Advent Reflection: Had we fallen asleep on our watch?

If you are like me the prophetic passages "predicting" Jesus' coming have long caused me frustration, puzzlement and troubled my faith. When read from a certain perspective one can certainly see how Jesus of Nazareth, as the 4 Gospels presents him as the Christ, fulfills these prophesies. Yet if one sits with these passages for too long one realizes that there are things prophesied that have not happened in history or at least haven't happened literally. Following that path, one then wonders if Jesus himself fulfilled these passages literally. Growing up I was taught that by keeping Advent we were remembering God's coming in Jesus Christ, and so preparing for Christmas, and we were waiting for Christ return at the second coming. There are two advents and we are between these two. Many wait for the second advent in a "left behind" sort of way, as dispensationalism has found its popular expression. One almost can't talk about the second coming of Christ without most people even fairly non-religious types seeing or thinking in terms of Dispensationalism: that is seeking to discern the signs, and a belief in a rapture and an anti-Christ and final great tribulation in which the world is destroyed in wars and plagues. The Gospel for tomorrow this First Sunday in Advent in year A of the lectionary is part of a string of texts used to justify these speculations, we are to be ready after all! But there is that is little thing about jesus saying we cannot know the time, which is often ignored.

Dispensationalism wasn't ever really the focus of Advent in my years growing up, but waiting was, and expectation. I think I have long puzzled over the exhortations to wakeful watchfulness: What are we watching for, and how do we know if we are awake?! The "Left Behind" mentality certainly seems watchful, and these sorts of dispensationalists certainly know what they are watching for. But this makes the incarnation something that is simply in the past. The church itself in this time between the advents is in a time of suspension. We are in the airport terminal, between flights and the next one has been delayed.

There is then the solution to this: focus on the realized eschatology, that God has come and the purpose of the church is to witness and or realize the Kingdom of God and the results of the incarnation now. This has its own issues. Wakefulness and waiting is turned into activism. And our hope begins to be lodged in our ability to realize God's Kingdom, Jesus becomes a moral example we are to copy, and God disappears, the incarnation becomes either a principle or becomes entirely irrelevant a back drop to our activism, an idea we no longer need once we realize that what is really important is the here and now and not the here after.

Yet what if this wakefulness and watchfulness is neither simply waiting for something to happen, and watching for the signs that it is happening, nor a frenetic activism that tries to realize and manifest the promised coming in primarily human terms and based upon human effort? What if these prophetic words are in fact true, and Jesus Christ has fulfilled them,and they are being fulfilled and will be fulfilled? What if our wakefulness is not some solution to the problem of these prophetic words and God come in human form, but a living out of all these things in expectation that God is at work? What if being on guard, keeping watch is remaining awake to God's coming pure and simple, no limbo, no self-sufficient activism. What if God's coming happened and continues to happen in the incarnation of the Word in Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, and will find its resolution and consummation in God?

I posit this is precisely what these calls to wakefulness and watchfulness in Romans and Matthew are about. I also posit that somehow in the last 600 years or so the followers of Jesus Christ, perhaps much if not all of the church was lulled to sleep by having seen the call to watchfulness as a call to resolve the puzzle of the prophessies and the moment between the incarnation and second coming of Christ. We perhaps can read our history of this period in terms of God's coming to us, and we being found wanting, of God coming seeking to rouse us from our stupor. We have become drunk on our certainty that we know what God's coming is: even though we all had differing solutions to the puzzle. I then posit that our disorientation now, our various attempts to gain our bearings, is due to our being awakened from our deep slumber and drunken stupor, and so we are unsure of exactly where we are and what has happened, and we have lost sight of God. Western culture and American Culture were created in our period of these drunken certainties, and the irreligious corners of our culture perhaps first awakened to the truth that we were in fact sleep waking and had no idea what we were doing or saying anymore. We now have awakened but we are like the guard caught off guard who is fearful to admit he had fallen asleep, and was derelict in his duty, and so we are trying to blame everything and everyone else but ourselves.

The hope it seems to me from this perspective this advent as we hear Paul and Jesus' words to us is that the Emergent, or our emergence (from our sleep and drunken stupor) is that we can see that God coming to us as a human, God's presence to us in sacraments, sacramentals and our everyday life, and God's continually coming that will be consummated at the end of the ages, are all of a piece. The possibility of our time is to come to see that the mystery, the contradictions, the uncertainty of all the referents of the prophesies, is not a puzzle to be solved but the reality we are to live into in wakefulness. God's coming past, present or future isn't about knowing: no one but the Father knows the day or the hour. Advent is about a being awake to the reality of the living God, come, present and coming. We fell asleep, we became drunk, we have been roused but are unwilling to admit we fell asleep. Our time of emergence should be a time not only of being awake but admitting we were asleep and drunk. We are lost because we failed to stay awake, and we missed God's coming, thinking we knew what waiting, and coming meant, forgetting that Jesus told us it wasn't about knowing but about living and being awake, attentive. God has roused us from our stupor, but the question is will we simply return again to our drink.

Stay awake accept God come in the flesh, accpet God continually coming accept that God in Jesus Christ will come again, and remain awake to God's continual coming, God's continualy coming and going. We do not know, but we are to remain awake, and alive to the possibilities of God in Jesus Christ.

Mystical Theology, Reading the Bible, and Critical Theory

This reflection has its origin in a conversation and argument Brian Merritt and I had a couple of weeks ago on Twitter. At one point in that he asked: How does a mystical experience override a rational interpretation, or something like that. However Brian actually said it, his quesiton contrasts what he correctly saw as my making a mystical theological point in answer to his critical, perhaps historical critical analysis of the text. In some sense this points to the question of how does one read Scripture as the Word of God after taking up critical methods?

I accept and have been trained in higher and lower criticism of Scripture. I have never been taught to distrust or disbelieve higher and historical criticism of Scripture, though for a time I did attend a church that found my use of higher criticism in my Religious Studies classes at university to be suspect. I mention this because what I say could be misunderstood as a critique of higher criticism of Scriptures, rather it simply is meant to allow that criticism of Scripture is itself a limited enterprise that may not be necessary for interpreting Scripture as the Word of God.

Critical methods and tools for interpreting and reading scripture, tend to dissect, seek to confirm authorial claims, and give the location of a text in an historical context. All of this is useful, but also has its limits. Critical methods as often as not need to in some way reconstruct what lies behind the text: the author, community, and/or historical milieu. The limit here is that the author, community, and historical milieu are not given by the text but must be reconstructed by analysis and synthesis that is then also the invention of the scholar who undertakes the analysis. There are various forms of criticism seeking to admit or address this, but they all point to the limits of criticism and an analysed text. To some degree one can argue that following along these lines of thinking and criticism we are left with that all texts tend to unravel and fail to maintain cohesion under extensive critique and analysis. Some even argue that for there to be meaning there is no and can be no stable unity of unchanging meaning within texts, or even any form of human communication.

In the end we can't get beyond the texts of Scripture. We have the texts, in their uncertainty, ambiguity, and at times even offensive plurality. From the perspective of a mystical reading of the Scriptures there is no need to get behind the text to encounter the word of God in the Scriptures . The word of God is not in the intention or theology of Paul or Moses, or Isaiah, but in the texts of Scripture we have that are theirs or is attributed to them. The word of God in the gospels and the Christ we are to follow and worship is not in historical reconstructions and inventions of scholars but in the four Gospels themselves as we have them. The word of God is not found in tracing out the various theological communities that may or may not have existed in the 1st century Church. Granted I may have a broader or greater understanding of the possible meanings of the human words of these texts that may give me more clues as to what God has said, but these things don't bring me into encounter with the Word of God in the Scriptures.

The reason for this is that Word of God is not the texts, the words on the page, but ultimately God, the Second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ. A mystical reading of Scripture seeks to hear and see Christ in the Scriptures. This means that in contrast to the critical reading of Scripture mystical reading seeks to read towards encounter before comprehension or understanding. The purpose of the scriptures is not to tell us about the theology of the prophets or of ancient Israel, nor is it to tell us about the theology of the first followers of Christ in the first century. The purpose of the Scriptures is for hearing and encountering the living God.

I don't intend by saying this to mean that critical methods of interpretation and reading have no place in the mystical reading of Scripture, only to say that critical readings of scripture can't and wont give us the encounter with God in the and through the text. There is in fact no technique or method that can ensure this, except waiting upon God and seeking to hear the text in the presence of the people of God. This mystical approach is not an individualistic approach and requires faith in those who have gone before and handed onto us these texts. I have no way of proving that the word of God is to be found in these texts and these texts alone, what I do have is the witness of those who have passed these on and of these texts themselves to be the Word of God.

One may find these texts wanting, and chose to look elsewhere and not take the witness as true, but the critical methods will not tell you whether or not the witness about these texts is true. The critical methods often enrich my reading open me up to various plays of meaning that can if approached correctly be part of the encounter of the Word of God in Scripture. In the end what I found helpful in the critical methods of interpretation was that through reading Derrida I discovered an otherness in meaning, and textuality, and language that could not be tamed and held, that escaped analysis. Through this experience of the limits of the critical methods I returned to what I had always known about the Scriptures, that in them is life, for they are God breathed and they live by the power of the Spirit, and I learned again after engaging in higher criticism to be open to an encounter with Christ in the text even when difference between meanings and intentions seemed irreconcilable in human terms. The mystical overrides the rational by accepting the limits of reason and human meaning creation.

(PS. this post by J. R. Daniel Kirk says something simlilar or at least parralel, I think)

Some random thoughts on the State, democracy and the Church

I believe especially as Christians we need to take the long view of the origin of the nation and the state. From my study the long view shows that the Nation-State has its origins in a separation of Church and State that was intended to make the State superior to the church, the Nation-State is then possibly in competition with the church. This competition though perhaps has even deeper roots as the idea of the Church as the Body of Christ was itself a borrowing from political philosophy, a statement then that the Church was itself its own polis, headed by Christ. The competition between the members of this body of Christ and any other polis, Empire, nation, state, Nation-state, is then probably hard wired into the very notion of Church, and Christian faith.

When the state actively persecutes the followers of Jesus Christ, it is easy for those followers to experience this conflict and even find comfort in it. And yet, the conflict from the perspective of the church taking the long view and not focusing on any one theorist within the history of the church or Christianity is that the conflict is due to factors that aren't due to God's intentions for the world. The church call's the polis, the State, the Nation-State to its truest and most just reality. The conflict remains thought because the polis, the state, the Nation-State, the Empire retains its fallen inclination towards self-preservation and self-justification, which it shares with all humanity. The conflict arises because the Church is to be the polis in which the citizens shed this egocentric self, and put on Christ, become a new creation, and new creature. It is the polis that announces that this world, all current human systems are of an old order that must and will and has already begun to pass away.

Christians as believers in redemption, salvation and God's grace and transforming love, believe and hope in the transformation of all reality, including the polis, thus there is in this hope always the temptation to see more transformation in a polis or in the systems of the world than there is in actuality. Very rarely does the church see this in their own time thought it can become glaringly apparent to those who live some distance in time and space from other systems. Many contemporary Christians are aghast that any Christians actually thought Constantine's conversion was real or even beneficial the the church. Yet those same Christians see nothing contradictory to tying themselves and their faith, to democracy, or communism, or America, or even more astoundingly a political party or a particular president (at least two in recent memory of opposite parties).

However, whether in Byzantium, or Medieval Europe, or America there have been voices that call us to allegiance to Christ only even when we the church believe we have the power and influence to affect change and reform in the systems of this world. Taking the long view and whole witness of revelation and the history of the Church it seems that we can neither wholly demonize the State, Empire, Polis, nor ever hope prior to the consummation of all things in Christ. that we can rest in a particular vision and actuality of any particular human polis. In fact we by virtue of our baptism are prohibited from so resting. We are always to be ambassadors of the world to come, of Christ, who was crucified by the systems of this world, and it alway already includes what ever system humans have created for themselves, including our current system of democratic Nation-States. We pray for leaders, authorities, nations and governments, not because the church wishes to endorse them but because they need and we need our prayers for them, for without them human systems descend into self-interest and self justification, and justice is defined by what those in power deem to be justice. This is true today as much for progressives and conservatives, or whatever definitions and labels one puts on human attempts to organize and control each other.

Back to an earlier point: Nation-States emerge out of a conflict with the church (one that perhaps the church did not fight well, and in so doing may have compromised its witness even as it tried to witness to its proclamation of the coming of God's reign in the world), in such a way that the state came to see itself in terms of the church. It in various forms and with various apologies and philosophies and economic theories, has attempted to claim that it can change and transform the human soul. That it should be allowed to legislate a better and Utopian world. that it should coerce people whether by force of arms or simply executive orders, laws, and regulations into being selfless. Yet, it denies its own selfish ambition, and the power that then brings to those who either through election or force of arms hold the reigns of government. Oddly enough the church has as often as not sought to tie its fortunes to these divine imperial claims of the state, and encouraged the notion that the state can be a trans-formative force in the world. If or one am naming that claim as blasphemous and idolatrous even if it may accomplish some good in the world.

Also those above claims reduce our own personal human responsibility, it throws upon the state our call to care for our fellow human beings, in the name of efficiency of a central authority that can direct and control outcomes. Well we know how well that works don't we, and yet we keep trying it.

Why I don't Vote- and no it is not because I am a Quietest

You can find a post here on not voting that says things differently than I do here but with which I pretty much agree. Also, there is a repost here, of Alasdair MacIntyre's argument for not voting written around the 2004 presidential election. If you want you can see them as exhibit A and B in my case for not voting.

There are a number of issues. To some degree what I wrote about here on Election day has much to do with it. There were a few things around which my decision to not vote originally hung: 1)an objection to the two party system 2) a sense that Christians myself included were putting our hope in the political process and who controlled the Government 3) A growing unease with the mythologies and civil religion of the United States that I came to conclude is idolatrous and thus felt that abstention from this "meat sacrificed to idols" was my best witness as a Christian and pastor. 4) To proclaim and call people from this idolatry through this abstention, though not necessarily through doing as I do. I do not believe that not voting is something a Christian must do.

Since the 2008 election I have struggled with my decision. I have asked myself, and reflected on this question put to me by others: if we can influence the state to protect the poor the oppressed should we not do so? I do think there is a place for this and my position has never been that it is a Christian thing to not vote. My voting is influenced by my being a Christian and disciple of Jesus, but it itself is not a necessary expression of so being. As I struggled with this I have also taken part in local conversations with city, state and Federal elected officials. I have a better appreciation for what being a politician is in our system and context, the pressure they feel to fix everything, but also the pragmatics of government which seems to be deal making, controlling various competing interests and making happy those who make up their base and their support (not the same thing). Such interaction has not made me more confident in our system nor made me more inclined to jump back in and participate in it.

What I have seen in the past two years is our two party system encourage self-righteousness in my fellow believers in Christ. Many Christians I hear talk about their convictions about this or that politician or this or that party are completely convinced that their support for the party or politician isn't in conflict with their disicpleship to jesus Chrsit. In fact they are quite convinced that their voting as they do is directly connected to what God wants for the world, that they are defending truth and justice and righteousness by voting for a candidate or party and opposing said candidate or party. Most disappointingly I have seen it in Jim Wallis. When he came out with his God's Politics and God is neither a Democrat or a Republican campaign, I felt it was mostly a jab at the Religious right and a hidden support for the Democratic Party. Jim's comments I have read tend to identify the Gospel with the current administrations policies. There is also, in Jim's rhetoric an increasing talk in terms of American civil Religion and speaking of the American citizenry as a people of God. These tendencies I find unpalatable in relation to the Gospel.

Lastly I continue to not vote because someone needs to witness to the fact that Christians are citizens of a realm, of a "nation" that is other than the nations of this world. We do not primarily express this citizenship by conforming to the desires, the duties of the nations, the states and the governments of the world. Democracy is not a characteristic of God's realm any more than any other human political or economic system. I might be amendable to an argument that democracy might be the most likely to approach the limit of God's Kingdom. Yet, even if that is true it is I believe important perhaps especially in our current situation and as antidote to American Civil Religion that has sought to conflate attributes of the church with attributes of the the Nation of the United States. As those baptized into Jesus Christ and Christ's body on the earth our only real citizenship is in the realm of God, and the world that is to come and has come in Jesus Christ. All systems and nations including democracy and the nation of the United States is part of those things that are passing away and are part of that system which had set itself against God, and part of those powers and principalities and systems that put Christ to death.

As I see it America itself pulls us as Christians to see it or to want it to be coincident with the Kingdom of God. There is a nuance here in that what i am seeing now is that this loyalty to America has become loyalty to one of two competing visions of America one Republican ("conservative") one Democratic ("progressive", "liberal"). As Christians we may have convictions that lead us to vote one way or another, but our loyalty isn't to parties, or governments. Our trust cannot be in politicians or the State, or system, like democracy. Liberation and justice and righteousness do not come from any of these. If we are to make a true difference in this world we need to admit that we have a citizenship that is from another world. It is only in God that we find the truth justice, and righteousness that is beyond reproach and can truly transform the world into what it should be.

This would be a Sermon Reflection if I was Preaching

This Sunday Reconciler is joining our host church and the other two churches that worship in the space for a All Saints worship service. I am not preaching, in fact all I have to do is show up. Which is kind of nice. The reflectin to follow then would be in prep for a sermon if I was preaching.

The Gospel for the feast of All Saints is Luke's Sermon on the plain. At the moment I am thinking about the blessings and the woes. Each week there is a Lectio Devina on Wednesday night around the Gospel text for the coming Sunday, During Lectio strangely I was sensing great hope in Jesus' pronouncement of the woes. I sat with this and have been sitting with this today as well. I have generally understood and generally heard the Beatitudes (and woes) spoken of in static terms. There are those who are being blessed by these words and those who are being cursed by the woes. These are classes of people and you want to be in the class of the blessed of course. What I began to hear in the woes was a call to not attempt to escape poverty or morning if one is rich and happy, etc.

More particularly woe to you who laugh for you will mourn, resounded in me as a call to mourn to accept the "curse" in a sense, and then it dawned on me that if I accept the mourning as one who laughs, I then become the one who mourns, and am blessed with comfort, which then may cause me to laugh, which should then send me back into mourning. This is a spiral of shalom and not violence. There is Judgement here only if I try to stop the movement attempt to stand unchangingly as the one upon whom blessing or woe is pronounced. And woe to me if in any way I may be found as the one who laughs, rich, or all speak well of- The static frozenness of such an attempt to be simply have the good things without regard of others is the place of judgement. Jesus calls us in the sermon on the mount to an openness and a dynamism that is life and pronounces death upon those who have no life in them and have become stone.

Post on not-voting to come

I owe a post on not voting. When I chose that my engagement with our political process was a conscious, deliberate and active decision not to vote in elections I also committed to being open and clear that this was the case and giving an account. I have posted on this subject on this blog before here. I will post on this but first I feel the need to post on the Sermon on the plain/mount.

Election Day Reflections

Today Scot Mcknight on Eschatology and Politcs asked us to consider where is our hope (he limited his reflection to evangelicals, but I think it applies to all and any Christians, to the whole Body of Christ)? McKnight asserts that our hope is in God in the gospel and God's mission in the world. "God’s gospel-powered mission creates a new people, the church, where we are to see God’s mission at work. Therein lies our hope." I am mulling over this in light of assertions that America is a light set on a hill, and in light of the ways in which for American Christians the fate of our understanding of the gospel and the fate of America and the political process is often linked. On some level we as American Christians want our citizenships as people of the United States and as people of the church to coincide and exist without conflict. We want the church and the state to mutually support each other. In our present context, and that which McKnight is addressing, this desire is not only about our citizenship but our partisanship and thus a particular vission of America that must coincide with our being the church. For many being Christian and supporting or being Democrat or Republican are nearly inextricable, and the political other is beyond the pale of Christian faith. Both sides of this debate use Nazi Germany as the prime example of why Christians must stand up and oppose the other party and its policies. The other party is seen as the fascist (and/or communist) party. Each group of Christians of course focuses on differing aspects of the Nazi regime and thus is able to see in the other a lurking Nazism. For Democrats it is the Nazi treatment of all minorities not simply the Jews and the regimes persecution of homosexuals and other sexualities it deemed deviant. Also for Democrats it is the populism of the early Nazi movement and its concern for a proper German identity. For Republicans it is the way in which Nazism and fascism through the power of the State sought to infuse itself into every level of society insisting the church and family serve and promote the Nazi State and its Aryan agenda. Christians of either party insist that we must resist these tendencies by supporting one party and opposing the other. But it seems to me that this means that Christians are actively promoting what the Nazi regime attempted to do and that is create a Christianity and church that was indistinguishable from party and nation. However, we are not seeing a repeat of the rise of Hitler. More likely we are simply seeing a division in the American Christian identity that has always collapsed being a citizen of this nation and a citizen of the people of God. We are after all that city set on a hill. Well no, no we aren't that is the church!

Oddly enough to me I see this collapsing even among liberals who in their anti-Constantinian settlement and anti-Christendom stances claim to have abandoned such civil religion. And yet we have such suggestions as that put forward by Candace Chellew-Hodge on Polling place as sacrosanct. As one who has a degree in Religious Studies I can appreciate the analogy of polling place as sacred space. But as one aware that we do have and have always had a civil religion in this country and that it has tended to have a Christian veneer, the collapsing of civility and politeness of a poling place with the exhortation to Love from Saint Paul the Apostle seems to be a watering down the Gospel and the notion of Love in Paul (which by the way is for Paul always already self-sacrificial and exemplified in the Cross and leads Paul to his own death) by equating it with politeness and civility in a public setting. I'm sorry but Jesus and God are many things but politeness is not the same as God's self-sacrificial love. And However much I may like John Stewart (and I think he is hilarious, damn funny, and has bitting insightful commentary on our times) and however nice, good and useful his analogy of cars merging "you go, then I go..." , such an image is hardly a comparable image to the cross and Christian Martyrdom which should be the meaning of Love for the Christian. Two things seem to make Chellew-Hodge's conflation possible: 1) that politeness in the line at a voting booth seems worthy of commentary in our day (who knew, I didn't but I haven't voted since 2002 so haven't been to a poling place in awhile) and 2) a desire to make our civic duty as citizens of the United States coincide with our civic duty as the people of God.

As I wind down I return to our current fear that the other political party will bring us to the brink of fascism (and/or communism): For the church there is in the United States the analogous co-option of the church and Christianity by the nation and state, but it's nothing new and has little or anything to do with fascism or communism. We are currently aware of this danger on the one hand because ostensibly it is the consensus that empire and colonialism are at odds with Christian faith, and that Christendom was a huge mistake. On the other hand we aware of this because there are now two competing visions of how being both a citizen of the United States and a citizen of the people of God can coincide without conflict or betrayal of either citizenship and without needing to give priority to that of the people of God. American Christians for most if not all of our history have assumed that our allegiance to God and Christ and the Kingdom of God could be entirely coincident with being citizens of this great democracy. Few have questioned the claim that America is a "City set on a Hill". Even now, while liberal Christians may point out how America failed at that miserably, liberals haven't given up on this idea but seek to make a progressive agenda into that which will fulfill this manifest destiny of the United States. It is long overdue for Christians in America to return to Augustine's City of God, and contemplate our only true citizenship, and revive a two kingdoms theology not in its form that allows Christians to betray Gospel principles if in civil office (and may have lead to German Lutherans slow response to Hitler and Nazism) but one that heightens the tensions between these two citizenships, and makes the bold claim that we are better citizens of the nations of the world if we are only loyal to our citizenship in the people of God. Or to say it another way; We are most truly good citizens of this world when we seek to have no other identity than that of Christ, and thus see ourselves as only truly citizens of the City of God.