Download PDF: The Heaven on Earth Light Show

Pentecost is one of the three annual pilgrim festivals in Judaism. The other two being Passover and Tabernacles. Pentecost was when every male Jew was required to proceed on foot to the Temple in Jerusalem. It is also called the Feast of Weeks, because it was held after the counting of seven complete weeks after “the morrow of the Sabbath” when the barley sheaves were offered as recorded in Lev 23:15-20. The festival is then held on the 50th day, i.e. Pentecost. All the pilgrim festivals possessed agricultural significance. So, Pentecost marked the end of the barley and the beginning of the wheat harvest. That is significant to remember. Pentecost as the end of one season and the beginning of another.

Let’s use the metaphor of a computer program to get at the story of the church and the significance of Ascension and Pentecost. In the computer generation, we are constantly offered newer and more featured software solutions, usually designated with version numbers. We are accustomed to installing a new version of software, which often calls for the uninstalling of the older version that we have been successfully using. And sometimes if we buy an upgrade, we have to have the older version around before the newer version will install.

So let’s think of Pentecost, as a newer version of the Church, which came into effect after God added features to his Church program and then rebooted for the new features to take effect. To reboot there is a momentary loss of power in order to regain a new surge of power to run the new features of the program. It is no different at Pentecost where Church Version 4 came into the world. By my calculations we have had:

• Church Version 1: The church in the garden story
• Church Version 2: The church in the Abraham story
• Church Version 3: The church in the Jesus story
• Church Version 4: The church in the Acts story

We are also familiar with the fact that new versions of software disable some former features or present them in a different way. This was certainly the case between Word 2003 and Word in Vista which is the old Word presented in a new metaphor. This same concept is true for Pentecost. To understand the concept of Pentecost in Acts 2, we must first look at Acts 1.

There are many movies that begin with a dramatic sequence of events that sets the plot in motion and sets up the key characters, conflicts, and themes that will drive the rest of the story. Ascension and Pentecost serve that function in Acts as a telling and tantalizing beginning that makes us realize that for all the drama of the resurrection, there are more extraordinary events still to come. However, most modern Christians have not paid close attention to the dramatic structure of Acts. Ever watched a James Bond movie?— the sequenced sets up at the beginning of the films, which often look like they have nothing to do with the actual film, were setups for the audience, promising even more action as the movie moves along.

The first section of Acts provides the main shape and themes of the whole book that is to come. Luke’s Acts could be entitled “the heaven on earth light show.” Acts is about what it looks like when the light of heaven comes to earth, (heaven meaning the place where God dwells now, not the place where we in the West think we go when we die). Acts portrays what it looks like when the rule of God comes to earth. Acts demonstrates what it is like when heaven and earth come together as one, a foretaste of the end of time when heaven and earth are married for all eternity.

Luke writes:

In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen. After his suffering, he presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God. On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”

So when they met together, they asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”

He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.
They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”

In the first few sentences of Acts, Luke sketches many of themes that will flow out in the full telling of the story of Acts. We must constantly remember that the story of Acts is all about Jesus. While the first name ascribed to it was “the Acts of the Holy Spirit,” it was such because of Jesus. Yes, it is true Jesus had done all that he is going to do while in his earthly form living in Israel for some 38 or 39 years. The Gospel of Luke, as well as the other Gospels, tells the story of the ministry of Jesus doing and teaching the Kingdom of God, and now the Acts is a continuation of the story of Jesus doing and teaching the Kingdom of God through his disciples empowered by the same Spirit that empowered Jesus all along.

In much of USAmerican church theology, the Kingdom of God is seen as the place out there in time and space where God lives, a place where, if we become followers of Jesus, we get to go when we die. The word heaven, that place where we go when we die, has become the synonym for the Kingdom of God. Or, as Augustine brought to the fore, the Kingdom is another way of saying Church. And in good Western fashion of being colonial, we then take on the job of extending or building the Kingdom which is simply referring to the building of the church. This is pure and simple wrongheaded theology.

The whole book of Acts is about the Kingdom of God. From the first page to the last page:

• For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit (Acts 1.5).
• For two whole years Paul stayed there in his own rented house and welcomed all who came to see him. 31 He proclaimed the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ—with all boldness and without hindrance! (28.31)

So the Kingdom of God frames the book of Acts.

In our Western telling and living of the story of God, we have forgotten the Israel dimension (Church: Version 2) within the story of God. We are often given to tell the story of God as:

• God created humankind
• humankind sinned
• God sent Jesus to rescue humankind

By telling the story this way, we have excluded a large part of the story which is found in the Old Testament. We must remember that God called Abraham and Sarah and their family as the means to rescue the world so that God could come into his creation as Israel’s solo representative in order to secure that rescue. The identity of Jesus is formed as the focal point of the whole story of the Old Testament. What Jesus did was what God called Abraham and Sarah and their family to do in the first place. The tension in the story of Israel in the Old Testament is that she knows that she is the bearer of the story of the Creator God, but seemingly cannot, as she stands, actually accomplish those promises to their fullest extent, although on occasion she comes close. That version of Church did not have all the features necessary in place to perform its ultimate mission, the blessing of all the nations. The tension was to be resolved by a newer version of Church with Jesus and his disciples and continue to be resolved by the Pentecost version of the church.

In Acts 1.6, the disciples inquired of Jesus, “Is this the time that you are going to restore the Kingdom to Israel?” The answer is yes, but it is not like you thought it was going to be. It would not be in a political sense as Israel thought it would be, when the world would bow at her feet. But, it would be different because of the newer features of the Church, all the world would bow at the feet of King Jesus and confess that he is Lord.

This surely raised the question then: “What will the Kingdom be like?” In the new version of the Church, everyone will have the opportunity to be empowered by the Spirit to be witnesses of the Kingdom Rule of God in this present age. What kind of witness? one might inquire. Not a witness about a personal relationship that one has encountered and everyone else should encounter it also, but a witness that the King of the world has been enthroned and we are to express what that King’s world is like. It’s a subversive story, meant to change the cultures that we live in.

The next part of the story that Luke shares is about the Ascension. What is the Ascension all about? Part of the difficulty about talking about the Ascension is due to the mental furniture that we have about heaven and earth. We believe that earth is here and heaven is out there somewhere, usually a long way away. This is the result of our Greek thinking, rather than the Bible’s way of thinking, which was and is Hebraic. Our imagination is stuck in our Western worldview about heaven and earth and we try to talk about the Ascension within that framework. So, we think Jesus went up away from the disciples to heaven. The story of the Ascension, as every good first century Jew would know, was a way of thinking about heaven and earth that we Westerners think and reflect from a different worldview. The story of God presents a different worldview about heaven and earth. Heaven and earth overarch and interlock with each other. Heaven and earth were always made to be joined to one another. At his Ascension, Jesus did not go away to some sphere not available to humankind, because heaven and earth really do interlock and overlap. The Creator, the Savior, and the Empowerer are all right here and now. When we minister, heaven crosses that thin vale and what is there in heaven is now present on earth. When we pray for a sick person and healing occurs, heaven has been revealed on earth. When we feed a poor person or better yet when we work on the systemic evil of poorness, heaven has revealed itself on earth.

It is true that heaven is God’s space, earth is our space. However, they are not so separated as the Westerner has come to believe. The Jew believed that there was a place where heaven and earth became one. It was the Temple in Jerusalem. For them, the Temple was where the sphere of heaven, the dwelling of God, and sphere of earth, the dwelling place of humankind, came together. So when a Jew was in the Temple, he or she was still on earth, but at the same time he or she was in the place where the sphere of God actually intersected with earth and at that moment in time that Jewish person was believed to be in the presence of God.

The Temple was not a place where one ran to find safety from the pressures of the world. The Temple was the symbol of what God was going to do for the whole world in his newer versions of the Church.

Heaven and earth are joined together in Jesus and demonstrated as such on the day of Pentecost. The new creation embodied in the risen Jesus, empowered by the Spirit, is now available in the new version of the Church via Pentecost.

Acts is about Jesus and the Church as the true Temple. Paul picks this line of thinking up in the book of Corinthians where he tells the Corinthians that they are the Temple of God. Jesus is surely the place where heaven and earth came together in perfect harmony. And in his Ascension we have a piece of the new earth now in heaven. And in Pentecost we have the power of heaven now on earth. The Ascension and Pentecost join heaven and earth. This joining is the means by which God’s glory will eventually fill the whole earth. The good news here is that we get to play a part in this ongoing story. Luke then tells us in Acts what it will look like when the glory of the Lord begins to fill the earth.

We must gain a new imagination about heaven and earth. We must think about heaven as the control room for earth. We must stop thinking about heaven as a detached-from-earth place to which we go, so we don’t have to have anything to do with the earth.

In today’s world, we are faced with a false antithesis of Deism and Theocracy. The Deism of the Enlightenment Project or as some may call it, Epicureanism, which was a philosophy advanced by Epicurus that considered happiness, or the avoidance of pain and emotional disturbance, to be the highest good and that advocated the pursuit of pleasures that can be enjoyed in moderation.

Deism/ Epicureanism believes and acts out from its mindset that God is upstairs. He’s a long way away from us. It believes and practices that religion is about how we in private get in touch with a far-away-distant God to relate to him, but religion has nothing to do with the real world in which we live because that world is about being happy by avoiding pain and emotional disturbances thus becoming happy in our pursuit of pleasures. This is the story that USAmerica is built on and the story that many in the church think is the Christian story.

Or, Theocracy, which is a government ruled by or subject to religious authority, which believes and acts out, like the fundamentalist of all religious parties, that we are going to force you into submitting to our way of thinking and believing about God. You are an infidel because you don’t believe like we believe. Islamic fundamentalism, with this mindset, simply wants to kill you if you don’t believe about God in the way that they believe about God. Or, in Christian fundamentalism, you simply get to go to hell if you don’t believe in God the way in which they do.

The world, who the Church is supposed to reach with the good news of the Gospel, on the other hand, looks at those two stories and says, No! to theocracy! If that is what it looks like for God to run the show, we would rather have our Deism. Incidentally, the belief in Deism is one of the reasons why there is a constant move to keep God out of public life because he is a private God.

However, theocracy changes according to which theos you believe in. If you believe the wrong theos, in a big bad God who is ready to kill you for non belief or to send you to hell because you are evil and sinful, then you need to change your theos! What if we came to believe in a theocracy that is centered around the person Jesus? How would that change the way in which we live and move and have our being? The Kingdom of God is about theocracy. It’s about saying to the world—this is what it looks like when God is running the public show and is not scurried off into some private chamber where folks practice private rituals.

What would it really look like if God was running the show? Showing how God runs the show was and is the ministry of Jesus. Here’s a leper, I will heal him. Here’s a prostitute, she can travel with me. Here are those without food, I will feed them. Here are the rich, I will show them how to use their financial gains. The book of Acts demonstrates what it is really like when the Creator God is running the show through those empowered by the Spirit and are running the newer version of Church.

The Ascension of Jesus into heaven allows him to empower and send his people with a new version of the Church into the world to demonstrate what it’s like to live in a theocracy where the true God is ruling.

For a moment, let’s move to the end of the story and say a word about the second coming, which is the final act in which heaven and earth will come together for eternity and replace this fallen heaven and earth. Jesus is not coming back to take us home, as so many in the church believe, but he is coming back to establish his rule and reign by transforming the old heaven and earth into a new heaven and earth. The point then of the second coming is not to take people away from the earth, but to restore the earth to its garden shape. That is the focused goal of the story of God.

Ascension and Pentecost set up the movement of the book of Acts as the continued preaching of the Kingdom unhindered and set in motion a series of developments that culminate in a crisis. The entire audience at Pentecost is Jewish; they are from every nation under the sun, so to speak. That is a hint of the magnitude of what will happen as the story unfolds. The Jews, who had taken God for themselves, will now be asked to take their God to the Greeks and the tension was for the Greeks to Judaize themselves to receive the gospel. Peter’s vision at the house of Simon the tanner, an occupation considered to be unclean by Jews of the day, suggested that God was up to something. Later in the story in Acts, after Paul’s first trip abroad, the powers that be in Jerusalem were concerned because their form of viewing God was being expanded beyond their ability to accept. Clean and unclean had been redefined by the great creative programmer in this newer version of the Church. Paul’s message was that everyone was welcome at the table to find and fellowship with the one Creator God. The only entry to that fellowship was Jesus, not, Jesus plus boundary markers created by the prevailing culture.

You should come to Acts 2 with the theological construct of Acts 1, i.e., that is how heaven and earth are brought together. Then, the Acts story of Pentecost becomes a counter-Temple statement. What was only possible to experience in the previous version of the Church, God and earth intersect in the Temple, is now going to be different. In the Temple you experienced the presence of God here on earth. In the new Temple, the new version of the Church, the community of faith is equipped and empowered to carry the glory of God into the world. When the church goes out into the world empowered by the Spirit, she is a sign, a foretaste, if you will, of the flooding of God’s glory into all the world. The church has to catch the vision, that in her, Jesus is truly the hope of glory.

Pentecost is a thoughtful reminder that empowers us to cultivate the garden, to rebuild the ruins of our world by creating a new culture of life, not just condemning the present one we are living in. Our job is not to be only a critic of culture, not only to copy or consume culture. Our job is to be creators of culture, i.e., make something of the world in light of the story that may have taken us by surprise. This is not an either/or way of life. We do not create out of nothing, we must take these gestures, i.e., critiquing, copying, and consuming as creative tools to bring cultural activity into our story. Poking holes in every cultural happening produces in us the inability to be able to see the good and redeem it. Remember, God created and saw his creation as “very good.” And even after sin entered into the picture, he never changed his mind. Pentecost restores us to creativity. In addition, Pentecost was a way of suggesting that every present human language and cultural form is capable of bearing the good news of the kingdom.

Pentecost can be understood as the reversal of Babel. God’s response to Babel was to reboot humankind once again and select one group of people to be his people. Their job was to bless the world. Over the years they took the message of the kingdom, i.e., to demonstrate, among all the nations, what the God of the universe was really like, But alas, they turned the message inward and not outward. They made the windows of their lighthouse into mirrors. God’s gift on Pentecost expanded the people of God to demonstrate that his work would no longer be contained within one cultural group. It was the gift to the world. We in USAmerica often make the mistake of thinking that the culture we have created in which the church was central and the chaplain of society, should simply send that cultural manifestation of Christianity abroad and let the world copy what we have, regardless of their own culture. We may have repeated the sin of Israel and turned our own windows into mirrors. Pentecost makes the good news of the kingdom available to every group, to create a way of being Christian while creating within their culture a new culture of being truly human.

So what? Good question. God had added some new features to his program of the church. The church had been rebooted at Pentecost and the newer functions are now available to everyone. We need to think of Pentecost within the structure of where it was presented within the larger story of God. Together with the Ascension, Pentecost provided a bit of heaven come to earth as the church was and is empowered to take the message to the streets of the world. That Pentecost power encounter is still being offered today. Read the story again for the first time and discover how your community of faith and your participation within it can play a part in the greatest story ever told. Go ahead, join the heaven and earth light show. It’s an adventure beyond belief.

The following is an interview of N.T. Wright by Dr. Tod Bolsinger on a variety of topics. Dr Tod Bolsinger is Senior Pastor at the San Clemente Presbyterian Church and Tom Wright is Bishop of Durham for the Church of England.

Enjoy!

N.T. Wright on Heaven

N.T. Wright on the Postmodern Movement

N.T. Wright on Satan and Evil

N.T. Wright on Debate about Homosexuality

N.T. Wright on Women in Ministry

N.T. Wright on Filming the End Times

N.T. Wright on the Authority of the Bible

N.T. Wright on Darwin

N.T. Wright Responds to John Piper

Tom Wright is one of my favorite NT specialist. Below are a couple of Easter idea that come from Preaching Today. If you have not read anything by Tom Wright, may I suggest: Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

Text: Matthew 26:17–28:20; Mark 14:12–16:20; Luke 22:7–24:43; John 13:1–21:25; Acts 10:1–48
Topic: A look at what it means to live in light of the Resurrection

Introduction: Bottling up the wonder of the Resurrection
The Easter stories are full of people getting the wrong end of the stick. Mary thinks Jesus’ body has been stolen. Peter sees the linen wrappings and can’t work out what it’s all about. The disciples didn’t understand the Scriptures. The angels question Mary, and she still doesn’t know what’s going on. Then she thinks Jesus is the gardener. Then, it seems, she reaches out to cling to him, and he tells her she mustn’t. You could hardly get more misunderstandings into a couple of paragraphs if you tried.

The point is, of course, that Easter has burst into our world—the world of space, time, and matter, real history and real people and real life—but our minds and imaginations are too small to contain it. So, we do our best to put the sea into a bottle and fit the explosive fact of the Resurrection into the possibilities we already know about.

At one level the continued puzzlement of the disciples is a mark of the story’s authenticity. If someone had been making it all up a generation later, as many have suggested, they would hardly have had such a muddle going on. More particularly, nobody would have made up the remarkable detail of the cloth around Jesus’ head, folded up in a place by itself, or the even more extraordinary fact that Jesus is not immediately recognized—either here, in the evening on the road to Emmaus, or when cooking breakfast by the shore. The first Christians weren’t prepared for what actually happened. Nobody could have been. As one leading agnostic scholar has put it, it looks as though they were struggling to describe something for which they didn’t have adequate language.

Pushing past generalized half-truths about Easter
But this problem isn’t confined to the first century. Ever since then, people have tried to squash the Easter message into conventional boxes in which it just won’t fit. There was a classic example in the Times on Good Friday [2008]. In an article entitled “Universal Truths,” the writer suggested that [everyone can sign on the dotted line] of the Easter message. “Good Friday,” the author wrote, “commemorates sacrifice, the giving of oneself as a martyr for the love of others, so Easter is the achievement of victory through suffering. These are universal spiritual truths. And the more interaction acquaints those of different faiths with the beliefs of others, the clearer is the common acceptance of these truths.” So, in conclusion, “The Easter message draws the devout together”—presumably the devout of all religions. “From suffering, goodness can triumph. Death is not final.” And then, [the writer] offers a grand and woefully misleading last sentence: “That is what all faiths in Britain can proclaim and where they can come together this weekend.”

Well, sorry! Of course we must work to find common ground and common purpose with those of all faiths and none. These things matter enormously. But you don’t achieve anything by downgrading the unique message of Easter. Just as I would expect to take my shoes off if I went into a mosque, so any sensible Muslim would expect, in a church on Easter Day, that we wouldn’t be talking about the generalized half-truth that “out of suffering goodness can triumph.” Even that takes some believing when you look around at the world today. They would rightly expect us to be talking about something unique that happened as a one-off—something that happened to the previously dead body of Jesus; something because of which Christianity cannot be contained in the vague religiosity of late-modern Britain, any more than Mary or Peter or John could grasp the truth by saying that someone had taken away the body. Easter is what it is because, together with Jesus’ crucifixion, it is the central event of world history—the moment towards which everything was rushing and from which everything emerges new. The gospel, says Paul in Colossians, has already been preached to every creature under heaven. This means that with the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, a shock wave has rattled through the world, so that despite appearances, the world is in fact a different place, full of new possibilities that were previously unimagined.

It is, I grant you, better to say that from suffering goodness can triumph than to lose hope all together. For some people who would say that, the glass of faith is perhaps half full. But what the article has done, in a typically patronizing example of late-Enlightenment rhetoric, is to offer a glass that’s half empty and getting emptier. Its wishy-washy religion has little to do with any actual faith, particularly with real Christianity. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t even spill over into the surrounding subject matter.

[The second headline in the Good Friday edition of the Times] was rightly complaining about Tibet. What good does it do to say in Tibet that “from suffering goodness can triumph?” Isn’t that just a further encouragement to the bullying Chinese government? And what would a Buddhist say, for whom suffering is an illusion? And would mouthing these platitudes do one tiny thing to encourage our government, or even our [Olympic] athletes, to put pressure on China?

The whole Easter truth and what it means for today’s world
Contrast all of this with today’s story: Acts 10:1–48. The story of Peter and Cornelius shows robustly what it means to have a glass that’s half full and getting fuller. The Roman centurion Cornelius had come, in his personal devotion and prayer, to invoke the God of Israel in respect and humility. God calls Peter to go and speak to this Gentile about Jesus—particularly about his death and resurrection. Peter doesn’t say to Cornelius, “I gather you’ve got a wonderful faith already. Isn’t that marvelous—that we’re all on different paths up the same mountain?” He says, “The God you’ve been worshiping from afar has come near to you in Jesus, and he has done something in Jesus which gives a new shape to world history and a new meaning to human life.” Cornelius believes and is baptized.

Real Christianity, the full-glass version, is both the truth that makes sense of all other truth and the truth that offers itself as the framework within which those other truths will find their meaning. The one thing it doesn’t do—which is uncomfortable for today’s pluralistic world—is offer itself as one truth among many, or one version of a single truth common to all.

This discomfort—so disturbing that many people try to hush it up, to belittle it, to pat it on the head and say, “There, there. That’s a nice thing to believe”—comes out today in several areas, not least in some matters of urgent public debate. Let me just mention two.

First, let’s discuss the current controversy about embryo cloning. Our present government has been pushing through legislation that comes from a militantly atheist and secularist lobby. The euthanasia bill was another example. It has been defeated for the moment, but it will be back. The media sometimes imply that it’s only Roman Catholics who care about such things. But that’s wrong. All Christians are now facing, and must resist, the long outworking of various secularist philosophies, which imagine that we can attain the Christian vision of future hope without the Christian God. In this 1984-style world, we create our own utopia by our own efforts, particularly our science and technology. “We create our Brave New World here and now,” they say, “so don’t tell us that God’s new world was born on Easter Sunday.” They reduce such dangerous beliefs to abstract, timeless platitudes. The irony is that this secular utopianism is based on a belief in an unstoppable human ability to make a better world, while at the same time it believes that we have the right to kill unborn children and surplus old people and to play games with the humanity of those in between. Gender-bending was so last century; we now do species-bending. Look how clever we are! Utopia must be just ’round the corner.

Have we learnt nothing from the dark tyrannies of the last century? It shouldn’t just be Roman Catholics who are objecting. It ought to be Anglicans and Presbyterians and Baptists and Russian Orthodox and Pentecostals and all other Christians—and Jews and Muslims as well. This isn’t a peripheral or denominational concern. It grows directly out of the central facts of our faith, because on Easter day, God reaffirmed the goodness and “image-bearingness” of the human race in the man Jesus Christ, giving the lie simultaneously to the idea that utopia could be had by our own efforts and to the idea that humans are just miscellaneous evolutionary by-products, to be managed and manipulated at will. The Christian vision of what it means to be human is gloriously underscored by the resurrection of Jesus, and we as Easter people should make common cause with all those who are concerned about the direction our society is going in medical technology as in so much besides.

The second area of Easter concern is our treatment of people from other countries. In 2007, Daniel Bourdanné, a distinguished African scientist, was installed as General Secretary of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, a long-standing and highly respected body which serves members in 150 countries with its headquarters in Oxford. The British High Commission in Accra dragged its feet over Daniel’s application to come here, eventually turning it down with minimal explanation. Daniel then asked for permission to travel to the U.K. on his current visitor’s visa and was told he could. When he arrived he was detained for 22 hours, his mobile phones were seized, and he was flown back to Africa. He is still waiting to appeal this decision and treatment. I would love to think that many people here this morning might wish to take up the case of Daniel Bourdanné with our immigration authorities, our Home Office, and indeed the High Commission in Accra. But I raise his case not simply as a one-off, but because it typifies the careless and shabby treatment our supposedly civilized country now metes out both to bona fide people coming here as part of their proper work, and to those who have come here validly seeking asylum. This is further highlighted by the story of a critically ill woman who was returned to Ghana and who has now died. In hunting for her case by doing a Google search with the words “asylum seeker dies,” I was horrified to discover that there has been a whole string of asylum seekers committing suicide because they have lost hope of fair or just treatment.

Why am I talking about all of this on Easter Sunday? When I mentioned asylum seekers in passing at the Christmas midnight sermon [2007], I was rebuked by someone who told me it had nothing to do with Christmas. Well, according to Matthew, the boy Jesus and his family were themselves asylum seekers in Egypt. And Easter gives us more. First, Peter’s message to Cornelius was that through his resurrection, Jesus has been constituted as the judge of the living and the dead. The resurrection of Jesus is the beginning of the final putting-to-rights of all things. In the light of the Resurrection, the church must never stop reminding the world’s rulers and authorities that they themselves will be held to account, and that they must do justice and bring wise, healing order to God’s world ahead of that day. Those who want to depoliticize the Resurrection must first “dehistoricize” it—which is, of course, what they have been doing enthusiastically for many years. We wonder why the church has sometimes sounded irrelevant! We who celebrate our risen Lord today must bear witness to Easter—God’s great act of putting-right—as the yardstick for all human justice.

Second, that same message from Peter to Cornelius stressed that, with the Resurrection, the one true and living God was welcoming all people into his family. The church is the original multinational corporation, copied but not outdone by the empires of this world, both territorial and financial. The xenophobia which treats other people as inconvenient and disposable is unworthy of a country where seventy per cent of the people describe themselves as Christian. Actually, I rather wish the real problem was xenophobia! I fear it is, in fact, the box-ticking mentality of some junior civil servants, coupled with the habit of normally unscrutinized bad behavior—and this at a time when the same government is not only tying us hand and foot in complex and trivial compliance legislation, but refusing to provide or police even basic rules for the conduct of its own members.

Conclusion: The call to live as Easter people
I make no apology for raising all these issues on Easter Day. Easter is about real life, not escapist fantasy. Easter is about God’s judgment calling the world to account and setting up his new, glorious creation of freedom and peace, summoning all people everywhere to live in this new world. Easter is about God’s rich welcome to all humankind. As Easter people we are called to celebrate all of that in practical ways as well as in glad and uninhibited worship. I pay tribute to the many people in this diocese who are sacrificially doing just that, not least with asylum seekers. That is the point of it all. It’s all done because Easter is about Jesus: the Jesus who announced God’s saving, sovereign kingdom; the Jesus who died to exhaust the power of this world’s rulers; the Jesus who rose again to be crowned as king over all things in heaven and on earth. God give us grace, this day and from now on, to live as Easter people, celebrating Jesus’ love and joy at his table and making his kingdom and justice known in his world.

From Preaching Today

The traditional Christian view of life is get right with God by saying a sinner’s prayer, then wait for him to rapture you away from this awful, sinful world, or die and go to heaven. Sound familiar? This story has captivated the church and is the story that many, many Christians live in.

There is another story and it is well articulated by Tom Wright in his article from Time Magazine. Go ahead, take a look, which story do you want to live in? It’s your choice.

I echo Tom Wright’s view in my book God’s EPIC Adventure:

If you went to the streets today or within the corridors of the church and asked what Jesus meant by “repent and believe,” you would most likely hear that he meant “Give up your private sins (most likely sexual, alcohol, and drug abuse) by accepting Jesus and gain some “inner peace” by believing a body of dogma and joining the local church at the corner of walk and don’t walk so you can go to heaven when you die.” God’s EPIC Adventure, 187.

AND

With the resurrection of Jesus, God created a new world and sent Jesus’ followers off to announce it to the world. If you go to the resurrection chapters in Luke 24, or in Matthew, or Mark, or John, and say, “What do the evangelists think this stuff means; why are we telling this story?” The answer is not, “Jesus is risen again, therefore, we can go to heaven when we die and be with him.” It’s interesting they never say that, those resurrection chapters. Rather, they say, “Jesus is risen from the dead. Therefore, God’s new creation has begun, and you are commissioned to go off and make it happen.” That’s the emphasis. And it’s a new world of justice and freedom; it’s the exodus world, the return-from-exile world, the world where Jesus already reigns as Lord, it’s the world with good news for all, especially, as in the New Testament, for the poor, 213.

Also see Tom Wright’s Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

Here’s a short video clip of Brian McLaren asking me a question about God’s EPIC Adventure. Enjoy.

Rose, my pastor, made a comment on my online Bible Study called Decoding the Apocalypse in response to a question: What is a clear witness? Below was my response to her comment.

As with most things, the Enlightenment Project produced a rash of reductionism. Witness was reduced to things like the “Four Spiritual Law” and “door-to-door” evangelism with the sole intent of putting an argument to people demonstrating that they were sinners and needed salvation so they could go to heaven when they died. If they surrendered they prayed the “sinners prayer” and got their barcode, so they could be successfully identified upon entry into eternity. Sound familiar?

Living openly, lovingly, and for others with Kingdom of God attributes such as the “fruit of the Spirit” was not prioritized as “witness.” If it was, it was more like “sissy” witness where “speech and argument” was seen as “real” witness. Of course, Paul introduced what he calls the “fruit of the Spirit” which is love, out of which come all kinds of lifestyle corrections. I believe for him, the “fruit” was a tangible demonstration of the “age to come” entering into “this present evil age.” It was the lifestyle of the future being brought into the lifestyle of the present. It was living the future now as though it was then. Living in this way surely would produce abundant conversations about why one is living differently than others in our physical communities. Telling one’s story in lifestyle would surely allow for opportunity to tell one’s story in words where one can give and honest, resounding, answer that she/he loves God. There is little or no argument that can be given for a life change. When the blind man in Scripture told his story, “I once was blind, but now I see,” having known the life of the blind man who was now a seeing man, who would argue.

Yes, to live well and to talk well we need to be empowered by the Spirit. His presence and power is not just for healing the sick and casting out demons. His presence and power are needed to help us live a Kingdom present life in the midst of an age gone amuck. When was the last time that when faced with a choice of a decision to be Kingdom people or “amuck people” we stopped and even briefly asked for the power of the Holy Spirit to decide in favor of being a Kingdom person? I better stop now, I’m talk’ too much here.

What if John when he was writing his Gospel was saying by his opening words, “In the beginning,” that his book was a Genesis 1 sorta thing, a rewriting of the story of Genesis 1 with a new Adam (although he doesn’t use the term). What if we read John in that way? Of course, Genesis 1 is about creation given to us in an account of “days” not necessarily twenty-four hour days. On the sixth day, God created humankind in his image. In John’s Gospel on the sixth day, Jesus appears before Pilate and Pilate says, “Behold the man.” Could we understand that as John’s way of saying here is the true human being giving his life for the world God created. Remember, at the conclusion of the sixth day in Genesis, God finished all the work of creation. On the cross Jesus says, “It is finished!” On the seventh day God rested. In the tomb on the sixth day Jesus rested from all the work of recreation.

O Sabbath rest by Calvary,
     O calm of tomb below,
Where the grave-clothes and the spices
     cradle him we did not know!
Rest you well, beloved Jesus,
     Caesar’s Lord and Israel’s King,
In the brooding of the Spirit,
     in the darkness of the spring. (N. T. Wright)

On the first day of the new week, resurrection, a new creation.

What if we read John and understood John that way and became part of that story instead of the story that so many of us find ourselves living in.

What if…

Question
Do you feel the Tribulation has already happened or do you feel it is yet to come? I have been doing some deep research in the word and I feel that it is to come, but I am searching for the truth, and if you have proof I will believe any answer you give me. I am from a biblical church and my pastor feels that the Tribulation is yet to come. I also do because of the proof he has given me. But if you have proof to prove it the other way, then please write.

Answer
There are three varieties of belief about this topic of tribulation (Pretribulation, Midtribulation, and Posttribulation).

Pretribulation
Pretribulation has to do with the rapture of the church before a tribulation. Until the 19th century, believers thought in terms of the rapture and the Second Coming of Jesus as the same event. It occurred after the tribulation. In the 19th century a swing to Dispensational Theology appeared. Dispensational Theology had its roots in J.N. Darby, a Plymouth Brethren minister. He introduced into the church the idea of the coming of Jesus in two stages: one for his saints at the rapture and one with his saints at the Second Coming at the close of the tribulation. According to his interpretation of prophecy, there was a seven-year period of time that was the 70th week predicted by Daniel (9.24-27). With the church removed, God would resume his dealing with Israel.

Midtribulation
The midtribulation rapture of the church became popular in the mid-fifties. The modification, which this view brings to the pretribulation rapture, was the limitation of the wrath of God upon the world as described in Revelation 16-18 to the first three and a half years of the tribulation period.

Posttribulation
Posttribulation is the view that believes that the people of God who face persecution are the Church. They believe that there is no internal evidence in the Bible and Revelation to indicate that the seven churches equal seven time periods and that there is no indication that John’s rapture is the Church’s rapture.

I think that it is fair to say that “being dogmatic” about a tribulation is clearly not helpful. It also occurs to me that since Scripture does not make it a “banner topic,” so to speak, that it would be a much more enabling concept to figure out “how to live” now rather than trying to figure out “when the tribulation is going to happen.” Actually the former does not really do one much good in the scheme of things while the latter seems to be the emphasis of Scripture.

P.S. It is dangerous to believe anything that someone else tells you is correct. It may also not be valid to look at the Bible as a book that must “prove” something. The concept of “proof” may be wholly a concept of the Enlightenment Project.

Question
Do you feel the Tribulation has already happened or do you feel it is yet to come? I have been doing some deep research in the word and I feel that it is to come, but I am searching for the truth, and if you have proof I will believe any answer you give me. I am from a biblical church and my pastor feels that the Tribulation is yet to come. I also do because of the proof he has given me. But if you have proof to prove it the other way, then please write.

Answer
The idea of a tribulation is always a “hot” topic. Usually there is more “heat” than “light” on the subject. The following is a brief description that might be of help.

Reflecting apocalyptic language of the OT, especially Daniel, the book of Revelation (see Revelation, Book of, in present volume) is the most extended depiction of tribulation in the NT, even though the word thlipsis is used only a few times. Although the reference in Revelation 7:14 to the great tribulation (cf. Mt 24:21) has caused unnecessary theological debate in terms of establishing the precise time and character of this tribulation in some futuristic eschatological schemes, Revelation 6-19 clearly reflects a series of graphically depicted events of tribulation before the return of Christ (Rev 19:11-21; see Parousia in present volume). This period is described in terms of the imagery of seven seals (Rev 6:1-8:1), seven trumpets (Rev 8:2-11:19) and seven bowls (Rev 15:1-16:21), all containing various disastrous events culminating in judgment. There have been numerous interpretations of how the seals, trumpets and bowls relate to each other, some interpreters seeing them consecutively and others with various degrees of overlap, some more and some less literally, but in any event in the end Babylon is destroyed (Rev 17:1-18:24), making way for the return of Christ. (Martin, Ralph P.; Davids, Peter H., “Tribulation” Dictionary of the Later New Testament & Its Developments)

To Be Continued…

Question
How many times does Jesus come back, 2 or 3 times?

Answer
I believe the correct answer is once. His first coming inaugurated the Kingdom and his second coming will consummate the Kingdom. There have been many bottles of ink spilt on many hundreds of pages discussing this topic. In today’s popular theology (i.e., The Left Behind series with LaHaye and Jenkins in this timeframe and The Late Great Planet Earth with Hal Lindsey in ’70s of the last century) it is believed that there is only one coming but in two parts. Part A of the second coming is the rapture of the church. Part B is the actual coming of Jesus. This theology came from England in the middle 1800s. It is not a historic belief of the church.

You can read both sides of the subject in two older books (easy to read) that will give you enough material to make a clear decision for yourself: The Blessed Hope by George Ladd and The Rapture Question by John Walvoord.