In his sermon this past Sunday at Pasadena Covenant Church, Leslie Allen made an observation that American culture doesn’t like fear and the Church has assimilated to this view. Thus, we make God the personification of niceness. We dismiss whole sections of the Bible because they deal with the reality of fear in our lives in ways that do not comfort us.

The statement that we avoid parts of the Bible got me thinking about what I tend to avoid in the Bible and I realized I’m a pretty reactionary reader. Largely, I react against interpretations I used to hold but don’t hold now, heated debates I don’t want to enter, or different camps with whom I disagree who have made these texts central to their identities. Our Bible study is going through Genesis and this week we read Genesis 19, or the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. We let the story amaze us with its richness and sadness. We realized many of the arguments and counterarguments we hear regarding the text do not do justice to the narrative. But before Sunday night, I would have easily said that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah was a text I would rather avoid—I called it a landmine—because of the way I have heard some preachers use it in a, well, hellfire and brimstone manner.

What other texts do I avoid? I’ve avoided Genesis 1-2 because I’m tired of the creationism/evolution debate. I’ve abdicated Revelation to the Left Behind and Hal Lindsey eschatologies. I read The Late, Great Planet Earth in high school and believed its interpretation of Scripture and history for a few months, but I now reject it. I skip over parts of 1 Corinthians because of the claims some charismatic brothers and sisters have staked. I grow nervous when I hear people preaching on giving and tithing or divine blessing because of the crap (and I do mean crap) coming from the prosperity gospel preachers.

Look at the Bible I’m left with if I follow this reactionary reading program. The TTRV (Tyler’s Truncated Reactionary Version) says little about God’s creative activities, interaction with unjust societies, expectations of what we are to do with our resources and money, how the Holy Spirit empowers the Church, how God cares and blesses, or that there is an ultimate purpose to history.

I would love to be able to take an appreciative approach to many of the interpretations of Scripture that make me bristle. Most days I say why bother and then go read the texts that haven’t been tainted for me. Some days I feel like proclaiming as Bono does at the opening of “Helter Skelter” on the album Rattle and Hum, “This song Charles Manson stole from The Beatles; we’re stealing it back.”

The belief that we have mastered certain texts so that we think there is nothing new to learn from them, is perhaps just as harmful, but that is for another post.

Rick Meigs at The Blind Beggar initiated a synchroblog on “What is Missional?” Busyness kept me from signing up, but I’ve enjoyed reading the answers others have posted. Though I’m not participating, I thought I’d offer the following quotation from Darrell L. Guder’s book, The Continuing Conversion of the Church regarding the good news of God’s mission in the world. Guder is something of a founding-father in contemporary missional discussions.

Through the particular encounter of God with Israel, the good news that God is loving and purposeful enters into human history and becomes knowable. Apart from such a particular history, Christianity has no universal message to proclaim. The Bible is not a collection of universal ideas cloaked in a particular culture. Universal ideas cannot be the good news that the concrete testimony of a particular people at a particular time can well be, if their witness is credible. Such universal ideas are merely the product of human imagination and creativity. Christian witness is not the interpretation of philosophy but the continuation of the event of God’s self-disclosure in human history. The historical experience of God is the surprising result of God’s initiation, God’s desire to speak and be heard. That surprise continues to define the concrete history of the world, and of the mission community within the world which is called to be the witness to God’s goodness, the “gospel of God.” God’s mission is good news because it is historical: it has been historical from the beginning and continues to be the history that defines our hope. We encounter God within that same history as God makes us part of salvation history for the sake of the world he loves. (29-30)

Yesterday, we celebrated the Lord’s Supper in our worship service. Todd Johnson, a member of our congregation and professor of theology, worship, and the arts at Fuller Theological Seminary, preached about the meaning of Communion using the story of the resurrected Jesus meeting the disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24.13-35). He reminded us that the Eucharist is not only a memorial of Jesus’ death, but also a celebration of the Resurrection and he challenged us to see it as such. When I walked into the sanctuary and saw the table prepared for the Eucharist, I had a sense that there would be something special in that day’s receiving the bread and drink. Todd’s sermon spoke deeply and definitively about having the eyes to see the reality in front of us that Jesus is risen, something which has been hard for me since Dad’s death.

After the sermon, we recited the Apostles’ Creed, in which we proclaim with the whole Church,

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. AMEN.

Given my struggles of faith recently, especially in seeing Jesus as victorious over death, I saw my participation in this creed as an historical statement. In an interview with Krista Tippet on Speaking of Faith, theologian and Yale Divinity School professor Jaroslav Pelikan had this to say about the use of the creeds:

My faith life, like that of every one else, fluctuates. There are ups and downs and hot spots and cold spots, and boredom and ennui and all the rest can be there. And so I’m not asked on a Sunday morning, “As of 9:20, what do you believe?” And then you sit down with a three-by-five index card saying, “Now let’s see. What do I believe today?” No, that’s not what they’re asking me. They’re asking me, “Are you a member of a community which now, for a millennium and a half, has said, ‘We believe in one God’?”

I was in tears saying, “I believe… in the resurrection of the body,” not because I could say it with deep conviction or power, but because I said it as a hope against hope. I said it not as a statement that in this situation, in my grief, I believe in the resurrection of the body. No, I said it remembering my twenty-three years as a member of the Church, which has proclaimed the resurrection of the body for two thousand years. I believe in the resurrection. This was not a confession out of my strength, but out of my weakness. If there was any strength in my proclamation, it came from the Holy Spirit, who invigorates those who hold to this central part of the Christian faith.

In the fullness of my awareness of death’s reality, I walked into the line in the aisle to tear off a piece of sourdough and dip it in a cup full of grape juice. This was my act of allegiance to the Kingdom of God even though I can barely see it right now. Eating that shred of bread and bit of juice was my protest against death in spite of its overwhelming presence in my life. I chewed weakly, praying for hope and choosing belief in Jesus’ victory when so much of the immediate evidence seems to say otherwise. I don’t know where this experience will lead me, but I do know I want another bite, another drink.

The Bible is a big collection of books (66 in the Protestant canon and more in the Eastern and Roman Churches) and as someone who believes that all of them are inspired (I’m not going to define my view beyond that), it can be a weighty endeavor to keep them in order. Because the Bible is so diverse, people can and likely do focus on certain books and passages without giving similar time to others. Such a phenomenon appears to be the natural result of trying to digest so much writing as well as the likelihood that God will use certain texts to affect us more than others. This tendency can turn dangerous, however, when we emphasize certain books to the exclusion of others, of saying certain books are more important than others, or of developing a “canon within the Canon.”

Time has a story on ten ideas that are changing the world. Coming in at number ten is “Re-Judaizing Jesus.” Writer David Van Biema begins with describing a spat between Ben Worthington and Rob Bell over how to correctly interpret Jesus’ Jewish identity. The main point, however, is not that they disagree about understanding Jesus’ Jewishness, but that they consider Jesus’ Jewishness to be vitally important to understanding who he is as portrayed in the Gospels. We Gentile Christians are saying to ourselves, “Just about every one of those fellows who wrote all those books in the Bible were of Hebrew background. I bet that’s an important detail.”

For centuries, the discipline of Christian “Hebraics” consisted primarily of Christians cherry-picking Jewish texts to support the traditionally assumed contradiction between the Jews — whose alleged dry legalism contributed to their fumbling their ancient tribal covenant with God — and Jesus, who personally embodied God’s new covenant of love. But today seminaries across the Christian spectrum teach, as Vanderbilt University New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine says, that “if you get the [Jewish] context wrong, you will certainly get Jesus wrong.”

The shift came in stages: first a brute acceptance that Jesus was born a Jew and did Jewish things; then admission that he and his interpreter Paul saw themselves as Jews even while founding what became another faith; and today, recognition of what the Rev. Bruce Chilton, author of Rabbi Jesus, calls Jesus’ passionate dedication “to Jewish ideas of his day” on everything from ritual purity to the ideal of the kingdom of God — ideas he rewove but did not abandon.

(HT: Emergent Village)

I already posted the following commentary over on my blog about the arts, The Space Between the Arts, but since it deals directly with matters of faith as well, I thought I would offer it here as well.

A simple warning: this, like most of my commentaries will discuss specifics about the work of art, meaning the commentary will contain spoilers.

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson creates an incredible dance between his characters and the audience. Without using voiceovers or soliloquies, we feel characters’ emotions whether they are emotions we would want to understand or not. Take, for example, in Magnolia, when the uber-misogynist Frank T. J. Mackey (Tom Cruise) stonewalls the reporter (April Grace) for confronting him with his true history, we understand and feel his frustration all the while remaining disgusted with the vileness of his work and his lies. Like all great filmmakers, Anderson also has the ability to change our perspectives so that when we leave the theater, we look at the world a bit differently.

I have seen his latest work of wonder, There Will Be Blood, twice now and I cannot get this movie out of my head. There Will Be Blood takes a hard look at the amorality of frontier capitalism embodied in the terrifying character Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis in one of the great performances on film). Daniel protects his fabricated image enough to ingratiate himself to the people who own the land on which he wants to drill for oil. Because he inhabits nearly every scene of the film, we can view the bleak landscape through Daniel’s eyes that sees the “ocean of oil” underneath his feet. Daniel is percipient but horribly selfish. He sees through people to procure the best deal he can, often and perhaps intentionally at the other person’s expense. In an uncharacteristically candid moment, Daniel has the following exchange with Henry (Kevin J. O’Connor), the man posing as his brother:

Daniel: Are you an angry man, Henry?
Henry: About what?
Daniel: Are you envious? Do you get envious?
Henry: I don’t think so. No.
Daniel: I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.
Henry: That part of me is gone—working and not succeeding—all my failures has left me. I just don’t care.
Daniel: Well, if it’s in me, it’s in you. There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money that I can get away from everyone.
Henry: What will you do about your boy?
Daniel: I don’t know. Maybe it will change. Does your sound come back to you? I don’t know. Maybe no one knows that. A doctor might not know that.
Henry: Where is his mother?
Daniel: I don’t want to talk about those things. I see the worst in people. I don’t need to look past seeing them to get all I need. I’ve built my hatreds up over the years, little by little, Henry. To have you here gives me a second breath. I can’t keep doing this on my own with these people.

In A Cry for Mercy:

Listen, O Lord, to my prayers. Listen to my desire to be with you, to dwell in your house, and to let my whole being be filled with your presence. But none of this is possible without you. When you are not the one who fills me, I am soon filled with endless thoughts and concerns that divide me and tear me away from you. Even thoughts about you, good spiritual thoughts, can be little more than distractions when you are not their author.

O Lord, thinking about you, being fascinated with theological ideas and discussions, being excited about histories of Christian spirituality and stimulated by thoughts and ideas about prayer and meditation, all of this can be as much an expression of greed as the unruly desire for food, possessions, or power.

Every day I see again that only you can teach me to pray, only you can set my heart at rest, only you can let me dwell in your presence. No book, no idea, no concept or theory will ever bring me close to you unless you yourself are the one who lets these instruments become the way to you.

But Lord, let me at least remain open to your initiative; let me wait patiently and attentively for that hour when you will come and break through all the walls I have erected. Teach me, O Lord, to pray. Amen.

For my Christmas post this year, I decided to reflect on some hymns, and this is a rather wandering reflection. I have found great enjoyment and deep meaning in singing some of the traditional Christmas hymns. In the past, I experienced a level of familiarity and comfort singing their melodies—they just feel like Christmas—but I rarely reflected on the words I sang. For whatever reason, I’ve become more reflective of the words we sing. My favorite in recent years has been, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” with its lyrics ringing thoroughly of exilic woe and hope. This year other hymns have become especially meaningful, but I find the most moving and hopeful parts in later verses. “O Holy Night,” offers a wonderful picture of hope that Jesus’ incarnation is not merely about my salvation, but about a salvation, a re-ordering, a re-creation of the world that instills hope, justice, grace, and love. The lines written by Pla­cide Cap­peau and translated by Adolphe C. Adam, “A thrill of hope, the weary soul rejoices, / For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn” evoke the despair I have felt lately and the glimmer of hope onto which I can cling. If you’ll allow me another reference from The Lord of the Rings (this quickly seems to be turning into a Tolkien blog), “A thrill of hope… a new and glorious morn” reminds me of Aragorn holding onto hope at the battle of Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers. He speaks of the morning’s hope, when he says, “Yet dawn is ever the hope of men,” and displays this hope in his parley with his enemy.

‘Why do you look out? Do you wish to see the greatness of our army? We are the fighting Uruk-hai.’

‘I looked out to see the dawn,’ said Aragorn.

‘What of the dawn?’ they jeered. ‘We are the Uruk-hai: we do not stop the fight for night or day, for fair weather or for storm. We come to kill, by sun or moon. What of the dawn?’

‘None knows what the new day shall bring him,’ said Aragorn. (527)

The ensuing victory over that particular army of evil gives me a stirring picture of the power of the new day Jesus’ birth brought the world. The “new and glorious morn” also points me in the direction of the new day after the end of all things when God will bring the new beginning of all things and we will know God’s reign in its fullness.

I mentioned my despair above. In a previous post, I discussed that the unique and universal pain of losing my father has has awoken in me a consuming fear of death. (It is a pain virtually all will have to experience, but it feels different than any other pain.) I notice death around every corner. Our world boils over with death and destruction—and not only human death by disease, but also destruction of the environment, the violence of the endless wars, the decay of human relationships, and our constant rebellion against God’s kingdom. In recent weeks I have been unable to muster much hope against death’s onslaught. I find little resources within myself to point to hope. I need the words of others to speak hope to me and for me. I need the reminder from “O Holy Night,” that,

Truly He taught us to love one another;
His law is love and His Gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother
And in His Name all oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,
Let all within us praise His holy Name!
Christ is the Lord! O praise His name forever!
His pow’r and glory evermore proclaim!
His pow’r and glory evermore proclaim!

Against the tide of death, I find hope and comfort in a later verse of Charles Wesley’s Christmas hymn, “Hark! The Herald Angel Sings,”

Hail the heav’nly Prince of Peace!
Hail the Sun of Righteousness!
Light and life to all He brings,
Ris’n with healing in His wings.
Mild He lays His glory by,
Born that man no more may die.
Born to raise the sons of earth,
Born to give them second birth.

In the past I understood the “second birth” as the spiritual second birth of which Jesus speaks. I think that interpretation is probably what Wesley had in mind, but in the face of Dad’s death, the words point me to the great Resurrection when God will raise all from the dead. As I said in my eulogy for my father, “My hope is not so much that Dad is ‘in a better place.’ Rather, my hope as a Christian is that Jesus Christ has conquered sin and death and that one day Dad and I will rise from the dead and see each other again as our transformed selves.”

This Advent season has been more than a reflection on the historical event of the Incarnation or a forward hope for Jesus Christ’s second coming—I have ached to see Jesus’ reign here and now. I pine for it and I have only caught glimmers of light in the darkness. But my hope is in that light, for light defeats darkness. I leave you with a verse proclaiming the victory of Jesus, the light of the world.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. (Jn 1.5)

Merry Christmas, everyone.

My small group has embarked on an interesting series. Most of us grew up in churches and we’ve decided to read biblical passages that were told to us as kids, but have since been untouched. We realized that we spend little if any time considering these passages either in our individual study, in group settings, or in sermons. Strangely enough, most of the passages we’ve discussed and want to discuss are narratives from the Old Testament. So far, we’ve looked at David and Goliath, Samson and Delilah, and Moses’ birth.

Why is it that we relegate certain biblical passages to being “children’s stories?” Perhaps it is because kids understand and remember stories better than they would some of Paul’s more expository discussions in his epistles. I could embrace that, but it seems we seldom look at these passages again later in life. I wonder if there is within our system something of a bias against narratives and the Old Testament. It’s as if we say, “Stories about the Hebrews are good, but simplistic kids’ stuff. The real meaty theology is expository and in the New Testament.” Do we not have something new or deeper to learn about God through reading Samson’s story again in our adult years? Are not Jesus’ parables just as rich and shocking now as they were when we could barely tie our shoes? My small group saw this week that the story of Moses’ birth and trip down the Nile in a basket works on many levels—one couple whose first child is just about to have her first birthday saw the choices of Moses’ mother in a whole new light. Just because children can appreciate the story doesn’t mean it is beneath me as an adult. I believe our devotion to God can only grow with repeated listening.

Mark 1.29-31 has been a troubling biblical passage for me. Here is the text in the NRSV:

As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.

The text troubles me because of the mention of Simon’s (who we generally know as Peter) mother-in-law. Obviously Simon was married as I know of no other way to acquire a mother-in-law. Yet, there is nowhere else in the New Testament aside from this passage’s synoptic parallels (Mt 8.14-15 and Lk 4.38-39) that I can think of that mentions Peter’s marriage or his family. The healing takes place in Capernaum by the Sea of Galilee, yet when we read about Peter in Acts, he seems to have made Jerusalem and possibly other places stretching into Asia Minor his headquarters. What became of Peter’s marriage? Is he an absentee husband? Did he just ditch out on the marriage? Did his wife accompany him as he followed Jesus through Palestine and later during Peter’s ministry? What can we learn from Peter about marriage and family life? The silence is deafening.