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Numbers 11:4-6,10-16,24-29

We always must remember that the Torah is a story in reading it, a story that finds its fulfillment in Jesus Christ and the life of the church. Israel functions as a type, a metaphor, of what is to come in our lives. With this in mind, Numbers 11 takes place after the exodus and after the revelation of the Law at Sinai, as Israel is moving towards the land promised to them. God has provided manna and drink for them along the way -- metaphors of the Lord's Supper. Yet the people do not find it adequate. Why not? What is the nostalgia to look back towards slavery? What does Moses say to God? Why?

Does God's response really answer Moses concern in the way that Moses seems to indicate? What is the function of the seventy? How does God stop the grumbling of the seventy amidst Israel?

James 4:7--5:6)

In the middle of the James pasage, we read again about the "grumbling" amidst the people of God, 'speaking evil against one another.' How does what James speak before the passage lead to addressing the struggle of 'speaking evil against one another'? James speaks about the frailty of life after the passage. How does this relate? Notice that economics lies behind the whole dissension in the last story, the same problem of welcoming the rich in the service while neglecting the poor earlier in the passage. The "righteous one" seems to refer to Jesus -- whom the rich killed. What is the economic dynamic behind the whole passage?

Mark 9:38-43,45,47-48

The Gospel reading shows Jesus encouraging those who work in his name in casting out demons even when not formally part of the twelve. Is the intial question merely a report or an accusation against Jesus? The blessing of the cup of cold water is that which comes to the disciples here because of bearing Jesus' name. How does this relate to the stumbling block? Does Jesus try to 'control' or 'program' the in-breaking of the kingdom? These are some of the hardest words of Jesus in taking moral responsibility not to stop the unscheduled, unprogrammed, surprising yet very serious in-breaking of God's kingdom that has begun in Jesus. Blocking this has eternal consequences of judgment and salvation.

Obviously all these passages deal with handling dissension among the people of God, its seriousness, and movement to its calming. The church, including us, are on a journey inbetween the fulfillment of God's promise in Jesus and its completion in the coming of the kingdom in its fulness, and we live in this tension between the "already" and the "not-yet". As a result, the Scriptures indicate that such tensions, though never condoned or good, will constantly be among us. After all, we are Israel, the pilgrim-people of God. What are the dynamics in the passages from which dissension arises? If the group finds themselves in the midst of these passages, what do the passages teach us? What virtues are necessary to sustain such activities? What is the role of the Spirit of God?

Posted by johnwright at 9:42 AM | Comments (0)

I heartily confess that one of the themes of my blogs and my life is to blur the distinction between Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants, not merely intellectually, but pastorally. I pray to overcome in the United States what the sociologist Will Hersberg called the three religious communities in the United States of Catholic-Protestant-Jew at the point of blurring the distinction between the first two on the basis of the Jewish origins of the church in Jesus Christ. I have undertaken this out of my heritage and membership in the Church of the Nazarene as a group devoted to preserving the faith given to the saints and cooperation with all members of the body of Christ (see the Foreward to the Manual of the Church of the Nazarene), standing as we do, in the Methodist tradition beginning with John Wesley -- a "ressourcement theologian" if there ever was one.

After I wrote my jeremiad on the contemporary pastorate on Saturday (which, interestingly, has received no comments!!), I found that Benedict XVI had some comments up on Zenit.org/english concerning this very issue. In Roman Catholicism, because of the "shortage of priests", the issues are even more acute. Yet independently, it seems to me that both the awareness of the issues and the direction of pastoral response is similar. I'd like to share quotes from these addresses, and see how we can learn together. Benedict's first interview comes from Aug. 31 in an interview at the Papal Summer Residence, called "Some problems for priests." The second is from September 24, 2006 on Benedict XVI on Integrated Pastoral Care.

We exist in the slow movement out of Christendom, in which pastoring has still sustains certain expectations within the broader culture, at the same time that the authority of the pastoral office becomes lessened. This is the background of the profound problems that various European priests addressed to Benedict. The first spoke about experience that they have. Hauerwas and Willimon echo in the background: "We priests are fully integrated into this Church and experience all the relative problems and complexities. Young and old, we all feel inadequate. This is firstly because we are so few in comparison with the many needs and we come from different backgrounds . . . We try to patch things up here and there and are often forced to attend only to emergencies, without any precise projects. Seeing how much there is to do, we are tempted to give priority to "doing" and to neglect "being"; this is inevitably reflected in our spiritual life, our conversation with God, our prayer and our charity (love) for our brethren, especially those who are far away." The second response is initiated by the same problems given in a different language: " It is worth remembering at least the fact that many of us priests are still bound to a certain not particularly mission-oriented pastoral practice which seemed to have been consolidated; it was so closely bound to a context, as people call it, "of Christianity." On the other hand, many of the requests of a large number of the faithful themselves presume the parish to be a "supermarket" of sacred services." While the office of priesthood holds more authority than that of the evangelical pastor, the dynamics are similar. The evangelical will have to be more personally therapeutic, while the Roman Catholic will have to be "official" in the precise descriptions.

But the real issue is, in such a cultural dynamic, how does one focus the pastoral work for the good of the church, a good that has to enfold within it the good of the life of the elders. Where Benedict turns to resource this updated ministry by returning to the central sources of the life of the church through the ages -- a sacramental guidance for pastoral work found within the very nature of the church itself.

Benedict states, "you have explained that there is, shall we say, the "classic" level of work in the parish for the faithful who have stayed on -- and who perhaps are also increasing -- and give life to our parish. This is "classic" pastoral care and it is always important. I usually make a distinction between continuous evangelization -- because faith continues, the parish survives -- and the new evangelization that seeks to be missionary, to supersede the limits of those who are already "faithful" and live in the parish or who, perhaps with a "reduced" faith, make use of parish services." He then adds " it seems to me that we have three fundamental commitments that stem from the essence of the Church and the priestly ministry." They will sound familiar, hopefully, to members of Mid-City and to this blog.

(1) "The first is sacramental service." Benedict enumerates the core of the pastoral work in baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, and rightly, preparation for marriage, as a means of "continuous and new evangelization."

(2) "The second section is the proclamation of the Word with the two essential elements: homily and catechesis." This is the weakest,most undeveloped part of his response -- how does one undertake such catechesis amidst the busy-ness of the world in which market formation expects pastors to respond to needs in the world that are pressuring for pastoral response rather than having a new agenda thrust upon them.

(3) "Lastly, the third section: "caritas," "diakonia." We are always responsible for the suffering, the sick, the marginalized, the poor." We need to hear Benedict in the difference from contemporary Protestant practice which expects pastors to pay first attention to the leading laity of the congregation to meet their needs. This is the 80% - 20% rule taught by people like John Maxwell. According to this business based rationale for pastoring, the pastor is to spend 80% of time with the congregational leaders in order to keep them on board and cultivate smooth relationships for the programming of the church. Yet seen from the perspective of the works of mercy, pastoral priority must always go to the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. This shifts responsibility of those with resources in the congregation to network for the meeting of their needs, even as they have their needs relativized through immersion themselves in the works of mercy.

It is here that informal, rather than formal networks within a congregation must understand themselves to be engaged in the pastoral care of the congregation. Benedict writes, "The parish priest cannot do it all! It is impossible! He cannot be a "soloist"; he cannot do everything but needs other pastoral workers. It seems to me that today, both in the movements and in Catholic Action, in the new communities that exist, we have agents who must be collaborators in the parish if we are to have "integrated" pastoral care. . . . The parish priest must not only "do," but also "delegate." The others must learn to be really integrated in their joint work for the parish and, of course, also in the self-transcendence of the parish in a double sense: self-transcendence in the sense that parishes collaborate within the diocese because the bishop is their common pastor and helps coordinate their commitments; and self-transcendence in the sense that they work for all the people of this time and seek to reach out with the message to agnostics and to people who are searching."

In the first interview the Pope recognizes the limitations of any pastor given the needs around us. He states that a pastor "must recognize that only in collaboration with everyone, in dialogue, in common cooperation, in faith as "cooperatores veritatis" -- of the Truth that is a Person, Jesus -- can we carry out our service together, each one doing his share. This means that my answers will not be exhaustive but piecemeal. Yet, let us agree that actually it is only in unison that we can piece together the "mosaic" of a pastoral work that responds to the immense challenges."

Benedict recognizes that we cannot minister as functional atheists, but "what is necessary for all of us is to recognize our own limitations, to humbly recognize that we have to leave most things to the Lord. . . . we must likewise do our utmost to be wise and prudent and to trust in the goodness of our "Master," the Lord, for in the end it is he himself who must take the helm of his Church. We fit into her with our small gift and do the best we can, especially those things that are always necessary: celebrating the sacraments, preaching the Word, giving signs of our charity and our love."

The pastoral office of the church then comes back to the three essential signs of the true nature of the church: the Word proclaimed and taught; the Sacraments, faith-fully practiced; and the oversight of the works of mercy of the congregation. The nature of the pastorate must draw from the depths of the life of the church over time to find its deepest relevance to the enduring needs of the congregation and the world.

Obviously Hauerwas and Willimon wrote in a bit of a different cultural context (North American mainline Protestants) and twenty-years earlier than Benedict. The commonality in analysis and response tells me that there is something significant and enduring in what they say.

Posted by johnwright at 12:48 PM | Comments (3)

I haven't had opportunity to blog much recently. Several projects, along with the typical business of teaching and pastoring, have occupied my time. I continue to read, talk, and think about the relationship between the so-called "Yale School" or "postliberal" theology and theological currents that led up to, deeply formed, and came out of Vatican II.

In light of recent experiences in the pastorate, this relationship has become more interesting. American culture places such an emphasis on the person of the pastor to personally and organizationall meet needs so that the office of the elder or priest as primarily about preaching the Word and conducting the Sacraments becomes relatively insignificant. Focusing on the correct demographics, democratic "inclusive" administration, administrative expertise of balancing the needs of those within the congregation with the needs that the congregation is attempting to meet, being a therapeutic helping professional to aid people cope with, adjust to, and heal from the psychological hurts and wounds, all become the crucial concerns of the laity -- and not without reason. Pastoring becomes hard work that is always vulnerable to profound criticism. Of course, such dynamics also encourage the flip side -- pastors who become authoritarian and demeaning to congregations so that it is the congregation members who become abused.

Pastoral authority is very difficult to exercise in a liberal culture that denies the legitimacy of authority except for the authority of the experiences of the individual or communal self. What persons "experience" (experiences always embedded in prior experiences) become determinative of naming how the pastor is perceived. As all pastors know, in the pastorate perception is reality -- and not without reason. This is our experience in the particular cultural formation that arises from liberalism's distinction of the private from the public, the therapeutic from the managerial, the realm of 'meaning' from the realm of 'bureaucracy.'

But what happens to the pastoral role in a congregation that is the "pilgrim-people of God" or "resident aliens"? My daughter, Tasha, picked up Willimon and Hauerwas's minor classic, Resident Aliens. It has an outstanding analysis of the contemporary pastorate in it that I've picked up and thumbed through as she had the book out. I'd like to share some quotes from it.

Hauerwas and Willimon write that "The greatest challenge facing the church in any age is the creation of a living, breathing, witnessing colony of truth, and because of this, we must have pastors and leaders with training and gifts to help form a community that can produce a person like Gladys and a people who can hear Gladys speak the truth without hating her for it.

Failing at that, the pastoral ministry is doomed to the petty concerns of helping people feel a bit better rather than inviting them to dramatic conversion. The pastor becomes nothing more than the court chaplain. . . saying nothing more that we do not already know. Or else the pastor feels like a cult prostitute, selling his or her love for the approval of an upwardly mobile, bored middle class [my comment: now a downwardly mobile, frightened middle class], who, more than anything else, wants some relief from . . . anxiety" (p. 123).

Denominational executives and leading laity desire stability, the ability to build growing, increasingly lasting institutions to support persons within the culture over the length of time rather than the church as a pilgrim-people, traveling through this age in preparation for the age that is to come. We do not need God to sustain a congregation; we need more sensitive, caring, affirming, charismatic leaders who can project personal care for every individual that one meets and administrate the congregation to meet the needs of all who need that personal affirmation to which everyone has the right.

We have learned to pastor and be a congregation as practical atheists. "Most of us professing Christians, from the liberals to the fundamentalists, remain practical atheists in most of our lives. This is so because we think the church is sustained by the 'services' it provides or the amount of 'fellowship' and 'good feeling' in the congregation. Of course there is nothing wrong with 'services' and 'good feeling'; what is wrong is that they have become ends in themselves. When that happens the church and the ministry cannot avoid sentimentality, which we believe is the most detrimental corruption of the church today" (p. 120).

As a result, Willimon and Hauerwas describe the resultant pyscho-social temptations and vulnerabilities that pastors can easily fall. "Have you noticed that, when many contemporary pastors speak of themselves as pastors, words like abuse, seduction, and prostitution creep into their vocabulary. . . . Pastors come to despise what they are and to hate the community that made them that way. Because the church is not a place to worship God, but rather a therapeutic center for meeting of one another's unchecked, unexamined needs, the pastor is exhausted. Only a few months into his or her first pastorate, the new pastor realizes that people's needs are virtually limitless, particularly in an affluent society in which there is an every-rising threshold of desire (which we define as 'need')" (pp. 123-24). They go on: "There is . . . no clear sense of purpose other than meeting of people's needs, so there is no possible way for the pastor to limit what people ask of the pastor. Not knowing what they should do, pastors try to do everything and be everything for everybody. The most conscientious among them become exhausted and empty. The laziest of them merely withdraw into disinterested detachment. Not knowing why their pastor is there, the congregation . . . becomes unrealistic critics of the clergy rather than coworkers, fellow truth-tellers. Self-hatred is inevitable in someone who feels abused, prostituted, unfairly criticized. The burden of being a generally good person, open and available to people of unbounded need, is too great for anybody to bear. Self-hate and loneliness result" (p. 124).

What does it look like for a congregation to ask a pastor to make the congregation not feel at home in the culture around them? What does it mean to pastor to call person's to radical conversion, the utter reshaping of one's hearts and lives by the sanctifying work of the Spirit? I think that it is simply to return the pastorate to its true calling: to oversee a congregation to witness together to the coming kingdom in the return of Jesus Christ that we have seen already in Christ's incarnation, life, teachings, death, and resurrection. It is to see the core of the pastorate in the pastor's office to preach the Word and celebrate the Sacraments and to oversee the congregation's involvement in the works of mercy. It is to recognize that "there is no healing, counseling, witnessing, speaking, interpretation, living or dying the clergy can do that is not the responsibility of every other Christian" (p. 113). It is with patience and wisdom, to rebuke and reprove the congregation, to encourage and support the faithful, to witness the glad tidings that the kingdom of God has come in Jesus Christ. It is to initiate the congregation into the faith handed over to the saints across time, to engage in constant catechesis to allow the Spirit to reshape us all, pastor and laity, into the awareness that God calls us into the fullness of care for God's creation only because creation does not have an end in itself, but only in God.

This is the adventure of being a congregation. This is what God really brings forth in our midst, sometimes despite pastors and congregations. God does raise up witnesses. The recent Houston Catholic Worker has an article by Marc Tumeinski. He writes, "The world would have us believe that the most significant events are shaped by the decisions and actions of those with power and money. Christians know a deeper truth: God shapes history. So often, He works His eternity -- and world shaping events -- through the simple faith acts of the poor and lowly; those with little money or worldly power" (Sept.-Oct. 2006). God does not have as much trouble convincing such "lowly" faithful that we are only pilgrims here, resident aliens; htat we are not seeking influence and stability, but seeking the God who is our Creator who has revealed God's own Self in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Posted by johnwright at 8:24 AM | Comments (0)

The OT reading in the BCP is from Wisdom of Solomon this week, a deuterocanonical book that we generally do not read from the lectern. Perhaps it might be good to start your meeting with praying together Psalm 54. Perhaps you can say how this is your prayer, and if not, why not!!! It sets up the James and Gospel reading very well, both characterized by the conflict that arises from living the Christian life. The key is to experience the conflict for the right reason at the right time with the right intensity.

The Epistle and Gospel readings center, so it seems, on the concept of humility. This is a difficult concept for us to understand as modern Christians. Modernity and the liberal political system have gutted Christian humility from its proper place related to obedience, and re-placed it with a concept related to tolerance. As we read these Scriptures, I'd like to speak provide some background for your discussions.

James 3:16-4:6

The James passage is quite direct. It centers our problems of unity as the problem of desires. We live in a culture of entitlement and victimization -- we feel entitled (i.e., we have "rights") to various items, offices, and influence. If they do not come, we then have become "victimized" by the oppressive powers or authorities around us. James speaks instead of a "wisdom from above." It might be good just to contrast directly the results of envy and selfish ambition versus the wisdom from above.

At the basis, the passage places "friendship with the world" in contrast with "friendship with God" in strikingly strong language. Friendship here is a type of moral formation that seeks to influence by allowing oneself to be influenced by certain persons for the sake of a broader agenda. Why would James speak so strongly against "influencing and being influenced" by the world? How is friendship with the world related to pride? Why does God oppose the proud but gives grace to the humble?

Mark 9:30-37

It is important to see the beginning of this passage, and the direct tie of Jesus' teaching on discipleship to his suffering, death and resurrection. How does this change how you read his teaching on the reception of children? Notice how the disciples struggle to get it.

A couple technical items. The saying that begins the specific teaching is "whoever wants to be first must by the "servant" of all." Yet the great word here translated as "servant" or "minister" does not mean lowly service, but one who re-presents all, who receiveds an assignment from all to uphold the will of a superior in a situation where the superior is not available. It is language taken from the realm of "ambassadors" -- to be the ambassador, the one speaking in behalf of all. This radically changes the interpretation of what follows. To welcome the child is to welcome Jesus which is to welcome God the Father. We have to remember that in this era, children were basically as the necessity to continue the heritage of a family, responsible for complete obedience to their family, with no social standing outside the family. Welcoming the child is welcoming the Father. If so, the whole passage relates Jesus' suffering and resurrection to his being sent by the Father to be "received" in the body of the child. Humility is receiving the child as the representative of the Father.

Both passages therefore link humility to submission and obedience -- not exactly seen as great virtues within a democratic-"participatory" society. The passages remind me of a section from Talal Asad's book, Genealogies of Religion. He has a chapter on "Discipline and Humility in Christian Monasticism." Discipline was related to the Rule of St. Benedict as a giving a certain divine wisdom for the reception of the Christian virtues. Humility, the acceptance of authority in the reception of Wisdom, becomes a central virtue because thought and virtue only arise from the discipline -- certain external goods given to one by an authority so that the internal virtues might arise. Without humility, one cannot receive the elimination of sinful desire, nor have ones dispositions realigned. Humility is thus linked with the obedience to God by receiving instruction for the re-shaping of individual desires. In a sense, one becomes most "free" (the ability to desire and do the good) when one lives in deepest humility to God -- shaped by an obedience to God in Christ as witnessed to in the rules and the Scriptures and sacraments. This is very different from our understanding today. Asad writes, "humility in the form of self-abasement is no longer admired in 'normal' Christianity, and modern secular thought and practice classify and treat it as one of the standard personality disorders. Rituals of humiliation and abasement are now symptoms of patients, not the discipline of agents" (p. 166-167). We give medical doctors much more authority than "spiritual doctors." The medieval world knew a completely different order of humility.

Maybe the discussion can move to the passages to retrieve a proper Christian sense of humility. It might be good to ask how having small children around re-shapes one's desires.
What type of "disciplines" do children require from those who "receive" them? Can one properly "receive children" at the same time as living in "friendship with the world"? What is the role of humility in the James passage? What type of person must we be formed into in our internal life? What is the external good? How can we live this out better?

I hope that this is not too disjointed. It is very difficult to speak of authority, submission, obedience, and humility in our world as a pastor. It makes one sound so "authoritarian" in the whole bad sense of the word. Yet there is a deeper vision, a truer vision of life in these Scriptures that provide the sense of humility that allows God to grace our life with the Life that is God.

Posted by johnwright at 9:23 AM | Comments (0)

Earlier this week I read Benedict XVI's lecture at the University of Regensburg. I was deeply impressed. Slowly this lecture filtered into the public media, though in a profoundly distorting manner. Some respondents have publicly stated that Benedict seeks to return to the crusades. The irony of this is that Benedict's lecture has a fundamental commitment to non-violence embedded within it. I'd like to spend some time analyzing this speech for what the lecture has to teach it because it reaches to the intersection of the academy and the church, nature and the supernatural. He adopts historical analysis very parallel to such works as David Burrell, Etionne Gilson, and recent Radical Orthodox thinkers. The response indicates the type of hard distinction between "faith" and "reason" that Benedict seeks to challenge.

Benedict quotes, controversially, a dialogue between a 15th century Orthodox emperor and an "educated Persian." The Orthodox ruler, in this document, criticizes "violent conversion". What interests Benedict, however, is the argument that the emperor used against violent conversion: "Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. 'God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature.'" Benedict argues, "the decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature." Violence contradicts both God's nature and reason. God's nature is non-violent; as reason participates in the nature of God, true reason itself is non-violent.

Benedict immediately puts a Christological cast upon this non-violent Reason that reveals the very nature of God. "John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: 'In the beginning was the 'logos'". This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts with 'logos.' 'Logos' means both reason and word -- a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason." Jesus Christ is not "unreasonable" or "outside of" reason", but reveals, in his very incarnation, the very grain of the universe. Jesus Christ, as the revelation of the God whose nature is Reason, defines the true reason in its nature as love, and therefore, as non-violent.

In his lecture, Benedict extends an argument about the centrality of non-violence, of peace to understand God. Faith opens reason to its true nature as participation in the non-violent God that has revealed God's own self in Jesus Christ. Remember in July, Benedict wrote:

"The Lord has conquered on the cross. He has not conquered with a new empire, with a force that is more powerful than others, capable of destroying them; he has not conquered in a human manner, as we imagine, with an empire stronger than the other. He has conquered with a love capable of going to death.

This is God's new way of conquering: He does not oppose violence with a stronger violence. He opposes violence precisely with the contrary: with love to the end, his cross. This is God's humble way of overcoming: With his love -- and only thus is it possible -- he puts a limit to violence. This is a way of conquering that seems very slow to us, but it is the true way of overcoming evil, of overcoming violence, and we must trust this divine way of overcoming.

To trust means to enter actively in this divine love, to participate in this endeavor of pacification, to be in line with what the Lord says: "Blessed are the peacemakers, the agents of peace, because they are the sons of God." We must take, in the measure of our possibilities, our love to all those who are suffering, knowing that the Judge of the Last Judgment identifies himself with those who suffer."

Benedict therefore extends the argument in the lecture. The revelation of God in Jesus is simultaneously the revelation of the true nature of Reason, the nature of which is seen in the cross and resurrection of Jesus. Non-violence is not "irrational," but reveals the very nature of reason. Thus, "not to act 'with 'logos' [i.e., to act violently] is contrary to God's nature." With human reason participating in God who is non-violent as revealed in Jesus, one finds that true reason is Christologically-tinged -- the Word through whom all things were created. Thus, Benedict reminds us that "the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language (cf. Lateran IV)."

Thus, the paper critiques the violence inherent in the instrumental understanding of reason in modern concepts of reason that are separated from God -- reason, separated from faith, becomes "unreasonable" -- ie, prone to the service of violence. Thus Benedict criticizes "modern reason from within" in a manner that "has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly . . . The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a hisotrical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith."

He thus speaks positively for Islam, as for the church, in response to modernist and post-modernist Western secularity: "the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures." Western pluralism is in its very roots "non-pluralistic" by its own exclusions. Benedict knows this from his own experience.

Violence is not reason; reason used for the purpose of violence is not reason, for it separates Reason from the nature of God revealed in Reason made flesh, Jesus Christ. Denying God, reason denies humanity.

I have no doubt that Benedict drew from the Christian -- Islamic dialogue to distinguish the Christian concept of God from Islam. Yet it was not out of an intolerance of Islam, nor to invoke Christian or secular violence against Muslims -- his whole lecture repudiates the violent past of the church and the European west against Islam. It is the whole scale rejection of the violence in service of the church that characterized so much of the later middle ages in the crusades and then in the birth of the absolutist and then liberal nation-state and its colonialization agenda. Yet rather than attack Benedict through symbolic violence, Benedict pushes us to reason without violence to deal with the differences of the world, for reason bears the imprint of Jesus Christ, who defeated the violence of the cross through the power of God the Father in the resurrection.

As I was writing this post, ironically the following post came to me from Jeff Blythe, a personal friend and still member of Mid-City. He spent years working with a Christian community of Somalis in Ethiopia (I believe). It illustrates the importance of Benedict's words, and the fact that Christians respond to the violence of the world through martyrdom rather than through the (ir)rationality of violence:

Ali Mustaf Maka’il, 22, was shot and killed in Manabolyo, northern Mogadishu, on September 7, 2006. Ali, college freshman and cloth merchant, accepted Christ as his only Savior 11 months ago.

A gunman loyal to the Union of Islamic Courts shot Mr. Ali in the back after he refused to join a Qur’an chanting crowd in response to the lunar eclipse.

The Union of Islamic Courts confiscated Mr. Ali’s body for 24 hours. The body was later returned in a military truck to his grieving family.

Kindly pray for the family of Mr. Ali as well as his grieving house church.

This is the first known martyrdom the Somali church has faced since the jihadist Islamic Courts took over Mogadishu three months ago.

Blessed are those who lose their lives for the risen Lord,

A. Ali

Posted by johnwright at 11:59 AM | Comments (6)

The Scriptures from this coming weekend are powerful. Rather than taking you through "a hundred questions", I would like to provide some background on the texts, some connections, and then help frame the discussion with areas of conversation if you would like. As always, the real issue is not understanding the Scriptures, but finding ways to embody them more thoroughly and wisely.

The key is to see the Gospel reading as the center of the passages, it seems to me. The Isaiah 50 text leads to the Gospel; the James text comes out of the Gospel. I will order my comments in this manner.

Isaiah 50:4-9

Isaiah 50:4-9 speaks of a prophet in exile, whose story gets taken up and lifted by God in the full Book of Isaiah to point to its ultimate fulfillment in Jesus Christ. The prophet had spoken words that God would defeat Judah's captors in Babylon through Cyrus the Persian. The prophet gathered a small group of disciples around him to announce this coming victory, who sought to influence the rest of the Judeans to not cooperate with the Babylonian defense -- God had given him the tongue of a teacher. It seems that the rest of the Judeans who lived in the "city of Judah" in Babylon (southern Iraq, ironically) did not believe the prophets words, and found his words of God's restoration of Judah back to the land as threatening the assimilation that they had achieved in Babylon. Babylon was their captors, but they were captors with whom they had come to terms. His own people seemed to have abused him because they did not want to risk the good news that God was going to deliver them. In fear of the future, they turned to violence against the prophet. You could look at the text and describe how his own people tried to silence him from his message that God was going to defeat the Babylonians and restore Judah to Jerusalem.

Here in this passage the prophet reflects that such intimidation will not stop the good news nor God's agenda from taken place. Abuse by his own people will not silence his teachings for it is anchored in God. He will not let fear of the future and punishment by the Babylonians stop him from participating in God's redemption of God's own people. Instead it deepens his resolve to continue in the path of the good news that God had given him about God's restoration of God's kingdom, Judah.

If this is the story of the exilic prophet, how do you as a group see this text fulfilled and extended and made perfect in Jesus? If Jesus is the suffering teacher, what are the responses to him by his own people in the text? What is the difference between those who resist the message of good news and those who accept his teachings?

Mark 8:27-38

This is a well known passage. Yet it is important to recognize that Jesus' questioning of the disciples does not really end with him asking them, "Who do people say that I am?" but continues in his teaching about the necessity of the Son of Man to undergo great suffering. Jesus exercises his messiahship through suffering violence and undergoing God's ultimate vindication in raising him from the dead. Notice again that there are two possible responses to Jesus' teaching: one that accepts his suffering and subsequent resurrection and a second that rejects the good news of the resurrection because suffering preceeds it. The rejection of the suffering and resurrection of Jesus is a word of Satan. Jesus then teaches on discipleship -- discipleship involves undergoing suffering for the right reasons, out of faithfulness to Jesus. The key here is the image of a cross. We have to understand that the cross was a tool used by the Romans to punish those who did not have position in the empire for disloyalty in a way to terrorize all into conformity. To take up a cross is to accept the consequences of disloyalty to the politics of the world around out of loyalty to Jesus. Why is this necessary for Jesus' followers? Does following Jesus involve taking up control and influence in the world's politics around us to help those merely in temporal gain? Why would Jesus at this point that is deeply embedded in not conforming to this world's politics raise the issue of eternal life -- "not losing your soul"? Why is Jesus the real issue here? Why does fear of the future inhibit one following Jesus?

James 2:1-5, 8-10, 14-18

James speaks of a type of social discrimination of those entering into a gathering of God's people. From what we can tell, the meeting that James describes was a synagogue where Jews and Jesus Messianic Jews gathered as a minority. The wealthy and those who had higher social status who came into the gathering would provide protection and resources for those within the gathering to help the long term stability of the congregation; the poor would place more burden on those who were part of the gathering. At stake is the long term resourced stability of the gathering as a minority in a pagan world. Seen in this way the "favoritism" becomes tied to the Isaiah and the Gospel passages.

Yet James strongly rebukes such "favoritism". A better translation of James 2:1, is "do you with your acts of favoritism really have the faithfulness of our Lord Jesus Christ?" This is a rhetorical question -- no, of course you don't. James then goes into the sayings tradition of Jesus, particularly as found in the Sermon on the Plain in Luke 6 and the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. The Beatitudes stand behind James teachings.

It is this "preferential option for the poor" that provides the "royal law" -- or, in this Jewish context, the "messianic law of Jesus' teaching" its background in the person of Jesus. It is violation of this law that matters because the primary goal is for one to live faithfully to the messiah, to Jesus. Jesus again is the issue! It is refusal to fear the future in the temporal world in light of God's redemption in the Messiah, Jesus, that matters. Therefore, faith (or, better, "loyalty" involves works because it is expressed through the same behaviors as Jesus -- what we have come to call the "works of mercy". James calls for personal involvement in faith and works, rather than their splitting. Yet throughout the letter, it is clear that one works in this world with eternity in mind; one does not dismiss eternity for merely faith and actions in this world. This "eternal perspective" is what provides a means of not favoring the wealthy over the poor in the gathering of the people because of fear of not having sufficient resources to protect and distribute all that is needed in this world for the sake of the poor. In this way, it is interesting that it could be the poor who could be tempted to dishonor other poor in an attempt to help the status of all by trying to reinforce social ties with those wealthier and of higher status.

It might be interesting then for your discussion to talk about fear of sustaining life in the present as individuals and a congregation with little resources amidst the great trials of living as a minority, our great hopes to impact the world, and our awareness of the tremendous needs of the world around us, and the rightful call to make a difference in these needs. How does such fear and pain affect us? What is the crucial virtues necessary to sustain life in such a circumstance? How do we faithfully call others into join this life in Christ? What temptation do these Scriptures suggest could come our way in our hope to be effective? What does it mean to be God's people in light of the teachings of Jesus and the fact that in Jesus Christ, God has already brought the kingdom to earth, has already reconciled the world to God's own Self, and that God will bring all things to culmination in Christ. What is the key to avoid the anxiety that Rev. Chung mentioned last Sunday in his sermon?

Have a wonderful evening!!!

Posted by johnwright at 7:59 AM | Comments (0)

I must admit that the reading the next few weeks bring a bit of joy to me -- Mark and the Epistle to James -- both areas that I have, over the years, developed a little bit of academic interest and expertise in. Most don't know that I even once published a little book on the Gospel of Mark! It sold 100 copies -- 90 to my mother. James is a wonderful book to understand in terms of what it tells us about early Christianity.

Yet the power of these texts is allowing the Spirit to live them, to hear them, to form our understanding of life to them, rather than shaping them into our understanding. I hope that the little pointers that I can give will help you discussions and the Spirit's work in sanctifying you holy.

Isaiah 35:4-7a

This passage from Isaiah needs understood in light of Isaiah 6, and Isaiah's call. You might want to read God's assignment to Isaiah in Isa 6:9-13. If so, to whom is God, in Isaiah 35, looked forward to coming in judgment. Why does God's judgment lead to "being strong and not fearing"? What is God judging? How emerges from God's judgment in light of Isaiah 6? Notice how the text looks to the future reversal of Isaiah 6. What has happened? What type of deafness goes on that is healed? Who are the silent who then talk? What does the imagery of Isaiah 35 do? Seeing the link between Isaiah 6 and 35 helps prepare the textual background for the Gospel reading.

James 1:17-27

Verse 17 is very, very important. What does the relationship between all gifts coming from God the Father and God's unchangeableness have to do with each other? What is this birth that God has given us? How does this imagery work with the healing of the blind and the dumb? Who is the "we" that have been made a "first fruits"? First fruits of what?

How do the ethical guidelines that follow relate to these statements about God and "us"? How do those instructed to rid themselves of "sordidness and rank growth of wickedness" related to the "first fruits" mentioned above? What is the proper response to this? What is the implanted Word? Why does this "Word" have power to save souls?

If this "Word" is implanted, why must one do, not just hear? It seems to me that the "perfect law" is related to this Word. Where does one see the perfect law? There are parables of Jesus that seem to be behind this instruction of James. Can you think of them?

What then is the "doing" that arises from the "implanted Word"? Why? What is the relationship between caring for the orphans and widows and keeping oneself. If you'd like, read Isaiah 1 for the prophetic background of this saying. According to James, what is the "end" of
"religion"? The Greek word translated as "religion" might be better understood as the bodily acts of worship. How does "true bodily acts of worship" in the care of the poor, the widow and the orphan, related to the "implanted Word"? How as a congregation and a people, do we keep the internal Word and the exterior action connected in a world that would separate them?

Mark 7:31-37

One needs to see that Mark 7:31-37 functions in light of the Isaiah text. What happens to the man? What spiritual truth comes through in the physical as a result of knowing Isa 6 and 35. What is Jesus initiating here? Do the people get its spiritual significance in their response? Can you have the spiritual significance without the physical significance? Why or why not?

This might be a good place to discuss the distinction but inner relationship between the physical and the spiritual, the experience of God's mercy in Christ and the works of mercy, the emergence of "true worship" that does not extinguish the "implanted Word" nor the necessity of the new birth. In the saints, we see that these are not different, but found together. In our world, we want to separate them. How do we practice as a congregation to keep them together?

Have a wonderful discussion!

Posted by johnwright at 9:17 AM | Comments (0)