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The tomb is empty!

It happened, it happens, it will happen!


Resurrection: Rob Bell from The Work of Rob Bell on Vimeo.

A liturgy of broken dreams.

The following is the text of an invitation to a dinner some friends and I are going to put on to celebrate Maundy Thursday. If you read this and are at all interested in spending an evening in a new liturgy with us, drop me a line. Just go to my profile and use it to send me an email.

Sometimes knowing the ending from the beginning changes the way we see the story.

I remember when the 6th Sense came out. For those that still have not yet seen it all these years later I won't spoil it for you, but it has a twist ending. It's one of those details that once known, changes how you see the entire narrative. Well, a friend of mine called me one day to express their frustration that another one of their friends had spoiled it for them by telling them the twist, which they off handedly told me. I had not yet seen the movie and therefore I too knew the end from the beginning. I could never see the story with fresh eyes, as it was intended.

The story of the "Gospel" is all too familiar to many of us. Those of us that have been raised in a religious tradition, or have chosen to participate in one for any significant length of time, know the story of Jesus. We know it beginning to end. That is to say, we know the end from the beginning.

I think that has blinded us to many parts of the story. The disciples, those that walked and talked with Jesus, had no such luxury. They experienced walking in the Way of Jesus day to day, never really knowing what the future held for them. They saw each turn of the journey for what it was. They were not blinded by an assumed meaning of the story that they could substitute for the whole, and not worry about the turns and twists of everyday life with Jesus. They got to experience the immediacy of the Way.

We propose an experiment. Please come be with us as we celebrate an important step in the journey of following Jesus. Come participate in the creation of a new liturgy.

We invite you to come have dinner with us to celebrate Maundy Thursday. The day Jesus washed his disciples feet. The day they celebrated the Passover meal together and they looked forward to Jesus inaugurating the Kingdom of God. The disciples brought their expectations and dreams to this dinner.

We've all had hopes and dreams for our lives. Sometimes we've even thought we've had the future figured out. We knew what God had in store for us, and how God was going to bring it to fruition. But sometimes, it doesn't quite go as we expected.

Come eat with us. Bring all your hopes and dreams with you, especially your misplaced, mistaken, and broken ones. Come forget the end that you have imagined, and be with us in this step of our journey together. Come as we call for the in breaking of the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom that eludes our expectations and dreams, and will exceed our imaginings of it.

New wine...

Then John's disciples came and asked him, "How is it that we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?"

Jesus answered, "How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast.

"No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. Neither do men pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved."

Matthew 9:14-17

I'm a member of a liturgical tribe. I'm an Episcopalian to be more specific. If one is trying to make a family tree of Western Christianity, the Episcopal tradition is the American expression of the Anglican tradition, or Church of England. It is a direct offshoot of the Roman Catholic Church. It has all the calisthenics of the RCC, but it generally takes itself a bit less seriously.

When someone not familiar with the liturgy might visit, they would note the better part of the congregation seems to know, without visible communication, when to sit, stand, kneel, or say a particular prayer, in unison. Oh gentle visitor, don't be fooled. This not a spontaneous demonstration of group telepathy. It is a result of practice, literally centuries of practice. Our tribe is playing out a script passed down to us by our fore bearers. These prayers, with their physical expressions of standing or kneeling, are result of generations of accumulated traditions. Granted, we do occasionally modify them, but they have deep roots in our history.

Sometimes these processes are viewed as the necessary and right way to conduct worship. It's almost as if they are expressions of some sort of Platonic form, that exists in the heavens, and we participate in their shadow forms, to the best of our abilities, here on earth. We should strive to find the most original, ancient, form of practice and adhere to it to make sure we are doing it right.

I'm not so sure that's the best way to look at liturgy. Anything, even ancient, was new at one time. Even something as basic to our faith as the Lord's Prayer had a genesis. There was a day when it was not. These prayers and practices were invented by good people, often times I believe, people led by the Holy Spirit. As the Holy Spirit, the presence of Jesus, moved in their lives, they were changed. They were stretched like wine skins are by the fermentation of new wine. The operation of God's presence in their lives worked itself out in new forms of piety, new ways of living, new prayers, new liturgies. These practices are where their love for their Savior led them. It is not where they began, it is where they arrived on their journey.

Is this a finished task? Has the new wine done all it can do in shaping the lives and practice of God's people? Are the prayers, practices, and liturgy that we have inherited the pinnacle, upon which we can either choose to stand or from which any movement requires descending?

Growing numbers of us don't think so. We choose to remain members of our respective tribes, understanding the value of tradition in making us who we are. But we also choose not to be constrained by the religious forms of the past as if they are writ in stone on the side of a mountain.

It's time to experiment. Some of us are going to celebrate Maundy Thursday with a meal and a new liturgy. If I survive I intend to post a synopsis of the result here.

They will know we are Christians by our doctrine?

I have to credit my friend Jonathan for the title of this one.

"To love is to know God precisely because God is love. The emerging community, at its best, can teach us again that love must be the first word on our lips and also the last, and that we must seek to incarnate that sacred word in the world. I recently heard a well-known speaker say that if faith does not cost us something, than it is nothing. Only much later could I respond: if faith does not cost us everything, it is nothing. Orthodoxy as right belief will cost us little: indeed, it will allow us to sit back with our Pharisaic doctrine, guarding the 'truth' with the purity of our interpretation. But orthodoxy, as believing in the right way, as bringing love to the world around us and within us... that will cost us everything. For to live by that sword, as we all know, is to die by it."

(pg. 3)
How (Not) to Speak of God
by Peter Rollins

I'm starting the above book, and just ten pages into it its helping crystallize and articulate things that have been rolling around in my head for years. Its good stuff.

I remember when I was in college taking History of the Ancient World. We began to discuss the Torah (first five books of the Tanakh, or Old Testament) from an historical stand point. The professor pointed out that the language used at times (e.g. "no other gods before me" in the Ten Commandments), seemed to indicate that the author may have believed in the existence of many deities, but chose to worship only YHWH. In short, Moses, or whoever wrote the books in question, was not a monotheist, that individual was what is termed a henotheist. Well, this thought bounced around for a few minutes in my little modernist "the Bible is inerrant" brain, knocked some stuff over, and was promptly expelled. (I will not presume that any inerrantist cannot deal with this issue. It is to say that I could not deal with the issue at the time).

It brought to mind whether Abraham was monotheist, not to mention a host of other characters. Could these great men of faith, my spiritual fore bearers, have walked in such great error? What about David's Mighty Men, who supported him in administering his kingdom? Was it time and effort spent in vain on their part? Did they just die and go to hell? (I know, no concept of Heaven or Hell yet.)

As I've grown older and learned more the issues only become more muddied and the previously sharp lines between categories of "Christian" and "Nonchristian" have become like pencil marks rubbed with a wet thumb.

The early Christians did not have a cohesive New Testament that we so readily refer to now. They had a multiplicity of books that circulated, some of which we now recognize as part of the Canon, and others we do not, like the Gospel of Peter with its giant angels and talking cross and the Gospel of Thomas with naked sayings of Jesus with no framing narrative. For the sake of discussion let us put these aside and deal only with the canonical gospels.

Mark has a very spare christology. It would be difficult to derive the Deity of Christ if all you had was Mark's account. Additionally the oldest manuscripts of Mark hint at the resurrection but leave out some of the meatier stuff.

What if you were stuck with Mark, like some communities probably were? What if you believed in Jesus' teaching and his sacrificial death, but weren't quite sure about the resurrection and had no concept of him being the Incarnation of God? Would that be enough?

Was the possibly henotheist faith of Moses enough? The even more probably henotheistic (?polytheistic?) faith of Abraham enough? What of the loving service of David's Mighty Men as they served him, as he served his God?

Now, some of my conservative evangelical brethren (and sistren?) would readily say that the Christians that had no faith beyond the words of Mark sadly went to Hell. They would probably do the same thing with David's fellows. Moses and Abraham would be a bit stickier, in that they are affirmed as men of faith in the Bible. This might be dealt with by an adamant insistence that they were monotheists, otherwise they wouldn't be described the way they were. Who knows, maybe that's all right. They might make a loophole declaring a different "dispensation" for that period of history. It was ok back then, but we can't get away with it now.

Let me suggest another possibility. Maybe we always have and always will struggle to know God for who He is. Maybe we still see through a glass darkly and only know in part (1 Cor. 13:12). Maybe its more about doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God (Mic. 6:8) rather than being absolutely certain about all the details.

You know, life used to be so simple....

"It is, unfortunately, one of the abiding temptations of pastors and scholars to reduce Jesus to words alone, to replace a lived life with a preached sermon or an interesting idea. To remove, however, that which is radically subversive, socially revolutionary, and politically dangerous from Jesus' actions is to leave his life meaningless and his death inexplicable. "

pg. 93
Jesus: a Revolutionary Biography
By John Dominic Crossan

Although I would never have articulated it as such, for fear of being branded a person of little faith, or more accurately, incorrect faith, I used to wonder why they killed a platitude spouting Jesus that just wanted us to be nice to each other and consider the lilies.

I'm trying to figure out what it is for *me* to follow Jesus in this day and age. What sacrifices am I called to make for the sake of seeing God's Kingdom, or Dream, come to pass in the world that I've been planted in. Will it require some form of civil disobedience? Will it lead me into opposition to people that I've come to respect and spent years cultivating relationships with?

I'm considering going back to school and getting a Master's in Social Work. I'm beginning to contemplate how much that process will likely change my life. I may have to switch jobs to employment that is more conducive to going to school, which will more than likely mean a decrease in pay. This will be coupled with trying to find a creative way to pay for school on top of my normal expenses. Most probably there will be no reading outside of my coursework for three years. And the stress.....

All I know for certain is that I'm tired of being where I am in my life. Its time for some sort of change.