Ben Sternke

Field notes on life and mission with God in post-Christendom

Thoughts

You only really see from the inside

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Athansius of AlexandriaI’m reading through Athanasius’ On the Incarnation right now for a church fathers discussion group I’m part of, and came across this lovely thought in parts 27-28.

Athanasius says that one of the ways you can see that death has been defeated by the death and resurrection of Christ is that for Christians, “no longer is death fearsome, but all believers in Christ tread on it as nothing.”

First of all, I’m struck by how he talks about the death of death as a cosmic fact. It’s not just some private experience that a person has (like gnosticism), but when a person becomes a Christian, they personally begin to participate in a cosmic reality that took place in the death and resurrection of Christ: the defeat and death of death itself!

And you can see this participation by the way so many Christians (even boys and young girls, he says!) treat death as nothing, knowing that it has been defeated by Christ.

Secondly, his argument in part 28 made me laugh out loud. He is speaking to those who may still doubt that death has been defeated. Even after seeing so many martyrs go willingly to death, he says,

If, regardless, he still has doubt in his mind that death has been destroyed and brought to an end… let the one not believing the victory over death accept the faith of Christ and come over to his teaching, and he will see the weakness of death and the victory over it.

Isn’t that funny? The argument basically is: Don’t believe me about death being defeated? Become a Christian and you’ll see it’s true!

One of the axioms of the missional theology we train leaders in at Gravity Leadership is that we learn how to live as disciples of Jesus not through detached analysis but through embodied participation in his life.

In other words, you don’t really discover a spiritual truth by examining it from afar. You don’t really see or understand the kingdom of God by moving away from it and analyzing it. You only really see and understand spiritual things from the inside, as you participate in them.

It’s kind of like trying on a new pair of glasses. You can’t really know if they work by looking at them and analyzing them from a distance. You have to put them on your face and participate in the way they bend the light, and see how your eyes respond to it. Only after trying the glasses on do you know whether or not they are helpful to you.

It’s really the same in faith – if you want to find out whether death has been destroyed by the death and resurrection of Christ, there’s no other way to really find out except to “accept the faith of Christ and come over to his teaching.” You’ve got to give yourself over to it before you’ll really understand even the first part of it.

How we come to the table

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My mom sent me this quote from Shauna Niequist on how we come to the table (from her book Bread and Wine):

We don’t come to the table to fight or to defend. We don’t come to prove or to conquer, to draw lines in the sand or to stir up trouble. We come to the table because our hunger brings us there. We come with a need, with fragility, with an admission of our humanity. The table is the great equalizer, the level playing field many of us have been looking everywhere for. The table is the place where the doing stops, the trying stops, the masks are removed, and we allow ourselves to be nourished, like children. We allow someone else to meet our need. In a world that prides people on not having needs, on going longer and faster, on going without, on powering through, the table is a place of safety and rest and humanity, where we are allowed to be as fragile as we feel. If the home is a body, the table is the heart, the beating center, the sustainer of life and health.

This is the posture we are trained into when we participate in the Eucharist. In our church we instruct people to come with hands open to receive the bread, rather than hands grasping to “grab” some bread. We allow someone else to serve us and meet our need as we come in a posture of dependence and vulnerability.

It’s interesting, though, how easy it is for people to slip back into “grabbing” the bread. There really is some training and reframing happening as we remember to open our hands to receive grace as the priest offers us the body and blood of Christ in bread and wine.

Church participation as suffering

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Here’s part of a Karl Barth quote from The Epistle to the Romans that Alan Jacobs put on his blog recently (emphases mine):

We must not, because we are fully aware of the internal opposition between the Gospel and the Church, hold ourselves aloof from the Church or break up its solidarity; but rather, participating in its responsibility, and sharing the guilt of its inevitable failure, we should accept it and cling to it. — I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience bearing witness with me in the Holy Ghost, that I have great sorrow and unceasing pain in my heart. This is the attitude to the Church engendered by the Gospel. He who hears the gospel and proclaims it does not observe the Church from outside. He neither misunderstands it and rejects it, nor understands it and – sympathizes with it. He belongs personally within the Church. But he knows also that the Church means suffering and not triumph.

I know this temptation to separate the Gospel and the Church. To think that I can somehow fly above the “tainted” expression of the imperfect churches and believe the “pure” Gospel. In my twenties, after I came home from a discipleship school with a missions organization, I rejected the church for a season because they weren’t serious enough for me. They didn’t “get it” like I did, and I didn’t want to associate myself with a compromised church.

This impulse is rooted in the instinct to avoid suffering. In an effort distance ourselves from those who would taint our reputation as a certain kind of Christian (not one of “those”), we don’t fully identify with the Church. We try to maintain a level of “purity,” trying to be Christian without the Church.

But Barth is right – to receive the Gospel is to receive the Church, with all her imperfections. To believe the Gospel is to become part of the Church, and so we identify with her and participate in her life, for good or ill. It is a form of suffering to be part of the Church, with all its warts.

And the only way to be part of the Church is to participate in the life of a church. The only way to live out the Gospel is to involve ourselves in the life of a local church community. And it’s like family: you can’t opt out just because you disagree with something Uncle Fred said about immigrants.

Even in a church plant like ours, where we have a strong “front-end filter” that weeds out a lot of the people I’d be embarrassed to claim, we’ve had people say explicitly racist things to first-time visitors, and we have a lot of relational dysfunction we are constantly helping people wade through. There is a suffering inherent in claiming all of these people as my brothers and sisters in Christ (just as I’m sure there’s a suffering inherent in them claiming me).

Of course, this embracing of suffering is rooted in the Incarnation. In Christ, God identifies fully with his sinful and broken people, enduring the suffering of being associated with creatures who are in every way “beneath” him. And this is the only reason we are saved from the devastating consequences of our sinful choices. Thanks be to God!

Athanasius on the Incarnation

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Athansius of AlexandriaI’m reading through Athanasius’ On the Incarnation right now for a church fathers discussion group I’m part of, and (this may not surprise anyone) it’s just fantastic. A few observations from just the first few pages:

God’s love and goodness are at the core of the incarnation.

“[The world’s] re-creation was accomplished by the Word who created it in the beginning… by the love for humankind and the goodness of the Father… he appeared to us in a human body.” There is no equivocation here: the Word created the world out of love, and the Word becomes flesh for our salvation out of love.

Athanasius works “backward” from Christ, rather than “forward” from supposed “universal principles.”

The creator of the world is “the Father of Christ,” which brings a specificity to God’s identity by inextricably identifying him with the Incarnate One.

It isn’t that we know something about Christ because he “comes from God,” it’s that we only know God because we’ve seen Christ. This is a distinctly Christian way of doing theology that we need to reclaim.

Death is a natural consequence, not a punishment.

The Fall is about humans succumbing to the “natural” consequences of corruption and death, it’s not an explicit “punishment” that God doles out to law-breakers.

We were created to “share in the power of the Word,” but our sin cuts us off from this sharing, and thus humans must “endure the corruption of death according to nature.” Death is not a divine punishment for immoral behavior, it’s the natural consequence of disconnecting from divine life.

Rejecting God results in “non-being,” not eternal punishment.

The assumed end of those who want no part of sharing in the power of the Word is “non-being,” not eternal punishment.

Get ready for a longer quote here:

For if, having a nature that did not once exist, they were called into existence by the Word’s advent and love for human beings, it followed that when human beings were bereft of the knowledge of God and had turned to things which exist not–evil is non-being, the good is being, since it has come into being from the existing God–then they were bereft also of eternal being.

Since we only live and move and have our being “in him,” it follows that those who extricate themselves from divine life will eventually succumb to non-being.

And that’s only the first few pages! Looking forward to continuing to dive into this ancient classic.

Lifetime value and the slow drip of planting a church with integrity

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Here’s Seth Godin on how we underestimate “lifetime value” (by a lot):

If an Apple upgrade breaks your phone and you switch to Android, it costs Apple more than $10,000.

If you switch supermarkets because a clerk was snide with you, it removes $50,000 from the store’s ongoing revenue.

If a kid has a lousy first grade teacher or is bullied throughout middle school, it might decrease his productivity for the rest of us by a million dollars.

Torrents are made of drips.

The short-term impact (plus or minus) of our work or our errors is dwarfed by the long-term effects. Compounded over time, little things become big things.

This got me thinking about church planting, especially the way we’re doing it:

  • Focused first on investing in people’s discipleship and growth over the long haul rather than trying to fill up a room as quickly as possible,
  • Embracing truly formational worship and community practices (even if some people leave because they don’t want to be bothered), rather than keeping everything on a que sera, sera level,
  • A strong “front door filter” that lays our most “controversial” cards on the table right away (check our the “Culture” section of our theological influences page, for example), rather than a shallow and wide front door that eventually turns into a bait-and-switch later.

As we do this, I’m always tempted to measure our short-term “success” and feel discouraged. It’s not an efficient way to gather a crowd, for sure.

But torrents are made of drips, and we’re banking on the long-term effects of our work taking deep roots in people’s lives and in the neighborhoods and communities we’re part of. We’re counting on the fact that “compounded over time, little things become big things,” in Godin’s language.

Or, in Jesus’ language, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.”

This is the unseen dynamic of God’s kingdom that we are counting on by planting this way. As we gather for worship, fellowship, and discipleship, we are participating in divine life, steadily being transformed into the likeness of Christ as a community.

And we’re trusting that these small participations will become transformations that compound over time to create something larger and more substantial that can stand the test of time and provide spiritual food and shelter for hundreds of years.