The sexy part, the part I’m personally really looking forward to most, is having Dr Lamoureux down to talk about Jesus + Evolution this Sunday night because I really feel there are far too many people who see science and evolution as some kind of barrier to exploring the Jesus story. For those of us that not only accept, but are fascinated by, and find beauty in, a concept like evolution, I think it’s important to acknowledge that this doesn’t have to be a barrier to spirituality. I may write some more thoughts about this later but the ability to move past the argument and past sound bites is, in my opinion, the more important concept for us to understand as a community, because the skill with which we do that will determine our ability to engage in meaningful dialogue regardless of where we personally stand on the “issues”. Without that we run the risk, in a very real way, of missing the point.

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The problem is without that centering idea, it’s tough to give context to decisions and their impact in community.

So here’s the language I’ve been using for the past year or two in my own mind to understand Jesus.

Jesus is God, stepped into history (for me this is about the divinity of Jesus – it’s what makes sure my faith stays Christian and not just Jesus-based enlightenment)

To save us from ourselves (this is about sin, but trying to understand it not as a list of taboo actions or ideas but as worst tendencies inside me. It’s about the hard edge of Jesus teaching – you’re way is death)

To show us a new way to live (this is enlightenment for me. Jesus is not just religion, Christianity is not just mental ascent to ideological principles. The Jesus way is a new way to live and grow and become)

To dismantle the infrastructure we’ve built between ourselves and God (this is about religion. Jesus comes to help us step over it, to move from the life we’re living directly towards the life we were meant to live)

And invite into relationship with our creator (this is about experience for me. My faith is logical and rational but never completely defined by empirical evidence. There is, always will be, and must be, the personal non-transferable relationship that exists between myself and God)

Still needs work…

January 18

This is part of the healthy way that the church has evolved throughout its history in a continual effort to find new and meaningful ways to talk about their faith. That process of cultural evolution has continued.

Substitutionary Atonement
The predominant metaphor that is heard today as the evangelical church talks about the atonement is one we call substitionary atonement. Sometimes we call it vicarious atonement or propitiation or judicial theory or penal substitution, but all of these subtle variants are a form of a metaphor that paralleled the development of the modern legal system. This framework focuses on the divide from the diagram earlier (see Part 1). Paul writes to the Roman church and says, “for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” and we are disconnected from God by those shortcomings. The theory of substitutionary atonement lines this reality up against the model of the developing legal system. We have transgressed the standard that God has set for membership in his social order much the same way a criminal transgresses the social order that society has set for itself. Similarly to when someone breaks rules and must be penalized through fine or imprisonment, God has set a penalty for our transgression, and that penalty is death. Now that is a bit of a kludge on the metaphor, which has been articulated much more eloquently to reflect the nuances of the relationship between God, law and sinner by better theologians. However, in its most basic form, substitutionary atonement is a legal picture of our relationship to God. The twist comes in because God sends his son, to pay that penalty for us. In his death he saves us from the consequence of our own actions by stepping into the gap for us.

This idea was first articulated in the 11th century by Anselm of Canturbury in what he called Satisfaction theory. You can feel the 11th century in the language. God has been offended or insulted and he demands satisfaction. I can almost see God slapping me in the face with his white glove before drawing his rapier and declaring, “on guard”.

The major theme though is that the price for our mistakes or our sins, if that language is still meaningful to you, is too high for us to pay on our own. The idea of the connection between death and sin has a rich history. It is first developed in the language of the Old Testament. The high priest of the Jews would sacrifice a spotless lamb every year as a payment for the sins of the people. When Jesus is referred to as the Lamb of God in the scriptures he is being compared to that picture. Even beyond that one symbolic moment each person was required to provide sacrifice to atone for their transgressions. The picture of death in those sacrifices was meant to continually remind people of the very serious and consequential nature of their personal decisions. This time though, God himself is making the sacrifice for us. The spotless lamb is pictured in the sinless man, his death a covering or atoning sacrifice for our mistakes.

This picture of the atonement is incredibly important because it shows us the significance of the choices both that Jesus makes on our behalf and of the choices we make for ourselves as we choose or choose not, to live the life we were intended for.

The danger is that sometimes this becomes the only picture we talk about in less rooted Christian traditions and without the multiplicity of lens through which to see the mystery of God’s atonement our language becomes incomplete, starts to break down and becomes open to criticism or even ridicule.

This picture of substitutionary atonement while, very important can become unhelpful. Picture this metaphor in a slightly different, albeit crude, context.

One day a father is sitting inside his living room watching television, enjoying his day off when a baseball comes crashing through the window shattering the serenity of the moment and the glass of the window. The father is enraged by what has happened and storms out the front door of his house, down the steps and onto the lawn, where he can see the neighborhood kids playing in the street. He demands to now who threw the ball through his window. One of the boys puts up his and hand and admits to the accident. The father calls to his son who is playing with some other kids in the backyard and proceeds to spank him in front of everyone until he feels his anger subside. He then tells his son to go back to playing in the backyard, tells the kids across the street that all is forgiven and goes back inside to finish watching his show.

This is not the picture that substitutionary atonement is trying to convey. However, without the balance of our other metaphors it can start to look suspicious to someone on the outside looking in. Substitutionary atonement is not about cosmic child abuse, a slavishly legalistic deity or even divine courtroom. It is a picture of the personal responsibility each of us have for our actions and decisions and of the great lengths to which God is willing to go to bring us back no matter how far we have strayed from what we were intended to become.

Jesus saves us by experiencing the consequences for each of our mistakes.

Mosaic
Humanity made at one with God. You and I, able to sit down again, with our God. All of creation reconciled to its creator. This is a picture that is bigger than my personal salvation, although it is that too. My journey toward God is part of a story that encompasses all of history and all of creation. Personal choices, eternal truths, environmental realities and social contexts, all of these brought back into alignment with God. This is why all of these pictures are important for us. When we speak of the atonement we are talking about the mystery of the universe, we are talking about THE story of everything. The way in which all of these different pictures or lens or metaphors interact is what gives this story its incredible magnitude, depth and beauty.

Let me go back one last time to a quote from CS Lewis
We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself. All the same, some of these theories are worth looking at.

It’s important for us to try to come to an understanding of this story. However in that attempt we need to keep some sense of mystery there. The atonement is so big and so important that my fear is any attempt we might make to have it appear easy or concise will necessarily lose some of the significance. At the same time, an idea as central to our faith as this, can’t be ignored or left alone. It is something that calls each of us to continually come back to it, to study it, to marvel at it, to be thankful for something so beautiful in our lives that we will never be able to completely frame it. The truth is, the atonement is all of the ideas we’ve looked at and in some sense it is none of them. It is simply the mystery that God has offered each of us the place of at-onement. All of the ways we talk about that idea simply add to the beauty of what that means. To finish I go back to where we started. All of these ideas need each other. You can’t talk about the death of Jesus without taking about his life and you can’t talk about his resurrection without talking about his death. So when we look at the ideas around the atonement we need to realize that we can’t talk about his taking our place unless we talk about his influence on our lives and we can’t about his victory unless we talk about his sacrifice.

It’s in the interplay between all of these myriad ideas that we find something of what it his death means for us, that in all these ways we are saved we are saved by Jesus.

Since then a number of people have asked for the audio and/or notes so I figured I would rework the info into an article for the blog… then I remembered that I have my regular job/writing to keep up with. I still think it’s a good idea (for my own personal thought as much as anything else) but I need a bit more time to put the information into proper(ish) sentences… so I’m going to be posting it in pieces over the next week or so as I go.

Hopefully it can help shape a different (or at least broader) frame on Jesus life and death than the sometimes myopic view presented in the evangelical church.

Intro
There are a number of traditions in the family of the Christian Church and each of those have placed a different emphasis on parts of the life of Jesus. The Eastern Orthodox church has primarily focused on the birth of Jesus – his entry into the world as the focal point for their theology. The Roman Catholic Church has built much of their emphasis around the resurrection, that fact that he died and came back to life as their focus. The protestant tradition which is where Westside has come out of, by contrast, has primarily focused their attention around the death of Jesus. Of course none of things can really be separated off in a meaningful way, because they were all a part of the story of Jesus.

You can’t have a resurrection unless you have a death.
You can’t have a death unless you have a birth.

So it’s important for us to keep in mind that we really missing out if we focus on one aspect of the story Jesus to the exclusion of another.

That said, the death of Jesus has always been a focal point in history. We divide history more less by occasion of his death (faulty dating but nonetheless we still mark time by this moment). It has also become fodder for all kinds of speculation, from conspiracy theories that suggest his disciples stole his body, to teachings that suggest that Jesus was just a spirit and didn’t really have a body to begin with.

Jesus death remains the focal point for much of the discussion around Christianity because it’s one thing to listen to and appreciate the ideas of Jesus, and it is another thing to make the leap to believe that this guy not only died but came back to life and that his life, death and resurrection are the turning point of human history.

I had a friend ask me a question just last week. He had been in a lecture at the U of C where the professor had made the comment that, “the death of Jesus is the central idea of the Christian Faith”. And so he ask, “Why? Why is the death of Jesus so central to our story?”

Well the key to our whole story and the reason Jesus’ death figures so prominently is the idea of the atonement.

Atonement
Atonement is actually an invented word. As all words are at one time or another.
William Tyndale, a Bible translator in the mid 16th century couldn’t find a good English word to translate this idea of what Jesus’ death was about. So he made up a word. He really liked the idea of reconciliation, which is a quite beautiful picture to begin with.

The word reconcile comes from the latin
Re – again
Con – with
Sol – seat
Reconcile – to sit with again

Tyndale however, felt that for him, there was another element that was missing. That reconcile didn’t fully capture this idea of the forgiveness or covering of sin that he saw in the feast of yom kippur. (which he eventually translated as the day of atonement) So he essentially invented the word atonement by combining some English words – “at” and “one” and the turning them into a verb atonement or at-one-ment. Tyndale felt this captured the idea of reconciliation – to sit with again but added a more intimate feel to the idea. This concept of being at-one with God.

It was a brilliant move because this very simple word conveys so much. It is an entry point to the entire story of God. Now sometimes we attach baggage to it and things get obscured much as the do with religious words like “sin” or “gospel” but it at its heart the word atonement is a fairly accesible metaphor for an extremely profound concept, because however we understand Jesus, however we dissect and study his life, death and resurrection, we are called, primarily, to understand this; that he has brought us to a place where we are at-one with God. That’s the Christian story. That we can literally, from the word reconcile, sit with him again. Atonement points us to that mystery.

We have lots of these important words and metaphors to help us understand and articulate what we’re talking about; how that happens or how we can explain it, but this is such a big concept that it’s hard, maybe impossible, to contain or communicate in succinct packages.

It’s been to our detriment that we have often done just that. Instead of making the idea of the atonement big, we’ve made it small. Instead of making the idea of the atonement mysterious, we’ve made it simple. And I think we’ve lost something important in that process.

Today the most common way you will hear the death of Jesus or the concept of the atonement explained looks something like this

You’re on one side
God’s on the other side

Death on your side
Heaven on the other

Quite the conundrum.
Thankfully, Jesus appears and becomes the bridge that gets you from one side to the other

Now that’s not necessarily a bad start. The problem is it can stop short of encouraging us to explore the depth of what this relationship means because it oversimplifies one of the great, actually the great mystery of the universe.

The philosophical mistake of arguing for a God-of-the-gaps who exists in the shrinking window of what we don’t know about the universe, and the more practical mistake of believing in a God who is only present in the shrinking gap of possibility defined by the choices we have already made in life.

Nevertheless here’s how I worked it through;

Life is only worth living because of the possibility of new experiences. There is always something new to discover, taste and experience.

Twist Movie endings (Sixth Sense)
Black Swan (Nicolas Nassim Table)
Wine (8000 years and still learning)

That doesn’t mean we should try to explain God only by what we don’t know. God-of-the-Gaps type arguments are fundamentally flawed because the frontier of knowledge keeps pushing that type of God in continual retreat.

Barnett

To use the God-Of-The-Gaps argument is to open up your poor old deity to scientific scrutiny. If you say that proof of your God can be shown by a particular unexplained phenomenon, you’re going to be in trouble when science gets round to examining and explaining that phenomenon. Does your God vanish or die, or just scuttle over to the next Gap, like some giant cockroach when the light is switched on?
Sometime, someday, most of the important gaps will be closed, and those remaining believers who rely on this form of argument will be heard saying “Ah, but what about the mating ritual of the Venezuelan Accordion Beetle, eh? You can’t explain that with your stupid test tubes, can you? Bow down and praise the Lord in apology!”Far and few, far and few, are the gaps where the deities live.

Bonhoeffer

How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge.
If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat.
We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know

Instead Jesus uses the term born again to frame this idea that sometimes we need to go back and look at our lives with fresh eyes to see God not just in “what’s left” but in places we may have missed him before.

When we’re born we are open to everything, full of potential. It’s over time that we learn to manage, focus and direct that potential to the point where it can seem like our options are pretty limited. The idea of being born again, in a lot of ways, is about seeing things with new eyes again and being open to new possibilities. Perhaps it was meant to be less about a new set of conclusions and more about a recapturing a willingness to consider new ideas or reconsider old ones in a new way that we’ve lost over time

We see Nicodemus three times in the Book of John.

John 3
Nicodemus shows a willingness to engage with something that doesn’t initially fit in his world
John 7
He opens himself up to listen and learn and be surprised
John 19
And then eventually – though a process of journey and discovery he allows that new experience to become the catylist through which he reinterprets everything in his life

Where was the moment when Nicodemus was “born again”? Perhaps it was closer to the moment he opened himself up to a new possibility than to the moment he settled on a new set of conclusions.

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Sept 28: Gaps in our Experience

It is the intellectual equivalent of a flash mob for me

Hundreds upon thousands of individuals contributing their part to a story bigger than any person could write on their own

The ultimate web 2.0 redefinition of what an encyclopedia can be
I love it
I use it for everything
I research everything from my messages to random common conversational disagreements to forgotten factiods that have slipped my mind and are driving me insane
It’s amazing—

For the record, wikipedia currently holds over 10 million articles
Comprised of over 1.3 billion words

An average of 4000 articles are added everyday
Each of those 10 million articles are edited an average of 14 times a day
Almost 57 000 people have contributed at least 10 edits on the site
And almost 2.7 million edits are recorded every single month
And at that pace you could forgive someone – perhaps me-
from starting to believe that all available knowledge will soon be accumulated in wikipedia – by the end of the week maybe

And that real research is for suckers

Because wikipedia is all you will ever need
But it can even start to feel there isn’t much left to be discovered in the world

Given a couple more days wikipedia will have it all anyway

Scientists believe they can trace history back 10 to the negative 43 seconds after the big bang
That is one million, trillion, trillion, trillionths of a second after the moment when all matter coalesced into the space no larger than a single atom and exploded into creation

You consider that and it can seem like there is very little left to the imagination at times

the problem with that is sometimes it doesn’t seem to leave any space for us to write a good story with our lives
What do you and I have to contribute?

Where wikipedia should feel like a smart mob with each individual contributing their piece to create something bigger than any one person

It can start to feel like your contribution doesn’t mean much in the face what’s already been gathered
Like you have nothing to contribute
Everything’s already been written
And this is part of what I think we’ve lost when it comes to spirituality in our culture

We tell the story of God likes it’s already been written

Like the book is closed
The story is over
It’s clinical and it’s sterile
its like a textbook and our place is to simply read and retain
Absorb and assimilate information

But never to participate
Or contribute
Or find our own meaningful place in that narrative

Because everything has already been written
____
But then thankfully we occasionally come across cracks in our knowledge base

Glorious little flaws in the way we have constructed the world around us

Things that remind us our understanding doesn’t go as deep as we might have thought

I sent out an article this week on the facebook update titled

13 things that don’t make sense
I won’t bore with all 13
Although you can still go read the article if you are as fascinated with random knowledge as I am

But one simple example

Placebos
We have no idea how or why they work
Don’t try this at home
But imagine you were to induce pain in someone everyday for a prolongued period
And then control that pain with morphine

And then a ways into the experiment you switched the morphine for, say, saline solution without telling the patient slash guinea pig

What do you think would happen
Well in most trials having non-medicinal saline solution pumped into your arm would take the pain away

Now we know placebos are powerful and most people would say it’s all in the head

But a guy named Fabrizio Bendetti was satisfied with that answer
So he actually did this to his patients
The lesson, beware Italian doctors
He took this a step farther
Once the saline solution was controling the pain he introduced a drug called naxolone into the experiment without telling the subjects
Naxolone actually counteracts the effects of Morphine
Now since no one was actually receiving any morphine Bendetti didn’t expect anything to happen
He just really like the idea of injecting drugs
Incredibly though
the nazolone started to counter act the effects of the saline solution that shouldn’t have been doing anything to start with

So now thanks to Bendetti doctors believe the placebo effect has some kind of biochemical basis

It’s not just all in your head
But now they are even more confused because no one knows exactly how or why or what is really happening
And it only took 24 patients in excruciating pain to figure out what we didn’t know

I only bring that up to remind us that there are still vast numbers of categories that don’t fit within the boundaries of what we understand
Things that haven’t been written
Things that we push to the edge of our experience or just simply ignore because we don’t know what to do with them

And maybe spirituality was always meant to fall into one of those categories

Maybe it was always meant to be more like wikipedia
(where everyone has something to contribute to the story)
and less like a traditional encyclopedia or less like a religion
(where everything is defined for us up front)

I realize that when we talk about the scriptures as a story we find ourselves in

It can be kind of esoteric and airy- fairy

It’s hard to put handles on that

But hopefully as we start to walk our way through the book of John during this series that will start to make more sense to us
I want to read you the open passage to gospel of John in a second

But first let’s put this book in context

John is writing at the end of the 1st century

This is a very late book, probably one of the last books in the Bible to be written
And as such he has a very different approach than the other gospel writers
The other guys are writing history
Not in the way we might write a history book today, trying to get all the details

But they’re trying to capture the most important moments in Jesus life as they happened, or at least as they remember them

John on the other hand is writing theology
He’s writing to make a point about Jesus
If Mark was written in the mid- 50s within a couple decades after Jesus death
And the Luke and Matthew follow in the 70s and 80s

John is writing in the late 90s a full 60 years after the time of Christ

And he’s reflecting on everything the church has learned and developed and hypothesized about this man Jesus
And he’s trying to capture that in a form that brings us along for the discovery

Just listen to the language that John uses he writes here his opening words

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.
Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.
The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.

He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

_John 1:1-14

So John is writing with an agenda here – to make a point about Jesus
To sum up a half century of theological exploration and development that has happened since Jesus’ death

And look at the language that he uses here
It’s certainly not the language of a text book or a history book
I mean what does his writing sound like to you?
To me the best parallel I can imagine is something more like a fairy tale

“In the beginning” sounds a lot like
“Once upon a time” to me

In fact the comparison runs even deeper than the language of the text
In the Jewish culture the bed time stories, the fairy tales of the Hebrews were the old testament scriptures

And by the time John writes most of the Jewish population has been hellenized

That means they have been integrated into Greco Roman culture

They lived and worked within the Roman economy
They adapted to Roman culture
They even wrote and spoke Greek most fo the time
In fact John is writing in Greek rather than Hebrew
And the most popular version of the Old Testament at that time was a Greek translation
We call that translation the Septuagint
And it was the primary old testament text in the early church

You can push that even farther because in the Greek tradition books didn’t have catchy names like they do today

They were called by, usually, the first 3 words of the first sentence

So when John is choosing his first sentence, it’s an important decision
And he makes a pretty ballsy move
Because he lifted the first three words from what book? The Septuagint
He’s just titled his book, for lack of a better contemporary equivalent… the Bible… by John

He’s framing the story of Jesus in the same terms as the stories of the Jewish tradition
He’s placing the story of Jesus in the canon of Jewish family history
He’s connecting the story of Jesus to every thing important to the Jews that has come before
And he does that not by giving us the details
But by presenting us with a story

Now think about what you need for a good story

First he sets up a protagonist
In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God

So the hero of our story is God

And then he builds a context for God to operate in

He says, though him all things were made, without him nothing was made that has been made
So the stage for this drama is epic

It’s creation– all of it
Everything that is

You and I and everyone else you meet
Or wherever else you go

Is the stage for this story John is telling us
And then he builds up the anticipation

He was the light
and that light that brings light to all men was coming into the world

But we still need a conflict – something to drive the story

And so he writes this, he says, he came to the world but the world didn’t recognize him
He came to his own but his own did not receive him

Now an interesting thing here
Because John sets this conflict up in a very personal way

He says He came to his own
The word is “idios” and he uses a form of the word that is passive neuter
It means his own stuff – what he owned
Remember John has already said that he made the world – so it is his own world

But then he switches things up a bit and he says his own did not receive him

Now this time it’s a masculine plural possessive form of that same word

This time it means his own people – or his own family, that’s who didn’t receive him
He came to his own world but his own family didn’t receive him
John is trying to pull his readers into the emotional context of this conflict

That God would come into his world in a way that risks his own safe position

I mean if you want a good story then the protagonist has to risk something right?
This is the batman superman problem
Batman is a regular guy who wants to stop crime so it’s easy to root for him – to see yourself in his story

But Superman is, well Superman
He can’t be beaten, he can’t be defeated
Sure he’s got his one weakness to kryptonite but really do you ever feel like Sups isn’t going win?
And where does all that kryptonite come from every week anwyay?
Well John’s trying to tell a story about God
So how do you make God a compelling, relatable hero?

You remind everyone that to love is to risk
To put yourself out there – means you take the chance of being rejected

And it doesn’t matter whether you can create a universe with the blink of an eye
If you want to love – you have to take a chance

So we’ve got a protagonist, a context, conflict
What else do we need for a good story

We need a resolution
And look at how John writes this, he says
The word become flesh and made his dwelling among us
Eugene Peterson translated it this way
He says the word became one of us and moved into the neighborhood

And to all who received him, to those that believed in him, he gave the right to become children of God

___
Now the interesting thing here to me
Is that he ends the story the same the same way he started it

With a choice

He starts the story with a choice that God makes to create
And he ends it,
by pointing to a choice that we make about where we will put ourselves in the story
See this is the thing about faith and spirituality

It can never become a story that is finished and written and over and closed

Because spirituality is built on the concept of a choice
Listen when you think all the way back 10 the negative 43 seconds after the moment of creation

You have one of two logical absurdities to choose from

Either
All matter coalesced into a space no larger than a single atom and exploded into a universe beyond comprehension
On its own
Or because someone chose it

And the truth is both are legitimate choices to make

The problem for me – is one doesn’t leave me with a good story to be a part of

If you choose to believe that all that there is to this universe is matter and energy
You don’t have much of a story left to live
Because in the end, when all is said and done, all you are left with is physical determinism

And any appearance of choice that seems to exist in your life can be reduced down to simply an illusion of the almost infinite number of variables that are at play in your existence
it may seem like you and I can choose but it’s only an illusion
Because if we could construct a computer large enough to calculate all actions of all of atoms in all of the universe

To play out all the ways in which they collide and gather and create molecules then cells then organisms

To calculate all the variables of our interactions and memories and the neural pathways they’ve created in your head
If we could determine all of the biological factors that go into something as complex as you

If we could do all that
And matter really was all there is to the universe

Then we could determine exactly how you would react and respond and appear to chose in any given moment
Everything would have already been written as a simple function of very complex math

Or.. you can choose to believe in choice

That God choose to create
That God choose to set in motion a series of events (how every that looks for you)
that has resulted in you sitting here tonight with a choice about how you will respond to him
And this is the story that John presents to us as a narrative to find ourselves in

He says there is side to this world that will never be able to be contained within a text book or an encyclopedia or a religious system that determines for you the end of your story

Because that is still unwritten
In philosophical terms we call this the Kalam cosmological argument
It actually comes from a form of dialectical argument common in Islamic study
(thank you wikipedia)

But it argues this
Everything that begins to exist has a cause
The universe began to exist
Therefore the universe has a cause
that cause, whatever it is, is what we call God
Now Kalam gets you no where near a Christian narrative about God

But it sets in motion the idea that life truly can meaningfully be about journey and discovery
And that the questions you ask and attempt to answer and are important and valuable and real
There’s screen writer’s guru named Robert McKee

If you’ve seen the movie Adaptation which is a fantastic exploration of the connection between life and story

He is played wonderfully by the actor Brain Cox
Well McKee does these screenwriting classes
In real life and in the movie

And he’s notoriously cranky and mean and sarcastic to his students
But tons of people attend because he’s a guy who understand the craft and has demonstrated that by writing a lot of really good material

If you’ve ever wanted to be a screenwriter
Read his book “Story: Substance, Structure, Style, And The Principles Of Screenwriting”

I haven’t read it yet but I’ve always wanted to
And apparently it is THE book to read on the art of screen writing

Anyway, he says this in his book

The story teller’s selection and arrangement of events is his master metaphor for the interconnectedness of all the levels of reality, personal, political, environmental, spiritual. Stripped of its surface of characterization or location, story structure reveals his personal cosmology, his insight into the deepest patterns and motivations for how and why things happen in this life. It is his map of life’s hidden order.

Now read through the prologue from John’s gospel again

Because that’s exactly what he’s doing
He strips the story of its surface
It’s characterization and location

And gives only the structure to what he’s going to flesh through the rest of his book

And this is his personal cosmology
That you and I began with a choice
And will likewise define ourselves with a choice
____
Look, for us to honestly place ourselves within the larger narrative of Christianity

Yes we need to be cognizant of what has already been written
We need to be students of history and theology and philosophy
It’s a lot of homework being a Christian
We need to learn from those who have walked this path before us
But at the same time we need to keep ourselves conscious of the books that have yet to be written

The spirituality of Christianity is this incredible book store
That spans ages and dynasties and cultures and personalities
But at the same time holds this empty shelf reserved for all the stories that have yet to be told
All the books that have yet to be written

Books that can only be written in each of our lives
As we engage with the story of creation
As we find ourselves in the narrative of the kingdom of God
Something that maybe was always meant to be more like a collaboration or more like wikipedia than we ever imagined the church could be.

You see recently I switched to Office 2007 and apparently AVG v8.0 doesn’t feel comfortable with the new .XML based file formats.

The worst part is it won’t even let me into the user interface to turn it off. Arghh

At least I have my iPhone to play with. I wonder if I could write a whole message on this?

I’m really looking forward to some more good conversations (slash sparring sessions) with Bob. Last time he was on staff Bob set in motion a good deal of the lines of thoughts that have helped shape some of my thinking over the past year. Probably more than he (or I) realized before our conversation yesterday morning. I’m excited to have someone near who is helping to reconstruct a way forward in this potentially liminal time for the church.

Also, I think he will be a great (re)addition to the teaching team for un’ed.i.ted spirituality.

This might be a story you’ve heard or read yourself before but hopefully we can look at it with fresh eyes all over again.

In the book of Mark Jesus is travelling with his disciples teaching and up to this point he’s been primarily teaching in Jewish areas of the Roman Empire. But at this point he decides to cross over to the other side. Now the “other side” is necessarily not the “dark side”. It has nothing to do with Emperor Palpitine and lightning bolt finger tips, although it might as well have for a lot of the Jews. The other side Jesus is talking about is the other side of Lake Kinneret, or more commonly called the Sea of Galilee.

At this point in history the Jews stayed on the west and the Romans lived on the east side of the lake. Technically the Romans controlled the whole area but they allowed the Jews to maintain a semblance of soverignity over certain lands, so on the west side of the lake were the Jews but the “other side” across the sea of Galilee were gentiles under Roman Control. There were some hard feelings there. In fact if you read the story in the gospels they refer to the area as the gerasenes, some manuscripts say the gadarenes, or the gargasenes. The confusion seems to come from a trio of little cities on the water in the area, Geresa, Gadara, and Gergesa, so we don’t know exactly where this happened but we can narrow it down pretty accurately. Now this word gerasenes seems to be a Jewish creation that some scholars suggest came to mean “the cast out ones”. Possibly it could have been in reference to the Jewish population that had left the economically depressed Jewish regions for the other side or it could have just been a reference to the gentiles who lived on the east bank and weren’t part of the chosen people. Either way a lot of the Jews were not impressed because this area represented for them all of the people who had occupied Jewish lands since before they were born. Everyone was waiting for the day that the interlopers would be thrown out of the land promised to the Hebrews. Especially the religious Jews had a fixation on the idea of the Messiah who would come return all of their land to the chosen people of God. So however you slice it when Jesus crosses over to the “other side” he’s stepping into a world that was significantly distinct from where he had come from with a lot of bad blood and a lot of political tension behind it. Now keep that in mind and let’s read through this story

They went across the lake to the region of the Gerasenes. When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an unclean spirit came from the tombs to meet him.
[some translations say “evil” spirit, which is a fair translation but literally the word is unclean]

This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him any more, not even with a chain.
For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones.
Mark 5:1-5

Luke also adds the fun little detail that this guy also hasn’t work clothes for a long time. So he’s naked, bleeding, living in the tombs and apparently also in charge of tourist information because this is the guy who meets Jesus and his dsicples when they step off the boat. (no wonder the Jews didn’t cross the lake all that often, the welcome wagon was a little lacking)

When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him. He shouted at the top of his voice, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? Swear to God that you won’t torture me!” For Jesus had said to him, “Come out of this man, you evil spirit!”
Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?”
Mark 5:5-10

Now I know if you’ve read the story before you want to get on to the good stuff but this is where I think the story reaches its turning point. This is where things really get interesting. So I want to pause here because sure in a second Jesus is going to send demons into pigs, who are going to run off a cliff and then the locals are going to get all upset over the bacon shortage, and that’s fun, but there’s some neat stuff going on right here.

Think about this picture so far. Jesus has crossed over to the other side, the region of the cast out ones, where he’s met as soon as he steps off the boat by captain nude.

Now remember in Jewish custom nakedness was a big deal. They didn’t have the kind of soft-core pornography we have on billboards. They didn’t have nude beaches or nudist colonies or the internet. Instead they had stories about how shameful nakedness was. Now my point here isn’t necessarily about nakedness being bad, it’s that there was a large social stigma attached to it. You can go back to Genesis and read a story about Noah. One night he gets drunk one night and passes out naked on his front lawn where one of his sons, Canaan, comes by and is like, “that is hilarious.” He doesn’t have any Polariods to capture how funny this is to him so he goes and gets his brothers to come check out dad. His two brothers, Japheth and Shem are less amused and they actually get a blanket and walk backwards with it until they can put it over their father without seeing his shame. In the morning Noah is a little hung over and cranky and he hears about what happened and Genesis 9 records his reaction this way;

When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, he said,

May God extend the territory of Japheth;
may Japheth live in the tents of Shem,
and may Canaan be his slave.”
Genesis 9:24-27

That’s the way he talks about his son for joking about his nakedness. So the fact this guy is naked is a big deal for the Jews.

But then again so was blood.

The Jews had a number of rules around blood too. It was considered unclean. In fact, they went so far as have a rule in Leviticus that says that if anyone even touches something that a women touches during her period, then they will become ritually unclean and must bath and clean themselves and not enter the temple for the rest of the day. So the fact that he’s cut and bleeding is a big deal too.

It doesn’t stop there though because in addition to being naked and bloody this guy is living in a cemetery.

Num 19:16 says this “Anyone out in the open who touches someone who has been killed with a sword or someone who has died a natural death, or anyone who touches a human bone or a grave, will be unclean for seven days.”

So, what we have here is a man, naked and bloody and living in a cemetery in the region of the cast out ones. Is there any doubt why Matthew, Mark and Luke, all feel like this guy has, what they call, an unclean spirit. Think about it. In political terms the guy is unclean. He’s not just a gentile- he’s living in the Garasenes. In religious terms this guy is unclean. He’s bloody and living in cemetery. In social terms this guy is unclean. He’s stark naked and that tends to make conversation awkward at the best of times. Even the gentiles and the Romans don’t want him around and apparently went to great lengths to keep him away, they did chain him up in a cemetery after all. The gospel writers are going to great lengths here to make the point that this guy is the ultimate outcast. The outcast of the outcasts. The King of all the outcast.

But they’re not done making their point yet because what’s the first thing that Jesus asks him? He asks, “What is your name?”
To which our naked, bloody, cemetery dwelling friend responds, “We are legion.”

Have you ever seen the movie The Exorcism of Emily Rose? It’s a creepy movie about a girl who may or may not have been possessed by a demon claiming to be… Legion. The Exorcist 3 mentions the demon Legion. All of our pop culture ideas about legions of demons come from this passage, this naked, bloody dude living in the cemetery, the outcast of the outcasts who says to Jesus, “We are called legion for we are many and he begged Jesus not to send them out of the area.”

I’ve already referenced how the situation plays itself out. The demons ask not to be sent into the abyss and instead ask to be sent into a herd of nearby pigs. Jesus agrees. They leave the man, enter the pigs and immediately run off a cliff, into the sea and drown. Not sure that was the best plan but then again I’m not a demon strategist, so what do I know?

Now if you’re like me, this type of story doesn’t fit well into your world. I haven’t had much experience with pigs… or demons for that matter and so my first response when I read these type of stories is to jump to the idea that this is obviously some kind of mentally unstable man and the writers of the gospels, not having the same medical understanding that we do, use the language of demon possession to make sense of what’s going on. I think that can be a fair way to interpret these kind of stories. Maybe that’s how you chose to interpret them, as a primitive to modern language gap, a simple story of a mental unstable man that Jesus helps, but maybe there’s something even more than that going on here.

Remember we talked earlier about the political situation between the east and west banks of the Sea of Galilee, how the Jews remembered the stories of their promised land and their hope for a Messiah who would one day rid them of the oppressive forces of the Roman Empire? Keep that in mind and look again at the language that’s being used. “We are legion for we are many” says our naked friend.

Now Legion was a very specific Roman term. In fact it was a Roman military term. A legion was a group of soldiers who would occupy a territory for the Empire. A legion was actually a very specific group of soldiers. At the time of Augustus it very specifically meant 6826 men, that is 6100 foot soldiers and 726 horsemen. That was a legion. So think about what’s going on. Regardless of how you want to interpret the specifics of this story, is it an allegory, is it an historically accurate representation of an event that really happened in time, is it merely a transposed story of a mental unstable man through the language and lens of a 1st century writer? Regardless of how you want to interpret it there is clearly something underneath the surface going on here.

Jesus crosses to the other side of the river and engages with a man who is ritually, socially and politically unclean. He then orders a legion of oppressive forces into a herd of animals that are unclean by Jewish standards. That legion then immediately runs off the cliff and leaves the very land that the Messiah is standing on. There is a lot going on in this picture. Add to that the fact that scholars like Dominic Crossan have pointed out that the pig, while yet another symbol of the unclean for the Jews, was also a symbol for the Romans. In fact the head of boar was the very symbol of the 10th Roman Legion Fretensis, the very legion that would eventually conquer Jerusalem for the Empire in 70 CE, about the time the gospels were being written.

This is more than a story of a mentally unstable man, and this is far more than a story about a demon. This is a story that is meant to show Jesus as the Messiah the Jews have been waiting for. Put yourself in the shoes of Jesus disciples watching this unfold. Imagine what the early Christians have going through their mind when they read this story. It starts and they can’t believe Jesus is even talking to this guy, if he even touches Jesus he’ll make him ritually unclean. And then the question of why this guy is even worth his time to begin with, the Romans don’t even want this guy around. But then this political allegory starts to unfold in front of them as Jesus, instead of walking by and brushing him off, actually stops and ask him his name. And all of a sudden this outcast, unimportant, less than human, being, steps in to represent everything that stands between the Jews and their destiny. He’s now far more than unclean. He is the enemy.

Yet Jesus, rather than choosing to dehumanize this man as a representation of everything that is wrong with the empire, does exactly the opposite. Rather than creating a casualty of war and advocating a posture that places us on one side and bad guys on the other, Jesus demonstrates to his followers that this Messiah can dismantle an empire without firing a single shot or drawing a solitary blade because his kingdom won’t be won through battles or force or coerscion but instead though the counter-intuitive practice of inviting those on outside of our story into our experience of God. Consider, the Jews were waiting for a Messiah that would cast out the legions of Rome and restore their political will, a Messiah who would cast down the empires of this world and create in their stead a new and more powerful version of the exact same kind of perversion. Those on the inside versus those on the outside. But Jesus uses the occasion to teach us that victory over empire is not going to be won though the military industrial complex. It’s won when we help people find a new identity outside the stories that have defined and limited them. This Messiah wasn’t interested in freeing his people from Roman occupation. He was interested in freeing them from a definition they held in their hearts as second class citizens. In our terms, our Messiah is not interested in freeing us from debt. He’s interested in freeing us from the consumer posture that defines our value. Jesus walks up to the epitome of the outcast and he asks, “what is your name?” What do you define yourself by? What do you feel is important about who you are as a human being, as a child of God and as a creation of the one great creator?

Some have read this as an allegory calling the Jews to rally behind their Messiah and rise up to help him throw the Roman Legions out of their land. Personally I think that completely misses the point. Christ is teaching us that as soon as we dehumanize our enemies we have already lost, but when we can invest, even those that would oppress us and hurt us with the value that requires us to ask their name and understand their story we can find a victory greater than politics or power could ever bring.

We have to ask ourselves what that question looks like in our lives. If God stood in front of you and asked what is your name? How would you respond? Would it be with the legion of things that have occupied you and enslaved your imagination? Maybe it would be all the things that you’re waiting for someone else to come along and fix for you or about you. Perhaps it would be the types of things that define our empire; our clothes, our cars, our DVD collections (that one’s in there for me). Maybe it would be your education or your job or your significant other. Or maybe, when God asks you, what is your name, you could respond with all of the things that you imagine for your life. The dreams that we have about how we could fit into the story of God’s great grace and redemption.

What is your name? Are you simply part of the empire, another cog in the machine, another consumer in the line, your identity subsumed in the economic narrative around you?

Or are you more than that?

Could you become, like Jesus, someone is able to look past the lines that define who is important and who is not? Could you and I be the kind of people that walk across religious and social and political lines to ask someone their name, the kind of people who create space in our lives to humanize the people around us with go out of our way to find the outcasts. And that doesn’t necessarily have to look like finding your neighborhood nudist, if you have one, I’m not sure what neighborhood you live in, because the truth is, if you think about it, the Jews probably wouldn’t have given much thought to this guy at all. In fact that’s kind of the point. Who are the people in your circles who are simply ignored? It’s probably not the crazy guy who won’t shut up. In our world it’s more likely the person who is sitting alone across the room, the one you never noticed because you were engrossed in a conversation on the other side. The story of Christ is about challenging us over and over again to see the world a new light. It’s about recognizing that the greatest battles in our lives are not won with more power, or more influence or more strength but with more compassion and more interest and more investment in the people around us.

Just like we do today, Jesus disciples had dehumanized anyone who wasn’t part of their story and with one simple question, “What’s your name?” Jesus reminds us that everyone, both the people we walk past and never notice and the people we rage against because they have wronged us in some way, everyone is worth our investment.

What’s your name?
How do you define yourself? Is it as the child of a God of endless love and wonder, or just another part of the machine, our identity consumed by the Legion of things that grasp our attention. Could we become the kind of people designed not only to notice, but to help others see the value they never expected to find inside themselves.

It got me thinking about the relationships and the communities I engage with. None of them have an enforced level of intimacy (other than a few very specific and intentional circumstances with a prescribed outcome). Most of them exist on multiple layers. With my best friends, we sit and joke, we share mutually appreciated activities, we discuss and dialogue around large questions, and then when we needed it, we elevate the conversation towards an honest and raw openness surrounding struggles we need support around or help with. In other words the most meaningful relationships are never static, they are scalable. They increase in intensity when it is needed and pull back when appropriate.

So why then does community in the context of a church often become associated with an overly intense and therefore artificial model of relationship? Could we facilitate something more like a real relationship by intentionally building in a level of relational scalability into our programs?

Case Study

A few months ago we did a series at my faith community, unedited spirituality, called Theological Theatre. We were taking a movie each week and building out from the themes to illustrate something about the person of Christ. I figured, myself being a big movie fan and inevitably going to need to watch the films before I spoke, and wanting everyone to have a similar starting point for the message why not having an open movie night during the week prior to the message. So on Thursday nights for three weeks I opened my house and invited anyone interested to come and watch the coming weekend’s theme film. It was a lot of fun. So much fun, in fact that we kept it going. People were coming over because they were interested in watching a movie and then getting to know each other a bit in the process.

And inevitable, it started to happen… more meaningful conversations, an increased level of openness and eventually the comfort level where people started to share with each other things they felt deeply about and needed support in. That doesn’t mean the experience became inherently intense though. It was still primarily a chance to come and watch a movie but when it was needed the relationships could scale up to provide support when it was needed.

Breakdown

I was taking with a colleague a few months ago and the topic of small community came up. He pointed out that if you chart people on a two axis grid of “social skills” and “friendships” you can plug almost everyone in.

20% of our time in church is connected to people with good social skills and lots of friends. These people are generally our favorites. We like them, they like us, and they are usually involved in some way with us as leaders, volunteers etc.

20% of our time is spent on people with poor social skills and lots of friends. That may sound counter intuitive but these people are generally ghettoized into tight affinity groups. These are the nerds who watch Battlestar Gallactica and just want to get together and talk about it – I fall in this category.

20% of our time is spent on people with good social skills and few friends. These are people new to an area or community who simply need to be given an opportunity to meet new people and create for themselves the relationships they’re looking for.

And 40% of our time is spent on people with poor social skills and few friends, who largely want a church to create for them the context for artificial relationships with a prescribed intensity. These are the people who often populate small groups but never go beyond the boundaries of the set out agenda.

The challenge for us is to provide a context where each of these groups can interact with a new set of people but push them to not become locked in an artificial program oriented model of relationship.

Bible Study revisited

The options really are quite endless here. Even a typical Bible study like group could become a scalable community. Imagine a group of indivuals that wanted to study the Bible together. That becomes their shared interest. It draws them together into a room to interact and discuss and get to know each other and once there provides them the opportunity to create real and meaningful relationships that can scale up to deal with support issues when needed. The learning that happens as they study together is great but it becomes almost a side benefit to the fact that people are engaging with each other and being challenged to do life and God together.

I think inherently we all know what a meaningful relationship feels like. The problem is that in church ministry we try to over-think what an ideal relationship looks like and then we try to program accordingly when what we should be doing is finding ways to facilitate less than perfect but meaningful opportunities for people to find their own friends.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.

Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.
He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

_John 1:1-14

The Xmas story as told by the apostle John
___
It was 1988 when I learned my first hard Christmas lesson. A lesson that in my memory banks I entitle for myself either, “ Leave the Door Shut” or “No Sneaking after Midnight”. Either way by 1988, ten years into my fragile little life, I had already stumbled upon the unfortunate circumstance of having walking into my parents room while they found themselves in somewhat, though not terribly, compromising amorous situation. Now being a somewhat self aware ten year old and realizing that I had neither the maturity to fully integrate these types of circumstances into my young psyche, nor the maturity to remember to simply knock before entering a room (because that would have made a difficult situation considerably easier to handle) I made the decision, Christmas 1988, to buy my parents a lock for their door. Now that’s a good start- but it didn’t capture the immense appreciation, that I as a ten year old, had for my parents and their decision to do things that I didn’t want to ever run the risk of walking in an find them doing. So my thought was to install the newly purchased lock in the middle of the night while they slept so they would wake up to the surprise of a fresh red bow on their brand new lock, ala Santa Claus.

See even at 10 yrs old I knew Mom and Dad were really Santa Claus. They waited until we were sleeping to come down with the gifts. But I was patient. So I waited, till after midnight, till after 1pm, till after my parents came down with the gifts, till after I heard the stillness of the house return and then I crept upstairs, brought my newly purchased lock and a screwdriver, slowly and quietly, like a cat, opened the door to my parents rooms and began to remove the old door knob. It was a great plan. Except that I was 10 years old and had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Every time I would try to turn the screws on the door, which I was holding between my legs, it would shift and creak. In the darkness of the room, with my eyes adjusted, I could see my parents toss in bed with every squeak of the door. On top of trying to hold the door between my legs the screws were really tight. I couldn’t get them to move. I was only 10 years old after all. So I gathered up all my might and gave it one big try. The screwdriver slipped off the flathead screw. Which by the way, are the worst of the screws. The screwdriver never stays fixed on the line. Every screw should be the square. Anyway the screwdriver slammed into the door, causing it to slam shut, leaving me standing in the hall, listening to my parents wake up.

This time my parents were up
At least my mom was
“Russell what was that – check on the kids”
“They’re fine go back to bed”

That wasn’t going to pass. I knew that, so I grabbed the screwdriver and the new lock and ran down the hall, took the first left into my youngest sisters room and dove under the bed.

Mom and Dad got up and came down the hall, checking both of my sisters rooms along the way, saw them sleeping peacefully and then headed downstairs to my room, where of course, I wasn’t anywhere to be found. That set off a mini manhunt. I do remember hearing the initial conversation though.

My Mom – “where is he, where could he be”
My Dad – “He probably went for a walk, lets go back to bed”
My Mom – “He’s ten years old, it’s three in the morning”
My Dad – “You’re right we’ll talk to him in the morning”
My Mom – “he’s ten years old we’re not going back to bed”

Five minutes later my sisters are up and the whole family is arranging search parties. Meanwhile I’m still hiding under the bed wondering how this went so wrong. Eventually I figure I’ve got to put an end to this, so from under the bed, in my loudest, groggiest voice I call out and ask, “What’s going on, why are you guys making so much noise.”

Everybody comes running over as I crawl out from under my sister’s bed. Now that begs the question. “Why are you under your sister’s bed?” So I try to convince everyone I had been sleep walking and found myself here woken up by their loud conversation. That… doesn’t work. Eventually I reach back under the bed and pull out my screwdriver and brand new door knob, still with a big red bow stuck to it. Surprise ruined. But a pretty good Christmas story to tell going forward. Actually the worst part was having to hear my mom tell that story for the next ten years, it’s only of late that I have developed an appreciation for the humor in it. At fifteen it was less amusing to hear.

I learned a lot of Christmas lessons that year; chiefly why wrapping paper really is the easiest way to keep a surprise (it’s no wonder it’s so popular) but also about the investment and the disappointment that can sometimes come from a truly heart felt gift. Now I know my parents loved it anyway. In fact they probably, looking back, enjoyed the gift even more because of the story behind it but in the moment, It felt to me like everyone was either laughing at how silly I was or annoyed that I had woke everyone up. That’s probably, no strike that, clearly not a fair characterization of everyone’s response but it was how I felt. That this gift that I had invested, not just my allowance, but a piece of myself in, wasn’t received in the way that I imagined it would have been. That the moment I had been working toward wasn’t happening the way I had pictured in my head.

You see a gift is always more than just what’s in the box, or in this case under the bed, it is a sign or symbol of the emotion behind it. If I was to give you a card for Christmas I’m not trying to tell you about how much I love bad poetry and Norman Rockwell paintings, it’s supposed to point to the emotion that drove the decision to write the card in the first place. This is why some gifts just work better than others. Let’s be honest. Your husband doesn’t want another tie. Your kids don’t want underwear and your wife doesn’t want powers tools even if you plan to use them to fix that creaky banister that’s been bothering her for months. A gift isn’t just about the gift. It’s about the assumptions we make about what was behind the reason it was given. In that sense a gift is really about the invitation for a response. We use a gift as a sign or symbol for our love and then we invite a response from the person we love.

I read the Xmas story from the words of John earlier and I was struck again this week in a new way by the words here. These are some of the most theologically packed words in all of the Bible, some of the most rich and meaningful language in all of the scriptures and this week as I read I was struck by the echo of 1988 and this story of a God who invests not just his power and his resources but his very self into a gift to his world. A gift that in the words of John is simply and tragically not received in the way he imagined it could be. John packs an ocean of emotion and understanding and theology into 14 verses that set the stage for his story, this story that he precedes to tell about Jesus through the narrative of the rest of his gospel.

Commentators call these verses a prologue as opposed to a preface. A preface is the stuff you need say before you get to what you want to say, any background or any information that you will need to understand what’s coming but a prologue, like these verses, are a pre-cap of everything that’s coming. In the first fourteen verses of his book John tells the story of everything that’s he’s going to say in a quick poetic capture of the themes and then he precedes to flesh it out in narrative.

If you’re ever interested in doing a study on the book of John keep that in mind because everything John writes is tied to the themes he lays out in the first chapter.

Now John is the last of the gospels. Not just as we read cover to cover through the Bible but also chronologically. It was written well after the death of Jesus, probably very late in the first century. If Mark was written in the 60s, Luke and then Matthew in the 80’s, John was probably written just before the turn to the second century. So John’s not just writing to capture history on paper. He’s actually looking back on decades of church development and trying to, very consciously, set out to address some of the questions that are being asked about Jesus. This is why John is often set apart from the other gospels The others are called the synoptic gospels. Synoptic is a combination of two Greek words, “Syn” and “optic” – they mean “see” and “with”, so we see with them. They are telling us about the story of Jesus life. John, on the other hand, is telling us about the significance of Jesus life. He doesn’t really care so much about the history or the dates or the chronology, he’s focused on what it all means, the big picture.

Look at the start of his gospel. The first three words; In the Beginning. It doesn’t get much bigger picture than that. Mark starts with Jesus public ministry, he jumps right into the fun stuff. He starts with Jesus at 30 yrs old ready to change the world. Luke starts with the story of Jesus birth, that’s why he gets lots of air play this time of year. Mary and Joseph and Bethlehem and angels and shepherds and no room at the inn. Matthew trumps even that and starts even farther back with the geneology of Jesus. He goes all the way back to show Jesus’ connection to God’s covenant with Abraham, where he came from and how Jesus is connected to the story of God’s dealing with humanity from the start.

But John, John starts “In the beginning”. Now there’s no coincidence here, that this is how another book we know starts.
“In the Beginning”

In Greek, books didn’t have titles like they do now. They were generally called by the first few words of their first sentence, usually the first three words. Now that could be modified if it didn’t make sense but generally books were known by their first few words. So what we now call the Septuagint, which was the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible for Hellenized Jews.

Hellenized Jews were Jews who spoke Greek and lived a very grecko/roman lifestyle
For those Jews, their Bible, was commonly called by its first three words
In the beginning

And here John uses the exact same wording as the first three words of the Septuagint. Same words, same tense, same order, exactly. Basically John calls his book by the exact same title as the Jewish Bible. He’s making a pretty important statement already in the first three words he’s written. He’s tying his story, this story of Jesus, into the larger picture of everything that has come before, everything that the Jews understood as sacred and important.

So where does the story of Jesus start for John, where does it really start for the church?

With his miracles?
With his birth?
With his geneology?

No
It starts, “in the beginning”

It would have been impossible for anyone with even a passing knowledge of the Hebrew scriptures to miss the fact that John is tying the story of Jesus to the story of creation. As if God is re-creating. Not necessarily scrapping everything he’s already done but re-creating, re-purposing, re-newing.

You find this language all through out the early church. Paul talks about this idea in Corinthians when he writes that “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation”. We are re-created.

Probably the most familiar use of this language, this re-creation language, has unfortunately been so misused and overused that it’s almost lost all meaning for us. We hear it all the time now but the only place where we actually read Jesus talking about being “born again” is in the book of John. The phrase is found in John’s writings because he is picking up on this theme, on Jesus mission, to re-create.

In John 3 Jesus is speaking to a man named Nicodemus, a man identified as a Pharisee, as a religious authority. Nicodemus is a man whose entire purpose, and mission and focus was about teaching people to understand and fulfill the law the Moses.

Follow the rules.
Say the prayers.
Go to synagogue.
Study the scriptures.

And Jesus says, no. No, that’s not it. There’s more to it than that. You have to be born again. None of those things really matter. None of your religious practices, or traditions, or good ideas mean anything unless you are willing to start over again because this new way of living, this new kingdom I have come to show you, this new way of life is so radically different, it’s like being born all over again, it’s like starting over.

So Nicodemus says, well how can a man climb into his mother’s womb again, how could anyone do that?

And Jesus says, well that’s maybe a little graphic but you’re starting to get how significant this idea is, because it’s not just about religion, it’s not about rituals, it’s not about rules and expectations and saying the magic prayer, it’s not about being part of a chosen few, or the right club, or the cool kids, it’s about the decision to pattern your life around something new. It’s about finding a new template to model your life around. It’s about stepping into the best possibilities of what you could become. The best of what you already are. The best of everything that you were always created to be, from the very beginning.

To drive this idea home to Nicodemus Jesus gives us the favorite verse of sporting events around the world; John 3:16.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Remember Jesus has just told Nicodemus that all his rules and all his laws are not going to cut it. You have to be willing to start over. Now he says, Oh yeah and being part of the religious club, the Jews, the chosen people; not enough either.

Now it’s whosoever.

Not just the Jews.
Not just the Pharisees.
Not just the religiously established.
Not just everyone who goes to church.

It’s whoever.
Whoever wants to
Whoever chooses to.
Whoever simply takes the chance to believe that life with Jesus could be different than life without.

To whoever that is, to those people, the gift of God is available. This gift of “eternal life”.

Now we usually read John 3:16 the way I read it. That we should not perish but have eternal life or life everlasting but the actual Greek word we translate “eternal” is from the word “a-hee-on” and it does mean eternal, that’s a part of it, but it’s so much more than that too.

My dictionary says that properly the word means an age, extending in perpetuity both into the past and future;
begun without end. It is an idea that is both present, past and future at once. It’s a very Greek idea. They liked to do this with lots of words. “A-hee-on” is the ideal, the perfect, the eternal representation of an era and so some scholars have suggested a better translation of John would be we are given the “life of the ages”.

And yes, eternal may be a part of that, but it’s more than that. It’s also the ideal life that we were created to find. It’s not just forever and it’s not just perfect, it’s that Christ came so that we could have the life we were meant for. This is the gift of God and this is the gift of Christmas, the gift of the incarnation. Not that we can adopt a set of rules that will earn us the adoration or at least toleration of a capricious God in heaven. No. That we can choose to step into the potential God has invested in us and start over, to be re-created in our choice to follow after Jesus. Think about it, in all the ways you and I have been sidetracked by bad choices, and selfish decisions and unhealthy patterns, that we could be re-newed and re-created to find the life that God always had in mind for us. Not the eternal, static, perfect, unchanging, after we die, eternally in a white robe, sitting on a cloud with wings on our back life that we see in the images of Angels on Christmas cards. God came for so much more than that. He came so that you and I could have the life we were meant for.

Do you see what John is doing here?
We are re-created, born-again-
To receive eternal life, the life of ages, the ideal life, the life we were meant to have…
From the very beginning

This is the gift of God, the gift of Christmas that was wrapped in more than just power or glory or resources, It was wrapped in God become flesh. Consider that for a moment, God, large and expansive and incomprehensible, now humble and gentle and condensed down so far that he fit into a life of a child, helpless in his mother’s arms.

Remember a gift isn’t just about the gift. A gift is a sign that points towards the meaning behind it, and it’s about the opportunity we extend to respond to what we offer.

At Christmas, God comes himself, as sign toward what life could be like with him. What it could be like to start over, to move past our failures and step into our best possibilities. And for that chance God risks everything he can, his dignity, his safety, his emotional well being, he puts it all on the line for us before you and I ever gave him a second thought, to be honest, before we even gave him a first thought. The greatest measure of God’s love is that he brings this gift, wrapped in his very person, in a way that is so fragile and vulnerable, that you and I can choose how we want to respond. For the sake of love God takes the chance that we would walk away from what he offers.

Imagine for a moment, God with a broken heart.

Every time you give something of yourself it will you leave you vulnerable. It’s no different even for God.

John says it this way
He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.

There’s an interesting thing here in that sentence that might not be readily apparent in the English. John says he came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. There are two “owns” in that sentence that are slightly different in the original text. They are both forms of the Greek word “idios” but the first is a passive neuter form of the word. It means his own stuff. He came to his own things. What he owned. The second “own” only a couple words later is slightly different. It’s masculine plural. It’s a possessive type of word– his own did not receive him. It means his own people, his own children, his own family… his own.

He came to his own world, but his own children did not receive him.

John is using a Greek literary tool to ratchet up the intensity here. In Hebrew they do this by repeating an idea in a slightly more involved manner. So in Hebrew you read things like, when you lie down, when you get up, when you sit at home, when you walk along the road. In the Old Testament you read these passages that sound like lists but each step is increasing the intensity. In English we do it by adding on adjectives or just increasing the volume or the pitch of our voice.

You low down, dirty rotten, scum sucking, too much coffee drinking, bad breath having, lying, cheating, good for nothing scoundrel.

In Greek, one of the ways you would increase intensity is to use the different forms of the same word.

He came to his own world, but his own children did not receive him.
He came to his own home, but his own family didn’t invite him in.

John is trying to show the immense pain that even God feels when he invests himself in this gift to humanity and it is not received in the way he imagined it could be.

In 1988 I had two weeks allowance, and some 10 year old ingenuity invested in my Christmas gift.
God has put his entire being into his.

In 1988 I offered my parents a moments respite behind locked doors.
God offers us life with him. The life of the ages, the life he created us for.

It’s Christmas, the time of year we give gifts.

Have you ever felt like your gift to someone wasn’t received the way you imagined?
Like they didn’t fully understand what you put into it?
Like they didn’t appreciate what you had done for them?
God knows what that’s like.

Have you ever felt like your love toward someone wasn’t returned?
Like they took what you had to offer and didn’t give anything back?
Like they didn’t understand what you had risked to say the words “I love you”?
God knows what that’s about.

As a parent have you ever experienced your kids going through what psychologists might call a dissasiociative phase? The rest of us might call that being a teenager, but all of a sudden they don’t seem like they want anything to do with you and you feel like you’ve given so much but now they’ve put up a wall to keep you out of their lives, and it hurts?
Or as a kid, as a child, have you ever felt like you couldn’t get your parents attention? Like they were too busy to invest in you and what was going on your life? Like others things were just more important to them?
God knows that feeling, that pain and that frustration.

The incredible thing about God, the incredible thing about the model he sets out for us, is his unfailing love.

In the beginning poetry of Genesis, it says God walked in the cool of the day through the garden of Eden with Adam and Eve and still humanity choose to walk away from him.

But instead of giving up, instead of walking away, instead of saying it hurts too much to go back, God makes himself even more vulnerable, he makes himself even more accessible, he chooses to put even more at risk. 2000 years ago the “word” that was God, the “logos”, everything that the very idea of God can capture, became flesh, became a child that would go on to live and die, so that you and I would be able to make a choice about who we want to have in our life. Love meant that God gave us a choice, the choice to live life with him, the choice to find the life we were meant for, the life of the ages, but also meant God made himself vulnerable to our rejection. The chance that we would choose to walk away, to walk another path, to distance ourselves from the one who created and loves us

Christmas is about a lot of things. It is about gifts, and family, and food, and friends but sometimes we do become a little too preoccupied to remember that at its heart Christmas is about the gift. The indescribable gift of God’s love. The gift of God’s vulnerability toward us.

In the Xmas narrative God takes on frail human, vulnerable flesh but more than that he takes on the frail vulnerable posture of love and he challenges us to do the same. He takes the first step, he makes the first move, he offers to recreate us into the life we were meant for and then waits, on the edge of his seat wherever that is, for our response.

Welcome, and congratulations. I am delighted you could make it. I know getting here wasn’t easy. You probably had errands to run, last minute presents to buy, sleeping arrangements for family members to determine, children to gather, calm, dress and transport- all of the decisions and the stresses of which a Christmas Eve is built. The indescribably infinite number of variable choices that have led to you- here- in this room- right now. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than we sometimes give our circumstances credit for.

For instance, behind the choice of which Christmas sweater to wear this evening – for you to be here now, in the words of Bill Bryson, trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It is an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never before been attempted and will only exist just this once.

Now imagine if you can- using very delicate tweasers to separate out one of those atom, less than a trillionth of yourself. Now take that single atom and miniaturize it to a trillionth of its initial size and into that space- so vanishingly small it could be said to occupy no space at all- pack everything that is- every last atom and molecule and particle that makes up you and me and Calgary and Calcutta and the rocky mountains and the burning heart of the north star – every last particle between here and the edge of creation- pack that all into a space no larger than a trillion trillionth of you- and you are ready to start the process that has led to you- sitting here tonight- 2007- Calgary Ab- Christmas Eve.

Scientists believe that if we could look back 10 to the negative 43 seconds after the moment of creation- that is one million, trillion, trillion, trillionths of a second after the bang that resulted in you and I- that we would see the birth of a universe. Again I’ll turn to Bill Bryson to describe the moment of creation from his book A Short History of Nearly Everything. In a blinding pulse, a moment of glory much too swift and expansive for any form of words, the singularity assumes heavenly dimensions, space beyond conception. In the first lively second is produced gravity and the other forces that govern physics. In less than a minute the universe is a million billion miles across and growing fast. There is a lot of heat now, ten billion degrees of it, enough to begin the nuclear reactions that create the lighter elements- principally hydrogen and helium, with a dash (about one atom in a hundred million) of lithium. In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or ever will be has been produced. We have a universe. It is a place of the most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful too. And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.

Bryson writes with an endearingly unapologetic passion and- almost reverence for the science of where we started. And though our enthusiasm has sometimes out stretched our grasp it is incredible to discover the secrets of our story the human mind has unlocked; to be able to look beyond our visual capacity- into space and see the beauty of a universe beyond our comprehension.

And yet- with every discovery- with every advance- with every secret that falls to the unending advance of human curiosity and knowledge- the farther we look out into space- it almost seems as if there is no room left for mystery in the universe.

If you and I are simply- trillions of drifting atoms- the composition of nothing more than random chance- the inconsequential outcome of a series of events with neither purpose, nor direction, not intent – than of what value is the beauty of all that is?

All that is- every particle of creation was condensed into a space so infinitesimally small as to occupy no space at all- The beauty of it is sometimes overwhelming.

It reminds of the Christmas narrative. The reason we have brought- each of us- our trillions of atoms into this room tonight.

The writer of the gospel of John writes about the Christmas story in the large and grand scope of the universe’s creation.

He says-

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.

Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

That Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and the Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

All that is- every thought and emotion and significance that resides behind the creation of all that is- was condensed into a space so infinitesimally small as to occupy a space no greater than that of a child lying in a manger- in a backwoods town- born to a simple couple- without even the means to find a place to sleep for the night.

I try sometimes to imagine the scope of creation. I try at times to understand my place in the context of a universe that is beyond my ability to comprehend. And I am fascinated- I am captured by the possibilities of learning and discovering and shaping my knowledge of what is-

But

I will never be able to fit into my mind the scope of the mystery that is Christmas. That God would shrink himself down into a space that fits in my head. That I can picture, that I can hold in my mind, that I can choose to believe.

Why do we invest ourselves in the celebration of Christmas? Why do we gather here tonight when we could be somewhere else?

Why is it that every year we trim a Christmas tree?

Because maybe there’s something to this story.

Also, Paris, Je t’aime… awesome.