Nehemiah 9:6-15

It is important to note that the passage from Nehemiah is a prayer. But as a prayer, it summarizes the story of Genesis 12-Numbers 36. What points serve as the key points in the repetition of this story in the prayer? Why these points? How is the “we” and “us” and “our” here? Does it make a difference who “we” are? Is it a particular or abstract, non-descript “we”?

The prayer takes place during the rebuilding of Jerusalem, an attempt to solidify the material environment for the Jews surrounded by a hostile people. How does this situation find parallels in the death and resurrection of Christ? In the situation of our local congregation now? In the situation of the church catholic throughout the world?

John 10:1-10
Maybe the best way to read the Gospel reading is to read it from the back forward – the last phrase. How does this last verse presuppose the resurrection of Jesus? What does it do to our understanding of “life” if “abundant life” is defined in the coming of Jesus? What is the difference between Jesus and the thief? If the “sheepfold” is abundant life, what is the thief? What would be the differences between abundant life of the thief and that provided through the gate?
We’re hesitant to define “abundant life” outside of defining it as what each individual personally “values” maybe with a vague sense of “social justice” for others. We have been profoundly shaped by what Charles Taylor has come to describe as an “individual expressivist order”:
I believe, along with many others, that our North Atlantic civilization has been undergoing a cultural revolution in recent decades. The 60s provide perhaps the hinge moment, at least symbolically. It is . . . an individuating revolution, which may sound strange, because our modern age was already based on a certain individualism. But this has shifted on a new axis, without deserting the others. As well as moral/spiritual and instrumental individualisms, we now have a widespread ‘expressive’ individualism. This is, of course, not totally new. Expressivism was the invention of the Romantic period in the late eighteenth century. Intellectual and artistic elites have been searching for the authentic way of living or expressing themselves throughout the nineteenth century. What is new is that this kind of self-orientation seems to have become a mass phenomenon. (A Secular Age, p. 473).

Abundant life becomes having the ability to “express oneself” authentically and creatively – one has a “right to personal expression”; it is bad to be poor because then the poor depend on others for their own expression, and thus are deprived of their “rights” – thus then need others to provide a voice for them – to give voice to the voiceless, to empower the oppressed. How does the John passage respond to such a deeply set cultural framework? What is the relationship between “abundant life” in the sheepfold and life in concrete local congregation such as Mid-City?

1 Peter 2:19-25

What does it mean to “follow in Jesus’ steps”? Notice that the sheepfold imagery appears in this passage as well? How does this passage from 1 Peter describe “abundant life”? How is suffering related to “abundant life”? How does this passage only make sense in light of Easter? How does it relate to the prayer from Nehemiah?

The readings push together memory/prayer as a particular people connected to the Jews, Jesus and abundant life, and non-retaliation/non-violence as deeply related convictions. It seems a weird mixture in current North American culture. Yet there is an inner coherence that differentiates us as believers from the world around us, maybe a necessary connection that we must see.

Last summer I read a book by Richard M. Gamble, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation. What Gamble shows is that it was the social gospel clergy, who before 1914 were pragmatic pacificists, that provided the inner-rationale for the US entry into “The Great War” (an oxymoron). Gamble writes: “these religious progressives interpreted the First World War in light of their social gospel theology. . . . these forward-looking clergy embraced the war as a chance to achieve their broadly defined social gospel objectives. In the same way that American imperialism at the turn of the century was, as historian William E. Leuchtenburg argued, not a betrayal of domestic reform idealism but rather the expression of the same expansive, interventionist spirit on an international scale, so too the progressive clergy’s enthusiasm for American participation in the Great War did not contradict their progressive theology. Their enthusiasm for the war was an acknowledged extension of their theological progressivism” (p. 3).

How can keeping these passages together, even as we enter deeply life with and for the poor, among whom we find Jesus Christ, prevent us from the same well-intentioned but profoundly unchristian positions as those early 20th century “social gospelteers”? What should we expect to experience as we keep memory/prayer as a particular people connected to the Jews, Jesus and abundant life, and non-retaliation/non-violence together?

Have a wonderful evening together!!