Go in peace...

For about the past year, I have become consumed with a few central ideas. These things have taken hold of me, wrestled me to the ground, and in the process, I have come to find some new names for myself...(borrowing on the theme of Jacob as he wrestled with the angel). A few of these themes that have become central in my life are listed below. I feel like they are being expanded, exploded, and put to the test as I wrestle through what life means in the context of marriage, grad school and so much more.

These aren't in a particular order, they are just in the order that I happen to be writing them down.

1) Grace.
I can't seem to shake this. God's grace is overwhelming. As of yet, I have no idea the extent of it, or the implications on my theology, but I know for certain that God's lovingkindness, compassion, and grace are becoming/must become the centerpiece of my understanding of God, and thus my relationship to God and others.

2) Incarnation.
Beyond my own experience, beyond what I have heard, beyond the words written in scripture, I cling to the person of Jesus Christ as God's self-disclosure to us. I do not want to worship a book, a community, a religion, or any number of other idolatries that I commit daily. I seek a relationship with the God who takes on flesh.

I am convinced that God continues to create and incarnate among us and in us every day. As a community of believers we are, and are becoming, the body of Christ in the world. The incarnation, like the creation, was not a one time event. Instead it is in the nature of God to create, to reconcile, and to take on flesh.

3) Communion/community
I cannot sort these two words out. They are linked. There is something essential to the nature of the Eucharist (communion) that demands serving one another the elements that represent the body of Christ. If the incarnation today is found in the living people who compose the body of Christ, perhaps communion is found in the offering of this body of people in service to the world.

The church has held many positions on what "happens" at communion. Most of the divergence of opinions centers on the physical properties of the elements of bread and wine (or juice for some). The problem is that people have trouble with Jesus' words: "this is my body broken for you... this is my blood poured out for you." If we look at this passage in light of Jesus calling us to be the body of Christ in the world, then perhaps it has very little or even nothing to do with the bread and wine, which happened to be the simplest, least ceremonial elements at a very elaborate religious feast. Maybe this means that the very simplest among us can go forth in the the grace of God and embody the love of Christ in a real way to the world.

Further, the church has long held that communion is a certain means of grace. That is to say, various groups in the church believe, to differing degrees, that participating in communion is a way to receive an impartation of the rescuing grace of God.

So then, if we are the body of God in the world, broken and offer in service and community to those who need God's grace, then we are able, through loving others, to embody the love of Christ and participate in and with God in the act of redeeming the world.

That is to say, we can, through yielding to the work of Christ in us, become the incarnational body of Christ, and not through proselytizing, but through loving and extending community, we offer the redeeming grace of God through the means of inclusion in the community of God.

4) Peace.
This one has been building in me for a long time. I cannot shake the notion that if God is about grace, redemption, and love; that if God loves all equally; that if we are all created by God; that if Christ came to reconcile all, then we must work and strain and hope for peace.

I am so tired of trying to defend this to others. I believe wholeheartedly that if we are to immerse ourselves in the gospel of Christ and truly be people who live the difficult life of sacrifice in order to love well, then we must conclude that no one is more worthy of love than another. Beyond this we must let go of the desire for possessions that weighs so heavily on us that it drives us to live beyond our means, to horde, to deny the rights of others, and to kill for what we think should be ours at the cost of another's life.

Peace and pacifism do not equate with doing nothing. That is absurd. There is a spectrum. Imagine an arc. The at the base of the arc is the word "active" at the peak of the arc is the word "passive." These two words mark two opposite poles which influence the spectrum. On one end of the arc is violence. As you travel up the arc, at the very peak you find passivity (nearest the "passive" pole) and traveling down the other side of the arc, back toward the active pole, you find pacifism, or, a term I am more fond of, Peace-activism.
You see then, that the opposite of violence is not passivity, but the active pursuit of peace. It is indeed reprehensible to do nothing in the face of violence, but it is even worse to perpetuate more violence.

5) A Gospel-centric reading of scripture
As you might have guessed from the other 4 categories, this has probably been the source of most of my new ways of thinking/being. I have absolutely no problem whatsoever prioritizing the gospel accounts and reading them as the primary interpretive lens for scripture as a whole. There is a lot in scripture that cannot be explained, that contradicts the message of God's grace and redemption, and that points away from the positions that I have outlined. I have no problem embracing this.

As I said before, I do not worship the text of the Bible. It is not God. Period. I have committed that idolatry far too much already in my life. No, if God could be nailed down to what is in scriptures, then God would not be alive, powerful, or graceful enough to be given even a second thought. Instead, the scriptures are a collection of really wonderful accounts of how some men have understood God in specific contexts in history. But that is not who God is.

No, God reveals who God is to many people throughout history. We could combine all humanity's encounters with God and compile them into the most sophisticated matrix of a text imaginable, and it would still not amount to who God is.

I believe that God is essentially creating and incarnating. We see life continually in a process of creation and renewal all around us. The most important act of God's incarnational nature is in the person of Jesus Christ. It is in taking on flesh and walking around and living with us, that God reveals the most of who God is. In the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, we see the God that we should worship.

All the problems I have with the scriptures as a whole, do they disappear when it comes to the gospels? Certainly not, but I hold that the gospels are the closest written account in scriptures to who Christ is and continues to be among us. I believe in the text of the gospels because I believe in the God who has been alive in the community that compiled and preserves those texts as living accounts of the ongoing living God who is personally and transformationally at work in our community today.

Some might question my view of the text. I say that I have the highest view of the text that I could possibly hold. It is alive, and breathing among us, and should never be studied as a concrete document from which propositional truth can be drawn and applied in a way that isolates and excludes. Instead it is a living text that must be wrestled with and seen for what it is, a text, and a testimony about, but ultimately not, God.


SO..... that's where I find myself in the past year or so. I find so many of these ideas captured in a song performed by Derek Webb. I have included it below.

"Take To The World"

words and music by Aaron Tate

go in peace to love and to serve let your ears ring long with what you’ve heard and may the bread on your tongue leave a trail of crumbs to lead the hungry back to the place that you are from chorus and take to the world this love, hope and faith take to the world this rare, relentless grace and like the three in one know you must become what you want to save ‘cause that’s still the way He takes to the world go, and go far take light deep in the dark believe what’s true He uses all, even you Grace and Peace, daniel