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Yesterday was the last Sunday in our district year. I gave my Annual Report as part of the Sunday sermon. It was a distracting time -- Lawrence was there, a cell phone went off, and it was difficult material to speak and to hear.

In some ways, Lawrence really helped me see the issue. Lawrence struggles with alcoholism and with other types of disorders. I have known him for years now. He has taught me much by relating how badly people treat the poor and the ill when they meet them. For those who know, Lawrence yells out in times of personal stress, "People matter more than Jesus" in the middle of our service, often repetitively. While he can make some uncomfortable, we know that Lawrence needs to do this some -- but also that he can control himself. Janine so wonderfully helped him yesterday as Lawrence had some struggles with his control while I was preaching, particularly at the beginning.

Lawrence is right -- people matter. But I spoke with Lawrence in the service that people matter because of Jesus, not more than Jesus. In some ways this is the whole point of my Annual Report -- that if we lose the fully revelation of God in Jesus Christ who is simultaneously the full revelation of humans to ourselves, we have drifted off into a type of "religious humanism" that ultimately cannot sustain itself. As I have thought through the struggles over the years in our congregation, it suddenly struck me that we have experienced trends much like American Catholicism. The Annual Report tries to point us beyond destructive cycles to live in the obedience of faith, finding freedom under true authority that we find in God through Christ in the context of the church -- concrete local congregations.

Senior Pastor Annual Report 2007
The Church of the Nazarene in Mid-City, English-Speaking Congregation
Dear Friends and Members:

The polity of the Church of the Nazarene requires that the senior pastor, each year, present to the congregation an “Annual Report.” In this report our Discipline requires that the pastor “report[s] on the status of the local church and its departments, and . . . outline[s] . . . areas of future needs with recommendations for reference by the church . . . for study and/or implementation in future steps for growth or progress” (413.15). The Annual Report allows me to reflect over the past with you, and engage in the pastoral office of teaching. It is appropriate that we do this on this Third Sunday of Easter. We have heard Moses overlooking the Promised Land at the end of his life. Moses prayed, "Let the LORD, the God of the spirits of all flesh, appoint someone over the congregation who shall go out before them and come in before them, who shall lead them out and bring them in, so that the congregation of the LORD may not be like sheep without a shepherd." God gave them Joshua (Jesus in Greek) “so that all the congregation of the Israelites may obey.”

“How paternalistic!” our culture has shaped us to say! Obey? Obedience implies authority. Authority, especially within the context of the church, sends up all sorts of warning flairs. Many of us come from “conservative” church backgrounds where authoritarian pastors quote Scriptures to justify nationalistic jingoes, moralistic judgementalism, and oppressive social causes from which some of us have experienced personal hurt. Obedience to the church? It scares us to death. Benedict XVI writes, “It is felt that . . . churches are part of the establishment and collaborators in the conspiracy of power. Confronted with the increasing anonymity and uniformity of the world, people seek refuge in small groups, whether they are called ‘base communities,’ ‘the Church from below,’ or whatever. Here they experience sympathy and good will; here mutual understanding rules, not laws. A little oasis of humanness in the spirit of Jesus seems to open up, but unfortunately it is constantly being disrupted by the unreasonable demands and manifestations of the larger Church, which exercises her power and, with her ancient ideas, mercilessly rides roughshod over the group’s beautiful world. The result is group against Church, . . . community against institution. Where the community represents the place for hope, the institution stands for the threat of the powerful” (Benedict XVI, A New Song for the Lord, 1996, p. 65). We struggle with the whole idea of instituted authority within the church.

When we think of the status of the local church this past year, internal struggle marks our year. Yes, God still does marvelous things in our midst; we are visible in the world as the body of Christ. The witness of the congregation literally spans around the world. Weekly the Scriptures are read, the Gospel proclaimed, and the Lord’s Supper celebrated. Because Christ has commanded us, we feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, clothe the naked, bury the dead, oversee the sick, find Christ in and among the poor – and we must never forget that we are the poor. Many of us don’t have homes or struggle with inadequate housing. We care for the stranger in our midst – often those in our multicongregation who, as we should, find this society bewildering and confusing. Like Jesus breaking bread in the presence of the hungry, bread literally continues to multiply and be distributed to the neighborhood from our building.

Yet this past year we struggled again with unity – as we have in the past; we struggled with authority – as we have in the past; we struggled with a common understanding of mission – as we have in the past. We struggled with the polity of the “institutional church” when we can build a polity as a “community” – as we have in the past. We struggle to share a common understanding of the faith given the saints – as we have in the past. “The result is group against Church, . . . community against institution.” It is hard to enter the Promised Land, to fulfill our witness unless we as a people are united in obedience.

Why have we so struggled? I have thought, prayed and agonized, reflected, listened, read, and gone through long hours of introspection and self-examination. I am convinced that we have been locked in a great struggle with theological liberalism. What do I mean by “theological liberalism”? For us it has appeared as a conviction that our local context, our own perceived needs and the perceived needs of the neighborhood and the world, should determine our mission. Gary Dorrien argues that the tradition of American liberal theology attempts to

"reconceptualize the meaning of traditional Christian teaching in the light of modern
knowledge and modern ethical values. It is not revolutionary but reformist in spirit and
substance. Fundamentally it is the idea of a genuine Christianity not based on external
authority. Liberal theology seeks to reinterpret the symbols of traditional Christianity in
a way that creates a progressive religious alternative to atheistic rationalism and to
theologies based on external authority.

Specifically, liberal theology is defined by its openness to the verdicts of modern
intellectual inquiry, especially the natural and social sciences; its commitment to the
authority of the individual reason and experience; its conception of Christianity as an
ethical way of life; its favoring of moral concepts of atonement; and its commitment to
make Christianity credible and socially relevant to modern people" (The Making of
American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion 1805-1900, 2001, p.
xxiii).

Mid-City, different from the conservative Protestantism of many of our backgrounds, has been seen as a place where committed persons could create “a progressive religious alternative to atheistic rationalism and to theologies based on external authority” and therefore, “make Christianity credible and socially relevant to modern people.”

Much like the Roman Catholic Church in Vatican II, we speak of the congregation, not as a static organization to meet personal needs, but as a “dynamic entity, as the people of God undertaking a pilgrimage between ‘already’ and ‘not yet’.” It is not surprising that we have experienced the same tensions that our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters do today in that some have “misunderstood [us] as a progressive movement in which the deposit of older traditions is felt to be outdated and is discarded in the name of a so-called progressive understanding of the faith” (Cardinal Walter Kasper in Searching for Christian Unity, 2007, p. 21). A progressive understanding of the faith misses the point that like Israel entering the land, we too function in obedience to external authority – particularly to Joshua, Jesus Christ, as witnessed to in the Scriptures, in whom we participate through baptism and the Eucharist by the Spirit, and confess through the Ecumenical Creeds of the Church. The church ordains and congregations call elders to preserve the faith given to the saints through the proclamation of the Word, the celebration of the sacraments, and the oversight of local congregations. We are a people under authority.

In late July, early August of 1996, Rev. Dr. Ron Benefiel stood behind our home having just moved to San Diego from LA First Church. As I flipped burgers, he told me of his desire to plant a congregation, anchored in the creedal tradition of the church and committed to live with and among the poor. All along our prayer was never to make the faith relevant, to bring in the kingdom of God through our works. With William Stringfellow, we affirmed that we must understand our congregational mission from the perspective that “the Christian, and the whole company which is the Church, need not worry about what is to be done. The task is, rather, to live within the victory of all that has been done by God. For the Christian the issue is not so much about what she/he does in this world but about how she/he is in the world. There is no serious distinction between who the Christian is and what he does, between being and doing. These are virtually the same” (quoted in Stanley Hauerwas, Dispatches from the Front, p. 112). God has defeated sin, death, and Satan in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and called believers together in worship of the Triune God as the church. By vibrant, personal faith in Jesus through Christ’s presence in the Eucharist by the Spirit, we participate in this victory, freeing us from the powers that would enchain us so that the Spirit might cleanse us from inward sin and make us holy. Freed by the Spirit, we thankfully learn to live in the obedience of faith that requires witness in the world in a life lived with and among the poor, engaging in the works of mercy. With Stanley Hauerwas, we affirmed from the beginning that “The question was not whether we were going to accomplish much, but whether we were going to live faithfully” (Stanley Hauerwas, Dispatches from the Front, p. 112). As William Abraham states, “human response does indeed matter in the life of faith, but the emphasis is not on our efforts to fix the church and the world or on our schemes to usher in a new era of withdrawal and renewal. The primary emphasis falls on the provision God has made in the church for the constant renewal of grace in every generation and in every nook and cranny of the universe. . . . the life of the church depends crucially on the life of the Holy Spirit working in and through her divinely inspired canonical heritage” (from forthcoming book on Canonical Theism, Eerdmans Press).

We need to commit our next year to understanding how the liberal culture in which we live (remembering that this is most manifest often in “conservative churches”) has profoundly shaped us, learning to live as one’s under authority, learning to live “the mystery of our faith, that Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again . . . in unity and constancy and peace.” We must commit ourselves to the faith given to the saints, to commit each and everyone to become engaged deeply and personally in the works of mercy in accordance with the saints who have gone before us. We must remember that pastoral exhortations from the pulpit are not sharing of personal convictions, but, by God’s Spirit, the proclamation of the Word of God that leads to experience thanksgiving at this Table for the gifts of God given to the people of God. We need to engage in the task of evangelism, pulling others into the worship of the Triune God through repentance and faith in Jesus. We need to give from our financial resources regularly, to tithe, so that our witness as a congregation may continue. We must recover the joy of serving God, knowing that we can be obedient to God in moving into the Promised Land, for God has led the way through God’s Son, Jesus, by the power of the Spirit.

What is our end, our goal? We have one and only one end. It is to find ourselves ultimately as participants in the vision that we read from the Apocalypse. See the “great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, "Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!"

Who are these donned in white? "These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes."

We live amid the great ordeal; life is often a struggle, personally, congregationally, globally. We don’t run from the struggle; we place ourselves right in its middle, enfolding our sufferings into the sufferings of Christ in hope of the resurrection of the dead. We don’t seek a safe place to withdraw – God calls us forward into the world as witnesses amid the poor, the hungry, the sick. We don’t seek to live invisible to the world, but to live fully visible in solidarity with the body of Christ throughout the world, not only geographically but also across time. We do not base our activities on a calculated basis whether our practices are immediately effective or not; we live the obedience of faith – submitting to God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, witnessed to in Scriptures as transmitted in the life of the saints across the ages as we await the culmination of all things in and through Christ. We engage our lives in hope to witness to the kingdom that God has brought about in Jesus.

Our end, our goal, our lives are to be enfolded now as a sign of this heavenly image to come, “to wash our robes and make them white in the blood of the Lamb.” Come to this table in faith, to hunger and thirst no more, to come before the throne of God. For salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the Throne and to the Lamb! Onward, church, into the future that God has already made present to us! Rejoice! Be encouraged! Be faithful! Live as part of the body of Christ that is this congregation. And above all things, be thankful!

Posted by johnwright at 7:55 AM | Comments (2)

Last Friday Kathy received a FedEx package at home. She delivered it to me in the afternoon in my BibTheo class. It was what we expected -- my book, Telling God's Story: Narrative Preaching for Christian Formation (IVP Academic, 2007)!! IVP has done a marvelous job producing the book. Copies are available at IVP's customer service number: 1-800-843-9487. It is posted for pre-order here.

If you click on the above image, Eric Lee tells me that you will see it a bit bigger. Needless to say, I'm excited and very, very thankful. I hope that you can get and read the book. While a book on preaching, it hopefully is much more in its analysis of North American Christianity and recommendations for a non-accomodated congregational/parish life!

Tell me what you think!!

Posted by johnwright at 8:53 AM | Comments (21)

I have stop posting sermons because I stopped writing manuscripts and began preaching orally without even notes. Within our cultural and congregational context, there is much to say for this. But this Sunday I wanted to be more precise in my language. I prepared a manuscript and retreated behind the pulpit. With last Sunday a multicongregational Sunday, this was my chance to give an Easter sermon. Some liturgists will argue that the primary convictions of a person/congregation come out at the most important liturgical celebrations. This comes pretty close to mine, but not merely mine, but, I would argue, the faith given to the saints.

I would welcome comments on the sermon. Part of the reason for the manuscript was to invite comments. Remember, Christ is risen!

Second Sunday of Easter
Job 42:1-6
Acts 5:12a, 17-22, 25-29
John 20:19-31

Introduction: It’s good to every now and then return to some fundamental questions to explain behaviors that can become habitual. For instance, why do we gather here in this room like we do on Sunday mornings? Why do we sing, read Scriptures, pray, come to dip bread in a cup of the fruit of the vine? Why listen to a talking head speaking from the front? It’s a bit strange behavior, if you think about it. How we answer that simple question might be the most important answer that we can give as the church.

I. If we listen to our culture, we gather to express our own brand of spirituality.
A. Calls for spirituality abound today. The last 20 years have witnessed an explosion of spirituality. We find spirituality on Oprah, on experimentation with Asian religious practices. Businesses have discovered spirituality; one can make a living as a spiritual consultant to businesses. Medical care has discovered spirituality; environmentalists; psychologists; mainline Protestants, progressive Roman Catholics, even the evangelical church embraces spirituality to run with it. Spirituality names an underlying depth to the human condition, the most basic impulse in humanity that calls for communal expression. These expressions may take different forms, but, so we are told, this human experience of spirituality is the same. Spirituality draws humans together as a community, linking individuals with others, with the world, with the cosmos, with God. Gathering together spiritually, we’re told, helps us find individual and communal meaning as we are enfolded relationally into the life process that is God-in-the-world through our own creative expressions in worship.
B. A person named Matthew Fox represents a popular expression of such an understanding of spirituality. You can find the basic tenets at Creationspirituality.info. Here’s what he teaches: (http://www.creationspirituality.info/Principles.html)
1. The universe is basically a blessing, that is, something we experience as good.
2. We can and do relate to the universe as a whole since we are a microcosm of that macrocosm and that this relationship "intoxicates" us. (Aquinas)
3. Everyone is a mystic (i.e., born full of wonder and capable of recovering it at any age; of not taking the awe and wonder of existence for granted.)
4. Everyone is a prophet, i.e., a "mystic in action" (Hocking) who is called to "interfere" (Heschel) with what interrupts authentic life.
5. That humans have to dig and work at finding their deep self, their true self, their spirit self; thus the role of spiritual praxis and meditation and community confrontation which can itself be a yoga. If we do not undergo such praxis we live superficially out of fear or greed or addiction or someone else's expectations of us. That salvation is best understood as "preserving the good." (Aquinas).
6. That the journey that marks that digging can be named as a four-fold journey:
Via Positiva: delight, awe, wonder, revelry
Via Negativa: darkness, silence, suffering, letting go
Via Creativa: birthing, creativity
Via Transformativa: compassion, justice healing, celebration
7. Everyone is an artist in some way and art as meditation is a primary form of prayer for releasing our images and empowering the community and each of us. Art finds its fulfillment in ritual, the community's art.
8. We are all sons and daughters of God; therefore, we have divine blood in our vein, the divine breath in our lungs; and the basic work of God is: Compassion.
9. Divinity is as much Mother as Father, as much Child as Parent, as much Godhead (mystery) as God (history) as much beyond all beings as in all beings.
10. That we experience that the Divine is in all things and all things are in the Divine (Panentheism) and that this mystical intuition supplants theism (and its child, atheism) as an appropriate way to name our relation to the Divine and experience the Sacred.”
C. From the perspective of the enlightened in our culture, we gather to celebrate the Sacred, the God-in-the-world-in-us. Spirituality is universal, pluralistic. We gather, so our culture tells us, whether we know it or not, as an expression of our deepest inner, communal self – an expression of spirituality that comes from being part of the divinity-in-the-cosmos.

II. There is a grain of truth in this position. But we have to recognize that if we gather for this reason, we have fallen to the anti-God forces in the world.
A. First the grain of truth. We come from God; we are for God; there is a lack that we experience when we close ourselves off from God. St. Augustine said, “We desire to praise You, for we are part of Your creation; we bear our mortality about with us and carry the evidence of our sin and the proof that You resist the proud. Still we desire to praise You, each person who is only a small part of Your creation. You have prompted us that we should delight to praise You, for You have made us for Yourself and restless is our heart until it comes to rest in You.” Our hearts are restless. We experience a lack when we close ourselves from God. We experience unsettling at the deepest levels of our being until we find our rest in God. But this disquiet is ambiguous. The disquiet either opens us to the revelation of the Triune God or leads us astray into idolatry. We need care, lest the disquiet chases us into idolatry, and we end up worshipping a projection of our selves, our culture, our problems – an idol.
B. Idolatry is precisely what this emphasis on spirituality is. This postmodern notion of spirituality takes a human democratic political, capitalistic economic system and projects it onto the cosmos and calls it “God” even while claiming, at times, to contest capitalist forces. In 2005 two British non-Christians, Jeremy Carrette and Richard King wrote a book, published by Routledge Press, called Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion. The authors argue that the rise of spirituality “is a manifestation of a wider process of cultural shifts . . . associated with . . . the emergence of large multinational corporations (many of which are economically more powerful than most nation-states)” (p. 6). They continue to show how “spirituality” takes forms of life, language out of ancient traditions, dissects them, and markets them to empower the individual in the contemporary world. Spirituality “strips the assets of ‘religion’ by plundering its material and cultural resources, which are then repackaged, rebranded and then sold in the marketplace of ideas. This reselling exploits the historical respect and ‘aura of authenticity’ of the religious traditions (what in business terms is often called ‘the goodwill’ of the company) while at the same time, separating itself from any negative connotations associated with the religious in a modern secular context (rebranding). This is precisely the burden of the concept of spirituality in such contexts, allowing a simultaneous nod towards and separation from ‘the religious’. The corporate machine or the market does not seek to validate or reinscribe the tradition but rather utilizes its cultural cachet for its own purposes and profit” (pp. 15-16). If Carrette and King are right, and I think that they are, catch the irony here. Language of “spirituality” sounds so progressive, so inclusive, so all-encompassing and universal. Instead it is reactive, forces differences into the same, abstracts the particular into a universal, and arises out of recent colonial developments in the West. It is just as particular as any and all language.
C. Spirituality is nothing more than the exploitation of the faith given to the saints by the very forces that those who often invoke spirituality are trying to resist. Like all idolatries, like all that is not based upon God’s revelation but instead upon human wisdom, it projects upon the cosmos the contemporary understanding of what is human writ large. Spirituality names the unrest within us that drives us to God or idolatry. D. Spirituality cannot be an adequate reason for us to gather in worship, to live a common life as the pilgrim people of God in the world today.

Transition: We live in a cultural context that can push us towards a subtle shifting towards a “progressive faith” grounded in a “pluralistic spirituality” rather than more deeply into the faith handed over to the saints. We in this congregation have lost members in the past to such a position; there are persons deeply committed to such a faith who influence and teach us; such a position has and still endangers our unity as a congregation. I have such better news. I have such a better reason for gathering together, for engaging in worship, for our common life of love for each other, for life as a congregation – and each person within it – deeply committed to congregational and personal direct works of devotion and mercy to the poor.

III. We gather because God has raised Jesus Christ from the grave.
A. Hear the Good News! God has raised Christ from the grave! Death has been defeated by death; Christ has brought life to those in the tombs!!! In the resurrection of Jesus, the Creator God has revealed God’s self as Other than Creation, not enclosed or limited within it. God is God who rules over all history -- not a relational process within history. God is the God who creates all from nothing, and brings forth life from the dead! In the resurrection of Jesus we see that God has revealed God’s own self in Jesus Christ. God is worthy of worship because God created all and has redeemed all in life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit. We are freed from the spiritual powers of darkness that would enslave us into the continuous repetition of the new and improved. In the resurrection of Jesus, God calls us to a life that really is life, life everlasting! The resurrection of Jesus shows us the universal in the particular, the radical inclusivity of God’s offer of forgiveness to us in Jesus, God’s universal faithfulness to God’s promise to all creation. Sin, death, and Satan have lost. God has shown that Love, Gift, Life is the last word, not absorption into a cosmic process, for God is Love, Gift, Life! Hear the good news: Jesus’ tomb is empty; He has appeared to Peter and his disciples!
B. Jesus’ resurrection is no mere spiritual resurrection; no mere collective artistic experience of the traumatized. Christ is bodily raised from the grave, a spiritual body, but a body nonetheless. We have witnesses. I say this, not on the basis of some incredulous, naïve statement of faith against reason. Faith is not a denial of reason, but its condition that leads to its perfection. Our gospel passage from the Gospel of John was most likely written by an eyewitness, written 60 years after the fact. Richard Bauckham, one of the leading New Testament scholars in the world, teaching at St. Andrewes University in Scotland, has recently written a book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Bauckham uncovers a tradition in the earliest church and evidence within the gospel itself that suggest that this gospel was written by John the Elder, a follower of Jesus from the Jerusalem area during Jesus’ life, present with him at his death, a witness to his resurrection. This is not John, one of the 12; this is another John, a John whose importance grew as others who knew Jesus died and his live testimony remained. Look at the story. It is tremendously understated; it does not bear the nature of glorious, splendiferous legends of superheroes: “When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side." Christ is risen; Christ appeared to his disciples! Don’t you understand? Everything has changed. God has revealed God’s self to us in the still punctured body of our Risen Lord!
C. “How, John? Explain the resurrection.” If we could explain the resurrection, it wouldn’t be true. The God whom we worship, the true God, is not an idol, not a process working itself out in relation to creation. The resurrection reveals the God who is the Creator of all, not one that we can dig out within ourselves or within creation. The actions of this God cannot be explained by us. If we try to explain the resurrection, we will end up with an idol. The resurrection stands at the core of the mystery of our faith: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” In the resurrection of Jesus we see the Mystery that is God does not act like an agent within creation, but acts uniquely as God, the Loving Sovereign over all. As we heard in our reading from Job concerning God: "I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. . . . Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. . . . I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes."
D. The revelation of God in Jesus Christ, confirmed in the resurrection, provides the basis for our gathering together in worship as the people of God.

IV. “I don’t know, John. Look at all the evil in the world, the needs, the degradation of the environment, the poverty. We’ve got to make a difference. I can feel spirituality; I can experience communal expressions of human creativity in worship; I experience the unity of all things around me in a cosmic change that everything is linked together by the same; I get motivated to help others, to be compassionate by reflecting on God-in-the-world. Faith in God through the resurrected Jesus is such struggle in the depths of the secularity of our world; it seems irrelevant to the challenges of our generation.”
A. I understand. Look at Thomas in the Gospel – “I won’t believe unless I see myself.” The culture of death is so prominent in the world in which we live, the reduction of persons to a commodity, the depth of poverty, the human activities that threaten the ecological balance in which we live. We want to grasp at what seems useful. God who is revealed in the resurrected Jesus? How useful is that?
B. We can’t subordinate usefulness to what is true, for ultimately, over time, only what is true is useful. Perhaps if we feel the doubts of Thomas, perhaps we can discover his confession. Jesus appeared. See what Thomas sees. Thomas felt his wounds in his hand and side. Thomas responded, “My Lord and my God.” The resurrected Jesus is still the wounded Jesus, bodily wounded by the depths of our sin, the injustice of our world. In the resurrected body of Jesus, we see the God who, in Christ, has taken into God’s self the wounds of injured humanity, indeed, an injured creation. The resurrected Jesus takes Thomas to God in the very wounds of his body. These wounds are not the last word. The wounds in the Body of Jesus are transformed by the God who is Love into God’s glory, God’s majesty, God’s sovereignty, into Life! Amidst death, we see life. We don’t have to participate in the sinfulness of the world to try to bring love by anger, to heal by destroying, to take control by protesting, to bring justice by intimidation. We are called to faith in God through the wounds of Jesus Christ, transformed by the power of the resurrection. We can enter the wounds of creation in the hope of the God who is sovereign over all, even death and injustice. We are freed to love, freed to be truthful; we don’t have to make a difference, we have to trust God who brings life from the dead!
C. Hear the good news. We don’t have to be useful as our world defines it! We can be faithful, do what is true, right, and good, patiently present within creation to let the God who raised Jesus from the dead make the difference. We can live out of control, to let God change us by calling us to the resurrected Christ amid feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, overseeing the sick, burying the dead, giving drink to the thirsty, honoring the image of God in all humans, even those who exploit and ruin God’s creation, being a committed part of a local body of Christ. We can discover ways of living in solidarity with the body of Christ throughout the world today as we live in solidarity with the saints through the ages. We are freed to hope and love through faith in the resurrected body of Jesus. “My Lord and my God!” We are freed to recognize that the most important task of our lives is to gather to worship the true God, the Triune God revealed in Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit. The most important thing is to believe in the risen Christ.
D. In the resurrected body of the wounded Christ, we move into the sinfulness of the world, not worrying about success or failure, but truthfulness, faithfulness, obedience to God in Christ.

Conclusion: We gather, friends, because God has raised Jesus from the grave. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ. Will hardship or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword. As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

Posted by johnwright at 10:37 AM | Comments (7)

Thom Stark wrote a second, important, well reasoned and correctly questioning response to my post on Hauerwas as a Catholic theologian. He rightfully notes that “As we've learned from Nation, catholicity is one of the distinctive marks of Yoder's theology . . . the way you write it, it sounds like you're pitting catholicity against radical reformation, which both Yoder and Hauerwas would argue is a big mistake.” Thom is exactly correct in what I am doing and very correct in cautioning me. What I want to claim is that Yoder’s retrieval of the Radical Reformation has a selective catholicity, is more determined by the Enlightenment than often recognized, and that there is an area of discontinuity in Hauerwas’ adoption of Yoder that Hauerwas’s rhetoric often obscures. This does not annul Thom’s observation that “the biggest difference between Hauerwas and MacIntyre is not the place they want to give to philosophy and theology in hierarchal order, but Yoder.” Thom is exactly correct here. But there is a richer catholicity that I believe we must retrieve to sustain Yoder’s catholic commitments. Yoder himself needs reformed by his own notion of catholicity.

Yoder indeed insisted upon the catholicity of the radical reformation. I am realizing his roots in the post-WW II ecumenical flowering that he continued to pursue even as the concern for the catholicity of the church diminished in the face of contextual theologies in the 1970’s and on, represented, for instance, by various liberation theologies. It seems to me that Yoder finds himself genealogically firmly in the Barth/van Balthasar/Nouvelle Theologie trajectory coming out of the mid-20th century. Yoder, however, in some ways stubbornly resists the full implications of this return to the sources of the evangelical, catholic, and orthodox faith in which he participated.

It was Yoder of blessed memory who taught me that I have no business trying to be a “Nazarene” or a “Wesleyan” theologian. Yoder complained how Bender had made the “Mennonites” a Protestant denomination to make a space for them within the economy of the denominational framework of American society. It was my impression that Yoder viewed Bender's work as a fundamentally mistaken accommodation of the radical reformation tradition to American society because it gave up the Radical Reformations claims to catholicity.

What I want to argue, however, is that Yoder separated his notion of catholicity from the Eucharist, and therefore, from office within the church. While he wants to accept the church’s pre-Constantinian refusal of warfare and acceptance of martyrdom, he separates this from the Eucharistic theology in the church fathers. To read Zizioulas and Yoder together might be a very important task in a return to the sources that allows the Spirit to form us into a faithful remnant of the church in these days.

It seems to me that Yoder makes deeper sense, and avoids possible pitfalls, if one places him within the context of a Communio-ecclesiology. Without this grounding in Christ’s presence in consecrated Eucharistic feast of the body and blood of Christ at the gathering of the baptized, Yoder can be misread as, to quote Thom, “a works-oriented "militant" pursuit of social justice in the liberation theology sense of the term.” This, I want to tentatively assert, allows others to read “Yoder in service of their prior agendas rather than reading Yoder as the master who taught a Texan as violent as Hauerwas how to be patient, albeit imperfectly.” There is a modernist streak in Yoder’s thought that we can obscure, a Kantian impulse that comes from his refusal to pursue ontological questions within the framework of the Christian faith.

I think that this is most apparent in his refusal of Christ’s real presence in the consecrated elements of the body and blood of Christ. Yoder seemingly equates the Eucharist or the Lord’s Supper to the social process of “breaking bread.” Yoder argues in “Sacrament as Social Process” that the meal that Jesus “blessed and claimed as his memorial was their ordinary partaking together of food for the body” (The Royal Priesthood, p. 365). He expounds this view in the next paragraph. “What the New Testament is talking about in ‘breaking bread’ is believers actually sharing with one another their ordinary day-to-day material substance. . . . bread is daily substance. Bread eaten together is economic sharing. Not merely symbolically but in actual fact it extends to a wider circle the economic solidarity that normally I obtained in the family. When, in most of his post-Resurrection appearances, Jesus takes the role of the family head distributing bread (and fish) around the table, he projects into the post-Passion world the common purse of the wandering discipline band whose members had left their prior economic bases to join his movement” (p. 365). One can therefore extend the Eucharist whenever Christians share food together or with others. Yoder draws a strong, Protestant line between the practices found in the New Testament and those in the early Church.

I think that there are serious, practical repercussions here. For Yoder here, it seems to me, the church makes the Eucharist. Christ becomes present in the world through the active work of Christ’s followers in their communal, social activity of sharing economic goods. The church is made by participation in a type of sociality that is found represented and encouraged by Jesus. While Yoder never explicitly divorces this activity from Jesus, Jesus is not necessary to such practices – the practces empirically are found separate from him. Jesus is not necessary to the coming of the Kingdom; Jesus represents the kingdom for his followers to show up where God already is in the world through economic activity. God’s activity in the world is brought about by a type of human work and economic arrangement. Socio-political, economic activity becomes that by which humans build the kingdom as the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, or the practice of breaking bread. It is thus that I think that those who read Yoder as advocating “a works-oriented ‘militant’ pursuit of social justice in the liberation theology sense of the term” do not entirely misread him. Without the personal presence of Christ as gift in the consecrated elements of the Eucharist, Yoder opens himself to being read “in service of their prior agendas” – as a type of progressive Christian communitarian.

In this way Yoder can be read, and maybe justly so, as what Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger criticized: “The social dimension which de Lubac saw rooted in deepest mystery has often sunk to the merely sociological so that the unique Christian contribution to the right understanding of history and community has disappeared from sight. Instead of a leaven for the age, or its salt, we are often simply its echo. If previously there was a narrowing of the Christian vision to an individualism, we are now in danger of a sociological levelling down. Sacraments are often seen merely as celebrations of community where there is no more room for the personal dialogue between God and the soul—something many greet with condescending ridicule. And so there has been a kind of reversal of the previous individualism that itself has fundamentally constricted the theological perspective and has also spread from the central theological themes to the most concrete and practical applications” (“Foreword” to Henri de Lubac, Catholicism, 1988 ed). The joy of participation in God as Gift in Christ’s body and blood by the presence of the Spirit -- and therefore find that in surprising ways that we are part of others in Christ -- becomes lost. A type of leftist moralism can easily arise.

We must always remember that the Eucharist makes the church; or better, God the Father makes the church through calling believers to a common participation in the body of blood of God the Son by the presence of God the Spirit. It is by grace that we are saved, not by works, lest any person boast. Ironically, I would like to argue that it is the Roman Catholic de Lubac who preserves this Reformation concern much better than the Radical Reformation Yoder. Yoder therefore has to become more radically catholic in his Eucharistic theology or Christ’s presence ceases in the world as gift through the church; instead it becomes the work of a community to bring about the kingdom by human activity.

It is precisely this where Yoder needs placed within a broader Christian ontology, a deeper return to the Christians sources in worship as well as Scripture. I think that the Communio theologians can help preserve Yoder from such readings. David L. Schindler in an interview on Zenit.org (http://www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=70184) describes the difference as between the church as “communion” versus the “congregation”. He writes, “The notion of the Church as "communio" thus contrasts with the notion of the Church as "congregatio." While "communio" emphasizes the nature of the Church as a gift from God, established "from above," "congregatio" indicates a community that comes to be "from below," by virtue of the decision of the individual wills of the community, in the manner of a democratic body.” It is this concern for joy of the Gift, particularly the Gift that is Jesus Christ that we need to preserve amid the world of contemporary nihilism, in its despairing or happy form.

Posted by johnwright at 11:34 AM | Comments (5)