Lent is the tightrope walk between self sufficiency (we must refuse arrogance) and self destruction (we must not cause depression). Faithfully walking the tightrope does not take the form of a middle way or a combination of the two – faithfulness is found in relationship with the God who created our bodies from the dust of the earth and offers everlasting life through Jesus Christ.
Author: jkwest44
Why He Wins
Humans are fundamentally storytelling creatures. The stories we tell ourselves deeply shape every bit of our perception of what is happening in the present and what is possible for the future. Story is not different in kind than truth or objectivity; story is the recognition that every word we speak and every concept we are capable of forming only exists to the extent that it is spoken in acceptance or rejection of the forms of thought that have been given to us. The more compelling the story, the more willing we are to give our lives to it. The more coherent the story, the more we are able to find peace through participating in that story.
What marks modern American culture more deeply than any other decision or division or factor is the radical rejection of any story that is not the individual’s own. But without an appreciation for the stories that wrote us, we will never be able to understand who we are or how we have come to be capable of experiencing the stories of others and the effects of those stories upon the self. If we don’t make explicit the story we are writing with our lives and how that story comes out of the stories that write us, we will never become more than the incoherent, fearful, aimless jumbles of anxiety that we are right now.
He wins and will continue to win for as long as he continues to tell a better story than the alternative. Stories based on fear and other-ing touch a deeply human nerve that tells the story of danger in the unknown. Fear is such a primal part of the human experience that its stories can hijack any of us in the blink of an eye. To build a sweeping narrative upon fear at every turn – fear of the other, fear of change, fear of losing influence or wealth, fear of anything or anyone that doesn’t think or talk or act like me – is necessarily going to guide our hearts toward violence.
Facts and figures are powerless in the face of such a compelling story for the storytelling creatures we are. Even the stories of an individual here and there have no power to counteract the primal force of his story of fear. We humans don’t care about whether the facts back up his story. We may think facts matter but emotions respond long before we have the chance to ‘decide’ what we think about the details. We view the world and it’s facts through the dominant story until its foundation is so fundamentally shaken that we have to jump to a new story.
The only way to counteract his story is to find a more compelling story that offers a new foundation. For too long, we have forsaken the art of storytelling because of all the ways it has gone wrong. To begin telling a story that stretches beyond the self is to risk the subjugation of that which makes each of us unique and beautiful – imperialism, colonialism, and racism are deeply problematic stories that have developed precisely out of the desire to tell a communal story. The more common response has been to reject the notion of a communal story altogether. But to reject such a story is to reject the only means we could have of establishing a peace that creates the space for coherence amidst our differences and a sum that is more than its parts.
Until we can offer a more compelling story and an invitation to embody that story together, the primal story of fear will continue to win out. Far too many of us may never outright act in hate, but instead devolve into practical atheism through the refusal to wake up and see the reality our brothers and sisters both face and create. Until a more compelling story is told and invitation given, there will never be anything more than multiple competing interests, vying for authority and influence. Until we learn to take seriously the stories that wrote us and the stories we are trying to write, we will never have the language to even combat, much less defeat, his (or the next) story of fear.
To tell such a story starts with learning the art of listening. Listen to the stories of our neighbors. Listen to the stories of our enemies. Listen to the stories of everyone who is willing to share what is beneath the words of the stories we hide behind. Once we have deeply and truly listened, then we will find the space in which love is possible. Once love is present, we will find the space in which it is possible to name and embrace the story we share. Until we learn to tell that story with our lives and relationships, we are never more than one step removed from fear dictating the story of our lives.
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Words without actions are powerless. Actions without words are meaningless.
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Conservative Christianity fails in the same way modernism fails – it seeks an objective story to become the authority for everyone to read and comprehend.
Liberal Christianity fails in the same way postmodernism fails – it denies that there is an authoritative story to be told, and rather seeks a concept without a story, perhaps love, to be authority.
The only way to avoid these pitfalls is to subject ourselves to the grace of God by engaging in the practices of life that form the agent capable of reading and embodying the story that forms and is formed by the tradition over time that we call church.
Techno-Babel
Now the whole earth had one internet and the same binary code. And as technology progressed they came upon a crash-free, virus-free, stable OS and installed it everywhere. And they said to one another “Come let us compose lines of code and Beta test them thoroughly.” And they had computers for networking, and wireless routers for data transmission. Then they said, “Come let us build ourselves a chat room, with fully functional video conferencing, and let us make a search-able database of screen names for all, otherwise we’ll be scattered abroad and out of touch for minutes (or even days!).” The Lord logged on to see the chat room and the video conferencing function, which programmers had designed. And the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they are all using ‘C’, this is only the beginning of what they will do; no connections they propose to make will now be impossible for them. Come, let us hack in, and confuse their language there, so that their servers will crash and shut down.” So the Lord crashed their program and they left off building the chat room. Therefore, it was called Techno-Babel because the Lord confused their language and crashed their servers so all were out of touch over the face of all the earth.
01000111 01100101 01101110 01100101 01110011 01101001 01110011: 11:1-9
I’m not actually opposed to using technology (I even wrote this essay on a computer) and I don’t believe God will really come down to destroy the internet. But, I am opposed to the uncritical use of technology as a medium for communication and I do believe God speaks more in spite of technology than through it. As we continue to press forward into the electronic age, I hope to use the story of Babel as a means of considering the limitations of electronic communication. By keeping the following two thoughts in mind, just maybe we can help prevent our own Techno-Babel: 1) Relationships are necessary for accurate communication; and 2) God is the only medium for real human connection.
1) The value of modern technology in communication is ambiguous. The internet enables people to see and speak to each other instantly across the world; translation programs even enable speaking with people who don’t speak the same language. Cell phones and PDAs allow people to stay in touch from nearly anywhere in the world and satellite technology may just complete the coverage map. At the same time, NE1 who has ever been in a txt msg fight knows how easily words can be misunderstood. No matter how clear your acronyms, abbreviations, and emoticons may seem to you, sth is 404 n transmission. @TEOTD, each side misses out on body language and facial expressions that are central to communication; a cold stare or a soft touch can say more than a thousand words.
Video conferencing is one of the newer gadgets to remove some of these issues. However, the relationships we develop with people, and not just the ability to see and hear them, are the basis upon which real communication becomes possible. It doesn’t take much effort to prove that miscommunication is quite possible, even likely, between people. Paul’s 1st letter to the Corinthians provides plenty of examples of how people can take a simple idea, turn it into a slogan, and miss out on the whole meaning of the message. It’s like saying ‘All things are lawful for me’ is a justification to do whatever I want (see 1 Cor. 6:12); perhaps a logical conclusion, but certainly not at all what Paul means when he speaks of Christ abolishing the law. The relationships in which words are spoken fill out as much meaning as the words themselves.
I’m certainly not denying the potential for technology to help start or continue relationships; I’ve known plenty of people who met online and my wife and I used countless hours of Skype video chat when I was 1000 miles away at school. To say that all uses of technology are inherently wrong would even implicitly deny the Bible’s validity; writing itself was at one time a new invention with an ambiguous potential for communication. What I am pointing out is that the written or spoken word has no single or necessary meaning; even the most treasured and beautiful words of scripture can and have been used to do incredible harm to others. The ability to speak instantly with anyone across the globe does not mean that communication is just the touch of a button away. Communication requires far more than the ability to hear and understand words; a whole network of presuppositions and assumptions goes into the way words are comprehended and the assessment or universality of that network is something that technology can’t even begin to address.
To speak to one another in a global society requires human relationships developed over time; nothing can replace the value of physically spending time with another human being. To share thoughts and ideas requires more than a program to map word equivalencies and nuances. The danger we are taught by the story of Babel is that globally unified purposes, actions, and languages aren’t inherently good. Enabling everyone to speak the same language (whether a ‘universal’ English or some totally unforeseen machine language) does not make communication possible across the globe. The kingdom of God stretches over all creation and certainly implies that the whole world is necessarily a part of our human relationships; but developing the ability to see and hear anyone, anywhere is nowhere near the same thing as edifying the Body of Christ through deep and challenging relationships with all persons.
Transferring data so that information can be rationally accessed is not identical to the life altering power of gospel community. Technology can be a powerful tool for human connection, but it is only a tool. Imagine if God had emailed Moses the Ten Commandments or sent a video series on Jesus instead of sending Him to live among us. The beauty and power of the gospel is that God loved us so much that He entered our world and changed everything. Christian relationships run deeper than broad band connections.
2) If the church ever hopes to be more than just one more sound bite in an A.D.D. world of flashy ads and catchy phrases, it must realize that God is the only mediator for human relationship. Technology only passively facilitates the senses’ involvement in communication; it does not actively enable anything to happen. Technology allows the thoughts or experiences of an individual to be transmitted into the mind of another, but it does not provide any essential means for interpretation or evaluation. To arrive at the truth of the gospel message and to realize its transformative power, we must rest our hopes on the movement and action of God and not the marketability of our mission slogans or ad campaigns.
If you want to reach someone on the other side of the globe, you have many options. You can pick up a telephone, send an email, find a nice chat room, etc. But when you actually decide to share something of yourself with that person, the transmission of 1’s and 0’s isn’t enough. When you come to know someone by your relationship to God, you are necessarily connected to that person. I don’t mean something happens in a mystically spiritual way that unites ‘life-forces’ or something science-fictional, but I do fully believe that God unites people together in an absolutely real, almost palpable way. God binds us together in all of our relationships and is most fully present in marriage when “the two become one flesh.” The type of connection that unites us as members of the Body of Christ is far more real and far more meaningful than the ability to reproduce sensory data through 1’s and 0’s.
When we sit down and consider how best to “reach” people in the church, the conversation often presumes the need to condense the gospel message or share the church website with people outside the church. Neither practice is inherently wrong, but to think that the truth of the Christian message should be primarily conveyed in a 30 second spiel (or even a 30 minute sermon) is to miss the majority of the biblical witness. Certainly, the Holy Spirit is capable of reaching someone through a 30 second conversation or even just a single word, but to turn that potential into the basis for Christian proclamation is to miss out on God’s abundant gifts to humanity. The church does not construct an intellectual portal into a heavenly realm (or hack into God’s internet servers) to provide mediation between humans and God. The church trains persons to identify the abundance of gifts that God has directly provided for us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The church facilitates the development of formative relationships in which we are made members of Christ’s body and enables us, by the power of the Spirit, to see that God is the only One Who actively enables communication of the Word.
To share the Christian message requires God to activate our speech and enable communication. Technology provides an unparalleled medium of communication because it seems to be a more direct and permanent connection with one another than God could ever provide; technology provides instant audio and visual connections from and to nearly anywhere in the world. However, the problem with Babel was not the inability to speak to one another and share in “the same words;” the problem was that people thought their labor was necessary to stay united. The more time and resources we put into the development of new technologies for sharing the gospel message, the more our attention is diverted from the fact that God has already united us in Jesus Christ.
Instead of finding ways to “reach” people, we should find ways to see what God is doing among us and invite others to share in our life together. We can’t rid ourselves of technology, but we can work to reform its use given a proper understanding of God’s role in the life of the church; we can work to make God, and not the appeal of a power point slide, the center of our proclamation and worship.
The next time you open up an email or chat window, consider what connection you really have with your conversation partner. Are you relying on and trusting more in a computer’s ability to get your message across than in the power of the Spirit through whom we are all connected? Good communication is a tricky business and technology is neither necessary nor sufficient for it to occur. To use technology in the life of the church requires a community of interpretation. To share in the Word of God requires more than a detailed reproduction of sense experience. Just as we must know the voice behind the text-message to avoid misunderstanding, we must know the voice of the One Who spoke creation into being if we really want to share the gospel. As I said before, I doubt God will ever come down to destroy the internet, but I would hope our tendency to embrace technology as the bearer of truth doesn’t force His Hand into causing our own Techno-Babel.
****Written in Spring 2010
The Limits of External Truth
To speak of Jesus Christ apart from the interrelated web of gospel (the unity of His life – the intention to know what happened), traditioned reasoning (His unity with Israel – the setting to make His life intelligible), and enacted narrative (the implications of His life – the long term intentions to follow Him) presumes the (successful) quest for truthful knowledge about the identity of Jesus Christ can begin somewhere other than the character and work of God; it is to presume there is a neutral ground within the human mind upon which rationality is capable of arriving at the truth about Jesus.
The mind is not, however, a neutral arbiter of factual experiences and propositions that bombard the senses from the world outside. The mind is shaped by the world, both sensually and intellectually, such that matters of fact and fiction can only be expressed in terms of their coherence or incoherence within the present shape of the mind; and not, as supposed by those who seek neutral knowledge about Jesus, by arriving at the correlation between idea or experience and a particular set of eternal truths outside of but accessible to the mind.
To make this statement is not to preclude the existence of external truths, but to assert that the move from flawed understanding to external truth is not within the power of the human mind nor is it contingent upon a succession of finite correctives to human knowledge. The true identity of Jesus Christ can only be grasped within the particular narrative revealed by God and accessible through the power of the Holy Spirit. His identity is, therefore, fundamentally different if not understood in the terms by which God has chosen and continues to choose to reveal Him to the world.
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Modernism is the assumption that I can tell the objective story of all that is through rationality alone.
Postmodernism is the rejection of the assumption that there is an objective story to be told.
Postmodernism destroyed the story when what we need to destroy is the notion of an “I” apart from story.
Christianity is the assumption that there is no “I” to tell a story apart from the story of God that writes and is written by us.
Membership Classes as Radical Hospitality #3 -Hospitality In-vitation
For the last two weeks I’ve tried to make the case that our Christian faith compels us to go out of our way to show signs of God’s love for others and that creating the space where we can know and be known by people is a requirement we should place upon ourselves. This week, I want to press a little further on one particular practice for making both of these things happen. That practice is the invitation to act.
If we look through the gospels, we’ll find that invitations take several different forms. Jesus invites the disciples to follow him in the form of a command, “Come follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” The invitation became the occasion for the disciples to take on a whole new way of life. Jesus is invited to dinner by a Pharisee, which turns into an occasion for questioning some of the laws at the very heart of Jewish practice and belief. The parable of invitation to the wedding banquet is used as an occasion to express the radically different type of community into which God calls us in response to the work God has done in us.
These are some of the deep, rich, and transformative ways that people experience invitation in the gospels – a new way to live, a new way to think, a new people to love. I think we too often get bogged down in the details of invitation as information sharing or merely getting the word out. It’s true that you do have to get the word out, even Jesus was invited to something in particular, but when that’s the focus of what we’re doing it’s far too easy to notice all the frustrations and problems that come alongside trying to get your information heard in a culture that is infinitely saturated with invitations to do or buy something. Take a minute to reflect on what form of invitation has had the most effect on you; not just what gets the information across, but what are those things in your life that have actually challenged and changed who you are.
What is the most effective way you’ve experienced invitation in your life?
[Also see #1 – Excommunication and #2 – Hospitality Required]
Family Reunion vs. Family Album
The way we talk about personal relationships with God, which is the necessary foundation to build up the notion that we can be “spiritual but not religious” or “Christian but not churched,” is like saying that we can be part of a family without ever interacting with members of the family. Technically, it’s not wrong. Plenty of people never speak with their parents or siblings, which doesn’t mean they aren’t related. But God desires more for us than to live in a constant state of isolation.
To claim Christianity without other Christians is to treat the bible as an old dusty photo album. The bible becomes a book you can pull out any time you like to look over the past photos and memories of what the family of God has been. You can think fondly of the stories and the images you find, which can uplift and encourage you through the hope that the same God is still present and active in your life. It’s a very powerful thing to occasionally flip through that old dusty album and to be reminded of who and whose you are.
At some point, however, it is time to put the album down and go out to make new memories with the family. The kingdom of God is more like an active family reunion than a solitary perusal of the family photo album. It’s all well and good to remember that you are technically part of a family, but God desires that we actively seek forgiveness and reconciliation and relationship with our brothers and sisters. There may be nothing wrong with looking through the good book, but isolating yourself in the past does nothing to heal the brokenness we experience every day and it does nothing to move us toward the fullness of what God desires for us.
Heaven is like one last family reunion where all the brokenness and hurt and “things we just don’t talk about” are washed away. All that is left is the beauty of the relationships for which we were created in the image of God. If that is the direction toward which God is guiding our lives, we might as well start learning what it’s like when we refuse to accept a photo album and start to expect a real family.
Thoughts 