The "If God Can Love Turkeys" song is one of my favorites. So it is with great joy that I found David Hayward's comic for the day.
Image by jakebouma via Flickr“There is a growing phenomenon taking place concurrently within at least every sizeable region of the world today. People within numerous different tribal cultures and also people within the cultures of each of the major world religions are increasingly accepting Jesus without converting to Christianity and without joining churches. ” They are encountering Jesus in ways that change their lives forever, without them leaving one group for another.
“They are learning to discover for themselves what it means to be faithful to Jesus within their own cultures and within their own birth communities. Conversion for them is believed to be a matter of the heart and not one of joining a different, competing cultural community.
“It is usually the case that after a number of these individuals within the same community are following Jesus, they begin meeting regularly as a small group. Over time this expands into multiple small groups among the same people group or within the same country. Eventually, it becomes established as a full-fledged movement of believers in Jesus that is outside of Christendom. It becomes a Jesus movement within another tradition. Does this mean they are living their lives outside the boundaries of biblical faith? Or, are they merely living beyond the boundaries of Christendom as a competing community?
“How did Jesus live as a son of Israel? Did he create a separate and competing community from the one that was already there? Did he tell people to leave their synagogues? Did he start his own synagogues?”
It is easy
to be spiritualistic without being spiritual; it is easy to believe in
Jesus Christ without being Christlike. But it is impossible to be a
disciple without discipline, and the longer we deny this simple fact,
the longer our church will lack relevancy and power.
--Rev. Dan Dick
Love, Love, Love, Love, Love...
“Love, love, love. Jesus made prostitutes feel valued, outcasts feel accepted, the religiously condemned feel justified, the lost feel at home, the broken feel whole, the heavy burdened feel free, the thirsty feel refreshed. How did he do it? He did it by loving them.” via
He was supreme in the beginning and—leading the resurrection parade—he is supreme in the end. From beginning to end he's there, towering far above everything, everyone. So spacious is he, so roomy, that everything of God finds its proper place in him without crowding. Not only that, but all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe—people and things, animals and atoms—get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the cross.
“Cultivating intimacy with Christ must be purposefully planned. If we simply spend time with God when something opens up in our schedules, “when the mood strikes,” or when we’re after some kind of quick emotional fix, our relationship with Him will be little more than a selfish and half-hearted acquaintance.”
- Leslie Ludy
We have this thing about Jesus, assuming that he's such a "big tent" kind of person that all persons are not only welcome to come along for the ride but that they are happy to join him. Not so. We can see clearly from Scripture that his message rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. It rubbed them so wrong that they killed him. Therefore all of our talk about the inclusivity of Jesus really is shallow. While all persons are invited to follow, the life-change required was too much for many. They could not follow.
Anyway, this is on my mind today and Allan Bevere, in a blog post, has fed me this morning. He has a quote from Markus Bockmuehl's article, "The Trouble with the Inclusive Jesus." I consider myself a pretty "inclusive" guy, cringing at some of what I hear from the more neo-Calvinist camps in Evangelicalism. But, I need to hear what Bockmuehl wrote today.
However one parses the exegetical particulars, Jesus of Nazareth is (as Richard Hays puts it), not only the friend of sinners but also the nemesis of the wicked. Another way of putting this is to say that Jesus of Nazareth includes a remarkably wide diversity of the marginalized, yet he also marginalizes an uncomfortably diverse range of the religiously or socioeconomically included. That necessarily complicates any discussion of Jesus' "universalism" or "inclusiveness": Jesus, like Paul, appears to envisage the saved as well as the unsaved or the not-yet-saved … Our problem, then, is that the apparent smoothness and attractiveness of the "inclusive Jesus" hypothesis are acquired at a very high moral price. As we have seen, the structure of the argument typically follows the familiar liberal departicularizing of a Jesus who takes his stance over against the Judaism of his time: Jews were narrow, ethnic, culturally conservative; Jesus by contrast was universal, inclusive, and welcoming without exception. (p. 14, 17).
Current accounts of inclusiveness are indebted much more to modernity than they are to the New Testament. Richard Hays words need to be heard: Jesus is not only the friend of sinners but he is the nemesis of the wicked. The issue is not the truly inclusive nature of the Gospel, but the imposition of a broad and shallow modern inclusivism that does indeed come at a high moral price. Bishop William Willimon reminds us that during his ministry Jesus drove away more people than he attracted.
And, after I saw ASBOJesus in my RSS feed, here comes a great cartoon from David Hayward, The Naked Pastor. While David isn't pastoring a church at this time, he bears the wounds from trying to rock the boat and buck the system while serving in a local parish. He also experienced great joy in the local church as well, but is clear in his writing how difficult it can be to "fight the good fight."
I love how he closes his post:
Viva la Rockers!
Viva la Buckers!
OK. I have been mostly silent about the whole "Jesus Coming on May 21, 2011" stuff that's been going on. I believe that Christ will come again at some point but I believe we're kind of in the dark as to when that's going to occur. Many times Christians or sects within Christendom have known the day or year when Jesus was supposedly to return And each time we've been wrong. And so, my hunch is that that, even with a lot of advertising and free media exposure warning people that tomorrow's the "big day," I will probably be around to blog another day...and not because I've been "left behind" while all the true believers are taken up into heaven, but because it just didn't happen.
This is not, in any way, shape or form, meant to imply that "the Rapture" won't happen tomorrow. It is only meant to say that I don't really think it will...although I believe that when it happens the salvation I have in Christ will put me on whatever side He's on.
So, I try to separate myself from those who believe Christ is coming tomorrow and dismiss them as crazy, Christian folk. But there's something about all the "end times" talk that makes me realize that, I'm just not that different from these folks we see on the news or driving around in their "rapture" vans. Even the Anchorage Daily News had a story on the front page. That's the ANCHORAGE DAILY NEWS, folks. There are a lot of similarities between myself and those who have sold everything in preparation for the rapture tomorrow. We believe a whole lot of the same stuff. And...I do believe that Christ will come again. Most of my argument really boils down to timing.
Yet it's easier to cave into the rapture humor. One, it makes me feel good to distance myself from religious crazies out there...making me feel a little less religiously crazy myself. Two, it diffuses some of the tension this discussion can get into if we REALLY get into it. Three, it can be pretty funny.
And so, I offer the following "rapture humor" from The Lutheran Satire. There's a lot of "meat" here that gets at some of the arguments between dispensationalists and non-dispensationalists. But there's a lot of humor here too.
It's VERY funny. It addresses some of the theological/Biblical issues involved. And it makes me realize how thin the line of division between these two characters is.
Regardless of what tomorrow brings, I cast myself on Christ today.
