Things standing shall fall, / but the moving ever shall stay. —Basava
Brian McLaren describes how Jesus often provoked disruption to move people beyond the status quo:
[There is] a powerful story at the beginning of John’s Gospel: Jesus’s protest in the Temple [see John 2:13–22], when he drove out the merchants of sacrifice and appeasement and then made two outrageous statements. [1] First, he said that God intended the Temple to be a house of prayer for all people (no exceptions), and second, he said that the corrupted Temple would be destroyed and replaced by something new, which would be resurrected in its place….
Jesus continues to use the imagery of disruption (John 3–4). First, he tells a man that in spite of all his learning, in spite of all his status, he needs to go back and start over, to be born again—perhaps the most apt image for disruption ever. Then he tells a woman that the location of worship doesn’t matter at all—which in their day meant that temples were irrelevant. What matters, Jesus says, is the attitude (or spirit) and authenticity (or truth) of the worshipper. Jesus was calling for a radical disruption in his religion, a great spiritual migration, and a similar disruption and migration are needed no less today in the religion that names itself after him.
A later New Testament writer repeated and expanded upon the disruption and migration Jesus was calling for (1 Peter 2:5). The way of life centered in the Temple must be disrupted because God wanted to dwell not in buildings of bricks or stones cemented together by mortar, but rather in human beings—living stones, he called them—cemented together by mutual love, honor, and respect.
McLaren invites us to trust the Spirit’s call to keep moving:
This disruptive revolution, this liberation, this great spiritual migration begins with each of us presenting ourselves, with all of our doubts and imperfections, all of our failures, fears, and flaws, to the Spirit…. You. Me. Everyone. No exceptions.
“The moving ever shall stay,” [twelfth-century Hindu mystic and poet] Basava said. [2] Those words contradict so much of our inherited religious sensibility. “Stay the same. Don’t move. Hold on. Survival depends on resistance to change,” we were told again and again. “Foment change. Keep moving. Evolve. Survival depends on mobility,” the Spirit persistently says. That prompting tells us that the migration we seek is not merely from one static location to another. It is, rather, from one static location to a journey of endless growth.
If you want to see the future of Christianity … don’t look at a church building. Go look in the mirror and look at your neighbor. God’s message of love is sent into the world in human envelopes. If you want to see a great spiritual migration begin, then let it start right in your body. Let your life be a foothold of liberation.
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| Psalm 106: A Song of Sober Self-Assessment |
 Click Here for AudioYesterday, we explored “Disney Princess theology”—the tendency to center ourselves in the biblical story. Psalm 105, however, corrects this error by retelling the Old Testament narrative with YHWH as the story’s main character and the unmistakable hero.Psalm 106 continues to recalibrate how we read the Bible by taking a sledgehammer to our consumeristic Disney Princess theology. Like Psalm 105, 106 also retells the story of Israel in the Old Testament, and like the previous psalm, it also emphasizes the story of YHWH rescuing his people from slavery in Egypt. But the focus of Psalm 106 is not God’s salvation, but Israel’s treachery.The chapter recounts in vivid detail the many sins, rebellions, and betrayals of God’s people. Far from the heroes of the story, Psalm 106 portrays them as the villains. They are the antagonists in God’s story; they are the stiff-necked people against whom he is constantly contending. No Israelite reciting Psalm 106 can finish with their Disney Princess theology unshaken.What do we learn from this sober psalm? It reminds us of the importance of self-assessment in the life of every Christian and Christian community. It is all too easy to mythologize our stories or the stories of the groups we belong to. We conveniently blur or erase the shameful bits, and we embellish the favorable ones. We valorize what makes us appear righteous, and we minimize what reveals our weakness. This kind of myth-making is valuable in marketing and politics, but it’s a significant barrier to emotional maturity and absolute poison to our spiritual lives.Max DuPree said, “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.” If we refuse to see and admit the truth about ourselves or our community, we cannot move forward. This is the function of confession in the life of the Christian. Confession simply means “to say the same thing.” It is the practice of speaking the truth about ourselves that God already knows. We don’t confess to benefit God but ourselves. It’s how we resist the temptation to mythologize, it’s how we accurately define reality, and it’s how we begin to grow.Admitting the unsavory truth about ourselves has another benefit also displayed in Psalm 106. It magnifies God’s goodness and love. Reading the story of Israel’s continual rebellion makes the Lord’s mercy and patience even more remarkable. When we minimize our failures we also minimize God’s faithfulness. This is why traditional Christian worship always includes a time for the confession of sin before administering the grace of Christ’s table. It’s the same reason a cinema dims the lights before the movie begins. Pausing to remember our darkness makes the light of the gospel shine that much brighter. DAILY SCRIPTURE PSALM 106:1-48 WEEKLY PRAYER. Origen (185 – 254). May the Lord Jesus place his hands on our eyes that we may begin to catch sight of the things that are not seen more than the things that are seen. May he open our eyes that they will alight on the things to come more than on the things of this age. May he unveil the vision of our heart that it may contemplate God in spirit. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ to whom belong glory and power for ever. Amen. |
