I have posted a new entry at the new Absolution Revolution. The new entry welcomes users to the new site and outlines some new projects I’m interested in exploring through it. Come on over and check it out!

I have had a fantastic time blogging with you all here at WordPress.com, but the time has come to move on. I have the new site set up now to the point where I think it’s ready to release, even though it is certainly far from being done. So from now on, I will be blogging over there, though for a while at least I will post here about new updates with a reminder to update your links. I’ll see you at the new site!

This is the sermon I gave at Patchwork Central’s Sunday evening worship on July 26, 2009. Of course, these texts are not the only ones pertinent to discussion of the so-called “end times,” but 1 Thessalonians in particular is of major importance since it is the text most-often used to discuss “what the Rapture will be like.” Judging by the number of bumper stickers and t-shirts with stupid slogans like “in case of Rapture, this car will be UNMANNED,” it is a matter that is sorely in need of an injection of good, contextually-informed Biblical theology in the popular arena.

As this is the full text of a sermon (approximately 30 minutes in length), it’s considerably longer than my usual entries.

First reading: Isaiah 40:9-11
Second reading: 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

[I started the sermon by recalling a story from my time at Harlaxton, when I spent the better part of an afternoon in Cambridge having dinner with a homeless man named Ian. Rather than try and recall exactly how I told the story on Sunday, here is my description of the event upon returning to Harlaxton that evening.]

Of course, as we all know, homelessness is not just something that happens in England. I remember growing up in Petersburg, a town of considerably smaller size than Evansville, and every few months I would hear advertisements on the radio for programs to benefit Street Relief and other efforts to serve the homeless in Evansville in some way. Now, being from a small town and having never seen a real, live homeless person before it was all a bit of an abstraction for me. It was hard enough for me to just get my head around the notion that there were people out there who didn’t have a stable place to go every night to sleep. Homelessness was something that, for me, only existed on the radio or television, or maybe I would have a teacher mention something about it in class. By the time high school rolled around I had a little better grip on things, having taken a few trips to cities such as Washington D.C. and seen first-hand people whom I knew would be sleeping under the stars that night – and not because they were on a camping trip with friends.

When I moved to Evansville for college I began to get a fuller picture of things, though being a dyed-in-the-wool Reaganite conservative I assumed homeless people, or at least most of them anyway, were there because they wanted to be, or because they were just too lazy to get a real job. Needless to say, since then my thoughts on the matter have changed a bit. I have had a few rather significant interactions with homeless people, like Brian whom I mentioned earlier, a guy named John who used to hang out with us around what is now the art colony, back when it was still Synchronicity, who fancied himself a bit of a traveling preacher for one. He and I used to sit on a bench either on Haynie’s Corner or on Main Street and talk about all kinds of stuff, and boy did he have some good stories to tell. I’ve been a part of the crowd at the Rescue Mission, both during times when I volunteered or coordinated groups that wanted to volunteer, and during times when in fact that was the only place I could afford to eat. I’ve never actually been homeless myself, but there have been at least 3 occasions when I’ve been anywhere from a few weeks to a few days away from not having a place to call home. Perhaps some of you have been in the same boat, eh?

There’s been a lot in the news lately about foreclosures and people not being afford to stay in their homes and all that kind of stuff. Not just people on the lower end of the economic ladder, but increasing numbers from the middle and upper-middle classes as well. No doubt the number of certifiable homeless has increased in the past year, though I have found reliable statistics predictably hard to come by. But even before there was talk of a mortgage crisis, a housing sector crash, Wall Street shenanigans, and the “R-” word (not to mention the “D-” word, which you’ll never hear out of any politician’s mouth unless he’s talking about how we’re not going to have one), the fact of the matter is that somewhere in the neighborhood of 1% of the US population, depending on what studies you cite and which methodologies you accept, went from day to day not knowing if they were going to be able to have a shelter to sleep in that night. That’s around 3 million people, if you’re counting.

The funny thing about that is that this is before there was what the experts call an economic crisis, this was going on when things were supposedly going well! At the risk of grossly oversimplifying a highly complicated issue, basically as revenues and profits and acquisitions and Gross Domestic Product were skyrocketing, the number of people in poverty, increasingly unable to meet even the most basic needs, was also increasing by leaps and bounds.

We live in a world where insecurity and homelessness are among the defining traits of our time. And it isn’t just this literal homelessness, the kind you can walk out your door and see most days even around here, that is rampant. In their astonishing book Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement, astonishing both because of it’s lucid and depressingly comprehensive diagnosis of the problems and because of its amazingly Biblically-charged call to hope-infused action, Brian Walsh and Stephen Bouma-Prediger identify three types of homelessness that pervade Western late-modern society. The first is what I’ve just described, the literal kind of homelessness where you don’t have a stable roof over your head, which they call socioeconomic homelessness. The second is what they call “postmodern” homelessness, the type of homelessness, metaphorically speaking, brought on by the onset of the cultural condition of postmodernity. Now, postmodernity is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot and is notoriously difficult to define, so here’s my definition: postmodernity is the cultural consequence of the widespread recognition that there is no “boundary-fixing” that cannot be questioned, challenged, redrawn, that all the criteria we employ to draw boundaries and articulate identities are contingent, and therefore deconstructible and able to be re-created for any or no reason. While there are certainly positive ways to read this cultural condition and the philosophical and social ideas that relate to it, it is also the case that one of the practical results is a widespread inability to develop a stable identity, leaving one’s self open to the whims of the market to constantly re-create one’s self-conception. Interestingly, while socioeconomic homelessness is a condition more often experienced by people lower on the ladder of economic status, it may in fact be the case that so-called postmodern homelessness is more a phenomenon of the affluent – though certainly not entirely so.

The third type of homelessness Brian and Steven identify is what they call ecological homelessness, which takes place on a somewhat larger scale than either of the two previously mentioned – which is to say, the whole planet. I think everyone here is at least somewhat aware of the extent to which humankind is apparently doing its darndest to trash the world, in some cases literally, such as when you consider that in the oceans plastic now outnumbers monocellular plankton by a ratio of as much as 10:1. We are eating ourselves out of a planet – industrial agriculture is the most polluting force in the world. We are buying ourselves out of a planet – the manufacture and discarding of consumer products depletes resources and creates waste on a staggering scale. And say what you want about capitalism and ending poverty and the potential of economic growth to create a better world for all, the truth is our industrial and consumer-based economic system may bring some people out of poverty but if it is not checked, if our collective economic life is not brought to some kind of equilibrium, we will destroy the entire basis upon which all human life and community is build on the planet Earth. And it really isn’t too much to say that a kind of love of money is at the root of all this evil. The Apostle Paul was right about that one, eh? And all three of these types of homelessness are related in at least that way – they are all connected to the industrial and consumer-based economic system. Wealth is generated in such a way that people are displaced and dispossessed of their homes, causing socioeconomic homelessness, the generation of wealth is driven by a spirit of continual superficial change that denies us the ability to build depth, causing postmodern homelessness, and the means by which objects that produce or represent wealth are made is destroying the planet, causing ecological homelessness.

So at this point you’ve all got to be sitting there wondering, “Jason, what does any of this have to do with either of those Scripture readings we heard earlier?” Well, I’m glad you asked. I don’t know about you, but for the most part when I was growing up and even into my college years, when I was supposed to be getting an idea of what it was like to move from the faith of childhood to more mature expressions, what I heard about religion in general and specifically Christianity was something like this: “well, it’s all going to burn anyway, so what’s the use? Let the world go to hell, we’re going to heaven!” Christianity, I was taught, is less about where we are than about where we are going – and where we are going is to heaven, away from here, abandoning this “vale of tears” to go to a happier place. No doubt most of you have encountered this idea yourselves. But this is not what the Jews who lived in Jesus’ time expected to happen, nor was it the orthodox teaching of the church in the first century, when the New Testament was written. The snippet from Isaiah 40 represents just a small part of the hope of Israel, which was not that God would take them out of the world to go live in the magic happy place, but rather that God would return to rescue the people from exile and oppression, in a new Exodus-like event, similar to but surpassing the old. What they were expecting was not for God to make a new home somewhere else, but that God would come home to be with them and bring healing and wholeness to what is broken. Now, there were about eleventy-gazillion different Jewish groups at the time who had different ideas of exactly how that would work, but with the notable exception of the Sadducees, who were top dogs and pretty much liked things the way they were, this hope was common to most Jewish groups in the 1st century, including the Jewish group that would later come to be called Christians.

The second reading, from 1 Thessalonians, gives us a good insight as to the particular way this group of people who followed the crucified Jesus, whom they claimed was Messiah of the Jews, worked out this belief. As I’m sure we’re all aware, there has been a lot of interest over the past few decades in the so-called “end times,” as evidenced by the explosive popularity of those Left Behind books, which are poorly-written, permeating our bookstores with bad stories and even worse theology. This passage from 1 Thessalonians is often held up as the signal description of what’s going to happen at this so-called “rapture” event. The rapture, so the story goes, is the time when Jesus will “return”, resulting in the believers, first those dead and then those who are still alive, being “caught up” into the air to be whisked off to heaven where they get to spend eternity living with God. But a close reading of the text ought to tell us that this picture of things actually has the story exactly backwards – it is not that we are taken away to some otherworldly place; rather, it is that Jesus comes down to the earth and we meet him on the way down to escort the king to his domain. Let me explain that a little more fully.

What Paul does in the text here is something he does quite often, which is taking an image from the Hebrew scriptures and applying it to Jesus, fusing it with an image from the Greco-Roman world. This is a particularly brilliant example of Paul’s method, but unless we recognize both the Old Testament reference and the reference from the Greco-Roman world we are apt to miss out on what is going on in the text. First, Paul is drawing upon the son of man figure in Daniel 7, who comes with the clouds of heaven into the presence of God and is given kingly authority over the whole creation – this creation, the one here and now that we live in. Jesus himself referred to this passage in his trial before the Sanhedrin, which resulted in the high priest charging him with blasphemy – which it would have been, except for that fact that it was actually true. Then those who have died, or as Paul literally puts it, “fallen asleep” in Christ will rise up. I have to pause here to mention the fact that the Greek word is from the verb family that means “to be resurrected”. This is another place where knowing the beliefs of ancient Jews comes in handy, because in the Judaisms of the time to speak of resurrection was most emphatically NOT to speak of being raised in some “spiritual” sense, the language of resurrection absolutely rules out the idea that the goal of being raised up is to go away to some otherworldy, non-bodily kind of place. Instead, resurrection language was used specifically to refer to the physical resurrection of all God’s saints at the end of this age to take their place in the age that is to come, which as I said earlier would happen when God returned to this world to redeem and heal it.

Ok, so what’s up with this being caught up in the air and going to the clouds and whatnot? Well, that’s where the image from the Hebrew Bible meets up with the image from Greco-Roman society. You see, in the Roman world, when the king or emperor or a great conquering general, or some big-deal person like that came to visit your city, you didn’t just open up the gates and let him in – it was a big spectacle, with festivities and shouting and music and the like. When the king approached, what would happen is the gates to the city would open and all the leading men of the city, its rulers and social elite and whatnot, would exit the city through the gates to go out and ceremoniously meet the conquering hero. Now what do you think happened when they met him, did they then join his entourage and he took them away in the opposite direction? No! What happened is they went to meet him and his party and escort them into the city, introducing him to his rightful domain. You take that royal greeting ceremony and turn it 90 degrees, from horizontal to vertical, and that is precisely what Paul is depicting. At no point does Christ come halfway down, collect the saints who are flying through the air towards him at breakneck speed, and then turn around and head back from whence he came – no, what happens is the saints rise up to meet him in order to escort him to his kingdom, which is the whole earth. Thus what is somewhat mistakenly called the “end times” is not about us going away, it is about God, in Christ, coming to be at home with the people. It’s not a going-away party, it’s a homecoming.

This, by the way, is the rationale for the Christian mission: not preparing people to go away to a new home in the skies, but rather, preparing the world for the homecoming of God. And I believe that, in light of all the talk about homelessness in its various forms, a potent way to talk about the mission of the church in this day and age would be to use the metaphor of home-making, of hospitality. We welcome the stranger in preparation for welcoming Jesus, as indeed Jesus himself said in Matthew 25 – I was hungry and you fed me. Perhaps today he would say, “I was homeless, and you welcomed me into your home.”

In some ways it is fitting that I talk about home and hospitality on this, which is the last Sunday Gretchen and I will be with you. I hadn’t thought of that when I started planning the service, but it occurred to me as I was writing. I wish we’d had more time, because in more ways than I can recount you all have helped to make this neighborhood a home for us. I know for myself, as I go away to study at the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, the ways you all have shown the love and hospitality of God have profoundly affected my conception of what it means to be a minister, to welcome friends and strangers, and to prepare those around me for God’s homecoming. Gretchen and I are putting together the final pieces to incorporate as a nonprofit, with the eventual goal being to combine faith and worship with hospitality, ecological responsibility, and social conscience in our new home of South Bend, and the vision for what that might look like has been inspired by Patchwork in a lot of ways. I’m not about to ask you for money, God knows Patchwork needs it here and now, but if any of you would like to be informed of what’s going on, of our prayer and material needs and of the things God is doing around us, we would love it if you could keep in touch with us. I’ll have a notebook where you can leave your information.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, since you’ve all no doubt been checking this site every day, and perhaps even multiple times daily, there hasn’t been an update in nearly two months. That’s because there have been and are some pretty big changes going on both with my life and this site. Here is a brief rundown:

1) I got married! My now-wife, Gretchen, and I were married on June 27. We still have the site for the wedding here, though we plan to update it one day to be more of a personal web site. Because of planning for the wedding, in addition to my ongoing computer problems (I’m currently running my computer off an Ubuntu 8.10 USB live disc because my hard drive is kaput), adding content in June was pretty much a no-go. Then we had the honeymoon, which we spent at the Cornerstone Festival, and then we were off to South Bend for a few days before heading over to Chicago for the Ekklesia Project gathering. Then it was back to South Bend, with a stop by Elkhart, a night in Indianapolis, and then back to Evansville. By the time all that was done, it was time to start planning for the next major change.

2) At the end of this week, on Friday, June 31, we will be moving to South Bend, which is why we were up there after the honeymoon – we were looking for a living space. We found an apartment in decent shape on the south side. The occasion for the move is my acceptance and decision to enter into the incoming fall ‘09 class at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart. Gretchen will be continuing her studies in library tech at a state college, for which there is a branch in South Bend, which is why we’re living there. I was accepted for the first year of the M.Div, which is really more like a pre- year, as formal acceptance into the M.Div is granted at the end of the first year, but I am fairly confident that it’s the right path for me – and if it isn’t, initial acceptance is into the seminary, not a particular program, so changing programs should be relatively painless.

I have a peace about attending AMBS that I have never experienced with any other program to which I have applied, and I am positive (as much as I can be) that this is the right move both for me and also for us. Gretchen supports it wholeheartedly and is excited about some things going on up north, hopefully I’ll have a chance to blog more about that in the near future. Evansville has been home for 10 years, so it’s not easy to leave, but I really feel this is the correct path. This will put us in northern Indiana for at least the next three years, and if I decide to do doctoral studies and get in at Notre Dame we could end up being up there as long as I’ve been down here. For that matter, I could not go into doctoral studies and we could still stay for a long time – the future is as yet unknown.

3) Gretchen and I are in the final stages of incorporating a nonprofit under the auspices of The Missionary Church International, a church that provides shelter for ministries and missionaries. The purpose of the nonprofit will be to establish a prayer-centered ministry within the city seeking to connect people to the mission of God in ways that flow out of the needs and experience of people in the city itself. The inital goal is to start groups (prayer, Bible study, and other types of discussion) with the intent to move towards a 24-7 kind of thing, though the hope is to connect with good things that are already going on in the city to make it something that makes sense naturally in South Bend, rather than overlaying a preprogrammed ministry plan over the city and trying to make it fit. Once the incorporation is complete I will make sure everyone knows plenty of ways they can help us meet our prayer and material needs. Translation: donations will be accepted.

4) This site is moving! I have a new domain, at http://absolutionrevolution.com (not yet operational). The “prophetic heretic” thing was the idea I had when I first started this blog, with some connections I planned to develop between Bruggemann’s conception of the prophetic imagination and Northumbria Community’s heretical imperative, but I never really developed that train of thought. Right after I registered this WordPress.com subdomain I coined the phrase “absolution revolution” and decided to use it for the blog title. Over the past three years I’ve been sporadically maintaining the blog, that has become its identity both on the web (at least mostly so) and in my mind. While theological explorations of social and political issues have always been part of what I have done here, over these past years my “Christ-archy” leanings have becomed more refined and developed, and what was originally intended to be more of a quasi-emerging kind of thing, with more connection between things like pop culture and the Gospel, became this thing that it is today.

Moving to a new site gives me more freedom with what I can do with it, hopefully moving beyond just being a blog to incorporating other forms of online publishing. I’d like to maybe post larger essays and possibly even host something like a radical Christianarchist wiki, or something along those lines. There are many possibilities. This will, of course, necessitate being more diligent about updating content. I’ve resolved to make contributions to the content of various internet sites to which I’ve contributed in the past, including this one, more of a discipline in the future. I think it’s something for which I have a knack, and my thinking has always been sharper when I’ve been writing and publishing and able to get (hopefully mostly constructive) responses to my thoughts. I also plan to attempt to generate more traffic to the site by participating in other online fora, making comments on blogs, and otherwise finding ways to make myself more visible on the web. I’ve realized more lately that I really do have significant contributions to make to the sorts of discussions that are going on around the web, and part of that realization is the feeling of responsibility to do it in whatever measure I am able – without, of course, compromising my family, school, and ministry life.

I preached again at Patchwork this past Sunday, Gretchen’s and my last with them, and I’ll be posting the manuscript later, when the flash drive on which it is saved is immediately accessible. For now, I’m off to work a bit more on the new site and then call it a night.

Shalom!

The following is the message I’m giving for the Sunday evening service at Patchwork Central this evening, which is Pentecost. Feel free to use it if you like, give credit if you wish.

Well, we’ve had a reading from Acts, a Psalm, and an Epistle, so those of you who know how this pattern usually goes will be expecting a Gospel reading here. I hope you won’t be disappointed, but we’re actually going to turn back a few centuries or so to an older story.

Today is Pentecost Sunday, when we remember and celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit, with tongues of fire and the ability given to the apostles to speak and have others hear in their own languages. This is really the beginning of the church, where the Jesus movement moved beyond a small circle of a few, frightened disciples who had taken to hiding in closed rooms waiting to see what would happen next – and really, who can blame them – what a whirlwind of events over the previous month or so! Their leader, Jesus, whom they believed to be the Messiah, had been tortured and killed, only to reappear a few days later, claiming that the new era of God’s liberation and peace had begun. This same Jesus had spent many days teaching them, and finally, instead of taking charge of things to lead the disciples in glorious conquest to the ends of the earth, ascended into the heavens with the parting command to go forth to all nations with the message of the Gospel. And finally, on this day, the descent of the Spirit gave them a new boldness to speak of this Jesus, and the same Spirit gathered into their number over 3000 in one day. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never preached a sermon with that kind of effect.

It’s a wonderful story, one we should always keep in our hearts to remind us that God can do amazing things, that God’s ability to work wonders is greater than we can imagine. But the story I’m going to read, in lieu of a Gospel reading, seems at first glance to be precisely the opposite of the one we heard earlier. I’m speaking of the story of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9, where instead of God’s work in changing languages and understanding leading to a new gathering, an age of understanding and hope, it leads to separation, confusion, and apparent chaos. The two stories have long been thought of as polar opposites, and while I won’t dispute that entirely I think we have generally missed some very important things the author of the Genesis story was trying to convey. But before I get into that, let’s hear the story again, and pray that God will open our ears to hear it in a new way.

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar [near the Euphrates river, in present-day Iraq] and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that they were building. The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth (Gen. 11:1-9, TNIV).

We think we know this story pretty well. Late medieval interpreters, living in a time when common use of Latin was beginning to decline, set the trend to read this as a story of judgment in which a golden age of enlightenment is shattered by the curse of difference, the confusion of languages, and for the most part we’ve followed their lead ever since. But is that really what’s going on in this text? There are a few clues in the story, and one whopper of an ancient Assyrian royal inscription, that indicate otherwise. First, isn’t there something fishy about their using bricks to build the tower? The text makes it a point to mention that they used bricks instead of stone. Who else do we encounter in the Bible who used bricks, and under what circumstances? If your answer is the Egyptians, you get a gold star. The Egyptians used bricks, made with slave labor, to build their cities. The notion of using bricks to build a tower would NOT have had positive connotations according to the historical memory of the Israelites.

Second, what’s up with this settling on the plain? In Genesis 1 God had charged the human race to fill the earth, a concept so important to God’s plan for humankind that it was given again to Noah after the flood in Genesis 9. And let’s not forget the amazing diversity of the Table of Nations in chapter 10. What happened to all that, and why are we now only talking about one seemingly homogenous group of people? And third, the words in verse one for “language” and “common speech” don’t generally mean what we think of as a language, like German, French, or English. Taken together they usually refer to a way of speaking, which could mean a dialect within a language, or a kind of lingua franca necessary to do business, which would not necessarily be the natural language of the people. Because of that, some commentators think verse 1 refers not to a “golden age” kind of language, but an imperial language, a language that is forced upon the people. Others read it more figuratively, but still as a reference to an empire whose subjects must toe the line. An ancient inscription from Assyria backs up this idea. The inscription, praising King Ashurbanipal II, lauds the king as having made the world have one speech. This king was well-known for both his brutality and his imperial building projects.So maybe the story doesn’t really present some kind of pristine human language that had to be broken up to satisfy a jealous God.

This leads us to another question – what exactly was it that provoked God to action? Why does God care about some tower some people are building on some plain in Iraq? Perhaps a better question would be, why do we think the tower is the big deal? The text doesn’t make a big deal about it, in fact when God comes down to kick butt in verse 8 the tower isn’t even mentioned. In fact, tower might not even be the best way to translate the Hebrew word – it could be more like “citadel” or “acropolis”. Perhaps we moderns, with our “skyscrapers”, have fixated on the tower, when there is another sin that should be noted. I mean really, do we really think God was so moved to jealousy by this tower, of this sudden human enlightenment, that he had to break it up?

I suggest that if we see the text this way, and I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty close to the Sunday School picture I got in my childhood, and I can’t think of a preacher who’s tried to correct the notion, if we see this as the message of the text then we’re missing out. There IS a sin in the text that is worthy of God’s judgment, but it’s not the tower. The sin is this: the city-builders wanted to make a name for themselves, and to keep from being scattered over the face of the earth. They come right out and say it in the text. In building this city, the people are fundamentally rejecting the very purpose for which God had created us all, which is to fill the earth as the image of God. Instead of being God’s image, they want to make their own name – contrast this with Abram who obeys God and is given a new name: Abraham.

There’s one more thing worth mentioning too – far from being a judgment born out of jealousy at this sudden human enlightenment, this is a judgment that results in liberation and mercy. First, if we accept the notion that what’s going on here involves imperial domination and possibly even slave labor, then God’s scattering of the enslaved workers is an act of emancipation, granting them freedom from their oppressive masters, for God is a God who hears the cries of his people who are in chains. Second, God’s statement “nothing will be impossible for them” isn’t a reference to some belief that building a big tower would give them superhuman status. In fact, a better translation might be “nothing they could want to do will be beyond them”, with a negative connotation – in other words, “no evil they could intend will be too much”. In chapter 9 God had promised Noah that God would not repeat the cataclysmic judgment of the flood. Now, only two chapters later, humanity is about to descend to the point where no evil thing will be too much for them.

Far from being a tale of a failed skyscraper or a lost golden age, this is a story of freedom and salvation. God comes down to liberate slaves and enable people to fill the earth with the image of God, just as God had planned for humans to do in the first place. And then, in the very next chapter, God calls Abram to sojourn from his home, to be a stranger in a strange land, to be the father of Israel and eventually Jesus, whose church was born on Pentecost.

In some ways Pentecost is almost like a companion story to Babel. Again, one language gives way to many in an amazing act of liberation, but instead of what we might have expected based on our old understanding of Babel diversity is not collapsed into some kind of uniformity, but diversity is affirmed in a miraculous way. And this isn’t the modern liberal sense of diversity as toleration, and occasional celebration of, difference. This is something that runs much deeper, something that is a part of our very human heritage. Cultural creation and diversity is a thread that runs throughout the whole Bible, from the image of God in Genesis 1, where many theologians have seen an implicit mandate to create culture, language, and art, to the very end in Revelation. The ancient author thought it important to mention Jubal, the ancestor of all musicians, and the first person in the Bible who is said to be given the Spirit of God is Bezalel, in Exodus 31, to make many crafts and the sacred objects and vessels of the Tabernacle. In Revelation 7 a great multitude gathers before the heavenly throne to worship, people of every tribe, language, people, and nation. In Revelation 21, the kings of the nations are said to bring into the Heavenly City the “glory of the nations”, which undoubtedly refers to the products of art and culture. After all, it takes all of humankind and then some to reflect the image of God. When we create, we are participating in the image God has given us, and the nature with which we have been blessed.

Now, I would love to end here on this happy note, I really would. I wish I could. But the sad truth is that we are not always, or even often good representatives of that nature God created us to have. For just one example, each of the songs we have sung so far this evening come from cultures that have been suppressed and exploited by either the United States or our colonial parent, Great Britain, as well as other nations from whom we derive our cultural heritage. The wealth of the British empire was built largely through the domination of colonial India, the American economy largely rests on the foundation built by enslaved Africans, and over a fifth of our land territory was once part of Mexico, to say nothing of trade conditions and security arrangements with Latin American countries and the insidious influence of what was called the School of the Americas (which continues operating today at Fort Benning, Georgia, under a different name). We will shortly sing a song from a Canadian Native American group, whose cultures our ancestors basically tried to eradicate (an attempt which arguably continues to this day in some forms).

While none of us here necessarily directly participated in these atrocities, the fact that we profit from them and others like them cannot be erased. Our ability to purchase affordable clothing often comes at the expense of child sweatshop labor in southeast Asia. The food we eat depends on business methods that destroy the ability of farming families to support themselves and agricultural techniques that destroy the ability of the land to produce without being pumped full of chemicals that then infiltrate soils, rivers, oceans, and the bodies of humans and animals, with murderous results. Our methods of generating the wealth that allows each of us to enjoy the standards of living we have guarantee that most of the world not only cannot ascend to this level, but in fact must suffer in order that we can have it. We are all at least guilty by association, if not by participation.

And with an eye more specifically to culture-creation, Elvis became rich by singing the songs of former slaves, but what did they get? This is a question with which I have wrestled much as a jazz musician, the question of cultural appropriation. I believe it is possible to honor our influences by our creation, but we have to be aware that so-called “multiculturalism” is not simply a celebration of difference, but a philosophy that perhaps only exists because one culture has become such a dominant power in the world. In fact, I’ve read some pretty good critiques of multiculturalism as a kind of cultural paternalism on the part of rich white people who maybe feel a little bad about some of the things their ancestors, and maybe even they themselves, have done. I don’t have the time here to develop a strong theological response to these problems, and I’m not sure that’s something I could do right now even if I did, but my point is that we need to be aware of the problems involved when we start dealing with cultural issues and the fact that we are all fallen people. We need to have a more nuanced understanding of culture and the arts and language, and how we interact, of what happens when different people groups come together – what kinds of conflicts, resolutions, and new ways of creating come about.

This is so because in the end we all have to wrestle with our common human heritage as bearers of the image of God, who have been made to fill the earth, to mediate God’s presence to all creation, and to honor God by making something good with the world we’ve been made a part of. It is particularly so for us, the church, who are the redeemed people of God, whose purpose is to display to the world what it means to live as people of the new creation, which to my mind includes the mandate to create culture that reflects the reality of reconciliation. It is certainly no simple accident of language that, as Wendell Berry is so fond of reminding us, the words “cult”, “culture”, and “cultivate” (as in “agriculture”) all share a common root, cultus, which means “care” and came to be associated with religion. Culture-making is a holy enterprise, and we should treat it as such. We are called to be a people of Pentecost, and not of Babel, for “if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ… And God has committed to us the message of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:17-19, TNIV).

Now we are going to sing a song by Broken Walls, a group that fuses Native American traditional music with rock in the hopes that through them God will bring healing to the relationships between White Americans and Native Americans. I hope this is one way we can honor the peoples whose songs we sing tonight, and honor the image of God that is in them. I pray the River of Life will indeed set us free tonight.

Once again I am presenting a seminar at the Cornerstone Festival. This one is less focused on theology and politics per se, but the topic could definitely be considered related.

Description: “The (Home)Coming of God: Homemaking as paradigm for postmodern ministry.” Exploring Biblical themes of covenant, land, and exile to articulate a theology of mission in the midst of a “homeless” culture.

My topic is strongly influenced by Brian Walsh and Steven Bouma-Prediger’s Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement, which I consider to be one of the most important books published in the last couple of years.

If you’re going to be at Cornerstone, try and come by! There are a lot of great presenters this year, including Tony Jones and Phyllis Tickle, and a lot of important topics being discussed. Homelessness seems to be kind of a theme, though I promise we didn’t get together beforehand to arrange that!

Shalom.

Revelation 4:11 can be legitimately translated thusly:

You are worthy, our Lord and God
to receive glory, honor, and dominion
for you created all things.
For your pleasure they came into being
and continue to exist.

Yesterday was Earth Day, a day when many people reflect on the health of the natural world and the relationship between human beings and the planet. Even though awareness of ecological issues is probably higher now than at any time in recent history, as awareness has increased so has the gravity of the situation. Estimated effects of anthropogenic climate change (also known as “global warming”) appear to be heading towards the more extreme end of the potential disasters, with warming feedback loops taking effect more drastically and quickly than previously thought. Studies over the last couple of years have argued (in my opinion persuasively) that increased ocean surface temperatures due to global warming are largely responsible for the increased intensity of hurricane seasons in recent years. The combination of global warming and peak oil scenarios seriously threatens nearly all sectors of the planet’s population, human and nonhuman.

I’ve written before about problems with the economic scheme that requires perpetual growth to stave off collapse and its devastating effects on the ecosphere and human communities. That isn’t new. But I have been remiss in my explorations into the Biblical concepts of creation and new creation and their implications for ecology and economics by neglecting the principle espoused by the above verse: all things exist for God’s pleasure.

In the evangelical circles I’ve frequented much of my adult life the idea that God gets pleasure from our existence, from our dependence on God and our desire to serve, is hardly controversial. I have heard a few dozen sermons on this idea, the idea that God loves me for who I am, and that my life is something about which God is passionate. Ok, so the italics may be a bit much, but I’m sure you get my point. Like other things, the idea of God’s passion and pleasure has been largely presented to me as a matter that affects me as an individual, but anything outside the scope of “me and Jesus” is largely neglected. Loving one’s neighbor is a good thing, but really it’s about my spiritual journey and growth.

Loving one’s neighbor as one’s self is a hugely important concept for Christian faith. It’s the second-greatest commandment, after all! But love of neighbor is not a free-standing command that can be imported easily into any context. While it is a concept found in many different religious and ethical traditions, some of which are not necessarily genetically related, we cannot understand the basis of Jesus’ teaching on this subject unless we grasp deeply the Hebrew notion of creation as done by God’s will and for God’s own pleasure. Indeed, each of our acts towards the Other, be it the human or nonhuman other, must be rooted in this truth: I love the Other because the Other is God’s own creation and her/his/its existence and well-being gives God pleasure.

How much different would our ecological and community lives be if, instead of self-interest, even “enlightened self-interest”, our relations were born from a deep realization that all of creation exists for God’s pleasure? How much more would we seek to honor the Creator and Sustainer of our own being by seeking the best for all beings? I believe a key role for the church in this age is to create real communities where we do not look to other created beings, whether human, vegetable, animal, mineral, or other, to sustain us without being concerned for their own sustenance. This need is particularly acute in this time of crisis, but it is written into the Biblical narrative of creation and new creation. All things are from God, and at most we merely have them on loan. For us, Earth Day should be a day of repentance for the ways we have colluded in the murder of God’s creation, as well as our creation of social, political, and economic systems that oppress, exploit, and murder human beings.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.

In God of the Oppressed, one of the most important theological works of the 20th century, James Cone compares the cross of Christ to the lynching tree. When slavery existed lynching was not common because slaves were considered valuable property, but after the end of slavery whites used lynching as a method of asserting dominance. This use of lynching corresponds well with how the Romans utilized crucifixion, which was primarily a punishment for rebellion and other crimes that threatened to undermine the foundations of the Roman social order.

One of the major threads of argument throughout the book is that God is paradoxically presented as the Liberator, who also suffers with his people. In fact, it is precisely when God’s people are faithful even in the context of oppression that God acts to bring liberation. Cone partners the Exodus of Israel from Egypt with the experience of black people in America and deeply challenges our understanding of the crucifixion and its meaning for people today. It is well worth reading, and re-reading, and re-reading again, particularly for people who are white like me who are used to understanding the crucifixion as we have heard it preached, most often by white preachers in the midst of a white-dominated culture.

As my friend Katie pointed out earlier today, “we’re taught that this horrible thing happened called lynching but it was a long time ago and only happened a few times by some Very Bad People who also sometimes put on white robes and burned crosses but of course everyone else knew they were wrong and that’s why it’s all in the past right?” I mean, we had slavery for 300 years, lynchings for another 100, but then about 50 years ago we had a Civil Rights Movement and now everyone is equal and happy, end of story.

Or maybe not. I don’t know about you, but that is very much how the issue of race in American history was largely presented to me in my school courses. There are bad individuals who are racist, but as a society we’ve moved on and everyone knows it’s wrong. This view, of course, completely ignores the deeply embedded effects of white flight, decades of systematic job discrimination, and rampant cultural appropriation and commercialization just to name a few (not to mention the fact, as Katie also pointed out, of the resurgence in KKK membership since Obama was elected).

For much of my religious life, I’ve been taught that Jesus died on the cross for my sins so that I could go to heaven and spend eternity with God when I die. I was told I was supposed to be good and love people and be nice to them and stuff, because I was grateful to Jesus for having died for my sins so I could go to heaven, but mostly that it was about me, as an individual, having my sins forgiven in a forensic exchange so that I could be whisked away to the otherworldly paradise when I died.

It should go without saying that such a view of the cross has little to say to the realities of systemic injustice that exist today – not only related to race, but also to gender and sexual identity, economic status, geographic location, and other categories. The focus is on individuals, not social realities, and on escaping the realities of life into a magical other-world. If this were really the core of the Christian faith, I might say my radical friends are right in their criticism and rejection of religion. However, Paul offers another explanation of the significance of Christ’s death on the cross.

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross (Colossians 2:13-15, TNIV).

The reference to uncircumcision points to the fact that, before they were brought into the life of Christ, the people were cut off from the covenant community of God’s love. As this passage points out, in Christ sin is cancelled. Our sins, collectively, are nailed to the cross and have died with Christ. But it is not simply the cancellation of the sins of individuals that is meant here. “You” is plural, and refers to the church community. The sin that is defeated here is social, as well as individual. And the last verse testifies that there is much more going on here than a simple forensic transaction by which people enter from a state of spiritual guilt into otherworldly justification: on the cross itself, Christ disarmed the powers and authorities, making a public spectacle over them, and triumphed over them.

The purpose of the Roman cross was to make a spectacle of the victim, to inscribe the victim into the context of Roman domination and so re-inforce the might of the Empire through the rule of Caesar. Paul makes the audacious claim that what has in fact happened is precisely the opposite! The logic of oppression cannot inscribe the logos of God into its narrative. Christ is victorious, but not by operating according to the logic of the powers. Instead, Christ triumphs by allowing all the powers of sin, death, and hell to exhaust their fury on him. He trusted God unto his own death, and in so doing turned the force of evil back upon itself causing its self-destruction.

We must drink deeply from the well of Paul’s theology of the cross, because the cross is the place where the New Community of God’s people gather, the church of God that is liberated from operating according to the logic of oppression. The cross both convicts and acquits us, because in order to be healed by it we must enter into it. It may not be “good news” to learn of the ways we collude with the powers that have been defeated on the cross at first, but it is liberating because in naming the powers we open ourselves to being freed through Christ in order to live according to a more excellent way.

Paul’s argument in the rest of chapter 2 flows directly from the logic of the cross: since we have died with Christ to the forces that rule the world, why do we still live as if we were subject to its law? Because the logic of death could not apprehend the logos of God, neither can it confine us who wear the name of Jesus as our own. The logic of Rome, the logic of slavery, of collusion with and perpetuation of oppressive structures cannot define the way the people who follow the Way of the logos live.

Coming to terms with the concrete ways in which we share in the guilt of the collective sins of our age is painful – it can be no other way, because in many ways the sin goes to the very core of our self-identities, of how we define our personhood. But carrying one’s cross is more than just an exercise program, it is a march to one’s death, and if we are to be raised with Christ we must also be willing to die. The logos of God spoke creation into being, and it speaks us into the New Creation. It speaks to us from the cross, bidding us to come and die, and find that we will truly live.

Privilege-checks are welcome in the comments. It’s only right, after talking about the need to put to death those parts of our identity that depend on the logic of oppression.

Shalom.

Hitting someone with a club is violence. Funding projects that destroy local economies and ecosystems is violence. Displacing millions of people in order to ravage the countryside to extract resources and build useless consumer products is violence. Denying refugees right of return and bombing their villages when they defy the injustice is violence. Creating social structures that systematically stifle free expression and the ability to peacefully promote legitimate alternative points of view is violence. Maintaining an economic order in which the only way to hold off collapse is perpetual growth at the expense of a finite resource base, which cannibalizes itself in order to produce growth that is mostly based on the creation of new debt to finance paying off the old debt, while blaming people who bought into the system because they believed what it promised them for its failure is violence.

Breaking a window is a symbol of the shattered illusions of people who are sick and tired, and don’t want to take it anymore. Breaking a window is a message to the monsters whose livelihood depends on murder, displacement, and ecocide that the game is up and the ones who got us into this mess have forfeited their moral authority to be the ones who define a “new world order”. Breaking a window is liberation, a sign of life, not violence that destroys it.

Whether or not it’s tactically a good idea in circumstances such as the G-20 demonstrations is another matter entirely.

In response to this blog.

“The work of the executive is… as unproductive and as spiritually desolate as that of the garbage collector. Indeed, depending upon the toxicity and persistence of the products and by-products [produced and sold under the executive's oversight], it may be more so. Certainly, by any standard, to haul garbage away is more virtuous than to manufacture it.” — from “Racism and the Economy”, 1988.