matrix theology

I simply haven’t had the time to post to this blog in the past year or so.

We’ve made the decision to consolidate the blogs down to just the one main blog -

http://pastorerik.hbc-nh.org

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Preaching is what happens when I faithfully explain the text of Scripture and the text of life, when the world of the Bible and the world of the listeners collide in Christ. So my task is to find those things that will help me see Christ in the world and see my world in the Bible.

– John Ortberg

This past Sunday, Nichole led our worship gathering, and it was something special. She is not a “rock star” – her heart beats for healing and encouragement, so her music is often mellow and reflective. But there is no doubt that she was in tune with what the Spirit wanted to say to us.

My favorite song was “Porcelain Heart”, a song Nic learned when we were going through some troubled time. She really pours herself into the song, and the richness of her voice blends with the tenderness of her heart and supernatural things happen. One of the amazing lines is:

You know; you pray

This can’t be the way

You cry; You say

Some thing’s gotta change

And mend this porcelain heart

Please mend this porcelain heart of mine

Creator, mend this heart

During the service, I shared my heart on the matter of relevance to our world. We, the church, often use words without thinking about their meaning. Relevant is one of those words. To most church leaders, relevant means “cool” or “trendy.” It is one of the catchwords of the contemporary movement. But what does it really mean?

The real definition of relevant is this – effectively and clearly speaking truth into a culture. Relevance is NOT being cool or using the latest techniques. It is being effective and clear. It is NOT measured by quantitative results but by clarity of speech and ministry.

The church is called to be salt and light to the world – but salt without flavor is just white dirt, and light has to be turned on something in order for it to accomplish anything. The church needs to speak truth into the lives of people around us. We have to be relevant to our culture.

So, now to the topic of preaching. We often confuse the idea of preaching with motivational speaking, theological lecture and/or some form of twisted religious entertainment. We talk about “good preaching” and the definition is often bizarre.

John Piper, who has spent a great deal of time studying the work of Jonathan Edwards had this to say about what “good preaching” is.

• Preaching Stirs Up Holy Affections – Good preaching aims at stirring up holy affections. These include a hatred towards sin and a delight in God, as well as a growing desire for holiness, tenderness and compassion.
• Preaching Enlightens The Mind – Sound preaching enlightens the mind and burns the heart. According to Edwards a preacher must shine and burn. There must be heat in the heart and light in the mind. Affections that do not arise from an enlightened mind are not holy affections but instead are simply emotional responses. (We would do well to head this insightful thought in light of the trends of emotional manipulation in our day).
• Preaching is Saturated With Scripture – Edwards held the firm conviction that good preaching is saturated with Scripture. Every sermon must steadily, constantly and frequently quote the Word of God. This truth will ensure that we stay on track as faithful ministers of the Word.
• Preaching Employs Analogies and Images – Abstract truth must be fleshed out. Edwards argued that vivid images touch the heart more than anything else. Piper informs us that Edwards strained at making heaven look irresistibly beautiful and the torments of hell look intolerably horrible.
• Preaching Uses Threats and Warnings – In our day of politically correct language and blind tolerance, Edwards argues for threat and warning since it restrains one from sin and excites one to spiritual exercise. (A true preacher today may not necessarily be a popular preacher.)
• Preaching Pleads for a Response – Sound preaching seeks a response. Edwards, like Spurgeon after him, pointed out: “Sinners… should be earnestly invited to come and accept the Savior, and yield their hearts unto him, with all the winning, encouraging arguments for them… that the Gospel affords.”
• Preaching Probes the Workings of the Heart – Piper points out that powerful preaching is like surgery. “Under the anointing of the Holy Spirit, it locates, lances, and removes the infection of sin.” He shows that Edwards probed his own heart and therefore knew the heart of others. Sorting out the wheat from the chaff in his own church gave Edwards great insightfulness into the heart of man.
• Preaching Yields to the Holy Spirit – Since all preaching is totally dependent on the work of the Holy Spirit, prayer is an essential for good preaching.
• Preaching is From a Tender and Broken Heart – Good preaching flows from a spirit of brokenness and tenderness. Edwards pointed out that the eye of blessing is upon the meek and trembling (Is. 66:2).
• Preaching is Intense- The reality of heaven and hell ignites renewal and infuses the pulpit with power. The preacher is conscious of his responsibility as he declares eternal truths.

(Summarized by Steve Cornell)

These guidelines are applicable, especially in light of being relevant in our ministry. Relevance is not necessarily the same as popularity. Sometimes the most relevant thing we can do is be counter-culture, to stand for something that is not popular, is not politically correct, is not “appropriate.”

Many preachers wonder why they are ineffective in their ministry. They follow all the right formulas and guidelines; they execute the task flawlessly; but people do not respond, lives are not changed. The reason is simple – they are no longer relevance. The entire function of the preacher is to be relevant – to be the bridge between God’s truth and man’s life.

In their book 7 Practices of Effective Ministry, Andy Stanley and the North Point leadership team make it clear that in any ministry you have to “clarify the win.” What is the win in preaching? It is changed lives. People should be learning how to love Jesus, hate sin and trust the Bible. The truth of God’s Word should be spoken in a clear, effective way and understood in the same fashion. All the technique and technology mean nothing if people’s lives are not being changed.

One last thing – preaching is NOT entertainment. It is not about PLEASING people’s expectations of what a sermon is or feeling satisfied that you “have it down.” Preaching is about changing lives; worship is about changing lives.

Recently, I had an epiphany. Everything about the Christian mission is about Jesus (profound, I know). In specific, it is about encountering Jesus. When a believer encounters Jesus, it is called worship. When an unbeliever encounters Jesus, it is called evangelism. So preaching, singing, teaching – all of these things are hinged on the idea of conveying the living JESUS of the Bible to people in their temporal culture and language.

“Some of Christianity’s most prominent voices play major keys…Others claim that if you come to church, you will find everything to your liking, from the cookies and coffee to the pop music and practical, uplifting messages.  Rather than speak in these major keys, this book introduces you to a minor key…”  (One Step Closer, Christian Scharen, p 11)

Some Music Theory
Western music is fascinating.  We have a set pattern of twelve tonal values which every instrument we play is anchored to.  These tones can be arranged in a number of different scales of eight notes, separated by either half-steps or full-steps.  Then we give names to each of these scales.

Most of our music is written in major scales.  These are scales that resolve.  The progressions through these scales produce full, finished sounds.  They are comforting.

Then there are the minors.  We have several minor scales, and they do not resolve.  They feel unfinished; they feel incomplete.  They beg the question – what comes next?

There are actually more minor scales and intervals than there are major ones, but in our modern world the majors became more desirable.  They gave the illusion that the composed pieces of music had a definite beginning and ending, and they had easily distinguished steps in between.

A Faith Composition
In the modern world, faith took on a major key.  The faithful wanted a set of beliefs that contained answers.  We wanted to know that things resolved, that there were bounds that defined everything – the universe, faith, even (if we’re honest) God.

The Bible became a source for evidences and proofs, a static codex of facts from which we could derive steps, patterns, systems and principles.  It was essentially the backdrop for faith rather than the embodiment of faith itself.  It contained stories that illustrated how to live; it taught truths that you had to adopt in order to have a “victorious” life.

Faith in a minor key
Now, it seems we are returning to the minor modes again.  Our simplistic, reduced ways of thinking in the modern world did not answer the questions of life.  In fact, it seemed to produce more questions and complicate things.  We are discovering that faith cannot be reduced to steps and alliterations.

Instead, we are letting things hang, unresolved.  The minor notes are ringing over their major cousins, and the journey is extending beyond our patterns and systems.

There are a few advantages of a minor key.  For one thing, it is much more flexible than a major key.  Majors have definite structures, and violating them requires…well, it requires moving into a minor.  As a result, there is little variation in a major key.  But a minor key can wander just about anywhere.

This is the kind of spiritual journey that this new faith is.  It wanders; faith becomes a journey, an adventure without predictability.  We do not know where it is going to end, or where tomorrow will bring us.  The minor key is more real, more tangible.  It feels more like life than the major mode did.

But for those of us raised in the major mode, the shift into the minor is difficult even though we are drawn by it.  We know that this unresolved kind of faith will leave us wondering; it will turn things on their heads.  It will destabilize so much of what we have been sitting on because minors keep moving.

We aren’t locked down and mortared into place with modern thinking.  We aren’t bound by the strictures of the major mode.  Instead, we are free radicals moving in clouds of probabilities.  The minor mode is freeing; and that freedom is frightening.

Can God REALLY work in the minor mode?  If we abandon the institutions of the major scales, won’t we fall into heresy?

I sure hope so…

I have climbed highest mountain
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you
Only to be with you

I have run
I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
These city walls
Only to be with you

But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for
But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for

 

It happened slowly – a revolution that took place at glacial speeds and with the same kind of momentum. A glacial ice sheet is so massive, so powerful that it changes the world by its existence. It is completely irresistable, but its power is almost entirely invisible.

In the atria of houses, in the courtyards of temples and the porches of schools – this unseen revolution was borne by simple people without agendas. There was no grand strategy or plan, no vision or organization.

The soldiers of this revolution were not armed with swords or spears or arrows. Instead, they carried love in its purest form as their only weapon – to protect themselves and others. Nothing but love. Love you; love others; love God.

They gathered, found acceptance and peace among others who shared their hopes and dreams. They celebrated Jesus in one another; they learned life and love from each other and shared it with people outside their gatherings.

These little communities of revolution were thriving, exciting and dynamic. The people came together over a mutual insanity – an amazing life they called anastasis, “resurrection”, and this amazing person who was/was not in their midst that they called christos and meschach - the anointed one, the chosen one.

He had been broken for them – his body shattered, his blood spent. He had given himself into the hands of death to “save” them; and his followers, this organism of many parts called ekklesia, or gathering, experienced not his death but his life in their lives.

They called this experience koinonia – the sharing, or the commonness. They lived Jesus, and in living as he had, they knew that he lived on. As they got further from the time of his life, they could not say with certainty that he had been raised from the dead. The only evidence they had that he still lived was that they lived, and they loved as he did.

They were risk takers and trend setters who changed their worlds by working together. They were unusual, unprecedented and yet they were madly successful. Thousands of little communities popped up all over the Mediterranean world. They were in every city and port, every town and village. People started putting their neighbors first, starting changing their priorities and altering their little pieces of the world. The church – it very slowly and steadily influenced communities and imperceptibly made the world a better place. Just as Jesus lived in obscurity and labored in the unknown, so too the church was an unseen force without advertisements or billboards or armies or political campaigns. It had no trappings of religion, just life and Jesus.

What is called church today is a faint, whispy shadow of these ancient Jesus people. If the church is meant to reflect Jesus, the reflection is fogged and murky. Over the centuries, politicians and demagogues and philosophers have tainted Jesus’ reflection with their organizations and doctrinal statements and theologies. They have tried to reduce the living One who is and was and is to come (Rev 1:8) to some kind of way of thinking, some kind of logical being. REDUCE Jesus to anything and he becomes just one of us.

Crusaders hacked Muslims to death; Inquisitions sentenced Jews to gruesome deaths. Church leaders crowned emperors; reformers massacred their opposition. Christians enslaved “pagans”, slaughtered the heathen. The church became an agent – not of love – but of hate. Jesus became a symbol of death and intolerance instead of shared dreams and hopes.

And it is in this shadow, and not the shadow of those ancient, beautiful Jesus people, that we live. Christianity, in all its varied colors and shapes, still lives as the bastard child of the medieval church and not those people who lived Jesus. Our vocabulary, our theology – we are tainted because when we take the name, we take the history.

This is a call for a radical change, not a little surface alteration. We must see our history for what it is. We do not need to reject all of it, as cults and Puritans might tell us. Even this most corrupted form of Jesus’ body has produced some most beautiful echoes of Jesus. We need to simply accept this history, this Christianity, and know that it is there.

Centuries of debris litter our “Christian” thinking. It is filled with castoff pieces of cultures and worlds that we have journeyed through. We cannot confuse this flotsam with Jesus. That mistake is what has made the church so useless.

Do I consider myself a Christian? This is a question I have really, honestly been struggling with lately. When I hear that word, sometimes it gives me the creeps. To me, Christians are introverted and, well, weird. They are consumed with their religion, to the point of selling it to friends and neighbors with sometimes attractive literature but usually tackyness and insincerity. They express love to people outside the church for the purpose of converting them and not for the purposes of love itself.

They walk around judging people for their hair or their clothes or their station in life. They set lines and boundaries for acceptability and they withhold true love from those who do not meet these standards.

So, if you mean by the word Christian, someone who is like that? No, I am not a Christian. I want nothing to do with that.

But if you mean someone who believes you can live in anastasis, that there is a living Jesus who was/is/will be in our midst, loving through us and being loved through us? If you mean someone who sees righteousness as relating to God rather than following the hop-scotch steps to heaven?

Then yes, I am. That is what I want to pursue in my own imperfect, tainted way.

I was sitting in Barnes and Nobles this afternoon, putting some stuff together for a book we’re trying to write, and trying to explain some of the subtleties of wicca (I have had enough exposure to it to get the general idea), and I had a sort of ephipany.

There I was, surrounded by walls, shelves, and books.  Straight lines EVERYWHERE.  This is the mark of our modern, rational world.  We love symmetry and order.  We like systems and plans that always fit together, always please the eye.

Wicca has a tremendous attractiveness to it because it is an escape from this modern systemism (I think that’s not a word).  In many ways, wicca revolves around the idea of finding harmony with the universe.  They bill themselves as an ancient religion (which isn’t technically true), because they see their faith as a return to some kind of lost oneness with nature.

At first, this sounds very un-Christian (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing), but in reality it is at the heart of everything Christians say they believe.  Think about it for a minute.  What is the purpose of Genesis 1-3?  It is to show how we fell out of step with the rest of creation.  It explains why humans seem to screw things up when they do stuff.

At the very core of our most sacred story is the disruption of the natural order of things – we call it sin.  Look at how the ancient Poet put it:

Paul put it this way: “Creation was involuntarily enslaved to futility…the entire creation groans and labors in labor, even now.”  [Romans 8:19, 22]

No matter how you put it, we were meant to exist as PART of creation and things got messed up.  The result is the chaos and disorder we see around us.  It is entropy; it is sin.

So, the purpose of true religion isn’t just individual salvation but the salvation of the earth, the universe – creation.  And we are the agents of that salvation by seeking and finding our places in the harmony of things.

See, the straight lines and the obsession with straight lines and proper geometry, etc – is about controlling nature, bending it to our will.  We try to make little gods of ourselves by altering creation; but we are NOT gods, we are people and we fit into this world. 

We  are creation, not creator.

We are the age of the disenfranchised.  We have everything, so we have nothing.  We have no needs, so we are consumed by our wants.  We can choose any path, so we choose none.  We have every possible resource, so we take advantage of none of them.  Ours are the generations that have everything, but we possess little.

We are the book of Ecclesiastes.  We have known every pleasure, every entertainment, every possible source of happiness – and we find it all wanting.  The generations before us accuse of being wasteful, but we simply do not see the need to continue to expend energy trying to derive pleasure from empty shadows.  We are maniacally depressed because we are faced with a world that holds no challenges.

Distance
My grandfather took weeks to cross the Atlantic so he could be involved in Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa in 1942.  My friends and cousins were dispatched to Iraq and were there in hours.  They didn’t even need to wash up when they arrived.

I have another friend who helps people translate the Bible.  In the course of a year, he will be in at least five or six countries – separated by thousands of miles, and he travels there quicker than anything you’ve ever seen.

Determination
Out of this chaos, this constant lifestyle, many of us are beginning to refuse to tolerate the world as is.  Rather than letting our world make us, we are determining to change our world.  We are brash, unexpected and somtimes down right rude.  We are frustrated, complex and often come off as angry.  We are determined not to be forced into a mold of someone else’s making.

This expresses itself in many ways – we are often the most cliquish but there are a significant number of us who refuse to be pinned down.  We often are forced to live in the shadows of greatness but we are going to emerge from the shadows and loom large over those who came before us.

Politics
My American Generation X would have been the largest generation in the history of our nation, if our parents had not aborted our brothers and sisters.  We would have been the greatest generation if there had been any great accomplishments left for us to achieve.  We will still usher in the age of America’s greatness, because we are now old enough to hold office and make policy.

It probably frightens the establishment to see some of us coming.  There’s a majority of our generation, as in generations before, who are sheep.  But there are many more of us who are not going to be led to slaughter.  We refuse to be cornered as Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative.  We know what is right, and we speak our minds.

Barriers
Ours is the generation that says “To hell with culture!” and throws the boundaries away.  Some of us are standing up and screaming at the rest of us because we see them being manipulated by advertisement and propaganda.  Our generation is a generation that is filled with latent activism, and watch out of it is released.

We are the generation who is going to eradicate bigotry and learn that there is only one race.  We are the generation who will acknowledge that we are all the inferior race.

Our parents look at us and say we have no boundaries, no rules.  We look at them and ask how long they’ve been tied to the chair of ridiculous restriction.  We choose to re-invent ourselves, not simply follow the dictates of culture.

Religion
We are bringing a revolution to the churches because some of us refuse to be tied down and entangled in out-dated rhetoric and used up methodologies.  Church is morphing into real life, and the distinction between sacred and secular is disappearing as we embrace truth whereever we find it.

The church that is emerging is re-invented, not simply reformed.  We are learning that the Jesus-life is the only answer to the emptiness that fills the world our parents gave us.  We are learning that when you live like Jesus, you unleash love, joy and peace on a world that has none little of them.

We are discovering that Jesus did not wear a suit to church, that the religious minority is wrong about him.  We are gettig to know him for the first time.

The Tension
Of course, this brings us into conflict with the generations before us.  They fear that we will bring anarchy, sometimes because they have never known true freedom.  They fear that we reject absolute truth, when in reality, we are recklessly pursuing it.  They fear that we will give people license to become libertine – taking whatever they want, whenever they wnt; but all we really want is the liberty to let truth, morality and faith to stand on their own without the props and restrictions.

It is easy to accuse us of being many things right now because our full potential isn’t released yet.  We are still young – we range from forty to fourteen.  But we are coming.  You’ve been warned.

A lot of people think they have never seen God in action.  He is an idea to be regarded occasionally at best, but for the most part he is to be ignored or relegated to the pile of things we should probably think about one day when we have the time and nothing more important is on television.

My simplest joys are a little bizarre.  I love to walk in the rain.  There’s something about the water falling from the sky – like a million fresh kisses of life.  It covers you, gets into everything and you’re transformed.  The world is enormous in a rainstorm.  It feels compressed and expanded at the same time.  And you can meet God in a rainstorm.

Every day you meet the divine and never know it.   It saturates our existence.  The sacred is everywhere because God made everything.  Like rain, it gets everywhere and into everything.  It’s beautifully chaotic and yet organized and it fuels life.  It takes the yellow dryness of my being, permeates the fabric of me, and turns it into something green and vibrant.

The Bible makes some pretty radical claims about God, like that whole “in the beginning God created” bit.  I’m not so sure that the Genesis 1 account of creation is meant to be taken literally, and I’m not so sure that even if it can be that it should be.  But I do know that the whole Bible makes it pretty clear that God is engaged in the world.  To what extent might be debated, but he’s definitely around.

One of my goals in life is to start seeing the sacred in everything – that part of the fabric of our universe that lets me know there is a God, I matter to him, and more importantly, he matters to the world. 

I want to have my existence soaked in God’s presence, because it already is but I don’t appreciate it.

I need to feel the tickle of his presence when I see a tree, the brush of his hand when I let the wind blow through my hair.

There’s something spiritual about human contact that I haven’t grasped yet, something supernatural about the embrace of friends.  To be honest, it’s like hugging someone is hugging God.  It is almost as if we incarnate Jesus’ words: “What you’ve done to the least of these, you have done to me.”

That kind of frightens me.  When I embrace someone, am I doing it with sincerity?  Would I shake God’s hand with the same thoughts in my head about him as I have for that cheating jerk I greeted at the car dealership the other day?  I’d almost rather not touch people than deal with having to hug them AND God at the same time.

But that’s the point, isn’t it?  Most of us don’t see the sacred.  We see just flesh and blood, just a person to greet or teach or help or ignore.  They aren’t Jesus to us.

And we walk down streets and look at trees and mountains and oceans and even man made stuff like cars and buildings and miss the God-stuff that is right in front of us.

See, we’re missing the sacred something.  There’s an element of HIM everywhere, in everything.  And he’s not hiding, but we’re not looking.  That part of our spirit is just cut off.  It doesn’t work; there’s no electricity flowing through the wires.

We’re missing a huge part of who we are and who God is because we look for the sacred something somewhere it isn’t.  We look in books and theologies and churches and service; and we forget that God is bigger than that stuff.  He fills places; places do not fill him.

Everything is sacred, every place a temple.  There is no place that God isn’t, therefore there is no place that is not sanctified.

How many times was Moses on Mount Sinai before he ran into a burning bush?  How often did Isaiah go to the Temple to pray and then one day, POOF!  There’s God’s throne?   The freaky thing is that the sacred was there all the time.  They just NOTICED it those times.

So, what’s your sacred something?  What part of this world or your life or someone else’s life is telling you a message from God and you’re listening to some other voice?  What is it that God is going to use to cut through the white noise in your head and touch your heart?