"To Forgive is Manly"

In his wonderful book, Beauty Will Save the World, Brian Zahnd says that beauty always has a form to it; it's something that is expressed and can be seen. Through his non-violent, non-retaliatory death Jesus re-centered the world around an axis of love rather than the axis of violence and power; this forgiving love of enemies in the shape of the cross is the most beautiful form.

At the end of the chapter the author challenges followers of Jesus with these words and a story:

"Jesus was not trying to give the world the best version of Caesar's kingdom; he was giving the world the kingdom of God!...Jesus refused to be drawn into any of the many heated political controversies of his day. Political controversies were simply irrelevant to what Jesus was doing in giving the world a radical new alternative...

"The only institution that can claim the title of 'Christian' is one that is actually Christlike...it must take up the cross and follow Jesus in the most demanding of Christ's ethical imperatives - loving and forgiving enemies. The principalities and powers of this world simply cannot do that. They belong to a structure organized around an axis of power; their entire orientation is one of retaliation, and their only paradigm is vengeance. Only the  church empowered by the Spirit and organized around an axis of love can forgive enemies...Quite simply, we are disciples of the one who would rather die than kill his enemies."

The chapter ends with a story about a young pastor, Dritan Prroj, in Albania who was murdered on his way to get his two children from school in 2010. This happened because of a blood feud that had begun five years earlier. According to the 'law' of the blood feud, if someone is killed, the family of the victim can avenge the death by killing another male from the other family. These feuds can wear on until all the males of one family are dead. Whole villages are paralyzed in this region because the men of entire extended families don't dare leave their homes.

However, Pastor Prroj, who was living in hiding, decided he could not live this way and would live openly; and he and his brother agreed that if one of them was killed, the other would not 'take blood' in revenge. "They would simply allow the cycle of violence to die with them in a deliberate imitation of Christ." Because he had helped lead large aid programs for flood victims in his region, Prroj was well known and respected as a man of peace. There was wide media coverage when he was killed; his death helped "expose the false 'honor' behind the demonic philosophy of blood feuds."

Two weeks after the murder of Dritan Prroj thousands turned out for a rally in the capital city of Tirana for the purpose of naming and shaming the evil practice of blood feuds. Many carried signs that read: "TO FORGIVE IS MANLY"

This story illustrates the power of forgiving love to break the cycle of violence and is how beauty took form in this particular time and place through Christlike followers of His.

"This is the church showing the wisdom of God to the principalities and powers....This is the cruciform in its most radical form. It is in the axis of love expressed in forgiveness that the axis of power enforced by violence is exposed as ugly..."

Messy Transition: Changing Priorities

Transition times are always messy and confusing and require changing priorities. What worked formerly or was practiced in the past has to make room for other more effective life-giving ways in the new age. This doesn't always mean a total abandoning of former things but it does imply re-prioritizing; using Phyllis Tickle's metaphor of a 'rummage sale' (see previous post here), it means that a lot of stuff we've collected over time needs to be looked at and sorted through to determine what should be kept (and the degree of importance given to that) and what should be tossed.

Last week (see here) I wrote about the overarching need in the church for reprioritizing Jesus over Christendom. In this post I want to mention three more areas of changing priorities that I see happening in the Christian community particularly in America. This is not exhaustive nor is it in any particular order of importance, but this may help spark conversations about how God is moving in our times and how we can move with Him.

First, I see a prioritizing of compassion over belief systems. In the Age of Belief (which we are transitioning out of) we have placed a high premium on having a correct belief system and adhering to that at the expense of people. There is a shifting of priorities to compassionate action. This doesn't eliminate a need for Jesus' followers to adhere to a few simple basic beliefs about God and Jesus, but it means we never allow our belief systems to become more important than people, particularly those who are disenfranchised, for whatever reason, to whom we extend mercy and understanding and help without condition.

Second, there is a move towards prioritizing the kingdom of God over the American empire. Ever since the Roman church agreed to partner with the political system in order to win more adherents to the faith (this was the beginnings of Christendom in the 4th century), we have confused God's kingdom with worldly kingdoms; and in the US Christianity has become increasingly enmeshed in political parties with the hope of remaining a dominant power in our country. The kingdom of God is political, but its politics is not built on the politics of this world nor does it operate with the same value system. I'm seeing a move away from blind patriotism that equates America with God's kingdom.

Third, I believe that slowly but surely there is a prioritizing of unity over division among God's people. On the surface it appears to be the opposite as we hear and read all the attacks against one another on the internet and in other venues. However, I'm sensing some fatigue setting in over this and am seeing the attempt by some to do some healthy debating that doesn't label the other person but accepts that they have valid reason for thinking differently. While this will take a long time yet to become the norm, I believe that it is coming and that we will learn how to do the hard and self-giving work of "achieving disagreement" rather than assuming erroneous things about one another.

All of this seems healthy to me, but it is very confusing and disorienting to our systems and our collective psyche. As I expressed previously, my prayer is for grace for God's people to walk through this mess in humility and love shown in genuine listening and learning without discounting another because they think differently. The Lord is with us to help us!

Transition from Prioritizing the 'Sail' to Prioritizing the 'Wind'

One of the shifts happening now in the church (see my post here about the historic transition we're going through presently) is the movement away from Christendom to simpler, more creative ways of encountering Jesus in community. In other words, through the centuries of organized religion, we have collected a lot of practices and beliefs that aren't all necessarily bad but that are often barriers to encountering the living Lord. This shift is taking the form of disillusionment with institutional Christianity and the exploration of simpler means of encountering Him and sharing Him.

In his book, Selling Water by the River, Shane Hipps contends that Jesus (the River) is accessible to all people and that unfortunately our religious systems and structures have become barriers to this access to Him. In the chapter about "wind and sails" Hipps shows how Jesus went out of His way to disregard the boundaries that religion had established. In His first miracle of turning water into wine Jesus "sets the stage for his way of operating in the world. It frames his entire ministry."

In this miracle, what's astonishing is not only that Jesus changed the chemical composition from one liquid to another but that He flagrantly broke the ceremonial rules which insisted that wine not be put into vessels that were dedicated for ceremonial washing. This is exactly what Jesus did - he had the servants use the  jars that were for ceremonial cleansing rather than use the empty wine jars. By doing this, He was mixing wine and water thereby defiling both and causing the people to be unclean.

Why would Jesus do such an offensive thing (and continue doing this sort of thing throughout His ministry)? Hipps says that it was because He was always trying to get people beyond the banks of the river and into the great expanse of the river of God's love.

"Religions have a tendency to get stuck. Institutions aren't made to stay limber...Thus the trajectory of any religion is always to become brittle. A basic law is at work in most things we humans create: whatever the intended purpose of our creation, when overextended, it can reverse on itself...when it (Christian religion) becomes overextended, the impulse is to preserve the institution rather than the message...Jesus consistently undermined the natural inertia of institutions. He was the embodiment of pure, unbridled creative force. Creativity is often disruptive. It has little interest in preservation; it is about making new things and making things new."

Jesus is not against religions. The author says that Jesus is the wind while religions are the sails. His own conviction is that the Christian religion is the sail that best catches the wind but adds the following, "We must never make an idol of the sail and thereby miss the wind. But it is also a mistake to say the sail doesn't matter. Without a sail, the wind is difficult to catch..."

"It is not the sail, but the wind we are after." Jesus continually broke the rules and boundaries established by religion so that people could get to Him; this is happening in our day as more and more of God's people work to make Jesus (the Wind and the River) more accessible to all people.

Grace for a Time of Messy Transition

In his book The Future of Faith Harvey Cox looks at the patterns in church history to suggest where we are headed as a people now. The following is a very simple summary of the three great eras of church history as outlined by Cox:

1. The Age of Faith: first 3 centuries of Christianity. "The faith of the earliest Christians was oriented around this hope for the new world of shalom that Jesus personified. Their emphasis was on community rather than creeds or clergy. The first three centuries of Christianity demonstrated theological variety, spiritual fellowship, and an anti-imperial stance." 

2. The Age of Belief: from the fourth to the twentieth century.  “…faith became identified with creeds, orthodoxy and ‘correct doctrine.’ The imperialization of the church under Constantine also resulted in the glorification of bishops and widespread ecclesiastical corruption."

3. The Age of the Spirit: began about 50 years ago and is continuing now to shake the foundations of the previous era of hierarchical, patriarchal, and institutionalized religion. We are presently in the midst of the dismantling of fundamentalism (close-mindedness and clinging to non-negotiable beliefs) within Christianity. This age is characterized by the “growing interfaith movement, the de-westernization of Christianity, liberation theology, and the tsunami of Pentecostalism.” In general, religious people are becoming "less dogmatic and more practical . . . more interested in ethical guidelines and spiritual disciplines than in doctrine."

Along the same line Phyllis Tickle describes the times we are in now to be like a great "rummage sale", something that the Church goes through roughly every 500 years, during which we struggle and argue (as would any family preparing for a garage sale) about all the stuff that has collected over the past 500 years related to God and Jesus. Some want to dispose of certain elements within Christianity and others want to keep them...and so the fight goes. Tickle says these transition times in history are very, very messy and that it takes several decades to sort through the mess until there is general consensus among God's people.

One major issue that always arises with these paradigmatic changes every 500 years is the question of where the church's authority lies. In the latest "re-formation" of the church (Luther being a key figure), the authority shifted from the Roman Catholic pope to the scriptures ("sola scriptura"). In the present transition, the authority is changing to something else which isn't clear yet; but there are reasons (another topic for another day) why scripture on its own can no longer act as our sole source of authority now but rather will be one of the key pieces of what will turn out to be the grounds of authority for God's people.

If this is so, then we as followers of Jesus must grapple seriously with the issue of the role of scripture for us collectively. This is happening now with many serious scholars debating and researching and praying and studying in an attempt to discover improved ways of handling the scripture so that it can play its role along with the Holy Spirit in leading us in this critical age. Some recommended material in this regard are books such as:
* Disarming Scripture 
* The Bible Tells Me So
* The Bible Made Impossible
For those of us who have been raised and trained to view the Bible as more or less a 'flat' book and without any flaws, these books may be hard to read with serious consideration. But I suggest them because they are written by followers of Jesus who value the scriptures and desire to help God's people sort through many questionable issues that are in scripture so that, on the one hand we don't ignore these questionable parts and, on the other hand we don't toss the whole Bible out because of the questionable parts. 

If Phyllis Tickle and others are correct that this transition will take many decades of struggle, I pray for grace for God's people to walk through this mess and to do so in humility and love for one another expressed in genuine listening and learning without discounting someone because they think differently. This isn't easy and takes the work of the Spirit in and among us.