You May Freely Eat… But

The Tree of Life… Eve could have eaten from this tree but she chose to pursue the fruit of tree of objective & distant knowledge instead.

For me, Genesis 3 is the story of a woman talking herself into rebelling against the one & only condition that God has set for living in the garden. God’s first words to Adam were expressed as freedom with minimal rules, “You may freely eat of every tree in the garden, but of the tree of good and evil, you must not eat…” Instead of being the story of the woman who enjoys the same intimacy with God in the garden as Adam, this is the story of a woman who remains where she is. Eve allows herself to be overwhelmed by the tyranny of her own ego.

Here we arrive at the heart of the matter. When we open ourselves up to the stranger and the alien, when we allow ourselves to be penetrated to the heart by another – we are shaped and formed by those experiences. We have movement and life and meaning and purpose in the world.

However, when we confine other people and different places to the edges of our self-same world, when we close the circle, and build a structure of meaning with ourselves at the center – well that’s the pathway that we traditionally call sin. The snake speaks truly, ‘If you eat the fruit… you will be like gods’. Sin is the sum of all those selfish and manipulative actions that gather momentum when the self is elevated to the position of a god. 

Remember the Sabbath… Keep It Holy

The Sabbath… Abraham Heschel calls it ‘God’s architecture in time’. The Sabbath creates the regular rhythm of a space in-between. This is the context where local, individual moments touch eternity. This is truth local & asymmetrical brought into proximity with truth unchanging & persistent. The habit of regularly entering into that space is the discipline of perspective. It a journey towards difference and holy otherness where the revealed and the mysterious are held in tension. Derrida says, “there is a duty to translate and not to translate, to understand, to enter into relation with another but at the same time preserve the otherness of the other”.

It’s interesting… truth local, pitted and asymmetrical is often overwhelmed by a seemingly wanton, unpredictable vortex of violence and dislocation. It is that sometimes intensified aspect of chaos where there is a mischief and a vandalism in its milder forms and terror & death at its most determined. 

Tragedy is potential dissipated, opportunity lost, beauty erased in a vacuum untouched by meaning.

The result of truth tinged with violence, overwhelmed with chaos is theodicy. The affective response to the harshness of local truth is, “Where is God ?” or the cry of Psalm 22, “I am poured out like water and all my bones are out of joint, my heart is like wax, it has melted within my breast… my God, my God, why have you forsaken me ?”

The Sabbath reminds us that not all truth is local. For the sensitive ones who create the space, it is the possibility of continuing revelation. It is the reminder of the close proximity of God’s glorious presence in the fabric of time. The Glory of God lightly touches the world and for those who engage in the holy habit of attending, of offering hospitality to the presence of God, this translates truth local & unrelenting into glorious possibility & a future punctuated with hope.

Every instant is an act of creation. There is a pilgrim journey, a constant and continuous movement that is made possible by the Sabbath – a journey towards otherness and difference away from our man made structures. Those who take this journey find day after day they are sustained, inspired and led by a God who is undiminished by truth local, pitted and unpredictable. This is the God whose glory is most easily perceived in the chaos.  

What If Mission Came Home

Last Sunday evening I attended the commissioning of some friends who are preparing to serve in overseas mission. It was inspiring to here them speak with passion and honesty about their desire & intention to serve God in South East Asia. Their challenge came as a question, “How could we simply kick back into home renovation and career building when there are so many people who have yet to hear about Jesus right on our doorstep ?”

Over the last few weeks I have been reflecting on the question, “What happens when mission comes home?”  I have been seeking to challenge the idea that mission doesn’t just belong with the 1% of christians who leave their homes and travel to other lands where the Gospel isn’t. Mission and mission practices belong right here at home as well. Mission could be the organizing principle around which we re-orientate the whole church. Supporting missionaries in other cultures could be but one expression of our total mission vision.

I was reading back through the covenant that my wife & I made with our home church before we left for South East Asia in 2005. In that covenant we said the following,

“We identify the centrality of the missional task within our own lives as disciples of Jesus Christ. We reaffirm our desire to follow God where he leads and to be His witnesses & disciplers in those places. Through the Holy Spirit’s enabling we will seek to creatively evoke and to nurture the Gospel as a powerful & vital alternative to the dominant culture in which we will live. We renew our commitment to open our lives to otherness & difference so that we may authentically connect & participate in the lives of others”.

As a consequence of this statement we committed ourselves to a number of concrete practices. Firstly we committed ourselves to weakness that deliberately sort the role of a learner & a lifestyle of simplicity. Next we committed to listening & sensitivity that sort discernment from the Spirit of God, fluency in language learning & nonjudgmental insight into the cultural practices of the people with whom we will work. We committed ourselves to hospitality that sort to create nurturing & safe spaces where storytelling, discipling & worshipping communities could thrive. Next we committed to advocacy biased on behalf of poor and marginalised people that sort their participation in processes of reversal, empowerment, transformation, healing & reconciliation – so they could experience the presence of the Kingdom of God among them. Finally we committed ourselves to excellence in our professional roles.

As I read back through this list of concrete missional practices I find myself asking the question, “If we were prepared to commit ourselves to these things over there then why can’t we commit ourselves to those same practices back here in Australia ?”

The World Breaks Everyone

‘Myanmar Refugees’, May 2008

We live in a fallen world – a world where we fall often and hard… a world where survival depends on learning to get back up again.  There is harshness, rawness – an ever so sharp edge to just plain living. When the elemental forces of nature gather, concentrate suddenly and unleash their power, people perish in great numbers. This is life annihilated, extinguished without meaning.  Survivors stand on the edge of a great abyss & question the very presence of God in the world,

“How could a God of mercy & compassion, the very ruler of the universe allow such a thing to happen ?”

The fragility of life on this ball of rock we call Earth, hurtling moment by moment through space. The invisible forces that hold it in relation to the sun in such a way that biological life is sustainable – mostly not too hot and not too cold – that is as amazing as it is precarious. Indeed that there is life on this planet in the midst of the vast darkness & coldness of space is a miracle. I like what Ernest Hemingway says about suffering. He says,

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry…”

There is an inherent vulnerability and weakness in living. Yet it is also built into us to fight and resist almost to the last breath. It is our survival instinct – the quickening that courses through our veins whenever we are in proximity to death.  The truth of life is its tenacity, its vigor in the face of death. Maybe that’s what it means to stamped with the image of God.

The good news of the Scriptures is that the suffering of people invokes the pathos of God.

God says to Moses, “I have observed the suffering of my people… I have heard their cry… I know their sufferings and I have come to deliver them…”.

The good news is God hears the cries of the suffering ones. God is not an abstraction dwelling in the lonely splendor of eternity. God is concretion itself – present and accessible – suffering alongside his people. 

I Desire Mercy Not Sacrifice

Mission as an organising principle… I was listening to Michael Frost talk about this in the last couple of days. He was saying he has a fear of mission becoming a style thing, of it being domesticated when it should be dangerous and costly and totally reorientating. His is a vision of mission as a never-ending, surging fighting movement.  It’s interesting… Jesus says to some rabbis who are critical of his eating with social outcasts, “Go and learn what this means, “I desire mercy not sacrifice”. What would happen if we allowed mission to become the focus of our churches instead of worship ?

When mission is the organising principal discipleship is key. The goal is one of maturing to the point of knowing what to do to personally grow and doing it. Disciples are even deliberately pursuing accountable relationships with people further along in the journey.

This is the vision of a church who breaks out of its building and seeps into the cracks and crevices of it’s surrounding community. It is always listening, sometimes participating in the conversations of the community, even starting some of those conversations. In mostly quiet, unassuming ways, whenever it encounters pain and violence and oppression, it offers solidarity and hope and healing.

It is the vision of a church whose edges are permeable, where sensitivity & awareness reaches out from its very middle, to the ends of the earth. 

It is the vision of a church that is deliberately creating spaces for people and experiences beyond itself, allowing them to get close. This affects disciples in costly ways – including the use of their time and financial resources, even relationships. It is a church that engages in ministry enterprises and experiments that are provisional, home grown and have every possibility of failure.

What would happen if we allowed mission to become the focus of our churches instead of worship ?

The Problem Of Air Gaps

I remember sitting listening to Charles Kraft in a week long intensive one time. He was intense, he was captivating, even better than his books. I remember him saying that meanings don’t exist within words or within  cultures or even within symbols & objects – meanings exist within people. Every saying is an act of translation – a struggle to get something that dwells within ourselves out and over the void towards another. Every act of understanding is a receiving, a decoding… a translation. The wonder of communication is that it even happens at all. It is a miracle.

I remember hearing lots of words that week but those words stuck. I must have been ready for them.

Name Calling

Martin Buber says, “In the Torah, God makes no philosophical statements about himself & speaks no formulas.” The God of Israel – the LORD, Yahweh – is a name and not a notion. The difference between the two is perhaps the difference between Jerusalem & Athens. A notion like ‘god’ applies to all objects of similar properties. That’s where we get the idea of  ’the gods’ from.

A proper name, however,  applies to a unique individual. A notion describes, a name evokes. The name Yahweh applies to the one and only God of all people. A notion is attained through generalization – a name is learned through interaction. From a Hebrew perspective to know a name is to know the character of the bearer of the name. A notion is conceived, a name is called. Abraham Heschel says, “the notion of a god and The God of Israel – the Lord Yahweh, are profoundly incompatible”. The God of Israel is a comsuming fire (Dt. 4:24)… not an abstraction and definitely not a generalization. 

Holy Bedlam

Luke 4 describes Jesus spending time in the desert, out in a place where people and civilisation were absent.

Out in the desert under the blazing sun, Jesus is distilled & concentrated so that all that’s left is a focused and very determined Son of God who finds the heart of what his mission will be.

Scriptures says that Jesus returns from the desert filled with the Spirit of God, and the very next Sabbath he stands up in his hometown Synagogue and reads from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah,

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me… The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and the recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.”

What is Jesus saying here ?

Jesus is boldly declaring what is called the Great Reversal. Essentially Jesus is saying that the Spirit of Almighty God is leading him to engage in concrete actions that will fundamentally reverse the status quo.

In other parts of the Gospels this movement to reverse the vast litany of injustice in the world is called the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God refers to a future time when all peoples will be united in all their diversity in a kingdom of justice and righteousness and mercy. There will be peace and equal prosperity and even harmony among men and women. Essentially the Kingdom of God is a future time when the reign of God will be universally recognized and established among people.

The message of Jesus was that this future is has made its beginning. It is breaking into the world right now in the person of Jesus.

What impresses me about Jesus is that he walks out from the Synagogue, through the middle of a murderous crowd & does exactly what he says he will do. And as he wanders about teaching his gentle message of freedom and justice and reconciliation, while he is healing people and working miracles – Jesus attracts a vast following of people from all walks of life. At the same time Jesus deeply offends other people… people of power and influence, people whose position is best maintained by keeping things exactly as they are.

Now the outcome of Jesus pursuing his mission was that the religious establishment conspired to killed him. And the outcome of that conspiracy ended with Jesus being killed off on the Cross.

What makes this Great Reversal so potent is that 3 days later Jesus began appearing again to his closest followers.

And you know what, Jesus’ message didn’t change after he was resurrected. Instead of saying, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me…”, Jesus tells his followers, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon you because he has anointed you to bring good news to the poor. He has sent you to proclaim release to the captives and the recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.”

“Go on, go and share this teaching with all people. Go make disciples of all nations… teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you…”.

By the time the Apostle Paul begins writing to the early Christian communities, this broad sweep of Jesus’ teaching has been distilled and concentrated again into a potent confession that propels would be disciples on their way. It says, “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord & believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead you will be saved.”

Here we have it… People who follow after Jesus, people who say Jesus is the main thing are people who deeply, truly, profoundly believe that God raised Jesus from the dead. As a result they begin to re-orientating their lives around the teachings of Jesus. They become participators in the Great Reversal. They seek to embody God’s justice and mercy and goodness. They group their lives together and they become God’s alternative community and the Risen Jesus is their ‘living middle’.

When people associate their lives together, when this Risen Jesus becomes the living middle, then it is possible for community to arise among them and the Kingdom of God spreads like a wildfire !

Moving Towards Others

At its core, mission is all about moving away from the familiar, the safe & the predictable. It is about resisting the strong drive to remain where we are. Mission expresses itself concretely as moving towards people and places that are different. Effective mission always involves taking on the role of a learner. It requires acquiring new ways of speaking and doing, so one can thrive in that other place. The aim is to interact & communicate meaningfully with the people we are moving towards, out of the very fabric of everyday life – for the sake of the Gospel. Within this dynamic of moving away from ourselves & towards others, the Kingdom of God spreads like wildfire.

On the two occasions where I have been immersed in living in another culture – I have to admit to it not being an easy place to choose to stay. In both of those places I have been mostly weak and awkward, often overwhelmed and stammering, sometimes even exhausted by the experience.

You might think that in such a place, one’s sense of identity could be in danger of being scattered or even lost. Yet I have found the opposite to be true. Immersing myself and embracing other people and their cultures, has put me profoundly in touch with the person God has shaped me to be. How much more difficult it is to become conscious of your shape and your purpose in the world, when you remain at home.

It is this persistence, this movement towards the not-yet-known stranger that shapes us & concentrates our presence in the world as disciples of Jesus. Think of it like God’s calling of Abraham. He says, “Go from your country… and your Father’s house to the land that I will show you… I will bless you… so that you will be a blessing… In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”  

So Abraham goes. He begins a journey and most of the time he is so barely faithful. God promises he will make a nation out of Abraham’s decedents but his son isn’t even born until Abraham is a very… old… man. Yet from such a fragile beginning, a story that twists & turns with every possibility of failure, becomes the revelation of God himself – the gospel that is good news for all the families of the earth.   

Dangerous Saying

Sometimes, I see the world as one standing on a grassy hill among ancient manicured burial mounds. The sun is high overhead. A breeze lightly caresses my face. In those moments, I stand content & sure as the stream meandering through lush green fields of ancient battle below me. There is continuity in it, that speaks as surely as the flow of river waters, glinting all the way to the sea.

Yet what if a lone red doorway suddenly breaks in on my peripheral ?  What if in my boundless curiosity I walk over, turn the handle and step through it ?
 


‘You may open any door in the garden but this one… if you open this particular door, you will surely die !’

In that moment of dawning knowledge, I see the world as one standing on the same grassy hill. The sun is still overhead. The breeze is lightly bracing my face. Again I am lulled into contentment… until I am not ! I am anxious. I have a jarring sense of discontinuity. I scan those green fields of suffering & the fallen then out on the edge of perception I see it. It is the river. It has changed its course. Now it rushes back to meet me. 


Facing such eruption, instinctively I turn towards the safety of home. But I stop ! Through the door, in my home, within my hearing… unbidden – a deafening roar is rushing to meet me. I see that in that once sure place, far off on the edge of the boundless, the mountains are skipping like rams, the ancient hill is trembling and the glinting river bursting its banks. A battle again rages in an overflowing torrent that reaches up to the neck !  
 


Behind me, a surge of words thunders… “Do not walk in the way of this people or believe in what they call a good outcome. Do not fear what they fear or be in dread. See it is the Name of the Lord coming from far away, his nostrils burning, thick clouds arising, his lips boiling with rage… His tongue is like a devouring fire & his breath – his breath is like an overwhelming stream reaching up to the neck”.