Your Kingdom Come

I’m leaving town for a few days, but I thought that I would leave something beautiful to read here, in case anyone drops in while I’m gone.  This is from Baxter Kruger:

As the light of Jesus shines into our darkness, we will not be yearning to escape the ordinary, we will be stunned and full of wonder at the ordinary presence of the blessed Trinity in our humanity.

Heaven is not a bodiless state in an invisible place. Heaven is the life of the Father, Son and Spirit coming to full and abiding expression in our human existence, and the earth and the cosmos are filled with the life and love and fellowship of the blessed Trinity.

Meantime we grieve over the self-centeredness, over the lust and greed, the social and racial, environmental and political and religious injustices that run wild around us, wreaking such havoc in our lives.

And we fast and pray for the Holy Spirit to reveal the truth to us in our darkness.

We pray for people to be given eyes to see and that the way things are in Jesus Christ would indeed emerge more and more in our human existence.

…on earth as it is in heaven.  Amen!

Showdown

So, I got a certified letter from our CLB* today.

It wasn’t an apology.

Sorry I have to be vague about the content.

The tone was heavily laced with once-familiar control and manipulation.

We will not likely witness the best of christianity at the meeting proposed between those who were driven out and those who remain.

I might be able to fill in more details after the meeting.

It’s not over until it’s over.

*(church left behind)

Subversion

Last week I read an article in Rolling Stone about Goldman Sachs (ht Br.Maynard) and the massive economic failure resulting from unchecked greed and corruption. Some of the comments after the article indicated that a revolution – an overthrow of the controlling powers, both political and economic – is the only solution. However, the controlling powers assure us that this is simply conspiracy rhetoric and that we should continue to trust them.

A few days later, I read both of these posts:

SERENE JONES: Right now, the whole system’s collapsing and the margin looks like a very big space. And a Christianity that speaks to those margins can be a powerful presence in that.

GARY DORRIEN: You get an economic oligarchy, a financial elite that rigs the game and its system. And they pile up a mountain of debt and they overreach in good times. And then the whole house comes collapsing down on everybody else. And then you end up having to deal with, you know, the mess.

And if you’ve got an oligarchy, which you always have in these cases, they are always very good at taking care of their own. That’s what elites do. And so, the question becomes, are you going to let them organize the recovery on their terms? Or are you going to break the power of the oligarchy. And then maybe get or build something better than what you had before.

CORNEL WEST: The question will be for churches, you can’t have a prosperity gospel anymore. The prosperity’s gone. You can’t have a market spirituality and an imperial religiosity because the empire’s in trouble. It’s wavering and wobbling. And the market is no longer a model, at all.

So where do we go? Transitional moment. This is a moment of the interregnum. We are looking for new ways.

BILL MOYERS: And, yet, the prosperity gospel, the gospel that began in a lot of big American churches, saying that God wants you to be rich, is spreading like wildfire to the rest of the world.

SERENE JONES: That is what turbo capitalism does – the biggest, sort of, war zone is interior to us – it takes over your desire. And it’s in the churches that another kind of desire should have been being crafted.

The Practicing Church – Tyler

And this:

Czech president Vaclav Havel and other dissidents began to ask, ‘How can we live the truth in a culture based on a fundamental lie, especially since the lie is in our heads? How can we begin to live into the truth? We desire so much more than just things. We want something to hope in, a reason to believe.

So in his country as in other iron-curtain countries, people began to set up what he called ‘parallel cultures.’ It was not a counterculture because, he said, it was impossible for us to live totally outside the system.

You cannot live outside a culture. But you can create within it zones and spaces, where you can become who you really are. It is in such places that one can speak the truth, where one can gather with others who share that truth.

This went on for years, not without difficulties, but for years. Over time, the truth became stronger and stronger, and at a certain point people began to walk in the streets and to say to the system, ‘We don’t believe you anymore.’ And the system fell.

It fell, not because of the power of Western nuclear equipment, but because the people said within the system, ‘We don’t believe you anymore.’ It was a vision that had been nourished within those parallel cultures.

- Mary Jo Leddy, excerpts from essay in Confident Witness–Changing World
( ht John LaGrou – Be Not Conformed)
(More on Coffeeshop Poets by Brother Maynard.)

I don’t know if there is hope for economic and political change or revolution in that arena. That isn’t what I want to address. These articles highlight the depth of failure by the church to model an alternative truth.

A few thoughts…

• The dominant cultural model of our churches has been to copy the models of corporate business in organizational structures, leadership styles, productivity, performance, and marketing.
• Perhaps those systems that mirror the corporate culture will also mirror their collapse.
• Should we look to these same systems to organize the recovery of a church that could be different?
• The church that exemplifies the kingdom is not conducive to the powers of an elite oligarchy.
• The church that is an alternative witness to this culture will look radically different than the celebrity-led, consumer-fed, mega-campus complex.
• God forgive us for the turbo-capitalism that drives us to success rather than faithfulness.

Sometimes the failure of all that previously worked is the doorway to an opportunity to be stripped of what is unnecessary and introduced to the beauty and simplicity of life in the kingdom. I have a glimmer of hope that the church is being turned in this direction.

Honestly, I feel like I only scratched the surface of all there is to say about this.
So have at it!

Hug a Calvinist

2nd Annual International Hug a Calvinist Day

Wherever you are, find a Calvinist to hug in celebration of John Calvin’s 500th birthday and all to the glory of God.

My online experiences with Calvinists left me feeling that they were perhaps not so nice. A few visits to the former EmergentNo and to TeamPyro were more than enough for me. (They are purposely not hyper-linked.) Then there was the “poster war” set off by producing my series of “emergent” posters. None of that created a desire to further my understanding of Calvinism.

When my husband started attending Men’s Group, he frequently came home with stories about John – stories about heated arguments involving John that occurred at the meetings. Not knowing his last name, we referred to him as John the Calvinist.

I was a little disappointed the first few times I attended Men’s Group and the infamous John wasn’t there. When I finally met John, I liked him and he seemed to like me. At first I didn’t witness any of the arguments John was known for. In fact, he seemed to restrain himself around me.

Eventually, the gloves came off. His first attempt at enlightening me was a set of copied notes from his Scofield Bible. Because of John, I wanted to understand Calvinism enough to be able to converse with a basic understanding of his positions. This was one of the reasons that I was pondering the Doctrines of Grace.

It is pretty much a given that John and I won’t agree about much, but now we laugh and celebrate the moments when we discover things that we do agree on. I know that he will furrow his brow when I talk about the kingdom, and I probably furrow mine when he goes off on dispensations. But he has a twinkle in his eye when he refers to me as his “favorite combatant.”

So Friday I will hug my favorite Calvinist, a kind, white-haired gentleman named John.

Eternal Choices

I listened to Tim Keller’s sermon on hell yesterday (ht Bob Hyatt). I recently heard a sermon on the same passage by Greg Boyd about the topic of eternal torment. Interestingly enough, while their approaches to this passage (Luke 16:19-31) were quite different, I agreed with many of the points made in both sermons.

This morning I was looking through the Scriptures at various passages about hell and eternal life. What really struck me is how conditioned I am to see these passages in terms of afterlife – one decision that results in either eternal fire or eternal life.

What if instead these verses are about our current lives, our daily choices? Maybe it isn’t as much about an afterlife destination, but rather about the realm of existence in which we choose to currently participate. And yes, the realm in which we participate now will likely color our experience in the afterlife.

“…what is unseen is eternal.” – II Corinthians 4:18

It is not a stretch to interpret eternity, the unseen realm, as a reality of our current temporal existence. The Scripture verses about eternal life suggest that as believers we should be living and experiencing eternal life now – not an afterlife destination, but our participation in the realm of the Spirit in our current living.

My definition of hell is the destruction and devastation that sin causes in our lives, the hell we experience as a result of sin. It may be more than this, I don’t know. While I am unsure of the idea of hell as Dante’s Inferno of Eternal Torment, I do agree with Keller’s idea of hell as the destructive fire of sin.

Based on that, I can also see eternal fire or hell as another realm of existence that we choose to participate in or to reject in our current lives. Perhaps we are always making choices about which unseen realm we are engaging with.

These thoughts remind me of the passage in Deuteronomy…

I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the LORD is your life… Deuteronomy 30:19-20

This is what I am thinking about this morning. Your thoughts?

Independence Day: Pledging Our Allegiance

TULIP or BEERS: Perseverence of the Saints

It has been a busy but good week. There is much interesting discussion on the other posts to catch up on, but first, l should (finally) finish with the P in TULIP.

Many thanks to my friend Bill for the ideal image for this series of posts!

Perseverence of the Saints

Since God has determined who will get saved and they cannot resist His call, they are unconditionally and eternally secure in that election. Therefore, those who have been chosen to be saved will always stay saved. They cannot resist or lose their salvation. There are no exceptions to the rule. As a result, the Christian has “eternal security.” Since there was nothing a person could do to get saved in the first place, there is nothing he can do to lose his salvation.
(according to biblehelp.org)

Shalom

Salvation is a relationship, not a transaction. Relationships ebb and flow, grow and change. They are not either “in effect” or “void”. Our reconciliation to Christ is accomplished and complete. Our salvation – the degree to which we are rescued from our brokenness – is an ongoing work of the Spirit’s transformation of our hearts. This is a lifelong process, not a one-time deal.

Shalom is the peace that results from healing in our lives, the rest that comes as our hearts are made whole. Shalom, wholeness, the defeat of sin and brokenness in our life occurs incrementally as we learn to live in the freedom available to us. As we grow in truth and understanding, we oppose the lies of the enemy and the disfiguring shame that has alienated us from the love of the Father. This is salvation, our deliverance and restoration from the pain of sin. Our relationship with the Father can and should be one of progressive peace and wholeness.

Conclusion

Is it possible to walk away from a relationship of knowing and being known?  It seems more likely to me that one would abandon a religion than a real relationship with the Father.  Wherever someone is at in this journey, an ever-increasing knowledge of God (knowing Him, not facts about Him) is what salvation is all about.

It seems like “are you saved?” isn’t really the right question to begin with.