• Posts Tagged ‘love’

    UMC Candidacy Questions: My Beliefs

    by  • February 21, 2012 • Personal, Theology • 0 Comments

    As a part of the candidacy process for ordination in the United Methodist Church one is required to type up and submit answers to a number of different questions and prompts. As I approach my meeting with the District Committee on Ordained Ministry on Thursday, February 23, I will be posting a few of my responses here. The third of these responses (and the last one I intend to post on this blog) follows, below. 

    ¶ 311.2.a.iii Write about your beliefs as a Christian.

    I believe that the God who created all things took on flesh and walked the earth in the person of Jesus Christ. I believe that Jesus is the Word of God, the fulfillment of the Old Testament’s history of Israel, the full enactment of God’s faithfulness to the promises he made to his people, the assertion of God’s Reign on earth. I believe that Jesus displays the power and the wisdom of God in the weakness and foolishness of his death on the cross. I believe that Jesus’ innocence, his faithful obedience, was affirmed when he rose from the dead. I believe that in Jesus’ death and resurrection sin was defeated and death itself died. I believe that God has poured out his Holy Spirit on the whole world to bear witness to this Good News about what God has done in Jesus.

    I believe that God has called-out the church to be witnesses of these things —- to partner with him in the sharing of this News and in the performance of this Reign through the power of the Holy Spirit. I believe that to bear witness to Jesus as Lord means to renounce all other lords as ultimately false and to follow after his pattern of Lordship by feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, showing hospitality to strangers, clothing the naked, and visiting the sick and imprisoned. I believe that living life towards this God who has come to love us his enemies in the person of Jesus means to live by a similarly radical kind of love toward God, toward neighbor, and toward our own enemies. I believe that holiness is becoming consumed by this kind of love, overwhelmed by its fulness and completeness, and graciously perfected and overcome by its practice. I believe that the Holy Spirit works on us through certain ‘means of grace’, central among them being the practice of baptism, whereby the church welcomes one into its covenant community of worship and witness, and holy communion, whereby the church takes up particular discrete acts of Jesus, gives thanks to God through them, breaks bread to remember what Christ has done for us and to rehearse for the Wedding Supper of the Lamb, and shares a common table as an act of holy hospitality and as spiritual food to empower our ongoing worship and witness. I believe that to follow after this Jesus, to walk on his way, is the only good and true and beautiful way to live, the only genuinely, fully and originally human way to be.

    I believe that the same Jesus will one day bring his Reign into its fulness, at which point we will answer for our sins, but he will wipe away our tears, make all things new, and come to dwell fully and completely with humankind in a New Earth. I believe that whatever this looks like, however God freely determines to wrap this whole drama up, it will be Good, and Holy, and Righteous, and True. And I believe that living our lives together and with the fellowship of the Holy Spirit between the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of all things that his own resurrection foretells is what gives us the courage to live counterintuitive lives of faithfully hopeful love as described above.

    UMC Candidacy Questions: Most Formative Experience

    by  • February 16, 2012 • Personal, Theology • 2 Comments

    As a part of the candidacy process for ordination in the United Methodist Church one is required to type up and submit answers to a number of different questions and prompts. As I approach my meeting with the District Committee on Ordained Ministry on Thursday, February 23, I will be posting a few of my responses here. The first of these responses follows, below.

    ¶ 311.2.a.i: What is the most formative experience of your Christian life?

    I could answer this question by talking about my church growing up, or the amazing and encouraging friends that God has blessed me with, or my experience in seminary and how it was probably exactly what I needed right when I needed it – all are wonderful gifts from God. But I think at this point I’d like to say that the most formative experience of my Christian life has been my current job as director of youth ministries at Aldersgate UMC in Santa Fe, TX.

    This charge is strengthening my faith. I loved seminary, but writing an exegetical paper on a passage from Isaiah (for instance) is much easier to me than convincing a roomful of skeptical 9th graders that God has done something dramatic and beautiful -— even exciting -— for us and for our world, and that God wants us to participate in the continuation of that drama, beauty and excitement that he’s still doing today. It’s not that I don’t already have faith, or that I don’t already believe these things that I teach. I most certainly do. But the exercise of having to explain my faith and why I’m so excited about it, and having to do so in different words and from different angles, has been deeply formative for me. It’s as if my mouth having to form the gospel is teaching my heart all over again how to love it. Having to explain why the good news is so good enhances and enlivens that goodness for me. Talking about how exciting God’s reign is has made God’s reign even more exciting.

    Further, being at Aldersgate encourages me to pray. There’s nothing that has encouraged prayer more consistently and humbly in my life than my being responsible for the spiritual formation of this small band of young people. Jesus claims that there’s a lot at stake here. Evidently messing this up might end worse for me than if I had a millstone tied around my neck at the bottom of the sea. But I’m also humbled and driven to prayer by the simple fact that I love these teens that I get to work with, and I care deeply for the families with whom I interact. And so I give thanks often, and I intercede on their behalf. What a gift!

    Lastly, my time at Aldersgate continues to grow my love for Christ’s church. Churches are messy. Sometimes we fight or bicker. Sometimes we spend way to much time talking about things that are really just silly distractions. And sometimes we do a terrible job of loving each other, not to mention our neighbors and our enemies. But sometimes the church gets it. Sometimes we catch a vision, if only a fleeting one, of God’s mercy and grace, and sometimes we even act on that vision. Sometimes we live out our allegiance to God’s Reign instead of trying to fortify our own reigns. Sometimes, if just for a moment, the church lives into her calling by really and truly worshipping God, and by really and truly living into God’s mission for which he’s sending us out into the world. Church is messy, sure. But by a miracle of grace God nurtures and shapes these messy bodies into what will become his bride. Aldersgate can be messy. And yet somehow God still manages to offer us his Sanctifying grace. And that has been deeply formative for me.

    a few Wesleyan hurdles: inner/outer, ‘heart’

    by  • December 2, 2011 • Theology, Wesley Project • 0 Comments

    Writing about Wesley is hard. He uses a lot of expressions that I find archaic, and the ways he deals with some concepts rubs me the wrong way. Two related examples. First, his usage of ‘heart’ is difficult for me because I’m worried about how it might be participating in the popular dichotomy between “head” and “heart” – between emotion and cognition – that I find troubling because of the ways that it ignores desire’s essential involvement in how and why and what we think (and all of that’s involvement in how and why and what we do).

    Second, Wesley employs concepts of “outward religion” and “inward religion”, a dichotomy that is easy enough to understand but arguably more troublesome than the aforementioned. My fear here is that the inward will become the realm of Christianity and the outward, ‘more serious’ stuff will become the responsibility of some other more ‘practical’ power, be it politics, pocketbook, personal preference, etc. We can tuck God safely away in a little ‘inward’ box and justify some pretty un-Christlike things. See pretty much anything written by JH Yoder or Michael Gorman if you’re not sure what I mean. The gospel isn’t ‘fire insurance’ it’s a whole new life – a new creation – here and now. And that’s radical, disruptive stuff.

    But my concerns are pretty contemporary, and Wesley is not a 21st century man, he is a 18th century man. And so I think he largely predates these misconceptions, at least in their modern form. In fact, I think these misconceptions actually came out of the mixture of Wesley’s language, along with parallel language coming from other quarters, and later (and a few concurrent) philosophical developments and fashions.

    This claim is bolstered by the fact that much of his energies are spent holding inward and outward religion together, employing the distinction to undercut the distance between the two. For Wesley, inward religion necessarily breeds outward religions, and outward religion fosters and deepens inward religion. The two are of a piece, and can’t be separated without doing violence to both.

    Furthermore, for Wesley the ‘heart’ isn’t too separate a thing either. The Oxford Fellow just means to point out that our human desires are exactly where God wants to go to work on us. God wants to transform and reform us where we love. Moreover, Wesley is also no adherent of Deb from Napoleon Dynamite‘s “follow your heart” philosophy (yeah, I just went there).

    I noticed these ‘hurdles’ (and other similar concerns) over the summer as well, but the more I read Wesley the more I am convinced that Wesley is merely a victim of a changing conversation, and that he is not guilty of these modern philosophical and theological crimes.

    Wesley on Several Occasions

    by  • November 7, 2011 • Theology, Wesley Project • 0 Comments

    I really enjoyed auditing a class on Methodist theology this past summer (“We have a theology?” I joked more than once). But I still don’t feel as conversant as I’d like to be in John Wesley’s thought. On top of that, the Barth project is on hiatus, and my leisure reading could use some focus and structure. Not to mention a change of pace, and Wesley is certainly that compared to Barth.

    So, I have a new goal: read all of John Wesley’s Sermons on Several Occasions. Side goal: write the occasional blog post on the experience. Here goes.

    Sermons on Several Occasions consists of 141 of them. Sermons, I mean. The title is very descriptive of the content. So I’ll leap right into the Preface to the first series (sermons 1-53). Here John Wesley introduces the sermons to follow and their general overarching theme: the way of salvation. I’ve picked out a few features of this preface that seem to be of note.

    First, his sermons are sermons, designed for the preaching of the gospel to the people (ad populum); they are not designed as systematic treatises, nor are they written for theologians. They are written to be “plain truth for plain people.” If he’s a theologian he’s clearly doing what Barth called “irregular theology,” but his priorities are such that it may be unfair to label him as a theologian at all. He’s much more of a pastor, albeit a pastor who understands that discipleship is a deep responsibility, and so worth the critical care and precision of articulation we tend to call theology. But even with that Word-care and precise articulation, he makes it clear that he’s trying as hard as he can to be unpretentious.

    Second, John Wesley is an evangelical. (If the previous sentence offends you, try it again with the prefix “proto-” in front of the ‘e’ word. If that didn’t help, I’m afraid that’s all I can do for you.) He says things like, “I want to know one thing, — the way to heaven; how to land safe on that happy shore. God himself has condescended to teach the way: For this very end he came from heaven. He hath written it down in a book.” Wesley cares a lot about salvation and how it ‘works.’ For him it works only because of Jesus, and he aspires to be a homo units libri — a man of one book (the Bible, of course). The salvation way of Jesus, disclosed in the Bible, is distinguished from all other ways, is before all other ways.

    Of course Wesley is not a contemporary North American evangelical. But while he never handed out a single “Have you heard of the Four Spiritual Laws?” booklet, he is heavily preoccupied with salvation. And while he gets somewhat heavy handed with “heart” language, he very much thinks that Christianity can’t really separate the ‘interior’ from the ‘exterior.’ And while calling him an inerrantist would be anachronistic at best, he does lean heavily on the Scriptures and treats them as primary and authoritative. While it would be irresponsible to read Wesley and hear in him the words of our fundamentalist neighbors, it would be just as irresponsible to read Wesley and not hear some room for rapprochement with them. God has acted to save the world, and Wesley is trying to take that very seriously.

    Third, Wesley knew there were other people who knew more than him, and even offered them advice on how they might change his mind (plain proof of Scripture + kind patience). And then he went so far as to say that truth is not the primary determinative category for Christian discipleship — love is: “For, how far is love, even with many wrong opinions, to be preferred before truth itself without love!” But if Wesley isn’t a contemporary North American evangelical, neither is he saying that it doesn’t matter what we believe or think as long as our ‘heart’ is in the right place. I read him here as being in the same line as James Smith’s argument in Desiring the Kingdom: people are not primarily thinking things, but desiring — loving — animals. It’s not that our minds don’t matter, it’s just that they aren’t in charge. Wesley is concerned with the love of God for us, and our love back to God. Because that’s where the action is.

    “The God of love forbid we should ever make the trial!  May he prepare us for the knowledge of all truth, by filling our hearts with his love, and with all joy and peace in believing!”

    Next up: Sermon 1, “Salvation by Faith.”

    Obedience and the Cross

    by  • January 20, 2010 • Theology • 2 Comments

    Revisiting Richard Hays’ The Moral Vision of the New Testament in preparation for putting together a long study of Mark’s gospel, I came across this gem:

    Nowhere…does the Markan Jesus promulgate love as a distinctive mark of discipleship. The disciples are summoned to follow, and the single fundamental norm is laid down in the narrative of Jesus’ own death on the cross. Unlike Paul and John, Mark nowhere explicitly interprets Jesus’ death as an act of  “love.” The way of the cross is simply the way of obedience to the will of God, and discipleship requires following that way regardless of cost or consequences. (84-85)

    Nothing against love, of course, especially in the Christian life. Just interesting that it can’t be used as an organizing principle for understanding who Christ is or what the nature of discipleship is according to the Gospel of Mark. Instead, obedience to death, a Pauline theme as well in places like Philippians 2.

    Herbert McCabe on Prayer

    by  • October 6, 2009 • Theology • 2 Comments

    I’ve been reading a bit of Catholic theologian Herbert McCabe’s writings lately. His style is always very engaging, sometimes humorous, and once in awhile profound.

    I’ve also been thinking a bit about prayer lately, mostly by flipping through von Balthasar’s Prayer (sidebar: does anybody know any non-Catholic books on prayer that I would like? Bonus points if the book is Barthian, Anabaptist or Wesleyan). The following quotes are from McCabe’s short essay on prayer in God Matters.

    All prayer is going to have to take its meaning and point from the sacrifice of Christ; we shall simply have to scrap all the metaphors about the allpowerful kindly father up there whom we can sometimes get through to and draw his attention to what we happen to need; we shall really have to get back to the traditional view that all providence is in Christ, that predestination is the predestination of Christ – that no one comes to the Father except through Christ. (217)

    The crucifixion says that the coming of the kingdom is not to be an achievement of Jesus but a gratuitous act of the Father’s love. The kingdom is to come as a gift… Gift is an expression of an exchange of love. To believe in the resurrection, to believe in God, is to believe that the resolution of the tragedy of the human condition comes as gift, as an act of love encompassing mankind. The crucifixion/resurrection is the archetypal exchange of prayer and answer to prayer. (219, emphasis mine)

    God is not first of all our creator or any kind of maker, he is love, and his life is not like the life of the worker or artist but of lovers wasting time with each other uselessly. It is into this worthless activity that we enter in prayer. This, in the end, is what makes sense of it. (225)