Speak

Chair in Empty Room © Arnold Kastenbaum

To speak a word into space -- into blank page or open airwave -- is as terrible as it is awesome.

It's made me wonder if God didn't feel butterflies before he spoke a Word into the void. If the adrenaline and vulnerability of that pregnant moment didn't give him pause. If he didn't close his eyes and breath deep once before speaking the world into being.

It was December the last time I hit publish on something original for this blog. Everything since then was recycled -- thoughts from old papers or my thesis. Half-hacked drafts sit back in the files here and there, but nothing found its way outside a Google server.

The longer the space the more terrible that moment of speech becomes. But troublesome as a void may be to the 'pen,' it's harder still to speak into a world chock full of contentious words. Of course, some say it wasn't a void God spoke into at all. It was Chaos. And through the Word, Chaos was brought to order.

I respect him all the more for it.

But what of the times when speech must be made in places sodden with pain, when every word feels hollow and far too weak to heal? Most treacherous of all, where can we find courage to speak when the roar about us finds agreement in lies or evil? How do we tear free from silence to speak truth to power?

Still, I can remember when my Lord did all these things. And so, for all the possible stumbling blocks and pitfalls, we must speak.

The Christian tells a different story. Like the one we follow, we're those who speak and act to bring an alternate sort of sense to things.

For me, that vocation has grown into a craving to write. Now that all the required lines of school are behind me, the desire to put words together on my own terms lives on. The time feels ripe to turn my itch into a habit -- a discipline. I think I still need to learn how to write, and it's as good a moment as any for that lesson to begin.

That will take a couple forms which will become more clear over time. But, for the present, a few things are plain.

First, I plan to structure writing into every week. That won't necessarily mean that a post gets made every week, but I will consistently work on writing.

The second piece is a change in format. This site will be replaced by a slicker platform. I've secured www.forshalom.com and will be working to make it live over the next month.

Finally, nothing much is accomplished or stuck to without a good BHAG (a Big Hairy Audacious Goal). Mine is to have a book published by the time I'm 30.

The proposals start today.

We'll see where it all goes. For now, I just feel good breaking the silence.

Complexity and Love

Cellular Complexity - J. David Sweatt

I wrote this as a journal reflection last Tuesday after my final Ministry Among the Marginalized class. That was the last Urban Mission course I'll attend in my grad school career. Pretty bittersweet!

As tonight’s discussion drew our course to its close, we reflected on standing in the tensions. How does this rising generation of urban ministers reconcile our deep dissatisfaction with the structures we are inheriting to the call of grassroots neighbor loving? Where can macrostructures be transformed by local relationships? What steps can we take to move our theories down from 30,000 feet into practical, actionable initiatives in neighborhoods filled with real, complicated human beings? How do we lead others both to the mountaintop for a better view and into the streets for palpable change? How do white males like myself do these things in solidarity or allow others to lead?

These questions mark our age. They represent some of the key tasks for Christians seeking God’s shalom into the coming decades, and they must be answered in recognition of the pivotal moment in history at which we live: stagnation and gridlock in national politics, financial instability and soaring inequality, compounding traumas among the alienated poor, a globalized market system that increasingly shifts power to a shrinking elite, structuralized ethnocentrism, worldwide ecological degradation, increasingly isolated individuals lost in a technological milieu and fractured from genuine community.

Today’s problems are increasingly complex and increasingly interrelated. However, they find their nexus in every neighbor and neighborhood. As we come to see each person, family and community as a system nested in systems that are nested in yet larger systems, we can better grasp the global while discovering hope in the local. An ongoing dialectic exists between the micro and the macro that allows influence to spread virally from any point in the vast network of relations that form our society. God has created a world where a remnant can indeed be magnificently powerful. The Church has an opportunity to re-story our world, to change the destructive narratives that shape the systems while simultaneously transforming the systems that keep us stuck in the same old narratives. Shalom, relationship, abundant life, these stories of the Kingdom are the ones we all yearn to hear and to experience. Space exists for them in the vacuousness of current public debate. The time is ripe for change if we will just keep asking the questions, opening dialogue with unexpected tablemates, and exploring new (and old) ways to be humans together on the earth.

Our approach to leadership in the midst of such complexity, possibility and fragility demands empathy, clarity and sensitivity. 

With empathy, we come to see all as enslaved to the principalities and powers, whether oppressed or oppressor. We seek out the story of the other for how it has shaped them toward their actions today. And we remember that we, alongside all others, must equally fall at the foot of the cross, that it is only by grace that we can take the bread and the wine and that it will likewise only be by grace that transformation ever finally comes.

Clarity can only come as we continue to examine the multivalent contexts that shape our reality and which gave birth to the marginalized in our midst. The time for relearning, for re-examining, and for reflection is never finished for the wise leader. We must be people of praxis, continually moving back and forth being action and contemplation, between engagement with the world and dialogue around what we encounter.

Finally, leadership today requires utmost sensitivity. This is first toward ourselves, recognizing our gifts and calling, embracing who God made us and finding our role within the Body while remembering that a person made of only thumbs won’t last long. Our sensitivity is secondly toward the other, recognizing when a strong prophetic word is needed to shake the culture's stronghold versus those moments when pastoral comfort most appropriate. Once again, we must stand in the tension, remembering that no single disposition is sufficient. Too often we make a false dichotomy of our options. Leadership toward shalom is not a matter of being right pastorally or being right prophetically. Shalom is a far richer end than mere correctness. It is also joy and delight, friendship and freedom. As my professor reminded us, people are far more apt to be transformed by the light we radiate than our condescending values.

If God can be called a leader, then leadership, in the final analysis, is a matter of love. And only by our love--the love stories we tell, the love systems we cultivate, the love neighborhoods we build--will the marginalized cease their misery, the apathetic cease their callousness, the oppressors cease their injustice. Only through this Christ-like love can all finally become one.

Friday Reflection - Hope. Faith. Love.

There is something about hope. It is a catalyst that breaths potential, vision and energy back into the withered. When a group of people, charged with the electricity of a common hope, are brought together, sparks fly between them and radiate out to others. Hope allows the dead to experience life, the grieving to find comfort, the disinherited to restake their claim, and the wounded to become the healers. 

There is just something about hope. It never leaves you as you were. It is transformative. Circumstances may not have changed in the moment between hopelessness and hope, but as a soul experiences its renewing breath, fresh eyes are gained to see the circumstances no longer for what they are but for what they could be. And thus hope begets hope. As the potential of the present is comprehended, as shalom is pictured where corruption reigns, movement happens. One simply cannot remain the same--inactive and unengaged--when such beauty lies within the realm of possibility. 

Hope, therefore, is synergistic. Particularly so when shared by a community. 

Hope would not need to exist if what we hope for were already present. Hope, then, is a matter of faith. It is confidence that what has not yet appeared can indeed be realized. The bible is filled with these moments of confident longing--the faith that God will act to bring about a future preferential to the present. In God’s economy, though it may not happen today, slavery is always merely the precursor to liberation. Wandering in wilderness is sure to be followed by being brought to a land of fruit and honey. God’s silence will someday be shot through once more by his Word.

However, there are always those who do not see the need for faith. To them, the world works as it is. It either benefits them to such a degree that they would never wish to see it change, or they lack the hopeful imagination to see it any other way. For hope and faith to take root, some jarring event or dissonance generating experience must rock them out of complacency. In Praying the Psalms, Walter Brueggemann calls these folks the “securely oriented.” 

To some degree, we are all to in agreement with the way things are. We all need our world flipped over to see right-side up in the the upside-down Kingdom of God. This boat rocking is what Brueggemann refers to as “being painfully disoriented.” But just when the pain of that experience seems most unbearable we miraculously find ourselves “surprisingly reoriented” not only by the experience of hope, but by the very action of God.

This cycle is fundamental to the human experience and foundational in the biblical narrative’s vision of life:

“We could summarize the overall structure and shape of this biblical vision in terms of the narrative dynamic of creation/fall/redemption….We can see in the overall shape of the narrative a pattern of being rooted/uprooted/replanted, or of being place/displace/re-placed, or of a garden/wilderness/gardened city. The biblical telling of things contains a profound memory of home, the painful experience of homelessness, and the ineluctable longing for homecoming. In short, the biblical story we have traced tells the tale of home/homelessness/homecoming.” (Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement)

Hope is grounded on faith, but the greatest of these is love. 

Without love our hope crumbles into fear and our faith devolves into fatalism. 

If love is not the core attribute of our future, then there is no one worthy of our faith and nothing worth hoping for. How radically spectacular then, that our God is love! It is the beautiful, redeeming love of the Trinity that guides all our stories back to being re-placed and replanted, to the gardened city, to a homecoming.

Discipleship: A Model for People of Shalom

What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus? And what is the stuff of that discipleship? What type of identity does a disciple have? What do they do? What is their life like? What are their goals?

I am grateful for a story that led me into wrestling matches with these questions at a fairly early point in my life. My answers have probably changed a good deal--more out of expansion than replacement--over the past five years or so, and I hope that continues. Writing is always a strange experience, because muddy thoughts caught up in paradox and uncertainty magically become solid when ideas hit a page. Once those written words are "published," they are transformed into the writer's opinion. That's a scary proposition, because I will probably disagree with most of what I have written on this blog in a few years. And I know many readers will definitely disagree, and transfer their disagreement with magically institutionalized ideas into disagreement with me. That's scary, but it is the inherent and necessary risk of authorship. 

Well, I'm going to launch into a long series based on the theme of discipleship and my current thoughts on that topic. In that process, I'm going to traverse across all kinds of themes of theology, human nature, and approaches to the transformation of society. I am going to offer my perspective on the questions posed above, and I am going to do it with the help of a simple picture I drew. For better or worse, that picture is of a very solid looking temple. This was the image that popped in my mind and helped me organize and integrate my thinking. However, it gives off a much more established ethos than I would ever claim. [for example: Since I drew the picture a month ago, I already regret using the word "Proclamation" on the banner. I wish it were "friendship" or dialogue. Probably the first of many...] 

This is going to be work in progress, and hopefully a journey embarked in conversation with you and others. 

So, with those many qualifiers, I hope you enjoy the posts that spin out of this little picture over the coming months. May they bless, encourage and inspire you as you follow the Man from Galilee. And where they lead you astray, set it aside or let me know so that we can both draw closer to him who is making all things new. 

Shalom, 
Nathan

The Wanderer

I loved the painting Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog since the first time I saw it in an undergrad English Lit book. 

Some might see him as a triumphalist, Master and Commander of all that lies before him, embodiment of the "white man's burden," the consummate colonialist ever claiming ownership of that which was never his. 

Perhaps.

That's just not how I see it.

From my point of view, that is me standing there on that rock. It is any one of us, and, in a way, it is all of us. 

In my mind, the Wanderer is a pilgrim. An explorer aimed at discovery whose motivation is the journey and the experience and the encounter with things unseen, not the conquering of those things. 

The next set of destinations are clear. They rise up out of the mist beckoning him onward. But though the goal may appear obvious, the way there is shrouded in mystery and uncertainty. Risk and danger are inevitable. 

Because the Wanderer is foregrounded in the painting, he seems to loom large over the valley. But any hiker knows that is never one's own experience in such landscapes. When vast trackless expanses envelop you on all sides, your smallness is never more poignant. It is deeply humbling. However, once your desire to control your surroundings is overcome, a sense of self rightly conceived, of finding one's proper place within the world, can settle in.

This, to me, is what life is like. It is a journey full of missions that seem impossible and unplannable. Every next step is fraught with uncertainty, but that upon arrival shape us and draw us into discoveries that open our heart afresh to God and our fellow humans. 

One of those gracious discoveries is that there are others journeying through the fog. We are not alone on this path. Friends and family wait to embrace us and walk by our side if we will but begin. 

When I look at this painting I am reminded of the Israelites when it finally came time for them to enter the Promised Land. 

They stood on the banks of the Jordan and gazed across at that far shore, but in between the river raged at full flood tide. 

The way across was unclear. They could not even see where to place their first step.

But they were told to go.

And so they stepped out in faith, and it was not until they stepped into the roaring waters that the waves parted and a path was made.

Practicing the Way of Jesus

I have been very positively influenced over the past few years by the whimsical approach to follow Jesus expressed and embodied by Mark Scandrette. This afternoon I had a conversation with a local artist and coffee shop owner who wants to shape an experimental space in his shop for exploring creative Christian spirituality and discipleship, so I told him about Mark. This led me over to Mark's website where I read this description of Christian belief and practice. They get to the core of our journey of faith and obedience after the Savior in a special way, so thought I would share them for your encouragement and reflection. 

Our Creator is caring and present. 

There is a new way to be human.   

The life and teachings of Jesus are a reliable guide to transformation and greater wholeness-- for ourselves and our world.  

We engage these realities through embodied practices. Jesus said, “Anyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is wise.” (Matthew 7:24) Thus we seek a balance between right belief and right practice (orthopraxy) in order to close the gap between what we say we believe and value and how we actually live.  

We see ourselves as part of the continuing story of the Judeo-Christian scriptures, the ancient creeds and the breadth of historic church traditions. We want the the Gospel to transform every aspect of our lives.  

As a network we are shaped by our commitment to seven vows rooted in the gospels: 

To Creator, Obedience

To Creation, Service

To each other, Community

        In all things love, In all things love

With possessions, simplicity

For life, prayer

In our world, creativity

       In all things love, In all things love

Peace and blessings friends.

reflections on MLK Day

Today, in the memory of Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy of work on behalf of the forgotten, the minimized, and the marginalized, take a little time to reflect on his message and on the state of your community, our nation and world. What can we celebrate? What bright shoots of beloved community have appeared around you? Where has hope taken hold and love led to justice? Where is the hard work of reconciliation ongoing? And where does evil still lurk or pose uninhibited? Where does division and violence plague our streets and families? How do we remain alienated from one another and who is being oppressed? In what ways must you take on the role of prophet and speak truth to power on behalf of those who are voiceless? Who can you empower to raise their own voice? How do these prophetic words critique your own life? Do you need to sacrifice something, to redistribute your own unequal stash of power?

The following are some of my favorite MLK quotes, a few of which you probably haven't heard before. Read them slowly. Don't assume that they confirm what you already think. Let them challenge you in a new way as they are doing for me as I am typing them out. And, finally, open yourself to the incredible love that King announced, the love of God that fills you up until you can't help but spill it out all over your neighbor...

"Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority....In spite of this prevailing tendency to conform, we as Christians have a mandate to be nonconformists. The Apostle Paul, who knew the inner realities of the Christian faith, counseled, "Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind." We are called to be people of conviction, not conformity; of moral nobility, no social respectability. We are commanded to live differently and according to a higher loyalty." * 

"But the real reason that we must use our resources to outlaw poverty goes beyond material concerns to the quality of our mind and spirit. Deeply woven into the fiber of our religious tradition is the conviction that men are made in the image of God and that they are of infinite metaphysical value. If we accept this as a profound moral fact, we cannot be content to see men hungry, to see them victimized with ill health, when we have the means to help them. In the final analysis, the rich must not ignore the poor because both rich and poor are tied together. They entered the same mysterious gateway of human birth, into the same adventure of mortal life." ** 

"In a real sense, all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be." *

"We must avoid extreme optimism--the notion that we have come a long way and have nothing to do but await the inevitable. We must also avoid extreme pessimism--the notion that we have come nowhere and can do nothing to alter our lives. We must say realistically that we have come a long way, but still have a long way to go. We must realize that change does not roll in on wheels of inevitability, but comes through struggle." ***

"What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. There is nothing essentially wrong with power. The problem is that in America power is unequally distributed." ** 

"The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state and never its tool. if the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority." *

"We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity.... We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. This may well be mankind's last chance to choose between chaos and community." **

"Above all, we must be reminded anew that God is at work in his universe. He is not outside the world looking on with a sort of cold indifference. Here on all the roads of life, he is striving in our striving. Like an ever-loving Father, he is working through history for the salvation of his children. As we struggle to defeat the forces of evil, the God of the universe struggles with us. Evil dies on the seashore, not merely because of man's endless struggle against it, but because of God's power to defeat it." *

*Strength to Love
**Where Do We Go From Here?
***first address as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, Holt Street Baptist Church, Dec 5, 1955