Field notes on life and mission with God after Christendom
After Jesus heals a man born blind, and the religious leaders cannot figure out what’s going on (despite the man very clearly telling them), Jesus says:
[Read more…] about The Judgment of Jesus“For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.”
John 9:39
I have been leading worship for as long as I’ve been doing ministry. Initially “leading worship” meant leading a band that was leading a congregation in singing their praise and prayers to God.
Eventually, as I was drawn into the liturgical tradition, it expanded to leading worship in more ways than just in song. Being the celebrant at a service of Word and Sacrament is to be the “worship leader” for that service.
[Read more…] about On Leading WorshipI recently read an article by Richard Beck about how Jesus was a pirate. When I read it I remembered a bemusing spiritual experience I had many years ago at a charismatic church conference.
I’ve always had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with my charismatic roots, and this conference was no exception. As is typical at events like this, we were spending over an hour each night singing worship songs, and as was typical for me, I was holding myself back from getting too emotionally invested in it.
The worship leader was a young man who had a unique gift of ecstatic prophecy through song, but instead of the normal “generic” worship phrases that were common in this kind of spontaneous singing, this guy would sing imaginative narratives that made you feel like you were in the middle of a story.
That night he began singing a story of being in a boat at sea, and on the horizon we spotted another ship chasing us down. As the ship gained on us, we realized it was a pirate ship, captained by Jesus himself!
Eventually Jesus the Pirate caught up with us and boarded our ship. He drew his sword and called us all to lay down our weapons and surrender. So, in my imagination, I dropped my defenses and raised my hands in surrender to Jesus. I don’t know exactly what I expected to happen next (maybe a hug?), but in the next lines of the song, Jesus took his sword, pointed it straight at my chest, and ran me through!
I laughed out loud in surprise at this turn of events, but in that moment of surrender, something important happened for me. God did something in me that I still don’t quite have words for.
From then on, it seemed like Jesus’s call to take up my cross and follow him was an invitation of love rather than a harsh obligation. Carrying my cross started to feel like the easy yoke of Jesus. The way of the cross began to feel like the way of life and peace.
So, while I’m still ambivalent about everything that happened in those charismatic churches I was part of, it’s also true that God was present and at work in the midst of it all. I’m finding it’s important to be able to name both the good and the bad truthfully without trying to justify or negate any of it.
When we are isolated from each other it’s easy to forget that we belong to each other. Before I know it, I can find myself retreating into a self-protective stance toward others, walling off my heart for fear of getting hurt. Here’s a collect I wrote this week for this state of affairs:
Lord Jesus Christ, in whom all things are held together, lavish your abundant grace upon us that we might remember that we are living members of your Body, connected to one another in far deeper ways than mere affinity, convenience, or personality. May your love overcome our instinct for self-protection, that we might hold each other close in prayer, as you hold us all together in your unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In Matthew 21:33-46 Jesus tells the parable of the wicked tenants, where a landowner rents out his vineyard to some tenant farmers who refuse to to share the harvest with the landowner, beating his servants and killing his son.
Jesus is telling the parable to the chief priests and the Pharisees, the elders of the people, and at the end asks them, “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” They answer, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”
The eagerness with which they denounce the wicked tenants seems to me to be an indication that up until this point, they didn’t realize they were being cast in the role of the tenants. I wonder if they thought Jesus was talking about the Romans as the wicked tenants, and they had cast themselves in the role of the landowner’s servants and son (and would have had ample biblical justification for doing so).
But the parable sneaks up on them (like all good parables do!): “Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom…” As the punchline went after another parable, told hundreds of years earlier by the prophet Nathan to King David, “You are the man!” However, instead of repenting in dust and ashes, as their ancestor David did, they double down on their waywardness, and look for a way to arrest him and silence him.
Repenting is easy and hard. It’s easy in the sense that all you have to do is say you were wrong. You don’t have to have any money or skill or pedigree to repent. Anyone can do it. But it’s hard in the sense that it requires that you rethink everything about how you thought the world was. It demands you actually trust in the mercy of God. To repent, you must take the risk that your life is not bound up in your status in the eyes of others, that being right isn’t how you get righteous.
You have to actually believe in the kingdom of God to repent, and it can seem pretty far-fetched to believe that we’re simply loved, and thus being wrong isn’t the worst thing that can happen. In fact, in the kingdom of God, repentance is one of the best things that could happen on a given day. The opportunity to learn that one has been wrong, and to simply apologize and go in a new direction is a freedom available to anyone.
(Also, I want to learn how to tell parables like Jesus… stories that don’t just illustrate or convey information, but get underneath and upend people’s assumptions about the way the world is and what God is like and what’s possible… Sometimes I get to do this in my preaching, but I want to do it more.)
