Advent and the Mission of the Church

 I'm exhausted with busyness.  It's all fun stuff, thinking of loved ones and matching up memories and thoughts with gifts from the heart, engaging in merriment with friends from various circles, complete with food and sweet, sweet nectar, planning extra worship services, ad infinitum.  I feel like a mid-level government employee in ancient Rome, working hard to make this world-wide census happen, too hard to notice Joseph and the soon-to-be Blessed Mother making their way to the family farm.

For all my churchy, overcommitted, overscheduled, blasted busyness, I miss Jesus.  Which, of course, means I've missed Jesus. I've missed him when my wife needs a longer hug and a prayer companion. I've missed him when Tim and Spider (our neighborhood homeless gentlemen) need to talk with another person just a bit more.  I've missed him whispering to me that his advent has changed everything, and that I'd have seen that much sooner and much more clearly if I'd only taken time to talk with him.

I've been too busy counting people for some ridiculous census in my own mind. I've one more obligation on the calendar tonight, a pint and discussion evening for Intown.  Tonight we'll be discussing this passage from NT Wright's essay, The Most Dangerous Baby:

“If Jesus is the true King of all the world, whose kingdom redefines power and glory so that they are now seen in the manger, on the cross, and in the garden, then to pray "Thy kingdom come" from the Lord's Prayer is to ask that this kingdom, this power, and this glory may be seen in all the world. It is not enough, though it is the essential starting point, that we submit in our own lives to God's alternative kingdom-vision; we must pray and work for the vision to come in reality, with the rulers of this world being confronted with the claims of their rightful King. 

 We cannot, then, pray the Lord's Prayer and acquiesce in the power and glory of Caesar's kingdom. If the church is not prepared to subvert the kingdoms of the world with the kingdom of God, the only honest thing would be to give up praying the Lord's Prayer altogether.”

Jesus, I'm sick of playing king.  Let the subversion start in my own heart.

 

look alive

I had breakfast with a friend this morning.  After some comments about my "hipster" bed-head, which was at least legitimate this morning (I mean who has time to shower before a breakfast meeting, and when you're biking, what's the point really?), he handed me a couple articles from Christianity Today, a magazine I rarely, if ever, read.  The articles reflected the stages of our lives: my friend in middle-agedness, myself in the bliss of late twentysomethingness.  

As I ate my biscuits and gravy (I biked remember? So, it's ok), we began talking about life-stages, self-conscious churchy-style hipness, and the judgment that floods each of us, stopping our ability to think clearly like dead leaves stop a storm drain at a street corner.  Perhaps in another 20 years I'll look back on the rest of this post and see it as backed-up rain water mixed with road oil, grime, and debris.  But what the hell.

The "quarter-life-crisis" concept (phenomenon? anomaly?) is already so overexposed and self-conscious (for example: this), sometimes I want to snap my fingers and be in my forties to avoid any sort of guilt-by-association with twentysomethings that couldn't decide their way out of a paper bag.  On the other hand, most people my parents age ("most" cluing us all in to my use of "glittering generalities") are nearing retirement from a job they've never liked, still working, still feeding the monkey, or the rat, or the machine, or the man, or the Wizard of Oz.  One of the articles my friend gave me this morning has the author lamenting about just such a life: his mortgage, college bills looming in the future, and other malaise-effecting realities of middle(american)life.

And I'm beginning to feel like a pong ball jumping back and forth from paddle to paddle, from youthful exuberance and potential delusions, to middle-age realities and potential settling and selling out.  Maybe this is just the transition to true adulthood.  I want a house, but do I need to be saddled with a mortgage? I want my (potential) children to go to college, but do I need to let future tuition payments drive the direction of my life and career?

On the one side are my peers, waiting about for something meaningful to do, something perfect, something to make them feel fulfilled at all times.  On the other side are my progenitors, running about trying to maintain, hoping to have enough for a post-retirement motorhome. And we're all so busy pointing the finger at one side or the other, we don't notice the water rising, the storm drains backing up, and the anniversary of our death passing by, striking one more year off its date planner.  Perhaps some Nada Surfian/Robert Bruceian ontology is in order. Look alive.  See these bones?  Just like we are, you'll be dust.  Death, that bitch, I know she'll get me in the end.

Dust and wind. So, I guess, do what's worth doing.

Feverish Verbosity

These are some thoughts on consumption I posted a while back over at Consumption and Communion.  Check out some of the other posts if you get a chance, good stuff.

 

 

Jesus, the Offensive Bread of Life

I've spent most of the day sermon writing in preparation for this weekend.  After spending the obligatory 15 minutes feeling bad for myself because I have to "work" over Thanksgiving weekend and I'm stuck inside while my wife went hiking in the snow (I promise I'm not still feeling bad for myself. Maybe a little.), I queued up my Grooveshark playlist and began to dig into the sixth chapter of John.  As I began to ponder the strange paradox of exclusivity and inclusivity found in the gospel proclamation of Jesus, my headphones were filled with David Bazan's Curse Your Branches.  It was an odd juxtaposition to say the least, and I was struck anew at the mysterious workings of the Spirit, and the offensiveness of a Savior who requires me to eat his flesh and drink his blood.

It seems I can't remind myself enough of the fact that Jesus came to me to give me life, not to improve me, not to help me, not to fulfill me: to give me life.  It's tough, after all, to improve or fulfill a dead person.  I'm also in need of constant reminding that I am not to be a PR representative for Jesus Christ, Incorporated.  He's offensive and there's nothing I can do to get past him.  If I could look at my situation honestly, I'd realize I'm a corpse in a morgue, and Jesus is the mortician.  Unlike any mortician that's ever been in any movie I've ever seen, he's there to tell me he loves me enough to bring me to life, not just tell me he loves me and then leave me dead.  No, he lifts my head off the sterile table, breathes life into my lungs, and offers me food and drink: the food of his flesh, the wine of his blood.  Do I dare spit this offense out of my mouth? Or do I drink down to the last drop the cup of the new covenant, and continue eating?  After all, man can't live by bread alone, we need to eat the Word, or should I say, the Word-become-flesh.

Tomorrow, when I tear into the flesh of turkey, the bread of stuffing, and gulp down blood-red wine, I hope I'll remember that he is the bread come down from heaven, that life is found when I eat his flesh and drink his blood.

Happy Offensive Thanksgiving.

The Outrage of Grace

I've been wrestling through some Robert Farrar Capon recently.  His writing makes me feel as if I've walked into my grandfather's study.  Only now instead of off-white carpet and cheap furniture, the study is full of classic books on shelves of teak, the obligatory green-glass library lamps lighting up antique desks.  And in one of the overstuffed, leather chairs that would obviously be in this upgraded study, he's sitting. But instead of my staunchly fundamentalist-Baptist grandfather waiting to talk to me about music choices and maintaining a good witness with my hairstyle, it's Capon, smoking a pipe with another lit for me.  He hands it to me with a glass of rather good scotch, and I'm disarmed by his stories of grace.

But every few minutes I come to my sense.  I'm a pretty traditional evangelical guy.  A pastoral intern at a PCA church.  I can't be consorting with potential universalists who place so much emphasis on an outrageous grace that I'm no longer aloud to be upset at anyone, except maybe those few that are trying too hard to look alive.  I just can't be hob-nobbing with someone who would say, for example, this:

"I don't know why God insisted on allowing us to run our own history in the first place; and I don't know why he insists on leaving us free enough to botch it in the second; and I don't know why he insists on saving it in the third.  Maybe he really is a jerk.  But if those three insistences are the facts of the case (and if you're a Christian, you believe they are), then there's no way around the outrage of grace.  By and by I shall give you something on judgment and hell, just because they're part of the imagery too.  But don't hold your breath waiting for the other, score-evening shoe to drop, because it's not going to.  Ever since Noah, God has had trouble keeping track of that shoe; and he finally lost it for good in Jesus.  He simply doesn't keep score.  History does, and we do; but as you just proved, keeping score simply ends the game.  And therefore he refuses to do it.  Instead, he erases all our records by death and raises us by grace with nothing but his record left.  Maybe it was just the best he could do; I don't know.  But I do know that's what he says he does.  Your objection to it was voiced perfectly --if less vehemently-- by the Elder Brother; and God's only answer to you was given equally perfectly by the Father: 'It is meet that we should make merry and be glad: for this your brother was dead and is alive again.  Even your rotten kid brother.  Even Hitler. End of Subject.'" (Between Noon and Three p. 252)

I may just need another glass of scotch.