Archive | May, 2010

The Wide Space of the Spirit

by on May 24, 2010

Pentecost is probably my favorite day of the year.  My Journey peeps joke that I say that when every single Christian holiday comes around, but seriously, Pentecost is my favorite.  I will not waste an hour of your time rambling as to why.  As it’s Monday, I thought I’d pass along a true Moltmannian metaphor that explains it well:  The Spirit of Life gives us ROOM.  Room to live, and to breathe, and to love, and to find meaning.  The Spirit is the very force of life that makes life worth living.

“When the heart expands, we can stretch our limbs and feel the new vitality everywhere, then life unfolds in us.  But it needs a living space in which it can develop.  Life in the Spirit is a life in the ‘broad place where there is no cramping’ (Job 36:16).  So in the new life we experience the Spirit as a ‘broad place’- as the free space for our freedom, as the living space for our lives, as the horizon inviting us to discover life.  ’The broad place’ is the most hidden and most silent presence of God’s Spirit in us and round about us.  But how else could ‘life in the Spirit’ be understood, if the Spirit were not the space ‘in’ which this life can grow and unfurl?  We explore the depths of this space through the trust of the heart.  We search out the length of this space through extravagant hope.  We discover the breadth of this space through the torrents of love which we receive and give.  God’s Spirit encompasses us from all sides and wherever we are (Psalm 139).  Christ’s Spirit is our immanent power to live- God’s Spirit is our transcendent space for living.”  -The Spirit of Life, p.178-179

Too often we have wrongfully believed that spiritual things are “otherworldly,” that they take us away from our physical present lives and move us into some cloudy atmosphere of abstraction.  The Spirit of God is not an abstraction.  She is not some force that distracts us from our “real lives” by transporting us into another more “spiritual” one.  The Spirit of God given to us at Pentecost is the force for life which makes us recognize where our feet are standing, and pay attention to what our eyes are seeing, and awaken to what our hearts are feeling.  And this feeling of being fully awakened to our present and rich reality very truly transforms us, because it gives us space to breathe so deeply that everything becomes possible.  Love becomes possible, and justice, and peace, and forgiveness.  We don’t feel cramped for space and choked for air, because we are surrounded by the Spirit of God that breathes upon us the very force of life.  When transformation happens in any and every way for us, it is because somewhere deep within us we have, even if only for a moment, believed this to be true, and felt it to be true, and acted knowing it is true.  And when we act from that place, the whole world can change.  When we act from that place, we claim that the whole world IS changing, even now, and we are called to be part of it.

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Ascension

by on May 18, 2010

On Sunday I was in Kansas City spending the day with the great people at Jacobs Well.  They had invited me to preach that day, unaware that the date  fell on Ascension, which has been something of an obsession of mine this past year.  Consequently, they got more than their fair share of Moltmann quotes, as this is a topic I’ve been in correspondence with him about in recent months.  You can hear the sermon here if you’re interested.  Thanks again to all the folks at JW for a wonderful and fun weekend!

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3 Leadership Paradigms for the Church

by on May 17, 2010

It’s Monday and you know what that means- Moltmann Mondays!

In the first chapter of Moltmann’s latest book, he outlines 3 paradigms of leadership the church can follow.  The first is the hierarchical paradigm, in which there is one God, one Pope/Bishop, one Church.  He writes, “In the political world, one ruler on earth corresponds to the one God in heaven, and in similar correspondence to the one God in heaven is the one bishop and high priest of humanity.”  Moltmann finds difficulty in the way this de-emphasizes the unique role of each follower of Jesus.  “If the church is identified in a one-sided way with the hierarchy and its functions, then the task of ‘the laity’ can only be to say ‘Amen’ to the liturgical, dogmatic and moral instructions of the hierarchy.  This is in pure form a church for looking after people; it is not a self-confident church of God’s people” (p.21).

The second paradigm is the Christocentric paradigm.  Here Christ is the head of the Church rather than a human authority figure, and it is through him that unity is found and held.  The congregation members are brothers and sisters who proclaim Jesus in Word and Sacrament.  Theoretically, this creates a community of equals, because it acknowledges the priesthood of all believers.  The problem, he says, is that “the distinction between trained theologians and people without any theological training has taken the place of the priestly hierarchy” (p.23).  Theories don’t mean much when they don’t get worked out in actual practice.

The third paradigm is the Charismatic paradigm, by which he doesn’t mean denominationally charismatic, but rather a broad sense of being led and guided by the Holy Spirit.  He uses 1 Corinthians 12:4-6 as a description:  “There are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit.  There are varieties of service, but the same Lord.  There are varieties of powers, but it is the same God who inspires them all in every one.”  In churches that are working in this paradigm, “everyone is an expert in his or her own life and personal calling, and all are experts in their original gifts and powers on behalf of the community and its mission” (p.25).  By this Moltmann is hardly arguing for relativism.  Instead, he is advocating for churches who take seriously their individual and communal calling to be active followers of Jesus in the world.  There is not a class of religious experts that ought to do the work for the “other kind” of people.  We are all called to follow, and the church ought to be structured in such a way that encourages and empowers and sends each person to do what they are uniquely called to do to bring life into the world.

As a pastor who hopes to work in this charismatic paradigm, I can’t say I’ve figured out a structure yet that fully realizes this potential, but I hope in our own small ways we are fumbling forward and figuring out how to enliven each community member to practice living into their unique callings more and more each day.

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Moltmann Mondays!

by on May 10, 2010

If you haven’t heard, my favorite theologian (understatement of the year) has recently had a book published in English entitled Sun of Righteousness, Arise!  God’s Future for Humanity and the Earth.  This is one of his more pastoral works, which means it’s written not for theologians but for all of us who are trying to practically live out our faith.  It’s a great summary of much of his more dense works of theology, with some new material as well.  I am BEYOND excited.  So much so, in fact, that I have decided to begin a new little tradition on my blog called Moltmann Mondays.  Every Monday, I’ll pick an idea or paragraph or quote from Moltmann’s work and talk briefly about it.

To kick off, here are some sentences from the preface of Moltmann’s latest:

“When I think back, I discover with some surprise that I have always understood Christian theology as a unity, irrespective of the persons who have thought it and maintained it.  From Orthodoxy to the Pentecostal movement in Europe, Asia, Africa and America, all theologians belong to the whole of Christendom on earth and to the thousand-year-old communio theologorum.  In Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Greek nor barbarian, neither master nor servant, and neither man nor woman.  All become one because the frontiers that divide them have been broken down.  And the same is true in Christian theology…Christian theology reaches out beyond denominational frontiers and cultural barriers.  Its discussions do not run parallel to confessional boundaries…I believe that the only future for a divided Christendom before God, and hence on earth too, is a common future.”

To understand Christian theology as a unity is easier said than done.  One of the reasons I was so attracted to Moltmann’s theology is because while most theologians I read were whittling ideas of God down into smaller and smaller bits (and therefore more and more splintered factions that required defending), Moltmann was stretching out wider and wider to bring more pieces in.  This makes intuitive sense to me, as one who recently described my appreciation in the emerging church conversation on what we call “big tent theology.”  We are not attempting to create a new faction, but rather attempting instead to widen our listening to include a more whole and holistic voice of Christian theology, spanning time, denominations, continents, and other perceived borders.  Good theology ought to move OUT and not IN.  (And if you haven’t heard me beat this drum enough, I believe the story of God in Scripture only works that way, too.)

Certainly, I also LOVE his recurring refusal to pay attention to boundaries drawn by humans in favor of the God who so loves breaking them. (See:  The Boundary-Breaking God)

And I also love his beautiful declaration that if we are to have a future at all, it is to be a shared future.  And this future must be held together by the One who alone is able to bring us into unity.  I wrote that “Any human dictator can control a homogenous society.  Only the living God can hold together a diverse global world in love.”  This is the difference between our desire to shrink God/people/the world into easily understandable and controlled splinter categories, and God’s desire to free up people/the world to flourish in creative ways outside of our controlling categories.  This is why we have a common future that must be grounded not in our own whittling and splintering work, but in the unifying work of God.  That’s as true for theology as it is every other work we do as humans living together in this world.  How can we gather rather than shatter?

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