Topic for October: The Safety of Sovereignty

I realized at the end of the month that having an introduction to the topic at hand (preferably at the beginning of the month) and why it was chosen may be helpful to the reader who may be otherwise unable to discern exactly what it is that is being written about. Bethany did well to bring me to this realization by citing a part of the prompt, but the reader was still uninformed as to the actual question for response. Henceforth, I believe it beneficial to all to publish the prompt before submission. 

The other day I was talking with Wyatt, and the thought had occurred to me that '...Security and stability are the rejection of Sovereignty and Providence.' Perhaps I read this somewhere and don't remember, or perhaps it is a synthesizing of concepts into one thought. Pertaining to this I am not entirely sure. Regardless, my thought was that in our attempts to stabilize our lives, to be financially settled, or to secure our gains in whatever form you may imagine, we take part in the process of taking power out of the hands of God (I am assuming the freedom to do so) and placing our trust in the idol made of paper. This is not intended to sway you one way or the other, but to provoke reaction, I am happy to have a contradictory viewpoint on any subject, but i think it might be helpful for understanding the question to have a little background on what provoked our asking in the first place.

What does our personal fiscal crisis (that is, our need to gain for stability) or lack thereof portray in regards to our understanding of God's power, sovereignty, and providence. In addition, what do we (Christians) do with money and the necessity to maintain and secure our goods in light of this relation? 

Enjoy!

In Defense of Stability

“Security and stability are the rejection Sovereignty and Providence.” […] in our attempts to stabilize our lives, to be financially settled, or to secure our gains in whatever form you may imagine, we take part in the process of taking power out of the hands of God (I am assuming the freedom to do so) and placing our trust in the idol made of paper.”

These were the words Taylor gave to inspire this round of blog entries.  Actually, I believe “provoke” was the word he used, and rightly so, for I am provoked. I can hardly articulate why, however, because almost immediately after reading those words (I won’t presume to guess how much they express Taylor’s own views), the song “Take My Life” begins playing in my mind’s ear.

If you’ve been in any contemporary worship services over the last decade, you probably know this song. One of the verses goes, “Brokenness, brokennes is what I long for, / Brokenness is what I need. / Brokenness is what You want for me.”

I hate this verse.

I hate this verse for many reasons, but only one is apropos to this discussion.  When I listen to crowds wail this prayer, I hear an implicit repudiation of stability and security--the conditions and the products of wholeness--in favor of the “holiness” allegedly produced by brokenness. 

A prayer for brokenness is a prayer some must pray: that I grant.  Let the stiff-necked, the arrogant, the self-satisfied pray this prayer, if they have the wisdom.  But to suggest (as “Take My Life” does) that “brokenness” is equal to the other virtues requested in the song--faithfulness, righteousness, and holiness--smacks of ingratitude and masochism. 

It is not Taylor’s fault that his prompt roused my indignation over sloppily-written worship choruses, but in a way I am thankful for the connection. Without it, I might not be willing to argue that denying the goodness of stability is just as blasphemous as thinking stability is a worthwhile end of the Christian life. 

Stability is better than instability. Security is better than danger. Call me old-fashioned, but I will stand by those assertions.When teaching his disciples how to pray, Jesus said, “Give us this day our daily bread,” not “Let us go hungry for the sake of being hungry.” 

At the same time, stability and security are merely instrumental goods. They can and must be laid aside for the sake of loving our neighbors, for the sake of justice, for the sake of making our hearts open to God.  

My parents certainly modeled this truth for me. 

I grew up really poor, although I didn’t realize we were poor until I was nearly grown.  As a child, I thought it normal to receive canned goods from family members at every holiday; to rejoice because Daddy hit a turkey with his van and then to eat said turkey; and to have my first new, store-bought dress my freshmen year of high school. (Of course, how I made it through thirteen years of public school thinking all this was normal remains a mystery). 

We had so little money because my parents were (and remain) campus ministers. They placed their vocation before financial stability. This is especially true for my mother: officially, only my father was hired to the ministry position, but my mother, unwavering in her commitment to her calling, has now worked for twenty-seven without an income of her own. 

Growing up in this way had many benefits, not least of which is making a grad student’s salary feel quite luxurious. However, the marvelous paradox of growing up in such financial instability is that I discovered that our family’s wellbeing was grounded on something far more stable than a salary: the love of  God, flowing through God’s people. During my childhood and adolescence, I saw wealthy families give joyfully out of their abundance, providing my family with cars (three altogether), clothes, canned goods, and more. Their wealth manifested God’s providence in our lives.  

Maybe that’s why I defend stability. In the vocabulary of my childhood, “stability” meant not prosperity, but abundance.  Sometimes the abundance came from our resources, but often it was granted, given, shared by others. 

Now, had we prayed to these friends and their bank accounts, instead of to God, then we would be guilty of denying God’s power and trusting the “idol of paper.” But stability isn’t the only thing that can become an idol. Perhaps that is why the prompt provoked me so; it implied that stability is somehow more God-denying than other instrumental goods. It called to mind rhetoric of revolution (which I usually find specious), and myths of redemptive violence, for instability is a form of violence, even if a quotidian, wearying-not-warring kind of turbulence.  

I love stability--I bless stability--for what it can testify: the love of parents who work to make a safe home for their children, the certainty of a friendship, the confidence that one can indeed do the work set before her.  The challenge, as always, is to make stability the ground for hospitality, for love, for service, rather than for self. 

Security is--like family, reputation, freedom, or rights--something beautiful and noble, worth preserving but not worth worshipping. Our security can be an acceptable sacrifice, not because it is sinful, or because brokenness is equal to righteousness, but because it is good, and life-giving, and human.  

“I will not offer burnt offerings to the LORD my God that cost me nothing.” 2 Samuel 24.24

Repent! For the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!

     A thief broke into a church in Florida and stole the sound equipment. A few days ago I received an rss feed that gave the story of how this particular church had reacted by forgiving the thief who in turn eventually joined the church congregation and the body of Christ. this to me seems to be the ideal picture of redemption that could take place if only we were willing to let go of our need for security and place our trust in the redemptive action of god. 

      To release our security would place us each as individuals and  collectively as the church in a position to have to directly deal with an issue that requires us to be the very people whom we are expected to be by way of forgiveness, the cancellation of debts, mercy, grace, and peace, and love. Principles and ethics recited on every person's lips who has spent any amount of time in a church house, however devoid in practice the principles themselves may be.
     The reason for the shallow nature of Christianity in the US, in my mind, must be its lack of understanding of the practical and ethical persuasions of the person whom its Lordship is under. By maintaining security of our goods and creating stability through monetary gain, we have no way of encountering any existential shift in paradigm on the basis of these proclamations of what God has done through Christ and consequently what we are to also do. We cannot effectively reciprocate the dedication to and love for Christ that Christ has shown for us if we do not understand what love and forgiveness are because we refuse to encounter them in our real day to day lives. We don't know what it means to sing 'MY CHAINS ARE GONE, IVE BEEN SET FREE' if we have never been bound in captivity. If we do not forgive we can not understand forgiveness, or even have it--to say it as Jesus did.
    Security is the wall that we build around ourselves, all that it does is keep us in. It is a lie, and it has cheated humanity of its soul and kept it in the dark, blinding each person to his or her essential nature of being as a child of God for so long we can't even identify our Father when we see Him. We dont recognize providence, because we are too afraid to lose that which we so arduously wasted our time making money for.

     We cannot see that we work and labor for the things that we already have. We have let someone convince us that they actually own some part of the earth and in order to have it, we must give them something. That person, has attempted to make themselves above and greater than any other person (and even God) on the basis of claim of possession of any specific resource by cheating others out of the right of having it, and then making us into working-class slaves in order to obtain it. This person would have no power if we simply refused acknowledgment of their claim to ownership and the slavish system.The inability to function within, or the desire to become the one on the top of this system is what drives thievery, which is really all that proprietorship is in the first place.
     

     The Christian response of course is not a direct taking of what another person claims to be their property (unless a particular circumstance calls for it, such as deprivation of a life-giving need), but a calling of people to recognize the truth of the matter; God is the one who is the true sustainer. God is the God who gives creation freely to humanity. Having recognized this reality we are also to give freely, so to the one who requires money, we give--and not only that, double!

      The release from this chasing after the wind, is not release of responsibility to one another, however, because we are living in a time of Eschatological hope--That is the "already, but not yet" status of the redemption of creation. We have a need to be responsible to one another, equalizing and doing away with economic disparity as much as we possibly can within our Christian communities. To do this causes us to be under the need for our Body of Christ, the Church, to care for us, as we also put our efforts into care for her. The release of stability as we have created results in the truest stability--the love of God from the Church to each of its parts. You can not steal from the one who has everything in common, because that which you have attempted to steal is yours already. There is not any reason for violence towards the one who thinks they are stealing, because it wasn't owned by any one to guard. When this becomes true governments fail and national borders fall away for the reason that everything is regarded as God's continual giving to humanity, and when all is benevolence there is no need to fight or protect. Conversely, without the need for war, there is no need for government. When people realize the freedom that comes from these truths, the hunger and thirst for righteousness sets in and the result is to seek justice peacefully by way of participation in the active rejection of lies and perversions of reality in communion and fellowship with the rest of the citizens of the Kingdom of God.

  

      They will persecute you on account of Gospel of Jesus because self preservation is job one. This happens for anyone who seeks security for any possession no matter how rich or poor they may be. The imminent threat of removal of the item that is held on to is going to cause violence and reactionary tactic no matter the item.  When the sense of security of the system of the ones who have built their kingdoms on the backs of the ones they themselves have made poor is threatened, they will come after you. Creating a false God, creating a God who is happy with the protestant work ethic and blesses Americans with wealth is the way of the ones holding the goods to perpetuate the system that benefits them. 

     The kind of prosperity that exists among such disparity of classes (not only in comparison to other Americans but to people across the entirety of the globe), causes me to be suspect to such a theology.  We have not been faithful to a Jesus who came as a bearer of the redemptive message, we have not kept covenant with YHWH. Our redeemer may have the name of Jesus, but it is a false redemption and a false God bearing a false gospel that has nothing to do with maintaining justice and righteousness in order to be a light to all nations that they may know YHWH, the God who will create peace, redeeming and restoring the proper order of the creation as it should and was meant to be. 

(Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said what I think would be a good contextual placement here,) “I call on the young men of America who must make a choice today to take a stand on this issue. Tomorrow may be too late. The book may close. And don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, "You're too arrogant! And if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I'll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still and know that I'm God."  "

Repent! Reject security! Follow the Christ, embracing providence! Do not only keep covenant but fulfill it maintaining justice and righteousness, do this by dedication to YHWH and love for all humanity. 

Repent! For the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!

A People Living in Fear

We are a people living in fear.

There is a financial crisis, and we are trapped in it. Or so we are told. There is violence and we must protect ourselves from it in reasonable, ethical, moral ways. Of this I am certain.

But too often our fears are exaggerated. We live in fear of our neighbor. Because we hear the worst news, we assume (or at least maintain a sneaking suspicion) that the stranger in need is really a predator to our better nature, waiting to con or kill us.

For those of us who have "no extra" money, we see the person in need on the street and think, if only we could give them a little bit of the green stuff, we could help them. Forgetting that what they really need is food... and love, both of which we have.

I recently moved from the country to the city. I suspect every sound at night, at least in the back of my mind, as being someone coming for me. I know this is foolish, but I have never lived so long in so close proximity to so many other people. And so I live in fear.

I also recently became substantially more financially independent. As my roommate (a fellow contributor to this blog) can attest, my fear of bankruptcy translated immediately into a peculiar form of anal-retentiveness about the electricity that took on almost comical proportions when we first moved in. And so I live in fear.

"...Do not be afraid, stand firm, and see the deliverance that the LORD will accomplish for you today; for the Egyptians whom you see today you shall never see again. The LORD will fight for you, and you have only to keep still." (Exodus 14:13-14)

And the waters parted, and the people crossed, and the waters swallowed Pharoah and his army.

"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.... Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not more valuable than they? ... And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these." Matt. 6:25-30

This word flies in the face of our modern sensibilities. Do not worry. And so, when confronted with the question, "Why do you lock your door? Why do you have insurance?" I was slow to answer. I thought,and I thought, and I thought. And then I realized. We are, to an extent, right to be afraid. The words of Dr. Steve Reid in his recent chapel address come to mind: "Don't be dumb." Look at the world around us. We are right to be afraid.

But...

We are not right when we let our fears consume us. Precaution is not sin. It is a recognition of the fallenness of our world. If a lock on my door keeps a would-be murderer out of my house, it also keeps me from retaliating or violently protecting myself or my loved ones against him- for my pacifism is as yet untested. But when we spend our lives paralyzed by fear and worry, when we become preoccupied with financial and domestic security, that is the sin.

Let us not forget how Jesus in Matthew concludes the paragraph excerpted above:

"But strive first for the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well." (Matt. 6:33)

The command is strive first! Give God our best effort. Make that priority one. But in the mean time, don't be dumb. Forsaking security is poor stewardship: It opens us up to a world of poverty it was in our hands to prevent, and prevents us from willingly giving of our resources to help those who are in need.

The Silver Spoon and Chain

There is nothing in this world worth the love of the Lord. When Christ lived a life without a place to lay his head without so much as a fox would have in its den, then how can we cleave to anything? It is true we are not Christ, and we never will be. Neither will any apostle, so who should we set as our example? I say aim to Christ, and follow as best as possible. I have never been able to do this. I have never been able to give enough up to go unhindered, but I am striping myself.

I was not born into millions, but I was born into money. When I was young it was a pride of mine, but now it is my greatest guilt. While I don't mean to cry from fortune, it is not the place of a Christian to sit comfortably. There are innumerable ways to justify wealth if one has a mind to do so. In the church I was raised in country club memberships are seen as a reward by some from God's self to them for being good christians. This is not limited to anyone congregation. We all know there is an industry based upon it, but it is more disturbing that many such justifiers walk among even our cleanest congregations. There is nothing scarier then Jesus' encounter with the rich younger ruler preached from a pulpit to those who control the jobs and purse strings. There should be no more cowards, but cleaving to security blinds our lion's side. Folk who stand as my parents do stifle truth, and I stand along and stifle it with them in silence. The ways I was raised in cannot be my way if I am to be Christ's. I must hate my mother and father in order to love our mother and father. Of course we are all swindlers and give the myriad of excuses. We must only be will to abandon them if Christ so calls us. Well, Christ has so called and for 2000 years it has been impossible to listen.

If it was not for Christ, income would be my goal. A family would be my goal. A big name would be my goal. While it is not true for all, these things for me are sin. They are not goals but vices. They are sin because I have felt a stirring to leave them for God. Such an invitation should not and cannot be ignored. I have never been 'spiritual' in the loosest form of the word, but this stirring has been so long with me that there is a physical weight. Luke 18:18-25 is in my bones. People have invented imagined gates to excuse themselves of this, but I can not. If I do not answer this call, then I will admit that I have failed God and have made myself despicable countless times over. I refuse to cheapen Christ with excuses.

We do have a duty though beyond an exodus from ownership. We waste ourselves if we simply release our property and exit society. We must instead strip ourselves down to the very lowest level of being effective human beings. From there we can function productively and give what we gain to Christ's gain. It is often said by those who do not do so that we can have as much money as we like as long as we act morally with it. We can give ourselves a limb so heavy that we cannot move it, and it is fine. It is not right to exit productivity and join the workless, but instead we should simply work for every dime we can without keeping one. There are things we need to be effective: a car, a home, a weeks worth of clothes. There is justice in having these things as long as all of our produce is for the gain of the kingdom. Keep no coin unneeded. Spare no love. It's only idealist as long as we don't do it.

I am a firm believer that the Kingdom is among a minority and always has been since the day of Christ. It is nothing to be waited on, but is something to commit to here and now. It comes from within us, not from the sky after all. We are not even humans until we accept our purpose to love. I am not yet human. I will try to be one day.

Going to Hell Sans Handbasket

It has been my experience that life has a way of throwing crazy curve balls at inopportune times. Starting a new life some few hundred miles away from home presented problems and challenges that I did not anticipate and indeed found nearly insurmountable. My grandmother is terminally ill, and I feel that I am neglecting my obligations to my family by being so far away. Given the current economic climate, finding a job has been a far greater hassle than it ever should have been. I anticipated the challenge of meeting new people and forming close relationships, but the added stress from the other two significant issues made my social life more tense and distracted than it would have been otherwise.

It struck me as ironic when our first topic engaged the idea of financial stability, given my struggles with said topic. I feel that I have learned something fundamental to the Christian experience: the motif of suffering as a core component of following Christ. I will treat the motif in three parts: my personal experiences in coming to accept the motif, the expression of the motif as running through the Biblical meta-narrative with special attention to John's writings, and the purpose of suffering in both the original culture and the surprisingly similar purpose of suffering in contemporary society.

I will admit that I came here with unrealistic expectations. I expected the world to hand me everything I wanted on a silver platter. It goes without saying that my expectations were shattered. Despite my consistent and vehement railings against the prosperity gospel, my theology essentially mirrored theirs. While I certainly gave lip service to the motif of suffering, I did not really put much stock in it. Everything went so well during my undergraduate program that somehow I came to expect that my current experience was indicative of how life is supposed to go. Perhaps life is supposed to be wonderful for everyone who ever lives life, but given the disease, famine, poverty, and death that the world endures daily, one can hardly claim that life is wonderful.

I became angry with God and wondered what was wrong with me that I should be going through this. It is funny how easily I embraced a retributive justice theory, even though I do not really believe that God punishes everyone. Somehow all my thoughts and certainties about how God works were up for grabs again. I have fluctuated between excessive rage and excessive depression for about the past three months. The real crisis was that I found that I felt entitled to a job, to my anger and sadness, and to a life of certainty and comfort.

I finally began to write some of my thoughts down in a journal and realized just how petty and foolish I had been. I have been given the gift of existence. Even though life is not easy, it is still superior to the alternative. Indeed, any sense of entitlement that I felt evaporates rather quickly when one recalls the suffering of Christ on our behalf. It was then that I remembered a passage from John's Gospel:

"If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Remember what I told you: 'Servants are not greater than their master.' If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also." 15:18-20 TNIV

I had not been abandoned by Christ; indeed, I met him through a church that is worth its salt and through my suffering. My job situation is no better. My grandmother is still dying. Life is still Hell. But I am not alone, and that difference makes all the difference. I shall return to this thought soon.

Yet I must fulfill my second promise, namely an overview of the motif's usage in the text. In the interest of brevity, I will give a very slim overview. God in creation originates the motif in creation with the act of creating another being by sharing the status of existence with other things. He lessens his uniqueness for the sake of others. He then proceeds to use and deliver a specific people out of their slavery in order to be a beacon of hope for all people. When that plan failed, God subjects himself to human status and to a personal Hell on Golgotha. He then suffers along with his church at the hands of Roman imperialism until the time of Constantine.

The suffering of Christ and his church becomes the modus operandi for redemption. In Acts 16, Paul allows himself to be whipped and imprisoned specifically for the purpose of slapping pax Romana in the face. Rome promised power, peace, and prosperity, a euangelion (gospel) that sounds remarkably like the pipe dream I had. Paul, a Roman citizen, could not be legally whipped or imprisoned without a trial. By subjecting himself to such treatment, a prison guard and his family believed in Christ, and Paul displayed pax Christi as superior to pax Romana.

When Rome began to hammer Christians hard in response to the Council of Jamnia, John wrote perhaps his most powerful work, the book of Revelation. Therein, John viciously assails Rome, calling it by the name of every evil empire within the Jewish collective memory. Upon running out of empires, John turns to the prophets Daniel and Ezekiel for more imagery of incarnate evil. In each story where Rome is compared with an evil empire/ image, the people of God suffer at its hands. In each story, God delivers his people. In each story, the clear testimony is the redemptive power of God via the medium of suffering. Ultimately, God suspends suffering and declares pax Christi eternally.

The power of suffering is that it exposes pax (insert empire name here) for what it truly is, an empty promise. Certainly the packaging looks good, but the wrapping paper is irrelevant to the kid on Christmas morning. What matters is what is on the inside, and though we might have to sell all we have to afford this pearl of great price, we rejoice to have it. Suffering is Christian dissent from this world and confession of God's eternal kingdom. It declares the inadequacy of this world to ever provide what we truly want out of it while looking forward to a world in which we have all we need. Bonhoeffer's Ethics places strong emphasis on this dual confession as such, and I feel that Bonhoeffer's argument holds.

Which brings me at length to a conclusion. Suffering is only necessary insofar as 1) culture proclaims its own agendas as superior to the agenda of loving God and loving others as one's self 2) death and evil (both human and natural) wreak havoc on the human experience. Until Christ's redemption brings in the Kingdom of God in fullness, however, suffering remains a necessary and empowering element of following Christ. I do not mean that Christians should always be scraping to get by, living in a consistent state of trouble. Nor do I mean that Christians who are secure financially should toss aside such security in favor of suffering. What I am saying is that if in the course of following Christ one should find themselves in my position with regard to financial security, embrace it as a golden opportunity. The real merit in Christian faith is not in escaping Hell, but in the presence of Christ even while one is there.