yes

“Yes, I deal with guilt every day.

What counts is my heart’s desire,

only that my heart’s motives be pure,

and that I strive for that…day after day.

The Devil must know guilt is my most vulnerable

place. Some days he is most successful in

destroying my creative energy and vitality

- just in that very way.

Yes to the fact that Jesus understands it all.

He has never willed me to carry guilt.

Yes to realising that carrying guilt is a greater

sing than the failures that cause it …

that it negates all Christ paid to set us free.

Yes to surrendering this area of my life to God,

and not picking it up …

over and over again.”

– Ann Kiemel; from Celtic Daily Prayer; Aidan readings, Fed 9, 2010

contentment

Image by Grant MacDonald via Flickr

Many people think of Ecclesiastes as a rather depressing book, if they think about it at all. It is one of those books that cannot be mined for the easy answer, the quick solution, or the effective proof text. Well, there is that one passage in chapter 3 where he explains that there is a time for everything under the sun.

The problem is this is all surrounded by the teachers description of just how meaningless life is. He even opens the book this way.

“The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem: “Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” ” (Ecclesiastes 1:1–2, NIV)

There is no purpose in wisdom, or in pleasure, or in folly, or in toil. However, if we can find satisfaction in what we have and what we do, if we can be content, we can do no better.

“A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work. This too, I see, is from the hand of God, for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment? ” (Ecclesiastes 2:24–25, NIV)

We are constantly seeking for the next big thing, for the next big movement of God, the next big event, the next book, the next pay raise, the next job, the next day, year, or decade. We are a culture of discontents because we are constantly living elsewhere. Time and again, the teacher of Ecclesiastes reminds us that the best we can do is be content and enjoy what we are doing NOW.

“So I saw that there is nothing better for a man than to enjoy his work, because that is his lot. For who can bring him to see what will happen after him? ” (Ecclesiastes 3:22, NIV)

I am trying to be present. Trying to accept the way things are right now. Trying to not live in the tomorrows, but live in today. After all, each day has enough trouble on its own.

giving in community

I have been doing a series on Ephesians at the church (you can see the sermon texts here, and here; the podcast is available here) and have been thinking alot about what it means to be a community. See, Ephesians is one of the best books for outlining Paul’s  thinking about the church, about what it means to be a part of the people of God reconciled to him and each other through Jesus.

Virtually all the references to “you” within Ephesians is plural. Paul is not talking to individuals, he is talking to a church. All the discussions about being called and chosen and redeemed are done in community. The prayers for hope and the Spirit’s working are prayers for a community primarily.

It is amazing how hard it is for us to hear this kind of message today.

Don’t get me wrong, Paul is talking to a group of individuals, but he is not addressing them as a collection of individuals, but as a community. It is not difficult for Paul to understand that God works in groups. The history of his people group, the descendents of Abraham, had always clung to the promises that God would be with them AS A GROUP.

“I will be your God, and you will be my people,” God promises to the Israelites after he freed them from slavery. So, for Paul, the Christian community has been incorporated into that people group, as was the original intention since the very beginning. God still works in groups.

But it is hard to live in groups. It is hard to give up our own desires to ensure the success of the group. It is hard to come to the worship space for a gathering, and put our own desires behind those of others. There is always a temptation, especially for those who participate in the leadership, to pack up our chips and go home when things do not go our way. There is always a temptation to put our own desires first.

I think this exposes a kind of pride. If we think that our likes and dislikes are the way things are supposed to be, then everyone else should have the same likes and dislikes. If we confuse preference with choice with necessity, we are suddenly unable to allow variety and disagreement. We place our own preference as the standard and ignore any dissenting opinions.

Suddenly our worship, our service, our actions are no longer about God but about us.

But if we can truly give up our own thoughts of supperiority and seek to help others encounter God, then we will begin to truly encounter God.

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Biblical Freedom from Religious Oppression: a review

There are times when I am sent a book and I get really excited by the title. I have to admit, my expectations were pretty high as I peeled back the wrapping around this book and caught a glimpse of the title. Unfortunately Biblical Freedom from Religious Oppression by K. Scott Schaeffer fell far short of those expectations and I do not recommend it.

Schaeffer does recognise a problem within current North American evangelicalism; the tendency to proof text.

You find yourself discussing the very important issue again, perhaps even with the same person with whom you disagreed before. As the discussion begins, you get excited, because you know that this time–you have the ultimate weapon in your arsenal. You wait for the perfect moment, open your Bible to the correct page, and recite the magic verse that proves you are on the side of God. …Much to your surprise, you opponent opens his Bible and does the unthinkable–he quotes a Bible verse that refutes your Bible verse.

Schaeffer argues that much of the disagreements about various issues can be solved when we take a look at all of the verses that relate to the issue. He calls this the “Every-Verse Method”. When we take a look at all the verses that discuss a certain issue, and properly analyse them, we will be able to come up with the true Biblical teaching on an issue.

This is a very good thing to promote. We need to understand the context of a given statement in the scripture, and its relation to the scriptures as a whole. The following, in a nutshell, is Schaeffer’s hermeneutic (the method he uses to interpret the scriptures). Essentially you pick up a concordance and look up every passage that refers to the issue at hand, then analyse the various passages, and viola! you have the answer you are looking for.

No longer should we seek out verses that support what we want to believe and ignore others that don’t. From now on, when seeking to determine our beliefs regarding a specific issue, we need to look at every verse in the Bible addressing that issue.

This, however, is a rather tedious task. To look up every verse that relates to some issue can be somewhat daunting given the size of the Bible. But Schaeffer claims to have done most of that work for us.

Looking through the entire Bible to collect all the verses addressing a specific issue can be tedious work, and most Christians have no time for that. That’s where I come in. Throughout most of this book’s chapters, I will present you with every verse in the Bible that deals with each chapter’s subject.

The rest of the book consists in Schaeffer walking the reader through his “every-verse method” and leading them to his ‘impartial’ conclusion. He deals with issues such as alcohol, divorce, creationism, pride and judgmentalism.

While I applaud the goal of Schaeffer in this book it is a very poor example of Biblical exegesis. Schaeffer continues to view the Bible as an answer book to the issues we bring to it, a book that can be segregated into small little proof texts. It treats the scriptures not as God’s historical revelation of himself and his love for us in Jesus Christ, but rather as a collection of disconnected verses that relate to each other in some way and can tell us how to run our lives.

I appreciate his attempt to free people from a very narrow view of the scriptures. He falls short, however, in providing a comprehensive view of the scriptures which moves us away from the practice of proof texting, toward seeing the book as a whole.

costly loss of lament

What is the cost to ourselves, and our worshipping communities, if we refuse to actively engage in the lament process?

Crying out to God with the voice of the poets in the psalms sometimes feels wrong, almost irreverent. It is hard to express ourselves with the raw emotions that are exposed in the psalms. This reluctance, however, is very costly to our life of faith; both our individual and corporate lives.

Walter Bruggemann argues that the lament “shifts the calculus and redresses the distribution of power between the two parties, so that the petitionary party is taken seriously and the God who is addressed is newly engages in the crisis in a way that puts God at risk.” (The Psalms and the Life of Faith, p. 101) This may seem like rather strong language, but the form of the lament ensures that the person praying is given a hearing and the speech is heard, valued, and taken seriously by God.

The basic loss to our individual faith life when we refuse to engage in lament is genuine covenant interaction. When we do not lament the covenant becomes only celebration of joy and well-being. Essentially, we become “yes-men and women” who simply agree with whatever happens and true relationship is removed, our only response to God becomes one of obedience out of fear and guilt. Allowing ourselves to lament, however, develops within us an expectation that God responds to our prayers and lives opening up the relationship to a true give and take.

The basic loss to our corporate faith is a silencing of the questions of justice. When we refuse to lament the negative aspects of the status quo, we refuse to call for something different. The lament psalms essentially make four claims, according to Bruggemann.

1. “Things are not right in the present arrangement.
2. They need not stay this way and can be changed.
3. The speaker will not accept them in this way, for the present arrangement is intolerable.
4. It is God’s obligation to change things. ” (ibid. p. 105)

When we refuse to enter into this kind of an interaction with God, our relationship with him becomes either fair-weather, or a cover-up of what is really going on in our lives and the world. We either find ourselves pulling away from God when things go wrong, or burying the true pain of our lives and world.

However, when we allow ourselves to use the language of lament in relation to God we engage in a genuine covenant relationship, and constantly examine and call for redefinition of the power relations in the world. In both the public and private aspects of our lives, the use of the lament forces us to assert that our God matters in every aspect of our lives.