CrossWalk Community Church Napa

Open Relational God: Introduction

Note: You can view this teaching on our YouTube Channel. Monica was raped. Jimmy struggles with the threat of . Rochelle questions the relevance of prayer. Kyler and his husband, Gary, adopted baby girls and wonder what to teach them about God. Chad lost his wife, Jenny, to COVID-induced complications. I bet you really don’t need many more details about these stories to recognize that they represent very difficult questions about the character and nature of God. Many of the answers coming from conventional theology have left some people wanting and others walking away from faithful pursuits entirely. What questions have you struggled with? How many times have you had to play the mystery card, giving God a pass on tough questions? The reason I want to teach about Open and Relational Theology is because I think it could be extraordinarily helpful for your life. It has for mine. There are very big questions about life and God that conventional Christian theology struggles to answer satisfactorily, leaving many people feeling unsure about themselves and God and life. Our paradigms matter because they help us make sense of the world. How we see the world shapes our vision for everything. In the Church, sometimes certain questions have not been encouraged or even welcome, sometimes they are discouraged because the very question appears to imply doubt. A robust faith does not shy away from challenging questions, it runs toward them, not as enemies to be fought and conquered but as a new vista to behold. We can only play the mystery card for so long before we lose confidence in our faith. Another major reason why I want to teach this is because the way we see God and everything else deeply affects how we think about ourselves and our place in the world. There are some really valuable aspects of conventional theology which obviously resonate with a lot of people, and yet parts of it have also contributed to some of the most horrific acts of humanity ever committed, even with God’s “blessing.” If large-scale atrocities can be mitigated against with some new ways of thinking, this venture is worth it. Yet our individual lives can be deeply impacted as well. We human beings tend to create God in our image, and then return the favor. Parts of conventional theology may work to shape us into jerks more than Jesus. If that’s the case, change is worth looking into. Theology is not fixed. While there are some central themes about the character and nature of God in the Bible, there is no single, complete systematic theology offered in its pages. Theology – the study of God – has always been fluid, shaped by new discoveries, insights, and experiences over time. When popular models of theology are challenged, there is always a mixture of rejoicing and backlash. Jesus certainly experienced this as he offered new ways to think about God and life. When you feel a little anxious as certain tenets of comfortable theological are challenged, remember that such feelings are normal when new ideas are floated. And remember that the author and perfecter of the Christian faith, Jesus, chose to push the envelope, discovering and proclaiming a bigger God so that we could, too. Over the next several weeks we will examine some conventional ways of thinking and consider some new ways. The key components we will examine include the following:· Open. Our lives are not written. God does not know the specifics of the future. Everything may “happen for a reason”, but it’s not necessarily God’s will or something predetermined. The future is open and undetermined. It doesn’t imply a lack of interconnectedness – on the contrary, it respects and is dependent upon it. When we really believe that God is open, we become more empowered, not less. This is different than conventional views.· Relational. God is deeply engaged with all of creation because God is in all parts of creation. The relationship is a two-way street – we are always affected by God and God is always affected by us. This means God is altered in some ways by creation itself. This is different than conventional views.· Amipotent. God is the most powerful force anywhere and everywhere, yet God’s power is self-limited by God’s uncontrolling love and our subsequent freedom. This is different than conventional views.· Present. God is in everything and everyone everywhere all the time and therefore deeply present with us in every moment, every experience – we are never alone. This is very familiar and welcome by most people even if it is a departure from conventional theology.· Loving. The nature of God is uncontrolling love which we really love for ourselves, but don’t love as much for others. This means we have freedom to do as we please, but it also means other people do, too. No matter what, God’s love prevails. This feel like it should be part of conventional theology, but it is not. Each week we will consider the above subjects with the help of some biblical examples of each concept and the writing of Tom Oord in his book, Open and Relational Theology. On Wednesdays at noon and 7:00 we will work through the questions at the end of each of the respective chapters, where you will also find a link to content from Oord himself – podcasts, lectures, interviews, etc. This matters to me. I teach this because it is home for me. It’s not like I found myself swimming in ORT one Tuesday morning a few years ago. Over (decades of) time I gradually began to question the conventional views that had shaped me and began wondering about what “more” there might be. I believe I am one of a large, growing number of people who are on that adventure. Oord’s books have helped give me words to express what I’m thinking, feeling, and experiencing. His work has provided a well-reasoned-and-articulated framework that makes a lot of sense and enlivens my faith. I want that for everyone. I hope you’ll join me for the ongoing conversation. Open My Eyes That I May SeeOpen my eyes that I may seeGlimpses of truth Thou hast for mePlace in my hands the wonderful keyThat shall unclasp and set me free Silently now I wait for TheeReady my God Thy will to seeOpen my eyes illumine meSpirit divine Open my ears that I may hearVoices of truth Thou sendest clearAnd while the wave notes fall on my earEverything false will disappear Open my mouth and let me bearGladly the warm truth everywhereOpen my heart and let me prepareLove with Thy children thus to share

God With Us: Word. Jesus. Christ.

Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel.Some problems take time to sort out, some issues take a while to resolve. If we are lifelong learners, we can be confident that as we come to grips with new information and as our perspective changes with maturity, we will forever be in process. The process seems to be one where we construct ways of thinking, eventually deconstruct them as necessary given new information and experience, and reconstruct our paradigms based on the process we’ve undergone. We enjoy our newly constructed schema for a while until – uh oh – we are introduced to new information and experiences that start the process all over again. This has been called “the perennial tradition” by Richard Rohr and others, and I think it’s accurate. My understanding of Jesus has gone through several rounds of this process. I am very familiar with the range of perspectives about Jesus – kind of important for a Christian pastor. Earlier in my life I simply accepted the birth narratives as literal fact. In time I heard about scholars who challenged the virgin birth, but I dismissed them because it seemed like they were challenging the authority of scripture as reliable and true, and therefore they were suspect and probably heretics as far as I was concerned. Over time and with more study, however, I began to understand the Bible differently – its own series of the perennial process – and had room to entertain the ideas I had previously rejected. We generally don’t have Eureka moments where we shift from one perspective immediately to another – major shifts take time because that level of change is very complex. Today I want to tell you how I understand Jesus this Christmas, knowing that in time this will change if I am open to new information and experience. Before I begin, I want to assure you of two things that I generally get questioned about: the Bible and Jesus. While I do not believe the Bible to be inerrant or infallible – these more modern concepts were foreign to Jesus and Paul and the entire rabbinical tradition and therefore should be challenged – I absolutely engage the Bible as sacred text. For Christians it remains our primary text to understand first the development of Judaism, and how the first followers of Jesus thought and lived so that we can think and live faithfully today. But because I don’t ascribe to the Fundamental/Evangelical doctrine of the Bible, I sometimes get dismissed as not teaching the Bible. I have been a pastor for over 26 years. I earned my doctorate studying the soteriology based on the Gospel of John. Between Sunday sermons, memorial services, weddings, and other special events, I have offered over 1500 original teachings, each averaging 16-20 hours of research and preparation. I don’t repeat a teaching. With literally only a handful of exceptions when I may have given a talk on another religious tradition, I have taught strictly from the Bible, even when offering a series that dovetails with a book. I am a Bible-teaching pastor. If anybody doubts it, they are welcome to view hundreds of hours of teachings on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel to try to prove me wrong. If you can do so, I will buy you an ice cream cone from McDonalds. As far as Jesus goes, I chose to follow in his footsteps at age 10, had a profound experience of the Holy Spirit at age 15 which amped up my relationship with God exponentially, sensed a call to become a pastor the summer before my Sophomore year of High School, had another dramatic experience of the Holy Spirit in college which further refined my faith and passion, and have remained an ordained pastor since July 23, 1995. My commitment to following the Way of Jesus has never been stronger or deeper. I will go to my grave proclaiming my faith even if that proclamation leads to the grave. I say these things because I do not agree with some classic views of Jesus that developed hundreds of years after his ministry that stuck for various reasons, or some newer revisions over the last few hundred years that have also gained traction. What I have resonated with more and more has been the original Jesus and those who experienced the power of his Gospel over the centuries. Many who challenged orthodoxy when it went against the grain of Jesus were silenced or killed. What I believe may be new to some of you, but it is not new. Jesus was born and raised by Mary and Joseph. Was there divine intervention of some sort? Of course. Does that mean that Jesus was born of a virgin Mary? Not necessarily. Such a birth does not need to be literally true in my understanding. Could it be? Who am I to say? Yet I join the likes of Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright (and many others) stating that my faith is not deeply shaped by the birth narratives. At minimum, Matthew and Luke’s authors were signaling to the readers that God was up to something in Jesus’ birth, and it required the cooperation of both Mary and Joseph to pull it off – that’s a powerful message to proclaim. Jesus grew up and when he was in later adulthood for his time, he began his public ministry for which he is best known. What was so special about Jesus is his relationship with God and his modeling of faith that allowed the Spirit to have full sway over his life as much as possible. It was this responsiveness to the Spirit that gave him insights that blew people’s minds about the scope of God’s expansive love, gave a new view of scripture, gave him power and courage to challenge political and religious authorities, allowed him to be a conduit of healing and forgiveness from the Spirit in unprecedented ways, allowed him to silently resist torture and death as a form of peaceful protest, and opened his followers’ eyes to his life after death. There has never been another who opened the Spirit of God to others like Jesus did. Therefore he is called Christ, or Messiah – we’ve never seen one so anointed as we have in Jesus. His life, death, and teachings opened the door for everyone else to welcome the Spirit into their lives as well and respond in similar ways toward similar ends. Jesus was the great witness to what living in fully open relationship with God looked like. This was very new. It marked a shift in consciousness that was not lost on his closest followers who learned the way and followed. He certainly validated his title of Christ, and his birthday is surely worth celebrating. But I don’t think Jesus wanted to be worshipped as God. He said as much during his life. What is difficult for his original audience as well as today’s is differentiating where the physical Jesus ends, and the infusion of the Spirit begins. There are statements that Jesus made that surely seem to reflect a first century context more than an eternally benevolent God – so there are moments of distinction on that note. While an easy and honest mistake, I wonder if contemporary Christianity is guilty of Jesusolatry – worshipping Jesus instead of the God who inhabited him. This rendering of Jesus takes nothing away from him as far as I am concerned. He is still special and deserving of allegiance. One massive benefit of viewing Jesus in this way is that it makes his final prayer attainable – his dying wish that his disciples would be one with God just like he was. If such union required a virgin birth, we’re all screwed! If, however, what Jesus was getting at was that what he experienced was available to all people, then that means it is actually possible. That is incredibly powerful news. I can celebrate Jesus and worship God. And, because Jesus was so inhabited, infused, open, and welcoming of the Spirit of God, I think we can still say that when we see Jesus, we see the face of God. No demigod required. More, it means that we human beings can actualize the Spirit similarly, experiencing and exemplifying the presence of God incarnate, becoming united as one, as much as we are able, for the restoration of ourselves and the world in which we live. May it be so. May we do our part to be the answer to Jesus’ last prayer.Some questions to process...1. How were you introduced to the historical person of Jesus? Was he framed as a fully human and fully God character unlike any other human being in history, therefore making him sinless which paved the way for his death on the cross to become a final sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins so that we would be welcome in heaven one day (if we consciously accept the offer of forgiveness)? Or was he framed as just a human being, a Jewish reformer who spoke into his context in ways that so rattled those in political and religious authority that he and his threat were eliminated?2. The idea of a demigod was anathema to Jewish theology even if it was welcome and common in Roman and Greek mythology. If Jesus was a demigod, does this mean God went against Godself? If Jesus was not a demigod, how does that impact our view of who is was, what he had to say and do, and why he mattered?3. “Christ” isn’t Jesus’ last name, but a denotation that something especially God-anointed was happening in him. It also may mean that we rethink the nature of Jesus and Christ as separate statements. How does that mess with you?4. What if Christ is the eternal presence of God that is everywhere, in everyone, in every part of creation? What does that mean for how you see yourself? All other people? Creation?Other Stuff to Consider…Selections from John’s Prologue; Colossians 1:15-20 (NLT)In the beginning the Word/Blueprint/Way already existed.The Word/Blueprint/Way was with God,and the Word/Blueprint/Way was God.[Love] existed in the beginning with God.God created everything through [Love]and nothing was created except through [Love].The Word/Blueprint/Way gave life to everything that was created,and [Love’s] life brought light to everyone.The Light/Love shines in the darkness,and the darkness can never extinguish it.The one who is the True Light,who gives Light to everyone,was coming into the world. Christ/Love Incarnate is the visible image of the invisible God.Love existed before anything was created & is supreme over all creation,for through Love God created everythingin the heavenly realms and on earth.Love made the things we can seeand the things we can’t see—such as thrones, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities in the unseen world.Everything was created through Love and for Love.Love existed before anything else,and Love holds all creation together.Christ is also the head of the church,which is Love’s body.Love is the beginning,supreme over all who rise from the dead.So Love is first in everything.For God in all Love’s fullnesswas pleased to live in Christ,and through Love God reconciledeverything to Godself.God made peace with everything in heaven and on earthby means of Love’s/Christ’s emptying/blood on the cross.St. Patrick’s Breastplate Prayer: Christ with meChrist before me, Christ behind me, Christ in meChrist beneath me, Christ above meChrist on my right, Christ on my leftChrist when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I ariseChrist in the heart of every man who thinks of meChrist in the mouth of everyone who speaks of meChrist in every eye that sees meChrist in every ear that hears meSelected Sayings of Jesus from the Gospel of John* “Anyone who drinks this water will soon become thirsty again. But those who drink the water I give will never be thirsty again. It becomes a fresh, bubbling spring within them, giving them eternal life... The time is coming—indeed it’s here now—when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The Father is looking for those who will worship him that way. For God is Spirit, so those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth... “I have a kind of food you know nothing about... My nourishment comes from doing the will of God, who sent me, and from finishing his work.” “I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself. He does only what he sees the Father doing. Whatever the Father does, the Son also does... I tell you the truth, those who listen to my message and believe in God who sent me have eternal life. They will never be condemned for their sins, but they have already passed from death into life.” “Anyone who is thirsty may come to me! Anyone who believes in me may come and drink! For the Scriptures declare, ‘Rivers of living water will flow from his heart.’” “I am the light of the world. If you follow me, you won’t have to walk in darkness, because you will have the light that leads to life.” “You are truly my disciples if you remain faithful to my teachings. And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” “I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying. Everyone who lives in me and believes in me will never ever die.” “I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other. Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.” “Jesus told him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. If you had really known me, you would know who my Father is. From now on, you do know him and have seen him!’” “I have loved you even as the Father has loved me. Remain in my love. When you obey my commandments, you remain in my love, just as I obey my Father’s commandments and remain in his love. I have told you these things so that you will be filled with my joy. Yes, your joy will overflow! This is my commandment: Love each other in the same way I have loved you. There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you slaves, because a master doesn’t confide in his slaves. Now you are my friends, since I have told you everything the Father told me. You didn’t choose me. I chose you. I appointed you to go and produce lasting fruit, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask for, using my name. This is my command: Love each other. “And this is the way to have eternal life—to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, the one you sent to earth... “I have given them the glory you gave me, so they may be one as we are one. I am in them and you are in me. May they experience such perfect unity that the world will know that you sent me and that you love them as much as you love me.*Jn 4:13-14, 23-24, 32, 34; 5:19, 24; 7:37-38; 8:12, 31-32; 11:25-26; 13:34-35; 14:6-7; 15:9-17; 17:3, 17-23 (NLT) Who Is Christ? By Richard Rohr (Meditation 12/2/2018) What if we’ve missed the point of who Christ is, what Christ is, and where Christ is? I believe that a Christian is simply one who has learned to see Christ everywhere. Understanding the Universal or Cosmic Christ can change the way we relate to creation, to other religions, to other people, to ourselves, and to God. Knowing and experiencing this Christ can bring about a major shift in consciousness. Like Saul’s experience on the road to Damascus (see Acts 9), we won’t be the same after encountering the Risen Christ. The Universal Christ is present in both Scripture and Tradition, and the concept has been understood by many mystics, though not as a focus of mainline Christianity. (See John 1:1-5, Colossians 1:15-20, Ephesians 1:9-12 if you think this is some new idea.) We just didn’t have the eyes to see it. The Universal Christ is Divine Presence pervading all of creation since the very beginning. My father Francis of Assisi (1181–1226) intuited this presence and lived his life in awareness of it. Later, John Duns Scotus (1266–1308) put this intuition into philosophical form. For Duns Scotus, the Christ Mystery was the blueprint of reality from the very start (John 1:1). Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) brought this insight into our modern world. God’s first “idea” was to become manifest—to pour out divine, infinite love into finite, visible forms. The “Big Bang” is now our scientific name for that first idea; and “Christ” is our Christian theological name. Both are about love and beauty exploding outward in all directions. Creation is indeed the Body of God! In Jesus, this eternal omnipresence had a precise, concrete, and personal referent. God’s presence became more obvious and believable in the world. The formless took on form in someone we could “hear, see, and touch” (1 John 1:1), making God easier to love. But it seems we so fell in love with this personal interface in Jesus that we forgot about the eternal Christ, the Body of God, which is all of creation, which is really the “First Bible.” Jesus and Christ are not exactly the same. In the early Christian era, only a few Eastern Fathers (such as Origen of Alexandria and Maximus the Confessor) noticed that the Christ was clearly historically older, larger, and different than Jesus himself. They mystically saw that Jesus is the union of human and divine in space and time; Christ is the eternal union of matter and Spirit from the beginning of time. When we believe in Jesus Christ, we’re believing in something much bigger than the historical incarnation that we call Jesus. Jesus is the visible map. The entire sweep of the meaning of the Anointed One, the Christ, includes us and includes all of creation since the beginning of time (see Romans 1:20). This Advent, let us wait in anticipation for the eternally coming Christ.

God With Us: Where, Exactly?

Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel. The backdrop of the Christmas story is despair. The few hundred years before Jesus was born was considered to be a time when God was silent. No new words from God spoken through prophets were being announced or published. The state of Israel suggested that God had left the building: foreign oppressors ruled over them in their own land, and their Temple was in ruins until a bit before Jesus was born. Even then, the Jewish tradition was tolerated more than celebrated. The recitation of psalms and prayers and sacrifices seemed to fall flat, words of exasperation falling on deaf ears. And yet it was a time when the desperation of people was rising to fever pitch. Some thought that God would act like God again (think Moses and the Exodus) if the people themselves would just show some faith and follow a leader courageous enough to sound a rallying cry. Many did rise, faith-claiming the role of messiah, the anointed one of God who would be God’s agent to bring about the restoration they hoped for. One by one those wannabe messiahs met their death at the hands of Rome. There was unrest. There was despair. There was crying out to God. There was silence. Where was God? Part of the brilliance of the stories surrounding Jesus’ birth are the inclusion of God showing up in surprising ways. An old, childless couple long past child-bearing years is told that they could expect a bun in the oven very soon, and they were to name the child John. In good male fashion, Zechariah offered solid “mansplaining” to the angel Gabriel, suggesting that this would be impossible due to their old age, and also that the kid would be named Zechariah, Jr.. Gabriel then did to Zechariah what women everywhere across all time have longed to do: he hit the mute button on Zech. Nine months of peace and quiet surely helped Elizabeth enjoy her pregnancy! Everybody wondered if God was up to something with them, and their suspicions were realized when, after the baby was born, Elizabeth named him John (to the shock of all), only to have Zechariah confirm it (at which point the mute button was turned off). God was not distant, inactive, or silent. God showed up. The birth narrative of Jesus is also incredible. Instead of a highly respected elderly couple unexpectedly becoming new parents, the story of Jesus’ beginning starts from the other end of the spectrum. Mary and Joseph are dirt poor. They are engaged – likely a marriage arranged for some time – but aren’t together yet until Joseph can provide for her. That could take a while since Joseph is a carpenter – not a high paying job, not much respect. Their engagement was legally binding even if they weren’t allowed to consummate the marriage. This is where the scandal comes in. Mary is visited by Gabriel and told that she is going to get pregnant via the Holy Spirit – that her coming pregnancy would be anointed by God somehow – and that the child she would bear would be the messiah of God. She visits her relative Elizabeth – now six months pregnant – and Elizabeth confirms that Mary must be telling the truth since baby John did a lot of kicking as soon as Mary showed up. Or was it the spicy tacos she just ate? Of course, getting pregnant out of wedlock – and not from your fiancé – is generally not ideal and caused a lot of problems with Joseph, their families, and their neighbors. Who would believe such a thing? One thing Mary (and eventually Joseph) learned was that God was not distant, but near. God was not silent but speaking. God was not inactive, but deeply involved. The night of Jesus’ birth, another set of undervalued people received a heavenly birth announcement. Sometime later, astrologers from a distant land noticed a star that communicated to them that a new king was born and made the very long journey to pay homage. The graveyard-shift shepherds under the stars that night found out that God was very much present – and with a massive heavenly host that could sing harmony – and that this God valued them despite their lowly state. The astronomers discovered that God spanned vast distances of geography and was also willing to speak another religious language to communicate to them. Not long after Jesus was born, more stories all along the same theme emerge – God is with us, right here, right now. If you have ever been in a place of despair, certain that God is not present, this comes as very comforting news. Or not. After all, God showed up for these few people while who knows how many people were still in the dark where all the anxiety gets stoked. Perhaps there is more we need to consider. From what we have learned from the writings of antiquity around the time Jesus was born, the dominant theological framework revolved around theism, where God (or the gods) ruled the earth “down here” from the heavens “up there.” There were certainly variations and nuances and different interpretations about what this all meant, but most people looked at the world through this faith lens. The Jewish people believed God was very powerful, yet apparently not always willing to lend a hand. Most of the time, when there was hardship, the assumption was that humanity had done something to offend God, explaining God’s lack of concern, which had to be appeased before God would act. Lots of animals and a few people were sacrificed to that end. Sound a little silly? Yep. Primitive, even? Yes. And yet many people still hold the same view today even if we don’t think about sacrificing sheep or cows or people anymore. Perhaps there is another way to think about God that makes more sense... The opposite of theism (where God is separate from creation) is pantheism (where everything is God). In this view, I’m God, the trees are God, the rocks are God, the mailbox, the dog , the squirrels, everything (except cats – there’s no way cats are gods even though they act like they are). Some folks resonate with this, but it tends to dilute God so much that God becomes so commonplace as to become irrelevant. The Jewish and Christian scriptures, by the way, reject the notion of pantheism. Another view that has been around forever and has been enjoying a rebound of sort for the last hundred years or so is panentheism, which literally translates “everything in God” and, by extension, God is in everything. God, the animator, energizer, lover, restorer, renewer, redeemer, etc., is present all the time, everywhere, at work in everything. God is never distant – and cannot be – because God is in everything. God cannot be silent or inactive or unredeeming or unloving or uncreative or unrestoring or... because God remains God in everything. If this is true, it means that when we experience periods when God seems silent or distant, it may have more to do with our awareness, perspective, and perception than anything else. Surely this was not entirely lost on people of antiquity. There are too many experiences that are shared by humanity that support this idea even if we don’t know how to express it. The feeling of joy and hope and love at the sight of a newborn child or animal. The wonder of Spring, the fullness of Summer, the shift of Fall and the dead of Winter. Love. Joy. The majesty of creation. Friendship. Solidarity. The peace and calm that accompanies deep meditation and contemplation. There are just so many instances and experiences where, upon reflection, we might say to ourselves, “I think there is more going on here than flesh and blood” (not to minimize flesh and blood which are also incredible examples of God’s presence). Part of our hesitancy to embrace such an idea is that the dominant way of thinking remains stuck in theism, where we humans are not good and creation itself is doomed for destruction because it isn’t good, either. Yet this runs counter to the very first utterances in our scared text, where everything is good and even very good, with God speaking it all into being. The concept of the fall of man – which was not the original interpretation of the Adam, Eve, and Apple story – went too far, building on Paul’s work for a different purpose and becoming its own monster, giving license for people in power to wield it over those below them. Theism needs to go. It doesn’t reflect God well and does little to help us move forward into greater maturity. Next week we will look at Jesus and consider how he actually lived more from a panentheistic framework than a theistic one. For now, take some time and wonder how it might be true that the presence of God is all around you and even in you. God is neither distant nor silent. Can you sense God? Can you hear God? Maybe we are all like Elijah, assuming God will show up only in the limited places we are looking. Maybe we are all like the characters in the birth narrative of Jesus – feeling like we’ve been left behind only to discover that God is fully with us all the time if we’ll learn to have eyes to see. In the live teaching I again featured Dr. Andrew M. Davis. Check out his book of spiritual memoirs from some well-known voices, How I Found God in Everyone and Everywhere - it will inspire!

God With Us: Let the Adventure Continue

Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel.How many Christmases have you lived through? How has the meaning of Christmas changed for you over the course of your life? As we enter into another season of Advent (the waiting and anticipating of the birth of Jesus), what does it mean to you? Sometimes we get locked into a particular way of thinking about things. That’s not a bad thing. We need to know where our firm places are to stand. When we land on what feels like good footing, we feel stable, confident, and able to build. The problem sometimes comes when we don’t allow ourselves to wonder if there are other footings that may help us build in other ways. Building on images of God for our spirituality and theology is wonderfully human and good. This is called the kataphatic tradition. Sometimes we get so limited by the images of God that we come to realize that no image is adequate, and we resort to not welcoming any images since they will be immediately limiting. This is called the apophatic tradition. These two traditions work together, of course, since they are opposites of one another. The question is, how are you employing each tradition this Christmas season? What images add to the richness of this time? What images have you chosen to not employ as much? How has the apophatic side allowed you to embrace more mystery in this season? Before we jump into the full Christmas story, I think it wise to spend some time determining where we’re “at”. I know for fact that we are much less able to learn anything new until we identify what we know. I hope this season will be wonderfully stretchy for you, which is a deeply embedded yet often neglected aspect of our faith tradition. There is more to learn, more to imagine, more to write – this is a key part of the biblical tradition. The biblical narrative which includes the formation of the Jewish people all the way through Jesus and the early days of the church gives witness to the evolution of thought over many centuries. The collective people of faith are still evolving. Are you? Are we? Let the Advent-ure continue...

2021 Thanksgiving

Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel.This Thanksgiving, I offer three resources for you that I hope will help you experience a deeper, more reflective, and theologically rich time of gratitude. Reading one or both of the writings below might be a great addition to include during your dinner. And I hope this video featuring scholar and writer Diana Butler Bass will help you rethink what gratitude is really all about for you this season. Or, if you’re coming unglued, maybe this video will help. – Pete A Brief Theology of ThanksgivingThe SALTProject.org Team I. Origins With apologies to the Pilgrims, the origins of the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States are more complicated than most people think. Was the first Thanksgiving meal in present-day Massachusetts, complete with buckled, wide-brimmed hats, in 1621? Or was it an English celebration (different hats!) on the shores of Virginia, in 1619? Or how about a Spanish gathering in what became Texas, in 1598 — or Florida, in 1565? The reasons for those celebrations varied, of course. The English colonists in Virginia, for example, declared the day a commemoration of their arrival, thanking God for safe passage across a forbidding ocean; likewise, the Spanish explorers thanked God for survival. On the other hand, after a 1637 massacre of Native Americans, the governor of Plymouth wrote that Thanksgiving Days would be “in honor of the bloody victory.” In 1789, President George Washington declared a national Day of Thanksgiving to thank God for the birth of a new nation. And the current annual date in late November — which is far too late, after all, for a “harvest festival” in New England! — wasn’t established until Abraham Lincoln’s declaration in 1863, explicitly giving thanks for the Union’s military efforts in the Civil War.II. Thanksgiving Today. So the holiday we inherit is a complex, morally ambivalent amalgam of different kinds of gratitude: for good harvest, for safe passage, for colonial conquest, for military victory. All of which only sharpens the question, How will we celebrate Thanksgiving today?Remembering this history of immigration and cross-cultural connection and conflict, we may give thanks for the dazzling diversity of this land, including and especially Native American communities. Giving thanks in this way, our gratitude can spur us to reach out and work together to create a more just and equitable world. Likewise, remembering the holiday’s links to war, we may give thanks for times of peace: in our hearts, homes, neighborhoods, and between nations. Remembering the holiday’s links to creation, we may give thanks for that nourishing abundance. Here, too, our gratitude can serve as inspiration to redouble our efforts to be genuine peacemakers, serve the hungry in our neighborhoods, and care for God’s good Earth, all creatures great and small.III. The Difference Gratitude Makes But there’s perhaps no better day than Thanksgiving to reflect on the astounding power of gratitude itself — and accordingly, to commit ourselves to cultivating it more intentionally in the coming year. If we think of “gratitude” primarily as a kind of duty to discharge (Now remember to write that thank-you note!), we’re missing the boat entirely, effectively reducing one of life’s wonders to mere good manners. On the contrary, gratitude is vital force in the world, a profoundly dignifying act that builds relationships, communities, and healthy human hearts.The science on this subject is overwhelming: in study after study, gratitude has been shown to lead to stronger relationships, better sleep, lower blood pressure, fewer trips to the doctor, fewer depressive symptoms, more patience, and more perseverance, among other benefits (check out these study summaries here and here). In one particularly intriguing study, gratitude turns out to be a powerful antidote to the “Headwinds/Tailwinds Asymmetry,” our all-too-common tendency to focus on the obstacles in our lives (headwinds) and overlook blessings (tailwinds), an imbalance that over time leads to feeling aggrieved and resentful. In short, focusing on headwinds breeds bitterness; focusing on tailwinds breeds appreciation — and the act of thanksgiving helps call our attention to the winds at our backs.IV. Becoming More Grateful OK, so gratitude is powerful — but how to make more of it in our lives? It turns out that some of the most effective tools for increasing gratitude are also some of the simplest and most familiar. First, the basic act of not just counting our blessings but also recording them in a form we can revisit later — say, in a journal or notebook — has been shown to significantly enhance feelings of thankfulness over time. Second, another simple action has been shown to be even more effective: writing a letter of thanks to a friend, family member, acquaintance, or even a stranger. That’s right — thank-you notes can change your life! Indeed, we should reconceive the humble thank-you note not merely as a way to inform others about how grateful we are, but also as a way to help strengthen how grateful we are in the first place. And a third practice isn’t only effective, it’s downright fun, even and especially in a time of pandemic: connecting with a friend once a week for coffee (or tea, or lunch - by phone, online, or on a physically-distanced walk), and intentionally devoting at least part of the conversation to sharing what we’re thankful for these days. When it comes to gratitude, just “saying it out loud” to someone we like and respect, not to mention hearing what they’re thankful for, is a powerful step toward noticing — and more deeply experiencing — the blessings in our lives.V. A Graceful Life The power of these practices makes sense: one of our most precious treasures is our time-and-attention, and how we spend that treasure will directly determine the health of our hearts (“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21)). Will we spend it all focusing on “headwinds,” thereby creating the perfect petri dish for growing resentments and narratives of grievance? Or will we spend it focusing on “tailwinds,” thereby nourishing the soil for growing joy and narratives of appreciation? Gratitude journals, thank-you notes, and thankful conversations are simple, powerful, effective tools for investing our time-and-attention wisely. And so is prayer. Viewed from this angle, prayer is a kind of spoken gratitude journal, an intimate thank-you note or thankful conversation with God. And so is worship. Properly practiced, worship is an elaborate exercise — a whole gymnasium! — for cultivating thanks and praise, and at its best, the result is a swirl of palpable tailwinds, amazement, and joy. And so is the Eucharist (from the Greek for “thanksgiving”), the Lord’s Supper, the Communion meal. Gathered around a table of bounty, remembering an old story, giving thanks to God for safe passage, for life, for peace, and for the strength to continue the pilgrimage anew.In the end, then, we’re “pilgrims” after all. So start (or revisit) a gratitude journal. Try writing a simple thank-you note once a week. Connect with a friend for coffee and (thankful) conversation. Recommit to a practice of prayer. And let this year’s Thanksgiving be not just a day of gratitude, but a springboard into a new life of gratitude, that most human and humanizing of gestures, the most graceful of all social graces. Thanksgiving from an Open and Relational Theological PerspectiveBy Tom Oord The uncontrolling love view has positive implications for prayer at Thanksgiving. Thanking an uncontrolling God makes a lot of sense. Thanking a controlling God doesn’t. Each November, Americans gather to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday. Words of thanks sometimes enter the public news or get expressed at civic gatherings too. It’s natural to wonder, “What do people mean when they say, ‘Thank you, God?’”No God Some people don’t believe in God. Many of them feel thankful, but their Thanksgiving language has no ultimate Referent. In their view, no Divine Being exists to which their gratitude ultimately points. Giving thanks may be their way to admit they’ve enjoyed goodness the past year. Sometimes, these people say, “Thank you, God.” But their disbelief in a Being to whom they should be grateful makes this confusing.All God Those who say God controls everything — let’s call their view, “All God” — express gratitude at Thanksgiving. They believe God directly or indirectly controls everything. In their prayers, All God advocates say, “Thank you, God, for ____.” They can insert any event whatsoever. Such events might be supremely joyful or utterly horrific. The God who controls everything is responsible for every act of respect and rape, for peace and pain, for havens or holocausts. Most All God prayers focus on what’s good. Reminding All God advocates their God causes evil can dampen their holiday spirit!The Allowing God Others who pray reject the idea God causes evil. But they claim God allows it. When these people give thanks, they try to sidestep the problems that come with saying God allows evil. They might blame free agents or natural forces. But they try to avoid asking why a God who can stop evil singlehandedly permits it. The God who can control others fails to prevent the dastardly deeds we endure. The Allowing God permitted the pandemic, the holocaust, and your sister’s rape. When those who say, “God allows evil” pray at Thanksgiving, they could insert any event into the “Thank you, God, for _____” sentence. The Allowing God gets ultimate credit and blame for causing or allowing all things.The Uncontrolling God of Love Thanksgiving prayers make better sense in the uncontrolling love perspective. Advocates of this view thank God for always giving freedom, agency, or existence to creatures and creation. And God presents a spectrum of possibilities to each creature in each moment. In giving and presenting, the uncontrolling God never controls. The uncontrolling God is the gracious source for all that’s good. This God actively loves moment by moment by providing, inspiring, empowering, and interacting with creation. Genuine evil comes when creatures fail to respond well to God’s call to love. Or evil comes from natural accidents and free processes of reality. In the uncontrolling love of God view, God does not cause nor allow evil.A Thanksgiving Prayer that Makes Sense In her Thanksgiving prayer, an advocate of the uncontrolling love view can say every good and perfect gift originates in God. An active but uncontrolling God is the source of goodness and blessing. And this God neither causes nor allows evil, as if God could singlehandedly produce or prevent it. The good we enjoy involves creaturely responses to God’s gracious action too. The uncontrolling love view supports our urge to thank creatures at Thanksgiving. God is not the only factor, actor, or force for good. Creatures can cooperate with God’s good work. As I say in Open and Relational Theology, an amipotent — not omnipotent or impotent — God exerts the power of love. Most believers thank other people at Thanksgiving. They know creatures can join with God to do good. It’s right to thank God as the source of goodness and those who cooperate with God. At Thanksgiving, it’s right to thank the Creator and the cook! Widely Indebted The more we realize how interrelated the universe is and how much God loves in an uncontrolling way, the more we understand how widely we are indebted. A Thanksgiving meal is possible because of God’s action, a chef or chefs, farmers, those who transport food, those who make the plates, tables, and homes we use when celebrating, plants, animals, and so many more. God inspires goodness throughout all creation. We have many reasons to be thankful… and many actors to thank! Thanksgiving Prayer. In light of this, here’s a thanksgiving prayer that aligns with the view that God always loves in uncontrolling ways…“We thank you, our loving God, for being the source of all that’s good.You also empower and inspire the good we receive from others.We’re thankful to humans and nonhumans for cooperating with your love.We’re grateful people because you’re a good and loving God!”

Sexuality and the Immodesty of Love

In this session from An Interesting Conference on Sexuality hosted by Jonathon Foster along with Tom Oord, we hear from Elaine Padilla, an author and a professor of Philosophy and Religion, Latinx/Latin American Studies at LaVerne University. She's super interesting and I love what she talks about in her video. I will not soon forget the phrase she uses here, "the immodesty of love." Find some of Elaine's scholarly work at researchgate.net/profile/Elaine-Padilla.

unBlinding

Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel.When blindness strikes someone after they once had sight, they forget what they once saw. The images once stored leave their memory. Everything fades to black. Physically, the brain forgets how to see as well. If sight is ever regained after being lost for a long time, it takes a very long time – years – for the brain to relearn how to see. Blind Bartimaeus got two miracles that day when he encountered Jesus. His vision was restored – his eyes worked again – and his brain immediately was able to meaningfully process the information it was receiving. Something that should have taken a long time took just a moment. Jesus struggled with blindness. We are not completely certain how long the process of regaining his sight took, but we can imagine that it took years – the long period of time leading up to his public ministry and beyond. We don’t have any reason to believe that his physical eyesight had ever been lost, but I am confident that he was very aware of the cultural blinders that he very naturally acquired as a man born into the context in which he lived. This sort of blindness is very much related to the blindness we struggle with in our own time. It is a coming to awareness that our lenses have been very much affected by influences beyond our control and choice to see the world and everything in it in a particular way. While we sometimes have moments when it feels like the veil has been removed, we later discover that it was just one veil of many that has impacted our ability to see clearly. As we’ve noted before, the crowd in the story likely acted just like crowds do today with those who are blind. They treated the blind as if they were dumb. They communicated in different ways that those who were blind were a burden on society, which shamed them. And they communicated to those who were blind that surely their affliction was an indication of God’s wrath for something they did. Note: similar attitudes and behaviors were held toward people who struggle with other afflictions: leprosy, paralysis, Gentile heritage, being female, being gender binary, being poor, as well as some afflictions of choice such as occupation (prostitutes and tax collectors come to mind). Overall, the culture Jesus was born into viewed all these people as “less than”. To varying degrees, the “less than” attitude served to dehumanize these others, which then allowed the culture to treat them as less than equal human beings. Their cultural lens shaped their vision to perpetually treat the “other” inhumanely. Jesus ventured into non-Jewish territory a little, but mostly he lived his life around the region of the Sea of Galilee, which was not the center of the Jewish or Roman universe. He spent most of his time with Jewish people who thought just like the folks of Jericho. We know that Jesus was able to recognize his cultural blindness because of what he did, what he taught, and the feedback he received. He was considered radical because he treated the “others” as human beings instead of the labels the culture placed on them. He didn’t simply publish books or articles or podcasts or YouTube videos or TED Talks about it – he actually lived according to his new way of seeing, with less and less of the cultural blinders that restricted him. He took a lot of heat at times. He was schooled by a non-Jewish woman asking for help for her daughter – can you imagine Jesus’ blinders being called out by a foreign woman, and he accepted it?! Remarkable! Religious leaders and the general public were stunned by his choosing to be with – up close and personal – all the “others” who had been dehumanized by the majority. He treated them as human beings. There was a first time for all of these gracious moves closer to those who had been ostracized. Especially the first few times, it had to be tough to swim upstream, to go against the crowd, to choose to see differently than everybody else around him. Jesus did this very thing when he stopped in his tracks, against the flow of the crowd, and treated Bartimaeus with humanizing dignity and compassion. Nobody else did. Certainly not the crowd. Apparently not the local religious leaders. Not even his disciples who had journeyed with him so closely. Not even Jesus’ disciples! They were still learning to see and live by what they saw. What strength and courage it must have taken Jesus to take a humane stand when everyone else just kept moving forward. All the way to the end of his life, Jesus chose to take a stand for grace, dignity, compassion, love, all because he began to see differently and live by what he saw. Bartimaeus received his sight, and he chose to follow Jesus, to risk living on what he was seeing. This is similar to the healing of a blind man in Jerusalem according to the Gospel of John. He is credited with the brilliant statement of faith, I once was blind, but now I see. His new sight and insight led him to stand up against the inhumane bullies that treated him like he was dumb, a burden, and cursed. When he chose to stand, he found himself alone, rejected by the leaders of the crowd. He was alone, until Jesus found him and invited him into his company. In the Christian tradition for the majority of Church history we have been told what it means to be a Christian based on easily identifiable scriptures – mostly from New Testament writings apart from the four Gospels. The letters – mostly from Paul – were written to churches or regions to help people with their theology. The new religion was a religion about Jesus. But this is not the same as the religion of Jesus – what Jesus believed and practiced. According to highly respected Christian ethicist David Gushee, Christians have largely missed the core meaning of what it means to actually live like Jesus because so much emphasis has been placed on what to believe about Jesus. Read an excerpt from his book below, or go directly to the article from which the content below was taken. I have written a new book called After Evangelicalism. I claim that white American “evangelical” Christianity is fatally flawed, and probably has been from the beginning of its modern incarnation in the 1940s. It certainly has become a carrier of theological and moral beliefs and practices that fall far short of the way of Jesus, that deeply harm specific groups of people, and that are driving many away from faith. My book both attempts to diagnose what has gone wrong and to propose better ways forward for a post-evangelical Christianity. In thinking through these issues, I make my way to the question of Jesus. I explore who Jesus is for white American evangelical Christians, in contrast with who he is in Scripture itself. I suggest that white evangelical Christianity has produced four flawed versions of Jesus. Which version is presented in various churches depends a lot on who the preacher is and how local traditions develop; and undoubtedly sometimes multiple versions of Jesus are presented in one church. Here is my list of pseudo-Jesuses: Jesus the Crucified Savior. The primary function of this Jesus is to come into this dark world to die on the cross so that we believers might be forgiven our sins and go to heaven when we die. This was the primary version of Jesus I was first exposed to in Southern Baptist Christianity. Jesus loves you and died on the cross for your sins. This Jesus can easily be rooted in the New Testament, although not mainly in the synoptic Gospels. Paul’s writings are a central source of this vision of Jesus, as is John’s Gospel. This is a defensible Jesus, in New Testament terms. But there is a lot missed with this version of Jesus. Specifically, this Jesus has no necessary moral content. He doesn’t really ask anything of believers other than belief. He doesn’t really care about anything other than eternal salvation. This Jesus can produce churches filled with people who believe they are saved but have no particular idea about whether Jesus has anything to say about how we live now. This means we will need to look elsewhere for guidelines for personal and social morality. “Elsewhere” is dangerous territory. Hallmark Christmas Movie Jesus. This is the kind, attentive, ruggedly handsome guy we sing about sometimes. This is the Jesus whom we ask to “hold me,” one who is there “when I am weak and he is strong,” and “when I am down, he lifts me up.” This Jesus is the best (platonic) boyfriend or bro-friend I could possibly have, the one who is there for me all the time, my comfort and encourager. He also runs a really nice Christmas-related operation, so that’s a plus. (This is a joke about Hallmark Christmas movies, which always feature a lonely guy in a cute small town who runs something like a mistletoe shop or candy cane store and just needs a good wife.) This is a highly sentimentalized Jesus, whose main role is our emotional stabilization in a trying world. This is a Jesus who again doesn’t make moral demands. He doesn’t help me think about what faith requires in action. He just wants to comfort me and look good in flannel. Jesus Who Wants You to Succeed. This latest Jesus is a staple megachurch evangelical Jesus. In suburban evangelicalism, this is the Jesus who offers success principles for leadership and life to upwardly striving young professionals. In prosperity gospel land, this is the Jesus who wants you to be as wealthy, lovely and thin as the pretty leaders on stage. I see little contact between this Jesus and the New Testament. This is also not a Jesus who could help me understand why I can’t follow Hitler and Jesus at the same time. Vacant Jesus — Fillable with Any Content We Want. This Jesus, having been distanced so profoundly from his Jewish roots, his account of himself and any New Testament depictions, is a mere shell, symbol or totem. This is a Jesus always available to be filled with whatever content we might like to drop in there. The way you get to this Jesus is by systematically ignoring the Jesus one meets in the Gospels. Or, if he is not ignored, we find ways to evade what he said, to thin down his theological vision and moral demands as far as possible, to shave away anything that might make a claim on us. “Vacant Jesus is not just useless. He can be positively harmful.” This Vacant Jesus is not just useless. He can be positively harmful. This can be the Jesus of the KKK, the Race God Savior of My People Only, #MAGA Jesus or Football Jesus or Corporate Jesus or Straight White American Jesus. Vacant Jesus is always available to be the totem of my tribe, my class, my race, my party, providing ultimate religious justification for whatever I most strongly believe in. The most dangerous thing about Vacant Jesus is that we can deploy him to reverse the actual demands of the real Jesus. Jesus according to Jesus For my book, I decided to see what New Testament scholars are right now saying about Jesus. I turned to a British scholar named James Dunn, a highly respected scholar who died just after I finished the book. In the last book Dunn ever wrote, which is called Jesus According to the New Testament, he acknowledges that the New Testament offers various pictures of Jesus — although none of them are Hallmark Jesus, Success Jesus or Vacant Jesus. He zeroes in on what he calls “Jesus according to Jesus” — the core depiction of Jesus himself as presented in the synoptic Gospels. This very core Jesus, the most basic Jesus, looked like this:· Jesus created and articulated the Love Command as the highest statement of moral obligation: love God with everything you have and love your neighbor as yourself.· Jesus placed priority on the poor. This was visible in his preaching, his parables and his actions.· Jesus offered welcome to sinners. He also taught that welcoming sinners is what God does. This drew criticism because it upset the expectations of those around him.· Jesus demonstrated openness to Gentiles. He taught that many will come from all directions to the messianic banquet, he ministered to many Gentiles, and he commissioned the disciples after his resurrection to go and make disciples of all nations.· Jesus included women among his close followers. He gave women a vital role in his ministry, including them among his band of followers, ministering to them just the same as to men, and appearing to them after his resurrection.· Jesus demonstrated openness and love to children. People brought sick kids to Jesus and he healed them. Jesus rejected the disciples’ efforts to shoo them aside. He elevated a certain kind of innocent childlikeness.· Jesus relaxed Jewish food laws and related regulations about purity. He emphasized inward rather than external cleanness.· Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper. This unforgettable last meal with Jesus became an important part of the ritual life of the early church and provides a link between the ministry of Jesus, his death and the practice of his followers.· Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God, which he understood as already evident in his ministry but also with a grand consummation lying ahead. He offered powerful, authoritative teaching and was notable for his striking parables.· Jesus healed and exorcised demons through the power of the Holy Spirit.· Jesus understood himself as commissioned by God for ministry, sent by God his loving Father, anointed by the Spirit, coming as messiah of Israel.· Jesus understood that, contrary to common expectation, his messiahship meant suffering, rejection and death rather than triumph. He expected to die in Jerusalem, and he did.Take a second and consider this list against the background of the four evangelical Jesuses I started with. Might you join me in finding it a little troubling that there are few points of contact between any of those evangelical Jesuses and the accounts of Jesus that we have just reviewed? To drive the above home even further, I close with the following article by William Willimon. Don’t have nine minutes to read it? Here is the gist: if you want to follow the real Jesus, expect a bumpy, adventurous ride where you are stretched in ways you did not know you needed to grow, where you get to learn to live the way Jesus lived, and also where you will most certainly experience the same kinds of pushback as Jesus did as well. This Way, Truth, and Life is where the Spirit of God thrives and the world becomes a bit more like it was intended, and the people in it are able to live into their True Selves in all of their made-in-the-image-of-God glory. Awesome. Difficult. Unblinded. Let’s go. Repentance, Conversion, and Faith: Jesus transforms, jolts, and disorders for the better every life he touches. By William H. Willimon Repentance: Wising up. Turning to the God who, in Christ, has turned to you – to change your heart and life. Metanoia (Greek for repentance) is cousin of metamorphosis. When John the Baptist prepared the way for Christ, he told the crowds to hear the good news, get washed up, be drowned, give away surplus clothing, practice justice, in short, “Repent!” Although Jesus discourages us from showing off our goodness, he commends public admission (confession) of badness. Critics attempted to trap Jesus in a discussion of tragedy by asking, “Hear about the tower that fell and killed those people in Siloam [natural evil] or the Galileans whom Herod executed [human evil]? What did they do to deserve that?” Jesus responded with a non sequitur: “Unless you change your hearts and lives, you will die just as they did.” If we can’t repent of our temptation to keep God at a distance with our detached theological discussions of others’ pain and injustice (and maybe even our books on Christian vocabulary), we’ll never know much about God. Repentance is turning and facing in a different direction whereby we are enabled to see. Until we stand under the gospel, we can’t understand it. Faith is best known from the inside looking out. Salvation is free and very costly. Jesus transforms, jolts, and disorders for the better every life he touches. When God turns toward you, and you turn toward God, your life turns around.Conversion: Detoxification. The God whom we wanted on our terms, taking us on God’s terms. Crabby Tertullian said, “Christians are made, not born.” Christians come from the church’s baptismal font, not people’s loins. Because Jesus and his kingdom fundamentally challenge everything we thought we knew for sure, conversion is part of the project. Paul didn’t know whether to describe what happened to him, when he met Christ, as birth or death. It felt like both at the same time. Christian is not synonymous with being born American. Conversion is mandatory. Rarely is the Christian life an orderly progression toward God. More typically, it’s a series of jerks and jolts, lurches to the left or right. Fasten your seat belts, you could end up miles from here.Nobody ever gets so adept at being a Christian that you lose your amateur status. Seldom a one-and-done experience, as Christ told old Nicodemus, “You must be born again,” to which Wesleyans add, and again, and again, and probably again. Birth to death, darkness to light then, at the end, death leading to life. Warning: I’m not saying that the Holy Spirit takes advantage of us when we’re down, but if you are going through a particularly painful time in your life, know that Christ enjoys showing up at such moments and working them to his gain. On the other hand, if you are happy with the life you are living, pleased as punch with the person you are, happy with the world as it is, be careful hanging around Jesus. He may take you just as you are but never leaves you there. Everyone he touches, Christ transforms. Extreme makeover, like our salvation, is something that God does to you rather than something you do for yourself. Baptism is not a declaration that you’ve at last found a faith that works for you but rather your bodacious willingness to let this faith work on you. Christ’s baptismal promises: you are not doomed to plod along in the life your parents handed you. By the power of the Holy Spirit, anybody can be a saint, everyone can have fate transformed into destiny by God. You, even you, can hit the road with Jesus. “Come die with me,” he says, “that you might rise to the life I wanted to give you in the first place.” As Jesus headed down the road one day a man comes up and asks him a deep theological question: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” One Gospel says that the man was a “ruler,” another that he was “young.” All agree that he was rich. Jesus brushes him off by telling him to obey all the commandments. Turns out this man is really good at being good; he’s been totally obedient since he was a kid, a hard-core success, both materially and spiritually. Then Jesus speaks those converting words that Christians like me have always wished he hadn’t: “Go … sell … give … follow me.” If you journey with Jesus, expect a rough ride.Faith: Acknowledgement that what scripture says is happening, actually is. Willingness to be whom God has created us to be; readiness to be transformed and transfigured by someone who works beyond, beneath, and above things as they seem to our senses. More a welcoming wave than a stiff salute, when Christ turns to us. Paying attention. Overcome by light. Enraptured. Faith happens when reality, first experienced as mundane and speechless, overflows, so that we hear something and exclaim, “I believe.” Better than some innate human yearning, faith is our reasonable response to an occurrence that has happened to us, named Jesus Christ. More than intellectual assent, the Christian faith is about walking with Christ even when you aren’t sure where he’s taking you. Being faithful more than having faith. Faith arises when we begin to trust Jesus more than ourselves. Most of us come to trust the God that Christianity talks about before we sign up for the whole system. Once you take that first trusting step toward the God who turns to you, Christian teaching, beliefs, and behavior begin to make sense. Paul didn’t know whether to describe what happened to him, when he met Christ, as birth or death. It felt like both at the same time. Jesus asked a man born blind, whom he has just healed, whether or not he “believes” in the Human One (or Son of Man). Jesus isn’t asking the man if he thinks that Jesus exists – Jesus stands in front of him. Jesus is asking if the healed person is ready to trust the one he is staring at. The man responds simply, “I believe.” When a gang of religious scholars gives the man for saying he believes in Jesus, the man replies, “Don’t know much ‘bout theology. All I know was I once was blind but now I see.” This dynamic – believing before all the evidence is in – occurs in the souls of millions. We are saved “through faith,” which sounds to us pragmatic, mother-I’d-rather-do-it-myself Americans like another assignment for self-betterment. No, faith is a gift. Not what we should, ought, must but rather God’s having done, finished, given. If we can say, “I trust Christ,” it’s a sure sign that God has made good on God’s electing promise: I will be your God; you will be my people. Paul says that Abraham (who wasn’t a Christian) is the prime exemplar of faith. Old Abram saddling up the camels, his geriatric wife pregnant, heading out on the basis of a cockeyed promise from a God he had only recently, briefly met. Abraham and Sarah are about as good examples of faith as we’ve got. However, Jesus repeatedly rebukes his disciples for their lack of faith, little faith, slow faith, and inability to believe what prophets said about him. Fortunately, we don’t need much of it; faith the size of a mustard seed will do. Bring on those mountains. “Faith” categorized as a generic human tendency is insipid. Everything depends on what you have faith in. The bland expressions “people of faith” or “faith community” presume that all faiths are the same and that there are people who have “faith” and people who don’t. When someone says, “I don’t have faith in Christ,” it means, not that they are faithless but rather that they have put their faith in someone other than a Jew from Nazareth who lived briefly, died violently, and rose unexpectedly. When free-floating “faith” becomes “faith in Christ,” that’s when our lackluster little lives become adventurous and talk of “faith” becomes interesting. Have trouble trusting that Christ is the truth about God? Be patient. Faith comes to you rather than you to it. The God whom you have difficulty turning toward has promised to turn toward you. Besides, who wants a God who is no more than the one you chose?

Sexuality and Outcasts

Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel.In this session from An Interesting Conference on Sexuality hosted by Jonathon Foster along with Tom Oord, we will hear from James Alison, a Catholic theologian, priest and author, and one of the foremost Girardians (Rene Girard) in the world. James shares his thoughts here about how Jesus chose to occupy the place of those who've been cast out. The thought should not have been lost on us that it's the LGTBQ+ crowd who have been cast out by so many over the years. Find out more about James at jamesalison.com

Blinders

Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel.This is week three of a four-week series based on the following account from Mark 10:46-52 (NRSV): They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” So, throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher, let me see again.” Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way. The way the crowd reacted when Bart cried out is jarring to me. In fairness, I could be letting my imagination run away with me. Maybe they shushed Bart in the most loving of ways that made him feel like he just got a nice warm hug. But I doubt it. The reason I doubt it is because in my experience of being a human being, groups like this can get rude and inhumane, focusing on the wrong thing and acting in ways as a group that they probably wouldn’t if they were alone. This phenomenon is called groupthink. When it gets ugly, we call it mob mentality. The gist is the same – people in a group are influenced by the group itself, wanting to conform and remain accepted by the group, and will do things they don’t understand or believe in as individuals to remain in good standing. Checking out this fascinating video of an experiment in a waiting room. Check out this video for a fuller examination of groupthink, how it works, and its dangerous potential. Bart chose not to conform to social norms that day when he broke his silence as Jesus walked by. His crying out for help was bigger than his vision issue. There was something terribly wrong beyond his inability to see. Bart himself didn’t fit the group. He was very likely not welcome in the group, treated poorly by the group, made to feel stupid by the group, and told he was cursed by God from the group. There are a lot of Barts in the world, and when they cry out, they get shushed. My guess is that every time a person chooses to buck the system and cry out – an indicator that the group has neglected to listen to and include their perspective or person – the group reacts aggressively. This happens in family systems when somebody calls out a patriarch or matriarch for whatever behavior they may have been perpetuating that may not promote the best for everyone anymore. This is painfully evident when a family system supports a family member’s addiction or refusal to address their mental health struggle. Mess with the system and there will be to pay. In Family Systems Theory, problems sometimes rise and are seen not with the addict, but with someone in the system who, like Bart, starts acting up (usually unwittingly). This Identified Patient isn’t the real problem, but rather a symptom of a larger issue at work in families. The interesting thing is that sometimes the family members will protect the unhealthy system because they know that things will get miserable if the status quo is challenged. Of course, this happens on the largest of scales as well. Our ancestors who settled what we now call the United States were at least informed by the Christian faith if not motivated to come to our shores due to their deep religious convictions. And yet they were responsible for the eradication of the Indigenous Peoples who had lived here for thousands of years. I know that some say that this is just the way it is all over the world, which is accurate. But the Kingdom of God that Jesus came to announce and usher in doesn’t operate the way the rest of the world does. The Kingdom of God also does not encourage the buying and selling and abusing other human beings, yet we took it to a whole new level in the US. Not surprisingly, when both issues were challenged – even within religious communities – it was met with fierce resistance. Some advocates of change were deemed heretics. After all, the argument went, the Bible does not explicitly forbid owning other human beings as slaves, so can you really condemn it? Of course, we’re not the only country guilty of such groupthink mentality. Canada made similar offenses against Indigenous Peoples that are horrific as well. Sensible individual Germans, when the power of groupthink came into play, became a machine for the death of millions of Jewish people. Every culture likely has a similar history of destruction related to groupthink. The reality isn’t just in our past, however, it is extremely and painfully current. Wonder what they might be? You don’t have to work too hard. Most headlines that deal with anything remotely political will signal where groupthink is at play. Economic policy, foreign policy, immigration policy, environmental policy, civil rights policies, education, health – it is a long list. With the dawn of new communication platforms offered by social media and the prevalence of smartphones, groupthink has become more powerful and perhaps more sophisticated than ever before. Watch Netflix’s The Social Dilemma if you’re wondering just how sophisticated things have become. My goal isn’t to push buttons that have already been pushed. We are at a time of increased sensitivity (to say the least). The dynamics are not new even though the names of characters might be. What we are living in is what human beings have lived in from the very beginning. The dynamic will be with us forever. Barts of many kinds will continue to cry out. The question is, how will we choose to respond? It is annoying and uncomfortable when people challenge the system(s) in which we feel at home. It’s easy to blow off Bart. But what if it’s Jesus who is the one crying out? What if the Spirit of God working through Jesus was actually an echo of Bart, saying the very same thing? “God, have mercy, now!” I believe this is the case. Jesus didn’t come to build a new level on top of the foundation of what was in place. He came to tear it down and rebuild it. The foundation was fine, but the structure got wonky, like the builders forgot to bring a square, a level, and a plumb bob. The Kingdom of God was and is a different operating system than what the world prefers. Jesus came to shine a light on both: he called out systems that were not aligned with the Spirit of God and he taught about what the Spirit of God was trying to do in the world. He had the audacity to call it Good News, which he stole from Rome. Jesus was saying that the Good News of God was better than the Good News of the Roman Empire. In challenging the restrictions of the Jewish leadership, Jesus was also saying that the salvation offered by God was bigger, more expansive, and more inclusive than the salvation peddled by the Temple leadership. The Spirit of God is still making those same declarations. The dream of God for humanity is bigger than the American Dream. The experience of becoming whole and well is deeper than is offered by popular religion in America. Do we have ears to hear? Do we sense a craving to know more? Next week I will address what that journey looks like if we choose to listen, see, and follow. But for now, be humbled by the fact that the healer, Jesus, who stopped and addressed Bart, which was an act of disruption, marched on to Jerusalem where all his system-bucking came to a climax. Groupthink came into play once again and resulted in the death of one of the purest, loveliest, most grace-filled human beings that ever lived. Groupthink has the capacity to do that. We are capable of horrific atrocities – all of us – especially when we are encouraged by a group. We likely have already been part of some horrible stuff that is directly counter to the Kingdom of God and haven’t even recognized it because our group has done its job. If you’re feeling a bit defensive right now, you just proved my point. The homework I encourage for all of us is to regularly examine all the groups with which we affiliate, knowing that they all have their groupthink effect on us. We are human, after all. Might there be a part of us that wonders how the Kingdom of God, the Good News, might challenge our systems?

Sexuality and Process Theology in Action

The following is the audio from a session of An Interesting Conference on Sexuality hosted by Jonathon Foster along with Tom Oord. we have a wonderful presentation from Monica Coleman. Monica is a process theologian, author, and someone who speaks around the world on all kinds of topics. She brings to light the interrelatedness of all things, the importance of communication, consent, and power in all things sexuality related. When you check into Monica's work by going to monicaacoleman.com, you'll find she speaks on many of the issues that religious leaders usually avoid: sexual and domestic violence, mental health, postmodernism, and religious diversity. Monica is a great gift to us all!