Birds without Wings

So I was sitting on my front porch the other day, attempting to gain some level of perspective I guess, and I kept thinking about the human condition. When I say the human condition, and due to my personal experiences and my theological foundation, I mean the state of humanity as sinful people. But also the idea that humans rarely act in the ways in which they speak. Words like intention, will, and flawed came to mind. Then I began thinking about that passage in which St. Paul talks about how the things he wants to do he doesn't do and the things he doesn't want to do he then does. A very simple and yet profoundly accurate statement, given my past and the decisions I make on a day to day basis. But why is that? Why is it that my intentions, which I believe are good and often part of the vision God has given to me, hardly ever meet with real action? You can give me all your doctrinal explanations, give me five point Calvinism and the state of the morally depraved man, but in the end my question and my struggle cannot be met by systematic theology. It cannot simply be described, probed and prodded, and then thought to be understood completely. I agree with a lot of the answers, though in many different ways, and yet I am still not satisfied with them. They don't speak to me as a human, they speak to me as textbook answers and thus they can't relate to me on some level. These articulations have been composed by humans, by sinful humans and yet they don't speak to me as such. It's a textbook answer to a stories old question.

 I've been sifting through N.T. Wright's The New Testament and the People of God, and I think that what has impressed upon me the most is the question of story. How do humans use epistemology (knowledge)? Wright's argument is that we understand things through stories. Stories shape our worldviews and help us take in information and process it. When counter-stories come up and interact with our current stories, we have choices to make. We can modify it to "fit" into our story, we can full out reject it and argue against it based on the strengths of our own stories, or it can totally subvert the story we have been telling ourselves. I think this is how Jesus comes at his audience (in the text and in us). He subverts our stories, telling us new ones that offer a new worldview and a new hope. The incarnation is so relevant here. Jesus, God in the flesh, doesn't throw textbook answers or remedies or systematic theology at us and say "It is finished"! No, instead he begins to challenge us, calls into question our strategies for living, and basically gives us another story to live under.

As I read and pray over the text now, I am realizing how much more this 'story' impacts me more than anything else. I don't need information, a new set of rules to follow. I need a good story, and it has to be so good that my worldview begins to change. No, I don't act completely out of this worldview yet, but the more I engage it, the more it gets into places I am uncomfortable with, the more I begin to see that my intentions are actually being acted out. I think this begins to happen when it no longer appears external to us. Instead, I am invited into this story and for it to shape my whole worldview. Humans act out of their worldview, stated and unstated. I think the move of the gospel is to go from the stated worldview to the unstated. In psychological terms, it is a move from the conscious to the unconscious.

David Gray wrote this song called 'Birds without Wings' circa 1993. It is such a great song, and I think it concerns this idea of the stated worldview, what I believe is our goals and intentions, in other words our "ideals". For many and myself, we hardly ever move from ideal to action, from hope to faith. Here are the lyrics:

Wishing that something would happen
A change in this place,
'cos I'm tearing off the fancy wrapping
Find an empty package

Take for a while
Your trumpet from your lip
Loosen your hold, loosen your grip
On your old ways
That have fallen out of step
In a changing time
Hoist a new flag
Hoist a new flag

Angry sun burn down
Judging us all
Guilty of neglect and disrespect
And thinking small

And death by boredom
And death by greed
If we can't stop taking
More than we need

But across the fractured landscape
I find the same things
Tired ideas
Birds without wings

Birds without wings
Birds without wings

And these are just thoughts
On lack-luster times
I've no interest
In excuses you can find

Like you've had a hard day
Now you've too tired to care
Now you're too tired to care
You've had a hard day

Well across the fractured landscape
I see the same things
Tired ideas broken values
Many with the notion
That to share is to lose
A hollow people bound by a lack
Of imagination and too much looking back Without the courage
To give a new thing a chance
Grounded by this ignorance

(and the cat comes)
We're just,

Birds without wings
Birds without wings
Birds without wings

I had a lover, its so hard to risk another

Have you ever broken up with anyone and felt that sense that you maybe made a mistake or that you were really risking something by moving on from them for someone else? Well, today I made that jump. I got online and ended my subscription to Netflix and have chosen to go with Blockbuster. I’m so attracted to being able to have movies shipped to me and yet still have the ability to go to an actual store and pick up a movie at random.

This is not to say that I have not appreciated you Netflix. You have been a constant friend and have showed me so much over the past couple of months. Who knows, I may humbly come back to your doorstep, ask forgiveness and tell you how much I missed you. I hope you will not be too upset with my decision. This is just what works for me now. And know this, it is not you, it’s me. I just can’t do this right now.

Take care

Love

- Pilgrim

Warning: Ramblings Ahead…

For those of you who frequent this blog, you will realize that there has been hightened activity as far as posting. This is due to the fact that I have had four consecutive days off from work, and I am finally getting to catch up on some writing that I have been meaning to do for some time. As much as I have wanted to articulate some thoughts and reflections on things I have been reading or thinking about, here is some random nonsense.

My artist plug of the month: Sufjan Stevens. He is attempting to make an album for every state in the Union. Crazy, but I can't wait to hear what he has got to say about Oklahoma.

Michigan                            Illinois         

                                                                                                                          

               

And in other news, my friend Kim and I are heading to SEATTLE on July 1st and will stay til the 5th!

 I'm going to be looking at a couple of schools during my time there. I have been wanting to make this trip for some time, to visit Pike Place Market, to walk around and see where the grunge movement started, and to attempt to go to as many Starbucks as possible.

I have a lot planned for this summer, a lot of weddings, a lot reading, travelling, and a trip with Rivendell to New Orleans to help out with rebuilding the city.

What do you have planned for this summer?

Exclusion and Embrace, Part Two: Distance and Belonging

If you recall from part one, part of embracing the other is simply recognizing them as "other". As Volf puts it, we "welcome" them, prior to any judgment about them except in asserting their humanity. Volf moves into his first chapter by demonstrating that we are to follow the call of Abraham, the great biblical figure who departed from his homeland to follow his call from God, with the only assurance being that God would provide. Volf uses this story as a metaphor for the call on the Christian life and the Christian community. Volf states that our current identity is flawed from our perspective, that often we do not recognize ourselves as above all, Christian. "Still today, many black Baptists or Methodists feel closer to black Muslims than to their white fellow Christians" (pg. 36). There are of course historical reasons for this, but nonetheless there is no deep "fellowship" of those who claim Christianity. Moreover, our cultural identities define us more than our Christian ones, we fight more for causes based more on our cultural commitments than anything else. The church has become complicit to its surrounding culture. The implication of all this is that we have lost our "saltiness". We are no longer the salt and light for the world. Thus far, this is not really any news but serves instead as a context for Volf's next argument.

Volf believes that to better form our identities as Christians, we must follow Abraham and depart from our homeland. The apostle Paul recognized Abraham's faithful act because in the end, he found the only hope possible, in the presence of God. For us, our calling is this: "the ultimate allegiance of those whose father is Abraham can be only to the God of "all the families of the earth" not to any particular country, culture, or family with their local deities" (pg. 39). Implicit in this departing is risk, cutting off the ties that profoundly define us. In our culture, we must become strangers, or aliens to our homeland (39). Moreover, an implicit change occurs, and the "response to (the) call from that God entails a rearrangement of a whole network of allegiances" (p. 40). And yet, God does not call us to leave our cultures in a spatial sense, this would be an abandonment of our humanity, and our failure to recognize our relationship with others as well. And this is where Volf gets really interesting, as he comes up with the phrase of being distant while at the same time belonging. The "belonging" is best seen through the eyes of the Apostle Paul, whose worldview drastically changes after his encounter with the risen Christ. Paul is not in complete contrast to Abraham, for in some sense he leaves behind, departs, from his "strategy for living" as Dallas Willard so aptly calls it. And yet, Paul is bound and yet free to proclaim this new truth of Jesus' lordship and resurrection to Jew and Gentile alike. Volf explores Paul's thinking as he moved from the genealogical and cultural particularity of his understanding of Judaism to the "bodies united by the Spirit"- stating that,"The Pauline move is not from particularity of the body to the universality of the spirit, but from separated bodies to the community of interrelated bodies-the one body in the Spirit with many discrete members."(pg.48) 

Human differences are not erased only to provide one category for their understanding. Instead, our variegated selves are bound to the particularity of the risen Messiah, Jesus Christ. What the Spirit does erase is our socially constructed differences and social roles (48). And therefore, "departure is no longer a spatial category; it can take place within the cultural space one inhabits." (49) One foot is firmly planted in the soil of the surrounding culture while the other is planted in a response to the Gospel. As Steve has said it before, it is like having one nostril to the stench in your life while the other is to the aroma of Christ.

Here is my question:

Are we (as a church) frequently aware of what we hold as our cultural commitments? Are we willing to recognize these things or claim ignorance so that we don't have to act accordingly to the call of the gospel?

Is Jesus your political Lord and Savior?

On Saturday I attended a lecture at Trinity Episcopal Church where Marcus Borg spoke on the topic of justice. It was titled "Seeing God's Passion for Justice (Again)".  At the outset, Borg stated that before we can even talk about how we can bring about justice locally, nationally, and globally, we must first make sure we have a reliable, workable definition of what justice even means. Borg argues that the American term for justice is "people getting what they deserve". In the bible, however, the concern is about distribution, not retribution. Biblically, this vision emphasizes economic distribution.

Borg's second point was that we must understand what the world of the bible was set in. His basic term for interpreting this context is ancient domination systems, characterized by (1) the rule by the few, (2) economic exploitation-slavery, indentured servanthood, clientage (3) and finally, the legitimation by religion- the religious structures affirmed and supported the hierarchical and political systems.

The third point Borg made was that we must learn again how political the bible was and is. Emphasizing the Exodus, Amos, Jesus, Paul, and Revelation, Borg stated that as he began to recognize this message in the scriptures, and as he began to engage this, he experienced a political conversion. What I appreciated about this part of Borg's presentation was that he didn't stress the political message so much as to exclude its deeply spiritual message as well.

Borg's conclusion sought to convey how economic distribution is the pervasive message throughout the biblical text. What it doesn't mean is that everyone gets exactly the same distribution, because that is not really injustice. What is injustice is that people don't have what they need or what is necessary for their livelihood. Justice is about people having "enough", according to Borg. Offering insight into our present situation, Borg gave examples of injustice in the United States by explaining the low median average income for families and how horribly deficient our public school systems are. But what does this mean for us? Borg believes that we must take politics seriously- at every level. And, we must delineate between charity and justice. Charity can be best understood as our personal decisions to help others. Justice is marked as a "changing of the systems".

Borg left his audience with two questions:

(1) Is Jesus your personal Lord and Savior? Not in the evangelical sense, but in the affirmation that Christ has lordship over your life.  

(2) Is Jesus your political Lord and Savior? Does the life and mission of Jesus, including his message on injustice, mark your life and claim lordship over your political actions.  

*That in a nutshell was Borg's presentation. Borg enjoyed saying that he likes to reconstruct rather than deconstruct but in the end I wondered if his message would have had more thrust if it sought out to portray the injustice that is in the church itself and the failure of us to name injustice in America. Why not just name some major injustices that occur right now in the United States? For as controversial as Borg is to some, I feel that he really played it safe in regards to his topic. Maybe I was expecting to be offended, maybe that is what I wanted. I think that is why so many of the prophets were offensive to Israel. They "named the elephant", they exposed the problems that no one wanted to talk about because it would be convicting and would thus force change. I don't know about you, but sometimes I needed to be offended by my own injustice, about how lazy and selfish I am when it comes to my finances and my "self-donation" for others for the sake of justice. 

God, give me a passion for your justice in this world…