Another step in the journey

Today marked the first day of my second trimester at Iliff School of Theology. I am beyond excited for my classes this semester and still reeling from everything I learned last semester. So what does this next step look like? For the next 10 weeks, I will be exploring the Hebrew Bible, Ancient and Emerging Practices in Christianity, Nurturing Communities of Resistance, and the Spiritual Foundations of Fundraising. Some of the congregation members at Lakeside and various family and friends have asked about what I’m learning/exploring so I plan to chronicle some of the journey here. I’m adding a blog post on Tuesdays and Fridays to my school to-do list so check back frequently.

After completing my first week of readings and activities, highlights and burning questions include:

Christianity was/is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow… or is it?

I am LOVING my reading so far in Ancient and Emerging Practices. Did you know that in the early church, folks coming to the Christian faith from pagan cultures (non-Jewish) would spend 2 years in preparation for baptism? What’s the deal, were they just slow learners? NO! The Christian community and way of life was so drastically different than the status quo that they needed time to imagine and plan for how they would adjust their lives to contribute and be a part of this radical community of love and relationship. They would learn the teachings of this new community rather quickly but it would take time to adjust their lifestyles. For instance, the early church taught and expected members to commit to faithfulness to their spouse. That must have been a shock to people who were used to visiting prostitutes to offer praise and make requests of the various fertility gods. The church also taught that babies who are unwanted should not be placed in the public area to die or be used by others for whatever purpose they desired. This ran completely counter to the way life was.

What would a significant time of preparation look like today? Would people separate themselves from consumerism and the quest for more? Would people honor the sanctity of every human life and rid their houses and their lives of sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, ableism, etc. like the early church had to rid their houses and lives of other gods?

Nurturing Communities of Resistance

So far we’ve been introduced to the work of Myles Horton, poetry and art as a form of resistance, and the formation of intentional communities to combat intimate partner violence. I can’t wait to learn more. Some nuggets to munch on…

“One of the major contradictions in political mobilization is that we often replicate the same hierarchical systems we claim to be dismantling” from The Revolution Starts at Home. How true of the church today?

And the following resistance in the form of spoken word rocked my world. You can find the full text here if you can’t hear Andrea.

The Stories we tell ourselves and where they come from

Although the protestant Christian Old Testament contains the same books/scrolls (a rabbit hole to explore another time) as the Tanak (Hebrew bible), the order of the books are different. This different ordering may seem like a small detail but has ramifications for the narratives we tell ourselves. For example, the Tanak considers Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel and 1 & 2 Kings part of the Nevi’im (prophets) while in the Old Testament they are considered historical books. How does our interpretation of the narrative change when they are considered prophetic rather than historical? More importantly, the Tanak closes with 2nd Chronicles which is a retelling of Kings, namely with King Solomon ruling over the united kingdom of Israel. This retelling might have offered the Israelites comfort and hope as they rebuilt the 2nd temple and came back together as a community after exile in Babylon (Chronicles is thought to have been written in 5th-2nd century BCE). That narrative is different than ending the Old Testament with Micah, which presents a wayward people waiting for the child from Bethlehem to emerge as a new ruler. How can such different narratives emerge from the exact same content by simply moving the books around?
*keep in mind retelling stories to make sense of current events has a long history in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Think of Jesus saying, “you have heard it said…” There were four gospels written/compiled at various times for different audiences/events. The Torah (the first 5 books of the bible) is thought to be a compilation of at least 4 different sources, 3 of which were tellings or retellings of the beginning of the world and God’s people. So there is nothing inherently “wrong” with changing the order of the books. I just find if fascinating that it completely shifts the narrative.

The Lie of Scarcity

Finally we just started to scratch the surface of reclaiming the vision of abundance found throughout the Judeo-Christian tradition. We read an  amazing article by Walter Brueggemann (you can read the full text here) that challenged us to embrace the biblical view of abundance instead of the consumeristis/capitalistic/empire version of scarcity.

“But Jesus presents an entirely different kind of economy, one infused with the mystery of abundance and a cruciform kind of generosity. Five thousand are fed and twelve baskets of food are left over—one for every tribe If bread is broken and shared, there is enough for all of Israel. Jesus transforms the economy by blessing it and breaking it beyond self-interest. From broken Friday bread comes Sunday abundance. In this and in the following account of a miraculous feeding in Mark, people do not grasp, hoard, resent, or act selfishly; they watch as the juices of heaven multiply the bread of earth. Jesus reaffirms Genesis 1. When people forget that Jesus is the bread of the world, they start eating junk food—the food of the Pharisees and of Herod, the bread of moralism and of power. Too often the church forgets the true bread and is tempted by the junk food. Our faith is not just about spiritual matters; it is about the transformation of the world. The closer we stay to Jesus, the more we will bring a new economy of abundance to the world. The disciples often don’t get what Jesus is about because they keep trying to fit him into old patterns—and to do so is to make him innocuous, irrelevant, and boring.”

… in short, generosity begets generosity, 1+1 somehow =5 when we share and give ourselves away.

Henri Nouwen goes on to say, helping people grasp concepts of stewardship, which includes literally helping them to separate themselves from their money and their stuff, is an “act of worship” as “spiritual as giving a sermon, entering a time of prayer, visiting the sick or feeding the hungry!” What do you think?