The First Five Books [The Pentateuch (Genesis–Deuteronomy)]

Why Should You Read The (Jewish Bible) Old Testament?
Here is some familiar ground that we covered previously. The Jewish Bible (Old Testament) provides the foundation for understanding the New Testament. It is often neglected or only read in part. Because of the prominence of the Law in the Jewish Bible, the idea of the grace of God is almost lost to its modern readers. It is often pointed out by readers of the Jewish Bible that God appears to be a God of wrath and judgment. However, some Old Testament characters present God as a God of love and justice. (Moses: Deut. 4-6; Jeremiah: Jer. 9.23-24).

The Jewish Bible (OT) provides the historical background which allows us to understand the message of the New Testament. The authors of the New Testament echo the Jewish Bible over 600 times. Jesus constantly appealed to its teachings as did Paul and other New Testament authors.

The history of the Old Testament is primarily found in the first seventeen books (Genesis-Esther). We must remember when reading this history that it is theological history. It was history told with a purpose. The history that is told is selected history to demonstrate the purpose of God to bring salvation to his creation. The whole Bible is often called salvation history because the God of the Bible is a missionary God.

What does it mean that God is a missionary God? Dallas Willard in his book Divine Conspiracy speaks about a “barcode faith.” Like barcodes on store purchases it doesn’t matter what is inside the package, the scanner just responds to the external barcode. Todd Hunter, has been known to say something like; “Christianity has become a mental assent to a set of beliefs around one theory of the atonement. You get a barcode and that assures you that you can go to heaven.” In short, nothing on the inside of a person has to change.

Marcus Borg in his book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time closes his book by talking about the familiar Christian phrase — believing in Jesus.

For those of us who grew up in the church, believing in Jesus was important. For me, what the phrase used to mean, in my childhood and into my early adulthood, was “believing things about Jesus.” To believe in Jesus meant to believe what the gospels and the church said about Jesus. That was easy when I was a child, and became more and more difficult as I grew older.

But I now see that believing in Jesus can (and does) mean something very different from that. The change is pointed to by the root meaning of the word believe. Believe did not originally mean believing a set of doctrines or teachings; in both Greek and Latin its roots mean “to give one’s heart to.” The “heart” is the self at its deepest level. “Believing, therefore, does not consist of giving one’s mental assent to something, but involves a much deeper level of one’s self. Believing in Jesus does not mean believing doctrines about him. Rather, it means to give one’s heart, one’s self at its deepest level, to the post-Easter Jesus who is the living Lord, the side of God turned toward us, the face of God, the Lord who is also the Spirit.

Believing in Jesus in the sense of giving one’s heart to Jesus is the movement from secondhand religion to firsthand religion, from having heard about Jesus with the hearing of the ear to being in relationship with the Spirit of Christ. ¹

God is not merely interested in our believing him, but that through our believing that we become the “salt” and “light” to his creation. He is about saving his world, putting it to rights. We learn best how to become a part of this “mission” by reading, understanding, and then living into HisStory.

Reflections

• What is your definition of the Bible?
• Where did you learn your definition?
• If the purpose of Scripture is to share God’s missionary activity in redeeming his creation, then why do you think that we spend so much time reading it for other purposes?
• What do you think about Dallas Williard’s “barcode faith” theory?

Wright on Hell

Wright on Hell & Bell

Surprised by Hope (Paperback)

Surprised by Hope (Kindle)

Sunday, as I sat through a service at the local community of faith that my family attends, I had the following thoughts.

We are so impregnated with individualism and consumerism. But, unlike a pregnant woman, we don’t realize it. Individualism and consumerism affects the olders and the youngers. It is not a respecter of persons. But, it still surprises me.

In Sunday’s service, the speaker was ill and it was a struggle for him to communicate. What I was struck by was his individualism and consumerism. He first read Psalm 130. With the lens of individualism and the need to consume, it looks like this Psalm is a personal cry for personal help. But, a more thorough reading might suggest that this was not about the Psalmist crying out for his own personal relief, but for the relief of the nation of Israel, the community of God, (church) in the Old Testament because of their sins. Our speaker personalized the sacred text and in doing so made it appear for his listeners that it was about his own and their own personal needs. Is it wrong to cry out to God when in need? No! But, it might be wrongheaded to use this text to support such a cry.

Next, we then moved with no segue to the story of Bartimaeus. The essence of the presentation was centered around the request of Bartimaeus to be healed. Reading with individualistic, consumerism eyes, we often put ourselves in the place of Bartimaeus as he asked for healing. But, what might Jesus be doing in this story and what might Mark mean as he tells this story? Jews, with impediments like blindness, being deaf and dumb, hemorrhaging, being crippled, were excluded from full membership of the community. When Jesus healed them, it was not about meeting a need to be consumed by the individual. It was about being fully restored to the people of God. Tom Wright suggests: “The effect of these cures, therefore, was not merely to bring physical healing; not merely to give humans, within a far less individualistic society than our modern western one, a renewed sense of community membership, but to reconstitute those healed as members of the people of Israel’s god. (Jesus and the Victory of God. 192).

In the sharing time, I was struck by one comment that suggested that Bartimaeus got his identity by being blind as he was called “blind Bartimaeus,” in the KJV of the text, but that translation has not been held over in more current versions where he is referred to as “a blind beggar.” Surely, one may choose to see what one wants to see in a text, rightly or wrongly, but are we then free to submit our findings to a community already infected with individualism and consumerism without first, at least, identifying what Jesus may have been doing or Mark may have been teaching?

So, I wrote my friend a short message inquiring about the following:

What part of what you did yesterday fed consumerism among those gathered?

What did God get out of our time together? It’s really about him and not about us.

What if the way we go about receiving from God is backwards?

What if the purpose of our gatherings is not about what we desire to receive but about God desiring us?

Remember, he was already there when we arrived and remained after we left. What was he looking forward to as we gathered? Another time of sitting around asking that he meet our needs, or a time in which we simply worshiped him without any expectation of receiving anything, but the pure pleasure of worshiping him.

Another Sunday has come and gone in which I spent a short period of time inside a building where we followed a pattern that has come to be called church. We gather. We drink coffee and have surface conversation. We sing. We hear announcements. We listen or not to someone teach/preach. We are invited to ask God into our broken lives or we are beckoned to an altar to ask forgiveness of our sins. We drop by a glass with wine or juice and broken crackers and dip and eat or small shot glasses reminiscent of a bar are passed around with juice or wine and we call it communion. Yesterday as I left this weekly routine, I asked myself the same question that the song title asks: “Is that all there is?” Surely, the answer has to be no!

One wonders when we will change our paradigm. When will we discover that Sunday is the day of the week that should remind us that in Jesus we live in a new creation as new human beings with the assignment of demonstrating that new creation to others around us. Tom Wight asked in his recent book, Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today, the following question: “What are you going to do this Sunday that is creative, that brings justice and mercy, that offers healing and hope” (170). One has to wonder that instead of living to turn the world right side up, we continue to live in the world thinking its thoughts and practicing its actions. One wonders what would occur if we took Wright’s question seriously? One wonders why we are always inviting God to do something when he is working already nonstop? One wonders when we will comprehend that he is inviting us into what he is doing, inviting us into his unbroken world instead of us inviting him into our broken world. So, what are you going to do next Sunday that brings justice, mercy, healing and hope to your neck of the woods?

Last month the 19th Annual Wheaton Theology Conference presented “Jesus, Paul and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N.T. Wright.” If you are interested in Tom Wright’s massive work, you might be interested to hear other NT specialist interact with his work. Continuing education via the Net is really a great opportunity. http://bit.ly/aKudUO

There are eight meal scenes in the story of Luke. The seventh one was what we traditionally call the Last Supper. The eighth one was on the day of resurrection with the husband and wife that Jesus met on the Road to Emmaus.

Think of the first meal in the Garden. The moment is heavy with significance. “The woman took some of the fruit, and ate it, she gave it to her husband, and he ate it; then the eyes of the both were opened, and they knew that they were naked (Gen 3.6-7). This first meal of the new creation was celebrated with a male and female. One shouldn’t pass to quickly by in the reading of the Luke 24 text without noticing the echoes of the first meal in the Garden. Describing the first meal of the new creation, Luke says, “He took the bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them, then the eyes of them both were opened, and they recognized him” (Luke 24.31).

The first couple’s eyes were opened and they saw themselves naked. At the beginning of the new creation, this couple’s eyes were opened and they recognized Jesus. They recognized him in the breaking of the bread.

If you have an opportunity to receive communion as you celebrate the Resurrection, the beginning of the new creation in this present evil age, do so and let you eyes be opened to all the new creation in Jesus offers. It’s a story worth living in.

I admit, I’m a Tom Wright fan. Here’s a quote from his book Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense.

Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world. It is time, in the power of the Spirit, to take up our proper role, our fully human role, as agents, heralds, and stewards of the new day that is dawning. That, quite simply, is what it means to be Christian: to follow Jesus Christ into the new world, God’s new world, which he has thrown open before us. (237)

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

In USAmerica, today is voting day. Regardless of who wins, we are again presented with living in an USAmerican cultural story that will either be led one way or another by the upcoming government. Many USAmerican followers of Jesus simply follow and live in that story without asking if there is another story that they should be living into. Many simply believe that the USAmerican story is the Christian story. The hybrid story is so well mixed one can’t tell where the Christian story is and where the USAmerican story is.

It seems to me a good time to review what story we are choosing to live into. So in the few words below, in the tradition of Reader’s Digest and the art of Modernity’s reductionism, here is a synopsis from my book God’s EPIC Adventure (318-319) of the proposed story of God from Scripture.

The drama begins in Act 1 of his play in the Genesis account of creation, “there was a time when God spoke all things into existence.” He created humankind and gave them free run of the most beautiful garden, which was his created world. But, in Act 2, as the crown of the Creator’s creation, humankind made a decision to worship what God had created rather than worshiping the Creator. What God had created perfect, humankind had flawed and the true humanity of the Garden became distorted and their view of God became dimly lit. The missionary God sought his created beings out and banned them from his Garden.

Act 3 continues the story, which is the content of the rest of the Old Testament, by God’s creation of a people whose vocation would be to become the “light of the world” so the pagan societies in which she lived could see what God was really like. Israel’s creation came with four great acts of God. He first delivered/redeemed them from their bondage in Egypt in the great act of the Exodus. He took a group of slaves from the slave market of the day and freed them. The next great act of God for his people was the giving of a national charter, a Covenant, so that they would know what it was like to live out their vocation as the people of God. Next, he made them into a kingdom where there vocation moved from nation to individual, which looked forward to a day in which a new kingdom with a truly human being would inaugurate God’s Kingdom here on earth. In the last scenes of Act 3, we find Israel in Exile and a short return from Exile. She had all but lost her vocation of being God’s “light to the world.” In the physical return from Exile, spiritual return did not occur. The Temple rebuilt did not return to its former glory which produced a conception of life that they were continually living in exile waiting for the one promised by the prophets who would bring them their freedom.

Act 4 tells the story of Jesus who stepped into human history, in the fullness of time. In his ministry, he came proclaiming that the Kingdom of God was present in this Present Evil Age. A truly human being, as humans were intended to be, had arrived as God honored his promises to this people. Four different writers tell us four different stories about the events of the life of Jesus. His message: “Repent and Believe!” The first hearers heard him say in this message that they should stop living in their present stories of military means, quietism, or their compromising ways with the present powers and begin living in a different story. He demonstrated for his followers, then and now, in his words what an authentic disciple should be like and demonstrated in his works of healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead what actions his authentic disciples should follow.

Moving into the final act of God’s EPIC Adventure (Act 5, Scene 1-6), we find the creation of the church by the Spirit as God’s new humanity. Like Israel before her, this new community of the Spirit was and is to be the light to the world by the releasing of gracelets given by the Spirit to help followers of Christ accomplish his mission.

We, as Christ-followers, now live in the scene between the sixth scene of the early church and the final scene yet to be written. Out mission is to discover our part in God’s EPIC Adventure and imagine and improvise how we live our part out for his sake, our sake, and the sake of the world. There are some clues about how this grand narrative is going to end, but they are only clues. We are truly God’s new humanity, living as followers of Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit to be effective agents of the Kingdom in this Present Evil Age.

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 are two audio presentations presented by Tom Wright from Reformational-UK, June 2007. I based my first book God’s EPIC Adventure on his five-act-play model. The second recording starts off a bit low in volume, give it a moment and it will brighten up.

Thinking about God in Tommorrow’s World

Whatever did St Paul do with the Kingdom of God

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

Two important events have occurred this week. My first book, God’s EPIC Adventure, is in print and I’ve been Simpsonized!

It has been and interesting process starting a publishing company HarmonPress and publishing my first book, God’s EPIC Adventure through that imprint. It’s an interesting feeling to hold a book in your hand and seeing your name on the front cover. For years I have researched and written lots of material. I was used to writing things like, Sweet says, or McLaren says, or Wright says, but when I saw my name appear in that context in the ForeWord which is written by Len Sweet, Griffin says, it seemed a little strange. Brian McLaren wrote the Afterword. You can read all about it at HarmonPress.

The day came and will go quickly, just like all other days, a mere 24 hours or 1440 minutes or 86400 seconds. Even though we count each day by hours, minutes, and seconds, it seems that the older one gets the quicker the hours fly by.

On my birthday in 1958 I was junior in high school and my dad was sixty-five years old that year. I though he was pretty old or at least it seemed so to me at the time. I was wrong. Today, I turned sixty-five and it seems really young to me.

It is true that I am in the winter of the life span. Lord only knows how many years I will have left and what effect I will have in God’s EPIC Adventure to partner with him in the recreation of his creation. Today, I am alive and am enjoying the time with two great projects. First, is the creation of Harmon Press (named after my dad) and the second is the creation of Missio Dei Learning Community.

Harmon Press has been in the womb since 2001. It’s been a long time getting born, but that’s not unlike lots of projects in life. The seed thought comes, it settles in, and sometimes it sees the light of day. The simple purpose of Harmon Press is to help authors, who have something important to say, get into print so the world can have the joy of reading their words and thoughts and they can have the joy of seeing their very words produced in a book. It’s true, if you are not visible today, the print world is not really open to you. However, with print on demand technology, it finally becomes affordable for an author to produce her or his own work. Our job at Harmon Press is to help these folks accomplish their dream of being in print. To kick of the fray, we are producing my very first book God’s EPIC Adventure which intends to help readers of Scripture have a fare shake at seeing the storyline of Scripture so they can become less fragmented in their own reading. It will take a reader on an excursion through Scritpure from Genesis to Revelation using the five-act-play model from Bishop Tom Wright. Its production target is the first of November.

The second project in hand is Missio Dei Learning Community. Missio Dei (the Mission of God) is being created to attract adult learners in our computer based society to access learning within an ongoing community online and live face-to-face encounters. We are not an accredited school but we do hold the status of being a “religious exempt” school in the State of Washington. We will be using a state of the art Course Management System to deliver courses for busy-in-life folks who won’t have to fight the freeway to get to class. The ultimate goal is to help Christ-followers experience the Grand Narrative of God and find their place of ministry in his Story. We are presently targeted to begin this process in the last quarter of 2007.

Both of these projects will have a web presence and will be fully online soon.

While retirement at age sixty five seems to be a goal, it seems to me as I have reached that age that life is full and enjoyable, and busy at this point with work. Since work is good and not a part of humankind’s rebellion, that’s a subject for another time, let work continue.

The Bible is the world’s best selling book! We own tons of them. Most folks that will read this will most likely own more than one Bible. Why do we own so many Bibles but read so little of it? Unlike other books that we often read, the Bible needs special care in reading. Below is a small bibliography that can help you get the help you may need to read the text of Scripture itself for both enjoyment and spiritual life. Living in God’s Grand Narrative as his new creation brings new meaning to why we live. Just move your mouse over the book to see more information about it.

• The Art of Reading Scripture
• The Beauty Behind the Mask: Rediscovering the Books of the Bible
• The Bible: A History: The Making and Impact of the Bible
• The Bible As Literature: An Introduction
• The Bible in Greek Christian Antiquity (The Bible in Early Christianity , So3)
• Birth of the New Testament
• The Book: A History of the Bible
• Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts
• The Cambridge History of the Bible
• The Canon of Scripture
• The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance
• Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading
• Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, Second Edition (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities)
• The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origin, Transmission, and Limitations
• The Formation of Christian Biblical Canon: Revised and Expanded Edition
• A History of the Bible as Literature
• How the Bible Became a Book: The Amazing Story Behind the All-Time Best-Seller
• How the Bible Came to Be
• How the Bible Was Built
• How to Read a Book (A Touchstone Book)
• How to Read the Bible Book by Book: A Guided Tour
• How We Got the Bible,
• The Gospels and Jesus (Oxford Bible Series)
• The Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible: An Introduction to the History of the Bible
• The Journey from Texts to Translations: The Origin and Development of the Bible
• How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth
• The Literary Guide to the Bible
• The Literature and Meaning of Scripture
• The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture
• The Making of the New Testament: Origin, Collection, Text & Canon
• The Making of the New Testament Documents
• Making Sense of the Bible: Literary Type As an Approach to Understanding
• The New Testament Canon: Its Making and Meaning
• The New Testament in Its Literary Environment
• The New Testament in Literary Criticism (Library of Literary Criticism)
• The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church and Its Background in Early Judaism
• The Origin of the Bible
• The Oxford Illustrated History of the Bible (Oxford Illustrated Histories)
• The Septuagint (Understanding the Bible and Its World)
• Studies in Early Christianity

Have fun reading and learning!

It’s been a week since Jerry Falwell went off into the next phase of life. Some thoughts have been roaming around about his life. I did and do not ascribe to his form of fundamentalist theology. Having said that, his life and ministry seem to me to try and bring together what is often a dualism of Church and State. As a pastor, he entered into the realm of politics where the church has been so silent while the American state has become secularized.

He has passed and followed a rather contemporary cultural practice of leaving his ministry to sons. As I understand it, one son will become pastor of the church in Lynchburg while the other will assume duties as the head of the university. This is just another incident in which father-son inheritance in ministry secession has occurred. I am sure there are many. Some come to mind: Oral to Richard Roberts, Robert Sr. to Robert Jr. Schuller, Billy to Franklyn Graham, John to Joel Osteen. I wonder why that is.

I also wonder why there are not more pastors involved in political situation at the local, state, and national level. The belief of the founding fathers that there should be no regulated church by the state has turned into a dualism of Church and State. There is now a deep ugly ditch between the Church and the State.

I’m not advocating that we return to a former state of being that caused our forefathers to seek church freedom. In England today, N. T. Wright, who is Bishop of Durham, is also a member of the British Parliament and actually attends session of the Parliament while remaining a pastor of his local church in Durham. I realize that is an English model.

What I wonder is: what if pastors of USAmerican churches entered the realm of politics and remained pastors of their congregations at the same time. How would that change the ugly ditch between Church and State?

Well, Dr. Jerry Falwell has gone on to his life after death awaiting his life after life after death. I wonder what he thinks about where he is and if it is what he thought and taught it would be. I wonder if he could return what he would believe and teach differently. I wonder!

Want a good read? Want to see how folks act and react to the Christian message of the Resurrection? Here is an article written by N. T. Wright for washingtonpost.com. Read the short article and then read comments. It’s an education in itself. Everyone thinks they are right!

It is easy and dangerous to distort the telling of the story of Jesus. Within American Conservative Christianity we have come to think of Jesus in one of two ways. First, an embodiment of divinity like a computer avatar rather than the unique incarnate son. We think of his death as an example of great sacrifice and his resurrection becomes a way of thinking and talking about God’s continuing work in the present world. Second, we think in a dualistic way. Jesus is someone who is from the outside of our world, a superman of sorts who has come from another sphere to tell us that our true home is someplace else, namely heaven. His coming was to teach us how to follow him to that distant and unearthly destination.

There is something wrong with that picture. Neither way of thinking comes close to the Story of Jesus as presented in the Gospels of the New Testament. American Conservative Christianity, served up on a regular basis in America and exported to the global world, simply ignores what the Bible actually says about Jesus in favor another story that has been created out of bits and pieces of perception and refracted through various biblical passage which misreads the text of the Biblical Story.

This brand of Christianity passes itself off as authentic because it believes the items that have come to be thought of as orthodox, namely incarnation, atonement, resurrection, spirit, and second coming. But, what has happen is that all these beliefs have been joined together into the wrong narrative sorta like a kid who is drawing a “draw by numbers” picture but decides to follow another sequence rather than following the numbers. The result of this activity: of not following the right sequence, is drawing a picture other than the one intended. If you put all the elements of Conservative Christianity within a story of a deist God who sent his superman son to undergo some redemptive violence in order to satisfy his primal vengeance, then raise this dead body to life in order to show followers a way back to heaven and away from earth only to come again and snatch them away from earth as earth finally rolls toward rotting in hell. If that is the narrative that one sets incarnation, atonement, resurrection, spirit, and second coming into, then that production produces a violently distorted parody of biblical Christianity. Alas, this is the story of American Conservative Christianity.

So What Biblical Story?
A fresh way of understanding the Story of Scripture is to understand it as a story where humankind, though created good, became radically flawed by sin. Into this flawed world, Jesus came as the long awaited King of the Jews, who themselves had been the redemptive promise of God for some two thousands years. Jesus came to do what Israel had failed to do. Jesus took on the weight of sin and exhausted it, not so those following him could escape this world because it was bad or evil, but because of his resurrection could become part of the project of new creation, a new heaven and earth, or one might say a new garden. This project started after the first created beings chose to follow themselves and not God. The second coming then, is not a day in which Jesus will snatch away his bride from this evil earth and take them to heaven forever, but a time when the rule of Jesus which was already established in his first coming: birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension, will finally be established in peace and justice in a transformed heaven and earth. It is this Biblical narrative that should replace the present conservative Christian narrative, so that this narrative can make a fresh impact on the world in this present time. N. T. Wright was influential in these thoughts.

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…

Year 2003, Month 1 almost done. Time marches on. We don’t think about how quickly it passes. A friend of mine died last month and another this month and my sister is dying of cancer. Death all around has caused me again to stop and reflect on time and how precious little of it we have to be about the call that God has placed in each of our lives. It reminds me of the days right after my open-heart surgery 4 years ago. Time is precious, a look at the trees (which we have lots of here in the Seattle area), the smell of fresh air, the face of my wife, the faces of my kids (older but still my kids), reading a book for pleasure, eating banana sandwiches (these days with Splenda), watching a movie with my son, etc. Time is precious. Tim and Leann have met the baby of Bethlehem in all his splendor and glory.

Here is a prayer that I have abducted from N.T. Wright and edited. It is as easy as breathing in (first line) and breathing out (second line). Actually prayer should be as effortless as breathing. This prayer reminds me of that point. It is constructed to be prayed together as a community or as an individual.

Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth
Set up your Kingdom in our midst (my life).

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of he Living God
Have mercy. Save me from the idols of our/my making.

Holy Spirit, Breath of the Living God
Renew us/me and through us/me renew your world.

I was warmed by the allelon gathering in Eagle, ID. It is good and right to discover others on a similar journey who are not separated by age, creed, race, etc., but find a certain wholeness in diversity. Uniformity sucks! Big Time!! Unity and diversity is the underpinnings of life together. May it be so and may God bless our lives together as we learn to allelon each other for the sake of his world.