The End

Eschatology is a fancy word for what one thinks concerning the way the world will end. It's typically a subject of doctrinal, literalisitic nit-picking. People try and make very modern explanations of apocalyptic Scriptures, taking things literally or figuratively where it suits them and their ideas best. My denomination has solved this problem by basically treating the apocalyptic Scriptures as though they don't exist. I hear Revelation used in a sermon very sparsely. Honestly, I prefer this to the average church where people 'unofficially' use the Left Behind series as a Bible commentary, but I don't find it to really be the best answer.

First, allow me to point out one thing: if people can get you to fear things that don't matter then they have thus successfully blinded you to things that do. I am understanding more and more of our world to be this way. So, consider, if a congregation spends a good portion of its time fretting over the way life will be wiped off the planet, it is very easy to assume that they might well do nothing about the way life is currently wasting away in the 'dark corners' of our world. So many American Christians live their lives 'preparing themselves' for the rapture, and have thus missed the Kingdom that is already here! More on that in a bit.

Second, I'll just spit out one of my biases. I believe that the majority of the Bible is written in the language of dramatic narrative. This means that its first purpose is to tell a story with power and persuading conviction. This also means that it often abandons historicity for the sake of the message it hopes to convey. Furthermore, where it desires the Bible conveys legendary/mythological materials as truth, and truth should never be reduced or confined to mere facts. This is the way I read the beginning of the Bible, and the way I read the end of it. If that offends you, I wish it didn't, but believe me, I have reflected on this deeply and I'm not saying it uncritically. God is real, and he is much greater than the book that we use to understand him. In fact I find that God is so utterly real that it is thoroughly impossible to know him by sequences of facts strung together in the pages of Scripture. If the Bible were pure historical report, we would never know God. Scripture itself admits that even the greatest of miracles don't suffice to turn our hearts to God (Exodus). It takes art, drama, and deep expression to win people. This is what Scripture is to me: the Theatre of God.

And we need this more than we often acknowledge. Walter Brueggemann speaks of our modern situation as one where we have absolutized the present, forgetting the past and the future. If we allow it, the Bible offers us much more than a history lesson. It gives us a way to understand where we come from. The Bible provides us with a Drama that gives us different eyes to interpret human experience. In this way the Bible is not set up against secular versions of history, only secular interpretations thereof. It is the way that we interpret what we know that the Bible challenges, it shows little concern in comparing the historicity of texts and archeological evidence. Beyond that Scripture frees us from the tyranny of the present moment by showing us the future. Again, not in sense that their is literally seven scrolls and seven lamp stands in heaven waiting for some spiritual/historical events to unfold. Revelation is a myth, make no mistake. But, it is a myth that is true. . . .

Eschatology is the dramatic representation of the future. It is God letting us live outside the present and experience what will be. When I hear most people talk of the End, I find that Brueggemann is much too right. We see the future in Revelation and try to force our modern world into that mold. We impose new names, as though Iran, Syria, China, and the United States have anything to do with what the Bible is getting at. We reduce the future to be a mere extension of our present world. I see countless greedy and evil structures in our world relying on such a belief to subdue the faith of Jesus Christ into some consumer ideology to justify war in the Middle East and the Arab states. It is a lie.

In the Bible it is quite the opposite stance. The future is the primary realm of existence for the believer. We live far more in the future than we do even in the present moment. This is what it means to be the people of God's promise. The future is much more than what the present will become. This is not what often becomes a form of idle waiting for the End, but instead is a radical view that the End has arrived and is still coming in fullness. It encourages us to relentless action in the present world, because in such action we see tangibly what it is that we hope for. The good we do is graffiti to Satan's kingdom, telling people of the ultimate outcome. We know the end and thus live boldly subversive lives to the structures of evil we encounter every day. We don't assume to win the battle for God, but instead erect signs of the triumphant God we serve. We rest on the promise of the future which gives new life in the present.

"Human life and human history have an end. But the message of Jesus tells us that, at this end, there is not nothing, there is God."

Jesus' faith is one that sees God as the ultimate end. In a very real sense the future is God's place of existence. We do not arrive at God by the simple procession of historical events. We do not make God come to our reality. We determine the future only insofar as we confine it to the present moment. (That's as strong a blow as modernism could ever receive)

In this sense the Kingdom of God too remains a future reality. It is not fully represented in our present existence. So, in a way the present remains cut off from the future of God. Except, (here comes the gospel) that in Jesus we find the Kingdom and the future with it, invading the present. It isn't fully here, but it is represented. Jesus is the representative of the Kingdom who tells us it is invading soon. This means that those who follow him have placed the allegience in the future, not the present. Our faith is in things to come, not in the things that are. These things to come, do not come about because Iran is making nuclear arms. They do not come about by Israel persecuting the Palestinians. Nuclear war does not equal Jesus' return. That would be the present invading the future.

Instead the future and God's Kingdom with it come by the will of God. So, in this we find the book of Revelation giving us theater to understand this future. It is not a book of historical predictions, least of all for events that would take place 2000 years after its original readers passed away! Some good that would do Roman Christians under Domitian's persecution, to say that in the year 2007 Jesus would come again. Revelation, instead, allows us to imaginitively live out God's future invading the present. In it we can see what the outcome is. Life's meaning is assured, because the future is known. In this drama we see the End that liberates us and implores us to tell the present world what's coming.

I didn't make the team

I grew up in Plano. People are rich there. My highschool had 3600 kids at in my junior year . . . for two grades. So, at this school needless to say, it was no easy task to get on a varsity team. I solved this problem by rejecting the idea of team sports when I was in sixth grade. Go me, with all my rebelliousness. Anyway, with the hundreds of kids at our school who didn't make the cut for a varsity team there was a solution: the lacrosse team! Now make no mistake, I have the utmost respect for the game of lacrosse . . . it's just that Plano is in Texas. And, Texas is hot. So, when you combine lighter weight football pads, a soccer field, and a sport where you are expected to run really fast while getting barraged by titanium poles attempting to sever your hands from the rest of you, with 90+ degree heat and large quantities of ozone filling the air, most parents don't sign their kids up. Then there's Plano, where skinny white kids don't stand much opportunity to see any Friday night lights. So they play lacrosse instead.

I on the other hand had rejected sports in general, until I sobered up (literally), and found some respect for athletic endevors my senior year. That to say: I didn't even make the lacrosse team. Sad, indeed.

Still, I carried this hope of being like the lacrosse kids off to college with me. Then I realized that my college was in Arkansas . . . they've never heard of lacrosse in Arkansas. Or, so I thought, until I realized that our school pulled in an inordinate amount of yankees. My crushed dreams sprang to life. Now, I had no real clue of how to play lacrosse. I did pick it up, but I knew in my heart I was never going to be very good. I also picked up some nasty asthma attacks after hard games, and realized if I were to really commit to traveling to be part of the team my grades were going to begin to suck. Still, I tried for a while . . . and now having not touched a lacrosse stick in three and a half years, I wonder . . . . what the heck was I thinking??

I did enjoy the game occasionally, but let's be serious here . . . I'm not competitive, nor really mean . . . and I still live in Texas, where it is still too freaking hot to play lacrosse. So, why did I spend three semesters commiting myself to this idea? Because basically it was a community. Now I must say, not all, but lots of the team were morons. They carried the same idiotic jock metality that I think turned me away from sports in middle school. Yet, for a while, I still lived with the high school clique mindset, where I wanted to part of a group that was cool.

I think God used that. Though I still look back with some regret at what amounted to a general waste of time, I do see the contrast between the lacrosse team (as well as my social club) and my closest group of friends. Between a group who's uniting factor was atheletic competition, and a group centered around God and his will for the world.

It took me a long time to perceive that. I spent so much of my early adulthood trying to distinguish between what matters and what doesn't. I think I only truly came to make that distinction because of the way God connected me to that group of people. I remember when we all first came together, thinking that I could never consider them my closest friends, and only months later realizing that the people I had assumed previously I was close to could never begin to match the intimacy I had seemingly stumbled upon in this group.

Maybe lately I've noticed how that such "stumblings" are the furthest thing from chance. That's what I've been realizing about community, it's more than just a benefit of serving God, but actually comprises the deepest core of God's will. God's desire is to connect that which was never intended to be separated. Surely between he and us, but I believe every bit as much between each other.

I've begun to understand the ideal that humanity was always intended to be. A race of people, united in spite of such wonderful diversity. If only we could first notice a contrast between the sweetness of community formed around God opposed to the petty allure of alliances built around other purposes. I've been humbled too at how fragile community can be, and how costly to maintain. Yet I also wonder how much the world would be changed if we could somehow pay such a price, and even in community drifting apart, how much could be changed if we carried such a spirit with us everywhere we go?

The Body

To my impatient fans, I apologize for the delay. I'm friends with a guy who's a college minister, and he decided to go gallivanting around India with some friends, meaning I had to cover for him teaching class yesterday.

Anyway, lately I'm still slowly trudging through On Being a Christian. The author is discussing historical, Biblical criticism right now, and though it's interesting, I am much too tired to get involved in a discussion of that nature this week. I'm about two thirds of the way through Brueggemann's Texts Under Negotiation: The Bible and Postmodern Imagination, and I must say it is turning out to be one of the best and most concise books I've ever read concerning how the Bible relates to our current social context.

Lately, through my reading and just life and general it seems that God has been hammering the concept of community into me. I find this to be a little strange since at this particular point in my life I feel less a part of any community than any time over the past several years. I'm burnt out on "big church", so I don't really go. I don't feel super connected to the college group I've long been a part of now. My closest circle of friends, though I still see them all regularly, it seems has drifted apart, and the amazing intimacy we had for a long time has dissipated with our increasing stress and busyness. Yet it seems from all angles God has been stressing to me the incredible importance of community.

On the one hand, Brueggemann's book is reminding me of the terrible isolation that our postmodern situation forces on so many people. Our society uses materialism and a modern equivalent to 'bread and circus' to palliate the haunting uneasiness resulting from not knowing anyone and not truly being known. When this feeling grows too strong to be ignored by such means, our culture's answer is marriage. Obviously a good thing, but a pair of people severed from true community are only slightly better off than the lonely individual. Family is good, but a family is not a church.

I am increasingly aware that God's will is to heal humanity as a whole from its fractured state. I am leaning more and more toward the idea that this is the whole purpose of religion in any form. Certainly not to cut short the function of restoring a proper relationship to God himself, but if we as a part of humanity remain cut off and hostile toward another human, have we really understood God? Have we understood what it is to love him if we still reject another race, or ethnicity, or social class?

I am increasingly impressed with the language referring to the Church as the body of Christ. Maybe nursing school has given me a greater respect for the complex nature of the body. I am impressed that we are not required to all do the same things. Our functions are varied. We are not required to ever serve the same purposes. The stomach may have no understanding of the lungs, but the lungs supply the stomach with oxygen and the stomach gives nutrients to the lungs. The eyes may think negatively of the ears, knowing how much more could be seen in the ears only functioned like eyes. But, in this the eyes just have not come to understand what the ears are purposed to do. Different cells work in different organs as part of different systems, and all may fail to understand the purpose of the others over there. We may not even understand the system they are in; let alone their particular function in an individual organ. Too often we only understand our own function, and judge others because they fail to do what our particular group does. But, were they ever intended for that? Ultimately, we are all united around the mind of Christ. Our purposes are determined by what his grand purpose is.

I was reading On Being a Christian today. It was discussing all the versions of the 'historical Jesus', who if you read scholars is gererally doubted was like the Jesus we see in the Gospels. Yet the author pointed out that though the Gospels may not give a polaroid of Jesus, each paints a representation of him, and "despite all the discontinuity, there is continuity." There are differences between the different Gospels, but the representations of Christ, his character, his values, his message, and his commitment, all line up in surprising clarity.

What I mean to say is this: we have a dang good idea of what Jesus' grand purpose was. The Gospels make at least that much crystal clear.

His purpose was revealed in his teaching, and in the way he lived his daily life. His purpose was revealed in gathering disciples and friends close around him to live as a community. His purpose was revealed in his life as he walked in the truth that the Presence of God covered him in order that the poor would hear good news, that prisoners might hear of their freedom, that the blind might see, and the oppressed would find release. His purpose was the Jubilee: where humanity realized equality, and communion/fellowship is restored between us all!

This is the mind of Christ. Could his body serve any other purpose? We believe what we believe, and practice what we practice, but we can never lose sight of the fact that the reason for it all is healing, liberation, and equality. Doctrine, tradition, piety, and theology are all accessories to purpose. The purpose of Christ is humanity restored.