Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Dark, stained, broken pieces of glass

Can anything good come from dark, stained, broken pieces of glass?

Of course, we've all seen it happen.

At the Breakforth 2006 conference this past weekend, I encountered a number of stained items — things that really didn't ring quite true, attitudes that seemed not entirely Christlike, methods that seemed to assume too much or ignore the way they could really hurt some people, songs that reflected dreadfull theology, sound mixing that pierced the ears, and so forth.

It struck me in fact that all our methods, all our songs, all our thoughts, all our sermons, all our blogging, all our theologizing, all our leadership techniques, all our attempts at community, all our invitations to see Jesus are like dark, stained, broken pieces of glass, cobbled together.

Yet somehow, when God's Light shines through all that stain, His glory is displayed — magnificently.

This allows me to be much more gracious with my stained brothers and sisters. The stain, which from my perspective seems to just block the transmission, may have an important role to play when God gets finished with all He has planned.

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Can Truth be an Idol?

Alan Hartung thinks so, and makes an interesting case in his post, The Idolatry of Truth.

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Becoming the Change we Seek -- A Different Look at Leadership

A little while ago, I noticed a Len Hjalmarson article entitled Leadership as a contemplative movement, in which he says

The only way forward to a new kind of church is to become people of restfulness and contemplation. So long as we are driven to bring change, driven to be effective, we will only recreate the driven, oppressive, addictive and compulsive systems we have always known.

The greatest hope of influencing change is not our compulsive activity to shape a world different than the one we know, but to become the change we seek. That means becoming still.. risking the quiet and empty spaces... It means facing our own fears that there will be no one to offer approval.. no voice in the silence.. no one to clap us on the backs to say "well done." I doubt if there is any greater challenge for an active people, any greater challenge for those who are passionate to see change, any greater challenge for those called to lead. But the only way we will see lasting change is if we become the answer we seek.

This is by no means the first time I have heard or thought something similar to this. But it seems to be constantly drowned out by the ideas of leadership prevalent in our culture. And particularly by the idea that leadership requires active and well identified leaders. But does it? We are told by Agur in Proverbs 30:27 that "locusts have no king, yet they advance together in ranks". How do locusts maintain such organization without leaders? Where does their leadership come from? Or how about the slime mold, an even more leaderless entity?

What if leadership was a gift given by the Holy Spirit, not so much to individuals, but to communities? Might we not then expect to see this gift played out sometimes in a leaderless fashion, where the leadership seems to come from the community itself? Just because leadership is a spiritual gift and a needed commodity in community life, does that really imply that God must call leaders?

John O'Keefe certainly doesn't think so. In the introductory post to a new blog called quantum servanthood he says:

the idea behind this blog is simple - to teach what it means to be a servant - and not to be a leader. leaders are killing our churches. even if they are paid, or not paid, people who think they are leaders in a community of faith are killing churches. it is my personal conviction that jesus never calls anyone into leadership, but he does call us into servanthood

In some ways, O'Keefe may be echoing Bonhoeffer's Life Together where Bonhoeffer claims that "God hates visionary men". Bonhoeffer's argument is that people who have a vision of what Christian community should be, and attempt bring about that vision, ultimately end up destroying community, as the pursuit of the vision leads them to become the accuser of their brothers who inevitably move too slowly toward the "vision" for the visionary's taste. I have certainly seen this happen — and I have seen myself become just such an accuser.

I think I would differ from O'Keefe a little. I'd agree that Jesus calls us to be servants rather than leaders. But I do not believe that this necessarily means that the servant is never given a leadership assignment by Jesus. The difference, of course, remains that while the servant may be assigned the task of leader, he remains first and foremost a servant — ready and willing to relinquish the leadership task when the assignment is completed. And for such time as her assignment is that of "leader", the dedicated servant will do all she can to do that assignment to the best of her abilities, even adding skills as necessary. But to allow oneself to take on the self-identification of Leader is almost certainly to guarantee failure when the assignment is completed and the time to relinquish leadership comes.

To bring this post full circle, it seems to me that it is far more natural for one who self-identifies as a servant to "become the change one seeks" than it is for a self-identified leader. Let us therefore adopt the posture of servants — of our Lord, Jesus, and of His children — and seek to become the change we seek in our churches and in our world. After all, did not Jesus do it that way himself?

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Monday, January 23, 2006

Making Do with More

Making Do with More is the rather ironic title of a recent Christianity Today article about the different reality faced by today's young North American adults in a world of unprecedented affluence and opportunity.

My generation — the parents of today's young adults — learned a particular set of virtues, as did our parents before us: work hard, make the most of the opportunities presented to you, get ahead and make a better life for your children. We are frustrated when our children don't seem to "get it". But does this schema really make all that much sense when the lives our children have are already so affluent, and when the opportunities available to them are so numerous as to be largely uncountable? Has that affluence really given them a better life? Has our drivenness really given us a better life or made us better people? What if our prized virtues have somehow become vices — really and truly, and not just in the minds of our children?

I wonder if things would be different if our virtue chain had ended in a circle of concern a bit larger than just our children. What if, as the world got smaller through staggering transportation and communication advances, our circle of concern had gotten larger? What if all our hard work and grabbing opportunities had been focused on making a better life not just for our few biological children, but for the many others in the world we could have supported had we so wished?

Perhaps there are virtues both we and our children have yet to learn in order to truly live as Jesus' followers in a time and place of abundance.

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Getting my Liturgy Fix

It's been a while since I've written. The weekend just over a week ago was a very difficult one, with many old issues being brought to the surface yet again.

In midst of trying to deal with them, I recalled that it had been a long time since I'd last participated in a "high liturgy" worship service, and somehow sensed that that might be related to the way I was responding to the things I was facing. So after checking calendars and times, I decided to attend the local Anglican service yesterday morning.

I've found it a little difficult to explain why I seem to need a dose of high liturgy every now and then — many people seem to jump immediately to the idea of style preference, and if I prefer that style then I must not care for "our" style. But it's not really about preference.

Somehow it seems that over time, the collection of things I am involved in — worship services, study, the emerging leaders group, etc. — seem to mold me toward a more individualistic faith. The language and structures seem somehow to be geared toward a "God and me" focus, which ultimately narrows my field of concern, and makes me more anxious that that narrow ecclesial world around me "get things right". That in turns pushes me to focus more on what's wrong, and on who's wrong, ultimately discouraging me from engaging in the sorts of behaviours that would build the sort of community I believe to be vital.

Participation in a time of high liturgy just seems to reconnect me with a much bigger reality — the reality of the one holy catholic church; the whole body of Christ. Finding myself again in that wider context takes off so much of the pressure to "get it right", and I am so much better able to give what I have to give to those around me. That is to say, I'm more able to simply serve in whatever capacity presents itself, rather than feeling that drive and need to "make a difference".

It's surprising how even just one service can make a big difference to the way I relate to the world. And this time around, that change actually started already when I decided that I would go this Sunday, at such and such time, even without being there yet.

Right now I'm thinking that it may be wise for me to schedule some high liturgy into my life on a more regular basis, as a kind of preventive maintenance, rather than waiting until the need becomes obvious.

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Monday, January 09, 2006

How was your Christmas?

"How was your Christmas?" seems to be the standard greeting at this time of year. Mostly I suppose people to be inquiring about the various cultural aspects that have aggregated around this season of the year. Which is a little problematic, because those are precisely the sort of thing that seem to me to make the season more on the burdensome side than on the delightful and wondrous side.

But when I stop to consider this Christmas season (which liturgically starts on December 25, rather than ending on it), there have been some things that have made this Christmas season actually much more like what I understand Christmas to be about theologically than have most.

For starters, one of the problems I usually find about Christmas is that the churches of my experience never really wanted to deal with the direct significance of Jesus' birth — that God Himself took on human form — something that ought to make us stagger. Instead, there was always a great rush to get to Good Friday. Year after year, the most repeated message I would get in church as we approached Christmas was that the birth of Jesus really was nothing of importance at all. Someone (or more usually several someones) would decidedly proclaim from the pulpit (or other official place) that everyone always gets all caught up in the baby at Christmas, and totally forgets that the real gift from God was not the baby but the death on the cross. I always thought this strange, since the other complaint that came even more predicably at Christmas was how everyone always forgot that Jesus had anything to do with Christmas whatsoever.

Even more odd, when we did get to Good Friday, no one really wanted to spend any time then contemplating just what the cross involved in terms of God's taking up of humanity either — instead everyone was now in a rush to get to Easter. In many ways, I think that our churches have taken on a very heavy dose of either gnostic or docetic dualism — we are really big about the divine nature of Jesus, but really quite squeamish about his humanity. We like the idea that Jesus was God, but please let's not talk too much about Jesus being truly — that gets God a little bit too much in our face, perhaps, or too much in the "muck" of life.

This Christmas season, however, I managed to avoid hearing anyone churn out that old saw about Christmas really being about the cross — the first time in many, many years. I heard a wonderful lecture by Mark Strom, read an amazing novel by Anne Rice, and this morning listened to a very passionate lecture by Dr. Cherith Nordling, all of which took the Incarnation far more seriously than I am used to encountering at Christmas, even though Dr. Nordling's topic was more directly on Resurrection than on Christmas. Our ultimate destiny is to be raised with Jesus into the fully redeemed full humanity that is His — and so far only His, as none of us have as yet been truly human as He was even in this broken world.

God the Son was willing to join us fully in our broken humanity — even to carrying the scars of that broken humanity with Him into eternity — so that we might ultimately join Him in a true and whole humanity that truly reflects the image of God.

Yes indeed, it has truly been a good Christmas.

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Sunday, January 08, 2006

Purpose? Or Person?

This morning's sermon was entitled simply, Purpose, and started a series about Life's Missing Ingredients. By implication, "purpose" is one of the things that is missing from the lives of many (most?) people. Supposedly, this is the message of the book of Ecclesiastes. While there was much in the sermon with which I could almost agree, and which seemed to be nearly correct, by the end I was left with a deep sense of something very wrong; that in coming somewhat close at many points the overall point was seriously missed. This post is really me thinking out loud, trying to ascertain just where that troubling sense comes from. No doubt in my attempts to get closer, I too will miss the point in some important way, but perhaps that is the way of all theological reflection.

I took the opportunity this afternoon to look through Ecclesiastes again. In doing so, it seemed to me that the book records the Preacher's attempt to determine just what is one's purpose in this life, particularly in the recognition that many ostensible purposes seem in the end to be simply pointless: vanity and striving after wind. Ultimately, even this passionate pursuit of meaning and purpose is in its own self a vanity — a vexatious and burdensome task — because "man cannot discover the work which has been done under the sun. Even though man should seek laboriously, he will not discover; and though the wise man should say, 'I know,' he cannot discover" (Eccl. 8:17) Indeed, even though God "has made everything appropriate in its time, He has also set eternity in their heart, so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end." (Eccl. 3:11)

The problem, it seems, it not that man's life is missing purpose, but rather that man (particularly when man has an abundance, and the leisure to pursue such thinking) believes that it is in fulfilling some "purpose" he will find satisfaction in his life; yet all such purposes in the end fail to satisfy. Instead, the Preacher says:

I know that there is nothing better from them than to rejoice and to do good in one's lifetime; moreover, that every man who eats and drinks sees good in all his labor — it is the gift of God.

Eccl. 3:12,13

Here is what I have seen to be good and fitting: to eat, to drink and enjoy oneself in all one's labor in which he toils under the sun during the few years of his life which God has given him; for this is his reward. Furthermore, as for every man to whom God has given riches and wealth, He has also empowered him to eat from them and to receive his reward and rejoice in his labor; this is the gift of God. For he will not often consider the years of his life, because God keeps him occupied with the gladness of his heart.

Eccl. 5:18-20

Go then, eat your bread in happiness, and drink your wine with a cheerful heart; for God has already approved your works. Let your clothes be white all the time, and let no oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the woman whom you love all the days of your fleeting life which He has given to you under the sun; for this is your reward in life, and in your toil in which you have labored under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, verily, do it with all your might.

Eccl. 9:7-10a

Early in the sermon, a metaphor of moving dirt from end of the camp to the other was introduced. Apparently, it was a common psychological pressure tactic to have prisoners of war spend many days, weeks, even months, performing some large physical undertaking — such as digging a huge hole at one end of the camp, and transporting the dirt to a huge pile at the other end — only then to have the prisoners set to the huge task of precisely reversing the task they had completed. This drove many prisoners insane, as it had no purpose.

It struck me that this will only drive those mad who believe that it is necessary or important to be able to see the purpose in what one does. The stronger the belief that one's work must have a purpose, and that in that purpose one finds what is important to life, the more devastating will be the discover that one's labor had, in actual fact, no purpose at all. But one who is able to enjoy his life in the midst of his labor, however purposeful or purposeless it may appear, will not suffer such devastation of soul.

Rather than suggesting that we must find fulfillment in the purpose of our work, I find that the Bible generally speaks of finding fulfillment in walking by faith — trusting in God who may or may not choose to reveal to us the purpose or purposes to which He has assigned us. As the Preacher in Ecclesiastes says, God has already given us our life, and to enjoy the life which God has given to us is our reward &mdash or rather, I think, part of our reward.

Augustine, I think, got it right. The unsettled feeling that many of us experience is not, in the final analysis a problem with a lack of purpose, but of seeking ultimate fulfillment in the wrong thing entirely. "Thou has made us for thyself," Augustine said, "and our souls are restless until they find their rest in Thee." John Piper, too, has it correct. In considering the first question in the Westminster shorter catechism, "What is the chief end of man?", Piper answers this way: "The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever." Indeed, Piper says, "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him." Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desire of your heart.

In the end, it is not so much the case that we were made for a purpose, as it is that we were made for a Person. And ultimately our inheritance, our reward, is that Person Himself.

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Saturday, January 07, 2006

Jesus as a child

For Christmas I received a copy of Anne Rice's latest novel, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, and have just finished reading it. It is an imaginative first-person account of Jesus' life at around age 8, beginning in Alexandria and following the family journeys out of Egypt and eventually back to Nazareth, through all the violent turmoil and instability that arose in the aftermath of the death of Herod the Great. Anne Rice is noted for her historical research, making the setting of her novels as accurate as possible. This one is no different. It would be worth reading just to get a better sense of the cultural and geographic setting of New Testament accounts.

More impressive, however, is her imaginative insights into the process of Jesus' developing self-awareness and self-understanding. Just how did the child Jesus grow in "wisdom and stature" and in his own understanding of the mission he had been sent to fulfill? If he was, as the orthodox creeds insist, truly human (as well as truly God), then his understanding must have passed through some normal human development process. Of course, the gospels do not tell us about this process, and so in the end knowing the answer to this question must not be essential to the life of faith — but reflecting upon it certainly can broaden one's conception of what Christ's nature as truly human really was — and by extension, what it may mean for us to be redeemed and transformed into truly human persons.

For this, Anne Rice is to be commended. Read her book — you won't regret it.

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Friday, January 06, 2006

How Amish Evaluate Technology

A post on the resonate.ca blog directed me to this 1999 article in Wired. It's a very interesting piece on how Amish communities evaluate what technologies will be allowed, for what purposes, and which will not. The bishops consider how extended use of the technology will tend to shape the people who use it, and also ask the question "Does it bring us together, or draw us apart?" — a particularly important question for a people that values community highly.

The author found much guidance in his interaction with the Amish on the use of technology to apply in his own thinking — something he had most definitely not expected. His article ends thusly:

I never expected the Amish to provide precise philosophical yardsticks that could guide the use of technological power. What drew me in was their long conversation with their tools. We technology-enmeshed "English" don't have much of this sort of discussion. And yet we'll need many such conversations, because a modern heterogeneous society is going to have different values, different trade-offs, and different discourses. It's time we start talking about the most important influence on our lives today.

I came away from my journey with a question to contribute to these conversations: If we decided that community came first, how would we use our tools differently?

While he was thinking primarily of technology in terms of "things", I suspect we could also apply some of the same observations to our use of technology in terms of "methods". Might we in the church not be much better advised to have the sort of "long conversation" with our methodological tools that the Amish have, than to simply adopt whatever method seems to have "worked" in some other context? How would our decisions around music style, liturgy, program times and methods, staffing, small groups, goals and vision statements, etc. differ if we thought about what sort of people we would tend to become from long term use of these approaches? I wonder.

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Thursday, January 05, 2006

Living with Death, Dying with Life

Living with Death, Dying with Life was the title of a lecture that Mark Strom gave at Regent College this past summer, which I listened to on my Tuesday morning walk. I've transcribed here the final few minutes of his lecture, which moved me considerably:

I want to finish with my own picture of the Jesus that we are speaking about here. Tom Wright in one of his little books has asked the question: “Was Jesus God?” and he says, Well, it depends upon which god you’re talking about. If god is some abstract removed deity who throws rocks, then no, Jesus is not that god. But the question becomes better: “What kind of god is the God who could become Jesus?”

This God could put on eyebrows and kneecaps, tear ducts and saliva glands. This God could be born under the tyrants Augustus and Herod. This God could accept the smells of shepherds and the extravagances of political emissaries. This God could start life a vulnerable hunted child born into scandal. This God could grow up under foreign domination and among terrorists and outcasts.

This God could sit in the street playing marbles. This God could wear with pride the calloused, splintered hands of an honest workman, building the houses and fixing the furniture of half-castes, outcasts, and bigots. This God could ask his cousin to baptize him along with the rest of the crowd.

This God could make the best vintage Pinot Noir or Cabernet Sauvignon even when the guests were too drunk to know the difference. This God could befriend a bloke in a tree with “small man” syndrome. This God could enjoy a prostitute washing his feet, giving her his full and undivided attention, ignoring the eye-rolling of the lawyers and theologians. This God could spend a whole night making a whip to crack over the backs of con artists who rip-off the poor. This God could wrap the greatest truths in the simplest stories and put a sting in the tail of every yarn.

This God could let himself hang on a tree; nails tearing at his sinews; blood, feces and urine running down his legs. This God could invite women to be the first to know that he was back. This God could delay his own glorious home-coming long for a bite of breakfast on the beach and a yarn with an old friend to let him know there were no hard feelings and to pass on his mantle. This God could take his own story and give it the most surprising ending.

This God — this God is worth knowing.

This God could reach into the crevices of my soul to bring to life the longings I smother so pathetically and recklessly with shameful excuses. This God could raise me up to life with him. This God could give me every blessing he could give himself. This God could draw me out of my petty self-interest without the hint of a “tut-tut”, a patronizing frown or a smile.

This God could be more infuriating and fascinating and gob-smacking than any god I could ever make up. This God could love my obsessiveness and overlook my forgetfulness. This God could laugh and cry with me and come play with me. This God could make me his glory. This God could love me. This God could make my heart good. This God could trust me. This God could never be safe, but always be good.

This God — this God is worth knowing. This God I want to know. This God I know in the face and spirit of Jesus. This God I know as I die and rise with Christ.

For more quotes from Mark Strom, along the lines of things he covered earlier in his lecture, check out this post I read yesterday by Len Hjalmarson.

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Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Feed Problems

My apologies to those of you who read my posts via email subscription or feed aggregator — there have been a few difficulties over the past few days.

For some reason or other, the feed totally mangled my Compassion in a Broken World post, as well as my 2005 Book List post (although you probably weren't all that interested in the book list). The email subscription service also seemed to have totally missed my Christ Plays in History post.

If you missed those posts, and want to read them, just follow the links included here. Of course, you can always check out the entire blog at its home location Metamorphic Journey.

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Monday, January 02, 2006

The Christian and Power

On this morning's walk, I listened to Dr. Andrea Sterk talking about the Uses and Abuses of Power in the Christian Roman Empire, in which she examined the way Christians utilized power in the 125 year period beginning with the conversion of Emperor Constantine.

Power, she said, is something of an ambivalent thing — it depends on who uses it and how it is used whether it is good or bad. Indeed it can even be ambivalent in the hands of the same individual, as she provided examples in her talk. The primary example of good use of power involved Basil of Caesarea, who used his influence as bishop to establish something of a combination hospital and Mustard Seed Street Ministry — gaining funding from both civic and imperial government as well as from private interests.

Nevertheless, it seemed to me that her examples followed a downward trajectory as the period wore on. The Christian community never really got over its self-perception as a minority, and a previously persecuted and potentially still persecuted minority at that, even after many years of rule by Christian emperors. Add to that the concern over the dilution and diminution of the faith with the large scale pragmatic conversions to a nominal Christianity, and there soon developed an anxiety toward opposing evil and maintaining a pure and devout faith. Social, civic and even imperial power began to be utilized in dealing with heresy, on an increasingly coercive and violent basis. From there things spread to persecution of pagans and Jews, as well as heretics — often utilizing the same religio-political rhetoric and reasoning as had previously been used by pre-Constantinian rulers to outlaw and persecute Christians. As polarization increased, the voices of moderation and conciliation were also marginalized and squeezed out.

Dr. Sterk drew some parallels to the situation surrounding the last US presidential election, where increasingly religious rhetoric was used to identify one side (or the other) of various political issues as being synonymous with Christian faith. All sides felt marginalized and oppressed; the so-called "religious right" still felt the marginalization from earlier periods, the solidly left feared the increasing power of the right who seemed to be taking over government and particularly the White House, and those in the middle felt shunned and oppressed by the extremes from both sides.

Much of the lecture reminded me of the concern expressed by the Dean of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. at the memorial service held in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 incident, when he prayed that "we not become the evil that we deplore." Insecurity concerning one's place in the world, a conviction that one is morally in the right, and the belief that the fate of civilization is at stake makes the availability of power a very dangerous thing — it is far too easy to take up the weapons of one's adversary and, in the end, simply become him.

In The Lord of the Rings, Galadriel faced this very temptation when Frodo offered to give her the one ring. "Instead of a dark lord, you would set up a queen; beautiful and terrible as the dawn. All shall love me, and despair." regrettably, history reveals that far too many Christians have not passed this test, as Galadriel did — whether faced with power in the political realm, or even just within the church.

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Sunday, January 01, 2006

Christ Plays in History

A short while back I had marked the following passage in my reading of Eugene Peterson's Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, concerning Mark's telling of Jesus' playing in history:

Though St. Mark writes his story under the influence of the greatest of the apostles, Peter, he practically writes Peter out of the story by making clear that Peter is, in actual fact, the lead sinner. The true relation between Jesus and his followers is at stake here. Peter as the lead apostle has the potential for moving into a place of prominence alongside Jesus. By portraying Peter as the lead sinner, Mark makes sure that will not happen. If Peter as leader can be prevented from moving into the limelight with Jesus, it is accomplished for all Christians forever. And that is what Mark does. It may be his finest accomplishment as storywriter — in Peter's presence and under Peter's authority and influence, he keeps Peter from taking over the story. The glorification of Peter is blocked at the source. Whatever stellar qualities Peter acquired through his leadership and preaching in the early church, they are excised from the story; only his weakness and failures are kept. The Jesus story includes a colorful company of others, but none of them is presented in such a way as to obscure or compromise the unique and unprecedented centrality of Jesus. Peter is portrayed as a bungler, as a blasphemer, and as a faithless human being. But not merely Peter, Peter as leader. Nor do the other chosen disciples become examples for us to look up to or follow. Thick-skulled and dull-witted, they turn out to be a pack of cowards. Sir Edwin Hoskyns and Noel Davey remark on the "staggering brutality" with which Mark writes the disciples out of any part of Jesus' work.

St. Mark, in other words, tells this foundational salvation story in such a way as to prevent us from setting apart any of our leaders as spiritually upper-class, to prevent us from putting them on pedestals. This is a salvation story and the Savior is Jesus. Nothing in the storytelling is permitted to divert our attention from Jesus. There is nothing here that will play into our preference for dealing with famous celebrities instead of the despised Jesus. There is nothing glamorous or inspiring about even the best of the leaders: every one, down to the last man and woman, is saved by grace.

Maintaining that simplicity and focus — that salvation is by God's initiative and grace in Jesus — has proved to be one of the most difficult things to maintain in the Christian community. In the course of the generations, Mark's storytelling has not prevented us from developing celebrity cults, elevating Peter and others to prominence, and thereby providing seemingly easier ways of dealing with our souls than dealing with God in Jesus. And it has not prevented us from being diverted by spiritual and religious novelties that promise shortcuts to soul entertainment. But Mark's story continues to provide the honest ground to which we all return from our God-detours and soul-diversions.

As I write this out, I am struck by Eugene's sanguine optimism in his final sentence, that indeed we all return. Truth be told, I often despair that we have made our celebrity cults, our fixation on our work for the Kingdom, our God-detours and soul-diversions, so powerful that return is well nigh impossible. Perhaps indeed this is one of those places where for man it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.

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