MBCC Blog

Wednesday Word: God

¹⁹ "Sir," the woman said, "I can see that you are a prophet.  ²⁰ Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem."
    ²¹ "Woman," Jesus replied, "believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. - John 4:19-21

This is the story of The Woman at the Well, a well known scripture passage that is usually focused on some of the cultural/social norms of the day that Jesus breaks.  And while a fine way to look at this passage, at a continuing education event this week, our resource person, Sean McMillan, challenged us to see another aspect of the passage.

Jesus was telling the woman that her God was too small.  God was no longer tied to a mountain or a city, but that God is Spirit and larger than she had ever imagined.  AND if she were to believe in a larger God, she could believe in a life that was larger and an understanding of the world that was larger than anything she had ever known before.

Sean got me thinking about the ways that we limit our lives by how we limit God.  For if we are truly able to trust in the amazing power of God, shouldn't we really believe that all things are possible or at least that mos things are?  I think so. 

Small God, small life, small faith. 
Infinite God, inifinite life, infinite faith.

So I wonder how I live, how our church will live, how we show out faith in the world.  Yes, hope can be simply wishes built upon our own fears, but hope grounded in a belief in the power of God lived out through God's community, now that is powerful faith.

What do you think about God?

The Wednesday Word is a weekly check-in and reflection from that fellow, Bruce Reyes-Chow, that they say is the pastor at Mission Bay Community Church.  The passage is chosen from the Lectionary readings for the day.  The image each week is taken at random and is meant to be as humbling as publicly appropriate for a man of such authority ;-)

I could use some grace today

I take the idea of grace very literally. And we could all use a little grace around here.

Several years ago, I went with my dance company to spend the day training on the trapeze. The trapeze school was hidden in the Sonoma hills. The wooded site, with gentle folk milling around and hand-lettered signs tacked to trees, had the aura of a hippie fair crossed with a circus encampment.

I was looking forward to the trapeze lesson. In elementary school, I ruled on the playground bars. I could even do the cherry-drop, a maneuver the teachers outlawed after a girl broke her arm attempting it. However, I hadn’t remembered that this trapeze would be six or seven times taller than playground equipment.

The ladder that led to the trapeze platform was about a thousand feet high -- or maybe 50, I couldn’t tell. When I climbed up to the little platform at the top of the ladder, it seemed to creak in the breeze. The instructor helped me hook into a harness, and then demonstrated how to get swinging. Basically, I was to reach out over the now-blurry ground, and when the instructor shouted, “Hup,” catch the bar that was swinging toward me. I was to swing my legs over the bar, and then curl into a ball as I somersaulted into the net below, where I would probably land on my back. “Easy,” the instructor said.

Since the trapeze was built for a taller person, I would have to take a little leap in order to catch the trapeze bar. I’m not usually scared of heights, but the ends of my fingers and toes were tingling. I couldn’t feel my feet.  I was a little dizzy. “Hup,” shouted the instructor. I couldn’t force my arms to move to catch the bar. The instructor re-set the bar and shouted “Hup,” again. My arms moved in slow motion, and I was still too slow to catch it the second, third, and fourth times. Finally, on the fifth “Hup”, I wrenched my hands up, stepped forward and grabbed the bar.

At that moment, the heaviness and tingles disappeared. As I swung, the treetops near the trapeze came into view. I felt a lightness that echoed the momentum of the swing. As I had been instructed, I folded my legs over the bar, let go with my hands, and swung upside down for a few swings. It was a delightful feeling. As the momentum slowed, I disengaged my legs, and -- miraculously -- I rotated in a leisurely back layout flip and landed on my feet. Surprised, I quickly sat down in the net.

I like to think of that moment of physical “grace,” as a very small illustration of God’s more figurative gift of grace. It was totally unexpected and undeserved, and it was in the middle of an unfamiliar, uncomfortable, scary situation where I really had no clue what I was doing. It was just a little gift of coordination that gave me the courage to go through the rest of the trapeze lesson, which continued to be much harder than I had expected it to be.

On a larger scale, when I look at the seemingly intractable problems we face – the war, pollution, political corruption, poverty, family conflicts, traffic jams, (and the rest, large and small, that we can all name) – it seems that we could collectively use some moments of grace to give us some hope that things could be better, and a little courage to make it so.

Look at me being all topical ...

Or rather, the NYTimes being all topical, with this story about the Hispanic experience of coming to the United States and at the same time, going to church less.  The whole article is pretty good, and reflects many of the same themes that we discussed as a church this morning.

This quote struck me as the most interesting part of the story:

"As a child in Guatemala, Mr. Chilín attended Mass every Sunday. But after immigrating to the United States 25 years ago, he and his family lost the churchgoing habit. “We pray to God when we feel the need to,” he said, “but when we come here to America we don’t feel the need.”"

Without getting too in depth on the state of American culture, it is telling that in our affluent and materialistic society, we often don't feel the need to depend on God, and therefore easily lose touch with religion.  We might also want to look at this as an answer to Bruce's question, "why do you go to church?"  Personally, I identified with parts of Jeff, Katherine and Robin's answers to that question.  Like Jeff, I started going to church because my significant other had such a positive experience there, and I was intrigued.  Like Katherine's experience of being accepted for her artistic nature, part of what kept me going to our church back in Chicago was all the great music, which allowed me to relate to people on a level that I already appreciated and somewhat understood.

Finally, and most relevant here, like Robin mentioned, one big reason I go to church now is so that I don't forget the place that God has in my life.  It is all too easy to live out most of my week while blissfully ignoring God.  In part, that is cultural, because it's not always comfortable to talk about church.  In part, that's my own sinful nature, because doing what God wants me to do is often hard, and doing what I want to do is usually pretty easy.  Often, I "don't feel the need." 

Not that I think "feeling the need" is the solution.  Going to church or praying because we "feel the need" is not a whole lot more rightous than just going out of habit or a sense of duty.  Going to church each week is not supposed to be about making myself happy or satisfying some desire for spirituality that have (though it usually does that too).  That's just a selfish reason, disguised in religious language.  Ideally, I would go to church each week as an expression of my relationship with God and with the Church, which is all of you folks.  That's the goal for me at least.  Good thing we have grace. :)

Unconditional Forgiveness?

I’ve been reflecting and thinking a lot about what Bruce had to say on Sunday and I wanted to raise a question or thought around this idea of forgiveness, especially unconditional forgiveness. In this season on Lent I’ve been contemplating a lot about the saving work of Jesus Christ and what it means to me and how I understand what happened in the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus both in the context of society and personally.

In light of that, I’ve just recently finished a book called Proverbs of Ashes  that shook me to the core. It is about what we as the church may be telling people about how to live out their lives. The book focuses on how the use of the Christian theory of atonement can perpetuate the cycle of violence in relationships. The classic view of atonement is critiqued by these two women’s experience with violence and abuse. So my question is, does the idea of “unconditional forgiveness” tell people (especially women) to forgive without change in action (by the other) to stay in an abusive relationships?

Do we get too caught up in trying to tell people that God wants to have a relationship with them "how they are now" that it leads us to do damage? I believe that we have to be extremely careful when we talk about unconditional forgiveness especially when we are doing it within the Christian framework. I appreciated Bruce talking about how forgiveness is reconciling relationships and I agree that Sin should be talked about in terms of broken relationships not moral miss-steps or laundry lists of bad deeds. I agree that we should do our best to reconcile relationships with one another regardless of the horrific atrocities that we can impose on one another as human beings. But how do you tell someone who is being dominated by another human being that forgiveness should be unconditional? 

How does “unconditional forgiveness” display itself in scripture? Is Jesus unconditional in his forgiveness? Is God? Looking first back through scripture I’ve come to understand that God acts in covenants with humanity, the covenant with Noah, with Moses, and even Jesus talks about the “new covenant.” If God is a covenantal God does that make God conditional instead of unconditional? Covenant means a solemn contract, oath, or bond. So what does it mean for us to understand God as having conditional oaths with Israel in the times of the Hebrew Scriptures? And how does that affect our view to offer unconditional forgiveness? What might be our role in a two-sided covenantal agreement?

I agree with Bruce who used some great passages (Matthew 26: 14-30, 47-55, 69-75) to talk about denial and forgiveness from Christ. Based on what I read in the Gospel accounts I think that Christ shows us someone who acts with unconditional forgiveness. He is someone who is more interested in the healing and creating right relationships than swearing them to uphold an oath (or even doctrine?). 

But this all brings me back around to Rebecca Parker and Rita Brock in Proverbs of Ashes and their experience that being told to forgive unconditionally just drives people to stay in abusive relationships. How can we talk about this Christian unconditional forgiveness without telling people to stay in abusive broken relationships?

Religious Icons

While in the Los Angeles area this past weekend for a gigantic dorkfest moot court competition, I had the chance to visit The Getty Museum.  I hadn't researched the museum or its current exhibits, so I had the surprise of seeing a fascinating exhibit entitled "Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai."

The exhibit (see here for more info) focuses on a large collection of religious icons and other artifacts from the Monastery of St. Catherine, apparently the oldest continuously operating Christian monastery in the world.  St. Catherine's is situated at the base of Mount Sinai, near the burning bush where God spoke to Moses.  Mount Sinai is also where Moses received the Ten Commandments.  Today, the Monastery is part of the Eastern Orthodox Church.  Amazingly, the Monastery lent many precious icons to the Getty museum and allowed them to be transported halfway around the world to be exhibited.

Icons (paintings of saints or other Christian figures) are used in Orthodox practice in order to help provide a connection to the divine.  The idea is to confront the viewer with a reflection or image of holiness, and the icons are used both in private prayer and in corporate worship.  The internal-church battle during the 8th and 9th centuries over the use of icons gave us the term Iconoclasts, "a term that has come to be applied figuratively to any person who breaks or disdains established dogmata or conventions."   St. Catherine's icons were spared during this period because of its remote location within the Byzantine Empire.  Protestants in general don't appear to have a clear stand on icons (Calvin was against them, Luther was for them, as long as Christians "did not worship them in the place of God," according to wikipedia.)

Several things struck me about the exhibit.  First, the images were very powerful and moving.  Part of that was, I think, my knowledge that I was looking at some really old stuff that has been used by Christians in worship for almost 1,500 years in some cases.  Looking at these icons allowed me to participate in the same experience as many early Christians, which was almost surreal.

Another amazing aspect was the amount of people at the exhibit.  Near the end, there was a short film that was being shown, explaining the history of the monastery and the icons.  I found it very strange that what was really going on in this secular museum was a bit of worship.  If many of the visitors had heard of a similar exhibit at their local church, I wonder how many would have attended?  The two classmates I was with almost certainly would not have been there.  But, because of the context, the people visiting the exhibit got to experience something profound about the Christian experience.

Finally, I wonder about the word "iconoclast" and what meaning it has for us today.  In many ways, MBCC is part of an "iconoclastic" movement to break away from some dogma of the larger church (or at least that is my sense, Bruce can feel free to correct me :).  But in other ways, we are of course trying to maintain traditions and practices that are important to worship.  Seeing this exhibit made me realize that there is a whole aspect of worship that I hadn't really been acquainted with, since it is not part of western Christianity.  So, if there is a point to this paragraph, it is only that we should be careful of what we get rid of in the name of progress.

Faith, Science and the Wind of God

Since I am pretty busy with school at the moment, I have been a slacker member of the MBCC blog.  However, I am also highly motivated by guilt (which is the main reason I am so busy at school at the moment . . long story) so in response to Bruce's prodding, here is an interesting thought I came across.  The quote below comes from Gregg Easterbrook, known as the "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" on ESPN.com's "Page Two" site.  For those unfamiliar with "TMQ," it is a must read article for thinking football fans.  Easterbrook is not your typical football columnist; he is also an editor of The Atlantic Monthly and a fellow at The Brookings Institution.   

"A Cosmic Thought: Cosmologists believe the Big Bang happened about 14 billion years ago, matter and energy filling the void in a process of unfathomable majesty, all the matter and energy of 100 billion galaxies coming from – well, we'll get back to you on that. For the first few hundred million years, it is thought, the firmament was dark: Matter was scattered and nebulae or stars had not yet formed, so there was no source of light. This assumption makes eerie the 3,000-year-old description, from Genesis, of the condition just after the creation: All "was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters." Cosmologists believe that initially almost all the matter in the universe was hydrogen – the main ingredient in water – and that it was moving outward from the point of the Big Bang at fantastic velocity, as if propelled by supernatural wind. At any rate, last month the Spitzer Space Telescope, which orbits the Earth and looks toward the deep cosmos on infrared wavelengths, photographed what might be the first stars ever to form. They appear to have been gigantic suns 1,000 times the mass of our Sol, and to have provided the first light that shown upon creation. That their light can still be seen from the edge of the observable universe is eerie, too."  (see the full article here). 

This section of Easterbrook's article captures something that I have always thought to be quite apparent, but that is often glossed over in mainstream news coverage: science and religion are often not in conflict.  Yet, it is easy to stereotype the rational, agnostic scientist and the irrational, faithful believer and set them hopelessly at odds with one another.  I like how Easterbrook suggests that God  does more than just fill in the "gaps" in current scientific knowledge (the "we'll get back to you on that" as to where the Big Bang came from in the first place).  Instead, he highlights how religious understanding and scientific understanding are interpreting the same world, but with different perspectives and language. 

To me, the poetic language from Genesis quoted above imparts something magical and true about the beginning of the universe that would be lost if told from a purely scientific or secular point of view.