New Parenting: Chaos, Kenosis, Community

            It’s been a while since my last blog post. Here’s why: our son Ian Longhurst-McClellan is nearly two weeks old. I am biased, to be sure, but he is the most beautiful boy I’ve ever seen. With large and curious blue eyes, he soaks in color and movement, mommy and daddy—everything new. He gropes and grasps with his tiny fingers. My favorite moment: after sleeping, he throws his stubby arms overhead and gives a yawn and stretch.

            These two weeks of fatherhood have me reflecting on three themes in particular from Christian spirituality: chaos, kenosis, and community.

            Parenting is chaotic, as most Canaan newsletter readers will know from experience. The house becomes messy and laundry loads multiply. Bodily fluids overflow.  I walk to one end of the house hoping to accomplish something, and by the time I arrive there, my tired mind has lost that thread of purpose. We who are Christians know, however, that chaos does not mean abandonment by God’s presence. In fact, just the opposite: chaos in Scripture can be a productive space of creation. Remember the opening scene of Genesis? “The earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep” (1:2). According to Clarke’s Bible Commentary, the Hebrew terms for void and darkness (tohu and bohu) convey confusion and disorder—chaos. But what happens to this confusion, disorder and chaos? The next line of the verse tells us: “a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” Chaos becomes creation, a new universe. With the Spirit’s help, what could easily become an overwhelming and anxiety-ridden time of new parenting transforms into a time of creation, abundance, and joy.

            The chaos of parenting invites me into kenosis, which is the New Testament Greek word meaning self-emptying love. The word is used in Paul’s hymn in Philippians 2: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.” Writers like Cynthia Bourgeault claim that kenosis sums up the basic energy and thrust of Jesus’ entire ministry. His whole ministry, Bourgeault claims, is a demonstration of kenosis. She writes in her book The Wisdom Jesus, “In whatever life circumstance, Jesus always responded with the same motion of self-emptying—or to put it another way, of the same motion of descent: going lower, taking the lower place, not the higher” (p. 64).

            In my brief two-week experience of parenting, it seems to me that loving parenting is all about kenosis. It means that I will rise in the middle of the night to change his diaper, even if I’m getting up at 5:30am to visit hospice patients. It means that if Faith needs a break to breath the air outside the house, I will gladly hold and bounce Ian in my arms. It means that if he’s crying I will find out why he’s crying and attempt to soothe him. It means that my agenda and desires do not come first—they are forsaken, emptied for a larger loving purpose. This is a tall order, and let me be the first to admit that I fail utterly at it (as Faith will tell you). A crying baby and sleep-deprivation pushes at my emotional trigger points. Sometimes I get angry. Sometimes I become impatient. But reflecting on Jesus’ ministry as a ministry of kenosis provides an inspiration and spiritual call for those 3am moments of quick and less-than-compassionate response.

            Finally, and a bit less esoteric: new parenting requires community. This is humbling for both Faith and I. We like to think of ourselves as “do-it-yourself” people. Strong and capable. But we have by necessity needed to lean on others to make it through this transition into parenting. The Canaan Church so thoughtfully stocked us with blankets, baby clothes, cash, and a solid changing table (which is getting a lot of use!). Personal friends have brought home cooked meals by at just the right times. Our parents have stayed with us to provide support in ways that we needed: taking a midnight feeding or diaper shift, going grocery shopping, even doing our laundry. We are filled with gratitude to have such a supportive community, and we are humbled by the generosity that has sustained us. We couldn’t have done it without you.

             Chaos, kenosis, community. These three themes run through all aspects of our lives, whether we are parents or not. Our jobs, relationships, commitments, caregiving, volunteering, and family lives offer us the opportunity to respond with kenosis in chaotic situations, all while relying on the support of community. May it be so, and may Christ’s witness and the Spirit’s presence be our guide. 

Fourth Sunday of Lent: The Cross and Reconciliation

Scripture: Ephesians 2:11-22, Mark 15: 33-39

(4 of 5 in a series of the death of Jesus)

The cross overcomes division.[1] In Paul’s writings the cross becomes a reconciling symbol of breaking down exclusive barriers. But how did Paul get there and how is it connected to Jesus life and ministry?

The Jews were God’s chosen people. God took Abraham from his home in Ur, and on a particularly clear evening, an evening not unlike the one’s we have here in Canaan, God showed Abraham a starry sky. You could see Venus and Mars. And God said, “I will make of you a great nation. You see those stars? So shall your descendants be.” Throughout the Hebrew Bible, we hear this continuing story: God creating a people, choosing a people, giving laws and land and religious rituals to this people that God names Israel.  

But you know what happens so often when we see ourselves as chosen? At first it’s great and liberating. At first it’s healing to know that God chose me, that God loves me, that I’m special. But after a while, if we’re not careful, we may forget that God chooses other people as well. We may start to feel entitled. We may judge other people. We may forget about the poor, the needy, the excluded. We may start to feel that we have a corner on the truth. So in Israel’s history this happened, and it falls on a group called the prophets to rise up and criticize the exclusion and superiority complex that develops in Israel. They forgot that God chose other people as well. The great poet-prophet Isaiah takes this issue on: in chapter 56 writes about how God welcomes the eunuchs, the sexual minorities of his time. God welcomes the foreigners, the illegal immigrants of his time. Isaiah reminds his people that God’s house is not a house just for the Jews, it “shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel” (56:7-8). Isaiah reminds his people that God’s love is always going beyond the boundearies.

Then Jesus comes along—formed and shaped by that prophetic tradition—and he shakes things up by identifying with the most excluded of society—even Gentiles. In his life—and in his death—he overturns the central dogma of his religion—that “we” are chosen and they are not chosen. “We” are holy and “they” are unholy. At his birth, the chief priests and scribes aren’t there—who shows up to witness the Messiah’s birth? It’s Magi from Persia, who work in the Persian kings court. They’re the one’s who follow a star and show up. When Jesus and his followers are passing through Samaria—he stops and talks with a woman at a well who is thirsty for living water. We know the story. Jews didn’t talk to Samaritans—they had had an ancient conflict about the proper place to worship—Jews thought you had to worship in Jerusalem, and Samaritans had a mountain called Mt. Gerizim as their sacred place. On top of that, Jewish men definitely didn’t talk to Samaritan women. But Jesus crosses all these boundaries and says to the woman at the well: “The hour is coming when true worshippers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth.” As if to say, “these boundaries are not ultimate—we are one in our worship of the divine.”

Before his death Jesus is betrayed by the leaders of his own religion and “handed over to the Gentiles,” the Romans. It’s a key repetitive phrase in the gospels: “handed over to the Gentiles.” The leaders of his own religion reject him as an outsider, as a pagan. As theologian Ted Jennings points out, the typical Jewish treatment for a false prophet was stoning. The chief priests and scribes could have stoned Jesus—but their rejection and repudiation of his goes far beyond that—they hand him over to the pagan Gentiles, the imperial oppressors. Jesus doesn’t even deserve a Jewish death to them. And so Jesus, as Hebrews 13:12 puts it, “suffers outside the city gate,” outside the boundaries of the chosen people. He dies on a hill called Golgotha outside the city. This is the ultimate symbol of God’s solidarity with the excluded. Crucified outside the gate. Abandoned by his people. God’s Messiah becoming the excluded himself.

The Jewish Temple was structured on exclusive boundaries—separation by degrees of holiness. And it’s not that Judaism was particularly exclusive—it functioned as any normal religion should and would in that time. The Gentiles could come to the Temple—but they had to stay in a special outer court. That’s where the sacrificial animals were sold, and where Jesus had his controversial outburst of “cleansing the temple.” Women could come to the Temple—but they had to stay in their own section too. Male Jews who were ritually pure had their own section, and they could go a little further into the Temple. Priests proceeded still further, they had the run of the place. And once a year, on the Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur, the High Priest could go behind a veil into the inner sanctuary called the Holy of Holies.[2] Once a year.

Something incredible happens as Jesus dies and breathes his last breath: The temple veil is torn in two. The door is thrown open.  The whole world becomes the holy of holies. The structure of exclusion, of insiders and outsiders, is torn down. The separation between the sacred and the secular is torn down. We all will worship in Spirit and Truth now. And then, to make the point even further, A Roman army commander is the one who recognizes the Messiah.  A centurion sees Jesus’ last breath, maybe he even hears the tearing of the temple veil, and he exclaims, “Truly this man was God’s Son.” So the cross becomes a universal symbol of reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles, between insiders and outsiders, between chosen people and not chosen people. This is what Ephesians means when the author writes: “But now you who were once far off (you Gentiles, you outsiders) have been brought near in the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility.”

All too often, in our history, we Christians have not been a community reconciled by the cross. Our history is full of the same things that Jesus and Paul critiqued Judaism for doing: becoming an insider club based on exclusion. It’s almost as if institutional religions can’t help it—it’s as if it’s in the DNA of becoming an established religion. We thought that we had the truth and that no one else had it. In the Middle Ages, we forced people to baptize or die. In our American history, we used our religion to justify whatever social exclusion was contemporary with the times:  Jews, African Americans, women, poor people, disabled people, immigrants, sexual minorities, most recently—Muslims. But that is not the way of the cross. The way of the cross is reconciliation. The way of the cross is solidarity with the excluded. The way of the cross is peace. 

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[1] This sermon inspired by chapter 3 of Ted Jennings’s Transforming Atonement, “The Cross and Division.”

[2] See IVP Bible Background Commentary, Craig Keener here.

Third Sunday of Lent: Jesus' Cross as Nonviolent Action Against Evil

3rd in a Series on the cross and Jesus' death

Matthew 5:38-44, Mark 15:21-32, Colossians 2:15

Jesus responds to injustice and violence with the active force of love and nonviolence. He does this in his life—and he also does this in his death. In fact, his death is a continuation or culmination of his life and teachings. We sometimes have this view of Jesus in both his life and on the cross that he teaches people to accept suffering passively. But that’s a misinterpretation: Jesus is anything but passive. Walter Wink has shown that turning the other cheek is anything but a passive thing to do in Jesus’ culture—it is a way of an oppressed and suffering person standing up for their dignity when they are being insulted and they have no other resources. The only way someone could hit someone on the right cheek was either with the left hand, which was considered unclean and used for going the bathroom OR with a back-handed slap—either way it’s an insult to be hit on the right cheek. It was like saying, “you are beneath me, you don’t even deserve to be struck equally on the left cheek with my right hand.” A back-handed slap demeaned someone with less authority—masters slapped slaves, men slapped women, Romans slapped Jews.

Jesus offers what Walter Wink calls a “Third Way” beyond the fight or flight response. A third way of active nonviolence. He doesn’t say grin and bear it, take the humiliation. He doesn’t say hit them back with everything you’ve got. He says turn the other cheek, offer them the left cheek, force that person in authority to at least recognize your dignity by striking you as an equal.  This is the counterintuitive logic of Jesus; this is the counterintuitive logic of nonviolence; and I’d like to propose to us that it is also the counterintuitive logic of the cross.

I’m starting to read parenting books—and feel free to check in with me in five years about this—but I’m convinced that the most successful disciplining of children’s misbehavior takes place through a nonviolent response, through responding to misbehavior with creativity and love rather than anger. That might seem obvious, but a generation ago it was not. It was not obvious to Mell Lazarus, as he tells in his story “Angry Fathers” (I’m sharing this story nearly verbatim from his original piece). Artie, Elie, and Mell are visiting the Catskill Mountains from the city. They’re staying at a country boarding house, and, being 9 year olds, they are getting restless. So they hole up in what the boys call the “casino.” It’s the public space where the guests hang out and play games like Bingo and Monopoly. But, Mell writes, “Gradually, inspiration (for their boredom) came: the casino was too new, the wood frame and white sheetrock walls too perfect. We would do it some quiet damage. Leave our anonymous mark on the place, for all time.” So, as Mell Lazarus tells this story, the boys pick up a wooden bench and use it as a battering ram to bash a hole into the casino wall. And another hole. And another. The owner, Mr. Biolos, arrives and finds out what they have done—and he is furious, he’s craving justice, he’s foaming at the mouth until their fathers arrive so these disobedient boys will receive their due corporal punishment. Mell says that Arties father comes first. He carefully takes off his belt—and viciously whips his screaming son. All the guests in the country house are by this time looking on, angry and waiting for the fathers to punish their boys. Eli’s father comes next—Mell writes that he knocks his son off his feet and kicks him. And then Mell’s father arrives in his car from the city. He takes a look at the holes in the wall, and then he gets back in his car and drives away. But then, about an hour later he comes back—and he’s got a hammer and a car full of sheetrock board. And Mell’s dad hammers through dinner and late into the night—while everyone is trying to sleep, he is fixing what the boys have done. His midnight hammering a testimony of their destructive behavior. And here’s how Mell ends his amazing piece: “My father made his point. I never forgot that my vandalism on that August day was outrageous. And I’ll never forget that it was also the day I first understood how deeply I could trust him.” Mell Lazarus’s dad found a way beyond the fight or flight response.

Jesus’ cross functions in a similar way. Jesus’ cross is the ultimate example of responding to injustice and violence with love and nonviolence. But in order to get there we need to cover a bit of ground and unravel some common assumptions about the crucifixion.

The Roman Empire didn’t crucify people for nothing—they crucified people who they perceived as a threat to Roman rule.  Crucifixion was a Roman torture tactic for political insurrectionists, for violent bandits, for threats to the peace. And if you pay attention to the details of the crucifixion story, as we’ve heard today, the story tells it as a Roman military execution. Why would Jesus have been perceived to pose a threat to Roman rule? Why would he be given the Roman death penalty? It’s not just because Pontius Pilate didn’t want to rock the boat. There’s a broader context: Jesus led a movement of the disenchanted and disenfranchised, the poor, the mentally ill, the sick, and the outcast. He claimed that a different kingdom, a kingdom of God—was here. For folks who thought emperor Caesar’s kingdom was the only game in town—this was challenging news. How dare this man claim another authority higher than Caesar? And because of this, because of his teaching about the kingdom of God, because of the unseemly company he kept, because of the miracles, and the boundary-breaking meals he ate, he was perceived as a revolutionary, a threat to public order—in the same family as Barabbas, and crucified alongside two violent outlaw bandits. Mocked by the Roman soldiers, wearing a crown of thorns, and a sign near him that read: “King of the Jews.”

But as we know, Jesus was not a revolutionary; he was not a Jewish political Messiah. He was not the King people were waiting for. Jesus pursued a third way of nonviolence rather than the fight path of revolution or the flight path of passivity. A Third way beyond “Fight or Flight.” We often think of Jesus on the cross as a passive, innocent victim—but he had agency in his ministry right up until the end. If passivity was his stance he never would have led his followers to Jerusalem during Passover anyway! All throughout the gospel of Mark we are given signs that Jesus knows what’s on the horizon when he gets to Jersualem. He foretells his fate three times, even in detail in Mark chapter 10. If Jesus were a passive victim, he would have stayed home, or at least waited until the festival was over, until Pilate took his chariots and soldiers home, until the plots against his life cooled down a bit.

But instead he marches into Jerusalem with his ragtag movement in a so-called “triumphal entry.” It’s not subtle. He heads into the Temple—the center of both Jewish religious authority and Roman power—and he announces that the Temple will be destroyed. You don’t need to pay a Temple tax and purchase animal sacrifices to worship God, he says. Does this sound like passivity to you—the flight response? No! But this also doesn’t sound like the revolutionary violence of a political Messiah—it’s not the fight response either. He’s not attacking the Roman guards and trying to free the Temple from Roman influence like his ancestor Judas Maccabeus did, a seminal event that Jews remember at Hanukah. He’s not minting coins with an inscription “Year 1 of the Liberation of Israel” like revolutionary Simeon Bar Kosiba did. Jesus is up to something different—he is pursuing the way of love, the way of bold confrontation with injustice—all the way until the end, despite the inevitable consequences of death.

The cross, then, is a nonviolent direct action against structures of evil. Through Jesus’ submission of his own body, the cross protests against both the Jewish and Roman structures of exclusion, intimidation, and violence—and it protests against those same structures in our day. Like turning the other cheek, or like Mell Lazarus’s dad’s response, the cross is a third way beyond fight or flight. That’s why the author of Colossians can claim that through the cross Jesus “disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.”

May Jesus’ nonviolent witness and suffering disarm our own violence, and the violence of our world. With God’s strength, response to challenging situations with creativity and love.

Saved by the Blood? Sermon 2 on Jesus' Death

Second Sunday of Lent, 2-24-13 

The cross and the death of Jesus have been often been taught in ways that are frightening and guilt-inducing. Here’s one story, collected by writers Joel B Green and Mark Baker: What happened on the cross “is as if God is a judge sitting in court looking at a big book that lists all our sins, and God says, I must punish you for all these sins. That time you lied to mom when you were nine years old, that time you made out with Tommy in the high school bathroom. I must punish you for all these sins. But if, a person accepts Jesus as Savior then Jesus will say, “No, I died on the cross to pay the penalty of those sins,” and then when God looks at the book again the list of sins is gone, and the page with your name on it is totally blank.”[1]

Here’s an even more frightening story collected by the same authors: “God is a railroad switchman who sees that his son has wandered onto the main track just as a passenger train is hurtling toward him. If the man throws the switch, his son will live, but the train will crash into freight cars parked on the siding, and many ither people will die. So the father opts to leave the switch open and kill his son instead of killing the people on the train.”

Scary stuff, right!  I don’t know if you’ve heard a view of what God accomplishes through Jesus on the cross in this way. If you haven’t, consider yourself blessed, but this perspective is very popular and widespread in different areas of Western Christianity.

At the fundamentalist boarding school I attended in Germany, I was told the first story about God in the courtroom looking at the book of my sins multiple times. Mr. Jones, the principal, is a loving and kind man, and I have a lot of respect for him. But this is how he taught the book of Romans to the senior class: Humans lived in sin and deserved punishment and death. God was so gracious to pay that penalty of death on our behalf through the sacrifice of Jesus so we wouldn’t have to die or burn in hell. What do you think the effects of this doctrine were on me? The effect for me was not gratitude that Jesus had paid the price of death for my sins—I guess I was supposed to be grateful about that. The effect was fear and self-loathing. Self-loathing about how sinful I was (as if a teenager needs any more reasons to be insecure!) and fear that somehow God didn’t love me, that God still wanted to punish me. And so I—and many of my classmates lived in this state of spiritual-existential terror. Afraid of offending the wrathful God.  Even if Jesus paid the price, at one time I had deserved death and hellfire, and who knows, maybe this vengeful God would change his mind and decide that my page was not erased in the big book of sins.

Last week I gave an overview of three dominant theories of the atonement: sacrificial, ransom, and satisfaction theories. I’d like to add one more to our list that has inspired the stories I’ve told today. It’s called the Penal Substitution Theory.

It even sounds ominous, right? It’s a legal term: “Penal” means “relating to the punishment of offenders under the legal system.” Substitution means that Jesus was the substitute punishment, instead of us. This theory builds on the satisfaction theory. Anselm wrote in the context of a feudal society, where lords ruled over vassals, who operated the land for the lord, and vassals employed peasants who worked the land. When vassals offended the lord, they had to pay a debt: they were summoned to court, where they could lose their land or even be killed.  So Anselm conceived of his atonement theory that mirrored these relationships: God was the lord, humanity was similar to a vassal that had offended the lord, and Christ died on our behalf to pay the debt that was owed, to satisfy God’s honor that was dishonored.[2]

This theory of Anselm’s had a domino effect on theological thinking about the cross throughout the next centuries and into our days. In other words, it got worse and worse. Calvin was the first to articulate the beginning of the penal substitutionary theory. He took the logic of Anselm and made it even more extreme. Humanity has offended God because of our sin, and the punishment for sin is death.  Calvin and other writers used passages like the ones read today to argue their point. As Paul said, the wages of sin is death. But, because God strangely still loves us, God sends Jesus to be punished as a substitute in our place.[3] Not only does Jesus undergo the worts of a human death through tortue and crucifixion, he suffers in his soul as well—he descends into hell before the resurrection. In other words, Jesus suffers so God won’t have to kill us.

This theory has effected areas of Catholicism and evangelicalism so much that people will often claim that this is what the gospel itself is. And, while we may not talk about it too much in our mainline churches, it’s still there in some of the songs we sing.

To close, here are four critical questions that neither the penal substitution theory or, in my mind, any of the other three atonement theories are able to answer convincingly. Four critical questions to think about when we think about the cross and the meaning of Jesus death. Four critical questions to keep in mind as we move into future weeks:

 1) In the story of the cross, what kind of character does God have? For the penal substitutionary theory, it’s not a God that any of us would want to spend time with. It’s an abusive and violent God whose justice requires suffering.

2) Connected to the first question, what or who is the agent or cause of Jesus death? If God is the one who sends Jesus to die, then that sets us up for a view of God as a tyrant. Is there another answer? I’ll argue in the next weeks that the agent or cause of Jesus’ death isn’t God at all, it’s the Jewish authorities and Romans imperial powers. It is structures of evil and injustice.

3) How does the story we are telling about the cross connect with the larger story of Jesus life and ministry? Most of the theories of atonement overlook the actual life and teachings of Jesus. And so we are left with contradictory messages: a message of nonviolence and compassion for the excluded through Jesus’ ministry but at the cross we are faced with a violent God who needs somebody to die.

4) What kind of justice is our perspective on the cross articulating? The justice of the penal substitionary theory is a retributive justice—it demands punishment. It looks remarkably similar to our own prison system. Is that what Jesus had in mind? Or is the justice of Jesus, who counseled us to love our enemies, different in some way? We’ll look at that in future weeks as well.

May God strengthen our faith as we approach the mystery of the cross.

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[1] See Joel B. Green and Mark Baker, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross.

[2] Helpful description of feudal relationships: http://www.historyguide.org/ancient/lecture21b.html

[3] See Andrew Sun Park, Triune Atonement, page 23.