Category: revelation

From Scripture to Spirit; Or, Once again away from liturgy (though perhaps returning again)

[This is a (rather lengthy) sermon I preached this past Sunday on John 16:5-15 and Revelation 1:9-19.]

I just finished my second year of college, papers were submitted and exams completed.  In honour of this occasion my roommates and I thought it would be good to hit the town a let loose a little.  So three of us headed downtown ready for a little mischief.  Now granted we were renting a house in [the small Mennonite town of] Steinbach [the fictional setting of Miriam Toews’ Complicated Kindness] so heading downtown may have limited our options a little.  In any event we hit the 7-11 for some Slurpees.  We pulled a stuffed racoon across the road by string when cars drove by.  You know, wild and crazy college stuff.  In any event as the night wore on we began to wander aimlessly around when eventually we heard some shouting.  We went to get a closer look.  Eventually we came across a man and woman fighting on the driveway.  We were quite close at this point.  Eventually the fight ended, they parted and the man got into his car to drive away.  We quickly hid behind a bush on the next yard.  Now as the man turned the headlights on and backed out of the driveway the car paused for a moment and in that moment lined up directly with the bush we were hiding behind.  The car lights lit up the bush like a light bulb clearly revealing three figures cowering behind it.  The engine was shut off and the door opened and we heard him get out with a yell.  And in that same moment we turned and ran with him coming after us.  Running down a back alley we eventually split up and I found myself running alone, well that is with an angry man coming up behind me.  Now I need to make clear that I am not runner, a sprinter at best, but I knew I could not keep my pace up.  And in those brief moments I needed to make a choice.  Bear in mind I had no idea how big or small, young or old this guy was.  I decided to stop.  As I stopped I turned around, folded my hands behind my back to face and see my pursuer.  I’ll leave it there for now.

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Book Review – Anarchy and Apocalypse

Ronald E. Osborn. Anarchy and Apocalypse: Essays on Faith Violence, and Theodicy (Cascade Books, 2010).

Osborn’s short collection of essays is one of the more eclectic publications I have read in some time.  Faith and violence are indeed the mingled themes that bind this work together; having said that, however, the collection is somewhat nomadic moving from shorter almost op-ed pieces to longer more technical engagements.  Osborn’s introduction claims that a possible underlying ‘project’ here is an attempt to relate anarchist and Christian approaches to nonviolence.

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Peter Blum on Im/possibility and the Church’s Syntactical Relationship with the Poor

The Gift of Difference hit the ground running with Peter C. Blum’s chapter, “Two Cheers for an Ontology of Violence: Reflections on Im/possibility.” The chapter reflects on the strange possibility that Derrida’s ontology of violence and the impossibility of nonviolence may actually offer more resources for peace than Milbank’s ontology of peace which (as almost all contributors to this work identify) actually justifies and ultimately requires violence.  Derrida reduces the impossibility of nonviolence to an assertion that existence in the form of expression will always be an expression of reducing “the Other to the same” (11).  Blum quotes Derrida, “nonviolent language would be a language which would do without the verb to be, that is, with predication.  Predication is the first violence” (12).  Impossibility for Derrida though is not the end but it is where “things get interesting” (15).  Blum raises a case of the Nickle Mines shooting as a case of the madness and impossibility of forgiveness.  Blum is not concerned with whether or not the Amish response escapes violence but the manner in which it forces us to face the impossibility of nonviolence, its madness.

I don’t think I will offer substantive responses to each chapter (though many deserve further reflection).  What this chapter raised was a sort of tangential offshoot in relation to the Kingdom-Church-World Theses over at Halden’s blog.  What I found confusing there was Thesis #11.  The language was muddled especially the church’s syntactical relationship to ‘the poor’.  In this short thesis there are three prepositions used to relate the church to the poor.

Thesis 11: Such kenotic, cruciform solidarity in obedience to the way of the cross leaves no room for the church to be anything other than the “church of the poor.” The church’s kenotic solidarity with the world thus occurs as solidarity with the poor. As Jon Sobrino reminds us, “The mystery of the poor is prior to the ecclesial mission, and that mission is logically prior to an established church” (Sobrino, No Salvation Outside the Poor, 21). Or as Moltmann puts it, “It is not the Church that ‘has’ a mission, but the reverse; Christ’s mission creates itself a Church. The mission should not be understood from the perspective of the Church, but the other way round.”(Moltmann, Church in the Power of the Spirit, 10). With the Catholic bishops at Medellin, the church must reaffirm and exercise the “preferential option for the poor.” This “preferential option” is not simply one of many tasks of the church—it lies at the center and heart of its mission. In fact, it is its mission, because this is Christ’s mission.

To me this clearly indicates the ongoing struggle of the western/affluent church to integrate something it still does not quite understand.  Are we the poor?  Are we with the poor?  Are we for the poor?  Given Blum’s reflection on impossibility I would like to suggest that the church is called to announce and embody the impossibility of wealth.  This was the revelation to the church of Laodicea.  You say, “I am rich.”  But you do not realize that you are poor (Rev 3:17).  There is no such thing as human wealth.  This is our great illusion.  This is found throughout the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament.  The wealth streams to the Temple of God.  It is only there that is has any worth.  We must not be for or with the poor or even attempt to become the poor.  We must rather unveil our poverty in thought, word, deed.  The impossibility of wealth then can be taken up in the gift of God (Come buy food without cost . . . ).  This most certainly does not leave material poverty off the agenda as the unveiling of poverty releases us from the mechanics that the illusion of wealth demand from us.  For me this also helps release the church from a bind that previous theologies tend to place on practice namely what we hope for the poor.  Do we want the poor to be wealthy?  Why would we assume that they would turn out to be anything other than what the wealthy already are?  We must not eradicate poverty as such but eradicate the illusion of wealth that creates security systems that alienate one from another.  It is this alienation more than material poverty itself that must be overcome.  This erases the need to join syntactically with the poor and creates only the conditions for God’s gift.

Alas, many think that the eternal is a construction of the imagination, money the reality – in the understanding of the eternal and of truth it is precisely money which is a construction of the imagination! – Soren Kierkegaard in Works of Love.

And His Government Shall Have No End

Through most of my adult life I have essentially withdrawn from the formal political process.  This has been the result, I think, mainly of my inability to understand political process and my theological hesitancy in viewing government as the means to what God is doing in the world.  It seems I have been able to do little correcting the former and I have tried not to take a militant position on the latter as I have encountered many for whom political process has made constructive contributions.

In Revelation 5 we hear about the new song sung by the four living creatures and the 24 elders.  They praise the lamb who was slain whose blood purchased people for God.  These people come from every tribe, language, ethnicity, and nation.  They are made a priestly kingdom and will rule the earth.  Revelation of course is shot through with the conflict around the earth’s rule.  Spending more time in this text I have begun to reflect again what it might mean or look like for the ‘lamb’s people’ to rule.

What came to me was really quite a simple and unoriginal contrast.  Traditional government is always willing to put others at risk.  Soldiers are themselves at risk and they put foreigners at risk.  Police themselves are at risk and they put other citizens at risk.  Who are these risked lives trying to secure.  I think they are trying to secure a type of non-life or static life.  This structure of government secures those who are passive as well as those who are able to risk others.  There is a brave refrain among the families of those fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan believing in the greater good of what is being fought for.  But their lives are not secured.  Their lives are shattered, at times it appears irredeemably broken.  So they say it is for their children but this fighting poses no guarantee of that belief.  And so the ones secured are only in the present, only those who do not need to fight and probably do not really care about it.  Those secured are the stabilizing block, masse, that government needs for support and credence.

So what of the ‘lamb’s people?’  They themselves rule by placing their lives in temporal risk for eternal security.  When they witness risked people they engage themselves directly for the securing of others.  Their authority then is acknowledged through their sacrifice . . . worthy is the lamb.  Kierkegaard’s notion of the eternal is significant here as it functions in the rupturing of every moment which humanly tends towards the temporal and the securing of the self at the cost of others.  Here there can be no allegiance to tribe, language, culture, or nation for all are represented in the call of the lamb.

It should also be noted that this is not a mindless risking on the part of the faithful it is rather a willing risk in light of and in discerning response to the ills and risks manifest around them.  This is where critical discussion and charitable response can join.