Comedy, Tragedy, and Fairy Tale

A Prayer

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:10:00 +0000

In my missional theology course, we had to offer a prayer of thanksgiving or repentance for the Enlightenment:

God, who turns death into life, you call us to metanoia: to turn. We confess that we do turn, but our turn is to the subject. We call for you to turn us.

Save us from our turn to the massive onslaught of empirical data that tells us it will all go to pieces in the end. We see the decay all around us. We pray that you will be the God who brings it all together in the end.

O, that you are the God who has turned the whole world upside down. In weakness strength, in sickness health, in death life.

You are the One who makes the life that has turned to death; yet you are the One who turns death into life, whose vector is parabolic; your descension brings forth ascension. In you the dead are raised.

God, we pray that you will turn us till in turning and turning, we turn round right.

Extra-curriculars

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:50:00 +0000

A collection of the stuff I have found most helpful outside of the classroom:

Sermons:

"Storytelling and Preaching"- Will Willimon- Duke Chapel (iTunes)

"Continuing Through the Disruptive Conjunction"- Walter Brueggemann-Duke Chapel (iTunes)

"Does God Heal?"- Sam Wells- Duke Chapel (iTunes)

"Rejoice Evermore"- Beverly Gaventa
http://www3.ptsem.edu/Content.aspx?id=2674

Articles:

Discipleship as a Craft, Church as a Disciplined Community- Stanley Hauerwas
http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=110

The Body of Christ has Down's Syndrome- John Swinton
http://abdn.ac.uk/cshad/TheBodyofChristHasDownSyndrome.htm

Interview:

"Wisdom of Tenderness"- Krista Tippett with Jean Vanier
http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/wisdomoftenderness/

Books:

Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale- Frederick Buechner

Letters to a Young Poet-Rainer Maria Rilke

Soteriology and Disability

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 03:56:00 +0000

I have recently been writing about our being formed by the lives that we live, that our discipleship often constitutes the stuff out of which our faith emerges. In living lives in a certain way we are formed into people we would have never been otherwise. For me, waking up early in the morning to help Walton shower, dress, brush his teeth, and eat breakfast is a constant reminder that I will never become a person who is not formed by my life with Walton, and I will never conceive of a God who is less capable of being God for Walton as for me.

I have not stayed in the denomination with which I was affiliated before I left home. Because of this reality, some often try to play the shepherd to round me back up into the flock. I remember meeting with someone who might or might not have been attempting to do this denominationally but who at least wanted my faith to conform to his vision of orthodoxy. I remember I asked many bad questions, and of course when you ask bad questions, you get bad answers. Much of our worst theology has arisen simply because we begin with the wrong questions. More specifically, we often take our quesions too seriously and God's, not enough.

That day, I spoke to this minister about the profound faith I have observed in Walton. Walton is unable to express his faith in the ways that we do. The best he can often do is repeat certain phrases after us and close us with a self-assured "Amen". But in having witnessed this man live his life, I have come to have greater hope for the rest of us. No, he lacks our intellectual capacity and so this hope cannot be the hope that if everyone gets enough education, then we will learn how to get along. This was a very different form of hope. I observed that Walton's body is sometimes cruel to him. He is often hospitalized for a digestive condition. He suffers. He has cerebral palsy. He had a cerebral hemorrhage and is bound to his wheelchair. This is the life of his body. When my body feels bad, I am cranky. I am short with other people and often take it out on them. But Walton doesn't do that. No, he only hurts himself. In fact, he has broken his nose after pressing on it too hard in a fit. It is a tragedy, and I do not want to romanticize it any more than we shouldn't romanticize poverty, but Walton, in his disability, in his humanity, he never puts his pain onto other people. He bears it himself. There is some hope for me in that. While I do not wish for anyone to do that to themselves, especially not sweet Walton, it is prophetic in a world where we bomb other people.

I learned many things from Walton. I learned about who he is, who I am, what it means to be human, and who this God is that is involved in the mess of our lives. It would be impossible for me to separate my being, my belief, from the person I have been shaped into by Walton. I mentioned to this minister that I think maybe Walton's witness might be instructive for salvation. It might just be that our cognition is not the thing that saves us (where they assume Jesus left off, since Jesus cannot fully save us by himself). I posited that Walton teaches me that we do not show up at the gates with a 3 by 5 index card with a set of propostions about the nature of God in order to receive salvation. Instead, I have experienced something of salvation by being in relation to Walton. And so, could it possibly be that as Walton cannot formulate these words for himself, that God will also work beyond any words I could ever affirm about God. What might Walton's faithful witness tell us about God's economy of salvation.

I will never forget the response he gave me. He said, "do not think of Walton and people with disabilities as the rule. Do not form your rules around them. They are the outliers."

Sure, that sounds about right. Don't think that the world is shaped around who Walton is. And I've learned that truth often with Walton when the world casts him aside. But I was not asking about the world. I was asking about God's world. And as I see things from my love for Walton and from the world I encounter in Scripture, Walton is anything but an outlier. In fact, Walton is at the very center of the life of God. The rule is structured around him. He is at the center. The "kingdom of heaven" as Matthew refers to it is related to heaven, but it does not mean heaven itself. It is better understood as the "rule of heaven". And in Matthew's rule of heaven, our productivity is drowned by God's outpouring of grace (Laborers in the Vineyard, chapter 20). And also, we are judged, so says Matthew, on whether or not we fed the hungry, cared for the sick, visited the imprisoned, and not because these are all pious activities. No, we are told that in doing these things, we were not feeding just anyone, we were feeding Jesus. The one in need, Jesus says rather straightfowardly, is none other than Jesus.

And evetually we get back to the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew begins not with the commandments of what we are to do, but with the beatitudes. You know, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." These phrases are not commandments. They are statements. Statements about who God is. God is the one in whom the meek are blessed. God blesses the meek. The meek inherit the earth in light of this God.

And they are outliers? This is what I was told from a minister who comes from a tradition that holds the Bible to be at the least inerrant, if not infallible. They take the Bible more seriously than us mainliners...so the story goes. Walton is an outlier?

I've come to a place that I don't really care to worship a God that will save me if that God cannot save Walton. And after all, what kind of God would this God be if God cannot and does not save Walton? Now this minister never made the claim that Walton would not be saved. He just proposed that Walton will get the easy way out, that Walton will get around the rules for us, that Walton is the outlier. I don't think I could even worship a God in whose economy of salvation Walton is an outlier. Luckily, I find the Biblical faith to be one that places Walton at the center so I need not choose between my tradition and my intuition.

Read Luke 14:15-24. God throws a banquet. You and I don't go...we're too busy with our jobs, our estates, our families, our well-laid plans. You know who is at the banquet when we don't go? Walton.

God tells us that when we give a banquet we are to invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. Why? Because that is who this God is.

Jesus and Terminator

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 18:58:00 +0000

http://juliamobrien.net/images/stories/jesus-billboard-full2.jpg

The Lectionary's Workings on Me- 9/20

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 23:25:00 +0000

Mark 9:30-37

They went on from there and passed through Galilee. He did not want anyone to know it, for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.

Then they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house, he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” But they were silent, for on the way, they had been arguing with one another who was the greatest. He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me, welcomes not me, but the One who sent me.”

Sermon:

Jesus is “on the way”. “The Son of Man is to be delivered into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after he has been killed he will rise again.”

"I’m going to die. Peter, I’m going to be betrayed and killed. John, they’re going to hand me over and kill me. All of you in the congregation, I’m going to die."

“I’m the greatest there ever was!” says Peter. John responds, “No way, Peter. I’m the greatest!” That is how our passage from the Gospel of Mark goes. These guys are buffoons.

Imagine you and your loved ones gathered around the kitchen table or maybe you are on the telephone because of the great distance that separates you. Mom or brother, daughter or grandfather…one of them says there is something they need to talk with you about. You’ve been nervous all day. You know when Dad makes an appointment to talk that something isn’t right. Finally. They tell you. The silence preceding the words had told you more than the words could tell you. Your beloved is going to die. They are “on the way”.

"I got a promotion at work today! Hey, I got accepted to college! Check out my brand new car!"

This is what happens on the road, “on the way”. Jesus tells them he is going to die, and they argue over who is the greatest. At least they could have just asked what was for dinner. But no, while Jesus is going to die, the disciples argue over who is the greatest. And this is the brilliance of Mark, the Gospel writer. For Mark, there is no division between who Jesus is and how we are to live our lives. When the disciples miss this reality, their failures are exposed for all of us to see. Again, Mark is telling us that from this point on we have to live our lives in light of who Jesus is.

W H Auden, the great American poet, once wrote a poem in which the penultimate stanza stated, “We must love one another or die.” He seemed to be saying that if we loved each other enough, we wouldn’t die. That is a very optimistic view.

Unfortunately, those of us gathered here have no grounds to be optimistic. We, after all, are Christians. Optimism seems to imply that there is a way around death. Christians, like Jesus in today’s passage, believe that we must go through death.

Toward the end of his life W H Auden changed that often quoted line from his poem. It no longer read, “we must love one another or die”. He looked at the world around him and knew that love would not save us from death, only a God who dies for us can save us at all. So he changed it to “we must love one another and die.” He no longer had that optimistic view of the world, that if we would just love each other enough, we wouldn’t have to die. It’s not that way for Jesus. He loves us and dies, and he call us also to love and die.

Remember that scene when Jesus says he is “on the way” and the disciples are
“on the way” with him, that he is going to die so maybe they should stop discussing who is the greatest. Remember how Jesus spoke of this…he said he was going to be “handed over.” Well, a few chapters later Jesus tells the disciples, “As for yourselves, they will hand you over to councils; and you will be beaten in synagogues; and you will stand before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them. And the Good News must first be proclaimed to all nations.” Good News, Jesus? Really, Good News? What in the world is good about this news?

Jesus is telling them they will be beaten in synagogues, where the religious leaders are, and that they will be on trial before governors and kings. They will be beaten and punished by those with religious and political power and yet there is good news?

Peace, safety, that is the kind of news I can get on board with. And the powerful ones give us peace and safety. And power is what controls the world, right? Then Jesus offers death, crucifixion…no I don’t think so. You would have to see the world upside down to think that good news can come from death.

The problem is that Jesus does see the world upside down and so will we if we follow him. You heard him. "The first will be last." "The child is the greatest." This is the world turned upside down.

That child among you. Jesus says that the child among us is the greatest. That if we welcome the child, we welcome Jesus. And if we welcome Jesus, we welcome God. When the child reaches out and touches us, the kingdom of God has come near.

When we think of children, we often times think of them as innocent. Then, once you actually have children you see their mischievous deeds as proof that Adam really did eat the apple.

In the first century in Galilee, a child is not seen in this light. In fact, children are not really seen at all. You know how when we pass by someone who is homeless, sometimes we will pretend that we do not see them? That is how the disciples would have thought of children. Children are those who are without legal rights. They cannot be independent and provide for themselves. They are not of great worth…In fact, they are worth very little. If you want to be held in high regard, you will not welcome strange children into your midst.

And Jesus seems to be telling us in this passage, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name, welcomes God Almighty.” Could God really be revealed in the one without power? In the one without prestige? I thought God was about power, not about weakness.

Before I came to seminary, I spent a year living with 6 people with intellectual disabilities and 6 people without intellectual disabilities. Those of us without disabilities helped those with disabilities to shower, eat, take their medicine, do physical therapy, use the bathroom, dance. Those with disabilities helped us to love, to be peaceful, to listen, to pray, to cry when we needed to, to laugh until our bellies busted.

I spent much of my time that year with a man named Walton. Walton is a 61 year old Cuban-American man, who loves to shake people’s hands, tell stories about his childhood, play with his blocks, and fold newspapers into perfect tri-folds.

Just a year and a couple of days ago when my mom was diagnosed with cancer, I did not feel at home in this world. I needed another world to live in. I needed someone to give me another reality so that I could escape mine just for, just a little bit. So I called Walton. Walton told me the story I have heard and loved 100’s of times before. The translated version is that “his Dad’s Pontiac got into a tremendous crash with a truck. There was a huge 18 wheeler that hit the Pontiac. Walton would always end with, “That was the Pontiac that my dad had.” Now this story is silly and I’m not sure how much of it is factual and that has never been my concern.

In that moment, Walton gave me a world to live in that might have been more real than the world I was currently inhabiting…that world with Pontiac and the huge truck…as he would repeat himself and pause to laugh at his own story… I couldn’t help but be dragged into his world. And that was what I needed to make it through that day. It is through people like Walton who give us a world as we never knew it before. And that seems to be what Jesus is doing by putting a child in the middle. The one who is the lowest of the low is the most important. Construct your world around the ones at the bottom. Make it a world where the low will be brought high, the poor will be rich, where those who are on the outside will be in the middle of it all, where we come together around the one who has no rights, around Walton, around the child that Jesus put in our midst. Do this and maybe the kingdom of God might reach out and touch you.

Ok… so maybe God can be revealed in those who are on the outside, but can God be revealed in death?

Mark seems to tell us yes. Throughout Jesus’ ministry, Peter is the only human who affirms Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God. However, as soon as he gets that right, he rebukes Jesus for predicting his own death. Peter just can’t get it that the one who is the greatest would be the one who is the lowest of the low, the one who does not conquer, but rather, the one who dies.

Now, there is only one other person who identifies Jesus as the Christ. And that is the Roman centurion. This guy was one of the cohort that put Jesus to death. He works for the Roman government that sentenced Jesus to capital punishment. Sure, he was just making a living, but he made a living by preventing others from living. He killed people for a living. There is nothing about him that would make him the right one to understand that Jesus is the savior of the world. There is nothing in him that would help him to come to that conclusion. Except. Except he was there when Jesus died. When the last breath went out of Jesus on the cross, the centurion was given the clarity. The clarity to utter “Truly, this man was the Son of God.” This is the climax of Mark’s Gospel. It is through Jesus’ death that we will see God fully revealed, and sometimes it is that way in our own lives as well.

Some of you know that my Mom died of cancer a few months back… two days before she died she told me, “Matt, I don’t know if I’m going to be healed. Well, I do know that I will be healed. I just don’t know how.” When she said this, she turned the world upside down. Nobody who is still alive actually thinks they will be healed in death, do they?

Johnny, Walton’s older brother, also has the same disability as Walton. He lived at L’Arche with me, or maybe I should say, I lived at L’Arche with him. Every time I would call Johnny while my mom was sick, Johnny would immediately ask “Come esta tu mama?” How is your mother? Since she died the first question he asks is “Como esta tu papa?” How is your dad?

I did not see Johnny for 3 months after my mom died. When I finally made it there to visit and walked into his bedroom, immediately, he looked up and said “WOW! It’s Mateo.” He motioned with his hand and asked me to come near to him. He put his arm around me and pulled my face within inches of his…he was silent for a few seconds. “Mateo”, he said, “I’m sorry about your mama.” We wept. I could not find any words to say, and if I could find them, I wouldn’t have been able to use them.

I have been to schools in my life that claim to be a big deal. I have never had to worry about where my next meal will come from. I have led a pretty privileged life. But God does not tell us that if we want to find God, we should go to elite universities or country clubs or on a cruise to the Caribbean. God tells us that if we want to be touched by the kingdom of God, we are to welcome the child into our midst, that one who is the least among us. And maybe, just maybe, when we do so we will find that it is not we who are welcoming them, but rather they who are welcoming us… and giving us a world that is turned upside down to live in. Jesus tells us in today’s passage that if you welcome the child you welcome Jesus, and when you welcome Jesus, you are actually welcoming God. Again, the child, Johnny, Walton, the homeless man whose name you don’t know, that relative of yours that has wrestled with addiction for what seems like forever, illegal immigrants who have to live in the shadows, those who have been incarcerated, these are the people without rights, the child, around whom this new world is constructed. Can you hear the centurion?

While life with Jesus is not so optimistic as he calls us to die, he also calls us to hope. When in the darkest days of the Apartheid struggle, Desmond Tutu, the Anglican Arch-bishop of Cape Town would say, “There is no basis for optimism, and so we must hope.” Living life with the one on the outside won’t make life easier…and Jesus never claimed it would…but he did say you would meet God. Can you hear the centurion?

I’m going to let you in on a secret. You did not come here today because the God we encounter in this book will make you happy. You came here because the God…in this book…will make you holy. You didn’t come here because when you come to church, you will laugh. You came here because if you are honest, you have plenty of reasons to cry. And last of all, you didn’t come here because this God will keep you from dying. You came here because this God, the God of Israel, the God of Jesus Christ, the God of you, me, and all the people in the world whether they know it or not, this God will make you whole, not by avoiding death, but through it. Can you hear the words of the centurion?

God is inviting us to live into a world turned upside down, in which the hungry are fed, the sick are healed, and the dead are raised.

Back on that road, “on the way”, Jesus didn’t just say he was going to die. Did you notice that? He said, “In three days time I’m going to rise.”

If we travel with Jesus, we will be on the way to Jerusalem, too. On that way, we must love each other and die. On that way, there is no basis for optimism. And so we must hope. A hope founded on the promise that as we will die with Jesus, we also will rise with him. If we listen along that way, those who have known what it is like to suffer, will point us to where we’re going…Walton, Johnny, my mother, some of you in the congregation today...you will be our guides. When we get there, you might hear the centurion, “Truly this was the Son of God.”

And the world will be turned upside down.

Thanks be to God.

Leaving Seasons

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 05:07:00 +0000

I look out the windows that line the hallways outside of mine and Stuart’s bedrooms. Outside I can see the three labs' doghouses. You never let Dad turn them purely into hunting dogs; you never thought anyone should be lacking a little love in their life. You always laughed when Deuce would sit on top of his doghouse and peer inside at you. You always told me so on the phone when I couldn’t be with you. You always thought he did it because he wanted to be seen by you. I always have to.

Where they play, there is a tiny fountain with a little boy sitting atop it, who seems to me comes from a time before ours. In his minimal detail, partly because of make and partly due to the erosion that time brings to us all, he sits calmly perched. I can’t say for sure, but when I was half my current age or less, he was a fisherman. I don’t care to go close enough to inspect it now, but the way I see it in my memory is that he has a small gap between his fingers and his palm. Whoever spotted him without a pole would search the yard for a suitable stick out of the tree above.

It is a Japanese Red Maple.

We went to your memorial service yesterday. I think you were there. After we buried you, we went to the church. While waiting, in a room off to the side for your service to begin, we received a card. Your children, not the ones of us who have retained that title even in our mid 20’s, your Community Bible Study children, they pooled together enough money to buy a Japanese Red Maple for you. For us. Three days ago, when we went by your burial site, you know, that day when I would have to walk off every 5 minutes to wail and tell you that I miss you, Dad had an idea. Since there was a little extra space right next to where you rest and where Dad will one day rest, he wanted to plant a Japanese Red Maple.

It is fall now, and red leaves bring tears to my eyes.

The Night I Came Home

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 03:27:00 +0000

I plodded my way down that creaky hallway passing the cord that hangs down to open the attic, that hall that always sensed my motion and gave it back to me as light. My head bumps the cord now, but it hasn’t always. I had to jump for it when I was a kid, which always prompted mom to say, “just because it’s there.” I did that by day, but I crept by night, desperately wanting to make it to my parent’s bedroom without drawing any attention to myself. I used to have nightmares. As much as I didn’t want to wake my parents as I plopped my covers and pillow down, I really didn’t want that intruder to snatch me on the way. I didn’t jump for the cord at night. I had to be inconspicuous.

I didn’t jump this time either. I stopped 3 or 4 times on that hallway that is a 5 second walk. If I was going to cry, I wanted at least to tell her I love her first. I made it to her bedroom, but she was not to be found. I peered around and saw a light from the bathroom. Noah told her, “Mama, we’ve got a special delivery for you. Your baby is here.” I had to leave behind the obscurity that my shirt sleeve over my eyes offered.

“Hey Mom! I love you…I have missed you a lot.” I have always been a hugger. Mom appreciates that. She has never met a hug she didn’t like. Ever since I stopped staying home 10 years ago, and probably before then, too, if I lingered in the kitchen too long, she would throw her arms around me and sigh that good sigh. I knew that I was leaving myself open to such activity, but I never minded.

But after greeting her, I was too scared to hug her. I don’t know how to these days. I do the mental check every time. Shoulder, neck, hip, spine, lungs, and only God knows where else until her next CT scan. Only, this wasn’t ‘every time’. I had to rush home from New Jersey for a reason.

I leaned in and put my head next to hers. She put her right hand on my face and pushed me toward her, feebly, her hand shaking. The whole time, I don’t think her eyes moved once. She has always had such gentle eyes. Eyes that tear up when I come home or when I leave. To her, it matters if I’m there. She had to release because a cough that was bigger than her had lodged itself in her chest. She didn’t have the force to expel it as she leaned forward convulsing. Mom has always embarrassed easily, or maybe she is just so aware of the other people around-in the caring for them kind of way-that she would step out of a room to blow her nose. The coughing, if you could call it that, ended with saliva emerging from her lower lip and hanging there until cohesion gave way to gravity.

The saliva was absorbed into her rubber ducky pajamas, the ones that make her happy in the hospital. Home seems a lot more like the hospital tonight. I blow my nose repeatedly as mom notes that everybody has had the ‘sniffles’. I tell her that my allergies are acting up. The truth is, I have learned in recent days, that if I concentrate on blowing my nose, I cannot cry quite as violently. It helps not to do that to her. At least, it helps me.

Dad wheels her out of the bathroom in my old rolling desk chair. I take this opportunity to make my one light-hearted comment of the night, “hey I know that chair!” Dad responds, without the tragedy that I hear with it, that they have been using that as her wheelchair chair since the blisters that covered her feet (a side effect of her drugs) were the reason for her immobility.

I went back to the hallway, and I have never left. I live there completely some of the time and I think, always will live there, at least in part.

God's Gender Retribution

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 19:36:00 +0000

I love this.

http://www.inhabitatiodei.com/2009/09/11/why-men-shouldnt-be-ordained/

Disabling Healthcare

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:31:00 +0000

Here is a summary of what I heard from a commentator on NPR today about healthcare. We should not have universal coverage because if all people were forced to or were provided coverage, then some people would not be able to choose not to get health care. In essence, it would corrupt our pure freedom not to get healthcare if other people who cannot afford it were to get health care.

The argument for universal care was that when people are healthy, they can contribute to the economy more. If they are healthy, they will get more done. If they are healthy, they will be able to bolster and participate in what George Bush declared to be the primary patriotic activity…to go out and shop. Or, if the implication is not that people are reduced to their consumptive ability, then they are reduced to their productive capabilities. What a poor vision of humanity! While what I take most offense to is the explicit anthropology of a Liberal democracy…not the “worth of the individual” as most proponents claim to espouse, but rather the destruction of God’s image that is indelibly stamped upon us. A human being is not of any value because that human being is simply is or because that human is a creature made by a Creator and bearing that Creator’s image, but rather, we must produce our own worthy in order to have health and health care. This is why the assertion that “America is the last best hope for the world,” (put forth by Obama, McCain, and Clinton during the election cycle) is so misguided and nihilistic. America and Liberal democracies cannot offer a robust vision of human life flourishing, only a utilitarian market of commodities and commodified individuals. For this reason, we are not to put our hope in nations, governments, rulers, economies, and militaries. If we were to listen to who they say we are, there would be no intrinsic value in life itself.

Despite my great aversion to this view of humanity framed by the health care debate, the greatest irony is that it betrays Adam Smith’s vision of a free market. He saw the market as functional for humanity, not humanity as functional for and subservient to the economy. The capitalists need to find that not only are they forfeiting the beauty of human life, they are distorting their own roots. Though in the end, I suppose they have shown us the truth of market economies, that if we look to them for our worth and our identity, we will find that we have no roots. If we choose to stand alone, then it will be to our own detriment.

And finally my last claim is that we need the church in order to sustain human life, or at least the God that the church often fails to give witness to. Under the working anthropology of the free market and the commentators on healthcare today, we are no different from the Third Reich in regard to people with disabilities. They had a program to exterminate all people with disabilities because they were a perverted version of humanity, because they cannot provide and consume like we can, because they are a scar and an eyesore on humanity. The free market has no resources to offer a rebuttal. If the reason for giving people healthcare is because of the bottom line. If numbers tell more about our worth than our very existence, then we have no intellectual or moral resources to sustain care for those with disabilities. To be sure, this group of people often times cost us a lot of money, to be crude about it. I took Walton to a lot of doctor’s appointments while I was at L’Arche. He never produced enough artwork to pay for these bills. He was not “worth his care”.

The only hope for us is that the church tells us that Walton is not just important in and of himself, but he is important for our us and our salvation, that he is important to the exterior and interior life of God. This is not meant to be a perverted reduction of Walton for us to get our own ends. Instead, the God of Jesus Christ tells us that if we are to come near to God, we must come close to Walton. We can only be ourselves when we are part of a creation that is reconciled to each other. We cannot have life and God without making sure Walton has life. And we cannot have salvation unless Walton has life. Said another way, we are all in this together, the weak and the strong, the articulate and the mute, the entitled and the un-entitled, the abled and the disabled. I know this because I have been loved by Walton.

"Christian Books"

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:10:00 +0000

Just got an email from Amazon entitled "Best-sellers in Christian Books". Nevermind the fact that few of the books seemed Christian at all. I was intrigued by a book named "Game Plan for Life: Your Personal Playbook for Sucess" by Joe Gibbs. The product description goes on to say:

Three-time Super Bowl and NASCAR champion Joe Gibbs’s Game Plan for Life is an “average Joe’s” guide to what the Bible has to say about the 11 most-important topics for men. Topics such as: finances, relationships, living a life of purpose, finding the right vocation, physical, emotional, and spiritual health, and overcoming sin and addictions. Edited by Jerry Jenkins, and featuring contributions from Randy Alcorn, Ravi Zacharias, John Lennox, Tony Evans, Chuck Colson, Josh McDowell, Don Meredith, Walt Larimore, Ron Blue, Ken Boa, and Os Guinness.

Anyone notice a topic they are missing that the Bible is kind of big on? God???
Jesus' exhortation to his followers to carrying their crosses seems to have little about making plans or personal success...how do these books pass as Christian?

Also I didn't realize that God makes altogether different claims on the lives of men as opposed to women...where in the Bible should I look for the 11 most important topics for women? Hopefully theirs at least includes God...maybe I'll have to get a sex change if God is important and I want to be "Christian" like these guys.

On the wisdom and foolishness of attending seminary-excerpt from a letter to a friend

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 21:39:00 +0000

Congrats on your accomplishments with all the work you have been doing. That must be gratifying. I suppose I believe now more than ever that odd things (or maybe better said would be "peculiar, unexpected things") come to us in life that in some ways change us but in deeper ways tell us about who we have been moving toward long before. Perhaps the great realization is when words or life or friends come to us in a way that echoes to something that has more whispered than rumbled within us. That is how I think many of the turning points in my life have come to be. Maybe they are nothing more than sign posts, but ever greater because of that. I write all of this not because anything in our conversation has necessarily stirred you. Much has been stirring within you for a while, that is for sure. I am just grateful that you listen to it, or question it (not in the skeptic's way, but in the way that Job indicts God to be God), or that you simply inhabit it.

If seminary is something that you are to pursue, it will more than likely pursue you. We can choose our hobbies, but it is hard to do that with passions. To be worthwhile, I think they need to be bigger than we are. I never have nor will I gain absolute certainty that I should be in seminary for certainties rarely comprehend and most often betray Certainty. That said, it is not foolish, or maybe it is the right kind of foolish, to throw ourselves into something new on a hunch, a nudging. Certainties we like to claim with science, safety we think we are afforded by the government or 401k's, but the only reason to even consider seminary would be if there just might be a God about whom we can't be certain and with whom we can't feel altogether safe. Good news often is bad news to us before it is good. And certainties are only worth their weight when there is nothing we can't comprehend. This move seems to make the world static to me, bite-size. Maybe I just like mystery, or maybe it is because miracles seem more true than the mundane, but I am only in seminary because I believe in a Living God. That sort of foolishness might be the primary requisite for seminary, and if not a belief, an imagination puts you close.

...

Also, I love the quote that you sent. It strikes me that out of all the fantastical-ness of fairy tales, what they are most trying to communicate is that each stumble, each detail, each insignificant component of our lives is the locus of such immeasurable worth. Fairy tales are not meant to remove us from the world, but to move us into the world with the eyes of a child and with wisdom that can only be gained by living as one, fully thrusting ourselves into the world.

Competing Anthropologies

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 17:50:00 +0000

A couple of days ago I was listening to NPR. I like NPR because they often times manage to escape the trap that we humans often fall into of turning a thick, robust, so full of life that it is bubbling over sort of world into a thin, single-layered, reductionistic world in which we can explain how something happens and then manipulate this world that wouldn't be worth living in if it were true.

That said, there was a show on marital infidelity and its causes. They had psychologists, sociologists, even a guy who runs a website for married people who are looking for an affair with another married person. However, don't fear, as he explained, he is only a business man. He is not doing anything immoral. I think his presupposition is that the free market is a sphere void of any worries of morality, only governed by unbridled cravings thanks to our split spheres of private and public. He claims he is only allowing people who had this desire to connect in a safer way that doesn't tangle unwed folks into this mess as well. However, just a couple of minutes before, it was stated that the incidence of marital infidelity increases greatly with opportunity. Sure, there might have been an inkling before, but they can jump over all those steps of second guessing when the website will deliver extra-marital sex to them and then put the billing on their credit card under an alias, like GFI Media, or something like that. That way, when our spouse looks at your credit card bill, she won't know. Sadly, when the psychologists and sociologists were asked about what they thought about this guy, they had no recourse. "He is smart, way ahead of me. I never would have thought of that." Of course, this "business man" also wanted to ask us to re-consider whether monogamy is an archaic outdated arrangement for us modern people. I love that as consumers whose desires are endless, we never question our working anthropologies, only any external system that might limit our omniverous selves. After all, the modern world tells us that nothing external or greater than us can tell us truth. Truth is in us. We are our own arbitors of truth.

Studies show that the main causes for extramarital affairs are stess and boredom. Never once was our assumption about what marriage is questioned. The self needs variety and the self cannot receive too much stress. If that happens, the self will look for a more interesting, or less known self, than the self that (s)he has already committed to. What really got me was when the "business man" empathized with the millions of adulterers who are unhappy because they are not getting enough sex in their marriage. "After all", he said, "these people did not agree to a sex-less marriage." And that is precisely the point! They did not agree to a sex-less marriage. They did not agree to a marriage with an abundance of sex either. They agreed (and committed to) in sickness and in health, till death do we part. This is a peculiarly un-modern claim that is made on the life of an individual which presupposes an alternative anthropology than the one employed by the psychologist, sociologist, and business man. All three of these people mentioned that the problem was that these people weren't happy , of which boredom and stress were merely manifestations. Yet no one, despite the wealth of data and experience about the myth and bankrupt notion of perpetual, chronic happiness, no, not a single one of them said, "well maybe happiness isn't what it's all about." Why? Because the modern world says that is what it is all about. Before any claim can be made on my life in the form of a duty or a respinsiblity, I, yes, I, must be happy. Then maybe we can talk.

I turn to Hauerwas and Willimon in Resident Aliens who tell us Christians that we live in a peculiar narrative, in which we are not called to be happy, but holy. And to be sure, holiness makes a claim on the self not just at the expense of the self (though for modern people it will feel that way), but for the very sake of the self. So if you're a Christian and you're bored or stressed...too bad. Who told you that you were condemned to perpetual happiness anyway? Is it good to be joyful sometimes? Absolutely. But when happiness is our ultimate ideal, and not the holiness of God, remember where you came from, and remember to where you are to go.

My Last Letter to My Mother

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 03:21:00 +0000

There is a story from when I was larger than life but as fragile as always. I was 4 years old and enrolled at First Christian Pre-School. That day it rained. Not too much to lock us inside and not too little to make it safe to be chased by girls. And so it happened. Branch, Chad, Bennett, and I, those four rapscallions alternately dressed as cowboys or wearing our shirts with our arms through the holes but with the rest of the shirt pulled behind our head (in order to or incidentally showing the chests that one day would have enough or little enough hair to count), we scampered across the enormous schoolyard that has become much more diminutive as I have revisited that place and that day and as hairs have slowly populated my now covered chest.

I don’t know who started telling the story or who first imprinted it upon us before it became etched. It might not matter so much who first gave it life because it is made of the stuff of life and now has a life all its own. Stories are that way. No single one of us tells it. All of us do. And it tells all of us, too.

I am still that boy, alternately thought of as a man in my late forties and a boy who is 4 and 1/4 years old. But I was actually born 24 years and a week ago by a mother whom I cry about often these days. That same mother, my only mother, did not receive a phone call that afternoon when hormones (or a lack thereof) still propelled me in the opposite direction of girls. Branch and I split off and took different paths in hopes of discouraging our pony-tailed potential captors from pursuing any longer. As all three of them, who to the best of my recollection likely had names that ended in double consonants and a “y” followed in my wake, I darted left in hopes of leaving behind the sure footing of the asphalt for the rough and tumble muddy, rocky terrain where we always rounded up the hooligans to keep the schoolyard free of outlaws. But not this time. Their girlish instincts quickly turned motherly when they caught up with the 4 year old boy with one less elbow in tact.

My mom, who had been at home with the intuition that settles and unnerves one’s stomach before rising and welling up in one’s throat, felt it was time to make her first unscheduled visit to First Christian. She was sent by the senses of truth far more guttural and from the gut and perhaps more precise than ways of knowing transmitted through words. What I felt in my elbow, she felt deep down in her motherly being.

I don’t remember much beyond this scene. I remember the fall, the miracle, truth embodied, and the tears. It was not a tissue or even my mom’s hands that wiped away my tears but her. At my height, her hug engulfed me and I imagine it was the vicinity where her stomach would almost touch her heart where my tears were absorbed.

The tears were done for then but they sputtered for days. I laid at home unable to eat a lot, and unable to eat at all without her hand acting as one of mine. Those next two days we went to at least two doctors who told me that I had bruised my elbow and that the pain would subside even when I protested with my boyish intuition and the intimacy of having this truth in my own body that my elbow was not ok. It was broken. It needed to be put right. And I couldn’t do it myself. I was 4!

I don’t blame them for not believing me. People often don’t, and not just about elbows. I got lecture after lecture about being the boy who cried wolf because there would be a time that no one would come running if I kept with my stories. My stories got bigger with time, I’ll admit it, but it was not without reason. I was terrified when people would come after me with the intent of making me uncomfortable in my body, whether it was my brothers in search of entertainment, getting a spanking me for what I had done or hadn’t done, or a 4 year old girl named Molly on a rainy afternoon. It didn’t really matter.

I have always felt things more strongly than many people seem to feel the things of life. For most of my life, only my mom has still believed my stories. Maybe because she felt the same things or at least the same way. Or maybe we were part of the same story.

There was another story I would tell most nights until the age of 10. The same intruder, or different ones, (it doesn’t so much matter, they weren’t the point of it) would lurk outside my bedroom and would leave me just enough time to scamper back to my parents bedroom where I could be safe between their bodies as they exchanged the rest that came their way through sleep for my rest that came from being sandwiched between them.

Prompted by some fantastical storytelling of my current agony, my mom and I trekked from doctor to doctor in search of the good news that indeed something was wrong. I prayed that someone would tell me that something was wrong, that I wasn’t a liar, or at least that I wasn’t just a liar. I wanted someone to tell me that the truth of my elbow, of my mom’s stomach and throat, of each of our bodies, of all of our bodies was that indeed something is just not right. There was hope in that. Something was right, though, when they all told me no and sent me to my mom’s embrace where my tears would disappear into her motherly enfolding embrace.

Twenty years later I still cry. My elbow was fixed a long time ago, and I have not been to the doctor for even a check-up in two years. But my mom has. Her tears have to do with a kidney and a shoulder, but even more to do with being a mom. And mine have to do with being a son. Just like twenty years ago.

These days for some reason people sometimes come to me as if I were that doctor. I think they ask out of the same fear that drove my stories to be unbelievable. They all say with different words, “Matt, something must be wrong. Why does it have to be your mom? Please tell me this isn’t right. Tell me this isn’t it, that this isn’t true, that this isn’t truth. I want to know that the truth of our lives, of our stories, of our tears do not end here. Where does it all go?”
I have a lot of words and none at all. The best words I have are “It is not right. But it, as all things, will be. It will all be put right.” But as all words fall short, I tell this truth in tears. Something about flesh tells truth deeper than words.

Around 100 times as long ago as when I was 4, another mother held a child somewhere near the place where my mom’s intuition is located. That child was born unto her, brought into the world by a mother as all of us were who are a child to someone. And that child, who had truth in his body like you and me and my mom, and who was truth embodied, bore much. In the fragility of broken bones and bodies and worlds, he passed into the vast abyss of death, of nothingness, and out of the barrenness of it all has born all of us into life through and beyond death. I suppose that story has been telling our story all along and will someday reveal itself as the story toward which our stories have been moving since before they began.

Frederick Buechner to Me

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 19:10:00 +0000

"God speaks to us through our lives, we often too easily say. Something speaks anyway, spells out some sort of godly or godforsaken meaning to us through the alphabet of our years, but often it takes many further spellings out before we start to glimpse, or think we do, a little of what that meaning is. Even then we glimpse it only dimly, like the first trace of dawn on the rim of night, and even then it is a meaning that we cannot fix and be sure of once and for all because it is always incarnate meaning and thus as alive and changing as we are ourselves alive and changing.

A child takes life as it comes because he has no other way of taking it. The world had come to and end that Saturday [Sunday] morning, but each time we had moved to another place, I had seen a world come to an end, and there had always been another world to replace it. When somebody you love dies, Mark Twain said, it is like when your house burns down; it isn't for years that you realize the full extent of your loss. For me it was longer than for most, if indeed I have realized it fully even yet, and in the meantime the loss came to get buried so deep in me that after a time I scarcely took it out to look at it at all, let alone to speak of it. If anybody ever asked me how my father died, I would say heart trouble. That seemed at least a version of the truth. He had a heart. It had been troubled."

Her heart was full though. She knew trouble but lived in peace.

Dom Christian de Cherge

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:28:00 +0000

I read this "Testament" of Dom Christian de Cherge in college in a course on Monastic Life. He wrote it in anticipation of his murder. He and his monastic brothers lived in a volatile Algeria, living peacefully with local Muslims, but persecuted by militant groups. They considered leaving upon repeated threats to their lives, but they decided to remain true to their vows and stay. If they were to leave, then their Muslim neighbors might not be fed as they were when these monks shared their food with their malnourished neighbors. They also allowed the local people to use their sanctuary since they lacked a mosque. So here is his address, a pre-emptive offering of peace to his murderer.

When an “A-DIEU” takes on a face.
If it should happen one day—and it could be today—
that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to engulf
all the foreigners living in Algeria,
I would like my community, my Church, my family,
to remember that my life was GIVEN to God and to this country.
I ask them to accept that the Sole Master of all life
was not a stranger to this brutal departure.
I ask them to pray for me—
for how could I be found worthy of such an offering?
I ask them to be able to link this death with the many other deaths which
were just as violent, but forgotten through indifference and anonymity.
My life has no more value than any other.
Nor any less value.
In any case it has not the innocence of childhood.
I have lived long enough to know that I am an accomplice in the evil
which seems, alas, to prevail in the world,
even in that which would strike me blindly.
I should like, when the time comes, to have the moment of lucidity
which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God
and of my fellow human beings,
and at the same time to forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me
down.
I could not desire such a death.
It seems important to state this.
I do not see, in fact, how I could rejoice
if the people I love were to be accused indiscriminately of my murder.
To owe it to an Algerian, whoever he may be,
would be too high a price to pay for what will, perhaps, be called, the “grace of
martyrdom,”
especially if he says he is acting in fidelity to what he believes to be Islam.
I am aware of the scorn which can be heaped on Algerians indiscriminately.
I am also aware of the caricatures of Islam which a certain Islamism encourages.
It is too easy to salve one’s conscience
By identifying this religious way with the fundamentalist ideologies of the
extremists.
For me, Algeria and Islam are something different: they are a body and a soul.
I have proclaimed this often enough, I believe, in the sure knowledge of what I
have received from it,
finding there so often that true strand of the Gospel,
learnt at my mother’s knee, my very first Church,
already in Algeria itself, in the respect of believing Muslims.
My death, clearly, will appear to justify
those who hastily judged me naïve, or idealistic:
“Let him tell us now what he thinks of it!”
But these people must realize that my avid curiosity will then be satisfied.
This is what I shall be able to do, if God wills—
immerse my gaze in that of the Father,
and contemplate with him his children of Islam just as he sees them,
all shining with the glory of Christ,
the fruit of His Passion, and filled with the Gift of the Spirit,
whose secret joy will always be to establish communion
and to refashion the likeness, playfully delighting in the differences.
For this life lost, totally mine and totally theirs,
I thank God who seems to have willed it entirely
for the sake of that joy in everything and in spite of everything.
In this THANK YOU, which sums up my whole life to this moment,
I certainly include you, friends of yesterday and today,
and you, my friends of this place,
along with my mother and father, my sisters and brothers and their families,
the hundredfold granted as was promised!
And also you, the friend of my final moment, who would not be aware of what you
were doing.
Yes, I also say this THANK YOU and this A-DIEU to you, in whom I see the face
of God.
And may we find each other, happy good thieves, in Paradise, if it pleases God,
the Father of us both. Amen. In sha ‘Allah.

Algiers, December 1, 1993 – Tibhirine, January 1, 1994.

Also, if you care to learn more about this, then you can read a short article by my favorite college professor. Search "dom christian de cherge testament plank". It is the third link. Great article.

Hauerwas might like Stringfellow

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 05:20:00 +0000

“A most obstinate misconception associated with the gospel of Jesus Christ is that the gospel is welcome in this world. The conviction endemic among church folk persists that, if problems of misapprehension and misrepresentation are overcome and the gospel can be heard in its own integrity, the gospel will be found attractive by people, become popular and even be a success of some sort.
This idea is curious and ironical because it is bluntly contradicted in Scripture and in the experience of the continuing biblical witness in history from the event of Pentecost unto the present moment. During Jesus’ earthly ministry, no one in His family and not a single one of his disciples accepted Him, believed His vocation or loved the gospel He bespoke and embodies.
Since the rubrics of success, power, or gain are impertinent to the gospel, the witness of the saints looks foolish where it is most exemplary.”

-William Stringfellow

Amusing Ourselves to Death

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 04:48:00 +0000

"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us."

-Neil Postman

Surprise and Wonder

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 00:46:00 +0000

"I would say about individuals, an individual dies when he ceases to be surprised. I am surprised every morning that I see the sun shine again. When I see an act evil I'm not accommodated. I don't accommodate myself to the violence that goes on everywhere; I'm still surprised. That's why I'm against it, why I can hope against it. We must learn how to be surprised. Not to adjust ourselves. I am the most maladjusted person in society."

-Abraham Joshua Heschel

The Jesus who isn't for modern people

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 05:20:00 +0000

I realize that most of my time here in seminary I have made a claim for the God whose agency is determinative of the unfolding story of salvation. I do not contend that we are puppets, and I depart significantly from Calvin's view of providence as I think storytelling is a far better tool for speaking of God than "omni"-words. What I do believe though is that Jesus Christ came to save sinners. I have encountered far too many people who have made themselves righteous through a "personal decision" that they made. Surely they would say that Jesus laid the groundwork, but in the end, he only set up the pins so they could knock them all down. Jesus might have died for them, but they had to accept him for that reality to penetrate theirs. Thus, they are the true actors. Such an obsession with personal agency and self-determination is hard to name because it is what our culture embraces and glorifies; it is all around us. You can become whatever you want. You can pick yourself up by the bootstraps. You can make something out of yourself. You can be all you can be. You can choose your destiny. What if that weren't true? If it weren't true, the modern way of being in the world is a sham. I figure this prism is pretty accurate in the kingdoms of America, capitalism, academia, and the army, but it doesn't hold up so well in the stories that Jesus tells about the kingdom of God. The God we hear about in the Bible leaves the 99 sheep behind to go get the one that wandered off. This God throws a party when a lost coin is found. This God goes and get the poor and the lame and brings them to the banquet without even asking them if that is ok first. This God goes to town and gets all of the unemployed people and puts them to work in his vineyard before paying the lazy people the same amount as the hardworkers. This God runs out to the field to greet the prodigal son and cuts him off before he can even explain and apologize. This God is the Samaritan who is the last person we ever wanted to save us even when we are bloody, beaten, and on death's door. But this God does not respect our personal right of autonomy. This God offends such modern sensibilities and takes us unto God-self. You might even say it is coercive. This God surely does not knock and wait. This God brings salvation to those who are awake and to those who are asleep. This kingdom sounds a lot different. This Jesus loves to save sinners.

Exegetical Danger

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 01:00:00 +0000

I rarely enjoy writing papers all that often as my thought sometimes do not cohere well or follow sequentially in an organized way. However, I really enjoyed writing a couple papers recently. Here is one of them. It is necessarily boring at the beginning because of the assignment, but hopefully it picks up. At the risk of regretting putting it on here, here it goes:

Mark 1:1-11

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, Son of God. Just as it had been written in the prophet Isaiah, “Behold I am sending my messenger before your face who will prepare your way. A voice crying out in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.’ ” John came baptizing in the wilderness and preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And all the Judean countryside went out to him and all of Jerusalem and they were being baptized in him in the Jordan River confessing their sins. And John was wearing camel’s hair and a leather belt around his waist and eating locusts and wild honey. And he preached saying, “the one stronger than me comes after me, and I am not worthy to stoop down and loosen the strap of his sandals. I baptized you with water, but he will baptize you in the Holy Spirit.

And in those days it happened that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized in the Jordan by John. And immediately coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens tear open and the spirit came down like a dove toward him. And a voice came from heaven and said, “You are my son, the beloved, in you I delight.”

This passage gives the reader an introduction to the story of Jesus Christ. The first sentence is more of a title while the next 10 verses begin to set the scene as a prologue. While many of those who encountered Jesus during his life were unaware of the fullness of who Jesus was, the author of Mark holds nothing back. In the title Jesus Christ is described as the Son of God, which happens to be a significant textual variant, but its inclusion indicates that either Mark or an editor wanted us to be aware of this reality before we even entered the story. Apparently this information is necessary or at least helpful to grasp fully the weight of the narrative that will unfold. Though the reader is not lost without the inclusion of “Son of God” in the first verses as in the next 10 verses, we find four different revelations of the significance of this figure of Jesus Christ, as we have an Old Testament quotation, heavens tearing open, a dove descending and a voice speaking (Mark 1:2-3 and 10-11). To be spoken of as the Christ carries with it connotations of being the anointed one or the Messiah (Hooker, 34).

The function of this epilogue is not to create a mini-narrative in itself but to set the stage for the Christ event in the following chapters. The emphasis of this pericope is particularly Christological. This passage is peculiar because it is rare for Mark to have a divine intercession such as “tearing open the heavens” or declaring Jesus “My son, the beloved” (Hooker, 31). An account of John and Jesus, its importance as part of the larger body of the work is to invite the hearer into the narrative that follows. It is connected back to Old Testament writing and moves forward to new developments, but a first-time hearer of this text would take interest in this prologue not just as preparation for what is to come but as revelation in itself.

That this work begins with a prologue is worth noting. Much of modern literature does not function in this way. For Mark, it would have been unthinkable not to set the stage or the drama that will unfold. In the introduction they immediately receive the reason for waiting to hear the rest of the story. They hear, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, Son of God” (Mark 1:1).

The book of Mark in the Christian canon was recorded as a way of recounting the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ in order to teach and preach this good news to others. This book would have been read aloud to a group of people, many of whom could not read and most of whom could not afford a copy of their own. This work would have been read to edify those gathered as the underlying belief of the author is that this story necessarily changes their stories because in the end, this good news of Jesus Christ is the story, their story. While this book is biographical, it is framed so as to evoke an awareness that “Jesus stands at the end of a line of salvation-historical fulfillment” following from Isaiah’s prophecy and through John the Baptist (Marcus, 137).

Following the title, verses 2-8 introduce John the Baptist, starting with an Old Testament prophecy that seemingly hearkens to the preparation for the Lord that is John’s work. Then we encounter this memorable figure of John with all the makings of a wild man attracting crowds who do not belong in this territory. John preaches and baptizes those who come to the Jordan, which then gives way to the particular baptism of Jesus. Jesus enters the scene as an outsider from Galilee, an ethnic other and perhaps a religious other as well, at least in the eyes of many gathered with John (France, 34). In this baptism we find peoples of different lands present for the announcement of God’s Son in human flesh, presumably by God.

In connecting John to the Old Testament and as the one who will prepare the way to Jesus, Mark also connects Jesus to the story of the people of Israel. Jesus is not just the Son of God that has appeared from Galilee, but he is the son who faithful (and sometimes unfaithful, or at long-suffering) Israelites have yearned for in our Scripture. Giving Jesus a context before introducing him is helpful, but giving him a context that will connect with a particular people is of great help in evangelizing or spreading this good news.

The word “euannelion” is rich with entendres. The verbal form is found in the Septuagint as a declaration of the good news of a military victory (2 Samuel 4:10 and Boring, 30). Good news comes by way of death, power, and conflict. Closer to Mark’s time and context, good news would have been about the peace and prosperity resulting from military victory (Donahue, 60). The Pax Romana would have been the arbiter of this good news. Finally, there would have been a usage of declaring the good news that today is the emperor’s birthday, and by the way, it is good news because the emperor is god (Donahue, 60). Caesar, your messiah, is the reason for your good news.

One can imagine the collision of worlds and of meaning when Mark proclaims this “good news of Jesus Christ, Son of God.” Warfare, kings, genocide, booty, oppression, and idolatry-the whole messy lot-are alluded to in this one Greek word, “euannelion”. It tells us of the riches and peace that is made ours through the slaughtering of the ethnic or religious others. It tells us of the claim that abundance can only come at the expense of another, that scarcity always has been our ordering principle, and that if life is to be had, it must be frantically snatched out of the jaws of death. This is good news, right?

Now we turn to Jesus, a man whom Mark does not allow us to meet without meeting him as the Son of God. This Jesus who comes not to kill, to get rich, or to obtain power but rather to be the recipient of a baptism, the hearer of a divine word, and a wanderer in the wilderness. This Son of God does not employ great agency in this prologue nor will he in the passion narrative (Mark 15:33-41). Here he is baptized, the heavens are torn open, and he is declared the Son of God. There he is crucified, cries out having been forsaken, and the curtain in the temple is torn. In Mark’s telling of the crucifixion, Jesus is finally again declared the Son of God, and of all people, it is a Roman soldier, his mocker, persecutor, and executor, who makes this declaration. The scandal continues. The artistic genius employed is the striking parallel in the adaptation of this good news in reference Jesus of Nazareth. As the Son of God, Jesus wields a great yet subversive power and destroys most everything that is (or at least destroys our perceptions through their transformation) including death itself as he appears to his disciples and proclaims this good news, the good news (Mark 16:14-15).

“Erhmos”, while seemingly just a geographical term either speaking of a desert or a wilderness, carries with it much potential for resonance with the people of Israel. When Israel is freed from bondage under the oppressive hand of Pharaoh in Egypt, they flee to the wilderness (Exodus 15:22). They go to the wilderness just as they had pleaded with Pharaoh to let them do when they desired to worship and sacrifice to their God (Exodus 5:1-3). The wilderness is a place where the Israelites were never able to put down roots, constantly wandering. They lacked all of the resources that would allow them to survive without a Living God. Their neediness put them in a position that would likely engender radical obedience toward the one who provided for them. However, the outcome was quite the opposite. The people turned away from God even in the wilderness. Then, once God was on the verge of doling out some well-deserved punishment, they would remind God to take it easy on them because after all, he was the one who freed them from bondage and led them to the wilderness. Because God had provided for them before, they called on God to have mercy on them and provide for them again. God’s goodness was being used against God. So since this God was the one who led them out of slavery and into the wilderness, it would only be fitting that Mark introduces us to God’s Son (or God incarnate) in the wilderness. We are met by Jesus of Nazareth in the wilderness, our wilderness.

In the wilderness John puts on this religious event, but the wilderness is a tumultuous place, full of shifty-eyed folk or at least the likes of wild beasts and Satan (Mark 1:13). The wilderness is hardly safe. To encounter this text in a fresh way, we first must understand that it seems odd that Jesus is found in such a dangerous place, but for Mark (and Jesus) it might have been the only way. Where else could such a volatile, figure such as Jesus who cleanses lepers, heals the blind and sick, and in so doing challenges the Lordship of Caesar without even needing to use words, come to the stage (Mark 1:40-45, 2:1-12, and 6:53-56)? He is too dangerous himself to be located anywhere other than the wilderness. Once he goes to the cities, he will then be executed for not letting things remain as they are, the comfortable, familiar way (Mark 15:21-32).

“Metanoia” is the Greek word we translate as repentance in the Christian tradition, but it also has mundane evocations such as “turning around and walking the other way”. While we often think of baptism as new citizenship or a new vocation, both of which I value greatly, something else is revealed by seeing a “baptisms metanoias” in Mark 1. That very baptism does not change where one is or where one goes. The idea of turning around actually invites and calls us to traipse along the very terrain upon which the need for repentance, sin, has emerged. Our new vocation, like Jesus’, is not to go straight into the Promised Land but to go back into the wilderness (Mark 1:12). As we turn away from our sin and are cleansed of it, we walk right out of the Jordan River through the muddy banks and into the wilderness where danger lurks, where hardship befalls us, where we befall ourselves. Baptism is going back to the same territory with a new allegiance, walking into and through the internal and external dangers because the one before you has made that path straight (Mark 1:2-3). As we trek along, we do so with an acknowledgment that the government-sanctioned stories of war, wealth, and power are powerless because our journey in the wilderness is not just trodden but also redeemed. We walk in the light of Christ’s resurrection.

While Matthew offers a similar account of Jesus’ baptism, he stops short of actually telling us of John baptizing Jesus, perhaps because it is almost embarrassing; he only tells that it happened after reluctance (Matthew 3:13-16). Matthew creates a greater juxtaposition between groups by having John the Baptist dress down the Pharisees and Sadducees (Matthew 3:7-10). While Matthew makes it abundantly clear that Jesus has come to disrupt the powers that exist, Mark pushes the theme of the universality in what is occurring and how Jesus breaks down these barriers of ethnicity, region, and maybe even religion, though the qualities are hardly distinct from one another (Mark 1:6-7). Luke connects this message of John and Jesus’ baptism with one of social commandments (Luke 3:10-14) and in turn directly links, if only chronologically, Jesus’ praying with the heavens opening (Luke 3:21-22). These three visions offer complimentary rather than necessarily contradictory accounts in which Jesus, in his good news, takes on a variety of vocations in subverting powers that be, speaking for the voiceless, and reconciling all to each other.

The scandal is that this particular good news collides with all other news that claims to be good. What John the Baptist was doing out in the wilderness was not unique. The Essenes had been baptizing people in the wilderness, effectually making this symbolic ritual tired and trite. Such repetition with expectations continually unfulfilled could just as likely create a greater anticipation as the people wonder, “Could this finally be the real thing? I cannot bear to bear my despair once more.” It is not novelty that gives us a desperate desire for hope but rather disappointment, hopes deferred or denied.

A western frontier man, two parts Paul Bunyan and one part John Wayne, wrangles the collection of distinguished and rag tag folks together: some Jews from New York City, Amish from Lancaster County Pennsylvania, and off in the distance a Catholic Mexican migrant appears and is baptized. The only functional part of the scene is that they would all be so dysfunctional were they not gathered in Nowhere, Appalachia. The only reason why Jesus is not told he does not belong there is because they do not belong there either, and also, because he does belong there. Meek, perhaps he is, but he is also dangerous, even in the wilderness, for he challenges all the prejudices informed by our particulars of culture and kingdom and our selective proof-texting of Sacred writings. National boundaries, ethnic background, language, and religious proprieties-he does not respect any of it simply because he shows up. Luckily after we are hit over the head with the insult to injury that he also happens to be the Son of God, he is cast off back into the wilderness where we wanted him to stay all along, where he has always belonged, where we, if we are honest with ourselves, have been since the beginning of things. Offensively, we find that this journey into the wilderness will culminate with someone having to atone for all of our business that we could not take care of ourselves. The one who did not belong among us is the same one who puts right what we cannot. His putting things right means that we could not, and we are not who we tell ourselves we are when we look in the mirror in hopes of making through another day with our masks in tact. The change he thrusts upon the world, upon us, feels as good as the refining of metal in burning away the impurities. He is dangerous enough to disrupt even the good news that Caesar or the President or the evening news gives us, and he does it all as this offensively insignificant farmer from Chiapas.

Perhaps the real scandal is that even more than it was all wrong, it was even more right. This Messiah stuff is all too embarrassing for Jerusalem or Rome. Let’s go to the wilderness where none of us lives, from which none of us can escape, that place where Danger lurks.

“Safe?… Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the king, I tell you” (Lewis, 86).

A Creation that Creates

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 06:26:00 +0000

How I love this poem by Hafiz.

I know the voice of depression
Still calls to you.

I know those habits that can ruin your life
Still send their invitations.

But you are with the Friend now
And look so much stronger.

You can stay that way
And even bloom!

Keep squeezing drops of the Sun
From your prayers and work and music
And from your companions' beautiful laughter.

Keep squeezing drops of the Sun
From the sacred hands and glance of your Beloved
And, my dear,
From the most insignificant movements
Of your own holy body.

Learn to recognize the counterfeit coins
That may buy you just a moment of pleasure,
But then drag you for days
Like a broken man
Behind a farting camel.

You are with the Friend now.
Learn what actions of yours delight Him,
What actions of yours bring freedom
And Love.

Whenever you say God's name, dear pilgrim,
My ears wish my head was missing
So they could finally kiss each other
And applaud all your nourishing wisdom!

O keep squeezing drops of the Sun
From your prayers and work and music
And from your companions' beautiful laughter

And from the most insignificant movements
Of your own holy body.

Now, sweet one,
Be wise.
Cast all your votes for Dancing!

Electoral Hermeneutics

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 04:04:00 +0000

Yesterday, someone asked me about an email they received that I might be able to clarify as a seminarian. The email said, "the Book of Revelation tells us that the antichrist will be a man in his 40's of Muslim descent: Barack Obama."

First of all, "antichrist" only appears four times in the Bible. Three of these references are in 1 John and the other reference in in 2 John. The closest "relative" to the antichrist found in Revelation would be "the beast". Many would say that the beast that oppressed John was the Roman Empire. In fact, he was writing the book of Revelation while exiled by the Roman Empire! Thus, if you wanted to see this beast as relevant to our times, the best substitute for Rome would be America. As Eddie Izard tells us, Rome and America are the only two empires ever to have their citizens put their hands over their hearts while singing the national anthem. (Nevermind the fact that we glorify violence and destruction in our national anthem...or that our ritual of patriotism is to "go out and shop"...or that the biggest supporters of capital punishment are religious folks who worship a God that was a victim of capital punishment by "the beast." The good news is that we make the top 6 for enforcing the death penalty. We share the honor with China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iraq. In case you are wondering, yes, we did win against Iraq.)

So anyway, back to Obama being the antichrist...the prophet Muhammad was born in 570 AD, well after Jesus Christ and John's writings. I suppose John could have predicted the rise of Islam, right? Unfortunately he just didn't put that down in the book of Revelation. Then, perhaps my favorite quirk is that somehow this antichrist, let's call him "Barack Obama", during his 40's transformed from a normal human being (well more an "Ivy League liberal elite") into the antichrist.

And my other favorite...Chuck Conrad offering a prayer at a McCain rally: "There are millions of people around this world praying to their god, whether it is Hindu, Buddha, Allah...that his opponent wins... for a variety of reasons. And Lord, I pray, that you would guard your own reputation because they are going to think that their God is bigger than you if that happens."
1) Buddha and Hindu are not gods.
2) God is not dependent upon our recognition in order for God to be God.
3) God is probably pissed at McCain for telling us to put our faith in country and to put country first.

I think we are often too critical of the prayers of others and that we should be more gentle, but that prayer is a steaming pile of dung. I would not be surprised if God hit delete on the iPhone when receiving that prayer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5fdzji2C54&feature=related

Political Peculiarities

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 04:54:00 +0000

"Civil religion is neither bona fide religion nor ordinary patriotism, but a new alloy formed by blending religion with nationalism. If civil religions were bona fide religions then one would expect to find a soft side to them, teaching love of neighbor and upholding peace and compassion. But this is not the case."

"Let me be as clear as I can be, the God of 'God and country' is not the God of Jesus Christ. Yet this is not a development that began with Sept. 11. One of the issues before American Christianity is whether the God we worship is the God of Jesus Christ...American Christians simply lack the discipline necessary to discover how being Christian might make them different."

-Stanley Hauerwas (both)

Crashing Silence

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 03:22:00 +0000

Many storms have kept me from writing since the semester began. A friend's email caused me to reflect. An excerpt:

You become aware of some place within you that brings pain. And yet, it only brings pain because it brings joy. It only feels so empty because it once felt so full, that crevice of your remembrance. That quarter of your heart, only a quarter turn away now. To turn so that we are not assaulted by that emptiness but are brought into its fullness is, I suppose, the way. What irony that when we let ourselves sink, our heaviness ceases. It is only when we flap about that we have taken on the weight of the storms without unto ourselves. Why? Has there ever been a time without a storm?

The Coming Season

noreply@blogger.com (Matt) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 04:17:00 +0000

Classes start tomorrow. I am taking Orientation to Old Testament Studies, New Testament Greek Exegesis, Minister and Mental Illness, and a speech course. I also am doing a field placement at a mental hopsital nearby where I will lead spirituality groups, do pastoral counseling, and lead worship. I feel healthily unprepared to be doing this, and I suppose maybe it should be so.

I am looking forward to being a little bit busier as I have read too much news in the past two weeks. Karl Barth says we should read the Bible alongside the newspaper, and for good reason, so that we don't let the church become co-opted by the government. When the government claims the Christian God as a tribalistic God in order to justify killing other tribes of people, it makes for bad politics and even worse religion. Barth protested such a course while in Germany and Switzerland during the 30's. Apparently we haven't been reading our newspapers or our Bibles, or maybe just not the two of them together...

Politically, I am a Christian, which means in electoral politics, I am rather apolitical since I don't see the world changing drastically through any single election. My hope lies elsewhere, and my call to be political is much more bound up in whether or not I live as a Christian rather than vote as a Democrat or a Republican. However, I am particularly excited for this coming election in which, we might just be able to vote to get our God back, a God that doesn't bless our government's rampages. And if God isn't found in our army, then I feel that less people will die. I'll vote for that combo.

Imagine if God wasn't on our money...