Brian J. Walsh's Blog, page 35

A New Way Home

It’s that time of year again. That time to journey home, the place of anxiety, fear, frustration and pain.

Advent Pain, Aching Hope

by Brian Walsh

Maybe it is somehow natural that we want radical new beginnings.

Maybe there is something about the human condition that wants newness in our lives,

and we want it now.

But then again, maybe such impatience is also a feature of a culture that needs

the excitement of the ‘new’ in order to keep the market growing.

To live in “modern times” is to be incurably impatient,

we are not a people who like to wait.

Heck, even the way in which Christian conversion is presented

seems to be all about arrival,

all about a radical, total and final break with a past way of life

and the embrace of a new identity in Christ as a done deal.

“Come to Jesus and be a new person!

Come to Jesus and all of your problems will go away,

all of your infirmities healed,

all of the troubles solved.”

I know, I know, few of us really believe that anymore,

and yet, we do seem to be frustrated that life in Christ

still seems to carry so many of the burdens of the past,

and maybe even a few more.

This was certainly my experience after coming to Christian discipleship

after reading the gospel of John.

It wasn’t that I thought that Jesus was going to solve all my problems

- I mean, I didn’t think that my conversion

was going to sober up my alcoholic father,

or immediately deal with my anxieties and sadness –

but this was the story that I was getting from the church around me.

Now that I was in Christ, I was told,

everything was going to be so much better,

everything was going to be so much happier,

everything was going to be so radically new.

Don’t get me wrong, that decision to follow Jesus

remains the most radical and momentous event in my life!

And yes, it was (and I hope remains) profoundly radical.

But my father died a drunk,

I was never reconciled with him,

and I constantly felt like a misfit in the church

because, well, as far as I could see,

there wasn’t much to justify

the kind of cheap pious Jesus happiness

that we sang about in the Christian choruses of the day.

It seemed as if maybe I hadn’t quite arrived yet.

Maybe this Jesus thing hadn’t quite taken its full effect in my life.

But somehow I didn’t believe that.

Somehow I had a hunch that this

“Jesus-is-going-to-fix-everything-right-away” piety was bullshit.

And here’s the thing,

there was nothing in the gospel of John

- the gospel that led me to Jesus –

that seemed to promise any such immediate

and final resolution of all of my problems.

Indeed, it seemed to me that if I was going to follow Jesus,

then the story was likely going to get more difficult,

more dangerous,

more conflicted,

more fraught,

maybe even more violent,

as things unfolded.

That’s how it played out for Jesus,|

why wouldn’t it play out that way for me.?

So a happy piety of arrival had no appeal to me.

It didn’t fit the Jesus I met in John.

It didn’t fit the realities of my life.

It didn’t seem to fit the reality of any life whatsoever.

And it wasn’t for a long time before I came to realize

that deep in the spiritual brilliance of the Christian calendar

there is a profound sense of a piety of waiting.

It is right there at the beginning of the Christian year.

For Christians the new year doesn’t begin on January 1,

rather, the new year begins on the first Sunday of Advent.

The Christian year ends with the Sunday in which we proclaim Christ the King

- almost as a statement of faith against the evidence of the year now gone by –

and begins with a posture of longing and waiting;

a longing and waiting for the Christ just proclaimed King

to become King anew in the midst

of our broken, conflicted and compromised lives.

And for that we wait.

Advent is about a piety of patience,

a piety of longing,

a piety of tears,

a piety of waiting.

But this patience,

this longing,

these tears,

this waiting,

is, indeed, a piety.

This is a spirituality that is born of living in this story.

This is an open-eyed faith that refuses to cover up the pain,

the disappointment,

the struggles,

the hurt.

To experience life in such a way is not impiety,

it is a very deep, and faithful piety.

But this is not the patience of acquiescence,

no, this is a patience driven by longing,

maybe we could even call this a righteous impatience

because we know that the Kingdom is not yet,

we know that the healing isn’t done

we know that the tears are still flowing.

There is no patience without hope,

an aching hope.

Advent is not about arrival.

Advent is about waiting in hope.

Advent is about prayer for the coming Kingdom.

Advent is about saying,

often with trembling lip,

wavering voice,

and with tear-filled eyes,

Come soon, Lord Jesus, come soon.

 

 

Filed under: Advent, Brian Walsh, John Tagged: Advent, Brian Walsh, Hope

Advent Pain, Aching Hope

Maybe it is somehow natural that we want radical new beginnings.

Community: Wounded and Blessed – a workshop for Idealists, Hypocrites and Wanna-be Disciples of Jesus

The Jeremiah Community and Urban Remixed present:

David Janzen from Reba Place Fellowship in Evanston, Illinois

for a half day workshop on the joys and sorrows of intentional community.

Saturday, January 11: 8.30am to 1.00

Church of Epiphany and St. Mark

201 Cowan Ave, Toronto

Suggested Donation: $25.00

David Janzen will speak twice that morning and there will be a series of break out sessions dealing with various dimensions of community life – things like, “who is doing the work around here?”, “who’s money is this?”, “loving our neighbours,” and many others.

Filed under: Community, Events, Toronto, Uncategorized, Urban Remixed, Workshops Tagged: Christian Community, Jeremiah Community, Toronto

Having Nothing

by Andrew Stephens-Rennie

We demand so much.

From ourselves. For ourselves.

We demand so much.

And others demand the same. Demand. Demand. Demand. It has to happen now. Faster, quicker, better.

The weight of the world

keeps us nervous at night

locks up the light

makes our efforts seem slight

We work ourselves into a frenzy, we push ourselves to the limit.

We are what we love (or so the argument goes).

But is any of this about love? And if it is, love of what kind?

We are what we love. And I don’t know how it is for you, I don’t know how it is where you are, but I’m not sure half the time what I love, how I love, that I love. Half the time, I’m not sure if the love I feel is enough, is the right kind. Not sure if the love I live is as deep and pure as I’d wish it to be.

There are times I wonder how self-congratulatory, self-motivated, self-righteous, self-absorbed, and self-aggrandizing this thing is that passes for love.

The apostle writes:

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. —1 Corinthians 13:1-3

Without it,

Talk is cheap.

So love.

Prophecy is overrated.

So love.

Knowledge is vanity.

So love.

Charity is frailty.

So love.

Sacrifice is bullshit.

So love.

Love with all you’ve got. Love in your talk, your prophecy, your knowledge, your charity and your sacrifice. Without deep, profound, self-giving love, it’s all a hollow, empty, fraud.

So love.

Deeply.

Profoundly.

So love,

Loudly.

Prophetically.

Wisely.

Charitably.

Sacrificially.

Love with all you’ve got. And even if it’s not that much, it will be enough.

Filed under: 1 Corinthians, Andrew Stephens-Rennie

Having Nothing

We demand so much.
From ourselves. For ourselves.
We demand so much.

Mandela, Calvinism and Derrida

by Brian Walsh

As I’ve been reflecting on the death of Nelson Mandela, two thoughts keep crowding my mind.

The shame of Calvinism and the vacuity of Deconstruction.

I’m sure that most of my readers will catch the significance of the first reference, but perhaps not the second.

Let me explain.

As someone who stands in the tradition of John Calvin, indeed, who is a servant of the Christian Reformed Church, the death of Mandela recalls for me (amongst many other things) one of the greatest moments of shame in the history of ‘Reformed’ churches. Throughout the history of Apartheid and Afrikaaner rule in South Africa, the oppression of ‘blacks’ and ‘coloureds’ received explicit blessing from the vast majority of Reformed churches in that country.

But these churches didn’t just ‘bless’ the racist policies of Apartheid, they provided scriptural legitimation  for them as well. Through a dubious reading of the biblical story, African people where characterized somehow as descendants of the biblical character, Ham. Preachers used this reading to argue that blacks were forever destined to be a lesser race, in need of the benevolent rule of whites. Now this isn’t that surprising, really. You see, a sin as heinous as racism, and a policy as evil as Apartheid, will always need some sort of sacred blessing. How else could you justify such things, unless God Himself, were to command it!

However, it wasn’t just a spurious exegesis of the bible which lay behind the repressive policies of the Apartheid State. More pernicious was (and is) a Calvinist understanding of law and the state. I have voiced my opinion on how Romans 13 is misinterpreted a number of times on this site. But one of the most devastating examples of how this text about ‘obeying the authorities’ has been employed in our times is precisely in the imprisonment and repression of Nelson Mandela and the leadership of the African National Congress. At the heart of the issue was that these people dared to rebel against the state, dared to call for radical change, and dared to advocate armed rebellion against that state. And in the eyes of this kind of Reformed theology, if the state is instituted by the will of God, then any such opposition to the state is an unforgivable sin.

This theology is, I say, a deeply devastating moment of shame in the history of Calvinist Christianity! Granted, most Reformed denominations around the world sooner or later came to declare that Apartheid was a heresy. But I’m not sure these denominations have grappled with the theology that was at the heart of this heresy.

And somehow, in the grace of God, a man who was so oppressed and violently persecuted by the proponents of such a theology, found a way both to remain a follower of Jesus, and to enact personally and nationally the ethic of Jesus. Nelson Mandela forgave his oppressors.

Now forgiveness is what brings me to Deconstruction.

A number of years ago a documentary was released called “Derrida.” Accompanying Jacques Derrida at a number of speaking engagements and interviewing him in his home, the film eventually followed the father of Deconstruction to Robben Island. When they came to Mandela’s cell, Derrida displayed an incredulity of the old fashioned kind. “Eighteen years?” he asked.  The Parisian intellectual couldn’t quite believe it.

The film then records the end of a lecture that Derrida gave in Capetown. Derrida was talking about forgiveness, and he argued that ‘pure’ forgiveness (whatever that is) is “impossible.” The moderator was bringing the session to a close when there was a final anxious question by a young white South African woman. “We sit here as potential objects of forgiveness. We are all of us, you included, in a sense, guilty.… Don’t you think that it fulfills an ideological function, telling us  we should not repent, not ask for forgiveness because then we ruin ‘pure,’ ‘unconditional’ forgiveness.” It was clear that for this young woman, and for South Africa there must be forgiveness. Without forgiveness there is no way forward.

The philosopher seemed perplexed, undone, and replied about the seriousness of irony.

This isn’t the place for a full discussion of the religious turn in the writings of Jacques Derrida. But it is important to note that this woman deconstructed the deconstructionist. And no matter how clever or philosophically complex his deconstruction of ‘forgiveness’ was, this young woman was having none of it. Living in post-Apartheid South Africa, living with the shame and guilt of her pale complexion, living in the wake of a life of privilege afforded to her and not to her black and ‘coloured’ neighbours, she passionately insisted that without forgiveness there is no future. Sometimes, as Bono once said, you simply run out of all irony.

And so, as Calvinism bears the shame for legitimating Apartheid, Deconstruction demonstrates its vacuity, its emptiness, its impotence to rebuild a communal, societal, political, economic and personal life rooted in forgiveness.

There is much to learn from the tradition of Calvin. And there is much to learn through the deconstruction of Derrida.

But Mandela taught us about the necessity of subverting the state when it oppresses its people. Of breaking laws that are there for the protection of racial privilege. And he taught us forgiveness. He modeled what a revolution rooted in forgiveness looked like. And without that, there is no healing of the past and no possibility of a future.

Thank you, Mr. Mandela.

Filed under: Brian Walsh, Romans Tagged: Brian Walsh, Calvinism, Christian Reformed Church, Jacques Derrida, Nelson Mandela, Postmodernity, Romans 13

Mandela, Calvinism and Derrida

As I’ve been reflecting on the death of Nelson Mandela, two thoughts keep crowding my mind.

How Long O Lord?

Each year on December 6th, we mark 24 years since the Montreal Massacre – that horrific day when Mark Lepine shot and killed 14 women at l’École Polytechnique in Montreal.

Jesus, Obama and de Certeau: Redemptive Tactics in the Security State

by Brian Walsh

Some opening thoughts on John 7. 1-36.

It’s a good thing that the whole Jesus thing didn’t happen in the 21st century.

I mean, we keep reading about people wanting to kill him, but can’t quite find a good time and place to do the deed. He seems so often to be keeping a step ahead of the authorities. Slipping off to the wilderness every now and then to pray, but also maybe to keep a low profile.

And while in John’s gospel he goes to Jerusalem numerous times, it is clear that he knows full well of the danger of these forays into the belly of the beast. So he slips into the city secretly.

Now if this was the 21st century, the story would have to be considerably different.

In a world of the NSA and CSIS keeping tabs on pretty much everyone who might possibly be a subversive, you gotta know that Jesus would be high on their surveillance list. The guy sure couldn’t use email, social media or a cellphone. And blogging? Forget it.

If they wanted to get him, and if Barak Obama was in the place of the High Priest, or Pilate or Herod, well, really a drone would simply show up when he was feeding the five thousand, or having dinner with some friends, or in quiet prayer, and BANG!, that would be the end of it. Who needs to go through the bother of arresting people and making them stand trial when the technology of death makes it all quick and simple?

Yep, it’s a good thing that Jesus lived before all this state sponsored surveillance and extra-judicial murder.

But of course, Jesus was also out of step with pretty much everything in his own day as well.

John tells the story of his biological brothers who figure that going to Jerusalem during the Festival of Booths would be a great idea. Go make a splash! Let’s take this campaign to another level. The time is ripe to really launch this whole enterprise.

Inexorably, Jesus rejects this strategy.

I don’t know, maybe he’s rejecting ‘strategy’ altogether.

Lots of folks who think about how folks at the margins deal with the power structures at the centre have been drawn to Michel de Certeau’s distinction between ‘strategy’ and ‘tactic’. Strategies are the planning machinations of the powerful, those who are in control and have the luxury to strategically plan the expansion and maintenance of their control. Tactics, however, are the purview of those without power. They are the opportunistic and surprising actions of the oppressed. Tactics ‘poach’ on the strategically structured world of the status quo precisely to undermine it.

Maybe Jesus’ brothers are thinking strategically about heading down to the Festival of Booths, and Jesus rejects the strategy only to then grasp a tactical opportunity. Maybe he is poaching on the Festival.

However you look at it this story is full of drama and intrigue. Whatever you might think of St. John, the dude could sure write a good story. And stories, especially when they are told orally, are all about timing. Both in performance and in the narrative itself, much depends on timing.

Timing is also at the heart of this story in John 7. What time is it? The brothers think it is ‘show time’. Jesus isn’t so sure. The authorities know that this whole story must come to an end. Jesus must die. But is the timing right for that yet?

And what time is it for us as we enter into this story? What time is it personally, communally, historically and liturgically?

We enter a story  preoccupied with time, and we do so at the beginning of a New Year. Advent marks the beginning of the Christian year. Curious, isn’t it. That we don’t begin the New Year with arrival, but with longing and waiting. For the secular calendar, New Year is a day when the waiting is over. The New Year has arrived. But the Christian calendar begins with biding time, begins with waiting.

And so we enter Advent with Jesus coming to the Festival of Booths.

We enter Advent as a time of waiting and longing,
as Jesus comes to a festival that remembers the waiting and longing in the wilderness.

Filed under: Advent, Brian Walsh, John, Wine Before Breakfast Tagged: Advent, Brian Walsh, Michel de Certeau, President Barak Obama