This is part 10 (the final installment) of a 10-part series.

A few weeks ago I had a riveting conversation with a man here in Tyler, a prominent academic, about liturgy and worship. “Episcopal liturgy is boring,” he honestly expressed. “It’s not exciting; I never learn anything new in the liturgy.”

And then, just last week, I was honored to be a part of another conversation about church and ministry and worship, this time with a couple of local Starbucks baristas, one in her twenties and the other probably in his 30’s.

They extolled the worship at their church, because (unlike the local megachurch they had once attended but then had left) the worship was not over-programmed. There was far less of a sense of manipulation and infinitesimally planned, staged, and choreographed performance.

“At our new church, the worship is free. If the Spirit leads, then we might keep on worshiping for hours,” she said with a deep sense of satisfaction.

I’m really grateful that, having been in Tyler now for ten months, it seems like I’m at the point that people are willing to have real, authentic conversations with me. These two examples above have been particularly important because they center on the great strength of our Anglican tradition: worship.

In these and other discussions (including in my Christian Formation class), I have used a couple of different analogies to help folks imagine what the purpose and point of the liturgy might be. (For Thomas Aquinas, analogy is perhaps the foundation of his whole theology.)

The first is language learning. How does a small child (one year old, two years old) begin to learn language? Does she learn it from a book? From an owner’s manual? From a Power Point Presentation? No. Instead, the little one is thrust into an already existing community (which, by the way, she did not choose). Then, over time and with lots of repetition, the muscles in her tongue and lips begin the difficult work of forming habits. (Habit is a key word for thinking about what the liturgy is.) In this way, the child learns, gradually, over time, and with fits and starts, how to say, “da da,” an utterance which eventually gives way to the fully formed “daddy.”

What are we doing in the liturgy if not learning a new language, which will then form us into a different way of thinking and living (Rom 12:1-2)?

A second analogy comes from ancient Roman military practice. When the Roman armies would move into a new territory of battle, they would always set up their camps in the exact same way. The bunks and the latrine and the fire place and the kitchen were always in the same place in the camp.

Why did they do this? To be sure, efficiency was one reason. But in addition to that they knew that what the soldiers needed was a measure of stability, familiarity, and even comfort in a disorienting, chaotic, and stressful situation.

Today more than ever we live in a world (even here in Tyler) which is more fragmented, more rootless, more anxious than ever. One more entertaining and distracting venue is about the last thing we need. As Neil Postman wrote well over a decade ago, we are “entertaining ourselves to death,” primarily as a way to escape the stressful anxiety of the world we live in.

We don’t need more stimulation; we don’t need more dopamine. We need a space of stability and rootedness where we can rest, where we can be formed into a new set of healthy habits will prepare us to worship God for all eternity.

For more, listen to Fr. Matt’s Christian Formation podcasts, accessible at www.christchurchtyler.org.

This is part 9 of a 10-part series.

When you hear the word “salvation,” what do you think of?

Many modern people, both in the church and out, imagine (in a way quite foreign to the thought world of the Bible) “salvation” to be some sort of mystical “zapping” of the soul such that, after the magic “zapping,” one now has an unbreakable and unquestionable connection to God.

On the contrary, however, when a first century Jewish person imagined “salvation,” he or she would have thought of images very earthy and mundane: lots of flowing wine, the fatted calf roasting on the altar, lots of children and grandchildren running around, good land to live on and to work, justice and mercy and material blessing for the poor and the outcast. One thinks of shalom, embodied life in the Kingdom of God.

It should therefore come as no surprise that, when it comes to “salvation” in the church of Jesus Christ (who, after all, was a first century Jew), such blessing comes to us through ordinary means: the vibrating vocal cords of a preacher, printed words on a page, bread and wine.

Baptism is a case in point. When God chose to create a rite to ingraft us into the community of God’s people, he chose water as a primary means to do so. Why?

There are too many reasons to list, but a perusal of the “Thanksgiving over the Water” in our baptismal rite (BCP 306) is a good place to start.

We thank you, Almighty God, for the gift of water.

Over it the Holy Spirit moved in the beginning of creation.

Through it you led the children of Israel out of their bondage

in Egypt into the land of promise. In it your Son Jesus

received the baptism of John and was anointed by the Holy

Spirit as the Messiah, the Christ, to lead us, through his death

and resurrection, from the bondage of sin into everlasting life.

Water is central to the creation story, the exodus story, the Jesus story … therefore it is central to our salvation story.

But now for a more taxing question: why do we baptize infants, in addition to adults?

In my Christian Formation class at Christ Church, we are discussing four arguments for infant baptism:

1. The argument from redemptive history: we perform this rite because an analogous rite was performed in the old covenant: circumcision.

2. The argument from ordinary means: if salvation is not a zapping in the heart, but rather comes to us through ordinary means, then this practice makes sense.

3. The argument from corporate solidarity: scripture teaches that salvation is primarily a “community thing,” and only secondarily and “individual thing,” so infant baptism should be seen in that framework, as a way of bringing a little one into the community of God’s people.

4. The argument from prevenient grace: if God chooses us before we choose him (as 1 John 4:19 seems to imply), then it makes sense that we have a ritual which gives expression to that fact, as infant baptism surely does.

For more, listen to Fr. Matt’s Christian Formation podcasts, accessible at www.christchurchtyler.org.

Last night I had some sweet time with my Bella, my seven year old daughter has who perhaps done more for my theology than anyone over the last few years. (See here and here.)

You see, Bella attends a private school locally which, while virtuous is so many ways (not least the truly rigorous education balanced with a good measure of fun and play) is populated with children and teenagers, who, quite frankly (and unlike what is the case at City School, where Bella attended in Austin), are on the upper-most rung of the socio-economic ladder.

Of course this is not all bad. We are unspeakably grateful for the opportunity to send our kids to All Saints, and often times money brings cultural richness. However, it does pose some real challenges.

Recently Bouquet and I have noticed that Bella is getting more pretentious, that her values are shifting a little, in some subtle (or not so subtle) ways.

Last night we spent some wonderful time in the backyard around our outside fire pit (it was cold last night in Tyler!) and talked about things like being rich and being poor, and how some Christians in the past (namely the Puritans) prayed that God would spare them from both extremes.

With that conversation ringing in my mind, I spent some time this morning in Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution.

The passage from Eagleton which really hit me aroused in me the intensity I often feel (I am tempted to use the word “anxiety,” but I believe that Jesus has risen from the dead!) when I think about Bella’s future in this culture of narcissism, nihilism, and non-sustainable consumerism.

It is difficult for me not to think that Bella (to say nothing of her own children) will grow up in the twilight of the western culture and civilization. Such cultural decline in the west is not bad, but it will be painful for many.

And it reminded me of a conversation she and I have had over the last couple of years about television, internet, and other forms of media. She has questioned Bouquet’s and my privleging of PBS over other television networks, including our decision not to purchase a version of cable TV service other than the bare minimum (which, by the way, we purchased for the sole reason of obtaining PBS, not available here without a basic cable package).

When explaining to her my suspicion and aversion to various forms of media and entertainment such as signing up for free videos from disneychannel.com, etc., she found one argument particularly compelling:

“They’re just trying to sell you stuff.”

Through email marketing, pop-up ads, irritating and vile commercials … they are just trying to sell you stuff.

I’m so grateful that she found this argument compelling, and it made her question and begin to “see through” the glitz and glamor of Selena Gomez and the Jonas Brothers. Such attraction is full of illusion and deception, she began faintly to grasp.

Born in 1972, I still find it a rather novel concept that media entertainment is about profits, not art. And yet, this is more and more the case, and this is a part of the larger “narrative” I want to inculcate into my daughter.

If I were to take a month off to develop this narrative one text on which I would rely would be the following quotation from Eagleton, which reminds me that:

- Conservative American culture is frequently naively complicit in supporting some of the very worst tendencies and underlying forces in our culture, forces in which the principalities and the powers are utterly owning us. For example, the assumption that form and content are able to be separated without damaging content (examples: Wal-Mart, megachurches, contemporary music).

- Subtle mistakes at the beginning of the Enlightenment in the west are now rearing their full-grown, ugly heads, with demonic furor. (example: the nation-state is now a merely surveillance organization to promote the untrammeled profitability of global capitalism.)

- This narrative (which one might call post-modern) of resisting worldliness through a recognition of the baselessness of consumerism needs to be developed more and more rigorously families and churches, such that it is foundational to how we think and live. That is, only the church has the resources to withstand and resist the onslaught of late capitalist nihilism which will continue to come down the pike, until, to adapt a phrase from the late Neil Postman, we entertain and consume ourselves to death.

- Bouquet and I need to work hard to develop real, authentic relationships between our family and those who are economically struggling.

… the chief threat to enlightened values today springs not from feng shui, faith healing, postmodern relativism, or religious fundamentalism. As usual, it springs from some of the fruits of Enlightenment itself, which has always been its own worst enemy. The language of Enlightenment has been hijacked in the name of corporate greed, the police state, a politically compromised science, and a permanent war economy. The economic individualism of the early, enlightened middle classes has now spawned into the vast corporations which trample over group and individual rights, shaping our destinies without the slightest popular accountability. The liberal state, founded among other things to protect individual freedom, has burgeoned in out time into the surveillance state. Scientific rationality and freedom of inquiry have been harnessed to the ends of commercial profit and weapons of war. One vital reason why the United States has declared open-ended war on terror is to ensure a flow of open-ended profits for a large number of its corporations. An enlightened trust in dispassionate reason has declined to the hiring of scholars and experts to disseminate state and corporate propaganda. Freedom of cultural expression has culminated in the schlock, ideological rhetoric, and politically managed news of the profit-driven mass media.

Rational or enlightened self-interest brings in its wake the irrationality of waste, unemployment, obscene inequalities, manipulative advertising, the accumulation of capital for its own sake, and the dependence of whole livelihoods on the random fluctuation of the market. It also brings with it colonialism and imperialism, which scarcely sit easily with enlightened values. Political individualism, intended to safeguard us from the insolence of power, results in a drastic atrophying of social solidarities. The vital Enlightenment project of controlling Nature, which frees us from being the crushed and afflicted victims of our environment, has resulted in the wholesale pollution of the planet. In claiming the world as our own, we find that we have ended up possessing a lump of dead matter. In asserting our free spirits, we have reduced our own bodies to pieces of mechanism. – Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution, p 71 – 72.

John 13:1-15

Maundy Thursday – A

“Tomorrow: Death”

If you knew that you were going to die tomorrow, what would you do?

Would you take the day off from work and be with your children? Would you clear your schedule so that you could be alone with your husband or wife for several hours? IF you are a single person, would you try to make some sort of statement, maybe create some art, paint a picture, of what is most important to you?

In tonight’s story from John 13, Jesus has realized that his hour has come. He realizes that the time has come for his exodus (as Luke’s Gospel puts it), his departure from the world and back to his father.

You see, from the beginning of John’s Gospel John has been telling us that God’s glory would be revealed in the climax of Jesus’ life.

In John 2, for example, right after Jesus turns water into wine (and note that both water & wine re-appear for us tonight, both in our Gospel lesson and in the rituals we perform tonight) his well-intentioned mother wants Jesus to display his glory.

And how does Jesus respond? He looks at his mother and tells her, “My hour has not yet come.”

My hour has not yet come. The hour for my glory, the glory of the Father, to be displayed and lit up for all to see … has not yet come.

This same thing happens again and again in John. People look at Jesus, and they begin to get a little glimpse of his glory, and then the text says, “but his hour had not yet come.”

Chapter 7: “No one laid a hand on him, because his hour had not yet come.”

Chapter 8: “No one could arrest him, because his hour had not yet come.”

But then in chapter 12, right before tonight’s story, something new happens. Out of the blue, some Greeks, some Gentiles, show up and want to hang out with Jesus. Then, right at that moment, Jesus realizes that his hour has finally come.

And so we come to this fateful night. He knows his hour has come. He knows that his entire life and ministry and all the conflict which has been provoked … he knows that it is coming to a head, and he knows it is coming to a head, tomorrow.

If you knew you were going to die tomorrow, what would you do?

His disciples were expecting a normal Passover meal. They had done this before, and here they were with their rabbi, and they were about to enjoy this annual ritual meal together.

And then Jesus does something completely unexpected. He gets up from the table, disrobes, puts a towel around his waste, and begins to wash their feet.

His disciples are dumbfounded: what is he doing? Not only is this not part of the Passover liturgy, but … um, rabbis don’t do this sort of thing. In fact, not even slaves do this!

In that world, slaves were the absolute bottom rung on the social ladder, but even they were given the dignity, even slaves had rights. It was unlawful for a man to require a slave to wash your feet. That was just too demeaning, too gross, too debasing.

And yet, this is precisely what Jesus does. And for his disciples, it does not compute. His action will not fit into their grid, it will not fit into their categories.

Why not? Why didn’t they get it? Why didn’t they get what Jesus was doing?

Yes, his behavior is unexpected for a Passover meal. Yes, this behavior is bizarre to say the least for a rabbi. And so they were sort of shocked & flabbergasted.

But the scriptures lead us to a deeper reason as well, a deeper reason for their lack of comprehension. In his book Death on a Friday Afternoon, Richard John Nuehaus puts it this way:

“To those accustomed to living in a world turned upside down, setting it right cannot but appear to be turning it upside down.”

As Jesus began to perform the most grotesque act they could imagine, it looks like the world is being turned upside down.

But that is because they themselves are living upside down, living in an upside down world.

And so are we. You and I, like them, live in a world where might makes right, where the appearance of success matters most, where weakness and dependence are shunned and excluded and ridiculed.

But Jesus comes, he does this, and he is showing us true reality. He is showing us how things are in his family. He is showing us what life is like with his father and the spirit. He is showing us how to live.

If you knew you were going to die tomorrow night, what would you do?

Tomorrow night, Jesus is going to die.

And what does he do? He humbles himself, he lowers himself, to the level beneath the slave. He gives up his rights. He serves his friends. He serves you and me. He served us to the point of death.

And then he looked at them, he looks at us, and he says, “Go and do likewise.”

Tonight, we will ritually participate in this act of service. Even though it is not nearly as scandalous for us as it was for them, it’s still kind of awkward.

As you do this, join me in ask God to make us humble. Ask God to make you loving.

But more than that, I invite you to do something else. I invite you to thank him for his humility. Thank him for turning the world right side up.

Receive his love for you.

You know why? You can never serve others until you let him serve you. You can never love others until you let him love you.

What would you do if you knew you were going to die tomorrow?

This is part 8 of a 10-part series.

Over the years as I have had an ongoing conversation with Isabella, my seven year old daughter who is a budding theologian, about what is going on in the sacrament of Holy Eucharist, particularly in “the service of the table,” the communion service.

After all, Bella and I wonder, what is going on with the bread? Why do we call it “the Body of Christ?”

One way we have discussed this, which has been particularly fruitful and enjoyable, is in terms of the “three givings or gifts of the Eucharist.”

First God gives to us, the human race also known as “Adam,” the good gifts of grain and grape, and this is the first “giving,” the first gift, the gift of creation.

Now grain and grape are good, but God has asked us (see Gen 1:28-30) to take them, and to make them even better, to transfigure them, bringing them “from glory to glory.” And so, we, human beings created in God’s image, take the grain and the grape, and we transfigure them into bread and wine. In obedience to God, we (“Adam”) cultivate the earth.

Now, in the Eucharist, what do we do with this bread and wine? We don’t eat and drink it, at least not yet. What we do is we give it back to God. Think about all the language of “offering” in the Communion service: “… these, thy holy gifts, which we now offer unto thee …”; “… and here we offer and present unto thee …” This language of “offering” brings out the oblationary aspect of the Eucharist.

And this is the second giving, the second gift. God receives our gift and then, what does he do with it?

Now, bread and wine are good. But God takes these gifts, he transfigures them, bringing them to a better state of glory, and now they “become” something even better: the body and blood of his Son, Jesus Christ.

Now, keep in mind that, historically, there are three different senses of “body of Christ.” There is 1) the “typological body” (the soma typicon) which was “literally” nailed to a cross and “literally” buried in the grave, etc. Then there is 2) the “true body” (corpus verum) which is the Church, the living members of the Body of Christ. Finally there is 3) the “mystical body” (corpus mysticum) of the consecrated bread of the Eucharistic Rite.

Is this consecrated bread “really” the body of Christ? It is, indeed. It is his body because is it ritually connected to his “typical body” and to his “true body” the Church, the “living stones” gathered at the feast. Because of the first two “bodies of Christ,” the bread is more than just bread. It is a sacrament of the whole world, already but not yet transfigured and transformed into the very life, the very body, of Christ.

This article is part 7 of a 10-part series.

In his magisterial For the Life of the World, Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann begins his articulation of the sacramental life with the statement, “Man is what he eats.”

Think about it. Even our narrative of God’s work in the world begins with a story about eating. The man and the woman in garden (imagined collectively in Genesis 1 as “Adam”) are somehow restless, somehow wanting more than they have received. And so what do they do? They eat. They grasp after some thing God had made, and they put it in their mouths, chew it, swallow it, and assimilate it into their very bodies, their very selves.

Fast forward to the end of our story, the last two or three chapters of St. John’s Apocalypse. Here again, what do we see? We see an amazing scene of a feast. In fact it is the very best kind of feast: a wedding feast! What better reason to celebrate than the joining of a man and a woman in the deepest possible love, the deepest possible union.

So we see, in the beginning and end of our story (not to mention all along the way in between: see Isaiah 25:6 as one of countless examples), that the idolatrous, gluttonous eating of Adam has been transfigured into the faithful, joyful, satisfying celebration of the New Adam, together with his Body and Bride.

In light of all of this, can it be any surprise that at the center of our lives lived before God, we find ourselves eating at a table with our brothers and sisters? More is going on at that weekly feast called Holy Communion than time or space permits me to develop right now, but suffice to say that, since God’s salvation (think “shalom”) is for our whole selves, body and soul, it is only fitting that he put his abundant, indestructible life into us not only through words and ideas, but also through food. Or, better (as Peter Leithart has written in his Blessed are the Hungry), through “love made food.”

And when it comes to Holy Baptism, we find a similar reality. God made us not only as individuals, but as members of community. As I told the youth confirmands recently, we are like a jigsaw puzzle, designed to “fit together” and to make a beautiful mosaic which is bigger than any one of us. In light of that, of course it makes sense that God would give us a ritual which includes us in God’s love not just as individuals, but as a larger community, called to “image” God’s own communal life, his loving dance, of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

In the last chapter Bell’s main accomplishment was to show that heaven is something that starts now.

As for heaven, Bell argues, so also for hell.

First, though, Bell rightly begins with the several biblical words (in both Greek and Hebrew) which get translated or interpreted as “hell.”

He starts out with the Old Testament, and rightly points out that one won’t find much support for the “traditional” understanding of hell in the Old Testament, where, despite the common use of the word sheol (which means “the grave,” though admittedly in a more imaginative sense than we modern people are used to), “what happens after a person dies isn’t very well defined.”

Now, before we turn to the New Testament, it is important to be reminded that the New Testament is every bit as “Hebrew” or “Jewish” as the Old Testament is. Thus, if the OT is not really interested in the state of the human soul after death, then we probably should not expect the NT to be, either.

I  want to develop this point a bit. It is called “reading Scripture with Scripture,” and it allows us to illuminate obscure passages of Scripture with other passages which are more clear. That is, if we are confused or unsure about the meaning of various passages in the NT which seem to talk about hell, then what should we do? We should turn to the OT. We should let the obvious “Jewishness” of the OT shed light upon the (equally, but for us less obviously “Jewish”) NT.

This is what we would ordinarily do if we were reading in the NT about something obscure such as angels, or how to think about one’s enemies, or the relationship between suffering and obedience. In every case, it is tremendously helpful to turn to the OT and seek context and clarity.

However, when we do this with respect to the NT’s portrayal of “hell,” we find nothing in the OT but a reinforcement of the very Jewish understanding of sheol as a highly imaginative version of “the grave.”

What do we find when we turn to the NT? Two main words: Gehenna and Hades (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Sheol). (The exception to this is 2 Peter’s use of Tartarus, a term referring to a mythological abyss.)

Gehenna was the name of the city dump out side Jerusalem. Jesus speaks of it only while rebuking the religious leaders of his day, and never to folks we would ordinarily think of as “sinners.”

When Jesus speaks of Hades, it is in contexts such as Luke 16, the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. Some notes Bell makes about this parable:

1.     The rich man is a stand-in for Jesus’ hearers, the religious types.

2.     The “hell” which the rich man created was the result of not loving his neighbor, and even in “hell” refusing to serve his neighbor.

3.     Jesus’ mention of “resurrection” (pointing to the resurrection he himself was about to undergo) shows that the meaning of Jesus’ story was “directly related to what he was doing right there in their midst.”

4.     When we interpret hades in this parable in light of the OT (and its use of sheol) one thing we notice is that the rich man is alive in the midst of death. He is dead, but he is also alive. “He is in Hades … but he hasn’t died the kind of death that brings life.” (page 76-77)

The upshot of all this, for Bell, is that Jesus is talking about hell later (that is in the next life), but also about hell now, and that we should “take both seriously.”

Bell goes on (rightly, in my view) to interpret other passages (such as Matt 26 – “those who live by the sword will die by the sword”) as actually referring to the “hell” which would ensue if Israel continued to fight the Roman Empire with the weapons of the latter’s warfare: a hell which did ensue in 70 AD when Rome destroyed Jerusalem (as Bell rightly points out). (page 79ff)

Bell similarly (and rightly) dismisses the story of Sodom and Gomorrah as having anything directly to do with Hell.

Then, in his last major point of the chapter, Bell argues the point that, so often in Scripture, the portrayals of God’s judgment so often include offers of restoration. This includes Jer 32; Jer 5; Lam 3; Hos 14; Zeph 2,3,9,10; Isa 47; Hos 6; Joel 3; Amos 9; Nahum 2; Micah 7.

In Isa 19, the prophet announces (in a passage resonant with Ps 87) that “in that day there will be an altar in the heart of Egypt” (Israel’s arch-enemy). “Things won’t be what they seem,” Bell writes. “The people who are opposed to God will worship God. The one who were far away will be brought near. The ones facing condemnation will be restored.”

Bell brilliantly then turns to the NT, reading Scripture with Scripture. He shows how this same dynamic of judgment leading to restoration is seen over and over in Paul, including in the passages in which he talks about people (such as Hymenaus and Alexander in 1 Timothy) “being handed over to Satan” in order that they might be restored.

Paul makes this explicit in 1 Cor 5 where he tells his friends to hand over a certain man to Satan “for the destruction of the sinful nature so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.” (page 90)

This “day of the Lord” imagery meshes perfectly, Bell suggests, with Jesus’ parable in Matthew 25 (known as “The Great Assize”) when Jesus says that the “goats” will be sent into the aion of kalazo, translated by many English versions of the Bible as “eternal punishment,” but which can more accurately be understood as a period of pruning or trimming.

I want to point out two things at this point:

1.     Bell is not (at least not at this point) denying the existence of “hell-in-the-afterlife.”

2.     What he is denying here is that people “go to hell” against their will. That is actually the main point of the chapter, and this is absolutely consistent, for example, with the view of hell that CS Lewis imaginatively portrays in his book The Great Divorce. (And I don’t see an avalanche of controversy raging in the evangelical world about CS Lewis.)

In this chapter, Bell continues with his (quite right) insistence that our popular understandings of heaven are far removed from the thought-world of the Bible, of first-century Judaism (of which Jesus and his first followers were a part).

Again, in doing this he is popularizing a similar line of work as that of NT Wright, massively prominent biblical scholar and Anglican bishop. (See here, and here.)

Again, I will list & briefly comment on the points Bell makes.

1.     There is something wrong with the idea that the Christian life is about going to heaven when we die. Basically, this would imply that this world, my life, my family, my body, my work, simply does not matter, and that the “main point” is to “get the heck out of Dodge.” Even before we turn to the Bible, we can sense in our bones that this picture of bailing out, leaving the world behind, is just wrong.

2.     Bell points out that Jesus, like all other first century Jews, had no concept of “eternity” as in “eternal life.” Bell does a good job of showing that this is not what the rich man meant in Matt 19 (see verse 16 and following) when he asks him, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Rather, this man and Jesus both would have been thinking of “the age to come” (Hebrew olam habah; Greek zoe aionion). That is, to the Hebrew mind (including in the Second Temple period) “eternal life” the way we think of it was not a big deal. “The age to come,” however, was a big deal. History is going somewhere. God is up to something. He is going to fix this broken world. He is going to do this, they would have thought, “in the age to come.” This is what the following Old Testament passages are about: Isa 2, Isa 11, Isa 25, Ezek 36, Amos 9.

3.     These passages point to three realities w.r.t. this “age to come.” First, the age to come will include all nations; it will be inclusive and universal in scope. Second, the picture we get is very earthy: it consists of grain, crops, wine, people, feasts, homes, and buildings (p34). Third, we can see that this vision is something deeply rooted in the creation narratives of Gen 1 & 2. That is, this vision for the way creation is supposed to be was not new. God has always been looking for partners who will work with him (think of Tolien’s “subcreation” and “subcreators”) to extend the garden, and to cultivate the whole earth. I like this paragraph (35 – 36):

For there to be new wine, someone has to crush the grapes. For the city to be built, someone has to chop down the trees to make the beams to construct the houses. For there to be no more wars, someone has to take the sword and get it hot enough to melt it down into the shape of a plow.

That is, bringing about God’s creative purposes takes work.

4.     When things don’t work the way God intended, he gets angry and he becomes full of hate. When modern western people say that they can’t believe in a god of hate or anger, remember this (37):

Yes, they can. Often, we can think of little else. Every oil spill; every report of another woman sexually assaulted; every news report that another political leader has silenced the opposition through torture, imprisonment, and execution; every we see someone stepped on by an institution or corporation more interested in profit than people every time we stumble upon one more instance of the human heart gone wrong, we shake our fist and cry out, “Will someone please do something about this?”

5.     What did Jesus mean by “heaven?” First, he meant “God.” Bell is correct here: Matthew’s “Kingdom of Heaven” is tantamount to Luke’s “Kingdom of God.”

6.     Second, “Heaven” is where God’s will is being done, in real time and in real space. Again, Bell is correct here. The Kingdom of God “happens” wherever Jesus is worshipped and made Lord.

7.     Third, Since our time & place is so often not where God’s will is done, what this means is that, right now, heaven and earth are not one. To gloss this in NT Wright language, “God’s dimension” and “man’s dimension” are not presently overlapping, but (as Bell points out on pp 43 ff) the whole story of the Bible (Old & New Testaments together) is the story of God’s dimension & man’s dimension beginning to overlap & to become one. (My note: this most fully happens in Jesus Christ & his body, the Church, but one day it – the union between God & world – will be “all in all.”)

8.     If this is true, then “right now counts forever,” and digging wells for clean water now matters since in “heaven” there will be clean water for all. This is the future breaking into the present, getting dragged into the present. (Fancy word for this: eschatology.)

9.     What Jesus’ encounter with the rich man in Matthew 19 shows us is that not only does heaven comfort, but it also confronts. That is, heaven

“has teeth, flames, edges, sharp points” and that “certain things simply will not survive in the age to come. Like greed. And coveting. The one thing people won’t be wanting in the perfect peace and presence of God is someone else’s life. The man is clearly attached to his wealth and possessions, so much so that when Jesus invites him to leave them behind, he can’t do it.” (p 49).

This meshes perfectly with what Paul says in I Cor 3:10ff: that certain deeds, practices, words and attitudes will on “the Day” (the prophets spoke of, see above) will be burned away, but that “the builder” (ie, the one with these attitudes) will be saved.

10. As CS Lewis points out, heaven is a place so real, solid, and good that it will take a lot to get used to. In a paragraph in which Bell (knowingly or not) is pretty much arguing for something like Purgatory, he points out that things like habits and character take time, so it is an unrealistic (if widespread) assumption that in “heaven” people will be changed in an instant. What this means is that a single mom who struggles to pay bills and squeeze child support out of her ex-husband who use to beat her and to keep her kids in school, and who does all this without giving up or despairing is likely “the first who will be last,” is likely the kind of person about (or to) whom God will say “You are the kind of person with whom I can partner to build my new world.”

Heaven is more real, not less, than this world, and so it is full of surprises.

Summary. For Rob Bell, heaven

a.     is coterminous with “God.”

b.     Wherever, in this world agreed with and served.

c.      Aion, that is to say: the intensification of reality beyond our present, normal awareness of things (ie, “three dimensions”) which is charged with God and the reality of his new world, which begins here and now, and continues into the world to come.

Again, in my opinion, all of this is utterly biblical, and utterly orthodox, and utterly exciting!

In chapter 1 of Love Wins Bell makes several points, all of which are spot on, and all of which many intelligent pastors and teachers have been making for a very long time. I’m going to list the points / questions and elaborate briefly on them.

1.     There is a widespread phenomenon in the modern, western church (what this really means is the evangelical church, which no doubt has analogues in contemporary Roman Catholicism) and it is driving many people away from the community of Jesus-followers. It is the phenomenon of confusing and polluting the Jesus story with our corrupted stories. A prominent version of this is to adopt a mode of threat in our telling of the story, and then to assume that, of course, my community is on the “inside” of those who are favored by God.

2.     Often, our sub-stories totally lack hope for the world and for people, and this is light years away from the tone and direction of the Jesus story.

3.   To make matters worse, we bandy around the idea of salvation with no real understanding of what that idea means, much less how the Bible actually uses that word. Examples: is salvation a conversion experience? Is it having correct ideas in your head about God? Is it being zapped in your heart? Is it having a emotional feeling? Is there an “age of accountability?” If so, what is it, and how do we know? Is salvation something that happens to me as an individual or something that happens to a community (such as Israel in Rom 11)? Bell suggests the sobering truth that, again, more often than not the way we speak of salvation is light years away from the biblical story of Jesus.

4.     Which God? Which Jesus? Bell rightly points out that, when people say they reject Jesus (or God), we need to ask, “Which Jesus (or God) do you reject?” Frequently, the Jesus being rejected is a Jesus who ought to be rejected. Maybe the Jesus being rejected is an unbiblical Jesus. Maybe the Jesus being rejected is a Jesus who was associated in a five-year-old’s imagination with a man who was molesting her. Bell gives the example (p 7) of a woman whose father raped her while saying the Lord’s Prayer, from Renee Alston’s Stumbling Toward Faith:

I grew up in an abusive household. Much of my abuse was spiritual. When I say spiritual I don’t mean new age, esoteric, random mumblings from half-Wiccan, hippie parents…. I mean that my father raped me while saying the Lord’s Prayer. I mean that my father molested me while singing Christian hymns.

Surely, to reject this “Jesus” can be seen as a step in the right direction (as CS Lewis would firmly agree).

In his introduction to Love Wins Bell clearly says that he does not take himself to have all the answers. Rather, he is asking some questions, rooting his thought in the categories the Bible itself gives us. In this he is doing the very same thing that NT Wright has been doing, and in fact, a great many (even most?) of the “bombshells” he is dropping, particularly in chapter 1 (dealing with “heaven”), are nothing more that what NT Wright has been teaching for years. Thus, Bell is traveling nowhere that Bp. Wright has not travelled before.

The second big claim Bell rightly makes in the introduction is that, to the extent that he has a “position” on this “issue,” this position of his is nothing new, and is well included within the mainstream of the “ongoing discussion” (p xi) that the church has been having for centuries. In this he is utterly correct. In fact, he is essentially espousing a view of Christian tradition which has been articulated by Alisdair MacIntyre:

The traditions through which particular practices are transmitted and reshaped never exist in isolation for larger social traditions. What constitutes such traditions? We are apt to be misled here by the ideological uses to which the concept of a tradition has been put by conservative political theorists. Characteristically such theorists have followed Burke in contrasting tradition with reason and the stability of tradition with conflict. Both contrasts obfuscate. For all reasoning takes place within the context of some traditional mode of thought, transcending through criticism and invention the limitations of what had hitherto been reasoned in that tradition; this is as true of modern physics as of medieval logic. Moreover when a tradition is in good order it is always partially constituted by an argument about the goods the pursuit of which gives to that tradition its particular point and purpose.

So when an institution–a university, say, or a farm, or a hospital–is the bearer of a tradition of practice or practices, its common life will be partly, but in a centrally important way, constituted by a continuous argument as to what a university is and ought to be or what good farming is or what good medicine is. Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead.

- Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 221

In this sense tradition is an ongoing dialogue that takes place over large periods of time within particular communities.

In conclusion, Love Wins (in the introduction at least) is in the very good company of NT Wright and Alisdair MacIntyre, and, thus, is a welcome and much needed articulation of theology especially since it is written at a much more popular level.

A final critique, however. Bell clearly has a “catholic” way of understanding tradition. It is too bad, therefore, that he does not have (or has not expressed, or has not acted on) a catholic ecclesiology.

That is, what is the church? Would that Bell were in a communion of churches, an actually embodied tradition (note what MacIntyre says above about communities: these are concrete communities of bodies & souls. Indeed, they are eucharistic communities (at least for scripture & tradition).

Here again, the emergent church slouches toward catholicity, but still lacking the actual ability to embrace the catholic church of history.

Here again (as has been the case for about a decade) “eccleiology!” is my mantra.

Oh how I wish Rob Bell would read John Milbank & Radical Orthodoxy.

This is part 6 of a 10-part series.

I have spent the last five installments in this series discussing our liturgical worship which we as Anglicans perform. My next question is rather simple, but profound: “Does the Bible tell us to worship this way?”

Well, yes and no. One the one hand there are passages such as the following:

- In Isaiah 6 we behold scene in God’s throne room / temple in which we see that confession and absolution precede sending out into the world.

- Nehemiah 8 gives us an example of the public reading of Holy Scripture in which God’s people stand in unison to hear the Word proclaimed.

- In the Words of Institution (Matt 26; Mark 14; Luke 22; 1 Cor 11) in which Christ instructs us in the particular actions to perform in the Service of the Table, or Holy Communion.

- The Book of Acts gives us snapshot after snapshot of first-century worship in which we see the preaching of the Word and the breaking of the bread, going hand-in-hand.

- Revelation 4-6, in which we are shown a worship scene in Heaven which gives us many images and precedents for us to implement in our worship of God.

As you can see, the Bible is full of useful instruction on how we are to order our lives of worship. And yet, nowhere in Holy Writ do we find something like a manual or a “how-to” guide for worship. Why is this?

I can think of several reasons.

First, God does not tell us explicitly how to worship him because we are free in the Spirit to figure it out for ourselves. After all, God wants us to be mature and discerning in our decision making, not like little children who must be given direct instructions all the time (Eph 4:13).

Second, the liturgy of the Church predates most or all of the New Testament texts. One of the oldest liturgies of the Church we have, The Didache, is dated by contemporary scholarship to around the year 100 AD, which means that Christians were worshiping in the way it prescribes at least as early as 60 years after the birth of Christ. (The Didache is the same in basic shape as most liturgies used in the East and Western churches of “The Great Tradition” to this day.) That is, the liturgy is older than much of our New Testament Scriptures, a realization which makes sense when one remembers that the first Christians were mainly of Jewish descent.

Third, and related to the second reason above, “faith comes by hearing” (Rom 10:17), which indicates that the Holy Scriptures are primarily something to be heard, not something to be read from a book. That is, the Holy Scriptures are first and foremost a liturgical thing. They are not an instruction manual worship; rather, they are intended to be used in the worship, as worship (which is why something like 80% of the BCP is composed of Scriptural texts)!

Fourth, Scripture itself presents us with multiple examples of what can only be called “oral tradition:” Luke 1:1-4; John 20:30; John 21:25; 2 Tim 2:2; 2 Thes 2:15. The Church has always held that it is from this “source” that much of our worship is derived and passed down, and not simply from the Bible alone.

Rarely do I post my sermons onto my blog. However, I am doing so in this case, partly due to several conversations I have had over the last couple of days.

I preached this at the 6PM Ash Wednesday service at Christ Church. The epistle was 2 Cor 5:20b – 6:10 and the Gospel was Matt 6:1-6, 16-21.

A couple of nights ago something happened that seems to happen to me about, oh, once a month on average.

An that is, I had an intense bout with insomnia. It was me against insomnia, and I lost. 1AM, 2AM, 3AM … the clock keeps ticking until … until the sun comes up and with it my 3 year old daughter.

Now, I’m not saying that a night without sleep is the worst thing in the world. Certainly compaired with shipwrecks, beatings, imprisonments, riots, and hunger … an occasional night of insomnia is not that bad.

St. Paul was no stranger to these things and more. Why does he mention them in today’s epistle reading from 2 Corinthians? What’s more, why does he speak of these things as if they are somehow something which comes from the hand of God?

Is St. Paul some kind of massocist? What’s going on?

We get a hint near the end of today’s reading, where he begins to throw out several different paradoxes of the Christian life:

• - how, somehow in the midst of his sorrow, he finds deep and profound joy
• - how his life is shot through with death, and yet in the midst of the death he is more alive than he ever thought possible.
• - how he is poor & dispossessed, but somehow in the midst of this poverty he is is rich;

See, these are the paradoxes of the Gospel: riches in the midst of poverty; joy in the midst of sadness; life in the midst of death.

How can these things be? Is this just crazy talk?

One of my favorite films of all time is The Neverending Story….

You see, brothers & sisters, Jesus Christ is not just some guy that we read about. The life of Jesus is not some narrative that we hear about every Sunday or even read about in a dusty old book.

Rather, the narrative of Jesus – his life, his suffering, his death, his resurrection – these are things that we inhabit. His story is a something that we get sucked into.

His life becomes are life; his suffering becomes our suffering; his death becomes our death; his resurrection becomes our resurrection.

Henry Nouwen puts in this way in his book The Selfless Way of Christ. [Quote Nouwen.]

And don’t you see? This is the first reason why we do Lent. It is a way of learning, little by little, to die. The church fathers spoke of the Christian life as preparing for a good death.

Because, you see, apart from death, there is no such thing as resurrection. This is why we give things up during Lent. This is why we intentionally make our lives a bit more difficult, a bit more inconvenient. It is a way of entering into the sufferings of Christ. It’s a way of sharing in his sufferings & death, that we might share, also, in his indestructible life.

But there is a second reason why we do Lent. And you heard it a moment ago from Deacon Stine’s mouth, and it is this: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

The question of Lent is this: what is your treasure? Is it your career? Is it your body image? Is it having healthy children? Is it food & drink?

What is your treasure, really? What is your pearl of great price, the thing that if you lose it, you can’t be happy. When you lose it, all of the sudden it gets kind of hard to breath. When you lose it, you begin to act like Gollum in the LOTR, or like an alcoholic who can’t find an open liquor store.

What is your treasure?

The wisdom of Lent is that the Church (beginning about 1100 years ago) is making a way for us to wean ourselves off of all earthly treasure. It is a way of ridding our lives of the stuff that does not really satisfy.

You see, we’re talking about desire. I’m reminded of CS Lewis who said that our problem is not that our desires are too strong (though this is the charicature of Christianity that the world dispenses to people). Our problem is that our desires are too weak. We are far too easily pleased.

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, we are like ignorant children who want to continue making mud pies in a slum because we cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a vacation at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

What are we doing in Lent? If you think about it, it’s the opposite of massocism. It’s really the cultivation of desire. True desire. Strong desire. Rightly ordered desire.

In Lent, we are weaning ourselves off of the stuff that doesn’t satisfy. We are learning to depend on God. We are learning to rest in him, to lean on him. To make him our one thing needful.

Only then can his power come into our lives. Only then can we gain the strength to resist temptation and live like THE FREE WOMEN & MEN WE WERE CREATED TO BE.

Only then, as we participate in his suffering & death, we will rise with him, entering into his indestructible life.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the HS, Amen.

The recent announcement of the Obama administration has rekindled my focus on the explicitly political dimension of Radical Orthodoxy and indeed the Gospel.

I continue to hold that the Obama administration’s abandonment of the Defence of Marriage Acts is logically consistent with the political philosophy (secular as it is) undergirding the US Constitution (this makes me a “liberal”), but on the other hand that the breakdown of the traditional family will plunge our secular society into social fragmentation and chaos (this makes me a “conservative”).

Hat tip to my friend Collins Aki, who pointed me to this (for more see here):

Radical Orthodoxy seeks to revive a credal Christianity that was progressively obscured from the late Middle Ages onwards, and it makes that recovered Christian vision the basis of a systematic critique of modern, secular society. “Modernity,” Milbank has said, “is liberalism, liberalism is capitalism and capitalism is atheism.” The problem with secular liberalism, for proponents of Radical Orthodoxy, is that, in removing God, it loses any grip on the notion of objective moral truth. Secularism leads to nihilism, because it leaves “worldly phenomena” such as morality “grounded literally in nothing”.

Milbank is convinced that Blond’s latest incarnation as a political thinker is continuous with his earlier identity as a theologian, and that Red Toryism is merely the “political translation” of Radical Orthodoxy. “Part of Radical Orthodoxy’s argument,” he tells me, “is that since the 1960s a kind of non-liberal left has faded away somehow, and what you’ve got now is a left that increasingly defines itself in terms of secular liberalism. We argue that if you want to criticise liberal capitalism, you’ve got to realise that this is the form that secularity will take. Capitalism gets rid of the sacred. If there’s no sacred, everything will be commodified. We argue that you need to re-enchant the world if you are to criticise or modify capitalism.”

The practical, political differences between Blond and his former teacher – Milbank identifies himself as a man of the left – are less significant than their shared commitment to this theological vision. “Phillip has always seen himself as a Tory, whereas for me the political resources lie in a Christian socialist tradition,” Milbank says.”

Regarding a Sam Harris video from TED which a friend asked me to watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj9oB4zpHww&feature=player_embedded

What is going on here is that Harris is presupposing an Enlightenment understanding of “values,” and then and saying that, contrary to much pop opinion, this is really not at all in different sphere from modern science. He might be right, because these two realms are, to invoke Aristotle, “contrary propositions within the same genus.” They are apparent opposites, but in reality they are kissing cousins, two sides of the same coin.

But what if we were to frame the debate in terms of representation versus participation?

That is, what if we were to grant that modern science and enlightenment-based values, are, in fact, overlapping spheres, but then to challenge the common assumptions of this sphere: that our minds interact with the “external world” or creation according to a scheme of representation (ie, “pictures in the brain”)? Over and against this modern assumption (espoused, for example, by Descartes) is the premodern approach to knowledge which is participatory: the form of the tree migrates into my mind (and vice-versa) much like small particles of fragrant coffee are wafting into my nostrils even as I write this.

What needs to be challenged, therefore, is the enlightenment, representationalist worldview which is shared by both privatized “values” and the modern science establishment.

“Values are certain kinds of facts: facts about the well-being of conscious creatures” presupposes a positivistic epistemology. He is letting modern science define his terms and frame the issues.

“There is no notion of values that I have ever come across that is not reducible to a concern about conscious experience.” Really? How about the “notion of values” of Ancient Jews? Or of 5^th century Athens?

Notice how he reduces religion-driven values down to the “afterlife.” Perhaps he should try reading the Bible sometime. Paul almost never speaks of “the afterlife,” let alone Jesus and the Old Testament. “The afterlife” is a term which hegemonically imposes a modern conception of self and religion upon Christian theology.

He assumes that “adding cholera to the water” would “probably not be a good thing.” I’m surprised to hear him say this, since he is not a pacifist. Surely there might be, given his worldview, a time and a place to add cholera to the water, for example, as strategy in the middle east of Afghanistan in the American Empire’s “war on terror?”

4:55 Brain versus mind. This is a huge example of begging the question. He argues that variant understandings of human flourishing are reducible down to culture-induced changes in the brain (but how does he know this?), and so we can understand these differing value systems through “a maturing science of the mind: neuroscience, psychology, etc.”

He speaks repeatedly of a “state of wellbeing.” What is that, and who gets to choose? Is it “not killing each other?” That seems rather shallow and unambitious. (What if we start killing ourselves?) Is it pleasure? That is certainly what the Epicureans and the radical skeptics thought, but the Stoics trenchantly disagreed. Who is right? Will modern science settle this debate?

What is wonderful, however, about Sam Harris is that he is passionately concerned about human flourishing. Would be that more “Christians” shared his passion.

In addition, I agree that “there are right and wrong answers” to the best ways to promote human flourishing.” How to determine those, however, is where the disagreement starts.

One more thought: I love TED!

I suppose that one of the things I learned from my almost 4 years as a Starbucks barista was the fun of introducing customers to new things: new coffees, new pairings, new ways to drink tea, etc. (Actually, I have always loved to do this. Even when I was a little kid I liked to experiment with drinks, for example & 7Up — not Sprite — with various fruit juices, and then share my new discoveries with sisters and parents.)

Recently here in Tyler, an area somewhat beer-challenged (though I love many things about Tyler!), I have enjoyed sitting at a bar somewhere, and starting a conversation with a Bud Light drinker (for example).

“Bartender, give him a Fireman’s Four on me, please,” followed by a discussion about the ways this beer is superior to his former go-to.

Another good beer in this situation would be New Belgium Sunshine Wheat, but, alas, I’ve not seen that one (especially on tap) in these parts, east of Dallas.

In other words, Fireman’s Four and Sunshine Wheat are good examples of bridge beers which can help a person transition from beer which, having little redeeming value, can only be called “cheap” to a truly wonderful beer, rich in flavor and full of body.

Another good bridge beer is Shiner Bock. I have seen many a beer drinker enhance their quality of life by moving from cheap beer to robust stouts and porters by way of Shiner. (Shiner Bock to Shiner Black to a good stout is a natural trajectory.)

Now, just as there are bridge beers, so also there are bridge churches. In my journey the PCA was just such a church. I was blessed to get a taste of liturgical and sacramental worship in the PCA in Austin while still retaining the sense that I was rooted in the evangelical world.

But over time (to make a long story short) I needed more. I needed to go deeper. I needed the full experience, the full body, the full depth of layer and subtlety.

Now, as an Episcopal priest, I have the joy and privilege to be forming a new worshiping community of young people in the context of an Episcopal Church (kind of like a church plant but with fewer of the intense challenges that accompany that monumental project).

One of the things going on with the “Epiphany Eucharist” is this idea of bridge worship. What we are trying to do here is to provide access to the liturgy and sacramental life of the church for folks for whom this way of worshiping the Triune God is quite foreign and awkward.

Just as (for Calvin) God “lisps” in the Incarnation, so also we are wanting not to “dumb down” the liturgy, but rather to implement creative ways of making it more accessible, more reachable, more natural.

Just as a Bud Light drinker usually has trouble going straight to Old Rasputin or Young’s Double Chocolate Stout or Dogfish Head Raison d’etre, so also many folks have trouble going straight from secular culture or megachurch culture (which are basically the same thing, I think) to the Rite I Eucharistic Liturgy.

I would love nothing more than if, after a year or two of folks worshiping with us in the Rite III Epiphany Service, they were to come up to me and say, “You know, I have really enjoyed and grown from this Epiphany Eucharist over the last many months, but I think I would like to try that Rite I Service downstairs.”

“Great!” I would respond, thinking to myself all the while, “mission accomplished.”

The Eucharist is, quite literally, a re-membering of the body of Christ. His scarred, fish-eating resurrection body (known in the ancient church as the soma typicon or “typological body”) which hung on the cross, becomes the living members of his true body (corpus verum), you and me.

Theologians call this “participation,” but as is painfully obvious, there quite simply are no words to describe this. In a way which transcends the “one flesh union” of my wife and me, we quite simply are members of Christ. We are his body. We are his body for the world and for the world’s life. Which is why the Eucharist involves a third body as well: what the ancients knew as the “mystical body:” the corpus mysticum. This bread, together with the wine, imports the world into the church: the world of harvesting, the world of threshing, the world of trade and commerce, the world of civilized humanity created as God’s image-bearing cultivators of his good world.

And so, do you see? As members of his body, we are enacting the world’s true culture and civilization. We are brining about the new world of the living, victorious Christ.

A couple of friends have asked me to share my thoughts about this conference.

Anglican1000 is a yearly church planting conference (which just ended) which was held at Christ Church Plano, a parish in the northern suburbs of Dallas which left the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas a few years ago. (The rector, David Roseberry, who planted the church in the mid-1980′s and grew it to become the largest parish in the entire Episcopal Church when it exited that church body, then led the church into the Anglican Mission in the Americas, and then subsequently changed affiliations to the ACNA.)

Some thoughts:

1. Praise God for the missional energy and excitement which is spreading in this group. The planting of biblically-based local churches can only be good.

2. It was kind of a surreal experience, on the other hand, being in the midst of a group of folks who are forming a reactionary or alternative church body, in opposition to a more liberal one. This was the air in which I lived and moved and had my being for about a decade in the Presbyterian Church in America, including several years as a pastor. The temptation for such a new body to define themselves against the “apostasizing ones” is absolutely undeniable, as is the potential arrogance and self-congratulation which go along with that.

3. It was also surreal to hear Tim Keller in this group. Keller’s rich, nuanced, thoughtful, culturally savvy theological engagement (which I have been studying for a decade) was soaked up by them like parched desert soil soaking up a shower of life-giving rain.

4. I noticed a tendency in the group (there were perhaps 500 church planters and other interested parties in attendance) to push for a more confessional Anglicanism, something I had known about previously at a more theoretical level from Dr. Philip Turner, who has argued against a confessional framework against Stephen Noll from Trinity School for Ministry. Several folks with whom I spoke explicitly argued for this, the need for a more confessional commitment as something that will bind the church together in unity. I continue to think, however, that this is not classically Anglican, and, quite frankly, that this makes this group tantamount to the PCA (especially since one can find great liturgies all throughout the PCA).

5. Connected to #4 above, this conference has deepened my commitment to catholic liturgical practice as the only way the Church can withstand the onslaught of modernity. (To play devil’s advocate for a moment, the strongest argument against this posture is the global south: that is, a non-liturgical christianity could well outlast and outflank modern secularism by continuing to take root in Africa and other 2/3 worlds countries, which then continue to bring this evangelical faith back to the post-Christian west.) It is clear that for these Anglican brothers and sisters at this conference, it is not the liturgy which binds the church together in unity. As a result one sees wildly divergent ways of worshipping among the church plants and a longing for a more robust commitment to confessional standards.

5. I did attend one workshop during the conference put on by a group in New England (led by Bishop Bill Murdoch) that is embodying a “new monastic” way of practicing intentional community that was truly encouraging, motivating, and inspiring. God willing, I will implement some of these practices in my ministry, and the worshipping community that God is forming, in Tyler.

All in all, I am grateful to God for doing a new thing in this group, and that “denominational” disputes cannot stop the work of God in the world. However, as a liturgical catholic Christian who embraces a “communion ecclesiology” (along the lines of Rowan Williams, Radical Orthodoxy, the Windsor Report, and John Zizioulas) who enjoys the oversight of a godly bishop, I am glad I am not directly numbered among them.

Inspired by a recent Facebook post from my friend Cynthia Nielsen I am reminded of an amazing passage by Graham Ward in his Cities of God (tied for the best book I read in 2010).

The body of Christ is a multigendered body. Its relation to the body of the gendered Jew does not have the logic of cause and effect. This is the logic which lies behind those questions, ‘Can a male saviour save women.’ This is the logic of Hegel’s description of the relationship between God and the Church.

As one who disagrees with Ward at the end of the day on same sex issues in the church, I nevertheless find his logic here compelling.

In fact I often think of Ward and this book during the service of Holy Communion, at the altar rail during the Distribution of the Elements. Frequently I will give a consecrated wafer to a woman saying, “The Body of Christ for you, my sister,” but then, before I finish that phrase, I am now giving a wafer to a man, calling him “sister.” It is a powerful reminder / suggestion to me, enacted during the liturgy, of the way sex and gender are deconstructed in the church.

Of course what I’m saying here presupposes the theology of the Three-fold Body of Christ, promulgated among others by Henri de Lubac.

Those of you familiar with the teachings of Tim Keller will see realize that the title of this post is “stolen” from him, as is the basic point of the Epiphany teachings we are doing as we delve into Paul’s letter to the Galatians.

Where we’ve been in Galatians so far:

1. We started out by looking at the so-called Parable of the Prodigal Son as a “lens” through which we view Galatians (thus “reading Scripture with Scripture”). This parable from Luke 15 is really about two sons, and not just the sinful, lost, younger son. As we have seen, the older brother is just as much in need of repentance as the younger brother who wasted his father’s inheritance in Las Vegas living it up, gambling, drinking, carousing, and (as the text says) sleeping with prostitutes. The elder brother is just as much as in need of repentance: just as much as the younger brother, he is using his father as a means to an end. Just as much as the younger brother, he is trying to control his father, the only difference being that the elder brother is trying to control the father through his obedience, through doing what’s right, through “the works of the law.”

2. Who is Jesus always getting upset with in the Gospel stories? Elder brother types: scribes, Pharisees, teachers of the law. The squeaky clean types, the cultural and religious conservatives, the ones who believe in absolute truth, the morally upstanding types, the ones who would be much happier living in red states.

3. What is Galatians about? It is a polemic levied against the “elder brother types,” but in this context they are not called “Pharisees;” they are called “the Circumcision.” Different characters from the Gospel stories, but the plot remains fundamentally the same.

4. Now, what’s crazy is that Paul himself is, by nature and by nurture, an “elder brother type.” As he states in Galatians 1, he had been a “Pharisee of Pharisees,” more zealous than his contemporaries for the purity of the law.

5. However Paul is a man who has been changed by grace! The risen Christ appeared to him (see the book of Acts), knocking him off his horse and onto his can. And after a season of meditation in the desert, trying to figure out what in the world had happened to him on that road to Damascus, trying to make sense of the Scriptures (for us, the “Old Testament”) in light of this shocking revelation of Christ, he begins to reach out in love to the very ones he had so murderously despised: the Gentiles! The Gentiles: the unclean ones, the sinners, the younger brother types.

6. This is the heart of Galatians: the life of Christ is not one of status quo religion, whereby we assume our own superiority over those who are different from us (this is the basic posture of the human heart, and the basic nature of so much of what passes for “religion”).

7. OK, then, what is the Christian life about? Two things (which we will consider together on Thursday nights for the next few weeks):

a. A New Law of Freedom (ch 5).

b. A New Community or Family (ch 6).

51 Christians were killed in Baghdad at a single shooting last week, the NT Times reports.

An excerpt:

In an emotional service interrupted twice by applause, the Rev. Muklis Shisha told the congregation, “The church is a martyr,” adding: “The cross needs blood, and the blood is happiness because Jesus is our happiness. I congratulate our country and ourselves for our martyrs.”

For many Christians here, the attack underscored a bitter irony of the American-led invasion. It opened the door for warfare on one of the world’s oldest Christian communities.

According to the Society for Threatened Peoples, a nongovernmental organization in Germany, more than three-quarters of Baghdad’s 400,000 Christians have left the capital since the invasion, and many have left the country. With a few exceptions, the country’s Jewish population left years ago.

“I don’t think the American people care about this,” said the Rev. Meyassr al-Qaspotros of the nearby Sacred Church of Jesus, whose cousin was one of the priests killed at Our Lady of Salvation, adding, “The Americans are the cause of all this.”

In his sermon to his own congregation, he said, he planned to stress the existential meaning of human suffering and the need for forgiveness, even in the face of horrific bloodshed. “God allowed man to torture Jesus, he will allow this as well, because he gave freedom to all people,” Father Qaspotros said. “We are willing to live with them as our brothers, and teach our sons to love them, because we are no different from them. We are all human.”

In light of a good convo with a friend last night, and in light of our upcoming “Monster’s Ball,” I thought I wd repost this, from St. GK.

“The sound rule in the matter would appear to be like many other sound rules–a paradox. Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of Italy. Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world.” –”Omar and the Sacred Vine,” Heretics

Happy (early) All Saints Eve!

Enjoy this excellent article by James Jordan on the origins of Halloween, or All Hallows Eve:

Concerning Halloween

James Jordan

It has become routine in October for some Christian schools to send out letters warning parents about the evils of Halloween, and it has become equally routine for me to be asked questions about this matter.

“Halloween” is simply a contraction for All Hallows’ Eve. The word “hallow” means “saint,” in that “hallow” is just an alternative form of the word “holy” (“hallowed be Thy name”). All Saints’ Day is November 1. It is the celebration of the victory of the saints in union with Christ. The observance of various celebrations of All Saints arose in the late 300s, and these were united and fixed on November 1 in the late 700s. The origin of All Saints Day and of All Saints Eve in Mediterranean Christianity had nothing to do with Celtic Druidism or the Church’s fight against Druidism (assuming there ever even was any such thing as Druidism, which is actually a myth concocted in the 19th century by neo-pagans.)

In the First Covenant, the war between God’s people and God’s enemies was fought on the human level against Egyptians, Assyrians, etc. With the coming of the New Covenant, however, we are told that our primary battle is against principalities and powers, against fallen angels who bind the hearts and minds of men in ignorance and fear. We are assured that through faith, prayer, and obedience, the saints will be victorious in our battle against these demonic forces. The Spirit assures us: “The God of peace will crush Satan under your feet shortly” (Romans 16:20).

The Festival of All Saints reminds us that though Jesus has finished His work, we have not finished ours. He has struck the decisive blow, but we have the privilege of working in the mopping up operation. Thus, century by century the Christian faith has rolled back the demonic realm of ignorance, fear, and superstition. Though things look bad in the Western world today, this work continues to make progress in Asia and Africa and Latin America.

The Biblical day begins in the preceding evening, and thus in the Church calendar, the eve of a day is the actual beginning of the festive day. Christmas Eve is most familiar to us, but there is also the Vigil of Holy Saturday that precedes Easter Morn. Similarly, All Saints’ Eve precedes All Saints’ Day.

The concept, as dramatized in Christian custom, is quite simple: On October 31, the demonic realm tries one last time to achieve victory, but is banished by the joy of the Kingdom.

What is the means by which the demonic realm is vanquished? In a word: mockery. Satan’s great sin (and our great sin) is pride. Thus, to drive Satan from us we ridicule him. This is why the custom arose of portraying Satan in a ridiculous red suit with horns and a tail. Nobody thinks the devil really looks like this; the Bible teaches that he is the fallen Arch-Cherub. Rather, the idea is to ridicule him because he has lost the battle with Jesus and he no longer has power over us. (The tradition of mocking Satan and defeating him through joy and laughter plays a large role in Ray Bradbury’s classic novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes, which is a Halloween novel.)

The gargoyles that were placed on the churches of old had the same meaning. They symbolized the Church ridiculing the enemy. They stick out their tongues and make faces at those who would assault the Church. Gargoyles are not demonic; they are believers ridiculing the defeated demonic army.

Thus, the defeat of evil and of demonic powers is associated with Halloween. For this reason, Martin Luther posted his 95 challenges to the wicked practices of the Church to the bulletin board on the door of the Wittenberg chapel on Halloween. He picked his day with care, and ever since Halloween has also been Reformation Day.

Similarly, on All Hallows’ Eve (Hallow-Even – Hallow-E’en – Halloween), the custom arose of mocking the demonic realm by dressing children in costumes. Because the power of Satan has been broken once and for all, our children can mock him by dressing up like ghosts, goblins, and witches. The fact that we can dress our children this way shows our supreme confidence in the utter defeat of Satan by Jesus Christ – we have NO FEAR!

I don’t have the resources to check the historical origins of all Halloween customs, and doubtless they have varied from time to time and from Christian land to Christian land. “Trick or treat” doubtless originated simply enough: something fun for kids to do. Like anything else, this custom can be perverted, and there have been times when “tricking” involved really mean actions by teenagers and was banned from some localities.

We can hardly object, however, to children collecting candy from friends and neighbors. This might not mean much to us today, because we are so prosperous that we have candy whenever we want, but in earlier generations people were not so well o_, and obtaining some candy or other treats was something special. There is no reason to pour cold water on an innocent custom like this.

Similarly, the jack-o’-lantern’s origins are unknown. Hollowing out a gourd or some other vegetable, carving a face, and putting a lamp inside of it is something that no doubt has occurred quite independently to tens of thousands of ordinary people in hundreds of cultures worldwide over the centuries. Since people lit their homes with candles, decorating the candles and the candle-holders was a routine part of life designed to make the home pretty or interesting. Potatoes, turnips, beets, and any number of other items were used.

Wynn Parks writes of an incident he observed: “An English friend had managed to remove the skin of a tangerine in two intact halves. After carving eyes and nose in one hemisphere and a mouth in the other, he poured cooking oil over the pith sticking up in the lower half and lit the readymade wick. With its upper half on, the tangerine skin formed a miniature jack-o’-lantern. But my friend seemed puzzled that I should call it by that name. `What would I call it? Why a “tangerine head,” I suppose.’” (Parks, “The Head of the Dead,” The World & I, November 1994, p. 270.)

In the New World, people soon learned that pumpkins were admirably suited for this purpose. The jack-o’-lantern is nothing but a decoration; and the leftover pumpkin can be scraped again, roasted, and turned into pies and muffins.

In some cultures, what we call a jack-o’-lantern represented the face of a dead person, whose soul continued to have a presence in the fruit or vegetable used. But this has no particular relevance to Halloween customs. Did your mother tell you, while she carved the pumpkin, that this represented the head of a dead person and with his soul trapped inside? Of course not. Symbols and decorations, like words, mean different things in different cultures, in different languages, and in different periods of history. The only relevant question is what does it mean now, and nowadays it is only a decoration.

And even if some earlier generations did associate the jack-o’-lantern with a soul in a head, so what? They did not take it seriously. It was just part of the joking mockery of heathendom by Christian people.

This is a good place to note that many articles in books, magazines, and encyclopedias are written by secular humanists or even the pop-pagans of the so-called “New Age” movement. (An example is the article by Wynn Parks cited above.) These people actively suppress the Christian associations of historic customs, and try to magnify the pagan associations. They do this to try and make paganism acceptable and to downplay Christianity. Thus, Halloween, Christmas, Easter, etc., are said to have pagan origins. Not true.

Oddly, some fundamentalists have been influenced by these slanted views of history. These fundamentalists do not accept the humanist and pagan rewriting of Western history, American history, and science, but sometimes they do accept the humanist and pagan rewriting of the origins of Halloween and Christmas, the Christmas tree, etc. We can hope that in time these brethren will reexamine these matters as well. We ought not to let the pagans do our thinking for us.

Nowadays, children often dress up as superheroes, and the original Christian meaning of Halloween has been absorbed into popular culture. Also, with the present fad of “designer paganism” in the so-called New Age movement, some Christians are uneasy with dressing their children as spooks. So be it. But we should not forget that originally Halloween was a Christian custom, and there is no solid reason why Christians cannot enjoy it as such even today.

“He who sits in the heavens laughs; Yahweh ridicules them” says Psalm 2. Let us join in His holy laughter, and mock the enemies of Christ on October 31.

Until this last week I had not heard of “Tell Me More” or Tell Me More’s “Barbershop” discussion on NPR. Now, though, I’m a fan.

This discussion in particular, about the Juan Williams incident, was riveting for me, and I only wish I had time to gather my sisters, parents, and wife into a room to discuss it. (Pub club in Austin would be another desireable dialogue community for this one.)

Bella: “Daddy, I don’t want to go outside and play in the front yard because I’m afraid that the bad guys will get me.”

Daddy: “Sweetheart, who are these ‘bad guys’ you’re talking about?”

Bella: “You know, the bad guys Auntie M. told me about, the bad guys on the news who kidnapped and did real bad things to that little boy last night. I saw it on the news, Daddy.”

Daddy: “Sweetheart, those people should not have done those bad things, and we must be careful and aware of our surroundings, but do you remember last week in the playground that you spit on your friend when she took your Hello Kitty ball away from you?”

Bella: “Yeah, I’m sorry I did that, Daddy.”

Daddy: “I totally forgive you, Sweetie, but since you did that, I mean, since you hit her and spit on her, does this make you a ‘bad guy?’”

Bella: “No, Daddy! I’m a good girl!”

Daddy: “But at that moment your heart was just as angry and hurtful as some of the people you see on the news.”

Bella: “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

Daddy: “And, guess what else, Bella?”

Bella: “What, Daddy?”

Daddy: “I once knew a man who got thrown into jail for stealing a lot of money. That’s bad, right?”

Bella: “Right.”

Daddy: “Well, did you know that that same man loves his little daughter just like I love you?”

Bella: “How do you know, Daddy?”

Daddy: “Because that man is your Uncle ‘S.’”

This dialogue is typical of ones I have with my seven year old daughter, Bella. What I’m trying to do here is to show her that, in a sense, there is no such thing as “good guys” and “bad guys.”

With one exception, I tell her, and that is the case of characters in stories. Characters in stories can be good or bad. So for example, Saruman in the Lord of the Rings is truly bad, with no qualifications.

I would argue that something similar holds for the story of Holy Scripture which finds its climax or fulillment in (the paschal mystery of) Christ, which is one reason I have a different take on the role of narrative for the Christian understanding of violence than those who argue that there is no place for violence in the Christian story or in Christian theology.

What I want to show in the rest of this essay, however, is that, in another sense, there is such a thing as “bad guys.” The moral tradition of Christian virtue teaches that man is a functional concept. That is, the human being, created by God for a concrete and specific end or telos, is analogous to a human-made tool, for example, a hammer. A hammer can be said to be a good hammer if it successfully drives nails into pieces of wood. Alternatively a hammer (or a clock or a chair) may be said to be a poor hammer (or clock or chair) if it fails to fulfill its telos, the purpose for which it was made, properly.

According to the Christian tradition, rooted in Holy Scripture, the telos of humanity is to glorify God or (alternatively stated) to participate in the mystery of the triune God. To the extent that a person does this well and properly, she is a good woman. To the extent that a little boy or girl or grown-up fails to do this, he or she is a bad person.

Where does this leave us? It leaves me with a tension, a dilemma which might be undecideable. When forming the character of my seven year old, I want to discourage her from viewing the other (in particular those who are different from her) as “bad guys.” I want her to examine her heart and to verify the biblical truth that “all have sinned,” that “the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked, who can know it?”. I want her to pluck the beam out of her own eye first.

I think this posture is biblical and consistent with the spirit of Jesus, for whom the only “bad guys” were the power-mongers of religiosity of his day.

Since, like my seven year old, I have the capacity (even the tendency) for violence in my own life, I’m not really justified in speaking of others as bad guys.

And yet, I must admit that the moral tradition of Christian virtue ethics also maintains that there is such a thing a “good guys” and “bad guys.”

At the end of the day, am I myself a bad guy? In my view, that is for my (Christian) community to judge.

My good friend Brady recently loaned me a copy of Henri Nouwen’s The Selfless Way of Christ. I found this passage good & convicting:

Only a life on ongoing intimate communion with God can reveal to us our true selfhood; only such a life can set us free to act according to the truth, and not according to our need for the spectacular…. This is far from easy. A serious and persevering discipline of solitude, silence, and prayer is demanded. Such a discipline will not reward us with the outer discipline of success, but with the inner light which enlightens our whole being, and which allows us to be free and uninhibited witnesses of God’s presence in our lives. – Henri Nouwen, The Selfless Way of Christ pp 59-60.