New adventures don’t scare me much anymore. My life has been lived as adventure it seems. So it’s not a new adventure just a new trail to take.
The path I am considering though…it’s one full of jagged rocks, ankle-twisting ruts and dangerous cliffs. It could end me but it promises life.
Thus I go.
Peace to each of you.
In a sermon he preached on Acts 1, Walter Brueggeman invited the listeners to imagine what must have went through the mind of Mathias as he anticipated the rolling of the dice for the next spot open in the 12.
Yes! I’m the next apostle. And maybe not…
Well, now it is certain death. So goes the life of a marteria, a witness, a martyr.
To tell the truth is risky business.
The lives of Jesus followers testify to the truth of the resurrection. As witnesses who tell the truth we mock death, we defy the lies, we announce the reality of resurrection that bursts open a new direction for the future.
Imagine the early Christians. They announced a regime change. The future was open for a new world, a new peace and it had nothing to do with Rome. Risky. Dangerous.
To speak the truth is risky business.
But what do we expect? Jesus told us as much would happen:
Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man… Luke 6
When we witness the truth people won’t like it.
The traditionalists won’t like it. They will cling to their traditions and spit in your face. They’ve erected structures that enslave. Resurrection sets free! They can’t handle the moving, life-giving power of God’s Spirit bringing life and newness to everything.
The religious won’t like it. They have their religion by which they keep everything the way they want it…they sell their religion, they perform for the Sunday gathering and pass the plate. You remember in Acts 19 when Paul upset the silversmith?
Many current American church groups can’t take it. Our culture of consumerism will fight back… Church has been streamlined and polished to the point that the resurrection life will break through and disrupt everything…
In a resurrection reality there is room at the table for the poor and oppressed… they’re not just a line on the budget
In a resurrection reality those with a past have a future and a contribution… they’re not just the latest how-not-to lesson for our children.
When preachers witness the truth of resurrection people squirm, they create excuses, they grow uncomfortably angry… it’s risky to speak the truth to a church culture conditioned to be fed and satisfied spiritually, to consume the latest religious product… How many churches today would have Jesus minister to them, really?
The resurrection of Jesus isn’t self-help speech that encourages you for the next week. Our gatherings aren’t intended to offer the latest pop-psychology to make you feel better about yourself.
We gather to witness the resurrection of Jesus and acknowledge our participation in it. We meet to dare the powers to go ahead and try something. We gather to regroup as we prepare to storm the gates of hell another week. We together fall to our knees in worship to announce as one the resurrection of our Savior who alone holds our allegiance. In doing so, we renounce all other allegiances.
Attending a Christian gathering should be the riskiest thing one does all week. Because we are identifying ourselves with a group who counters the current society and its attempts to offer life. A people who hold up the poor and create solidarity with them. A community that condemns sexism, racism, injustice, oppression. We gather to say that the culture outside of the kingdom of God has no claim on us, death can’t defeat us!
And if… if you sit there, like me, wondering about the risk, asking what risk? It may be time to reevaluate our witness and our testimony. It may be time to rethink whether our lives express the truth of resurrection as incumbent upon the body of Christ, or have we settled for a rather sorry version of pop-culture religion?
Sinister eyes, focused for judgment,
windows of a soul
inculcated by an illusory sense
of worth extracted from disparity.
What infinite irony!
Life-debasing discrepancy
ripe on the tree:
a discerned good.
I enjoy a regular conversation with a fellow minister in town. We often get together to discuss theology and church polity (i.e., complain about how badly we’re treated as ministers). During one of our chats he mentioned a frustration he feels with some of Christianity’s lopsided atonement theology. He bemoaned the overemphasis of stressing Jesus’ death to the exclusion of other aspects of his redemptive actions…theologies like Jesus died for me (period), thanks for the cross of Christ (period), shape many who accept Jesus. At times I wonder if reality were pop-theology would people have to nail Jesus back to the cross after Easter Sunday? Am I wrong to wonder if this thinking encourages the blatant commonalities between funerals and some Christian worship gatherings?
It’s as though some forget he lives (I know that most actually don’t forget and do accept ontologically that he lives, but our religious talking points often betray us). We are a Sunday community in a Friday world though, right?
Most of this talk simply adds up to parsing the theological nuances that we preachers like to volley back and forth over coffee. And, yes, we call it work. Still, the discussion did raise an interesting thought.
What if we de-emphasized the cross to emphasize it? Follow me for a moment. The cross, if understood back through resurrection, represents the biggest “So what?” in history.
God says to Satan: “Nice. You tried to kill me. So what? That’s all you’ve got. Watch this!” The cross event exposes the impotence of death to trump God. So Satan has a cross, big whoop. God is love and life.
In the very act of de-elevating the cross we elevate it to a proper placement within God’s redemptive break-in. Standing alone the cross is nothing more than another point for death. Paul faced this enigma, suffering ridicule for connecting God’s victory to a cross. It makes such little sense in a winner takes all match, it appears as a pitiful attempt to deal with the problem. That’s the point. Everything death could do ended on Friday but God wasn’t finished. He showed back up Sunday as if to say, “What cross?”
The big deal of the cross is that it wasn’t the biggest deal.
John Dobbs has launched a grass-roots effort to honor ministers by asking bloggers to blog about a minister(s) who has impacted them (you can read more about it at his blog). I love the idea. Here is my contribution.
I come from a family of preachers: a grandpa, an uncle, a cousin and a dad. Dad didn’t always preach full-time, but he served as a deacon, which if done right exemplifies the essence of a minister. Now (and for the last 10 or so years) he ministers in the pulpit for a small congregation in Texas. Not only that, he directed a week of camp at Green Valley Bible Camp for around 9-10 years, and a majority of those years were directed while he worked full-time as a network analyst. He took his vacation to minister to young people in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas instead of sipping margaritas on the beach (actually I can’t convince him to have a drink with me so he wouldn’t have done that anyway…but the line sounded good).
Even though I actually started preaching full-time before he did, he still produced an incredible impact on my journey as a minister. Honestly, my initial mode and style of preaching came from other places and not him. I endured an indoctrination at a school of preaching and struggled to find a message and ministry of grace. He deserves no credit for that part of my ministry.
Though he raised me around rigid conservatism, he actually showed me the path of questioning everything while still getting along with those with whom we disagree. While a deacon, dad rarely let the preacher off the hook. He wanted to know why the preacher said what he said. I remember frequently waiting for dad to finish talking to the preacher after all the lights had been turned out in the church building. He wouldn’t settle for a traditional answer, he wanted to know God’s direction. This momentum of questioning eventually caught up to me, moved through me and swept me into a new era of my own ministry. This is where dad gets the credit.
He taught me how to question. He passed on to me the gift of relentlessness when it comes to finding God. He showed me that going against the traditional flow is what we’re often called to do, even if it stirs up family Christmas and comfortable congregations. He never liked the taste of canned answers and I’ve inherited those taste buds.
So Tony Linton, dad: Thanks. I now enjoy a ministry flooded by grace and truth because you taught me to never settle and to never quit asking questions.
If you have a minister in mind then write up a tribute to him/her and explain the positive impact on your life. Thanks to John Dobbs as well for the great idea. Keep the flame of encouragement going… get to writing. There’s got to be some more good preachers out there, somewhere.