You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2008.
I entered and I will leave.
All that is inbetween is questionable.
What have a learned?
At 50 there is only one word: Love.
Everything else is dross and presumption.
God is Love.
The last post brings up perhaps more questions than it answers. An air of cynicism pervades given the joining of Gospel with econimic and political concerns and interest.
The situation is perhaps a bit like the following story:
43 The next day He purposed to go into Galilee, and He found Philip And Jesus said to him, “Follow Me.”
44 Now Philip was from Bethsaida, of the city of Andrew and Peter.
45 Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found Him of whom Moses in the Law and also the Prophets wrote–Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.”
46 Nathanael said to him, “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.”
47 Jesus saw Nathanael coming to Him, and said of him, “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit!”
48 Nathanael said to Him, “How do You know me?” Jesus answered and said to him, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.”
49 Nathanael answered Him, “Rabbi, You are the Son of God; You are the King of Israel.”
50 Jesus answered and said to him, “Because I said to you that I saw you under the fig tree, do you believe? You will see greater things than these.”
51 And He said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see the heavens opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”
Of course the story begs for allegoricalization. But let’s not be so quick to leave the nakedness of the story and its simplicity.
Can any good come today out of Nazareth?
“Come and see.”
Image of Christ which sold on eBay for $1500. It’s oil and transmission fluid spilled on a concrete floor of a garage. The woman who put it on eBay claims ignorance of its supposed value after a mere eight years of selling things online.
Imago Dei?
We understand who we are via mirrors in our lives. In an older world people understood their value and placement via a more rigid and prescribed social and religious structure. With those thrown to the wind (mostly a very good thing) it is now a smaller circle of friends, associates and family members which mirror back to us who and what we are.
Which is why the therapist business is booming and always will in Western free and, consequently, alienated society.
I can assure you it is your more significant others, past and present, who are definitive in the ways you see and evaluate yourself. This runs from the general (who you are in society…most often a cog or gizmo) to the specific (a daddy, mommy, brother, son, lover husband or wife).
Attempts at self-definition only seem to work when others buy along. Money helps with this buying of your story. Of course, the story you are selling is incomplete and quite possibly an utter fiction. I suppose the real question for any human being is how to have their fictions transformed into non-fiction both now and in the life to come. Perhaps it is even best to see all as one continuum.
The Life to Come
I was watching football on Saturday. The Washington Redskins were playing Seattle. The talk turned at one point to the Redskins season and how the shooting death of free safety Sean Taylor had affected the team and the league. The announcer spoke calmly about Sean Taylor watching the game from heaven as if that was as common a fact as the sun rising each morning.
I wondered what the reception would have been if such reporting had been printed in the sports section of the newspaper, or in Sports illustrated.
My point is this. We will introduce such talk safely after a tragedy and it’s “hands off” those who do. They are not to be taken seriously…it is just convention; something to make us all feel more assured when a man of great promise is shot down senselessly at 24 years of age.
It is, perhaps, a misgyided attempt to make sense of a life with such promise cut short by death. But isn’t this the case with all of us?
So we have fictions all around and we are a fiction ourselves.
Not even the Biblical writers (you know, with their penchant for making stuff up) confess they have little or no idea what comes after death. St. John, perhaps one of the disciples most qualified to comment, says only the following:
it has not appeared as yet what we will be We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is.
This is both a mystery and an open answer worth serious consideration because it addresses the core issue of our present and future identity.
Anybody else interested in that?!
Of course you are. In a way it is all you think about all day long in a variety of ways. Just note it in all its places. Just note it for one day…today.
Ask “how does this question or situation relate to my self-defining and who I am and am becoming?
John says simply that we do not yet apprehend what we will be and that the only thing we know is that when we see Christ we will become like Him.
My old mentor Darrell Johnson once said that come into the fullness of being made in the image of God meant to become a type of Xerox… something which can only hold an image after it has received intense exposure to the original.
He stole it from someone else. I stole it from him. But you get the point. The question then remains: If we are changed by seeing Him as He is (I assume this is not just after death, but starts now) and therein become like Him…how does this work in our world?
How has the Church responded to this call for change and transformation in seeing Christ?
In my view it has done so by avoiding any change at all, for all you have to do is avoid seeing the Living One and His glory and you can remain the same and unchanged. Thus the “commemorative Jesus” of most of Christendom embodied emblematically in pictures, bland theological discussions, worn-out arguments about the “real historical Jesus” (much easier to handle a dead one 2 millennium later than a Live One today) or simply used as part of either a soteriological or eschatological algebraic equation.
The Living Christ is Hebraic not algebraic.
Yet the Jesus we are most often exposed to leaves no deeper or living an impression than auto fluids on a concrete garage floor.
So imagine a Church where the Living One is sought each day as the Center, as Lord, as Master. Imagine if real change and transformation comes from intense exposure to the original instead of enrolling in a class of dead precepts and principles. Imagine if our work in theology led to active worship as a response instead of a book deal for some watered down culturally-accommodated pablum.
If we are truly changed essentially by seeing Him, what are we waiting for? Why are we bidding on the dead concrete slab instead of seeing the Living One in Creation, in the Word, and finally face to face?
Fresh baked herb loaf and California red wine.
Communion
I have been writing and think so much about bread this week I thought I would take a stab at baking some. So at 6 a.m. I came downstairs and loaded up my bread machine with whole wheat flour, soy flour, virgin olive oil, brown sugar, sea salt, Italian herbs sunflower seeds and some yeast in warm water. The machine does all the hard work, then I remove the dough hoping that it will become alive enough to rise up for baking.
This one (pictured) did…some. Not dense enough to shingle the roof with, but hardly a light loaf. Still, tasty cut thin with some melted brie, roasted garlic cloves (which become quite mild if you do not cut them) and some fruit preserves.
That’s dinner later on.
The most notable thing about wine and bread as symbols of Christ come in Communion or the Eucharist. Long disputed in it’s various meanings and traditions it is really quite simple if you do a normal exegesis (interpretation) of the texts.
Jesus, at the crucial moment of his being betrayed by Judas, was assembled with His followers for the infamous Last Supper. In it He explained that the bread was His body, and the blood the “new covenant in His blood”. His request to them, and to us, was simple: “whenever you eat bread and drink wine, do so remembering Me.”
Therefore all we have said, or are likely to say about either bread or wine in some way is reflective of Him and also ourselves.
Thus the problem Paul addresses in Corinth some 20-plus years after the Last Supper (chapter 11 of the first letter).
When problems of interpretation occur it is usually for one of three reasons: ignorance of the context, ignoring a simple reading of the text, or not going deep enough when there is a seeming contradiction.
The Church at large has tripped over the first two and ignored the last.
Put simply, by 55 A.D. the Corinthians had denuded the true meaning and spirit of the “love feast” to a dead rite where the wealthier members would bring much food and wine for themselves alone, share none of it with the poorer members of the fellowship and had all but forgotten the true meaning and remembrance of their Lord’s giving us Himself with body and blood.
Thus Paul says they have not discerned the true meaning of a rite meant to silently preach the whole of the Gospel by eating simple bread and drinking simple wine.
It was a daily occurrence as one thing they did seem to have right in their community was that. But perhaps the very ordinariness of such a ritual made it easier for them to forget. Still, there is little doubt that Jesus wished to be their daily bread and wine and for them to remain close to Him in that daily meditation.
Currently most churches have communion once a month, some weekly. The arguments for such limitations are thin at best, usually citing it becoming less meaningful by overuse. No doubt prayer gets similar treatment by many, myself included. In all events it is a bad call.
The evening meal was to be initiated with others in the breaking of bread and remembering Christ’s Body broken for us. The fact that it was broken and dispersed alone shows it was meant to be common and shared and not a private or selfish endeavor. THis was followed by the common meal, also meant to be shared in potluck fashion with no regard to social rank or financial wealth. After supper the cup was shared in remembrance of Christ’s blood shed in creating a new covenant.
The bread and the wine look back to the Last Supper and Christ’s sacrifice, but also ahead to the great wedding feast where the Church, as Christ’s bride, is met by the Bridegroom Himself.
Once a day it is good, with others if possible, to break bread and remember what God has given us: Himself. And to drink from the cup (or something like minded for those of us who do not drink alcohol) remembering His blood shed today for our sins, and how the blood of the slain lamb is over the lintel (door frame) of my house and how judgment “passes over” my house daily because of it.
It’s a new covenant with new life and should be celebrated with some consideration daily. Think of how it might change our perceptions of the world, ourselves and others.
Imagine a society where, instead of baking bread for hungry people, they produced mass quantities of pictures of bread and posted ads for them at every corner, and handbills were given out with pictures of different types of bread, hundreds of different types of bread. Pictures of wheat bread, pumpernickel, Jewish rye, banana bread, croissants, sheepherders bread, bread sticks, garlic bread…heck, even melba toast.
Now imagine that these images of bread not only became the dominant mode of exchange (some hoarding these pictures, others spending them as fast as they could get them), but were actually consumed on a daily basis despite the fact that they had no nutritional value whatsoever.
Imagine that, besides the handbills, posters and billboards which depicted the pictures of bread, the evening television news consisted of discussions and international debates over which of these pictures of bread were worth the most, and which were declining in value or had become disreputable as a true picture of bread. Imagine witnessing special interest groups arguing and protesting the advantages and disadvantages of consuming their particular type of bread-pictures. And, of course, in such a world, litigation would be intense over who had the actual rights to each type of bread picture, and there would often be disputes over counterfeit pictures or poor foreign copies had infiltrated the market.
And the entire time that men and women were viewing these billboards, wheat was growing up around the posts. And wherever they stapled posters, streams gurgled by with yeast cultures forming in the shallows and the sun.
What would you make of such a society?
*******
Have you noticed that despite the boom in communications technology, people are less and less likely to talk with each other? They talk at each other. They posture, hold their opinions, do their business, but people no longer meet at the city gate and talk with each other. They stay in their darkened apartments and houses and stare at one of the 63 channels on their viewscreen. Their real needs for life are appeased and deflected as they are vicariously run through basic emotional experiences by what they view. And all the while, as they attempt to feed on these empty images, the wheat grows up around the posts, and the streams gurgle by with yeast cultures forming in the shallows and the sun. 
*******
Much of the modern church would feed us pictures of bread instead of inviting us to meet the Bread of Life Himself.
Let’s disappoint them, shall we?
Caption: “Vat! Manna again?! Oy Gevalt!”
SPOKE purports to be a Journal of Christ so why not give a listen to the words of Jesus on Bread/Leaven from the Gospels:
” I am the bread of life; he who comes to Me will not hunger, and he who believes in Me will never thirst.“
” I am the living bread that came down out of heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread also which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh.”
” It is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three pecks of flour until it was all leavened.”
” Watch out! Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.”
Not a whole lot more (except little things like communion)…but deep and concentrated.
The most extensive teaching on bread in relation to Jesus is found in John chapter 6.
After the feeding of the 5,000 they ran around the sea of Galilee to meet Him in Capernaum. In Capernum they may have found Him at the synagogue. Archaeologists have unearthed the lintel of the synagogue in Capernaum. It depicts a pot of manna ornamented “with a flowing pattern of vine leaves and clusters of grapes” (Edersheim).
According to Joshua, the 40 years of manna for the Israelites in the desert ceased after the passover when they had come into the promised land.
It is with this backdrop, and the messianic expectations and liturgy of Passover that Jesus both feeds the 5,000 and teaches them in Capernaum that He Himself is the bread of life…the living bread come down from heaven.
As is always the case with Jesus, He is both the signifier and the sign itself. The sign points to the living embodiment, which is Jesus Himself. You will find this to be true in all cases and with each name.
Just as Jesus is Living Water, and Living Word, He is also Living Bread.
The hunger and thirst you experience which cannot be quenched or filled is meant to be filled by Him alone in a living way.
To Leaven or Not to Leaven
Leavened and unleavened bread is a powerful symbol in the Bible. During Passover they ate unleaven bread or the “bread of affliction” to remind them of the Exodus. It was starting from scratch every day and the bread was dense and dead having no yeast.
My friend Kim once bought me a breadmaker. It’s easy except the yeast thing. With what must have been ineffective yeast my bread loaves were chocked full of nuts, spices, virgin olive oil, sea salt and brown sugar. When done it was suitable to saw off pieces and re-shingle the roof. Such is the plight of unleavened or ill-leavened bread.
The manna given the Israelites in the desert was daily. The only exception was it kept for two days over the Sabbath. The other days it would go bad by nightfall.
This fleshes out the prayer for “daily bread”. Give me what I need today, tomorrow will come with it’s own requests. Moreover, we are to want God as our living bread daily. As there is no separation of the scared and secular our services on Sunday are not meant to be anything but a group reminder of our daily activity and life with God.
If what is the only time you get bread, you are starving yourself the other six days.
To this comes the idea of leavened bread. One the leaven of the Kingdom (the parable of the leaven secretly put inside three pecks of flour) and the leaven of the Pharisees.
The leaven of the Pharisees is named as hypocrisy, or basically missing the entire point. Jesus cautions and says “beware”. How quickly religion and hypocrisy are added and multiple within us.
What are Christians most known for in the world? Hypocrisy and religious judgment. That is the leaven of the Pharisees. Religion is the enemy of faith, hope and love found in Christ. Just a small amount of it permeates and grows throughout the whole loaf.
Likewise the leaven of the Kingdom.
Recently I made some dough in the breadmaker and bought some fresh yeast. It mixed for awhile then applied some heat. I came back 30 minutes later and the entire globe was filled to three times the original size and it was overflowing out the top. So it is with the Living Bread and His Kingdom. Let Him place His leaven in our hearts and see how it works its way out from the center of our being.
Unleavened bread. Image courtesy of the Cook Almost Anything blog.
Bread is both the most ordinary substance and sustenance; and the most sublime symbol and sign of the ineffable. As God’s own heart and way is perfectly revealed in His Son there is no separation between the sacred and the secular. All is sacred, from the worship of high church, to the eating of simple bread.
It was after traveling with Jesus along the road to Emmaus, and not recognizing him, that two men discussed with Him the days events including all matters concerning one Jesus of Nazareth. After careful explanation (there would be no talk of “that’s just your interpretation…”) of how the Moses and the Prophets pointed to this Messiah, the two men urged Jesus to stay with them.
In the blessing of the simple bread their “eyes were opened and they recognized Him.”
“Recognizing” is literally “re-cognition”…a “re-knowing”. They already knew Jesus but were unable to see that it was Him until the bread was broken. Then they spoke after he left them about how their hearts burned inside of them as “He was speaking to us on the road.”
So it can be in the breaking of Bread. Far from our once-monthly and even weekly communion services, it seems Jesus had something more organic and daily in mind when He promised to be our Bread, laid the only request for provison in His prayer for bread, used it as the symbol for His body and fed the crowd on Passover with five barley loaves and two small fish.
More instructive was the fact that St. John makes note that they are made of barley, the “meanest” of all breads, often used to feed animals or used as an offering for the sins of prostitutes.
As it was the Passover, the bread would be unleaven (made without yeast to make it rise and multiply in it’s simple fashion). Such bread was eaten for seven days and was called the “bread of affliction” because it was a tangible reminder of the Jews fleeing the slavery of Egypt into the desert because they had not had the time to grab the leaven (yeast). They had only so much time to plunder the Egyptians. In the wilderness they ate unleavened bread for 40 years, and also manna, a daily bread provided from God that could not be stored.
It was with these notions of bread that 5,000 Jews came to Jesus during the Passover and where He broke the bread, gave thanks and began to distribute it. More than any leaven, this miracle not only fed the 5,000, there were twelve baskets of leftovers from the original five barley loaves.
Jesus leaves after the people get excited and wish to make Him the Bread King.
Once on the other side of the Sea of Galilee (in Capernaum) Jesus finds that many have races around the rim of the Sea to meet him.
Is it because they have realized He is their Passover lamb? Is it because they realize He is their Manna come down from heaven?
No. They want more bread.
Like the woman who wanted the living water so she would not have to come daily and draw from Jacob’s Well, they want bread on demand…not the One to Whom the sign points to as the “the bread of life” Himself.
I doubt we would have done any better, or do.
The key issue is believing in Him. That is the invitation of John 6 and also the promise that all can “do with the works of God” because the worlk of God is simply to believe.
Part 2 to come.
“For, there is ever deepest unity and harmony in the truest life, the Life of Life.” ~Alfred Edersheim
Wine fermentation at the cellular level. Photography by Sondra Barrett. Visit her beautiful website at sondrabarrett.com
It’s New Years Day 2008 and I know well enough that resolutions are like buffing out a scratch on your car when your transmission needs replacing.
Paul, writing to the party animals in Corinth, remind them that those steeped in Christ are made a “new creation”. Elsewhere he says similarly in regards to outward circumcision, that the New Creation makes circumcision irrelevant. That is akin to saying that God’s fecundity in Christ making the New Creation makes religion the empty bottle after the wine has been drunk.
What races through the New Creation is the Living Christ who intoxicates like living wine. It is no wonder that Jesus taught this new wine would burst the “old wineskins” with it’s new fermenting and living expansion. The old skins have been expanded as far as they will go and become brittle and thin. The new wine will burst them unless fresh wineskins hold Him who is that living wine.
Yeast
The key ingredient in the production of wine and most bread is leaven or yeast. It is the living agent used to produce both abundance and fermentation. The study of Bread in the Old and New Testaments is fascinating, but reserved for tomorrow.
Let’s stick to wine. Ironically, I gave up drinking wine last year and fought to do so completely the great majority of the year. I loved the way it tasted, how is burned a bit on the way down and warmed the whole of my body. It also, in small doses calmed my active mind.
But my doctors came alongside and said it had to go or I would.
So last night was free of wine. I have to pass from the image to the Living Wine Himself. I am forced to or I will die: a fitting living metaphor. Not just a cautionary tale, but a more vivid invitation for direct contact with the One to Whom the image is meant to be a mirror reflecting back to Him.
Do you wish wine inside you? Do you want celebration and to party? Come to the Feast of the Lamb where the wine and food flow freely from the open hand of God.
In Matthew’s account the disciples of the Baptist come to Jesus and note that while they are fasting Jesus’ disciples are eating and drinking freely. Jesus reminds them that His disciples have the Bridegroom (Himself) with them. When He is taken from them for crucifixion then they will fast with a deeper longing than anything John’s disciples can understand. It is in that context that Jesus teaches them about the old and new wineskins. John is the old wineskins, as is all of Judaism. No religion can contain this new and living wine, even one sanctioned by God Himself. His disciples will be the new winseskins, as are you and I.
We can be filled up with this One Who is new wine. This happens only via the Holy Spirit. Paul understood this and simply said “don’t become intoxicated with wine but instead be so filled by the Spirit”. Just as our perceptions, speech and interactions can be informed by wine/spirits, so can they be by the Holy Spirit of God which is elsewhere called the Spirit of Christ.
This is the true intoxication leading to the true celebration. The Baptist understood this. The very same disciples came to him with the question they posed to Jesus about fasting and wine drinking. Without consulting each other (John is in prison and the recounting of this is from John 2, not the synoptic Gospels) John uses the same metaphor of bride and bridegroom that Jesus uses. “I am not the Christ but I have been sent before Him. He who has the bride is the bridegroom; but the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly because of the bridegroom’s voice. And so this joy of mine has been made full.” Then he ends it withe the infamous words “He must increase, but I must decrease.”
Cana
Both incidents came after the wedding at Cana where Jesus, in the middle of the feast when the “wine had failed” had the servants fill the six stone waterpots reserved for the Jewish rite of purification then draw some for the headwaiter who thought it magnanimous that the bridegroom should save the best wine for last when most of the guests were already drunk and their palates most undiscerning.
Well, that whole last paragraph of events can be mined or mulled depending on your fancy. But the overarching meaning of the story John states clearly: “This beginning of His signs Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and showed His glory, and His disciples believed in Him.”
Turning the waters of stone vessels meant for purification into the finest wine for a wedding feast is the first sign of His glory and the New Life found in Him this new year. He Himself is our wine; He Himself our purification working new life within our stony and hollow vessels. The sign points to something beyond itself…the mirrored image reflecting to the True Image.
When that wedding feast was done (itself just a snapshot of the True Wedding Feast to come) they porobably took the leftover wine from those six stone waterpots and placed them in fresh wineskins for they were still close enough to the miracle to be alive and expanding.
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