big-talking golden rulers

brotherken said:

"Now I know a lot of this doesn't jive with the way many ministries are run today.In most cases we (the church) have given the impression that you must convert, or at least listen to our preaching, to benefit from our charity."

to which hineini responded with a whole nother blog:
I think this is a really interesting idea and one I'd like to speak with you all about a little more. Much has been made in previous posts about how easy it is to criticize the church, maybe more so in terms of its service to those "outside". I have been curious why this is so for quite some time. What I was thinking of offering here was maybe a form of question as to why this is. The simplistic version of the question is "Why doesn't the church do what it says" (as a nod to jollybeggar I will concede that this question already assumes the church guilty as charged) but I want to encourage anyone to pose that question anyway they'd like and offer any thoughts they have.

On my own behalf, I'd like to speak briefly about a distinction that I think offers very hopeful possibilities for a turn around for the church, or, the church's repentance if you will. I want to start by returning to the quote above, specifically the second sentence;

"In most cases we (the church) have given the impression that you must convert, or at least listen to our preaching, to benefit from our charity" (brotherken)

The problem I see here, and of course this problem offers a hopeful possibility, is the concept of charity. Now it may look like I'm playing semantics here, and to be fair I may have asked brotherken to clarify what he means (and I hope he will) but I think many of the difficulties the church faces currently in regards to "the least" is the church's inabilty to transcend charity, to move beyond charity to charity's better, solidarity.

Let me explain. As mentioned above in the conversation regarding the "golden rule" I mentioned that although the golden rule offers a helpful tool for generally peacable and charitable conduct towards those who surround me, it still uses my desires, how I would like to be treated, as a rule in determining how I should treat others. I must first decide what I want before I act and in acting, I in a sense, impose myself on the other, assuming they will want what I want. With charity the giver is never at risk, their position, their beliefs, their life are held in reserve from the other. They are giver, and the other is receiver. A one-way transaction, that in this world's economy cannot but create a debt in the receiver.

In order that this doesn't drag out I will get to what I see as the hopeful possibility. The step beyond charity (which is actually a step back for the "I") is solidarity. Now what do I mean by solidarity. Well, solidarity is the radical humilty of the self that seeks to empty itself (kenosis) of itself and instead privilage the other. The self keeps no interior fortress of unassailable beliefs or doctrines but seeks to move beyond the distinction between I and they. As an important side note, this rejection of the "us" and "them" distinction is not a collaspe into a collective "we" instead its a privilaging of the other. It is the embrace and pursuit of St Paul's words to "count others better than yourself".

Obviously there is much more to say but I'd like to hear what others have to say. (hineini)

...by the way, jollybeggar says 'thanks for the nod!'

fired

in response to a thing on another blog, shandi said...
...my sculpture was done in a different technique... coil method of building up from the groundfloor rather than taking away unnecessary clay. So... in essence... I was nothing until built up in stages. But... as you astutely pointed out... I should have been left on my own to solidify my personality before being put to the kiln. And.. yes I did crack.
***

yeah, tragically our churches can become kilnlike, can't they?

i mean, fledgling sculpture subjected to all that heat and intensity? i'm not sure that this is what Jesus had in mind when he said to a few everyday people 'come, follow me.'

shandi's description of the technique used to create that bust is beautiful and, if allowed to also stand as metaphor, is one that shines light into who we are: raw material built around an integral core becomes the realization of that which the scultor envisioned in the first place...

i have, a number of times over the last five years, wondered why God waited so long to remind me of the call to ministry that i heard when i was seventeen. i mean, sure, i got it all wrong the first time around, thinking that i was supposed to be a rockstar for Jesus or something... but why did he choose to wait until i was, like, thirty-five or whatever before suggesting we try this one again?

my eventually agreed-upon answer: because there were still more layers of the raw material that makes a person a person (relationships, experiences, learnings, pain etc) needed to be added before the intended form was realized and ready to be used in the way intended for now.

clearly, i don't have a clue about working in three dimensional mediums like clay and such, but i've got to ask: what happens to said sculpture if you never fire it? is there some way to keep adding more on there?

reason i'm asking is because i don't think i ever want to be fired alive.

i never want to have some sense of complete realization because from there you kinda go 'okay, now what?' small affirmations along the way, acknowledging the artistry of the one at work forming me i think... sure. just nothing that says 'my work here is done.'

i think that being fired may very well be (in this metaphor that naturally goes way beyond my own depth and ability to recognize logical comparisons) death itself. only then can the final form be considered and assessed.

also, once something is fired, the only way to reuse or otherwise rework it is to smash it into fragments, right?

nope- the less smashing for me the better!

now as to why the institutional church seems to be, in many cases, kilnlike? it's probably because people have allowed themselves to be fired, and now desire that for everyone else as soon as possible.

not every church is a kiln... many of them are studios.

nobody knows where you are
how near or how far
shine on, you crazy diamond
pile on many more layers
and i'll be joining you there
shine on, you crazy diamond
and we'll bask in the shadow of yesterdays triumph
and sail on the steel breeze
come on you boy child, you winner and loser,
come on you miner for truth and delusion and shine!
(waters, '75)
***
note: for anyone who's been paying attention and is wondering, it's not that i don't have anything to say about my recent trip to sri lanka, it's that i still have too much to say. eventually i will be able to write about it.

funny

funny how God works sometimes...

when i enroled in bible school during the fall of '83, i thought that i was basically signing on for a year of camp- that and the hope of meeting other musicians withwhom i would launch my big recording career. not exactly the best reasons to go, but whatever.

i remember telling my girlfriend at the time to quit fretting because it's not like i was going off to find a wife or something.

we never kissed again.

in fact, i was basically dead wrong on all counts. funny how God works sometimes.

yet, after a year and a half of it with limited academic success i realized that, although i had met a beautiful girl and fallen in love, i was not going to be a preacher or a missionary or a youth pastor and so any further time there would be wasted. i enroled in university in the faculty of education and got on with life. married in 85 and graduated in 88... been married and teaching ever since.

funny how God works sometimes.

about five years ago, God said 'okay, you've had your fun- now let's try this again.' i found myself once again taking classes and asking myself 'if God were to call you here, could you move here?' on holidays. mrs jollybeggar was thinking the same things at the same time.

this and that happened and today i sit in my office at the church, reflecting upon having just finished doing the youth pastor thing at a camp, and suffering a bit of anxiety on the eve of a missionary trip to sri lanka. the only real bummer on this one is that mrs jollybeggar won't be able to accompany me on this trip. however, i know that there will be others...

funny how God works sometimes.

(i say all this to say that i won't be posting anything until the end of august. shalom)

faithless?

we were talking about assisted suicide. icarus goodman, who has a blogspot called 'the flights of icarus' (very cool hook, man) has a really interesting post dealing, yet again, with the terry schiavo story. it's worth reading. (http://icarusgoodman.blogspot.com/2005/02/let-her-die.html)

i sent him the 'rollerball' link and the dialogue continues:

icarus says (edited highlights)
I wonder, from a Christian perspective, when is ending one's life ok? I do remember reading about Abimilech in Judges, and he orders a servant to kill him because he has been mortally wounded by a woman, and he doesn't want to die by her hands. Nothing is said condemning that action. So is killing yourself early, to avoid pain or shame acceptable in Christian views? Does it have to do with being artificially kept alive? Just wondering

good one- what to make of abe?
well, he seized the 'throne' (if it can be called that- he became king of shechem, which was a city that might have been about the size of fargo, north dakota) by murdering his seventy brothers, and didn't prove to be a leader of any real integrity after that, just in case anyone was thinking that he might. the fact that a woman from thebez (just down the road) dropped a rock on his head and he found that too embarrassing to accept so he had himself killed by the guy who was hired to carry around his armour for him just seems like some sort of ironic, spaghetti western frontier justice.

that action is just one of many of his actions that get tagged as 'wicked' and accursed. i don't think that he is a very good example of a man after God's own heart. in fact, it seems that there were very few people in any position of power at the time that actually represented the way God had envisioned people to behave. it's like israel in that period was populated and ruled by tolkien's uruk-hai. the book of judges ends with this summary of the whole mess:

"in those days israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit." (judges 21.25)

what kinda spooks me is that, in the absense of any moral absolutes, we find ourselves in our more-or-less comfy western world doing as we see fit.

there's a similar story a little later in israel's history. king saul, israel's first king, is once again at war with his official nemeses the philistines. after some pretty fiersome fighting, saul's sons are dead and he is overtaken by archers- overtaken says to me that he's running away- in a scene mildly comparable to that one in 'dances with wolves' where the coach driver is overtaken and executed at close range by warriors with bows and arrows.

when the archers leave, probably to get some of the buddies to come back have some barbaric fun humiliating a king, saul bids his servant, in the tradition of abimilech, to kill him. the servant refuses and so saul 'falls on his sword', after which the servant does the same. no more philistine fun today.

anyway, what is surprising is what happens one chapter later. a suspicious survivor of the battle (kurt vonnegut once said 'never trust a survivor until you know what he did to survive') arrives at the encampment of david. david is the newly annointed king who has been on the run for years, awaiting the conclusion of the reign of saul with respect and honour. this guy arrives and tells the story of saul's final moment with one key revision: he says HE is the servant who honoured the last wish of saul by assisting him. producing saul's crown and royal armband, this refugee is probably hoping to get in with the new regime. david's reaction is surprising, but indicative of the type of king he would be: he and his men tear their clothes and fast for the rest of the day in mourning over the death of the king and his sons. then they have the refugee promptly killed for assassinating God's annointed.

really, though, when i am looking for answers from Jesus, these stories are context. Christian spirituality is about Jesus, not his distant ancestors, yet we are correct in looking to the old testament as well as the new for teachings on God's perspective. what i see when i read the gospels is Jesus doing everything he can to heal the sick and raise the dead. life is precious to God- he is its author. never do we see Jesus placing his hands over someone's eyes because they are just too far gone, releasing them from time and space. rather, we see him speaking rather curtly about faithlessness to those who suggest that this or that scenario is hopeless.

i think that, if Jesus' life, ministry and death are any indication of how he would have spoken to the question of avoiding shame and pain through assisted suicide, then the Christian view is pretty clear. Jesus' death was a painfully prolonged public shamefest.

however, as to the whole question of being kept alive artificially, i am still trying to process that one myself without being found faithless.

dancing sheep?

originally posted on February 25, 2005

we were writing back and forth about rescuing 'lost lambs' in ways that reflected our 'giftings...

i hear what you are saying... especially the 'gifted' part.

what is a gift? are relationships gifts from God? if so, then the lost lambs are right there in your area of gifting. rather than seeing gifts in the general and traditionally interpreted biblical sense, how does this play out for you personally?

my fear is that we miss our specific role in the reaching of the lost because we categorize our lives into boxes: (work, friends, family, work-friends, work-family, church, church-friends, church-family, church-work, church-work-friends etc.) and lose track of our relational role in the whole thing. who do you have more of a chance to share Christ with, to demonstrate the patience and grace and love apportioned to you with, etc etc- a stranger that you meet when you are playing music somewhere or somebody that knows you because they've played hockey with you or worked alongside of you for ten years or whatever?

a band i play with is very definately a missionfield- i get excited about doing stuff with those guys because playing is fun. however, for my person, the ministry is with the guys in the band- i have greatest impact on them because we have relationships that are established already- not with the crowd (big or small!) assembled. anytime i sing i am leading worship because that's a sanctified role i play for God's glory, and i don't really think that the words have as much to do with pleasing God as the heart anyway. although we don't frame it that way, singing "i fight authority-authority always wins" becomes a testimonial praise song on a number of levels because of who i am, but when we're singing 'one thing' (finger eleven) and that tear makes a break for it down my face, it's not the crowd that notices or knows what it's all about- it's the boys in the band.

music is a great vehicle for praise. i'm just not sure of how effective an evangelism tool it is, because it is so emotional and emotions are so volatile. the lost lambs can dance, but do they dance home?

lost and found

originally posted february 24, 2005

concerning how we serve God as individuals rather than as part of a larger organization...

here’s what makes sense to me: we serve God in many different contexts and many different ways. we serve him by reaching out to the varying degrees of lost and we serve him by building up spiritual muscle in his body in order to equip the church to reach out to those varying degrees of lost. I don’t think either is a stand-alone righteousness… they both qualify the other.

the first part of our missional orders is often the part that gains most of our attention. we know Jesus said to go out, and we drink a lot of coffee as we strategize how this going out is to take place. the ‘going out’ part is the creative, outside-the-box stuff- trying to remain connected with the people Jesus died to save in order to be used of him with them. however, if our focus rests entirely on chasing after people’s hearts then the great commission is only partially realized because Jesus’ last words were bi-directional: go out… make disciples. hmm- there’s the ‘make disciples’ part.

discipleship isn’t instantaneous… it wasn’t even that way for Jesus. after all the time and relational investment, his closest disciples still buckled under pressure- we all do. Jesus’ final words on earth include within them a reminder of the process that he had modeled with his own friends in the three years of ministry that had ultimately led to the cross and beyond it into new life for us all. making disciples takes lifetimes as we learn new things from Jesus’ word and his people that challenge what we embrace so far as obedience.

so I guess what I’m saying, in short (?) is that we probably need to sort out how, in our own life, we are going to attend to both of the calls to ministry as spoken so succinctly by our Lord: how do we reach out to the lost? how do we equip the found?

ephesians 4.11-13 speaks of how we are invited to serve the body, culminating in the vision for all of us:

“till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.”

I like the thinking that is taking place here, because of the inherent challenges that arise from the acknowledgement that it is easy to continue doing the same things exclusively for they are most comfortable (perhaps that is what matt redman meant when he wrote sadly about having crafted a more comfortable cross for himself).

“let each one of you speak truth with his neighbour, for we are members of one another.” (ephesians 4.25)