Tod Bolsinger

A Robust Gospel

The little gospel promises me personal salvation and eternal life. But the robust gospel doesn't stop there. It also promises a new society and a new creation. When Jesus stood up to read Isaiah 61 in the synagogue at Nazareth, then sat down and declared that this prophetic vision was now coming to pass through him, there was more than personal redemption at work. God's kingdom, the society where God's will is established and lived, was now officially at work in his followers. That society was overturning the injustices and exclusions of the empire and establishing an inclusive and just alternative.

Scot McKnight in Christianity Today

(HT: Mark D.Roberts)

 

For Love of God and Neighbor

Luke sees the Christian life as an alteration of two activities, prayer and kindness, each feeding the other.  The plight of those in need sends me to prayer; prayer strengthens me to help those in need. But for Luke there is one thing that can make a Christ-like life impossible...wealth.

Thomas Cahill, The Desire of the Everlasting Hills, p.188, 190)

Three Stories, Two Activities and One Obstacle to the Christian Life

As I have been contemplating what it means to be people who live out the "Jesus Creed" of Love of God and Neighbor, I have also been reading my way through Thomas Cahill's Hinges of History series. I am currently on the book about the impact of Jesus on western civilization, called The Desire of the Everlasting Hills. A history of the social impact of the life of Jesus. 

Cahill points out that in Luke, the Story of the Good Samaritan is followed immediately by the story of Martha and Mary, where Mary sits at the feet of Jesus while Martha does all the housework (Luke is the only evangelist to record this scene), and then with Jesus' teaching on prayer (including a primitive version of the "Lord's Prayer").  (This sequence is found in Luke 10:25-11:13.)

While numerous sermons (including my own) have chided the all-too-busy "Martha-like" person for being so concerned with the things of the world and missing the chance to sit at the feet and learn from Jesus like Mary does, Cahill points out that the placement of Martha and Mary after the Good Samaritan, and before the teaching on prayer leads to a much clearer principle for living the Christina life.

"Luke is building up a purposeful sequence, which begins by answering the question "Who is my neighbor?" and goes on to remind the reader that unfailing kindness (even to strangers) is possible only if we keep Jesus in mind--that is if we pattern our lives on his--and that such a resolve can be accomplished only if we pray as Jesus did, asking Jesus' loving Father (who is our Father also) to watch over us...

Luke sees the Christian life as an alteration of two activities, prayer and kindness, each feeding the other.  The plight of those in need sends me to prayer; prayer strengthens me to help those in need. But for Luke there is one thing that can make a Christ-like life impossible...wealth. (p. 188, 190)

This paragraph, read today at the end of a week where our church has gone through a Scripture Vigil (literally hours of "sitting under" the Word") and have been prayerfully considering how God wants to use our sacrificial giving of our wealth to strengthen our ministry to our neighbors, I have been more aware than ever that we are culture of "Marthas" who are pulled by the demands of the world, our fretting about wealth and security, and our desire to live a life that is good, reasonable, practical and comfortable.  While those who have prayed, worshiped and read the Scriptures have found their hearts filled with peace and generosity, many more have been unable to take the time to sit in a quiet sanctuary and read the scriptures, or attend a prayer service. 

As a church and a culture, I am more aware than ever of how we who long to practice kindness, need more and more prayer, to enable us to genuinely love our neighbors. And how kindness and prayer are more difficult for the wealthy than most of us ever imagine.

The Word in Community

Today, at our church, a vigil will come to an end.  It is part of our "For Love of God and Neighbor Campaign".  It has been meant to be a week of spiritual discipline for anchoring our church's mission in the words of Scripture. It is the first time that we have done something like this, but I sense it won’t be the last. 

Last Sunday at the end of our last service of the morning, a elder in our church stood before the congregation and read aloud from Genesis 1:1-5, we then dismissed the service and a small group of junior high students and their young adult leaders sat in a circle and took up where the elder left off.  For the next five days, from early in the morning until late into the night, there has been someone reading, aloud, from the Chronological New Living Translation of the Bible as we as a church community work our way through the entire Bible.

Tonight, at 7 PM a group of leaders in our church will gather together to read the last chapter of Bible, Revelation 22.  We have asked four readers to lead us, with a child reading the penultimate verse and then in call and response fashion the leaders of our church will read the last verse together.

Five days, 1441 pages, 76 hours of reading and an amazing experience.

I was signed up to read with my wife early in the experience.  I assumed that I would only read once. My son, who had already read with the Junior Highers tagged along because he wanted to do it again. I listened as my wife read about Passover and the slaughter of the first born Egyptians because of Pharaoh’s stubbornness (with my own first born son listening on). Then I read the passage where because of Israel's own stubbornness (how quick we forget!) God had to punish them in the wilderness.

Throughout the day, I remembered that while I went about leading the church staff in meetings, preparing for events, meeting with people, there was someone reading the word of God aloud in our sanctuary.  It was like being in a musical, but the music was the voice of God through the voice of his people.  Tuesday afternoon, I snuck in the back of the sanctuary for a few minutes and listened as our church receptionist read all by herself, her friendly voice that greets people when they call the church, filling the sanctuary with the word of God.

Tuesday night after a Sanctuary Remodel Committee meeting,  I joined a group of young adults and a homeless women who were gathered reading about Solomon's building the temple. A long passage about so many details, it made me grateful for the committee that is paying attention to our sanctuary details, so that in the words of 1 Kings 8:60, "Then people all over the earth will know that the Lord is God and there is no other."

I left at 10:15, but the young adults carried on through the night, moving from the pithy wisdom of Proverbs through the blush-causing Song of Solomon and into the prophets.

On Wednesday morning my ten year old daughter Ali asked me to get her up early so that she could read before school.  We arrived at 6 AM where one of my colleagues was already in sanctuary.  From 4 AM - 6 AM he had walked alone circling the inside of sanctuary and reading the psalms of praise.  Then I listened as my daughter's sweet voice told of the sacrificial love of the Messiah from Isaiah.  She finished by reading Isaiah 59:21: "And this is my covenant with them," says the Lord. "My Spirit will not leave them and neither will these words that I have given you. They will be on your lips and on the lips of your children, and your children's children forever.  I, the Lord, have spoken."

This morning, I returned again.  At 4 AM I joined with a Marine dressed in his uniform who sat in the darkness under a huge picture of the Good Samaritan on our chancel with only the glow of the lights for reading illuminating the scene.  We read from the gospels (after so many hours we were finally in the New Testament!) taking turns for two hours until both daylight and the friendly face of a 70 year widow and elder in our church lit up the morning.  As we gave the scriptures to her, her Texas drawl added depth and warmth to the story.

I prepared to leave the vigil to her strong voice, so that I could see my kids off to school.  As I left the sanctuary I heard her reading the words of Jesus, “I have loved you even as the Father has loved me.  Remain in my love. When you obey my commandments, you remain in my love, just as I obey my Father’s commandments and remain in his love.”

I know that my Texan friend turned the Bible over to a retired lawyer who loves the Scriptures.  I smiled to think of his booming, confident voice taking up the task from her quiet confident drawl.  And throughout this day, more will read, more will listen.  A homeless woman has probably heard more of the Bible this past week than any of us.  A family brought their preschool aged boys just to listen and be part of something they really don’t understand.

We have needed the whole body of Christ to take on this task, we needed single adults who had the freedom to read late into the night, stay-at-home moms and retirees who could fill the working hours, children who could bring laughter as they giggled through trying to pronounce Hebrew names and working folk who would begin and end their days “in the world” with a time “in the Word” reminding us what all these writings are really about. 

Reading aloud the scriptures, listening to them they way they were read for centuries, in community, hearing the grand narrative of God’s redeeming love for the world, letting it soak into the life of our community as we seek to live out the “powerful play” that goes on. 

I feel sadness for those who missed out on this experience.  I feel some sadness about times I have missed out on what may have been equally powerful and meaningful because my life schedule didn't permit it.

But for those of us who have been part, and for our church as a whole, I can only imagine what this might do to us.

"When I discovered your words, I devoured them.  They are my joy and my heart's delight, for I bear your name, O Lord God."  (Jeremiah 15:16)

[Update: Sheryl France-Moran a reflection on the Scripture Vigil at her blog, too. ]

The Kingdom and Our Neighbor

“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’"  
           Matthew 22:36-39, what Scot McKnight has called "The Jesus Creed."

“The Kingdom is the society in which the Jesus Creed transforms life.”
Scot McKnight, Jesus Creed, 127.

"I kept steadily to meetings, spent First-day afternoons chiefly in reading the Scriptures and other good books, and was early convinced in my mind that true religion consisted in an inward life, wherein the heart does love and reverence God the Creator, and learns to exercise true justice and goodness, not only toward all men, but also toward the brute creation; that, as the mind was moved by an inward principle to love God as an invisible, incomprehensible Being, so, by the same principle, it was moved to love Him in all His manifestations in the visible world; that, as by His breath the flame of life was kindled in all animal sensible creatures, to say we love God as unseen, and at the same time exercise cruelty toward the least creature moving by His life, or by life derived from Him, was a contradiction in itself."
            John Woolman, Quaker leader and early abolitionist, 1720-1772.

Abba Anthony on Neighbors

'Our life and our death is with our neighbor. If we gain our brother, we have gained God, but if we scandalize our brother, we have sinned against Christ.' 
Abba Anthony, 4th Century

Sacrifice

"To sacrifice something is to make it holy by giving it away for love."

   Frederick Buechner

Healthy, Connected, and…Frail?

“A healthy church is one in which we seek to stay connected with God by seeking to connect others to God, one in which we 'win God' by converting one another, and convert one another by our truthful awareness of frailty.”

Rowan Williams, Where God Happens, 27.

Another snippet from a book on the Desert Fathers by Archbishop Rowan Williams has triggered another round of obsessing about the "Jesus Creed" of loving God and neighbor:  “Have I got this all backwards… again?”  Williams definition of a “healthy church” has the requisite “love God” and "love neighbor" that certainly squares with the core teaching of Jesus. 

But he offers a most challenging twist on the usual order.  Most of us say, “I’ll first love God and then look out to my neighbor.”  That is, that after I am “prayed up”, “spiritually centered”, have a great "experience" of worship, feel "inspired" and "connected" to God and have had my fill of the Lord’s Supper or the latest praise band, I will then take my spiritually-sated self out into the world and see what I can do.

But Archbishop Williams turns the statement on its head.  And then offers a most unexpected action step.

First, the “turn.” 
“A healthy church is one in which we seek to stay connected with God by seeking to connect others to God, one in which we “win God” by converting one another.”  In a church world that has been driven by creating environments where people can “connect with God”, the Desert Fathers, Williams said, realized that we find God primarily by connecting others to God.  That as we seek to reach out to others, share the presence of God with others and by our efforts bring God to others, we discover (or maybe better "recognize")  that God is already deeply present with us.  As we join the Spirit’s efforts to glorify (another word for “reveal” or “show”) God to those who have lost connection with God, we find, to our great amazement that we who are doing the connecting are experiencing the most undeniable sense of  God’s presence at work in and through our lives.  We “win God” by focusing on “winning the neighbor” to God.  (Now  doesn’t that feel all backward and out of order?)

Then, the unexpected action step. 

We “convert one another by our truthful awareness of frailty.”  Most of us think that if we are going to “convert” or “win” others to God then it will only come as we are “convincing”, “winning”, “attractive” and “strong” in faith and belief.  But Williams tells us that as the Desert Fathers fled to solitude, they discovered the depths of their own sin, their own immeasurable need for God, their own weakness, frailty and inability to truly love their neighbors (why else would they become recluses, no?).  And as they developed and shared a “truthful awareness of frailty”, they revealed the God they had found. 

This is a far cry from the way most of us go about “doing church”, “arguing for the faith”, “converting” or “convincing” others.  I thought about this last week with the passing of Jerry Falwell.  How much more “moral” would our country had become if there was a group of Christians who freely admitted that we are the “Immoral Majority”.  That is, that we are sinners, we are scared, we are prone to fight and bicker and judge and pull away and live alienated from each other and so we need desperately to pray for spiritual and political leaders who will--because they live with “truthful awareness of frailty”--do everything they can to work for a just, compassion and moral society.

As I sit with more and more people who are feeling disconnected from church and disconnected from God, I am a beginning to wonder if we have the whole thing backward. Maybe we’ll find God and a healthy church the more we “we seek to stay connected with God by seeking to connect others to God” through truthful awareness of frailty both in ourselves and in our world.

A Chinese Artist, An Egyptian Monk, a British Bishop and A Good Samaritan

This picture of the Good Samaritan by Chinese artist He Qi adorns our sanctuary walls during our series on "For Love of God and Neighbor".

At the same time, I have been learning new insights on love of neighbor from a most unlikely source, the Desert Fathers.

One quote applicable to the struggle of seeing the despised "Samaritan" as a neighbor and then a commentary that helps us make some sense of the incongruity of learning "love of neighbor" from a group of spiritual recluses...

"The Monk must die to his neighbor and never judge him in any way whatsoever."  Abba Poemen, 4th century Desert Father.

What is to be learned in the desert is clearly not some individual technique for communing with the divine but the business of becoming a means of reconciliation and healing for your neighbor. You 'flee' to the desert not to escape your neighbors but to grasp more fully what the neighbor is--the way of life for you, to the degree that you put yourself at their disposal in connecting them with God. (Archbishop Rowan Williams, Where God Happens, 33)

Who is the Neighbor you need?

In Luke 10:25-37, we have one of the most famous stories in human history. It is arguably, along with the parable of the prodigal son, the most famous parable of Jesus.  It has been told in innumerable Sunday School classes.  And indeed, the phrase “Good Samaritan” is now a label in our culture for anyone who lends a helping hand.  There is even a “Good Sam” club for RVers who are dedicated to helping those who need help along the road.  In other words, very few of Jesus’ stories are better known and have made a greater impact than this one. 

But is that the point of Jesus parable? 

Let’s state right up front that if all this story teaches us is that God wants people to help others in need, then this is a fine story, a really appropriate and good story and it is worthy of telling to our children and seeking to live out ourselves.  If the point of this parable is that we should be willing to do whatever we can to help others, even at great cost. (The Samaritan not only personally took care of the man who was robbed and beaten, but paid the equivalent of two days salary to do so.) Even if this is nothing more than a story about generous, sacrificial, tangible care for others, it is truly a great parable with an important and challenging point.

But then we’d miss the actual point that Jesus was making here.  And it is even more pointed.

Let’s look back at the actual interchange between the religious scholar and Jesus again.  The lawyer asks, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” 
Jesus asks him what he thinks the Bible says. 
The Lawyer responds by citing the same words that Jesus is telling people all over the country side: Love God, Love your neighbor.
Jesus tells him, Good, you got it.  Do that and you’ll get eternal life.

Then the religious scholar shows his hand. Luke writes, “But wanting to justify himself…”

That is, wanting to win the debate and put Jesus in his place, he asks a follow up question,“And who is my neighbor?"

The lawyer is asking Jesus, “So who do you say I have to care for in order for God to be pleased with me? Who do I love as a believer who has eternal life?  Who is in the club, Jesus? 

If Jesus answers the way most teachers of his day would have answered, he would have said, “And your neighbor, the true believers, the ones who are right with God and therefore, you must love like yourself are….” 

By now, everyone there would have caught the sub-text:  What group are you in, Jesus?  Who is right?  What camp has God’s blessing, in your opinion?  Who am I responsible for?  And who can I ignore because they are not worthy of my love, they are outside of God’s love, they are wrong, immoral, illegal, irreligious?  What do you say? 

But this is what we most often miss in this story: Jesus’ parable turns the question on its head.  Jesus doesn’t directly answer his question.  He reframes the entire question from a different perspective that highlights human solidarity, not ethnic and religious division.

“A man—a Jewish man—a Jewish man who is a lot like you—oh smarty pants lawyer...went up from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of robbers.” 

Jesus’ famous parable begins with an interesting twist that most of us fail to see: Jesus puts the scholar in the position of the victim.  And doing so, makes Jesus agenda for changing the whole world more clear and more urgent. 

Jesus is saying that it is a waste of time and it makes the world a worse place if we spend our time trying to figure out if “they” are part of “us.’  Indeed, if we are to act like Jesus and live out the Kingdom of heaven, then we don’t even think in terms of “us” and “them.”  And even more, in a world where at any moment, anyone of us can be in need, we all need a neighbor. 

When all it takes is one corrupt CEO to wipe out retirement account, one tractor trailer on a freeway, one bad diagnosis, one act of terrorism, one stray bullet, one wrong turn into a bad part of town to wipe out all we know and love, we all have need and we are all a neighbor.

"Can you recognize the hated Samaritan as your neighbor?  If you can't, you just might be left for dead?"?  ( N. T. Wright)

(This is from last Sunday's Sermon, which you can listen to or download in its entirety here.)