Toward Hope

Uploaded Vacation Pics

OK, I know I have been blog silent for some time...I still feel like I have little to say. But I thought I'd point you to the complete flickr set of all our vacation photos.

Rome Day 3 - Colosseum, Palentine Hill, & The Forum

Yesterday we spent the day being overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the Colosseum. This architectural masterpiece is nothing less than amazing and even it's ruined state did well to inform us of just how vast and large the Roman Empire was. We learned that not many (if any) Christians died there; they were executed at the Circus Maximus and the Colosseum was reserved for gladiator fights and animal shows. The columns of St Peter's were made with salvaged marble from the Colosseum once the games ceased.
The Forum and Palentine Hill were also quite amazing. Learning about the history of Rome was interesting and the ruins were impressive. It did leave much for us to imagine as to what the original town looked like...I think we'll buy one of those "Rome then and Now" books that has helpful overlays to help fill the gaps. Anyways, here is the Flickr set with ample pictures for you to see...
Tomorrow we are off for an early Christianity and Catacombs tour....

Rome Day 2 - The Vatican

On our second day in Rome we visited the Vatican. The ornate texture of the place is grand in it's vastness and caused sensory overload. The art work contained therein can vault one back in time to feel like a part of the history that produced it. As I said yesterday, pictures hardly do this place justice. As I stood beneath the glorious canvass of the Sistine Chapel, I was overwhelmed with the beauty of it all. It was later in St Peter's Basilica that Michelangelo's Pieta caused me to pause and consider the cost of discipleship.

We had a guide named Ann from Through Eternity Tours that did a fabulous job giving insight into the history of all we saw. Her commentary kept all interested and I would definitely recommend her services to anyone making the trek to the Vatican. After the Vatican, we stopped by the gelato place outside the walls that Ann recommended and four 5 euros Christiene and I indulged in the best and biggest gelato cone we'd ever had. It's worth the 30 minute trek back for more.

Here are the pictures we took yesterday. I created a new "Rome Collection" on Flickr.

If you are ever at the Vatican, walk the Copola!

Day One in Rome

Here we are! Freshly jet-lagged as a result 15 hours of flying, we managed to meander into the city for some pizza at the oldest pizzaria in Rome. After dinner we wandered through the Quirinal area that is host to the magnificent Trevi Fountain. I can't begin to tell you how surreal the intersection of history and modern culture is in this beautiful city. Ancient wonders are scattered throughout rome and jump out at you as you pop around corners. Pictures hardly do the city justice. There is a deeper layer of interaction as one stands before the artifacts in this city with all senses in play.
Here is a collection of pictures from our first day. I've uploaded them to my Flickr account. Enjoy!

Different Types of Ecclesiology

I am still in no place to blog thoughtfully....still nothing meaningful to say. But I will link to other [more] thoughtful bloggers to give you something for stopping by this site. Halden posted a great description of different types of ecclesiology.....

"This is intended solely as a descriptive, handout-style breakdown of different sorts of ecclesiology within the broad spectrum of the Christian tradition. As such it clearly is not accurate on the micro level. Any and all typologies are, in my opinion extremely dangerous. However, if they help in facilitating the theological task at points, then perhaps they ought not be done away with.

From my perspective there are two basic polarities which define the shape of a given ecclesiology. The first is what I term the High-Low polarity, the second I refer to as the Strong-Weak polarity. Within this framework any given ecclesial body could potentially fall in one of four categories, High-Strong, High-Weak, Low-Strong, and Low-Weak. Here are my descriptors of these categories and my attending attempt to put various Christian ecclesial bodies in their proper place. I am sure there will be inaccuracies here based upon my own ecclesial experiences, familiarities and limitations. So, please correct me if you are so inclined. It will help greatly my final development of this typology.

Types:

High Church Ecclesiology: High view of church history and tradition. Emphasizes the liturgy and above all the Eucharist. Churches are generally structured episcopally (i.e. through a hierarchy of bishops who stand in communion with each other). Emphasizes salvation as membership in the church through participation in the sacraments. Generally holds to infant baptism. Close connection between baptism and initiation into the broad community of faith."

Click Here to continue reading

Off to Europe...

Well, it is two weeks and counting till the wife and I (that's right, no kids) head off to Europe for a cruise. We will be in Rome for four days, then board a Regent Cruise ship for six nights, touring the Mediterranean to such places as Pompeii, Naxos, Ephesus, and Santorini. Here is the kicker. The vacation is an incentive for hitting my sales numbers last year. Being part of a large software company has its perks. Our company has the whole ship with special programming for this cruise. I am stoked and looking forward to this time as a significant spiritual experience as we walk the same cobbled streets as St Paul and the early Christians did.

We are only on the hook for our accommodation in Rome, the Roma Pass, Vatican Tour, and Early Christianity and Catacombs tour. Trip Advisor gives the tour company the best rating for the quality of commentary. Word has it that scholars and classical historians guide the tour.

I will (time permitting) be blogging on the trip and hosting pictures to my Flickr Account.

Does anybody have any recommendations for us on what to see?

Lamenting Death in the OT

Our church is making its way through a long series on the story of scripture. We are after the meta-narrative and desire to see people embedded into the scriptures in a way that will drastically form identity and purpose. It is a good journey.

Over the last couple of weeks we have been in the book of Judges. Today we looked at the story of Samson. As is typical of such a passage, the sovereignty of God theme was broached in regard to how God manages to fulfill his will, even in the least optimal set of circumstances; like Samson's disobedience. Also a focus was the fact that, during this time, Israel made no attempt to repent for her wickedness while under the thumb of the Philistines. She was somewhat comfortable, satiated, and made due under the Philistine rule. Perhaps a sign of how forgetful they were of God's plans and desires for them as a people.

While listening to the sermon, I could not help but think about the incredible loss of life recorded. What about the one thousand men Samson struck down with a donkey's jawbone? They were surely fathers, brothers, and sons whose lives were deeply mourned. I got to thinking if it was really God's will to see all these people die. As you know, there are many other references to wartime death in the Old Testament that are problematic, to say the least. My fear is that often these passages can be read in a triumphalist way with little regard for how God feels about the casualties caused by the circumstances of the fall lived out. We tend to write "them" of as pagan (or secular) and minimize life as we do so. But how does God feel?

Perhaps these scriptures can serve as an invitation for us to allow God to implant his heart into ours. What if we looked at these scriptures from the perspective of the father? What if we felt these scriptures with the father's heart? Might we see a God who even agonizes over the death of the Pagan priest as His true love painfully allows the circumstances of his sin-bound creation to unfold? It is hard to make sense of it, but my gut is telling me that we would be served well to consider this from His perspective. It might just ease the conflict of such passages and do away with much of the sacred and secular dichotomy that pits us against modern day enemies (read culture) that are evil and need to be defeated.

the Story of Stuff

If you haven't seen this, please go and see this. this will make you think more about stuff. It flows nicely out of the last post on consumerism.

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Eugene Peterson on Consumerism

From Eugene Peterson's, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places...

"In our present culture all of us find that we are studied, named, and treated as functions and things. "Consumer" is the catch-all term for the way we are viewed. From an early age we are looked upon as individuals who can buy or perform or use. Advertisers begin targeting us in those terms form the moment we are able to choose a breakfast cereal.

For those of us who are reared in North American culture, it is inevitable that we should unconsciously acquire this way of looking at everyone we meet. other people are potential buyers for what I am selling, students for what I am teaching, recruits for what I am doing, voters for what I am proposing, resources for what I am building or making, clients for the services I am offering. Or, to reverse the elements, I identify myself as the potential buyer, student, recruit, resource, client, and so on. But it is consumerism ether way.

I have no complaint about this at one level. I need things, other people offer what I need; I am happy to pay for and take advantage of what is offered whether it is food, clothing, information, medical and legal help, leadership in a cause that is dear to my heart, advocacy in matters of justice, or victim-rights that I care about. I'm quite happy to be a consumer in this capitalist economy where there is so much to consume.

Except. Except that I don't want to be just a consumer. I don't even want to be predominantly a consumer. To be reduced to a consumer is to leave out most of what I am, of what makes me me. To be treated as a consumer is to be reduced to being used by another or reduced to a product for someone else's use. It makes little difference whether the using is in a generous or selfish cause, it is reduction. Widespread consumerism results in extensive depersonalization. And every time depersonalization moves in, life leaks out."

~Eugene Peterson

Easter Beautiful

I was trying to explain Easter to my 3 year old daughter today and when I asked her what was significant about Easter Sunday, she said: "Jesus died on the cross for us."

"Ok, Anna, that was on Friday and that is true, but what about today, Sunday?.

"Um, um..."

"Today, Anna", I said, "is the day Jesus rose from the dead. You see, jesus died for our sins and for the whole world. And what is remarkable about his death is that he did not stay dead. He rose from the dead on Easter Sunday to give us life and make all things new and beautiful."

She replied..."Easter Beautiful?"

"Yes, Anna, Easter Beautiful...that is an excellent way to put it. God is making all things Easter beautiful by rising from the dead and giving us new life."

Needless to say, I was touched and reminded that from the lips of infants and children...

So I thought about "Easter Beautiful" and was inspired out of blog silence with the following words...


Easter Beautiful! People, nature, the whole realm, of all we know. Is being made, Easter Beautiful!

Could beauty be better? Can people change? from the grip of evil's derange? Brought back to life, from death's corruption, Sins forgiven by Love's Easter eruption. Making blossoms bloom in lives of gloom.


Without hope no more! And living breath bestowed. Hearts now better, now full. For God is making everything, Easter Beautiful!

Peace

Out of blogging silence I could not resist posting the following guest-article about peace by Scott Stephens, found at Ben Meyer's blog today. It is nothing short of prophetic and quite nicely pulls back the veneer that hides the fallacy of a worldly understanding of peace that is in conflict with the essence of the gospel.

A guest-post by Scott Stephens

Peace is one of the most deceptive terms in public discourse. Consequently, it is not at all clear to me that people know what they are referring to when they talk about peace. Take the current political climate: peace most commonly refers to not having been part of the invasion of Iraq in the first place, or now getting the hell out of Iraq and thus bringing an end to our part in this bloody war. When it comes to Iraq itself, the West’s dreams of peace are for an end to sectarian violence and the emergence of some kind of nascent democratic society. And yet even at this point things are not what they seem.

Notice, for instance, that the recommendations coming out of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) have increasingly stressed the importance of the creation of low-wage employment for Iraqi youths (who comprise over sixty percent of the population). The rationale is: get them spending all their time working and saving for clothes, leisure activities or a new iPod and they won’t have either the energy or the motivation to kill other Iraqis. What I find remarkable about this is not just that the grand American rhetoric of ‘bringing freedom to Iraq’ is reduced to the more banal image of adolescent Iraqis flipping falafels at some street vendor in Baghdad. It is the way that this image reflects back to Western democratic societies its fantasies of what peaceful existence looks like. Let me explain what I mean.

The fundamental delusion that rationalised America’s invasion of Iraq was the belief that, once set free from the grasp of a maniacal tyrant, Iraqis would spontaneously adopt recognisably democratic forms of social life. In other words, they believed that beneath the skin we are all American, and that the longing for freedom, peace and the advantages of the free market run deep in the human soul. The reality of the situation, however, was that deposing Saddam Hussein opened the gates of hell. As George Packer wrote in The Assassins’ Gate, ‘Iraq without the lid of totalitarianism clamped down has become a place of roiling and contending ethnic claims’.

This state of affairs should have come as no surprise, for the chaos to which the nation reverted post-Saddam was anticipated in King Faisal’s chilling description of his own people in 1933: they are, he said, ‘unimaginable masses of human beings devoid of any patriotic ideas, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatsoever’. Far from releasing Iraqis from the terror of the Ba’athist régime so that some repressed longing for peace could bloom, the American invasion exposed the inherent violence and sheer bloodlust that had been held in check for four decades.

My point here is not to try to exaggerate the violent nature of the Iraqi people, but rather to call into question the widespread belief that peaceableness is a quality that underlies the human condition, which is allowed to surface whenever the external determinants of tyranny or extremism are removed. Is it not rather that human beings partake in a violence so profound that it dwarfs even the most aggressive mammalian behaviour? And are humans not remarkable for their natural incapacity to organize themselves peacefully? These were the observations that troubled Thomas Hobbes, whose immense political theology stemmed from the conviction ‘that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.’ War, for Hobbes, is not an exceptional state of mass violence that interrupts a more fundamental tranquillity. War is the human condition itself.

(I have to admit that I like Stephen King’s variation on this same theme. In one of his more gruesome novels, Cell, there is a kind of electromagnetic ‘Pulse’ that is transmitted through mobile phones, which seemingly produces uncontrollable aggression in its recipients. As the book progresses, though, it is revealed that the Pulse didn’t introduce or generate this bloodthirsty animalism; it simply wiped away the veneer of human civility, exposing – to use Carl Jung’s phrase – our more fundamental ‘blood-consciousness’. Here’s how one character explains it to his companions: ‘At bottom, you see, we are not Homo sapiens at all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle. And that is what the Pulse exposed five days ago.’)

What then of the so-called ‘peace’ enjoyed and promoted by democratic societies? Isn’t it apparent from the Pax Americana that now holds sway – whether at home or abroad – that such peace has become little more than an obsession with the trivial, a benevolent boredom, or worst of all, the inalienable right to excess? It acts, in other words, like a palliative, a form of cultural sedation aimed at distracting us from our violent predisposition, all the while satisfying our bloodlust through vicarious means (television, movies, sport, etc.).

I think it is important at this point to register the extent of my disagreement with Stanley Hauerwas, someone I otherwise greatly respect, on just this question of the substance and character of peace. For all his notorious anti-American rhetoric, it seems to me that on this very point he remains an unreconstructed ‘good ol’ boy’, and his ethical program is perfectly at home within the greater Pax Americana.

I have already suggested that the conception of peace as a deeper (ontological) reality than violence – a concept that is fundamental for Hauerwas, John Milbank and David Bentley Hart – is theologically problematic and ethically impotent. But it is the way that Hauerwas characterises a life narrated by nonviolence as one of profound boredom, marked by the willingness to enjoy the trivial (he often likens the life committed to nonviolence to watching baseball) that I find deeply problematic. For he seems thereby to have accepted in advance the price to be paid for becoming a beneficiary of this idolatrous peace: that we abandon any kind of moral seriousness, renounce every ‘higher’ cause – such a subordination of one’s life to the state, party or cause, Hauerwas says, ‘is the character of totalitarian regimes’.

At this point, isn’t Hauerwas pandering directly to the American obsession with leisure? And further, is this depiction of the ethical life as one which ‘takes time for the trivial’ not an uncanny reiteration of George W. Bush’s urging of people to fight terrorism by continuing to indulge in the excesses of the American way of life? Hauerwas thus unwittingly confirms the accuracy of Slavoj Žižek’s recent observation, that ‘the split between the First and Third World runs increasingly along the lines of an opposition between leading a long, satisfying life full of material and cultural wealth, and dedicating one’s life to some transcendent cause. We in the West are immersed in stupid daily pleasures, while Muslim radicals are ready to risk everything.’

Perhaps now, more than ever, it is important to be reminded of Jesus’ words, which war against this pseudo-peace – whether the bloody peace-through-submission of the Pax Romana, or the indolent peace-through-sedation of our current Pax Americana: ‘Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!’ The intense conflict introduced by Jesus and radicalised in his resurrection, cuts through every organic or ethnic tie (family, nation, gender), leaving those who follow him alone and unprotected in a world determined by self-interest. The apostle Paul goes even further, locating this conflict at the level of the Dawkinsian ‘selfish genes’ themselves – his term for which is ‘flesh’. If there is any peace recognized by Christianity, it is this experience of being profoundly disconnected within a world that knows only violence.

But today, the Church has traded peace for leisure, whoring after the trinkets of our pleasure economy and abandoning its calling to risk everything for the sake of Christ’s kingdom. Our Easter declaration that ‘Jesus is Lord’ is a manifesto for the only peace that really counts. Will we have ears to hear?

Changing times and the blog

I wrote this post a few days ago when I was in Austin Texas on business enjoying the benefit of the warm Texas sun and the hospitality of the people. Today I want to chat about the changing times I am going through and how that relates to the blog. In the midst of intermittent blogging, I've had some time to consider the role of writing for me. A reality of my life (something I have known for a long time) is that I am quick to say much and speak often. The question I am asking myself is; "Should I?" Perhaps pithy In conversation might be helpful. Perhaps in writing I should do the same.

I've read that when words come out of silence they are capable of giving life. It is as if, in the Christian life, silence is the womb that brings forth words of new life. Words that are spoken out of compulsion merely reveal the motive of the speaker to gain approval, value, and meaning from others. The danger is that we miss where our true worth comes from. Does it come from looking smart or having the right answer all the time? Or does it come from a perspective of one's self that is grounded in the deepest humility and in God? I am thinking the latter and wondering how that could better define me.

So, now the blog. I have been discouraged from writing. I am out of words, ideas, and thoughts. Perhaps it is because I feel that what I know and how I live often don't measure up. In Eugene Peterson's book, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, he suggests that most in leadership and ministry share an acute anxiety caused by an awareness that the more we know the less we practice what we know. Knowledge can create a chasm that separates the intellect from practice; the rubber from the road. It throws us into a gnostic world of thoughts and ideas, separated from the realities of the word incarnated through practice. It makes the learner feel like a fake.

It is believed of Abba Agathon, a desert father, that he once walked around for three years with a stone in his mouth. Why? I think he took James' words about the tongue and its dangers seriously. My desire is to write often and well. I long to share my thoughts and hope they are in turn a benefit to those who read. But for now, I think I need to listen in a way that will give space for God to do a new work in my life. For the next while I will (figuratively) walk around with a stone in my hands, and maybe my mouth too.

Len on Vanier on community...

When we left the traditional church setting in the fall of 2000, one of our complaints was that community only happened around task. In retrospect, it seems both true and natural. Community is a by product of something else, and when it is an end in itself it tends to implode. It becomes incestuous. Communities form naturally around shared purpose and shared task. The more clear and intentional the purpose, the stronger the community tends to be. The challenge, then, in forming communities is to help them to maintain an inward life even as they work at whatever purpose they are called toward, as they move to incarnate their purpose. Jean Vanier is right that,

"The more we become people of action and responsibility in our community, the more we must become people of contemplation. If we do not nurture our deep emotional life in prayer hidden in God, if we do not spend time in silence and if we do not know how to take time from the presence of our brothers and sisters, we risk becoming embittered. It is only to the extent that we nurture our own hearts that we can keep interior freedom. People who are hyperactive, fleeing from their deep selves and their wound, become tyrannical and their exercise of responsibility only creates conflict."
Community and Growth

I am experiencing the loss of strength of vision with age, and I visited the optometrist yesterday for an updated prescription. Common enough. But I was struck that as time passes and my physical vision grows weaker, my inner vision grows more clear. It becomes both easier and more natural to look “not at the things which are seen, but the things which are unseen.” At times it feels a little gnostic.. but then I recall that phrase from Paul, and I realize that what may sometimes appear dualistic is really the embodiment of a paradox.
HT Len

A Gospel Paradox...

The gospel is such that when we try to reduce and simplify it, its complexity and robustness challenge us beyond all our reductions. When we try to complicate the gospel and fly in theological circles beyond the grasp of most, we are confronted by the simplicity and accessibility of it. There is no comfort zone here but to live within this paradox that will always keep us seeking to understand and grounding our understanding in the simplest of forms.

If you haven't read Brant yet...do so now...

...because his last post about Church in the first century is worthy of praise.

Vision as Incremental...

I have been far too busy to blog lately because life is taking its toll on me from all angles. One thing I have tried to keep up is meeting for lunches downtown with friends who church plant and are involved in the missional conversation. This has been a source of life for me in the absence of time to blog.

One topic we have bantered about lately is that of vision. There is much talk about vision in churches and so much of it is good and some needs to be questioned. What I perhaps question most is the type of vision that is based more on models of commerce. Many critique this as it often leads down roads of church growth strategies that are concerned most about growing numerically through a repeatable and controllable process. But is biblical vision about that?

In conversation with my friend Anthony, he put me onto the idea of vision as vocation rather than a static constant. What I mean by static constant, is that if a church's vision, for example, is to grow to 10000 people, the unswerving pursuit of that vision can often lead to a lack of openness to the spirit's direction for a body as their life together unfolds. The desire may be a noble one that seeks the Kingdom, but it may not be the specific direction or goal for that church as discerned through the circumstance of their life and the Spirit's presence. Vision as vocation, on the other hand is a buy-in into the macro promise of the covenant God to restore all things. Vocational vision can be understood as a communal resolve that we are a pilgrim people, traveling through time with the Spirit, as we implement and participate in the redemptive action of God to restore all things. What that looks like in a local context needs to be teased out and discovered through relationship to the Spirit in a posture of listening. It is not controllable, but is is discoverable. As we only have the creative visions of scripture that give language to this redemptive hope, it comes to be for us through a process of improvisation (thanks NT).

The above should lead us to consider that perhaps vision is an incremental endeavor. If we have a vocational vision that includes an openness and attentiveness to the Spirit from a macro perspective, then we can trust that direction will be reveled incrementally as we travel through time with God. What is more, the vision discovered will be an impulse by the Spirit that is intertwined with the communities wrestling match with God. Discovering God in the midst of our circumstances (faithful and unfaithful) as we walk through the good and bad consequences of our life together is the playground for discovering our next steps toward God in this life. What grounds this for me is Israel's journey through the wilderness. There was only enough guidance for the next few steps of their life alongside their vocational vision/hope for the promised land. Are we willing to take the route they did? Perhaps not for us, but for God, this seems the preferred place he would have us. Strikingly, it is not a place of efficiency, strength, and pride, but a place of weakness, humility, and powerlessness where the only walking we do is with a limp.

This leads me to wonder if each church vision should not begin with a resounding "For now..." as they seek to discern each step along the journey.

What do you think?

Ecological Crisis and the Missional Church

There has been increased discussion these days about the importance of the environment and the challenges presented by Global Warming. In fact, polititians are even finding these issues unavoidable as they construct their election campaigns. Talk shows are covering the issue and newspapers are reporting it. This is evidence that the crisis has made its way into mainstream thought and this is good. In addition to the political press, churches are taking more seriously the stewardship question. In fact, the stewardship/eccology quesiton plays an importnat part of the missional church conversation.

One of the characteristics of the missional church is the emphasis on an eschatology that affirms creation. It is the belief that God is making all things new, including His creation that He deems good. We could go as far to say that the strong emphasis here is a necessary reaction to much of the dualism in mainstream Western Christianity that has contributed to the Global crisis. "If the gospel is all about going to heaven after we die, then why bother saving the earth? It's all going to burn up anyway!" From my perspective this line of thinking is absurd; however, it is a common eschatological belief that consumes many Christians, and a dangerous one.

This leads us to ask important questions about what our missional spirituality should look like; especially as we seek to form faithful communities in the midst of a culutre that largely perpetuates this global crisis. Here are two questions to consider:

In what ways can churches that affirm creation serve as a prophetic witness to the powers that be?

How might local churches "win the favor of the people" by participating in the good stewardship of creation?


Leave a comment for discussion.

Returning to God's Ever-Present Love

"We often confuse unconditional love with unconditional approval. God loves us without conditions but does not approve of every human behavior. God doesn't approve of betrayal, violence, hatred, suspicion, and all other expressions of evil, because they all contradict the love God wants to instill in the human heart. Evil is the absence of God's love. Evil does not belong to God.

God's unconditional love means that God continues to love us even when we say or think evil things. God continues to wait for us as a loving parent waits for the return of a lost child. It is important for us to hold on to the truth that God never gives up loving us even when God is saddened by what we do. That truth will help us to return to God's ever-present love."
~Henri Nouwen

Nouwen identifies what is perhaps the biggest point of confusion about God's love; unconditional love and unconditional approval. Unconditional love is the hardest kind, because it begs us to offer a love that doesn't always feel good. This love says hard things when they are called for. This love sees past relational comfort to the well being of the whole person. And what is more, this love demands the greatest measure of forgiveness between the beloved, because to go the distance with proper love is the most expensive option for all. But the rewards are great. From God's perspective, we experience love to an unimaginable degree in the cross, and as Nouwen says above, this love will help us return to God. Form our perspective, when we follow God's pattern, we extend this same love and participate in returning others to God. We can be sure that this is the economy of the new creation we hope in; an inheritance that won't spoil or fade.

Relating to God...

The other day we had a discussion in our mission group about Exodus 33. If you recall, this is "post-golden-calf" idolatry and God wants to send Moses and the Israelites into the promised land without His presence (v 1-3) for fear he might kill them. What we see is that the covenant relationship between God and the Israelites is seriously strained and the affects are visible in both God's disappointment and anger, and Israel's distress at the fear of losing His provision. Moses has none of it and what ensues in the dialogue between them is nothing short of a passionate, very personal exchange. This passage illuminates the very personhood of God and is rife with emotion. What is more, we see in God an initiative to love, and in Israel and opportunity to reciprocate with faithfulness. Verse 11 mentions that "the Lord would speak with Moses face to face, as a man speak with his friend."

That the very personal nature of God would stick out in this tumultuous passage is rather curious. Even in God's anger he still offers an angel to go with Israel to the promised land, but not His presence. Surely they deserved less than that! Moses pleads with God (v12-13) by reminding Him of His covenant and faithfulness and it is God's mercy, because of his fondness of Moses, that prevails and changes His mind. Rather than extracting justice and (by His right) revoking the covenant, His unconditional love is extended. The magnitude of this mercy I think escapes us in the familiarity of the passage. Consider a man who loves a woman and continues to protect her and provide for her. Consider his infatuation with her beauty and the words of commitment she utters to him. Consider this emotion and then imagine walking in on her with another man...ad she does this often. Such is idolatry and such is a vague glimpse of the situation that illuminates the magnitude of the mercy extended.

The way God and Moses interact also reveals a problem with many of us Christians these days. As we are wrapped tight in the blanket of consumerist culture, it is sadly to be expected that much of our experience of God would follow in similar fashion. How Many times am I guilty of a wandering heart, not considering the hurt and disappointment I cause God. Worse yet, how many times do I/we flippantly come to God as our need arises and fail to relate to him in a manner that doesn't resemble a vending machine? We (in evangelical circles) shy away from rituals that make vivid the seriousness of relating to the living God and therefore our relationship with God suffers from a casual attitude and antinomian like behaviour. Not all, but many. What if we had symbols and deeper rituals that remind us that our whole beings belong to God? What if our life together made room for God to reveal His emotion, personhood, and humanness in a way that makes us consider our actions before we wander away into idolatrous pursuits? Perhaps our spirituality would resemble more the Moses/God pattern; a pattern that would allow God to be His free self.
image credit

A Celtic Blessing

celtic cross at oakwood cemetery
Originally uploaded by fubuki

"May you have -
Walls for the wind
And a roof for the rain,
And drinks bedside the fire
Laughter to cheer you
And those you love near you,
And all that your heart may desire" via TSK