Sunday, November 24, 2019
I am Peter
In Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, Kenneth Bailey wondrously helps me enter Peter’s world. I had never “caught” that Jesus put himself in a posture or position of submission to Peter. Jesus’ “asking” Peter for help was, in terms of the social dynamics by which their world functioned, like putting himself in the position of a dependent servant. Jesus NEEDED Peter and his exhausted rowing skills to be able to teach the crowds for a couple extra hours before Peter could go to sleep. Granted, Peter owed Jesus one after Jesus had healed his mother in law. But, that only served to reinforce a relational connection between the two of them.
I had also never “caught” that that Peter would have been highly annoyed that some carpenter rabbi was telling a professional fisherman how to fish. Peter doesn’t respectfully say, “At your word, LORD, I will throw down the nets” so much as to sarcastically say something more like, “OK, BOSS, whatever you say.” Despite Peter’s attitude, Jesus entrusted himself to Peter, where Peter could have denied him or told him no.
I also didn’t know that finding a place in the lake where such a haul of fish could be found would basically make Peter into a rich man in a matter of weeks. Today, it’d be like winning the lotto. So, I never had the tools to realize that Peter’s exhaustion and annoyance at staying up for a couple more hours to help Jesus teach about God were extensions of the unfruitful work he had put in all night to fulfill his desire to be rich and secure. So, correspondingly, I also had no idea that Jesus’ call for Peter to be a “fisher of men” was an invitation to care about God and people more than the money that was suddenly readily available at his fingertips.
All of these elements of the story of The Call of Peter in Luke 5: 1-11 resonate with me deeply. Particularly in ways that only came together for me in prayer. In the presence of God, I was gracefully shocked with the realization that Peter's story is mine, too.
A scene from Andrei Tarkovsky's infamous film "Andrei Rublev."
I only ever got into nursing in the first place, because I felt like that’s what Jesus had asked me to do. Jesus asked me if he could use my boat. So, when I lost my first nursing job(s), here I was out in the water rowing and rowing for him, already exhausted. Begrudgingly thinking to myself, “Whatever you say, ‘Boss.’” My repeatedly working all night coming to nothing.
So, while taking a year off from nursing and working as a server, here I was learning to love people more than my security, status, and riches. The challenge to learning that lesson was my anger at unjust tippers while I served them.
The day after God taught me...in conjunction with my reading of the letter of 1 Peter about discipline beginning in the house of the Lord...from Colossians 3 about working to please God rather than man, as though working unto the Lord...Even when my “master’s” reward is unjust...Here I was randomly and nonsensically getting outrageously large tips for no reason from an angel I had never met before.
There I was a year later - ONLY by the grace of God - back to working as a nurse and making more money than I ever had as an architect.
In the midst of that was a stunningly gorgeous woman shockingly (to me) showing signs of sexual interest where I had just been enjoying her presence. A week later, here I am vulnerably submitting my new thoughts and feelings before her to reject or accept in the interest of a kind of relational connection that had been for a long time foreign to me.
Feeling overwhelmed at work by all the new the responsibility heaped on my plate to SERVE my patients and that threatened my vision of an easy, comfortable, restful life of status, I sent a "strongly worded email" to my bosses "suggesting" that we needed more staff. Peter's self-assertive “OK, BOSS, whatever you say" rightly described my attitude at the time. I got written up, lol. "Discipline begins in the house of the Lord." Those are, perhaps unironically, Peter's words. I helpfully found some more efficient ways to work, lol.
Soon after that was that one time when I suggested the family and I pray with my patient – who was obviously transitioning towards that stage where he would soon be actively dying. I had just recently started praying Psalm 23 every morning. His daughter had been frustrating me with how overbearing she was in her demands - again challenging my image of my easy, restful life - and here I was nearly sobbing as she prayed Psalm 23 by heart over her dying father, my tears of repentance falling on the patient’s arm as I bowed in prayer.
So, after all that, here I have been, kneeling at Jesus’ feet in reverent awe and fear all at once. “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”
And, his response has been to lift me up and edify me in his freeing love. Building me up into a place of more responsibility rather than of fear, anxiety, and resentment over the burden of care. As he then says to Peter: "I will make you a fisher of men." And, just as Peter couldn't imagine where that would lead him, the image above from "Andrei Rublev" is Peter and I rowing through fog towards an unknown horizon with Jesus, who asks us to entrust ourselves to him as we continue on our journey with him.
I had also never “caught” that that Peter would have been highly annoyed that some carpenter rabbi was telling a professional fisherman how to fish. Peter doesn’t respectfully say, “At your word, LORD, I will throw down the nets” so much as to sarcastically say something more like, “OK, BOSS, whatever you say.” Despite Peter’s attitude, Jesus entrusted himself to Peter, where Peter could have denied him or told him no.
I also didn’t know that finding a place in the lake where such a haul of fish could be found would basically make Peter into a rich man in a matter of weeks. Today, it’d be like winning the lotto. So, I never had the tools to realize that Peter’s exhaustion and annoyance at staying up for a couple more hours to help Jesus teach about God were extensions of the unfruitful work he had put in all night to fulfill his desire to be rich and secure. So, correspondingly, I also had no idea that Jesus’ call for Peter to be a “fisher of men” was an invitation to care about God and people more than the money that was suddenly readily available at his fingertips.
All of these elements of the story of The Call of Peter in Luke 5: 1-11 resonate with me deeply. Particularly in ways that only came together for me in prayer. In the presence of God, I was gracefully shocked with the realization that Peter's story is mine, too.
A scene from Andrei Tarkovsky's infamous film "Andrei Rublev."
So, while taking a year off from nursing and working as a server, here I was learning to love people more than my security, status, and riches. The challenge to learning that lesson was my anger at unjust tippers while I served them.
The day after God taught me...in conjunction with my reading of the letter of 1 Peter about discipline beginning in the house of the Lord...from Colossians 3 about working to please God rather than man, as though working unto the Lord...Even when my “master’s” reward is unjust...Here I was randomly and nonsensically getting outrageously large tips for no reason from an angel I had never met before.
There I was a year later - ONLY by the grace of God - back to working as a nurse and making more money than I ever had as an architect.
In the midst of that was a stunningly gorgeous woman shockingly (to me) showing signs of sexual interest where I had just been enjoying her presence. A week later, here I am vulnerably submitting my new thoughts and feelings before her to reject or accept in the interest of a kind of relational connection that had been for a long time foreign to me.
Feeling overwhelmed at work by all the new the responsibility heaped on my plate to SERVE my patients and that threatened my vision of an easy, comfortable, restful life of status, I sent a "strongly worded email" to my bosses "suggesting" that we needed more staff. Peter's self-assertive “OK, BOSS, whatever you say" rightly described my attitude at the time. I got written up, lol. "Discipline begins in the house of the Lord." Those are, perhaps unironically, Peter's words. I helpfully found some more efficient ways to work, lol.
Soon after that was that one time when I suggested the family and I pray with my patient – who was obviously transitioning towards that stage where he would soon be actively dying. I had just recently started praying Psalm 23 every morning. His daughter had been frustrating me with how overbearing she was in her demands - again challenging my image of my easy, restful life - and here I was nearly sobbing as she prayed Psalm 23 by heart over her dying father, my tears of repentance falling on the patient’s arm as I bowed in prayer.
So, after all that, here I have been, kneeling at Jesus’ feet in reverent awe and fear all at once. “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”
And, his response has been to lift me up and edify me in his freeing love. Building me up into a place of more responsibility rather than of fear, anxiety, and resentment over the burden of care. As he then says to Peter: "I will make you a fisher of men." And, just as Peter couldn't imagine where that would lead him, the image above from "Andrei Rublev" is Peter and I rowing through fog towards an unknown horizon with Jesus, who asks us to entrust ourselves to him as we continue on our journey with him.
Saturday, November 16, 2019
The Kingdom of God is Not Within You
21 nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is within you.”
- how I grew up seeing / reading Luke 17: 21
“The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.”
- NRSV of Luke 17: 20-21
"In his teaching, preaching, and healing ministry, especially among the outcasts of society, Jesus demonstrated that God's salvation had come. He proclaimed that the kingdom of God had, in some real sense, arrived in his person (cf. Luke 17: 21)."
- Our Father Abraham: Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith, by Marvin R. Wilson (p. 181)
"Is the Kingdom of God Within You?", by Richard T. Ritenbaugh - CLICK HERE - is also interesting as a discussion of this verse.
This is a beautiful quote and summation from that link: "The original question posed by the Pharisees was, 'When is the Kingdom of God coming?' (verse 20)...His reply to the Pharisees is rather curt: 'You won't be able to discern the coming of the Kingdom because you haven't recognized that I am its chief representative, though I have been among you.'"
This difference between imagining the kingdom being "among us" in the very personhood / body of Christ (the church) rather than "within me" has huge implications for my discipleship and for how I relate to the church and the world. It means I don't show up to church as one of a voluntary collection of individuals to be entertained and lectured by God. Also, to gain "freedom" doesn't mean to access "the kingdom within" and thus gain freedom from my body or from exterior social constraints. Instead, as a disciple in the kingdom, I am learning to enact and embody kingdom love and faithfulness in relation to others.
Why do you think we tend to read the kingdom of God as being "within us" rather than "among us" in the person / body of Christ? We tend to do this, even though such a reading renders the context nearly unintelligible. I don't want to just blame poor translation, because I suspect that our modern, Romanticized image of ourselves as individuals contributed to the reification and legitimization of such translations.
Ritenbaugh also, however, then goes onto say that verses 22-37 are about the Second Coming. I don't readily agree, because:
1. The whole context (between verses (20 and 37) appears to be in reference to the bodily person of Jesus in their presence currently, and
2. That particular section that Ritenbaugh references (verses 22-37) is book ended by references to his death / disappearance from their "midst" (current NLT of verse 21) in verses 22 and 37.
22 Then he said to his disciples, “The time is coming when you will long to see the day when the Son of Man returns, but you won’t see it....37 “Where will this happen, Lord?” the disciples asked. Jesus replied, “Just as the gathering of vultures shows there is a carcass nearby, so these signs indicate that the end is near.”
So, with verses 22 and 37, it appears to me that Jesus is referencing the cross. This would also, of course and obviously, make sense of why Jesus tells the authorities that they won't be able to discern the coming of the kingdom. It is coming when they are seeking to kill him. Their role in the coming of the kingdom isn't exactly what they expect lol.
This difference between imagining verses 22-37 as being about the Second Coming rather than current events of the first century have huge implications for our discipleship. To start, it means that my discipleship isn't about, "within myself," believing the unbelievable or intellectually assenting to the supernatural. It's particularly not about "believing" such things as the Second Coming over against those secular heathens who deny things that can't be observed in natural history. It means I don't hold, grasp, or carry "within" myself "the truth" that I then impart to, nor over and against, others.
The story being told is of both the Pharisees and disciples encountering a God who blows their expectations and hopes out of the water for something not only possible and unexpected but never even conceived or imagined in the first place. I am one of those disciples living that same story, whose image of himself and of God is continually being remade and re-shaped in ways of love, grace, and truth that I never before could have even imagined. Who I thought was beautiful is continually being made into someone unimaginably more beautiful! As a community of God's people, we share, carry, and bear this beautiful image "among" those who are "in our midst."
Why do you think we tend to, by default, read the rest of the chapter (v. 22 on) as though it's referencing the Second Coming? I think I was anachronistically projecting my own position in history onto / into the story.
*Image taken from a Facebook page HERE.
- how I grew up seeing / reading Luke 17: 21
“The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.”
- NRSV of Luke 17: 20-21
"In his teaching, preaching, and healing ministry, especially among the outcasts of society, Jesus demonstrated that God's salvation had come. He proclaimed that the kingdom of God had, in some real sense, arrived in his person (cf. Luke 17: 21)."
- Our Father Abraham: Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith, by Marvin R. Wilson (p. 181)
"Is the Kingdom of God Within You?", by Richard T. Ritenbaugh - CLICK HERE - is also interesting as a discussion of this verse.
This is a beautiful quote and summation from that link: "The original question posed by the Pharisees was, 'When is the Kingdom of God coming?' (verse 20)...His reply to the Pharisees is rather curt: 'You won't be able to discern the coming of the Kingdom because you haven't recognized that I am its chief representative, though I have been among you.'"
This difference between imagining the kingdom being "among us" in the very personhood / body of Christ (the church) rather than "within me" has huge implications for my discipleship and for how I relate to the church and the world. It means I don't show up to church as one of a voluntary collection of individuals to be entertained and lectured by God. Also, to gain "freedom" doesn't mean to access "the kingdom within" and thus gain freedom from my body or from exterior social constraints. Instead, as a disciple in the kingdom, I am learning to enact and embody kingdom love and faithfulness in relation to others.
Why do you think we tend to read the kingdom of God as being "within us" rather than "among us" in the person / body of Christ? We tend to do this, even though such a reading renders the context nearly unintelligible. I don't want to just blame poor translation, because I suspect that our modern, Romanticized image of ourselves as individuals contributed to the reification and legitimization of such translations.
Ritenbaugh also, however, then goes onto say that verses 22-37 are about the Second Coming. I don't readily agree, because:
1. The whole context (between verses (20 and 37) appears to be in reference to the bodily person of Jesus in their presence currently, and
2. That particular section that Ritenbaugh references (verses 22-37) is book ended by references to his death / disappearance from their "midst" (current NLT of verse 21) in verses 22 and 37.
22 Then he said to his disciples, “The time is coming when you will long to see the day when the Son of Man returns, but you won’t see it....37 “Where will this happen, Lord?” the disciples asked. Jesus replied, “Just as the gathering of vultures shows there is a carcass nearby, so these signs indicate that the end is near.”
So, with verses 22 and 37, it appears to me that Jesus is referencing the cross. This would also, of course and obviously, make sense of why Jesus tells the authorities that they won't be able to discern the coming of the kingdom. It is coming when they are seeking to kill him. Their role in the coming of the kingdom isn't exactly what they expect lol.
This difference between imagining verses 22-37 as being about the Second Coming rather than current events of the first century have huge implications for our discipleship. To start, it means that my discipleship isn't about, "within myself," believing the unbelievable or intellectually assenting to the supernatural. It's particularly not about "believing" such things as the Second Coming over against those secular heathens who deny things that can't be observed in natural history. It means I don't hold, grasp, or carry "within" myself "the truth" that I then impart to, nor over and against, others.
The story being told is of both the Pharisees and disciples encountering a God who blows their expectations and hopes out of the water for something not only possible and unexpected but never even conceived or imagined in the first place. I am one of those disciples living that same story, whose image of himself and of God is continually being remade and re-shaped in ways of love, grace, and truth that I never before could have even imagined. Who I thought was beautiful is continually being made into someone unimaginably more beautiful! As a community of God's people, we share, carry, and bear this beautiful image "among" those who are "in our midst."
Why do you think we tend to, by default, read the rest of the chapter (v. 22 on) as though it's referencing the Second Coming? I think I was anachronistically projecting my own position in history onto / into the story.
*Image taken from a Facebook page HERE.
Wednesday, November 06, 2019
The Least Qualified Kanye Take You’ll Find On The Interwebs
So, there’s this Kanye thing. I’m not a Kanye fan. Never have been. I’ve never bought a single one of his albums. Never listened to an entire one anywhere near all the way through. The easiest things that come to mind when I think of Kanye are his gaffs at awards shows and his suposedly new found faith (and support of Trump). I did listen to the two songs on his new “Jesus is King” album that everyone says are most “repeatable.” I did also enjoy them!
Yet, despite my distance from really knowing the man, I find myself drawn to this “Kanye thing.” I’m intrigued. And, in the midst of that intrigue, I’ve found myself asking larger questions to which this public situation or conversation seems to speak.
"Why are evangelicals all over this Kanye thing like white paint on a picket fence?" I've noticed that Christians are really excited that, because of Kanye, Christ is being proclaimed and known. There seems to be a prevailing sentiment among us that we’re in a war for the culture and direction of “our country.” Now we have a huge celebrity on our side to help us win! Yay!
For the record, I’m an evangelical by heritage here. So, I’m at least partially asking or talking about myself. While thinking and praying about all this, I came across stories that struck me in two different ways.
THE TAKES
One was James Corden’s airplane karaoke with Kanye and his Sunday Service chorus. When I saw that, though I was a bit turned off by Kanye’s quip about his taxes that seemed to reveal a bit of a prosperity gospel message, I was filled with joy to the point of shedding a tear or two. It was very easy for me to identify with, engage, or attach to.
On the other hand, I came across a number of “Kanye takes” from African American Christians who had a lot to say about the racism and White Supremacy at work around whole situation that I pretty much never would have thought of on my own. Let’s just say they weren’t so easily excited about it as I was. I tried to allow those other voices so different from mine help serve to reveal my blind spots in helpful ways.
So, there’s clearly a discord there. It got me to thinking…
MY CONFESSIONS
When I walk into a mega church and see all the church’s name brand merchandise, hear the loud music, sit and learn from an engaging and charismatic preacher...man I get all excited inside and feel identified with or attached to something big and important for Jesus! I feel attached to the winning side against evil and darkness and pain and despair.
Considering what I know about myself and my history – various ways I’ve tended to mistake idols for God - I get suspicious and wary of those exuberant feelings when I’m in a mega church.
In the middle of a conversation with a couple of excited evangelical friends about how I felt that was connected to this whole Kanye story, they weren’t mowing what I was growing, pickin up what I was putting down, smellin what I was sniffin. So…
I felt the need to explain myself in a whole lot of detail to them and thus essentially make or force them to see what I see and thus more possibly and want what I want. Instead of confessing that feeling of that need, I just simply and compulsively “explained” until I was blue in the face, in my own strength, without trusting a connection, presence, or work with them or with God. It was exhausting. I took a two hour nap afterwards. And I’m pretty sure that my explaining in that way set me against my friends in a position of antagonism, which I'm really not even!
I think or suspect that evangelicals are getting caught up in with this Kanye thing in very much that same way that I felt compelled to set myself against my friends by “explaining” “the truth” to them, too. That makes me wary like I am of my feelings when I go to a mega church.
Yesterday, I engaged with a patient who is Afircan American. He spent his life working as a laborer, doesn’t speak very polished English, lives in what my family would deem “a bad neighborhood,” and has a tiny, old house filled with 30-year-old dusty clutter that he can’t afford to replace with newer and more expensive technological entertainment. It often takes a while for him to get around to completing a sentence or a thought. He talked a lot without a lot of direction about a lot of stuff I didn’t need to know to do my job. I found myself feeling irritable towards and impatient with him.
Just as I felt wary in a mega church and now feel wary of my need to “explain” things to people, I immediately felt wary of my feelings towards that man yesterday.
I at the least suspect that same part of me that was compelled to presume to exert control over my friends is the part of our evangelicalism that wants President Jesus on Air Force One rather than the Lamb of God on a donkey. My functional picture of heaven is clearly Kanye’s luxurious ranch life instead of my patient’s life as an unskilled laborer.
What qualified as “explaining” in my head – about the connection between mega churches and Kanye’s productions - really probably amounted to a euphemism for an attempt at overpowering my friends and making them look like idiots (which they’re not). Coercing my friends over to “my side” strikes me as the same as joyously having Kanye on “our side.” We’re winners for a big life on an American ranch in middle America with God. The laborer in a small, dusty house in a bad neighborhood who has a hard time completing his thoughts – he’s, in Trump lingo, “a loser!” (Apparently I’m more like Trump than I had realized)
As I confessed my compulsion to my friends, I realized that I hadn’t been speaking participatorally in unity with them. I was speaking as though we weren’t on the same path or in the same world together. The first truth I told wasn’t about myself in relation to them as my friends. The first truth I spoke was about some contested object “out there” and thus appropriately directed outwards TO them as “the other” who disagreed with me. And, I think that’s what we tend to do in relation to “the world.”
MY HOPES
The truth is that friends aren’t idiots and have their own agency and power to shape the world with me. And, that creative agency and power is given to them by God as WE, together, are purposed to participate with Him in the re-creation of all things with Jesus. Same goes for the “loser” laborer who isn’t in as much of a busy hurry as me and isn’t interested in reaching up the social ladder towards life on a luxuriously giant ranch.
As I found myself getting annoyed and impatient with my patient yesterday, I was gracefully honest with myself about it. In that moment of grace that opened space for the work of Jesus, I also realized that I was placing myself in a position of status over and above him, looking down my nose at him. It was in that moment that I was given to not only see and enjoy but accept into my own being that he was filled with more love, grace, truth, and light heartedness than I ever have been! As I confessed my judgment of him in my heart, I was given to see that he was teaching me how to be human! The reason he was rambling on and on about information irrelevant to bureaucracy and clinical goals is because he was, with the radical hospitality of Jesus, welcoming us with open arms and, despite having just met us, trusting and treating us as dear friends. Perhaps I really AM a "fool for Jesus"?
My wariness of our normal way of hoping to win makes me hopeful of finding different way of hoping and doing. What if, as evangelicals, we might be able to learn to be human from those who we tend to treat as our enemies or other than ourselves? What if that other way starts with the confessions of a professed non-expert, someone who doesn’t really know what he’s talking about, someone who’s just unhurriedly mumbling and stumbling along the laborious path that God has him on without looking ahead to the unlikely Triumphal Victory Parade of Arms in Pyongyang? Can I, like a man who clearly doesn’t understand his own medical condition, talk about Kanye without being qualified to do so?
Do I need to now “explain” how the complaints of racism and White Supremacy from my African American brothers and sisters are tied to my own confessions here? Do I need to now control the narrative on how those brothers and sisters might have also, then, been, perhaps unwittingly, “explaining” something important about what I was also noticing about and wary of regarding our evangelical reaction to this whole “Kanye thing”? They were telling me about my blind spots, but we were participating in the telling of the same story together. My deception is the same as their suffering. It’s not us against them.
Confronted both with my wariness and that laborer’s “easy yolk”, I get to thinking about how Jesus makes himself known in ways that are very different from how we tend to want to do so. Emmanuel, God with us, came as Jesus Incarnate, as one who came not to be served but to serve. He commanded not that we “win America for Jesus” but that we would be known as his disciples by our love.
Do I need to now "explain" how, perhaps, all this evangelical hoopla around Kanye is "Feast of Fools" for Jesus?
So, when I think of those big, exuberant, and important winning spectacles for Jesus that we see from Kanye or at a megachurch, spectacles which we passively watch as consumers or classroom pupils, or that we participate in as concert goers, it's my hope that we can perhaps begin to learn engage “the world” in more local, embodied, and “smaller” ways, ways perhaps driven by personal, relational discipleship instead of by big programs - whether those programs are on an IMAX theater screen or in giant pre-fabricated church buildings.
Whaddya think? Am I off my rocker? Has my cheese fallen off my cracker? Am I a crazy fool for these warinesses and hopes of mine?
18 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
20 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. 22 For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, 23 but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
- from 1 Corinthians 1
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