gathering in light

Well the political world is in a frenzy these days, everyone’s making speculations, mud is being thrown in every direction and some of us are picking sides (The first and last link are somewhat unrelated to the larger topic, I just posted them for fun). And I keep wondering if Jesus has anything to do with this? I mean, as Christians we have particular values we think are super important right? But when it comes down to it, it seems like we often vote more on our ideologies than on virtues and practices we find in the life of Jesus. I think this is the point “Marvin Bloom” may be trying to make (see first link above). And in a way it’s hard to keep playing the game of pretending we’ve got it all figured out (a point I take away from the last link above).

I ran across this quote the other day and it got me thinking about all this:

For Christians, a great tension therefore exists in our day between the gospel and ideology, betewen following Jesus and serving idols. The countrast is razor-sharp. There was only one way that Christ could conquer the powers of this world and make ‘a public spectale of them:’ he did not seek his own well-being, he distanced hiself form every pursuit of power, and he prefered to obey God’s commands rather than to look after his own idenity as the Song of God (phil. 2:6-11; Col. 2:15).

Many of use as Christians have systematically suppressed this knowledge of the Savior. We have selected our own goals, delivered ourselves over to various ideologies, and thus have unwittingly worshipped demonic powers. We have built our own empire rather than serving God’s kingdom. Following that course has been the deepest cause of our political fragmentation. It has been the ruin of the Christian church (Goudzwaard et al, Hope In Troubled Times, 128).

If we ran down our particular voting blocks could we make clear connections to how we vote and the life of Jesus. Or have we built our own empires of ideology when it comes to these issues? Short of asking you “How you think Jesus would vote?” Do you think he has anything to do with it at all? Are the issues so unrelated that his life is somewhat irrelevant? Or do you see it as having some effect but not across the board? I personally wonder about it, not just for my own consistency but also for the church? Does Jesus have anything to do with our politics? Or is that the wrong question to be asking?

In Slavoj Zizek’s book on September 11, “Welcome to the Desert of The Real,” he discusses the idea behind Homo sacer, in order to describe the kind of racism we often find within our society today. The Homo sacer:

is an obscure figure of Roman law: a person who is banned, may be killed by anybody, but may not be sacrificed in a religious ritual. The person is excluded from all civil rights, while his/her life is deemed “holy” in a negative sense (wikipedia).

Another way of looking at it, which is the way Agamben uses the designation. Here the Homo sacer is a person who is a legal exile, one who may live among the people but has no legal rights. An easy example of this from Scripture would be Cain, who in Genesis 4 is made to be a wanderer and fugitive on the Earth. He is marked so that he cannot be killed - whether it is for religious vengeance or otherwise, but he is left with no community or law to protect him. And we don’t (typically) feel sorry for him, he is after all guilty! Right?!

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I’ve had a lot of vested interest in the emerging church for a number of years now, partly because of my own previous experience in communities that reflected many of the qualities present in Bolger and Gibb’s “Emerging Churches,” and partly because upon reading that book I was better able to organize my own disparate thoughts on the future of the “emerging” Friends church, or what we now convergent Friends. But there is often a too complicated debate over who and what the emerging church (EC) is, whether it is a good thing, and who really represents this “movement.” I am not really interested in defending or critiquing this movement, though I am personally in favor of at least some of the expressions within these groups, because I think the church should always be contextualizing its message the best it can. But this doesn’t really help us understand the who and the what of the EC. That said, I have been playing around with various ways of categorizing these various emerging groups, and I wanted to throw out this very early, proto-typology and see how it flies.

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Chillin to In Rainbows from wess on Vimeo. [Read more]

Series contents | Introduction | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five

For this last post in my church in mission series I want to explain the five practices that John Howard Yoder offers the church as a means of faithfulness and witness in mission. But first, by way of review, I’d like to restate my overall argument. I’ve argued that much of the church’s style of mission in the West has been shaped around consumerism, something we see in the way the church uses the word ‘relevancy.’ Following Yoder, I said that the church’s mission and ethics is to be first and foremost rooted in taking the life of Jesus (the incarnation) as our starting point for mission. Then I moved on to explaining how the church is to be a bi-cultural community. This community is always positioned within exile, refuses to become absolute (whether through physical power or other means) and seeks to transform, or bring the peace of the city in which it finds itself. The church is a remembering community, one formed around texts, practices, songs, and stories, but it is also an active, transforming community and is called to live out the reality of God’s kingdom now. This is an outlook, I think, the church must accept more and more Christendom crumbles.

If the Church, as Bi-Cultural community, is to be a people that not only seeks to remember its history but transform whatever society it is in, then how is it to go about this transformation? How do we go from self-preservation to societal transformation? Yoder, in his book Body Politics, names five practices he believes all churches can and should do, practices that not only govern and shape the church (or help it remember), but also point outward as a model for a new way of living that all of society can be transformed by.

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Series contents | Introduction | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five

According to John Howard Yoder, one aspect that distinguishes this bi-cultural faith community we call the Christian church from the world is it’s insistence upon being non-coercive. This point of view has major implications not only for the mission of the church in our culture as well as in others, but it also brings up some important points about how we read our history.

A Quick History of Christendom

Since the start of Christendom, when the Roman Emperor Constantine became a Christian and Christianity became the state (re:enforced) religion, the church has struggled to take the teachings of Christ seriously on matters of violence. This is why we call the marriage between Christianity and the state is called Constantinianism. This theological, and political shift for the church, which was a move from the margins of society to the center of power, had profound effects upon the way it understood itself.

Yoder says:

The deeper shift behind it all was the loss of the identity of the Christianity community, as visible over against the world, replaced by the effort to “Christianize�? (thinly) the entire society. Once the premise that Europe is “Christendom�? has been granted, the rest follows. The church-state tie and even the Crusades can make sense (as they still do in our day, in modern forms, to a host of Americans) once the first assumption, namely, that everyone is “in,�? is made�? (104).

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Things have been a little slow this week since I am in the process of finishing up the quarter, but I’ve got some interesting links this week. Oh and sorry to flood your inboxes with Twitter, I wanted to have them on my blog as posts so people could comment on them, but not go through my feed, anyways, it didn’t work. I am looking into plan B.

Is facebook becoming evil? With privacy becoming more and more of an issue will Facebook start cooperating? See here as well.

Here are the nine most Badass verses in the Bible (be forewarned some of this is pretty crude).

Are you looking for a new gravatar or favicon?

For all you music fans be sure to check out NPR’s recent All Songs Considered website re-design. They’ve got some amazing stuff on their. I think the coolest feature is the playlist feature where you can select a list of music you’d like to listen to from their website.

For those of you who haven’t heard, the Daily Scribe is up and running again, with some new and old faces in the community. Be sure to check it out.

Have you heard of the Fisherman yet? I think I like the Air Jordan/Rock Climbing version.

Build a cheap solar heater (I wonder if it works).