very well.

Me:   Philip, thank you for being so honest and clear. Two things I want to respond to:
– You are right that it is not ‘god’ who changes but it is WE who change and our understanding that evolves. That is important, I have been having amazing conversations all week with people telling me about their previous conception of God dying. NOW – it was not the Living God who died but their understanding of God. 


This is important because we are not saying that “there is no God” but that the former conception of “God is dead”. I say this because I believe that the Son of God died and that many conceptions of God died on that Cross.

 

- I got in trouble with someone who was talking about “God being in control” of everything, then later was sad about the passing of a friend. I said “Jesus must have been mad at that guy to kill him like that.” They objected. To which i responded “you can’t if both ways”.



I also wrote about this for Football Jesus [link].

Next Tuesday, the post is on Divine Power. This is what I will tackle.

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