Being "Good"
Category: Religion and Philosophy

Galatians 6:12-16 Those who want to make a good impression outwardly are trying to compel you to be circumcised. The only reason they do this is to avoid being persecuted for the cross of Christ. Not even those who are circumcised obey the law, yet they want you to be circumcised that they may boast about your flesh. May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is a new creation. Peace and mercy to all who follow this rule, even to the Israel of God.

Paul ended his letter to the Galatians by writing the last part himself in his oversized handwriting. Either he didn't see too well, or he was making an emphasis, or both. The paragraph above is part of what he wanted to get to his readers big time.

Talking about circumcision makes Bible study tough! It seems kind of weird and most of us don't talk about penises too often. But Paul talked about foreskins quite a bit because cutting off the foreskin of Jewish children was the sign of God's special relationship with the nation of Israel. This mark on the body signified being set apart. Jews thought that it made them good. The reason I bring up the subject is because it is part of Paul's argument that ends with "Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is a new creation."

A couple of people have told me lately about recurring conversations they have with people in their cells about "good" friends. This especially happens when someone is justifying why they are going to maintain their new romantic relationship with an unbeliever – "I can do it because they may not be a follower of Jesus but they are a 'good' person." This kind of argument made Paul tear his hair out then and it would now, because "Being good or not doesn't matter; what counts is a new creation."

One must not reduce Christianity into a personal moral code that is equal to other moral codes. It is not a moral code; it is God beginning his new creation. Jesus isn't just teaching us to be good, he is God making us good, and good in the sense that we were a wrecked car headed for the scrap heap and he is using the raw materials to make the best possible car there is out of us. Our cooperation with God is where any goodness we claim begins. What kind of car one was doesn't mean anything. What counts is what we are becoming by God's hand. We're relating to the Creator, not selecting what elements of a code to apply.

A lot of us are, essentially, unbelievers, as far as Paul would be concerned. We are still stuck in our own form of circumcision – justifying ourselves by doing what we think is right and assuming that makes us special to God. And we look for friends to loop into our belief system that is based on everyone agreeing that we are OK as we are --- we don't need remaking and, essentially, we can make it up ourselves as we go along without too much reference to the work of God in Jesus.

It is discouraging to sit with loved ones every week in a cell and have them undermine your faith by trying to unconvert you, by making you a new kind of Jew relying on circumcision to make them something, relying on being good to justify yourself. All this is being done, of course, in the name of love and tolerance and being happy that "I found someone who cares about me" or not suggesting that "You think my Grandma went to hell? She was a good person." It sometimes seems that everything counts to people BUT a new creation!

Currently reading : The Book of Air and Shadows: A Novel By Michael Gruber Release date: 2008-02-26

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Back from the lake
Category: Religion and Philosophy

The Adirondacks were cool and wet. So we had to find our family fun in other ways than jumping in the lake all the time. We found lots to do. It was a great couple of weeks. Thanks to everyone who prayed for us and wrote and called (while I had no bars on the cell for the whole time).

One of the greatest moments happened on our last night. After a lot of my lamenting about the historic-level odd weather, someone yelled in the house: "Dad, get out here, quick!" Across the evening sky was a full rainbow." Ben said, "God's promise." Indeed.

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Embracing the other

The other night I was talking to the Shalom House folks about the challenges of community living these days. Alongside all the typical hardships of just being humans trying to love is a new twist offered by the philosophies of the day. There are social and political realities that drive us to think and react certain ways. If we are not aware of them, we will unwittingly conform to them, I think, and they will not contribute to our quest to form community in Christ

One of the surprising new things that continues to take root in our postmodern consciousness could be called tribalism. People are finding smaller and smaller tribes with which to identify. Part of the taking on of such an identity is becoming distinct from all the others. In the U.S. this process is accelerated by all the salesmen getting a hold of the sociological reality and marketing to it. They help solidify the boundaries of these new-fangled  tribes into marketing niches. (So whole niches say things like, "I wear Vans. I have a tattoo. A crew cut is good-looking. I wear neck ties. An exurb is peaceful and safe." etc.) We get used to being a self at the center of this swirling mass of interchangeable tribal identities driven to achieve an "identity" we can feel safe in. If we come from an ethnic group or an actual traditional tribal group, it makes it even more compelling to protect our small niche from all the others (like I just saw road signs in Welsh that I saw that mark the disintegration Great Britain into its smaller parts).

For Christians, especially those living in an intentional household, embracing the other, as Miroslav Volf names the action of self-donating love that is our destiny, is complicated by our social awareness of these other tribes and our sense of justice in protecting them from each other. But in our households, our embrace must come before sociology or justice. In the church, we trust first and then deal with the dilemmas of the broken promises made to our "identity." In the household we donate ourselves to the hope of love and then decide what is the best way to work that out.

Those of us who live in an intentional household (or just manage to stay an intact family) are doing representing the presence of the future in an atomizing world. It's a beautiful thing.

Currently reading : The Reserve By Russell Banks Release date: 2008-01-29

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Deut.

I saw that one of the most popular MySpace blogs is an anti-Christian diatribe featuring a Youtube clip of the surprisingly infantile Richard Dawkins starting off with "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most disagreeable character in all of fiction." His young audience twitters in the background. The blogger gives a list of quotes from Deuteronomy to show how foolish it is to be a Christian and support the belief in a jealous, hatful, murderous, controlling buly.

Here are a few of the examples from the blog:

Deuteronomy  2
Defeat of Sihon King of Heshbon (genocide)

 32 When Sihon and all his army came out to meet us in battle at Jahaz, 33 the LORD our God delivered him over to us and we struck him down, together with his sons and his whole army. 34 At that time we took all his towns and completely destroyed them—men, women and children. We left no survivors. 35 But the livestock and the plunder from the towns we had captured we carried off for ourselves. 36 From Aroer on the rim of the Arnon Gorge, and from the town in the gorge, even as far as Gilead, not one town was too strong for us.

Deuteronomy 5
The Ten Commandments (jealousy and vengeance

7 "You shall have no other gods before [a] me. 8 "You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 9 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 10 but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.

Deuteronomy 7
Driving Out the Nations (anger. intolerance)

 1 When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you- 2 and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. 3 Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, 4 for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods, and the LORD's anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you. 5 This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles [b] and burn their idols in the fire. 6 For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession.

As I pondered the "atheist" propaganda I realized that I know quite a few people who have been troubled by it. Unbelievers keep bringing out the old arguments these days for a new generation that has yet to be bamboozled by them.

Let me say just one of many things that could be said about their arguments: atheists like Richard Dawkins are lapdogs of modernism.

They subsume the Bible under a unifying theory they devise and then disapprove of what they "discover." They assume a principle of godness, apply the principle to the record of God's acts in the Bible and dismiss the God their theory eliminates. They posit an alternative theory with themselves as the unifying principle (or at least human "reason" that fits their idea of reason) and believe in it. It is the oldest delusion in the Book. When Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil it resulted in death. Dying people have been trying to get us to accept death as "reality" ever since.

The dying people of the modern era perfected the notion that God is like one of their immutable principles. He couldn't really be true unless he was an experiment that could be repeated in the lab. Obviously, he did not conform to their theory and was proven untrue. The exponents of God-free "truth" went on the prove their worth with the twentieth century, which they are still trying to prove was fabulous  -- wars, holocaust, new diseases, genetic manipulation and global warming, etc. notwithstanding.

Unlike Dawkins and the blogger, one should not read Deuteronomy according to a modern (or postmodern) theory. God is not a humanist/democratic/capitalist principle. The knowledge of God begins with love, not with an assessment of the facts according to a theory that one believes in. To invite us into knowledge, God has expressed his love fully in Jesus. That should get us started. And if you look back, he carved out a nation for himself to begin the process of recreating the world even better than the garden. That eventually got Jesus started. Deuteronomy was just another beginning on the way to the future. I think we should learn from that past, just as we do our own.

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Jimmy was right
Current mood: blessed
Category: Religion and Philosophy

My mind turns to Isaiah again after reading an op-ed that reminded me of Jimmy Carter:

Isaiah 56:10-12

Israel's watchmen are blind...

They are dogs with mighty appetites;

they never have enough.

They are shepherds who lack understanding;

they all turn to their own way,

each seeks his own gain.

"Come," each one cries, "let me get wine!

Let us drink our fill of beer!

And tomorrow will be like today,

or even far better."

In 1977 or so, Jimmy Carter warned that our national addiction to oil would undermine our sovereignty as a nation. He said we could forestall the dilemma if we acted fast. He put solar panels on the White House and created an energy bank to subsidize development of alternatives to oil, among other things. As soon as Ronald Reagan came to power the solar panels were taken off the roof and the bank abandoned. Two oil-field wars later, Carter's prophecy is proven.

Now the candidates are sparring about drilling offshore or despoiling more arctic wilderness to feed the monkey on our collective backs.

I am among the people who think this blindness from the world's leaders is unsurprising. I think Jimmy was doing his best to be a Christian president (and he's a great Christian ex-president!) but it is no surprise that people who say, "And tomorrow will be like today,or even far better," are likely to be elected president.

What to do?

1) Like Isaiah, tell the truth about them. I feel some permission to call leaders the dogs they are, when it is warranted. I try to be nice. 

2) Like Isaiah (if you read the rest of the book), hold out hope for the restoration that is coming, and which, in Jesus, has been inaugurated. Be a circle of hope with hope panels installed on the roof. (Not sure if the metaphor works, but it came to mind). Our hope is not merely in Barack, or whoever, although it would be nice if he really did pray that prayer at the wailing wall. Our hope is in the Lord and the Lord is with us to make an impact today and to bring everything around right in the end.

3) .Have some consciousness about what we bring to our situation as a place where the kingdom of God is breaking through, where Jesus reigns, and where people have some re-created sense about what is good. This is a good time to take ourselves seriously as the church.

In the face of blind leaders who seek their own gain, or who at least facilitate a system that supposedly thrives on seeking one's own gain, we often feel too powerless. We aren't. 1 Cor 15:58: "Stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain." The little we seem to have, placed in God's hands and used for God's ends has eternal value. The dogs will be dust and Jesus will reign. 

Currently reading : Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation By Miroslav Volf

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Doing the word
Current mood: quiet
Category: Religion and Philosophy

I have been reading NT Wright's Surprised by Hope for the past couple of weeks and finding it very encouraging. Here is another quote to ponder about the Bible. It reflects our conviction to do the word:

"The Bible...does what it does best when read from the perspective of new creation. And it is designed not only to tell us about that work of new creation, as though from a detached perspective, not only to provide us with true information about God's fresh, resurrection life, but also to foster that work of new creation in the churches, groups and individuals who read it, who define themselves in terms of the Jesus they meet in it, who allow it to shape their lives. The Bible thus is the story of creation and new creation, and it is itself, through the continuing work of the Spirit who inpsired it, an instrument of new creation in human lives and communities.

The Bible is not, in other word, simply a list of true doctrines or a collection of proper moral commands -- though it includes plenty of both. The Bible is not simply the record of what various people thought as they struggled to know God and follow him, though it is that as well. It is not simply the record of past revelations, as though what mattered were to study such things in the hopes that one might have one for oneself. It is the book whose whole narrative is about new creation, that is, about resurrection, so that when each of the gospels ends with the raising of Jesus from the dead, and when Revelation ends with new heavens and new earth populated by God's people risen from the dead, this should not comes as a surprise but as the ultimate fulfillment of what the story had been about all along."

I'm hoping you all already thought of the Bible in this way. Did you? Do others in your cell and in your circle?

Currently watching : Into Great Silence (Two-Disc Set) Release date: 2007-10-23

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The Dark Knight
Category: Religion and Philosophy

One of the reviewers summed up the most-popular-movie "The Dark Knight" (should have been subtitled, Batman Interminably) like this:

"Gotham City is experiencing a respite from crime thanks to the clean up efforts of Batman, and the arrival of a sharp, new district attorney, Harvey Dent. But the peace will not last. As crime bosses throughout the city become desperate, they join with The Joker, a maniacal mastermind whose only desire is to see Gotham descend into anarchy. As the city careens toward destruction, will the forces of good hold fast, or will they have to become like the monster they fight in order to survive? "

Yes, that was in there, but did I miss something? Why are we all going to see this snoozer? Heath Ledger is going to get an Oscar for THAT? I feel like I LIVE in Gotham, our tastes are so venal.

What I most object to (and yes, I did whine throughout the movie about how in the world Joker came up with an ARMY, apparently, to pull of his elaborate schemes to torment Gotham when he seems to have shot most of his helpers, as a rule, among other things), what I object to most is the myth of redemptive violence repeatedly replayed and pondered as if we are really suffering about something new, here. What a redundant song! (It is almost like watching Mama Mia and getting Dancing Queen stuck in your head).

At the end, savior Batman takes off into the dark with his new insight. He is going to give the people the leader they need by having them chase him! He's now a murderous scapegoat for the stupid populace. I suppose that is also who Dick Cheney imagines himself to be as he fights the terrorists while we all hate him -- the Dark Knight of the White House (or just the dark night).

The previews of the coming blockbusters were all variations on this same theme -- how is violence going to solve the horrible violence we are experiencing? How are the "good" guys (and they never seem to know if they are good, since morality is pretty passe) going to keep a step ahead of the "bad?"

What a mess! I hope the Jesus-followers can sort it out -- the more we drink this kool-aid, the deader we could become. Jesus already reigns. Sin and death are defeated and he is risen to inaugurate the kingdom. Every time his kingdom has been "extended" by violence, as if it were just of this world and not the beginning of earth-as-it-is-in-heaven, it has been a disaster -- so can we not go with this endless propoganda in every movie? The Romans were practicing the myth of redemptive violence, after all, when they killed Jesus and made the world safe for democracy, I mean, the empire.

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John Cassian, July 23
Category: Religion and Philosophy

Let's spend a minute to remember another great ancestor. John Cassian's day is July 23 (in France, at least). He was another of the daring and brilliant Christians who helped invent how to live a practical Christian life in the waning days of the Roman Empire (c. 359-450) He is a contemporary of Augustine (354-430) and Patrick (378-493).

John (a name he chose) Cassian (probably his clan name) may have been born in what is now Romania. He went to Bethlehem as a young man and joined a community of what came be known as monks. In 390 he and the leader of his community made a pilgrimage to Egypt to learn from the famous hermits who lived there. They stayed for seven years, went back to Bethlehem and returned again to Egypt. From the "desert fathers" Cassian gathered the thinking he would later write in his books on the inner and outer life of a Jesus follower.

The Egyptian church was caught up in a crisis about doctrine. Cassian and his friend fled to Constantinople where the important bishop, John Chrysostom made him a church official (404). When John Chrysostom was deposed the church sent Cassian to Rome to plead for help. In Rome he was consecrated as a pastor, and he also witnessed the sack of Greece and Italy by Alaric and the Visigoths.

The general upheaval may have been what prompted Cassian to found a new community in the area of Marseilles. Society could not provide peace and safety so it encouraged believers to rely on God in solitude and community. Cassian organized two monasteries (one for men and one for women) that were heavily influenced by what he learned in Egypt (and no doubt what he experienced in church and state politics!). He wrote, for the instruction of his pupils, The Institutes and The Conferences. In the former he gives first the external rules for a hermit's life, and then he describes the internal labor by which the final goal is reached. In the latter he shares his experiences with the Egyptian hermits. By these books, and by his two foundations, he introduced monasticism to the western part of the Roman Empire.

In the Conferences, he also weighs in on the controversy between Pelagius and Augustine as they tried to define how individuals are redeemed. Pelagianism was condemned, eventually, and Augustine's thoughts were amplified into Calvinism after a thousand years of influence. Eastern Orthodox believers will argue that Cassian was never in error, although people labeled his thought "semi-pelagian."

What worried the Augustinians is that Cassian maintained that after the Fall there still remains in every person "some seeds of goodness implanted by the kindness of the Creator, which, however, must be "quickened by the assistance of God". Therefore, "we must take care not to refer all the merits of the saints to the Lord in such a way as to ascribe nothing but what is perverse to human nature". We must not hold that "God made man such that he can never will or be capable of what is good or else he has not granted him a free will, if he has suffered him only to be capable of what is evil." The three opposing views have been summed up briefly as follows: St. Augustine regarded people in their natural state as dead, Pelagius as quite sound, Cassian as sick. Cassian saw grace and freedom as parallel, grace always cooperating with the human will for a person's salvation, as in Phil. 2:12-13: "Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose." He teaches that the grace of God always invites, precedes and helps our will, and whatever gain freedom of will may attain for good it is the gift of grace.

I think Cassian's theology reflects a person who has tried to live of his faith in the real world and has been a pastor to people who are striving and a planter of saving faith in new territories. When I was first gaining faith, myself, I discovered Cassian and put him in my collection of Christians who lived out a practical faith regardless of the circumstances or consequences. It seems that God is always inspiring someone "on the ground" in every era. Cassian's adaptation of Egyptian monasticism was a radical response to troubled times. His writings were practical help for real people. Thanks, John! I'm looking forward to meeting you after the final day.

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How and what we worship
Category: Religion and Philosophy

For those of you who are unlikely to read the latest NT Wright book, Surprised by Hope, I offer more quotes:

The question is, how will you choose to worship? "Are you going to worship the creator God and discover thereby what it means to become fully and gloriously human, reflecting his powerful, healing, transformative love into the world? Or are you going to worship the world as it is, boosting your corruptible humanness by gaining power or pleasure from forces within the world but merely contributing thereby to your own dehumanization and the further corruption of the world itself?...

One of the primary laws of human life is that you become like what you worship; what's more, you reflect what you worship not only back to the object itself but also outward to the world around. Those who worship money increasingly define themselves in terms of it and increasingly treat other people as creditors, debtors, partners, or customers rather than as human beings. Those who worship sex define themselves in terms of it (their preferences, their practices, their past histories) and increasingly treat other people as actual or potential sexual objects. Those who worship power define themselves in terms of it and treat other people as either collaborators, competitors or pawns. These and many other forms of idolatry combine in a thousand ways, all of them damaging to the image-bearing quality of the people concerned and of those whose lives they touch."

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Looking for someone with something
Category: Religion and Philosophy

In the words of one of our native sons, I am seeing dead people today. Past people. Especially those hard-to-see-anymore ancestors of my faith. 

It seems like a lot of people have a hard time connecting to the saints of the past – or to the past at all! The Bible seems remote and the followers of Jesus who have gone before us seem even more obscure. This might be, in part, because we live in a climate of thought in which time has been "democratized," in the sense that all times are created equal. Plus, time has become subject to the law of supply and demand, so the past is usually only remembered if enough people value it. As a result, the past doesn't exist at all for many people. Thus, another way we Circle of Hope people are countercultural is in the way we pride ourselves in being "transhistorical," meaning that we feel a real continuity with the past. We maintain a connection, in the Spirit of Christ, with followers who have laid a foundation for us. And we respect the history of creation as members of the great mass of human creatures who made an impact on the earth before we got here. We will get to know a lot of these folks better after the resurrection. For now, we honor whatever community we share with the people of the past.

For some of us, our transhistorical nature in Christ has more meaning than to others. I am one of us who likes those dead people. I am especially attracted to the kindred spirits who were living in the so-called "Celtic" territories of Ireland.., in particular, then Scotland and England, then the Netherlands and.Germany, and so on, until the missionary endeavors were done. They had some good stuff going.

Sitting here in the Cardiff airport (after yet another arduous day of dealing with airline folk) I am feeling a lot for the forgotten saints of Wales. We visited a couple of their homeplaces yesterday: Llandaff (sounds something like Ssllandav), Llancarfen and Llanwith Major (down by the beach in the Vale of Glamorgan). These apostles were named Teilo, Dyfrig, Cadoc, and Illtyd, and all were part of the first flowering of faith in Wales during the same post-Roman empire era as St. Patrick and other more famous people who periodically have parades in their honor. After visiting their territories, they seem a little lost. (You have never heard of them, have you?).

In the airport, here, I feel a little like a forgotten and lost believer myself. I am surrounded by a big duty-free shopping mall (I had trouble getting my overstuffed-with-souvenirs bag through the stalls of further opportunities for stuffing!). It is bustling with post-modern, capitalism-first, lifestyle. Money is being changed like crazy, fossil fuels are being spewed all over, and the scent of vacation (heavy accent on the vacant) is filling the air. The biggest line from Cardiff today was for people heading to Malta! I've been in a lot of buildings lately, rather uninhabited for the most part, in which Jesus was front and center. Now I am feeling lonely for him a bit in this big glop of traveler-herding.

Finding me and Jesus, here, might be a bit like finding St. Cadoc in Llancarfen. Finding the building that marked the spot where he worked meant going down a one-lane road through the vale with eight foot field hedges on both sides. We came out into a tiny medieval-like village foggy with a misty rain. A golden stag was on the steeple, marking the saint who was assisted by stags in his plowing one time because the local boys mocked him. Cadoc had a training center for Christians when there were few Christians in Wales. He became famous for about 500 years. He fell out of fashion when the post-Roman Empire Christians imposed their Romanized practices. I think they thought deer were unlikely to plow – besides, Cadoc was Welsh.

What I am feeling is not so much abused and lost. I'm feeling a renewed sense of kindred spirit. The fact is, I went looking for Cadoc. No matter how obscure or inconsequential we might seem, the resurrected Jesus continues to bring life from the dead, just like he did it in some remarkable partners in the 4-8^th centuries. People are, amazingly enough, still looking for his followers, if they've got something of God to share. At the end of time as I know it, I want to stand among the Lord's co-workers, being found, now and then.

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