tabletalk

Of Jobs and Houses: What's Happening?!

Whenever I am away from my blog it is usually because my life has overwhelmed my ability to sit down and reflect. Too many blogs are unreflected thoughts - which is fine, don't get me wrong. Just not my interest most of the time.

Why?! you may ask.

Answer: Since December we have been intently looking for a place to move and I have been on the job search. In the last 3 weeks all these things have come together.

First the job search. I am taking a position as Director of New Church Development for the Presbytery of the Cascades. For you non-Presbyterian types, the Presbytery has a certain jurisdiction. In this case the Cascades Presbytery is all of Oregon, the very southern border of Washington and the very northern border of California. It is a position that is funded for two years. The work of starting churches is at the center of my interests and passions. I'm excited for the opportunity to assist the Cascades in their vision and work. It is absolutely unique in our denomination, but I hope it will become more common. Click on Cascades NCD Website to find out what they are doing. I begin work on April 15th. I'll be in Portland. It is the same Presbytery that John and Gail Moody serve in (for those who know John and Gail) plus I have already taken advantage of the kind hospitality of Chuck and June Cassell (for those of you who know Chuck and June).

Second: We've found a house!

It is in the Ashton neighborhood of Forster Ranch in San Clemente. We plan on moving by April 15th. One of our goals was to get closer to the ocean. Unfortunately to be at the ocean was impractical financially. But we are now 4.5 miles from our new home to putting our big toes in the water. We think that is great. The house is smaller, but still has room for guests.

Why and how and?!? OK, I get it. We believe our long term residence is in S. California. Because the job is only funded for two years we decided to stay settled in SoCal and I would become an interstate commuter. How? Well we're not sure, but it seems to be the right thing all around. If we don't buy in this market then we may well be shut out in the future. We will always maintain a home in SoCal. Dee has moved her office out of the home and into her main office in Irvine. Lindsay is looking for a job in Orange County and Chelsea is in-between things. I'll be getting a small place in Portland for the time being. Alaska Air will be my friend. Anyone have frequent flier miles they want to contribute?! No, seriously!

Did I mention that the escrow on the house was 15 days! Kudos to Bill Rolfing our realtor, our lender, Karen Vietmeier of Los Ranchos Presbytery staff, Julie Sandler who found the loan, and I'm sure countless others. Thanks.

More in a while.

Questions From Without: Hell and the Bible 1

My friend, Scott Truman, wrote a comment to the previous post and suggested three passages where he wants me to apply McLaren's matrix. Scott thanks for the thoughtful response. We'll use your texts for conversation.

The matrix McLaren suggests is to: Identify the Passage; Identify the Behavior it addresses; What is the Consequence; What's the Point the text is making.

Passage: Matthew 13:24ff - The Parable of the Sower and the Seed
Behavior: Being weeds and bearing no fruit, no harvest. Everything that causes sin, all who do evil are
included in this passage. Being either counter to the Gospel or unproductive.
Consequence: Thrown into the fire, weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Point: Bear fruit; hear and respond to the message, the good news.

Let's start at the end to think about this passage. Jesus wants his hearers to repent, turn, receive the good news of his coming and bear the fruit of relationship with him. The fruit is that others will come, not that they be turned away.

I had a professor in seminary who said that the purpose of this passage was to find the good soil and only sow the Gospel in that receptive ground. My hand flew up in protest and I was summarily dismissed. I believe the greater context of this passage is to say that God's message and salvation is so abundant in grace and mercy it can be spread over all kinds of soils in the attempt that it will find a place to grow. There is abundance not scarcity in this passage. Abundance of what? Grace and Good News.

I believe with McLaren that the intense language of the New Testament as regards hell and judgment, is intended to cause us to take seriously Jesus admonitions. I don't believe it is intended to create a kind of scenario that results in a "turn or burn" mentality. God is not interested in our burning, he is interested in our turning. God doesn't give up on those who reject him, but he warns us that we are in a serious and perilous spot.

So many times Christians use these passages to support our separation from those who don't believe. We quote them or hold on to them to justify our position as being right and good. We're safe, those sinners are in trouble, just like Jesus says.

Jesus however uses these illustrations to motivate those on the inside of the faith. The message is a positive one: bear fruit. It isn't the judgment against the world that Jesus is talking about, it's against those who seem to think that they know him. Can we hear his voice? Every time I preach or teach the Bible, once I understand the context of the passage, I consider the fact that it is first a word to me before it is a word to others. It is what is called "standing under the Word." Take the log out of your own eye before you take the speck out of your neighbor's eye.

I believe we'll discover that these passages are more like this, than they are condemnation for the lost. Jesus came to seek and save the lost. It seems his harshest criticism is for those who say "I see, I hear, I speak" and are blind, deaf and dumb.

Questions From Without: Hell and Reading the Bible

Anytime someone reads the Bible they come to it with a set of expectations. Every single person brings prejudices, insights, wisdom, ignorance, good methods and bad to reading the Bible. Many times in our 21st century existence we forget that there are 20 centuries between us and those who wrote the texts we read. Often we simply lift the texts out, transporting them over the centuries into our modern existence without any translation or context. This can cause us to go horribly wrong in our interpretations. We all want it to speak to us. Often all of these expectations and methodologies end up keeping us from understanding. Every approach has its limits. There is no "right way" to read the scriptures. But there are better ways to read it than ohters. This requires great discernment and good mentors and a lot of honesty.

We are going to look at a way of reading the passages on Hell, suggested by Brian McLaren in chapter 19 "Homework Assignment" in The Last Word and the Word After That. It's a method that I believe allows us to let the passages to speak for themselves. This is Lewis's point, let the text speak and learn from it without imposing your expectations and needs on it. We can't do this perfectly but we can approximate it. Here is McLaren's method:

"Make a table with four columns, headed 'Passage,' 'Behavior,' 'Consequence,' and 'Point.' Read through Matthew, and note each passage that deals wit the subject of judgment (not just the passages that explicitly mention hell of Gehenna or Hades). Then note the behavior that will be judged, along with the consequence that follows that behavior. Then try to identify the point: what is the rhetorical purpose of the passage?
Here's what I think you'll find.
1. Our contemporary modern Western conservative Protestant gospel would say this:
Behavior: Not accepting Jesus Christ as personal savior, not being saved or born again, not asking Jesus
into your heart so your sins can be forgiven, etc.
Consequence: Being sent to hell.
Point: Accept Jesus as your personal Savior.
2. Not one passage from the Gospels says anything remotely like this."

We're going to use this method. If you would like to try it on your own that would be exceptional, but if you trust McLaren not to misquote the scripture, then we'll simply use his table from the above chapter.

The next few blogs will look at how this works. One of the things to know is how the people of Jesus' day viewed hell. Each of the principle religious groups of Jesus' time had a different way of approaching this concept. Hell was in no way accepted by all the religious people of that time. It took centuries for it to become something like what we have today. Remember we can't simply understand a text in our own time without understanding it first in Jesus' time. We will need to know how the Sadducees look at a text and how the Pharisees would view it. There are other groups like the Herodians and more. So I will comment on them as their views are addressed in different texts.

The hard thing for us is to set aside our agendas so we can listen to the biblical agenda. Wouldn't it be best to get close to what God wants of us, rather than to make God get close to what we want?

Questions From Without: Before Deconstruction

Deconstruction in some circles is a dirty word. For many it means making changes for change sake. For others it means throwing the baby out with the bath. Still others believe it is simply a reaction to the status quo by anarchists who want their own way to be put in place. Some of you are puzzled right now by the use of the word and what I'm saying.

It's a simple word. We're going to, as McLaren says, deconstruct Hell.

Let me give you an analogy. I've worked on many cars over the years. I've rebuilt engines a couple of times. I'm very methodical when I work on an engine. The manual is always next to me. As I pull things off the engine to examine the trouble, I lay them out neatly on the garage floor, usually on some sort of tarp, taking care to remember and organize the parts in the order that I have removed them. When I find the parts that don't work, worn rings, charred valves, whatever...I replace those things with new parts. Then I reassemble the engine with the new and original parts. Careful again to put everything back that is needed. If there are extra parts when I reassemble...then I have to go back and start over. I don't want to do that.

Deconstruction is a little like that, though we may decide that there are extra parts in our engine that we can do without. Things that simply inhibit the running of the engine. Or there are better designs to our current concerns.

Before we begin deconstructing Hell, let me remind us of one of C.S. Lewis's points in Experiment in Criticism. Again, I believe this is a must read for any teacher or preacher. I think it is a must read for anyone who wants to know how to view art or read a book. This little book, though quite literary in scope, outshines Adler's book How to Read a Book.

The point I want to take away from Lewis is this: allow the book to tell you about itself. As much as you can, surrender to the text. Don't read into it (which in hermeneutics we would call eisegesis). Literature like art, Lewis says, will communicate itself. Good, bad, enduring, superficial, it comes out in the reading of it. It is difficult to surrender to a book sometimes. Sometimes we're at odds with the author and their method. Sometimes it is over our heads. Sometimes there is such historical distance that we are unfamiliar with the context. All of this happens when we read the scriptures.

How does this apply to Hell? What we know of Hell is often informed by everything but the teaching of Jesus. We hold dear lots of opinions that simply don't come from Jesus. In order to know what it is, we also need to know what it is not. McLaren does the heavy lifting here. In his chapter "Homework Assignment" he outlines the Gospel's teachings on Hell in a way that allows us to examine closely what they are about, and he gives us a way of seeing what they are not about. You may disagree with his method or conclusions, but in the end we must at least take a look at the scriptural passages and determine whether our interpretations are broken or not. If they are, what needs to be done to fix the problem?

So, my encouragement: Be open to reading the text of scripture and surrendering to it alone. We can never be fully objective. But surrender means we will look, and read and wait until the truth or lack thereof, comes out at us. We also don't do this in isolation. There are reputable and faithful saints who have gone before who inform our reading. But for right now, let's put all the opinions aside and see if we can't simply take Jesus at his word without Dante or Milton or Luther jumping in. And let's be honest when they do jump in to not let what we've always held onto get put into Jesus' mouth.

Deconstruction is next.

The Flames of Hell

These are three pictures from my neighbor's back yard about 6:15pm. This is looking back at Trabuco and Modjeska Canyons. This is the Santiago fire in Orange County. These flames are more intense than they look, and represent only part of about 12,000 acres burned. We are pretty safe, though the flames are only a few miles away. We pray for those who are in greater need and suffer greater loss. We remember to be careful not to attribute our safety with being blessed by God, because it means that those who lose everything are not. This I don't believe. And if we believe we have good fortune, it is intended to be used for the good of others not simply to be self satisfied.

Questions From Without: Hell, Damn It's Leaking

You have permission within the bounds of these blogs to say out-loud both 'damn' and 'hell'. We just won't damn anyone or anything to hell, how's that?

In this short blog I want to give you an image from McLaren. P.143 in the chapter "Up Toward the Stars", there is this: "You can't leave a sinking ship until you begin to construct a seaworthy one. Hell is one of the leaks of your sinking ship. You're trying to patch the hole. During your days here, I'd recommend you try to imagine a new ship, a seaworthy one. Put your energy there. You may find that the hell problem sinks with the old ship, then, and you won't solve it, but you'll leave it behind."

This in short is what I will attempt to do, with the help of more learned and faithful people than I. When we deconstruct something, like a value we've held, or an opinion that needs to be changed or behavior that needs to stop, it isn't helpful to simply do away with the old. Because what we take out of one, the nuggets of truth, need to have a place to go. If we're going to examine hell as a concept that Western Christianity has made about the future as a response to its insecurity about the future (which I hope to demonstrate), then there needs to be a seaworthy vessel for the scriptures we look at. There needs to be some kind of construct in the making. You can't simply take all the pieces apart and not build something.

We also don't want to tear something apart just to be new. But when something doesn't work, in our jobs, or families, or lives, or our faith, we can't keep pretending that it does work. If we have made the concept of hell a servant of our anxiety, then it ceases to serve us well. If it is something from God, in the form we have, then we better pay attention. But it seems to me that we have taken the Hebrew understanding or lack thereof of an afterlife and made something of eternity and salvation and punishment that Jesus doesn't make. So while we take things apart to examine, let's also build something up that will take care of our anxiety for the future. Let us build something that is seaworthy for the challenges of life - all of them, not just a few anxious thoughts that get our attention. My feeling has often been that we get tired of trying to contain the complex and we short-cut our arguments and beliefs just to have something. It's a bit like getting a job just to have work without attending to your passions and interests and abilities. (Believe me - getting work if you need it to survive, well, we can't stand on ceremony.) But you get the drift. We're better off recognizing what we're doing and not confuse our anxiousness with vocation. Just settling something to relieve our anxiety, well, it doesn't work. We must take the anxiety full on.

Maybe I'm off subject because of my own anxious life. But I still believe that most of us who have an idea of hell that is evangelical and more conservative in nature, have it rooted not in the text, but in our anxiety. So this is not wasted words. We are anxious for our future. If I can get my ticket into the next life - I'm clear. Goodbye anxiety. Problem is, I've been with too many people who punched their ticket and the anxiety remains to the point of death.

If I read the "Sermon on the Mount" right, then God takes care of his children, we need to trust that basic promise and not be anxious for tomorrow for it isn't real. Today is real. It doesn't mean I don't plan or prepare - that's today's work, but I live in the now not in tomorrow. We've made salvation and promise and punishment all about tomorrow in our Western culture. It's time we stop. So let's build a seaworthy ship for now, for the day, for reality and not the anxiety of tomorrow. That anxious ship will leak.

I want to begin with a reiteration of Lewis's understanding of reading a text, like the Bible. In my next blog we will revisit that. Because it is the biblical witness that gives us guidance here. Our problem is that we let Milton (Paradise Lost) and Dante (The Divine Comedy) overshadow Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And we are terrible of letting go of the familiar. But it is time to let go.

Questions From Without: A Preface on Hell (Damn)

Let me begin up front and say that what I write about hell will lean heavily on those I read. Obviously, I'll give you Lewis. Maybe even as obvious I'll give you Brian McLaren. Much of what I will comment on will not be original (maybe nothing is - it isn't my point). McLaren's book, The Last Word and the Word After That, is going to be the must read and expanded text for my short writings. Read the whole thing, but if you don't you can read along here and I'll give chapter and verse.

But I begin with a preface. This is my own. Original, well, as I said....

In recent months I've been working hard at staying in the moment. Being present to what I feel, what I think, who I am, what is happening to me in the course of my now is becoming increasingly important. I've tried to do this over the years, but it has become more intentional and necessary in my life at this juncture. Why? Well as one person put it to me recently, right now is the only reality I have. Next Saturday is a fantasy. It doesn't exist. The events that lead up to the future haven't happened, so next week, next month, next year isn't real. In quoting Henri Nouwen to me, my friend tried to remind me that to project myself into the future brings only greed and anxiety. To live out in the future is to foster anxiety and greed. (See Nouwen's book - The Way of the Heart in my book list.) 'What ifs' rob us of the ability to be attentive to here and now concerns. And here and now is the only reality. It may not seem profound, but it is hugely profound for living. When we get ahead of ourselves we can miss the reality of now. In fact, we often use the future precisely to avoid the here and now.

I believe that the Western form of Christianity we live in can breed and does often breed anxiety and greed. I believe it is in no small part because we want to secure our future. This I think is fed often by our theology of heaven and hell and salvation and judgment.

My underlying belief in this set of blogs is that God is fundamentally concerned with reality, the here and now. God is certainly the God of past and future as well as present, but we only know it in the here and now. Remember, we are called to knowledge of God as in knowing a person, not in the accumulation of knowledge for our heads. Biblical knowledge isn't Bible trivia (which I hate) it is relationship, intimate relationship, with our Creator. All we know of God, even if it is past information, is intended to be present to us now. It is not a treasure to be kept locked up but information that is to used to help us pay attention now.

What has this to do with hell, you ask? Ah, my point. We have made things like salvation, hell, heaven, and many others to be mostly concerned with the future. I believe this is a giant cultural mistake driven by our need to secure that future. I believe the discussion of heaven and hell isn't ultimately about an anxious unreal future, as it is about who we are here and now. God is the God of here and now. We often abandon that in the face of the seeming contradictions we face in things like the problem of evil, where we look around us and don't see the evidence of God's rule (Kingdom language). This causes us to shrink back from asserting the fact - God is in charge. A faith statement to be sure, but one that has evidences in the present and should be argued from the present, not only the past. Argued from our lives and our actions.

This means to me that Jesus' teaching on hell is concerned more in the here and now, the present, than in a future. God is very present. In the blogs to come we will unfold this with biblical material and questions and simply try to look at things differently. Lewis's Experiment in Criticism will be helpful for how we approach the text of scripture and allow it to speak afresh to us. We have so many cultural layers to peel off that it may take some time before this will be a conversation and not a reaction.

If Jesus' teaching is more concerned with the present than the future, then typical evangelical language and use of the images of heaven and hell will have to be evaluated. McLaren, love him or hate him, provides some stimulating challenges to the way things have always (ok the last 300-400 years) been. Our present positions are not that old compared to the faith. (And remember, if you are not an evolutionist, you don't believe that things get progressively better...that would include biblical insight!) Don't write me about this last line, I'm not making any kind of statement except to say be open to the fact that we might have gotten it wrong!

(Maybe I should subtitle this series "Damn"? Vote?)

Danger Will Robinson

It seems to be a pattern, this walking away from the blog world in order to maintain my life. I must admit, each sojourn away gives me persective into how my blog concerns can take over my reality. It's not that I have a following or anything. We'll leave that to the Roberts of the world. But I imagine myself to have a following!

Blogging for me is a public journal of sorts. It is a way to have a conversation with more people than myself. Blogging is a way for me to test my thoughts with others. Blogging for me is the discipline of writing. It is not a place where I hope to convince anyone of anything, or even impress with my ideas. Though I admit, I often believe that is what I am doing. This enterprise started out as a discipline to further my writing and thinking. Funny, but leaving it fallow is also a disicipline that is necessary for my writing and thinking.

The hazard for me is simple: there is a constant danger in separating out the public and the private. When I dance about with an idea or a feeling in public, I often can come to the conclusion that I've "dealt" with it. When in fact, what I have done is to put forth a "presentable self" that seeks to be applauded. It is not unlike what I do when I preach. The careful preacher makes sure that they are not disconnected from their sermons, but also recognizes that there are boundaries to be respected. I'm not suggesting that blogging be a place where I blur those boudnaries.

No. For me the issue is simply that between preaching, teaching, blogging, pastoring, the danger is that there are more and more places where I present my acceptable and controlled self, and fewer places where I am myself. Don't get me wrong, I am pretty much my self, wherever I am (this sometimes leads to disillusionment with people who have built up ideas of who I am that are not based on reality.) But it is an occupational and even a human condition, to appear with what Susan Howatch called our "glittering image" in public, all the while we are losing touch with other aspects of our humanity.

This is not unique to pastors. But we have an unusual callling that demands our true selves to be engaged with people at the most intimate and difficult of times. During these times we are called to "hold it together" as professionals. However, I am not called to be distant from the lives of those around me, I'm called to incarnate the presence of Christ that is in me for their sakes, and my own as well. All this is to say, blogging doesn't always lead to integration. Sometimes it is isolating and dis-integrating. Not unlike the work we pastors do, blogging can lead us to live in more than one world. But just like my ministry and life, the goal is wholeness and integrity - not merely intellectually, but emotionally, spiritually and psychologically.

Just a note. I'll be blogging again. I've actually got some things to say, but it is not an endless supply. And sometimes our voices need to be silent (even our keyboards) in order to listen. Sometimes that silence needs to be longer than at other times. Let's face it, sometimes we have thoughts that ought not to be expressed.

The NBA Playoffs, Chick Hearn and Imagination

I'm almost ashamed to admit, and pretty sure that what I write here will enlist more territorial animosity than anything theological that I write. The Lakers have been my team since childhood. Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, Gail Goodrich, Riley, Chamberlain, Kareem, Magic, Coop, Worthy, Scott, Rambis, Shaq, Kobe, Fisher (.4), Horry (who last night joined Kareem and Pippen as the only other player to appear in over 200 playoff games) Harper, Odom - all of them and more - I have watched and cheered and cursed depending on how the game goes!

WHAT I MISS. More than anything I miss Chick Hearn. Got his autograph at a game once. He had all these great phrases that must be copyrighted because you don't hear them anymore. "It's in the refrigerator, the light's out, the eggs are cooling, , the butter is getting hard, the jello is a jiggling." He'd say this as the game appeared to be in-the-bag for the Lakers. If they were playing great, he'd say it. If they were stinking it up, he'd say it. He'd say things like "Marge [his wife] can shoot freethrows better than Shaq." Or "Tonight they couldn't beat the Sisters of Mercy." He often would say of someone who tried to do too much with the ball and turned it over, "The mustard is off the hot dog." When a player upfaked another and the defender bit it would be "He put ______ in the popcorn machine." He is credited with the term "slam dunk" and many more.

More than all these word pictures that Chick was so good at, he was even better at making you part of the action. He was maybe the last of the simulcast artists who announced TV and radio at the sametime. He knew the distances of all the shooting spots on the floor. If it was a three from the corner he gave you the location and distance. If it was from the free throw line he told you how far it was. If a guy dribbled right and crossed over left he told you. The sky-hook by Kareem was a "swing left and shoot right" move. You could "see" the game on the radio.

It was told that Chick would rehearse calling a game by going to the Forum (mostly) by himself and call an entire quarter of action just by imagining the players out on the court. Nobody was there, he saw it in his head. When it happened on the court, he'd already seen it so it was not a surprise.

There is a spiritual lesson in this. Chick was dedicated to a craft and a sport that in the scheme of things had only the value of entertainment, a mere distraction from everyday concerns. His ability to imagine things before they happened, allowed him to describe think even better when he encountered them during a real game. Would that our Bible reading lead to even better discipline. One of the challenges to myself and to many Christians of our time is to be Biblically literate. If we can read the Word and imagine the events themselves in our own lives, or us in the events, then when they take place, how much better prepared we will be when we encounter the circumstances in real time, real life? A lot. And when it comes to the biblical story, the Story of the way things really are, we are not dealing with entertainment but life and death issues. Eternity is at stake.

Let me once again give you Lesslie Newbigin's point about how we read the Bible from his book A Walk Through the Bible.

"The story told by the Bible was the story by which people
understood the meaning of their lives, and for several
centuries, even after the invention of printing in Europe in the
mid fifteenth century, it was the only book most households
had. Most households today have a Bible. But do people read it
in the way they read other books? Do they read it as a whole,
as a story from beginning to end? I think not. Most of us treat
the Bible as an anthology of helpful thoughts to which we may
occasionally turn, and from which we can obtain comfort,
guidance, direction. And even in our readings of the Bible in
church, we tend to look at only very short passages which
reinforces the impression that the Bible is a collection of
nuggets of wisdom from which we can choose what we find
helpful. But in that case, of course, it is not the Bible itself that
decides what is worth reading: we decide in advance. The Bible
is not our authority."

Newbigin is talking about seeing the whole of the Bible as one story. It takes discipline to do this. It takes time to see the whole picture. It takes reading or listening or both to the whole story. It is more than a few clever cliches, it is the imagination to see the story spread out before you and you in it. Would that we have a little more of the dedication that a person like Chick Hearn put in to a temporal entertainment. Would that we take this world-defining story to heart and mind.

It's not in the refrigerator yet.

Verbal Picture: Word Clouds

The following is courtesy of snapshirts. Click on it for a larger image. It is an alphabetical representation of words used with some frequency at tabletalk. I don't think I want my psychologist friends to think too much on this. But the words we use regularly are a clue to who we are and what we are doing. Yikes!