Predestined 3: Characters, Plots, and Scripts on the Stage of Life

Like many raised in the church, I grew up thinking that I must discover God's will and plan for my life. God's sovereign will seemed to be very specific, involving very detailed plans of everyday life as well as the large decisions of life. This divine plan had to be sought out daily in prayer, reflected over while pouring over the Holy Scriptures, and always seemed like something that was just out of reach. Does God want me to go to this college or that one? Does God want me to go to college at all? Should I go up to the clerk at the gas station and "tell them about Jesus?" These were the kind of things that consumed me growing up and I find that many Christians are still consumed and anxious about such questions.

Along the way I have given up such a view of God and life. In the previous two posts, I have sought to explain a very different understanding of God's Sovereignty and the idea of predestination. Whereas in the past many have considered finding God's will as a scripted life, I have characterized it as the unscripted life. Rather than some script that one must discover each new page, or some sort of cultural script that defines certain accomplishments, possessions, and circumstances as happiness or success, the Jesus follower must live an unscripted life. In the second post, I described the kind of things that our human will and volition should be pointed towards-- that of stewarding ourselves and the process of continually putting off that which burdens and keeps us from living a full life and opening ourselves to the new things that we encounter while following behind Jesus.

I am continually persuaded that God's will is about character rather than circumstances. Such character involves a death to the old ways of life and putting on the life-giving traits of the Spirit. In my last post, Jason Thomley commented on how this process is described in Jeremiah 1 where God gives Jeremiah the two-pronged vocation of tearing down and planting. In Colossians 3, Paul describes this two phased process (that one could probably break-down into much more detailed steps). First, Paul starts out with the primary goal: Set your mind on things that are above (v. 2)! This is like the two greatest commandments of 1) Love God & 2) Love Neighbor that some of you lifted up in your comments on the last post. But like most of us, we look at Paul and say, "Yes, that's right, seek the things that are above... okay, but how do I do that and what does that look like." The same sort of thing happens when Jesus gives the two greatest commands in Luke 10. A religious scholar sly asks, "You have answered correctly, but who is my neighbor?" Just as Jesus provides the story commonly known as the Good Samaritan, Paul lays out some key ideas of what it means to set one's mind on thing above. In verse 5, he says that we must put to death fornication, impurity, passion, and evil desire, as well as, get rid of anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language. Then in verse 10, he says that we must clothe ourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience while bearing with one another and forgiving one another and having love and thankfulness and peace, and letting the Word of God dwell in you while you sing to God. In verse 18, Paul he gives some practical steps for households. I'm sure if he wasn't working with parchment or papyrus scrolls he might have written more and got more detailed.

What is God's will? I might not be able to give a full answer, but I do know that it starts with character-- with putting to death many things in our lives and clothing ourselves with traits that open up our spirits to Spirit of life.

Faithful Stewards & the Unscripted Life

When we give up the illusion that we can control our lives and destinies, when we forsake the idols of self-worship and being self-made gods, when we depart from the way of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, we have the chance to live by trust on the road of the unscripted life. This is the journey of following Jesus who is out in front of us forging the way to a place we cannot even imagine.

In my last post, several of you asked plenty of questions and made several statements about choices, plans, being responsible, and free-will. In my language, these all revolve around the idea of faithful stewardship. Instead of attempting a "how to get there" kind of life where we use, abuse, manipulate and scheme, the Jesus journey is one where we consider who we are, what we are carrying, and how we journey. First, it it is to be a light journey where we let go of a lot of baggage and burdens. This is a continual process as we are distracted, tempted, and even good-intentioned along the way to pick up plenty of stuff that we eventually find that we must set down. Second, it is journey where certain resources are vital and necessary. How will we use those resources and plan for their best use along the way? Third, along the way we find ourselves encountering all sorts of opportunities... circumstances to use gifts and talents, to love and be loved, to give and to receive. We look and find ourselves in possession of so many different gifts. We encounter persons and circumstances along the way where these gifts can be used. Plans, choices, and free-will were meant to be used in faithful stewardship along this journey.

We Are Moving To Chicago!

I found out this past week that McCormick Theological Seminary will be giving me a $25,000 scholarship each year to attend their school (tuition is $11,000). I will be pursuing a joint MDiv/PhD between McCormick and University of Chicago. Sarah and I will be moving their this summer where she will be looking for a job in Marriage and Family Therapy. McCormick is in Hyde Park surrounded by University of Chicago.

I visited McCormick back in February to interview for the scholarship and had been anxiously (a very big understatement!) waiting to hear if I got the scholarship. This will allow me to truly focus on my studies and really dive into research. My two areas of focus are liturgical studies and Christian ethics/moral theology, especially in the intersection of the two.

I will also be pursuing ordination in the Presbyterian Church (USA). It takes three years to get ordained in this denomination, and the PCUSA has the most difficult ordination requirements of any Protestant denomination in the world. This makes them a very educated crowd. Since I have been working at a PCUSA congregation during the past four years, I have come to have a deep respect for the wide-range of theological perspective, an inclusive set of social ideas from conservative to liberal, and wide-spectrum of worship elements from emergent to traditional to contemporary to Gregorian chants and Taize services. I even like the Book of Order-- the Presbyterian rules for how a congregation and the denomination should function!

I'm very excited to be pursuing ordination. With my attendance at McCormick, I am able to see a glimpse of how my life over the next five years is going to play out. That is very refreshing!

Summoned & Named

Len Sweet wrote a book a few years ago called Summoned to Lead. In it he proposes the idea that leaders are not born nor made but summoned. In my thoughts on vocation, I would like to expand this and say that "we are what we are called to!" Our identies are wrapped up in our calling.

Along with this is the idea of naming. I have been named by God. This name reveals my calling. Just as Jesus was called Christ, Emmanuel, Prince of Peace, Alpha and Omega, etc., we also receive names that reveal our calling.

In addition to this, I am finding that we too have the responsibility of calling and naming. Faith sharing is calling others to the task of bringing the kingdom. Faith sharing is naming the realities and possibilities we see in others.

It is in these two concepts that we find our true selves in the dance of the Trinity. Such a thing occurs in the midst of a faith community that views life through such lenses. Without such lenses, a community inevitably puts on the tinted glasses of another view that will, more often than not, create commodities out of people.

Church & Cosmology 2.1

So I got railroaded a bit in my postings from the book The Church and Contemporary Cosmology, but I am back to the task and ready to post some more. In my last post on the topic, I implied that humanity has a greater responsibility in this technological and global world. We possess the ability to create and destroy-- as we always have-- but now we have the ability to do it on a grand scale. As the author of chapter two, Eric Chaisson, states:

We have become smart enought to reflect back upon the material contents
that gave life to us. Life now contemplates life. It contemplates
matter. It probes our origin and our destiny.

I would argue that not only was this made possible by a global system and technological advances, but that we have a greater responsibility due to the amount of choice that we have. Democracy placed a new stewardship task and vocational duty on humanity-- we must now take responsibility for how we govern. Capitalism also created a new stewardship task and vocational duty-- we must now take responsibility for what we choose, what we buy, where we buy, and how we consume. Corporatism created similar responsibilities-- as shareholders we now must take responsibility for the products we produce, the services we create, and the policies that we enact. Most of these responsibilities have developed slowly over the past 500 years reaching the masses of western society (and increasingly in emerging places) over the past 50 years. Such a world creates new possibilities and challenges.

A new cosmology is emerging and will emerge. As with every new cosmology that comes about (approximately a new type every 500 years), Christianity adapts and even transforms itself to have a prominent voice. In this new age, how will the church address stewardship and vocation? Will it truly ordain all of its adherents as priests in all of the realms of life? Let's hope!

Ritual and The Everyday

We live in a ritualized world. To me that seems very basic; however, I do not think we consider this that often. When I walk into a restaurant, I can generally anticipate what will occur. I can do this because of ritual. My world is thrown out of whack when the ritual is not followed. A good example of this is when you call a business and the receptionist picks up and just says, "Hello." Although such a statement would be normal calling a person, we all know that such a remark in a business call would not work-- not just inappropriate, but actually mess up the normal modes of communications. Ritual. It's the stuff life is made of. Every culture (and subculture) creates its own rituals.

Religion and spirituality is about ritual. These rituals distinguish, separate, create, identify, and even destroy (destruction of former friendships, identities, rituals, etc.). In this way, religion creates the sacred, or more accurately names what is sacred and what is mundane or ordinary or profane. Over the past 500 years, much of what western religion deems sacred revolves around what I call moralisms. In other eras (and in other cultures here in the present), religion often revolved around other aspects of life (such as food, crops, government, military, etc.).

What I find most interesting is that in my current privatised, individualised western culture religion and its ritulas can often be relegated to just a section of life rather than a holistic system of everyday existence. In our dualist culture, singing "religious" songs is considered holy or sacred whereas dining together is considered common/mundane. Baptism is considered a spiritual act but a drink with a friend at a coffee shop or pub is considered ordinary, even profane. However, if all of life is a set of rituals perhaps all of life can be sacred. Mowing the lawn might possibly be a "spiritual act" if the proper rituals are assigned to it by a community/culture.

How do we make the ordinary sacred? The usual answers will not suffice: praying over a meal does not make it sacred for the meal itself should be sacred itself-- at least in my opinion. The prayer is another ritual that occurs in the midst of the ritual of the meal. I think that something else must distinguish a sacred meal from a profane meal (probably much more than just one thing). What are these things?

Vocational Discernment Dinners

I am working with the families in my ministry to explore vocation and identity. Tonight, I went over to a family's house for dinner and then we sat in their living room as I laid out the theological foundation for our conversation and then we proceeded to talk about our lives. I listened as parents described their hopes, dreams, and disappointments of life and listened as their kids described their visions and fears regarding the future. We explored identity, life, and vocation through a theological framework that challenged the individualism and consumerism of our day while affirming the tradition and robust theological thought of past and present. I will post more about this framework in a few days.

Notes on Vocational Theology

What is theology? How do we recove a truly biblical basis for the theological enterprise, especially in the world? The idea of clergy and laity is a negative theological dichotomy. In Scripture, the term clergy (kleros) is used of the whole people of God. "A theology of the whole people of God must encompass not only the life of God's people gathered, the ekklesia, but he church dispersed in the world, the diaspora, in marketplace, government, professional offices, schools and homes" (page 8, The Other Six Days by R. Paul Stevens). A true ecclesiology will "encompass earhly realities and expounds the menial, the trivial, and the necessary: washing, cleaning, maintaining the fabric fo this world, play, games, art, leisure, vocation, work, ministry, mission and grappling with the principalities and powers. It must help us understand and experience sexuality, family and friendship. It must show us the place of sabbath and sleep" (page 8).

Francis of Assisi: "Humankind has as much knowledge as it has executed." Theology must also be emotional. Indigenous people must practice theology on the go, in lived reality, in the "fresh dirt" of our worldly existence. Although these theologies run the risk of being incomplete, inadequate, and even heretical, they are the best way of doing theology. It is hermeneutics at its best.

Bottom-up theology, on-the-spur-of-the-moment theology, is the theology of the people and as such represents true discourse and study of God, for the discovery of God takes place in his creation, the world, rather than in the classroom of concrete and stone and abstract thinking created by humans as found in the university. This is not to demean the theological journey of the academy, for it is necessary to find an orderly way of creating the bounds of theology. However, this is always the secondary step.

The primary arena of ministry and theology is not the in-house service of the church, rather it is the marketplace-- the place where goods, services, and information are exchanged. How can the church equip people for full-time ministry in the world? Why do we not ordain and commission "the laity" in their daily lives?

The Reformation failed in reforming ecclesiology. Instead, it was much more concerned with soteriology. The priesthood of all believers was interpreted according to its effect on individual salvation. As such, the structures of Protestatism borrowed its models from Rome and the growing world of the middle-class business. Because of this, we have never learned how to do wide-spread theological education in the congregation-- true theology that is lived in the marketplace. One must conclude from the way churches do not engage the people in their daily work that the church has no interest in this and that faith is a privatised sacred system that takes place in a walled building with religious symbols.

The concept of the individual Christian is a false one. No such concept exists in Scripture. In the Bible, the smallest component of the church is the church. The ministry of the church is mutual, to one another.