(Ir)religiosity

Below is the manuscript — more or less, I tend to deviate quite a bit — of the sermon I will be preaching this morning, Transfiguration Sunday, at Quincy Community UMC.  It is based on the gospel text for this week (Luke 9:28-43).

In 1993, Greg Mortensen attempted to climb K2, the second highest mountain in the world.  For Greg, the way up was literally the way up the mountain, to the summit.  But Greg never made it to the top of K2.  There were problems with his crew and on the way back down the mountain Greg was separated from the rest of the group and wandered into a remote village in Pakistan called Korphe.  The people of the village cared for Greg and after spending time with them, Greg realized that the village had no school and no system of education for the children.  Once he returned to the States Greg decided to raise enough money to build a school for the children of Korphe.  This endeavor eventually grew into the Central Asia Institute, a non-profit organization which builds schools for remote villages in north-eastern Pakistan.  Greg recounts his journey in the best-selling book Three Cups of Tea which the Sunday School class has been reading over the past several months.  But these schools are only being built because Greg wasn’t able to reach the top of the mountain.  Three Cups of Tea was written because, in a sense, Greg failed.  Or did he succeed?  It seems that in the end Greg discovered that the way up, the real way up, was the way down — down into the village in Pakistan, down into a world were children had no access to education.  Down into the problems of the world where he could make a difference.

The way up is down.

We see a similar story in our text today.  In Luke’s gospel, Jesus takes three of his disciples — Peter, James, and John — to the top of a mountain to pray.  Now, I doubt that this mountain was as massive as K2 but it was high enough that Jesus felt he could be alone to pray.  This is something that Jesus does many times.  According to the Scriptures, Jesus would go alone, or sometimes with a few disciples, to a mountain or some other secluded place, to pray and mediate often.

But this time it was different, at least that is Luke’s version of the story.  According to Luke, while he is praying Jesus’ face begins to glow and his clothes begin to dazzle.  Then, suddenly, Moses and the prophet Elijah appear next to Jesus and Luke tells us that they begin to talk to Jesus about what he is to “accomplish in Jerusalem,” an obvious reference to Jesus’ passion and crucifixion.

Now, we have all been to the movies with all the new special effects, so let’s image what this scene might look like.  Jesus is on a mountain, his face and clothes are dazzling, and Moses and Elijah appear and start talking to him about his future trip to Jerusalem, the capital city.  Not exactly a calm, still event, right?  It seems to be pretty spectacular.  I mean, Steven Spielberg or Peter Jackson could probably do quite a bit with that on the big screen and I imagine it would be pretty true to the story, at least that seems to be Luke’s version of the story.  But where are the disciples during all this?  Luke tells us that they are so weighed down with sleep that they can barely stay awake!  Really?  Barely stay awake?  How could they miss this?  Moses, one the great heroes of their history who led their ancestors out of slavery in Egypt, has just appeared and Elijah, one of the great prophets is with him.  I mean, these are famous people that Peter, James, and John would have heard about growing up.  And to top it all off Jesus’ clothes are dazzling.  But yet the disciples can barely stay awake.  I mean, imagine it — what would it be like if Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy suddenly appeared right now, right here in this church?  And what if Pastor Susan’s clothes started dazzling?  I think most of us would be wide awake.  But Luke tells us the disciples can barely stay awake.  In fact, they don’t even say anything until it is time to go back down the mountain and then Peter says something like, “Oh, but this is such a great experience, let’s stay.  And we’ll build a church here, in fact, we’ll build three churches, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”  It’s almost like Peter has woke up and realized what’s going on and he doesn’t want the experience to end.  We all know what that’s like don’t we?  Have you ever been part of an experience that you didn’t want to end?  Something that you wanted to prolong as long as you could?  Almost as soon as Peter says this a cloud appears and a voice says, “This is my Son, my Chosen, listen to him!”  And then, just as fast as they appeared, Moses and Elijah are gone and Jesus heads back down the mountain.

For Jesus, the way up is down. Read the rest of this entry »

We like to dichotomize things.  It makes our lives much easier when things can be easily compartmentalized and divided.  But the problem with that tendency is that it creates unneeded — and often blatantly false — polarities and bifurcations.  These type of constructions are endemic in the modern church and some of the more common and noticeable ones are the divisions between conservative and liberal, evangelical and progressive, traditional and contemporary, and so on.  Even within the latest renewal movement which aims to rethink and re-imagine “church” and Christianity we see a division between emerg-ing and emerg-ent.  This penchant to create fissures and fractures seems to be a natural one.

Nevertheless, I think something is missed in doing so because no group or category has a monopoly on Truth (capital “T”) but each one has a certain part, a certain important piece, of the truth (little “t”), a piece that is lost when its counterparts jettison it altogether.  So I like the tension and the dialectic.  To me, that’s the real sweet spot.  It can be painful and messy, yes, but I think that makes it all the more beautiful.

Of all these petty and unnecessary binaries the division between orthodoxy and orthopraxy is one of the most important, or at least one with greater implications.  It’s also one of the most divisive that will almost always incite inflammatory or emotional reaction from someone.  Really, when you think about it, where stand here has implications for just about everything.  It’s serious business.  And the usual arguments are so…tiresome.  Conservatives insist that orthodoxy trumps everything and that it must be vigorously defended against heresy.  Likewise, liberals, quoting Matthew 25 no doubt, rebut that praxis must be emphasized over (and sometimes against) belief.  But both poles have blind spots, blind spots that their counterparts love to point out.   And so goes the endless deadlock and debating round and round the circle.

I think both of these points are hopelessly unimaginative and helplessly beholden to a modern mindset that is very quickly becoming outmoded.

I want to suggest that it is not either/or and that placing doxis (belief) and praxis (action) against one another misses the larger movement.  I think it is and/both.  And rigid hegemony of either is dangerous if not destructive.  Belief is deeply important to me but only insofar as it transforms the very fabric of my being, rupturing my comfortable and conventional way of relating to the other, with something wholly Other, something I otherwise thought to be impossible, even absurd, but now made very possible via my response to God’s grace and Jesus’ to call to radical love.  Similarly, those tangible actions and that palpable praxis, because it is so radical and beyond predictable possibility, simply cannot be brought to full fruition without a grounding narrative or belief, a reliance on something beyond my own finite human capacities.

So both belief and action are inherently interdependent and mutually interactive.  And both are understood differently.  Belief is not simply something to which I submit my mental or cognitive assent, neither is action, like some sort of fetish, something I do in order to avoid guilt or shame.  Both of those usual conceptions avoid real transformation.  As much as we might argue otherwise, they just don’t alter our being, our person-hood, and our relations with God, self, and the other.    And for me that is the ultimate point.  That is what we are striving for:  individual and collective transformation so that we are realigned according to God’s purposes, restored of the Imago dei so we can responsibly participate in God’s alternate reality (what Jesus called the kingdom of God) and graciously increase the love of God and neighbor in our various contexts.

Belief and action, doxis and praxis.  Both are very important and both are contingent upon the other, but neither can be allowed to crust over into tired dogmatism because when they do we run the dangerous risk of slipping into idolatry. And when we do that, well, we’ve really missed the point.

Doxis or praxis?

Hint:  this may be a trick question.

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I posted this on my site at Missional Tribe last night.  Given its importance I thought I’ve throw it up here too.

In light of the new Tribe that is forming over at MissionalTribe.org, I’ve decided to revisit some previous posts.  Last April I participated in a missional sychroblog hosted by Jonathan Brink over at Missio Dei.  It was a very rewarding experience and allowed me to work through some of my thoughts and feelings about why I call myself a missional Christian and why I am drawn to the larger emergent conversation.  So, what follows is a reworking of two different posts (here and here ).  My thought has really changed much — though I feel like I could probably flesh this out in a small book — so I’ve only reworked the material so it will fit together cohesively.

What is Missional Living?

For me, missional living is participating in God’s work in the world, accepting the invitation of grace and responding to it and being part of God’s story, being part of God’s life. When I see people intentionally and earnestly seeking to discover what God is already doing in the world and when I see people partnering with God as co-creators, participating in divine, redemptive action in the narrative of history, that’s where I see missional living taking place.

But just as important, when I see people living missionally, it is always local, always within a particular context. Missional Christians go to great lengths to understand the context around them and how they might own that context while faithfully and creatively living the gospel message, the good news of redemption and subsequent restoration. In fact, when you think about it, that is the essence of the incarnation. God becoming human, putting skin and bones on, God getting local, pitching a tent among us, and showing us in our context how to live in God’s story and how to participate in the synergetic process of creativity, nurturing an alternative reality of reconciliation, i.e. the divine commonwealth. And it doesn’t get much better than that.

Why Am I Missional?

I am missional because I not only believe it is the best and most faithful response to God’s grace in authentic contextual community as incarnational, synergetic participants in the process of creativity, but because I believe it is the best, most compelling and liberating remedy to the “worldly” (and I use the word with a bit of hesitation) systems of domination and coercive power in which we all live and participate.

And that gives me some serious hope.

We live in a, postmodern and postcolonial world and because of that context we’re beginning to realize our past mistakes in proclaiming the good news and as a result we’re reinventing what it means to live and proclaim (and proclaiming by living) the counter-cultural good news of Jesus of Nazareth.

And really, when you get down to it, it’s not that complicated. It’s just hard to actually do. Mainly because it involves a completely different way of “being” and living. One that denies self and lives for and in service to the entire world; one that takes Jesus at his word.

So, when missional persons read things like: “Love your neighbor as yourself,” “Love your enemies” and “Forgive those who persecute you” they try their best to not reduce them to cute one-line catch phrases but actually put them into action by exemplifying what Paul Tillich calls an “ultimate concern for ‘the other.’”

And that’s why I am missional.

Because it involves living out the good news not just talking about. It involves an ethic that is not divorced from but it vital to the ongoing, interactive narrative of salvation. Rather than humor oneself solely with sophisticated theological or philosophical reflection, a missional follower of the Way participates in theological praxis alongside theological reflection. Furthermore, a missional agent, a missional insurgent, sees any theological reflection that is not preceded, accompanied, and followed by praxis as inherently counter-productive to and Jesus message and God’s dream for the world.

I will never forget the tragedy that happened a few years ago at the Amish school in Pennsylvania. And even more compelling the response of the Amish community to the tragedy will be forever ingrained in my memory. Rather than acting in anger and revenge, the community destroyed the school where the shooting took place and moved on by responding with an overwhelming outpouring of forgiveness and reconciliation. They reached out with compassion, mercy, and grace, grieved along with the family of the perpetrator and set up a charity fund in that family’s name. They attended the funeral of the perpetrator and responded with further acts of forgiveness and love. They became Jesus.

And that is why I am missional.

Because, to me, being missional is the best possible way to live the good news of the Jesus movement and participate in God’s alternative reality (God’s kingdom) in the world today. It is the best possible way to be Jesus in the here and now and to convey the message of restoration and re-creation. It is the best possible way to seek justice, resist evil and do good.

Simply put, it is the best possible way to live.

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