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Easter always gets second billing. When people think of Christianity they think CROSS…not empty tomb.
Which is just wrong-headed for anyone who is mortal.
I guess it makes a certain twisted sense. Paul said that the cross would be the issue. It was in 60 A.D. and it is today. A “stumbler” or “nonsense”. Yet the same God Who chose women to be the first eyewitnesses to resurrection (not men who were the only ones counted as valid) decided to be very clear on the centrality of the cross.
Deal.
I do not know how it plays out for you…but my guess is it either stumbles you or doesn’t quite make sense. (The whole “cross” thing).
I find it interesting that people wear elaborate crosses around their necks (I do) and are drawn to it. No ones wears an empty seplechre. That’s the story we now have to deal with.
All our arguments that want to predate the cross or stick on it miss the historical fact. He Rose.
He isn’t dead.
In thiose moments when you cried out to Him to be alive you were not wrong. He is with you…NOW.
One of the difficulties of “Spoke” is that if it is to be Christocentric it cannot devolve into a place for personal blogging about our story…or at least not at the core of it, or the Hub. That once again lands us in an anthropocentric situation which is at the heart of most bad theology, listless worship, and passive spirituality.
The Patriarches, and the prophets were largely over shadowed by Yahweh. Jesus not so much overshadows as much as radiates from within the Center. To the extent in which His current Lordship, love and risen presence are allowed to shine the Church and members of it can say they are healthy and vibrant (alive). To the extent that His kingdom is covered or veiled under a bushel or in minds and hearts the situation is somewhat dire and doomed.
I have other blogs where I can wirte about my own experiences and whine, complain and even engage in debate. The fruit of such blogs (which outweigh this one seven to one) is dubious at best and non-existent at worst.
But if Brueggmann is correct about the corrective nature of the subversive texts, then it applies here, or at the very pressure points where we wear thin and the Gospel is meant to shine through, at the very least, the cracks.
So I will use some brief travelogue in illustrate.
I woke up in pain and feverish last night just two hours after going to bed. The anthropocentric narrative wonders how to appropriate health and recovery at such moments but this is not the larger story. To the extent that I subsume the larger biblical narrative in service of the immediate temporal one I will be way off base.
In the end while it was appropriate to ask for healing, that was brief and non calculated as anything but covering all bases. The real request, given the subversive texts and the “alternate” view, was for God to simply be with me through whatever suffering there was (and in the immediate there was plenty fo very direct pain).
If Lewis is right that pain is “God’s megaphone” then I would assert that, once recognized, pain can also become more like headphones (or in the current cultural mileau, earbuds). The Psalmist does ask for repreive often, but mnore often for God’s presence. To simply not be alone in the reality of siffering.
And so it is with Paul. No whiner, Paul had more outward distress packed in his one small life than most pastors of a denomination had in toto. His view is through the alternate text. His sufferings have a different meaning (which you can read about in some detail in his last letter to the Corinthians).
So if the Universe is Christocentric that changes everything when it comes to what is weighty and why (as well as what is more superfluous or silly).
You see even death is not serious in the way we make it out to be…not given resurrection. Let’s say my heart seized up a few hours later last night (it was racing at a very fast pace, I was burning up like a Gemini capsule and I have a history of heart failure including congestive heart failure). What great and tragic thing befalls me given literal resurrection?
Sure it is a pain and loss (I will allow others to determine the relative greatness of this loss) for others to some degree. Certainly it ruins my girlfriend’s day and is no small loss to my children and friends. To others this loss is more to my liking (like my creditors). But you see I am not seeing this primarily through the lens of my culture at all.
But I would go with Paul on this one (and a great many others things I might add, this all being the point) and say that for me that would simply have been “gain”.
It is true that in the postmodern landscape we must find out what our own narrative is. I would assert that we cannot understand our personal narrative until it is seen in light of the larger living narrative of God. IN His mercy He has revealed this narrative in His Son. If we do not know it and allow it to overshadow, illuminate and inform (fill) us, we have only ourselves to blame for our ongoing confusion.
What Would Cheeses Do?
This morning’s sermon was on Jesus’ parables about seeds, growth, leaven, bread. But there was a quote that had been read into a speech recognition software. My pastor admitted that sometimes it (the speech recognition software) typed out “cheeses” instead of Jesus.
I made some smartass remarks to Moon and then realized I was gonna start to crack up at the wrong time.
Er…ahem…
But that really is closer to the way Jesus is presented. Like Cheeses.
So then next time some bad-time Fundagelical asks WWJD in that way they oft do…just ask What Would Cheeses Do?
We have yet to really understand What Jesus Already Did, or What Jesus Does Today.
Maybe the better question is WWJDIMT?
7. It is the task of ministry to de-script that script among us.
Brueggmann goes on to say this debunks or unmasks a world that no longer exists or did exist.
This is what the Prophets did with Israel and the battle over idolatry. Every world-script/construct is a social fiction based in idolatry. The same play is enacted despite distance, enculturation or time. In fact the play is simply recast by enculturation.
Two images come to mind that are the same but from different sources. Poet William Everson’s rumination that he wants to find the “stones levels” which are beneath the “blind surf of events”. The other comes from A River Runs Through it…and the Word of God being beneath the stones of the river.
That is what the radical texts of the Old and New Testaments provide…and exploration into the stone levels beneath the blind surf of events, commerce, and the noise of the world.
I say it often but it bears repeating: The world screams, God whispers.
Above the waters of that river, or the surf at the beach is “The Fly”. Bono has taken on the role of prophet (debunking and unmasking) in his long standing role (script) as “The Fly”.
The original song is telling. Review it.
The use of “The Fly” in the new film U2-3D is the most overt he has been. It is a blitzkrieg of deconstruction with a prophetic spin.
More on The Fly this week…it deserves a full treatment.
Put practically, the availability of the alternate text of scripture is a means of both unmasking and debunking the current fictions…whether secular, religious, nationalistic, militaristic or commercial.
Know the story and your place in it and you have your feet on stone levels but the vantage point of The Fly.
“Ministry” is simple service. The work of de-scripting is service motivated by love. At the core it is love to tell the truth and to love the Truth.
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