Enchanted Community

BLOG. 5/22/13: REACTION TO LAST BLOG ON LIFE-SPAN OF THE CHURCH

I received an interesting comment, somewhat in reaction to my insistence in the last Blog, that a church must reproduce itself every generation.

My respondent was of the conviction that the primary task of the church would be one of worship, and in a very real sense he was correct … except, how does one worship, with any integrity, the God of whose commands one is blithely ignorant, or to which one is indifferent, or which one flat-out disobeys? Jesus said: “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I tell you?” (Luke 6:46). The parting words of Jesus (Matthew 28) are to go, make disciples, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. If that mandate is not somehow central to our understanding of Christian calling, both individually and communally, then something is deeply amiss.

True worship drives us to obey, to live lives of righteousness, to be about Christ’s mission. Then, conversely, to be engaged in Christ’s mission of being light and leaven, of being the children of the Light, inevitably drives us back to our worship, and to our utter dependence on God, since the task in humanly impossible. After all, our classic progression of worship, in both Catholicism and a good part of Protestantism, is derived from the progression found in Isaiah 6 in which the prophet was first of all blown-away by the vision of the holy God, which caused him to fall on his face in confession of his human inadequacy or sin, then receive the live coal of absolution.

But then note: This encounter with the awesome God is followed by a call to mission! “Whom shall I send and who will go for me?” Isaiah was so overwhelmed by what he had seen that he responded: “Here am I send me.” The Lord then spelled out what that calling was to be about. The task given was as humanly impossible as the task Christ gave to his church. He was sent to Israel, which had the form of religion, temple, liturgical rites … but had forgotten their calling to be a nation of priests by obeying the Torah. Ours is to make the gospel of the Kingdom known in every corner of the globe, beginning next door.

In my previous Blog I made the point that the life span is inseparable from a life of gospel obedience, flowing out of worship. In an authentic New Creation/Kingdom community we are to be accountable to each other for our obedient response to Christ and his mission. Our worship of God should, week by week, energize us in that calling. Only so are we building our house upon the Rock! Our life together flows out of worship and then drives us back to worship.

We need to remember: As with Isaiah, true worship of the God revealed in Jesus Christ is neither tame, nor safe. It will cost us our lives. And, finally, worship and gospel obedience always go together. That message is inescapable in our New Testament documents. Each with the other is incomplete. To be continued …

BLOG 5/20/13: WHAT IS THE LIFE-SPAN OF A CHURCH COMMUNITY?

Here’s a good Monday morning question for you: If a Christian community (i.e., a church) is a living organism created to be the communal incarnation of Christ, and of his mission in the world—then what is it’s life-span? How long is it viable? How would one know? This is a critical, but difficult question for many habitual church-goers, or ‘church-ified’ folk to even comprehend.

Let me give you my very strong conviction in answer. The church is, in the design of God, to be the community of the Kingdom of God, or of God’s New Creation in Christ. It is to be dynamic and reproductive, it is to bear much fruit, it is to be like leaven, which leavens its context—it is never to be passive or custodial or static.

Venerable ‘church institutions’ may well have impressive sanctuaries and be engaged in many good works, they may have been there for a long time as expressions of religious Christianity, but the question comes: are they alive, and have they ever been alive? Or have religious rites and activities, and institutional hubris and prosperity become their raison d’être?

In the New Testament documents one finds no church institutions (as we know them) but rather contagious communities (under all kinds of egregious circumstances) in which the word of Christ dwelt richly, and in which the purpose of church leadership was to equip every professing follower of Christ to be mature in Christ and to be himself/herself reproductive in the mission of God. This is precisely how “the word of God continued to increase,” or, “those scattered went about talking about the word,” or “And walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it (the church) multiplied” (from Acts).

My persuasion? That each expression of viable Kingdom community has but one brief generation to incarnate itself authentically in that specific time and culture and place … and to reproduce itself. This would mean that every believer, every member, of that community would need to be equipped to be passionate about the mission and purpose of God in Christ, and self-consciously engaged in the reproductive mission. Please note here, that all of these folk must be accountable to the community for such doing of the word of Christ!

It’s spring here in my back yard, and I have watched year by year the ritual of birds making their nest, hatching their young, giving flight training, and then booting them out of their nests. Mother birds don’t keep their offspring in the nest, but rather they create the offspring, who in turn will create yet another generation, and terminate for them the comfort-zone of the nest.

All too many ostensible church communities haven’t learned this lesson. Rather, they keep adding ‘members’ and providing them activities inside the church’s nest, and never teaching them to fly. Authentic church leaders do not allow clergy dependent church dwellers, rather authentic church leaders attempt to work themselves out of a job by equipping the next generation of reproductive believers in Christ. A clergy-dependent ‘church’ may be ever so attractive and ‘successful’ in human term, but it is both unhealthy and disobedient. True and healthy Kingdom communities reproduce themselves with each generation. The Spirit of Christ dwelling in such communities makes reproduction dynamic and irresistible.

Answer: the life-span of an authentic church is one generation, after that it atrophies—or maybe the word of the Kingdom falls into the thorns of ecclesiastical stuff and gets choked out!

BLOG 5/16/13. A BIT OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION

I hope that my readers will forgive me for a bit of self-promotion. It is prompted by the email advertisement of Wipf and Stock Publishers this week, promoting their new publications in theology. Wipf and Stock has done the church and the Christian world a real service in both publishing works by prominent theologians, as well as by some of us of more modest reputation. They have also done a service by republishing many significant out-of-print works.

I was delighted and thankful to see in this advertisement my own recent publication: The Church and the Relentless Darkness with its cover image and a brief description there, along with several other recent releases.

Wipf and Stock has now published or republished five of my books, which I am so thankful to have available, though I am not a well-known figure. My sojourn and my writings on the nature of the Christian faith and the Christian church I consider to be the word of my testimony (to paraphrase Revelation 12:11).

The five books are: 1) A Door of Hope (reprint), 2) Subversive Jesus, Radical Grace (reprint).  But it is my trilogy, my recent engagement with the essence and mission of the church, that this recent publication completes: 3) Enchanted Community: Journey Into the Mystery of the Church, 4) Refounding the Church From the Underside, and 5) The Church and the Relentless Darkness.

All of these books are written out of actual dialogue with young adult friends, and out of the emerging generation who struggle with these issues. I have put together a composite of these several young adult friends, so that the dialogue is not fictitious but composite. They grow out of a dearth of honest dealing with the field of ecclesiology (the church’s teaching about itself, or about the doctrine of the church).

Enchanted Community engages the question of: what is the church? Refounding the Church From the Underside grapples with the why? of the church. How does the church fit into God’s design for New Creation? How is it to be formed? What is its purpose? What are the dynamics, which make it spontaneous and authentic as the incarnation of the God’s New Creation people?

From those questions came the really unique one, from my young friends: Where does the resistance to such an awesome divine purpose come from? How can the church devolve into a religious institution, a community of (what Bonhoeffer termed) religious Christianity that, while perhaps commendable in many ways, seems to have little to do with the thrilling mission of God? And no one seems to notice? To answer this I had to engage in a realistic approach to the theme of spiritual warfare, which is replete in scripture from Genesis 3 to Revelation 21.

These are also available from Amazon, and some of them on Kindle. So now I’ve said it and done my self-promotion. I commend these writings to you. Writing them has been a thrilling discipline for me.

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BLOG. 5/13/13. THE LIABILITY OF BEING CALLED “REVEREND’

Whenever someone calls me Doctor (which I’m not), or Reverend (which title I disdain), I find that something inevitably happens, there is some kind of an invisible barrier that descends and makes the whole ensuing relationship a bit unreal. You become a “church professional”, a few steps away from reality—maybe one who is to be respected (indulged?) within your own ecclesiastical realm, but the unspoken message is: “You’re not one of us.”

It’s really almost humorous. So long as you enter a group of people as another ordinary human being, the conversation is pretty straightforward, but when someone addresses you as reverend, the whole tenor of the conversation gets a bit more contrived is some weird ways. Hey! I’ve got sixty years of footnotes on this.

The problem is that there are a lot of men and women who love to be called by that title. You can even get it by mail order now. Agencies wanting my contributions will send me sheets of return address labels with the title: Rev. Robert T. Henderson—which, in my case, go straight to the shredder.

There was a time when a colleague and I actually tried to introduce a motion into our presbytery that we overture the Presbyterian Church to cease using that designation, since “to be revered” is contrary to the New Testament calling to be a servant of all. Do you know what happened? That motion didn’t even make it out of committee. Church professionals were jealous of their designation as clergy, as reverends.What is true in the New Testament documents is that there is no such category as clergy, and no one is ever called reverend. O, to be sure, there are elders/presbyters, and overseers/bishops who emerge in the New Testament community. There is a gift of pastor-teacher (or, teaching-shepherd), along with other gifts given by the risen Lord. Such gifts become evident in the more authentic, exemplary, proven, and mature members of a community of believers. Peter teaches that all of Christ’s followers are part of God’s holy nation, and are all part of God’s royal priesthood.

After all (as has been said so often) Jesus didn’t come to make us more religious, but to make us more human. We are called to be those human beings who are a “radiant display of the divine nature,” i.e., who are to demonstrate humanity as God intends it to be. And the first hallmark of such believers is relational—it is the life that is the incarnation of the grace and love of God in all of the “one another” relationships. Such demands that we let others get close and to ask questions, it is not aloof. It is not acquired by an academic theological degree. It is authentic and lived in humility. Such lives become what the New Testament describes as “a sweet savour of Christ” unto God (II Corinthians 2:15 KJV).

True leaders in the Christian community are those who, with utter humility and integrity, can say (as did Paul), “be imitators of me, even as I also am of Christ” (I Corinthians 11:1). Those who are the leaders, or presbyters, are to be “examples to the flock” (I Peter 5:3). Not only so, but the dynamic is that all believers should aspire to such beautiful and fruitful influence (I Timothy 3:1). God’s leaders are servants They are not power hungry. They are the incarnation of what true discipleship is all about, and they are disciple-makers. They are contagiously relational.Finally, the whole clergy, priesthood, exalted ecclesiastical titles thing, is a later aberration—even a subversion of what Christ provides for leadership in the community. Even later came the subversion that somehow such came with an academic degree, alas!

Got it? OK. Just don’t call me reverend. Thanks. [Invite your friends to subscribe!]

BLOG 5/9/13: WHAT IS THE LIFE-SPAN OF A CONGREGATION?

The life span of a congregation: what? I was discussing this with a wonderful friend who is a church planter over lunch in our favorite pub one day. So a vital Christian community is established, and is very self-conscious of who they are and why they exist in that particular context. The participants have self-consciously engaged themselves in the mission of that new community. They are obviously attached to the teaching shepherd who has given birth to their community, and who forms and feeds them on serious engagement with scripture week by week.

The question: how long with this last? What happens when this popular pastor and teacher leaves or retires? What happens in a second generation? The question is a serious one because we have a quite mistaken concept of a Christendom church that is essentially a sacralized building, clergy, liturgies, and very much a humanly explainable institution of religious Christianity. (Such a concept seems oblivious to the calling of every participant to be engaged in the mission and to be equipped for maturity in Christ.)

But look at the seven churches in Revelation 2-3. They were one generation away from their apostolic founding, and yet (with the exception of the two under persecution) they were beginning to lose their focus and their sense of purpose and mission. From the evidence we have, the churches of that early period were pretty mobile, flexible, and versatile … but there were at work those corrosive influences of the dominion of darkness in which they lived.

I watched an interview with the retiring president of Yale University recently. He has been a very successful president of a prestige university for twenty years. But in the interview he explained that every seven years he totally re-evaluates what he has accomplished in the past seven years, and reconceives what he want to accomplish in the coming seven years. This means that he is always reconceiving what he is doing in the light of what would make Yale and even more significant force in the educational world. There’s something Biblical about that. There is the Sabbath year for Israel in which they let the land lie fallow for a year. There is the annual Passover observance when they in essence go back to the boundary and remember from whence they have come and why Yahweh has called them. Then there is the Jubilee Year when all the land returns to those original recipients of the land grants, and in which all the indentured servants are set free. They go back to Square #1 every fifty years.

If a particular church, or Christian community, is “successful” and has all of the accouterments of institutional Christianity with the degree of prestige that goes along with that – does that mean it is a true expression of that for which Christ calls his church? If it is populated with religious folk who participate passively in church programs, but do not see themselves as 24/7, well-equipped agents of the mission of God, can it be called a church of Kingdom integrity.

Is there with our particular church communities a discipline, such as practiced by the president of Yale, whereby we deliberately and periodically evaluate who we are, why Christ has called us, and how effectively we are incarnating the mission of God? And can we include those church professionals in such and evaluation? Do we have a capacity to look at the culture and the demographics of our context to see if we are effective as a contagious community of God’s New Creation (Kingdom of God)?

In the days of Israel’s decline and apostasy they had all of the accouterments: temple, priesthood, celebrations … but they had forgotten why they were there, and their meaning in the design of God. So the question: What is the life span of a Christian community?

BLOG 5/6/13: MAYBE A WORD FROM JEFF BEZOS TO CHURCH LEADERSHIP

It may be a weird place to find some profound wisdom for the church leadership who live frustrated with the impotence of so much of the church scene, but, oddly enough, I have found just such wisdom in a recent book about Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com. The book is entitled simply Jeff Bezos’ Secrets of Success by Gerardo Giannoni.Maybe its because I have spent a good half century working on the seemingly intractable task of trying to figure out how to resuscitate church institutions that embody (to quote from Revelation 3:1): “You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead.” Think of all those congregations of every stripe that have all the accouterments of acceptable churches, and yet seem never to stop and ask what they are supposed to be, and are supposed to be accomplishing.

I can’t answer for the motivation of those church founders of a century ago, but in my own career I have watched my own tradition planting their denominational franchises by finding a location, purchasing land, putting up a building, employing church professionals with the hope of attracting members, and then working to make the whole thing survive and even be ‘successful’ without ever asking what it is that Christ has called his church to be and to do … never asking the questions: what is the church? And, why is the church? Much less are most of that myriad of prestigious church institutions willing to periodically be analyzed as to how they are fulfilling Christ’s call, and how the leadership is fulfilling its presence.

So here comes Bezos. He realized early on that he could not implement his business vision in an existing corporate structure. Most old corporate traditions and structures don’t easily embrace such radically new concepts. This is not to mention that there are cultural changes that radically alter the landscape in which businesses operate.

His basic premise? Amazon would be a customer-focused business, i.e., his focus was not on the merchandise they would be selling but rather primarily on the customer, and the customer’s satisfaction. And what are his three principles which he ‘dings’ into his leadership team? 1) Listen, 2) Invent, and 3) Personalize. Customers want reliable information, products, and delivery. So Amazon listens to criticism and even minor dissatisfactions—even encourages such. Then they invent ways to make their services more satisfactory to their customers, and they keep the engagement with the customers. (That’s a far-too-brief, even truncated version, but you get the idea.)

The Christian communities that understand that they are called by Jesus to make disciples who are equipped to live as mature ministers of the message of Jesus Christ in the realities of their daily ‘briar-patches’ and who are continually listening to the needs of the individual believers, refining their communal life to make this happen, and being accountable for such are the ones bringing forth the “much fruit” that the gospel is promised to bring. Just to focus, in this particular blog, on the first of these: Listen! Church leadership cannot be an in absentia and depersonalized body of overseers who miss the point of the church! Church leaders are those who know the names of the church community’s participants, and are continually refining the church’s ministry of enabling those participants to have the word of Christ dwelling richly in them, so that they are able to be maturely thinking and behaving as Kingdom of God folk. If such is not happening … then Re-invent the church’s design (or maybe get new leadership!).Will such leadership disrupt a lot of the entrenched interests? Absolutely. Jeff Bezos makes just such a point, but the end result justifies it. Have I opened a can of worms, or what? I’d like your comments. Peace!

BLOG 5/2/13 AT THE END OF THE LORD’S PRAYER … A WAKE-UP CALL

At the end of the Lord’s Prayer there is an interesting “wake-up call” that doesn’t get much notice. At the beginning of that prayer is the petition that God’s Kingdom (New Creation) may be coming on earth as in heaven … then at the other end of the prayer is the petition that we may not be led into testing but that we may be delivered from the evil one (Matthew 6:9-13).

There is a similar pattern in Paul’s remarkable letter to the Ephesian church in Asia Minor. Paul is totally consumed, at the beginning of that letter, with his awe at the reality that the mystery hidden for the ages has now been revealed in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. But then at the very end he drops the other shoe, namely, that they must be very sober about the context of their presence as the people of God and to be always putting on the whole armor of God because of the subtle schemes of the devil to bring it all down on their heads and to neuter their effectiveness as the people of God.

I say: it is interesting that this gets so little attention in all too many of our Christian communities. It is the ever-present reality. Some of the millennial generation identify themselves as pragmatic idealists, but we Christian folk should not only be pragmatic idealists, but also pragmatic realists who live lives of hope in the thrill of what God has done, but very aware of the presence of a malignant darkness that is so ever present in church, society, politics, environmental degradation, relationships, jurisprudence, art, sexuality, i.e., all of life.

We do sing about it, but often mindlessly. Think of they hymn “This Is My Father’s World” and its words “… but let me ne’er forget, that though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.” Or the hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” which while affirming that God’s Kingdom is forever, also, right away in the first verse states: “For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe; His craft and power are great; And armed with cruel hate …” Then while acknowledging that on earth there is not this evil one’s equal, goes on to affirm that in Jesus is that word which is above all earthly powers, and that in him is our true defense.

So with this Blog, just to remind my readers that this final petition of the Lord’s Prayer is our wake-up call to the very real warfare in which (whether we acknowledge it or not) we are engaged. It is our sobering reminder that “still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe.” It acknowledges that this present context is not at all neutral and that we are always in peril of the devices of that wicked one, internally, spiritually, and externally. It is a reminder that we can get hurt in this calling that is ours. It seeks divine grace, alertness and protection as we live in the midst of this present (evil and rebellious) world.

The warfare is real. The evil one is malicious and aggressive … but he was ultimately defeated on the Cross: “For this purpose was the Son of God manifested: to destroy the works of the devil (I John 3:8).

In case you might be interested, I have attempted to deal with this more thoroughly in my recently released book: The Church and the Relentless Darkness (Wipf and Stock, 2013).

Peace!

BLOG. 4/29/13. WHAT ABOUT: “INTENTIONAL CHRISIAN COMMUNITIES?”

Sometimes, when looking at the church scene in my community, I am bewildered by the huge diversity of expressions, some fruitful and contagious, others cumbersome, moribund—captive to their traditions—and passive with ‘what is’ for all practical purposes. Then I look at the emerging generational culture, replete with creativity, engaging the world in which they live as “pragmatic idealists” … and I think to myself that one would need to be a specialist in complexity science to know what to make of it all.

Then, last week I got the quarterly update from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s Graduate and Faculty Ministry from its national field director, Bobby Gross. I was heartened because it tells of the clearly focused communities of faculty and graduate students that are emerging on many campuses. It gave me a glimpse of what intentional Christian communities might use as a model. These communities are formed around four clearly articulated reasons for their existence: 1) a community that is diverse and supportive, 2) spiritual formation that deepens their roots in Christ, and 3) empowerment for fruitful evangelism and service, and 4) resources for integration of faith, learning and practice.

Their form is fairly simple: they are indigenous to their context. In one sense they may be (as we all are)  “aliens and exiles,” still the campus is the locus of their incarnation, and as teachers and scholars they are part of the culture, though as those formed by a specific worldview. Their intent is to exhibit excellence in their responsible presence and in their various disciplines on that scene.

Keep that in mind as you look at the church scene in North America. How many church communities are that intentional in equipping every baptized participant in his or her calling to be the excellent presence of God’s new creation in the places of their incarnation?

When I read Bobby’s report I thought back a dozen years to an early InterVarsity Graduate-Faculty Conference, meeting in a ballroom in a Chicago hotel. Across the platform was the banner containing the motto for that conference and for those 1200 faculty and graduate students gathered there: “Following Christ, Changing the World.” As I looked at that company made up of so many nationalities, and from so many disciplines, I took hope. It was an awesome moment.

Back to my point here: every Christian community, as it is formed in obedience to Christ, needs to be equally intentional in equipping every participating believer in Jesus to be equally encouraged and resourced in faith, learning, and practice … and so to be empowered for evangelism and service in their 24/7 incarnation. Passive participation in Christian community is an oxymoron … and yet it is much to often the norm rather than the exception. Every participant should be self-consciously following Christ and changing the world.

InterVarsity’s communities possess no buildings, and their staff members are equippers. The real agents of God’s New Creation/Kingdom of God mission on those campuses are not the staff, but rather those faithful and equipped graduate students and faculty. Conversely, all too many existing (and unhealthy) church communities are clergy-dependent and building focused … and like it that way! The loss of such ostensible church communities would be no great loss to the Kingdom of God (remember Jesus’ word that branches that bear no fruit are cut off and burned?).

Vital and fruitful church communities are intentionally equipping their participants to be mature and active agents in the various places of their incarnation. What form do such communities need to accomplish such?

We’ll return to this along the way.

BLOG 4/25/13. THE CHURCH: THINKING OUT OF THE PAST, INTO THE FUTURE

This Blog’s designation comes from a book of mine entitled: Enchanted Community: Journey Into the Mystery of the Church. When I gave the book that title, one of my most cherished older friends was a bit uncertain that enchanted was appropriate, and I appreciated her rationale. On the other hand, Paul describes the church as the dwelling place of God by the Holy Spirit, and any human community inhabited by the Holy Spirit cannot be comprehended as any kind of a humanly explainable phenomenon. It is enchanted.

In the church’s early incarnation it certainly was that. It was outlawed, it was persecuted, it had no prestige, its message was the totally outrageous one of God becoming human, and then being executed as a criminal by the Roman empire—but even more outrageous was that this God-man was raised from the dead. All of that unlikely beginning and yet the church grew spontaneously and exponentially and soon was a most influential presence in the empire.

It was totally unexplainable in merely human terms. It had none of the accouterments of the religions of the world at that time. It had no sacred buildings. It had no sacralized priesthood. It had no wealth or power. What it had was a dynamic sense of its calling by Jesus Christ to be the community that was a demonstration of his New Creation (Kingdom of God). And it had the indwelling presence of God the Holy Spirit, empowering, gifting, communicating, recreating, and enabling the church to accomplish goals, which were impossible by merely human means.

The church had always before it the compelling raison d’être, namely, that it was the agent of God to get his gospel of the Kingdom to every kindred and tribe and ethnic entity in the world.

It grew exponentially with all of those merely human handicaps, and the impossible task of making disciples of all peoples on the globe. In those dynamic early generations every member was equipped to be, not only mature in the image of Christ, but to be engaged actively in its missionary growth (cf. Ephesians 4). In Acts we get the repetitive reminder that the word went everywhere. The word ran and had free course. Spontaneous growth, organic growth, church plants in faraway places.

What happened to all of that?

Within a few generations, it became forgetful and reverted to patterns of merely human religion. It consigned its “ministry” to a formalized clergy, which allowed the rank and file believers to be supportive, and observing, while being passive and not responsible for the mission. Yes, and too many want it to remain that way!

Forgetfulness. Subversion. Passivity. Dis-enchanted. Merely human religion became the norm: clergy, sanctuaries, choirs, liturgical rites … and all humanly explainable.

I want to summon up an exhortation which Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has offered us from Israel’s mandate when it entered the Promised Land. Those exiles, as they occupied their new home, were told to regularly “go back to the boundary” and remember who they were, and where they had come from, and what was their covenant responsibility. The church today desperately needs to go back to scriptures and rediscover its mission and its enchanted essence as given by the Spirit.

There is a new generational culture of pragmatic idealists arising who tend to be futurists, and are not all that willing to be content with a church which has forgotten its essence, and is “sinking in the quicksands of the past,” but are those who are intentional in being participatory in its enchanted life. The church not only needs to, but also must itself, “go back to the boundary” and refound itself on its true purpose, and with the Spirit-given gifts, and with the active participation of every baptized participant in the mission of God to the world.

This present culture is not at all impressed with forgetful religious Christianity, which contradicts its own reason for being. Rather they could get excited about what it might look like in 20/20!

BLOG 4/22/13. BOSTON—ANGER, OF COURSE, BUT HATE? NOT AT ALL

Let me add my “two cents worth” by way of personal reflection on the tragic events in Boston a week ago today. I, like most, was understandably incensed at the bombings, and grieved with so many over the suffering, the tragic destruction, and the heartbreak of what was to be a wonderful celebration of human achievement. Who would not be angry at those responsible?

At the same time I am reminded that as a follower of Jesus, I am also part of his New Creation which is counter-cultural, which counter-culture allows me to be angry (until sundown Ephesians 4:26), but does not allow me to hate. Quite the opposite: we are, by our calling to Jesus, to love our enemies, to do good to those who despitefully use and persecute us. We are reminded again from our own scriptures that Christ died, the just for the unjust (that’s us) … that while we were still enemies (that’s us), Christ in love died for us, and that by that death we are reconciled to God. We know that our counter-cultural calling is to be peacemakers and reconcilers.

The young men who perpetrated that violence in Boston were the products of a whole different religious ideology, which turned into their hate and destruction against that which they saw as the enemy of that ideology. I have read in missionary reports of some Mennonite peacemakers who deliberately and actually seek out those committed to the Islamic fundamentalist distortion, which calls for jihad against Islam’s enemies, and approached them for conversation on this very foundation, that the prophet Isa (Jesus), mentioned favorably in the Quaran, calls upon us to love our enemies, and that their prophet Muhammed expresses similar non-violent teachings. What is amazing is that those Mennonite peacemakers found a positive response in their Islamic conversation partners in these congenial engagements over tea.

Those young men in Boston were, and are, captives to a darkness, which our apostle Paul teaches us that we were all captive to, i.e. the spirit now at work in the sons of disobedience until we were rescued by Jesus Christ (Ephesians 2:1-10) and transformed into his agents of good works, of new creation, of love.

Maybe today is a good day to revisit Saint Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred … let me sow love. Where there is injury … pardon. Where there is doubt … faith. Where there is despair … hope. Where there is darkness, light. Where there is sadness … joy. O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled … as to console, To be understood … as to understand, To be loved … as to love, for It in giving … that we receive, It is in giving that we receive, It is in pardoning, that we are pardoned, It is in dying … that we are born to eternal life.”

Yes, we are a counter-culture, and we have been taught to be realists, and to know that this world is replete with the brokenness, which has resulted from the cosmic rebellion against the creator. This being so we are also taught that in this world we can expect tribulation. But it is in the midst of such destruction and brokenness that we are called to be children of light and bearers of the love of God .

Is that too much theology for a Blog? OK, then let me encourage my readers to, with me, offer up the outrageous prayer that the surviving brother captive to his darkness, lying isolated in that Jewish Hospital in Boston, may have a miraculous encounter with the Prince of Peace, who can deliver him from his captivity, not from his obvious guilt and possible penalties, but from his captivity to the prince of darkness. Thanks.

But we can never hate him! “Where there is hatred, let me sow love.” YES!