I Am Not the City of God

One thrust of emerging conversations in Western Christianity has been a lament of a particular kind of neglect. We, it's confessed, have made the gospel of Jesus Christ a solitary affair. We've emphasized that Jesus would have died on the cross even if we were the only person for him to die for; that's how much he loves each of us, to the near-annihilation of everyone else.

Now, ask pretty much any parent and they will say that there's enough love in their heart for each of their children to consume them entirely, but somehow, mystically, that consuming love effectively spreads evenly over all the kids. I don't discount that--love is a many-splendored thing, after all. But the problem that's been identified enough that it's not worth going into great detail here is that the object of that love--each of us--doesn't necessarily have adequate vision to grasp that it doesn't make them the center of the universe.

In light of such a strong emphasis of God's intense love for the individual, God's intense love for the world is often shoved to the background. I come to appreciate this problem again and again as my own self-absorption comes into view. Most recently, I was led in this rediscovery by Walter Bruegemann, writing on Psalm 46.

"All great cities brag. . . . No great city ever did a better job of bragging than that ancient city of Jerusalem."

So far so good, except that as he makes the case for Jerusalem, the beloved braggart of God, he quotes Psalm 46:

"God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved."

Psalm 46, it turns out, is about Jerusalem. It's not, it turns out, about me. Neither, it turns out, is Psalm 87:

"Glorious things of thee are spoken, O city of God."

It turns out that every so often, quite unconsciously, I think of myself as the city of God. When I do, all other people are left outside my gates.

Brueggemann confronts this hubris, this city-sized self-absorption, with three cautions from Jeremiah:

Do not let the wise boast of their wisdom.
Do not let the mighty boast of their might.
Do not let the wealthy boast of their wealth.

Rather,

Let those who boast boast in this, that they understand and know me, that I am the Lord; I act with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight, says the Lord. (Jer 9:24)

It's worth noting that Jeremiah was writing about the city too; and that I'm still appropriating God's word to the city as God's word to myself. In reality I am not the city of God; God's city is his own business, and if I'm lucky I'll get to live in it--forever and ever, Amen.

Meanwhile, God--Psalm 46 reminds us--isn't a city either; he's a fortress. Go figure.

How I Shall Seize Control of My Company

I wrote this for my other blog, Strangely Dim, in 2004. Five years later, still not in charge. Bummer. But this week my boss is out of town, and today his boss is out of town, so who knows?

***

Call me Absalom--that's the name of the role model for my upward mobility.

Wait--I'll save you some needless Googling. Absalom is a prince of ancient Israel, a son of King David who temporarily usurped his father's throne. You can read about him in 2 Samuel.

Anyway, Absalom successfully unseated the most popular king of Israel's then two-king history, which makes him a highly practical model for my own naked ambition.

Now, banking on the likelihood that nobody who might challenge my meteoric rise to the top actually reads my blog, I'll share my strategy with you so you can pray for me and even apply it to your own relentless pursuit of power. Absalom made his play in three simple acts.

Act 1. Absalom acted nicer than everyone above him; therefore I shall act nicer than everyone above me. Absalom and his father each won the hearts of the people at different times. David did it by being just a little bit crazy; Absalom did it by being a "man of the people."

This will be a bit difficult for me, since I actually am a little bit crazy, and the people above me are actually very nice. (Wink, wink--just in case they do read this.) Nevertheless, one of the cool things about being out of power is that the people in power have to make all the difficult decisions and (this is important) announce those decisions. I can simply commiserate with those affected by the decisions and "let them know I'm there for them." This was Jerry Seinfeld's strategy as he courted a woman in a troubled relationship; eventually he moved from "being there for her" to "being there." Brilliant.

Act 2. Absalom acted smarter than everyone above him; therefore I shall act smarter than everyone above me. Absalom had opinions about everything, and his opinions usually made his audience feel better about themselves. Since I don't have to make the decisions for my company, I'm free to critique the decision-makers from the sidelines. This, by the way, is also my principal strategy for taking over my church.

Act 3. Absalom recruited his father's staff and even slept with his father's harem. I'm reasonably confident that the powers that be in my company don't have harems, but there are plenty of other ways I can contribute toward a polarized work environment. Ask anyone. Once I take over, people will quickly shift their loyalties to me--if, that is, they know what's good for them.

That's it: three easy steps to a coup d'etat. Absalom pulled it off and enjoyed supreme power for a couple of weeks, until he was, of course, executed.

Like I said, pray for me.

And Yet . . .

I went to a regional meeting for my denomination earlier this week. Such meetings are typically best described as bureaucratic agony occasionally interrupted by curious insight or bubbling controversy. There was no shortage of either this time; an ongoing scuffle about the fate of some of the denomination's property holdings, a passionately problematic statement of faith by a soon-to-be-unanimously-ordained new clergy, a hard push for a new church-innovation program in our area, a visit from the titular head of the denomination in Cuba, and conspiratorial machinations at every corner of the building. The only thing I could discern a shortage of, actually, was the coffee. Thanks for nothing, denomination.

I tease because I care. But prior to all the minor irritations and occasional arbitrated conflicts was a service for worship. The service was built around a reminder of our baptism, linking that baptism to the Jews' exodus from Egypt that passed through the Red Sea and secured their deliverance. The preacher acknowledged on behalf of all of us that it's wonderful to be chosen by God, but we are nonetheless challenged by the journey he has chosen us for--challenged by the circumstances that attend to any such journey, yes, but also challenged by the limitations we discover in ourselves. In an attempt to keep both those aspects of our experience in view, we recalled the profession of faith made at our baptism but also the very real ways we violate that profession in such mundane ways. I found it to be one of those moments of curious insight, so I thought I'd give it space here.

***
L. Trusting in the gracious mercy of God, do you turn from the ways of sin and renounce evil and its powers in the world?

P. We do and yet we choose to be servants to sin, making false idols of material objects and other relationships in our lives that distract us from God's gracious goodness and abundant mercy.

L. Who is your Lord and Savior?

P. Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior and yet I turn away from those most in need of His love. I reject and fear those whom Jesus welcomed into salvation and find myself a servant to my own needs and desires, forsaking the true community in the body of Christ.

L. Will you be Christ's faithful disciple, obeying his word and showing his love?

P. I will, but only through the guiding power of the Holy Spirit, the everlasting love of Jesus Christ, and the transforming grace of God.

Book Review: Flickering Pixels

It's probably an important sign of the times that the people most invested in book-reading have manifold ways of reading for free. Libraries stock bestsellers and can handily find loaner copies of whatever they don't stock. Book-swapping websites are among the more practically-minded social networking innovations. Bloggers can solicit or are occasionally solicited, out of the blue, with review copies of whatever they're interested in reading. That's most recently the case of Flickering Pixels by Shane Hipps, a book for thoughtful laypeople interested in the shift from a print to an image-based media. It came to me gratis in both digital and print editions.

I eagerly downloaded the digital edition, but I have yet to crack it open, which tells me something about the parameters within which I'll consider an e-book. But then came the print edition, and once I opened it, I couldn't close it. No one asked me to review this book, but I'm doing it anyway, because I feel a bit guilty that Hipps has gotten none of my money, so I'd like to cajole some of you to send him some of yours.

Hipps is a Mennonite pastor who came into this vocation after a lucrative career in advertising. He's doing fascinating integrative work between the shift from print to image media and the implications for Christian theology and practice. He's in the line of tradition of Marshall McLuhan, that guy who once said, "The medium is the message"; that insight and everything that extended beyond it earned him cover photos on major magazines and a reputation as being "the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Freud, and Pavlov." While that may be overstating things, I learned from Hipps that McLuhan isn't just the author of a cliche but rather an important student of cultural psychology. His observations merit theological consideration, something Hipps does ably.

In Flickering Pixels Hipps shows the impact of the printing press on religious thought, making a compelling case that Protestantism in general took the shape it took because of innovations in print media. "How disconcerting," he writes, "to have a faith yoked so closely to a medium that is now in the dusk of its life." Not that print is dying, but it is being eclipsed by image-based media, an innovation that brings its own benefits and blind spots. The book reads to me like a sea-change; the time is now appropriate to refashion the faith, to stop lamenting the weathering of old wineskins and to allow the new image-based media to tease out its own message. Hipps helpfully shows that the cliche that media change but the message remains the same is not true; what remains the same is not the media or the message but the message-giver.

Hipps reads better as a culture critic than as a writing pastor; his applicabilities are a bit strained and underdeveloped, and he's infinitely more tweetable in his discussions about media. But the books that follow Flickering Pixels will benefit from the wake he's creating: we're given seeds of a renaissance here, and we're given permission to go plant those seeds somewhere and see what grows out of them. I'm eager to read his first book, The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture, which is directed toward leaders of churches and ministries, and I'm especially interested in seeing what he publishes next.

Book Review: Finding the Groove

While I was in San Diego for the National Pastors Convention, I had the chance to meet Colorado pastor and new author Robert Gelinas, whose book Finding the Groove: Composing a Jazz-Shaped Theology had just been released. He was in the early stages of euphoria, understandably, which is always a great time to meet a new author.

Robert is one of the pastors I met in San Diego whose "epiphany of recruitment" proved so compelling to me. He blogs at Reflections of a Jazz Theologian. I was drawn to Robert's book as a former jazz musician (I don't play anymore, but my whole identity used to be caught up in it) and an armchair theologian. Two great tastes that go great together, know what I mean?

Robert's book builds consciously and unapologetically on Carl Ellis's great book Free at Last? (the first leisure reading of an IVP book I did after coming on staff there) and is founded on Ralph Ellison's classic pronouncement that all of America is jazz-shaped. Apparently I batted my eyes at Robert's agent enough that he had the publisher send me a complimentary copy, on the assumption that I would review it here--which I was happy to do.

The connection between jazz and American history and even between jazz and theology is undeniably intriguing. Jazz was quickly recognized in Europe as a significant musical expression and a distinctly American contribution, such that early African American innovators found an eager audience abroad even as they continued to endure Jim Crow laws and discrimination at home. Duke Ellington wrote historically significant sacred music, and John Coltrane publicly sought transcendence; his cult following included a church in California named after him whose liturgy was built around free-jazz saxophone. Jazz history is a story of black innovation, white appropriation, interracial cooperation, paradigm shifting and genre blurring, all in the context of a volatile society experiencing its own regular upheavals. Jazz has moved regularly from background to foreground to background; it may be due for its spotlight again, which may explain why a publisher was willing to take a chance on such a niche book.

Robert lays out the major categories for a jazz understanding of a Christian worldview (improvisation), spiritual disciplines (the "woodshed") and community (listening, riffing). His take on hermeneutics is really intriguing, and his argument that the Harlem Renaissance could be for the American church what the Italian Renaissance was for the European church is wildly appealing. He rightly points out that the great Dietrich Bonhoeffer spent some of his own woodshed years in Harlem during the Renaissance before returning to wartime Germany and writing some of the most important theology of the twentieth century. I note that the great Thomas Merton also spent a seminal summer in Harlem during roughly the same period before entering the monastery. I've elsewhere called Merton and Bonhoeffer the patron saints of Generation Thee; but I didn't make the connection between them and Harlem. Would the white American church ever allow itself to be taught by the black American church in the way that Merton and Bonhoeffer did?

As usual, I read the book as an editor and couldn't help thinking about how I would change it: deeper into the ethics of improvisation, more on the evolution of jazz over time and the occasional purist backlash, more observations of what a church community might gain from a "combo" or "ensemble" perspective on fellowship and mission. But maybe that's a better task for the community of jazz theologians that I hope Robert will build. Jazz is in exile these days, in a similar way that the Christian faith is in exile. Neither is at the center of American life; each is on the periphery, trying to draw an audience, offering its call and awaiting its response.

Robert has a second book slated for next year: Strange Fruit, on the cross of Christ. I can't help but think that the second book will be the 201 course to this entry-level option. In the meantime, I hope the book generates lots of discussion; I hope Robert gets invited to teach regularly at Denver Seminary and to write lots and lots of articles and to speak broadly at conferences that draw young pastors and church planters. Because I think he's right: America is jazz-shaped, and as such it demands a jazz-shaped theology. That means solo projects like this one, but it also demands an ensemble, and as many of us as are called need to step up to the mike, crack open our real book and take our twelve bars.

Power to the People

Chew on this, from MaryKate Morse's Making Room for Leadership, and tell me what you think of it:

Power is less like a tool we use to make something happen and more like the water we drink to stay alive. . . . In healthy settings, individuals have the power to make changes in their lives, either internally or externally. They are free to contribute to the well-being of their community. . . . This essential ability to choose does not come with one's name on an office door or with a specific role. It is the nature of being human.

Thoughts?

Lenten Readings from Me-Ville: Heads Up

Lent is coming! A church near where I live is reading through my book Deliver Us from Me-Ville as part of its Lenten observance. It actually seems like a pretty good resource for Lent, if I do say so myself: during Lent we take a long, slow look at ourselves and invite Jesus to guide us from ourselves to his cross and then on a life journey of discipleship. Really--you can make it work.

Anyhoo, this church has created a reading plan for the book, which the pastor graciously shared with me, so that I might share it with you. It'll also be posted to the Facebook group, if that's your preferred venue. But I'll also be posting a quote from the book here every day during Lent, with the kind permission of my publisher, to serve as a sort of checkpoint for you as you make your way through your Lenten observance. Tell your friends--make it communal or something!

Daily Reading Plan
Week 1: The High Cost of Living in Me-Ville
 Day 1 Pages 15-19 Feb. 23
 Day 2 Pages 19-23 Feb. 24
 Day 3 Pages 25-30 Feb. 25
 Day 4 Pages 30-37 Feb. 26
 Day 5 Pages 37-41 Feb. 27
 Day 6 Day off Feb. 28
 Day 7 Day off Mar. 1

Week 2: Jesus Visits Us in Me-Ville
 Day 8 Pages 43-47 Mar. 2
 Day 9 Pages 47-52 Mar. 3
 Day 10 Pages 52-57 Mar. 4
 Day 11 Pages 58-63 Mar. 5
 Day 12 Pages 63-67 Mar. 6
 Day 13 Day off Mar. 7
 Day 14 Day off Mar. 8

Week 3: Jesus Displaces Us
 Day 15 Pages 69-75 Mar. 9
 Day 16 Pages 75-78 Mar. 10
 Day 16 Pages 78-82 Mar. 11
 Day 18 Pages 82-87 Mar. 12
 Day 19 Day off Mar. 13
 Day 20 Day off Mar. 14
 Day 21 Day off Mar. 15

Week 4: Jesus Delivers Us
 Day 22 Pages 89-93 Mar. 16
 Day 23 Pages 93-99 Mar. 17
 Day 24 Pages 99-102 Mar. 18
 Day 25 Pages 103-105 Mar. 19
 Day 26 Pages 105-113 Mar. 20
 Day 27 Day off Mar. 21
 Day 28 Day off Mar. 22

Week 5: Jesus Binds Us Together
 Day 29 Pages 115-121 Mar. 23
 Day 30 Pages 121-124 Mar. 24
 Day 31 Pages 125-127 Mar. 25
 Day 32 Pages 127-133 Mar. 26
 Day 33 Pages 122-138 Mar. 27
 Day 34 Day off Mar. 28
 Day 35 Day off Mar. 29

Week 6: Getting in the Way of Jesus
 Day 36 Pages 13-144 Mar. 30
 Day 37 Pages 144-151 Mar. 31
 Day 38 Pages 151-157 Apr. 1
 Day 39 Pages 157-161 Apr. 2
 Day 40 Pages 162-164 Apr. 3
 Day 41 Pages 165-171 Apr. 4
 Day 42 You’re done! Or are you…? Apr. 5

Lighten Up, in the Name of the Lord

More to come on National Pastors Convention, but in the meantime I came across the following in Dark Night of the Soul, which, it turns out, has nothing to do with Batman:

With respect to the fourth sin, which is spiritual gluttony, . . . such persons expend all their effort in seeking spiritual pleasure and consolation; they never tire, therefore, of reading books; and they begin, now one meditation, now another, in their pursuit of this pleasure which they desire to experience in the things of God. But God, very justly, wisely and lovingly, denies it to them, for otherwise this spiritual gluttony and inordinate appetite would breed innumerable evils. It is, therefore, very fitting that they should enter into the dark night, . . . that they may be purged from this childishness.

Funny how some of the markers of great piety in our era--voracious appetite for spiritual reading, frequent meditation on the Word of God, and so on--are here considered markers of spiritual immaturity. It explains some of the bemused comments about evangelicals I've read in books by monastic Catholics such as Thomas Merton. Begs the question: which spiritual disciplines do you suspect someone like St. John of the Cross might suggest you lay off for a while? How would you respond if a spiritual giant told you to lighten up?

Epiphanies of Recruitment

I'm at the 2009 National Pastors Convention in San Diego, hawking books and courting authors. Fun fun. I've never been to this conference, but as you might imagine, a gathering of two thousand pastors involves quite a bit of talking. I've had really interesting conversations with people from all over the country, but the thing that struck me the most is the recurrence of "epiphanies of recruitment."

An "epiphany of recruitment," a phrase I first read in Brian Mahan's nearly perfect book Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose, is a moment that, in retrospect, serves to bring clarity and cohesiveness to a person's vocation, a moment in which the veil shrouding God's plan for a person's life is pulled back enough to engage the conscious mind in a way that will sustain the subconscious over time. An example in the book was Dorothy Day's childhood conversation with her mother about people who can't afford to have doughnuts for breakfast. She recounted a sense of urgency that her ample supply of doughnuts be made available to such under-resourced people. Dorothy Day went on to be a champion of the poor in the middle of the twentieth century.

The two epiphanies of recruitment I heard described today both coincided with the person's conversion to Christianity. One asked his grandmother for a Bible, decided to start reading it with a short piece, settled on the book of James, and came across the following passage:

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

That verse--not the more popular altar-call verses like "God so loved the world . . ."--taught him what it meant to be a Christian, and among other things, that meant a lifetime of looking after the fatherless and the widow. He was about eight at the time.

The other epiphany of recruitment I heard about today involved a teenager who stumbled across a weekend-long outdoor festival of Christian musicians and speakers. The young man was riding his bike when he heard what turned out to be a multiethnic choir; as he listened to the choir sing, he heard a voice whisper, "This is what God's church looks like." He rode his bike back the next day and the day after that, and converted to Christianity. He's now pastor of a thriving church that is thoroughly multiethnic.

I don't suppose that all epiphanies of recruitment are so salient, but they are all, in theory, that seminal. We file them away, however, and in the interim between our preadolescence and our adulthood, culturally bound expectations and social politics conspire to whittle away at our idealized ambitions and supplant them with something more mundane, more pragmatic. Mahan's book offers exercises to bring those epiphanies into sharper focus for our adult selves; he translates Dorothy Day's experience, for example, with "Did you ever have a doughnut plan? What happened to it? Have you thought about trying it again?" Seems like a good question to throw open to the 3+ readers of Loud Time: what comes to mind from your experience as you read about epiphanies of recruitment? What happened with it? Have you thought about trying it again?

And perhaps further than that, how can we keep alert to the epiphanies of recruitment occurring in the lives of young people around us? What is our responsibility as observers of such moments?

I & Thou in San Diego

This week I'll be in San Diego, California, for the National Pastors Convention. There I'll be working in the bookstore, trying to woo customers toward the books that my employer is publishing; I'll also be drinking lots of coffee, trying to woo writers to publish with us. To top things off, I've learned that the publisher of Deliver Us from Me-Ville will be there as well, and I'll be trying to woo them into publishing my next book. All that wooing should keep me pretty busy.

It's a good thing that this past week a group of my coworkers, guided by the Suburban Christian, spent an hour discussing the book I & Thou by twentieth-century philosopher Martin Buber. We approached the topic, which deals with the tension between relationship and function in how we interact with one another and with the world we inhabit, and most supremely with God, from the perspective of a publishing enterprise. If the tendency to define our various encounters as person-object (I-It)is a corruption of our created instinct to be relational (I-Thou), is the book-publishing industry inescapably objectifying and commodifying, or is there, for example, a way of reading books as an I-Thou encounter? More pressing, perhaps, and more ethically urgent is the question of whether we can enter into contractual relationships with authors, whether we can subject authors to a production schedule, whether we can give any consideration to readers, without falling into the objectifying pattern of an I-It relationship.

The best we could come up with, I suppose, was to establish reminders with ourselves that the people we encounter--whether authors, coworkers, customers, critics, gatekeepers or reluctant readers--are whole persons, not demographic statistics or content-producing machines or two-dimensional nuisances or even golden calves to revere. If we were made to relate mutually, as subject to subject, then our capacity to reduce others to something less is something we contrive, something we manufacture. Sometimes that's just how it has to be in a world such as ours, but it's healthy every now and again to remember that, when the e-mail's been sent or the account has been closed or the book has been read or the contract has been signed--when our relationship as it is comes to a natural, if only temporary close--those we relate to don't cease to exist.

So if I see you in San Diego and you get the feeling that I've switched on autopilot or run you through some kind of suck-up flow chart, remind me that you're human, and I will sheepishly apologize and try to enjoy the moment with you. But while you're there, be sure to check out the IVP booth, and stop by the David C. Cook both to pick up a copy of Deliver Us from Me-Ville.

Spam of the Day: This Beautiful Mail

Haven't done one of these in a while, but I enjoyed this letter quite a bit.

Hello,
How are you today? I hope you are fine. If so thank be to God almigthy.
please excuse me, I saw your contact email while browsing through the
internet so I decided to contact you despite that I have not seen you in
person. It will be my pleasure to communicate with you. My name is Grace
John, 26 years from Liberia in West Africa. I am single girl looking for
honest and nice person. Somebody who care and fear God whom I can partner
with. I don't care about your colour or ethnicity.

I would like to know you more, most especially what you like and what you
dislike.I'm sending you this beautiful mail, with a wish for much
happiness. I am looking forward to hear from.

Thanks and God bless.
Love from,
MissGrace

If you're going to send me spam, I'd appreciate it if you took a cue from Miss Grace and make it beautiful.