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To me, Nellie embodied the prairie we loved. At times, hard and indomitable, but at others, caressing, beautiful, and tender. I worshipped her when I was a child, yes, but I grew to love her all the more for her complexities, her vastness, her sweeping presence, her edges. She was never simple or trite; I am unable to sum her up by the usual grandmotherly platitudes.
Nellie grandmother
The Church is being reinvented in response. We are dying, perhaps, but even death is part of our story: it comes right before resurrection.
Resurrection
It feels as if the more I moved into church culture, the less I heard about Jesus. We could go months and months of Sunday sermons on how to live our lives, how to “apply the Word” to our lives for Monday morning, and yet never hear the name of Jesus. We
Less jesus in church
lost Jesus in there. It seemed one could be a Christian without being a disciple of Jesus.
Lost jesus
There are a lot of Jesuses running around these days. There is the Jesus who wants you to find a good parking spot at the mall. There is the Jesus invoked at music awards and the one raised like a flag to celebrate capitalism and affluence. There is the Jesus drawing lines about who is “in” and who is “out,” and there is the Jesus on both sides of the picket lines. There is the one in the slums and the one in suburbia and the one in Africa and the one in America and the one in Calgary. There is the Jesus who told Mother Teresa to touch the lepers and love with her hands, the one who led the
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A lot of jesuses
Eventually we become like the God we create.”
We become like the god we create
I could no longer reason away or gloss over the systemic abuses of power, the bitterness, the bigotry and hypocrisy, the sexism and racism, the consumerism, the big business of church that was consuming people and spitting them out for the “greater good.” Church became the last place I wanted to be. I didn’t trust Christians. And I was tired of pretending that those things were not real.
Didnt trust christians
Even as I grew more disenchanted with organized religion, I was still hanging on to the hem of his garment, begging for healing.
Hung onto his garment
I wanted to follow Jesus: not a way of thinking or a doctrine, not a sermon or a list of rules, not political affiliations and church denominations or a path to a shiny-happy life or anything like that. I wanted to follow Him and love Him, right to the end, wherever He led. It occurred to me on that day that if I got to know Him—really, truly know Him—I could perhaps begin to spot counterfeit Jesuses. There are Jesuses out there who are co-opted for every cause and argument, and these false
Follow real jesus
John 21:17 right before He betrayed Jesus, “Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you.”
Peter…lord you know i love you
Theology is simply what we think about God and then living that truth out in our right-now
Thelogy defined
If our theology doesn’t shift and change over our lifetimes, then I have to wonder if we’re paying attention. The Spirit is often breathing in the very changes or shifts that used to terrify us. Grace waits for us in the liminal space.
Liminal space
When you feel afraid of going too far, remember these words of David: Is there any place I can go to avoid your Spirit? To be out of your sight? If I climb to the sky, you’re there! If I go underground, you’re there! If I flew on morning’s wings to the far western horizon, You’d find me in a minute—you’re already there waiting! Then I said to myself, “Oh, He even sees me in the dark! At night I’m immersed in the light!” It’s a fact: darkness isn’t dark to you; night and day, darkness and light, they’re all the same to you. (Psalm 139:7–12 MSG)
On questioning
Pat, pat, pat, right on the head. Patronize, patronize, patronize, right on the soul. Just stop wondering, stop wrestling. You aren’t supposed to be a grown-up in the kingdom, darling, you’re supposed to be like a child and accept what you’ve been taught and stop asking questions. Trust the truth you’ve been given. To which I now respectfully ask: I’m sorry, but have you ever been around a child for any amount of time?
ha!!! Have you been around childrsn??
The asking isn’t wrong. The wondering isn’t wrong. The doubt isn’t wrong. It’s humbling to admit you don’t know; it takes guts to ask and wrestle. The childlike quality isn’t unthinking acquiescence: it’s curiosity.
Curiosity
And finally, a few of us may land in the sixth stage: universalizing, when we come at last to compassion and love and grace, to the enlightenment of treating all with ferocious love and tender justice.
Shoot for stage six
But I had to learn that taking the Bible seriously doesn’t mean taking everything literally. I had to learn to read the whole Bible through the lens of Jesus, and I had to learn to stop making it into something it wasn’t—a glorified answer book or rule book or magic spell. I had to stop trying to reduce the Bible to something I could tame or wield as a
Not everything is literAL
cast away the idols of certainty, materialism, and control.
Cast away idols
Peter Enns summed me right up when he said that the problem isn’t the Bible, “the problem is coming to the Bible with expectations it’s not set up to bear.”2 My expectation was divinity, simplicity, infallibility, literalism, easy answers.
Peter Enns
Peter Enns argues that God never told the Israelites to kill the Canaanites. The Israelites believed that God told them to kill the Canaanites.6 This way of reading Scripture made more sense to me. It was more in line with Jesus, more in line with the way He taught us how we had misunderstood and misrepresented God even in our histories.
Misrepresentation
“Jesus was bigger than the Bible,” argues Enns.7
Jesus bigger than the bible
But I imagine that if you were a religious elite at the time, the movement—and how Jesus embarked upon it in the midst of a real walking-around life—was more infuriating than funny. After all, Jesus would say, “You have heard it said . . . but I say . . . ,” and then suddenly everything gets flipped into a newness of life and spirit, superseding the rules, fulfilling the law by transcending it, even. When Jesus first taught, “You have heard that it was said, “Eye for eye and tooth for tooth,” but I tell you . . . love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,”8 it was electrifying. It
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Jesus was frustrating to those people
Jesus reveals God,
Jesus reveals God
God isn’t a different God than He was in the Old Testament; it’s just that Jesus gave us a new perspective, the true perspective, on God. And in stark relief, the Bible shows us this very truth.
Jesus is true perspective on god
The Spirit isn’t limited to meeting us only in the words of the Bible. And when the time is right to return to Scripture, to be able to fully embrace and love the gift of it, then the time will be right.
Spirit not limited
As he wrote so beautifully in his letter to the Galatians, “You are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus. And all who have been united with Christ in baptism have put on Christ, like putting on new clothes. There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus.”11
Al one in christ
Now I’m able to find something good in them all: in the over-the-top excessive prosperity preachers and the smug theologians and the pot-stirring elitists and the overly passionate kids in the stadium light shows and the disillusioned, bitter cynics. Because here is the truth: I’m all of those things too. Someday I’ll add the woman I am now, the theology I practice, the words I write so earnestly to that list. I know I will. There’s room for all of us. There’s room for all of me.
Al of us
The Church is sorting and casting off, renewing and reestablishing in the postmodern age, and this is a good thing. The old will remain—it always does—but something new is being born too. If it is being born in the Church, it is first being born in the hearts, minds, and lives of us, the Body.
Church rebirth
I am not in the business of sin management anymore: instead I am being transformed into His likeness. I am an exile in this fallen and broken world, here to plant gardens and to prepare for the coming day when all things will be renewed and restored, to tend to the earth and to humanity—and my place in the world—with tender ferocity. We are participating in the life of Christ.
Kingdom of God
Love is ferocious. Now the wrath of God is a great expression of God’s love: it’s the force that burns away everything that gets in the way of our full self, our clearest communion with God. It’s a cure for the sickness of sin within us. God’s love is meant to heal us; it is not a fire that rages against us. At the core of redemption is a love story.
Love is ferocious
remember hearing once that Jesus came not only to save us and redeem us, but to show us what it means to be truly human. Because he was fully and completely human, He is our perfect example of the humanity we were meant to embody as we move through this life.
Jesus fully human
When I couldn’t find my way through the clutter of praise and worship, I found Jesus in the silence and in the liturgy. When I couldn’t go into a megachurch, I could sneak into a small chapel and light a candle. When I had no words to pray, the Book of Common Prayer gave me back the gift of prayer. When I couldn’t sing along with certainty, I could hold a hymn book and simply listen, let the voices of others carry me. When I was consumed with my own life, blinders on, the liturgy reoriented me to the real story—to redemption, justice, and confession and to worship and community. I learned to
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When I couldn't find…
Kathleen Norris’s Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith,3
Read this
Faith becomes more complicated when we allow our hearts to break. When we become present with and for the suffering of the world, when we begin to pay attention to our own stories and the stories of those alongside us—when we do this, our expectations change and our relationship with signs and wonders changes. But our hope only grows deeper roots, our longing for the Kingdom of God stretches out to the sun, and the Spirit’s wind and water and
Complicated faith and heartbreak
My prayer is that the Holy Spirit would sweep into our lives with holy disruption, upending our assumptions and privileges, our greed and selfishness, our pride and our stupor. To empower our work and our witness. Like Zechariah 4:6 tells us, not by might, not by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord.
Prayer for the spirit
don’t give it power, don’t acknowledge it, don’t confess it, don’t be sad, don’t be mad, don’t be despairing, don’t pay attention to the monster crouching in the corner. We believed that our feelings and circumstances had to obey our carefully curated version of the Word of God: we are more than overcomers; the joy of the Lord is our strength; death has no sting. So don’t grieve when death comes calling: They are now with Jesus. Don’t be sick: Come down with a healing. Don’t be sad: The joy of the Lord is your strength. And I can’t tell you the grief I carry still over the people who were
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The danger of not grieving
People take Scripture and twist it against our hearts, making us believe that God is to blame for our suffering or that our sin compels His holiness against us.
Twisted
I’ve had to untangle myself from the belief that evil or suffering is always the fault of someone’s lack of faith. Our strengths often come with a shadow side.
Suffering not caused by lack of faith
But in actuality, much of our suffering is independent from our choices. We suffer at the hands of another, we suffer because of the actions of another, we suffer because this is what it means
Suffering is human
I didn’t learn how to lament and grieve, how to pray and be in community until I learned that God could be trusted. God is against the evil and suffering in the world. He is not the origin of evil nor does He “use” evil as a means to justify some cosmic end. Rather, God fights evil.
God fights evil
Jesus often confronted the suffering of people—whether physical or mental or emotional or spiritual—with healing. God’s will was to heal and to make well. We aren’t meant to accept these things as God’s will: God didn’t plan for my babies to die or for our friend to die or for Haiti’s earthquake and subsequent cholera outbreak, for horrendous abuse and evil in the world, for any oppression or heartbreak in humanity.
Jesus and suffering
Rather, as the people of God—the ones whose citizenship lies in the Kingdom of God—we are part of the resistance of those things, the overcoming of them, the redemption and hope in the
Part of the resistance
We aren’t immune from suffering or excused from the experience of being human simply because of our faith. I only wish that were true.
Not immune from suffering
Instead, I think sovereignty is the promise that it will all be healed in the end. Sovereignty means that all will be held. That God is at work to bring redemption and reconciliation, that somehow at the end of all things, we don’t escape from the goodness that pursues us, the life we are promised, the love that redeems.
Sovereignty Is the promise of healing
I’ve learned that faith isn’t pretending the mountain isn’t there. It isn’t denial of the truth or the facts or the grief or the anger. It’s not the lie of speaking “peace, peace” when there is no peace.7 It’s faith because it is hope declared, it is living into those things that are not yet as they will be. I hold space for the righteous anger and the grief. I join in the lamentations of the weary world. And then I will seek ways to embody those very prayers, to incarnate them, to further heaven’s hopes and summon God’s glory in ways big and small, seen and unseen, mundane and holy.
Faith…quote
After all, everybody knows the rich white folks don’t want to look at ugly gray cinder block shanties. It ruins supper on the terrace. That entire story is pretty much a metaphor for my experiences in justice work. I’m well-meaning but ignorant. I only know the stories I’m told, and too often I long for a quick-fix happy ending. When I heard the truth of the painted houses of Jalousie, my stomach sank. Because I’d fallen for the beautiful facade. Again.
Jalousie
Perhaps that’s the problem with cherry-picking Bible verses for our personal lives: we miss the bigger and more beautiful story of what God is doing in the world.
Cherrypicking, justice
Eugene Cho
Look up
It was precisely because I reoriented my life around Jesus and following Him, apprenticing myself to His way of life, that I woke up to God’s heart for justice and redemption After all, God’s heart for justice doesn’t start and end with me or you: it includes the entire world, and we’re missing it mightily if we reduce the Gospel to a personal salvation experience.
Dont miss it and make the gospels only a personal salvation story
