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4 My Invite to Christian Fashion Week
So, I wrote a tongue in cheek post yesterday about Christian Fashion Week that generated more virtual chatter than I expected. Apparently there’s a good number of you out there (enough to fill out the rosters of the entire American and National League East) who feel an almost evangelical negativity about my clothing choices. Whatever.
But here’s what’s funny. Mayra and Jose Gomez, the people hosting Christian Fashion Week apparently saw my post, thought it was hilarious, and offered me a VIP pass to attend.
Of course, that got me to, you know, read what Christian Fashion Week was actually about- something I hadn’t bothered with before (this is a blog after all not the NY Times.) The mission behind CFW is to advocate for women in the modeling industry who often feel pressure to objectify themselves or jeopardize their career. That’s actually a laudable, Christian goal and now, egg on my face, I feel like a jerk for making fun.
So there’s my shout out.
PS: CFW is in Florida this week so I can’t attend. It wasn’t clear from their invite whether they just wanted me to come or to come and participate as a model. Probably the former but if the latter, here is my submission for the swimwear exhibition.
3 Christian Fashion Week
This morning Teer Hardy, my coffee gopher, IT lackey and general all-around underling, brought it to my attention that Christian Fashion Week is upon us. Yes, apparently there IS such a thing and, since it’s in Florida, home of mall-like mega-churches, I doubt they’ll be showcasing camel hair cloaks or the shirts off your neighbor’s back.
I could be wrong but I imagine a runway full of denim Christian Educator dresses and plenty of I-used-to-work-at-a-Saturn Dealership polo shirts with requisite church insignia.
I didn’t get an invitation to Christian Fashion Week. I guess Jesus did warn his followers about committing adultery in their minds/hearts. No doubt, I wasn’t invited because the other models would be threatened by my panther like virility, thus compromising the Christian virtue of an entire convention center. Pandemonium would ensue and the millennial reign wouldn’t be too far behind.
Since I wasn’t invited I thought I would post my submission for Christian Week here. As crucial to a pastor’s toolkit as a portable eucharist kit.
Magnum Shorts
1 Gabriel: The Accidental Poet
Yesterday evening, mournfully picking at the dinner he manifestly did not want to eat, Gabriel channeled his inner
Margot Tenebaum and gave voice to this melancholy musing. An accidental poem.
“Gym lights make me sad.
They flicker and flicker but never go all the way on.
They never get all the way bright.
Gym lights make people’s skin look sick and queasy.
It’s like they need a friend.
But they’re too high up and too far away
For a friend to reach them.”
0 Your Story and the Holy Spirit
Tonight, in my church, we’ll convene a group of 40-50 lay people who will study and pray for the next few months about planting a new congregation, a satellite campus. Part of what we’ll be talking about is the need for 21st century Christians to convert themselves all over again, to turn away from institutional (‘organized’) religion and rediscover what it means to be part of a movement of Jesus followers joining Christ’s reconciling work in the world.
One of the effects of institutional Christianity in the 20th century has been the near total inability of Sunday morning Christians to articulate their faith, to be able, without embarrassment or cheese, to tell their story. To weave God’s story in to the story of their life. Of course mainline churches are in decline. How could you convert someone else to something you can’t actually talk about in a coherent way? Much less compelling. A faith that is essentially private is incapable of being shared.
Tonight we’ll be inviting people to start telling their stories. We’ll even be giving them very specific vocabulary words to try and use: God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, Faith, Gospel, Salvation, and the Names of People and Places.
We’ll also be giving them vocabulary they’re NOT allowed to use: Member, Denomination Name, Committee, Voting, Years of Belonging to a Church, Personal, Private, To Me
One of our goals over the next months is that by the end of this process we’ll have 40-50 people who can tell their story in a way that’s not embarrassing to them or to their listener. Just that alone would give us a DNA worth replicating.
So, with story in mind, here’s my story:
I could tell you about how I first came to faith.
I could tell you about a childhood and adolescence with God seldom mentioned by any one in my family save my grandmother’s Italian prayers and my parents screaming God-damn at one another.
I could tell you about the surprising, compulsory church attendance my mother instituted one Christmas and the Sundays thereafter. I could tell you about my refusal to participate in the worship during those Sundays, my mockery of everyone else who did, my demanded criteria before I would ever decide to believe.
I could tell you about being surprised in one of those Sundays to discover myself singing and praying along. I could tell you about sitting in the church balcony, watching the wine being poured into a chalice and bread being broken to Jesus’ words ‘…for you..’ and suddenly feeling convicted.
Pardoned.
Forgiven.
Set Right.
Reconciled.
As though whatever slate I’d been carrying around within me had been wiped clean.
I could tell you about the few years after that Sunday, before leaving for college, in which I tried to make up for lost time, throwing myself in to the life, worship and ministry of the church. I could tell you about how, in that time, I grew into some one I was not before- someone whom some of my friends and many in family did not like as much as the person I’d been before.
But someone who more closely resembled, albeit imperfectly and only in fits and snatches of moments, Jesus.
I could tell you that story from beginning to middle to now.
But if I told that story as though I were the main character, as though the story at any point turned on my initiative or volition, not only would I be lying I would be making a grave theological mistake.
My story cannot be told without the Holy Spirit.
My story is not ‘my’ story (nor is your story ‘your’ story).
My story is the Holy Spirit’s story, or rather my story is the story of how the Holy Spirit caught me up in God’s story.
My story (and your story) is not the story of how I came to faith. My story is the story how the Spirit, through God’s gracious initiative, made me a participant in the story of salvation.
That we so often do not tell our stories this way reflects the extent to which we minimize the work of the Spirt, the only result of which would be a privatized faith.
I wonder, how would you tell your own story?
Would you be able to?
3 Freaks and Geeks
These days when I look in the mirror I usually see this.
A cultivated look of masculine cool, rugged but refined, the man men want to be and women just want…Indeed I like to think, albeit subconsciously, that thus has always been so.
But then I come across this picture, floating out there in the virtual universe like an indictment or, if you prefer, like the voice of a 7th grade girl determined to rupture my shaky self-image. Here then is a picture of me from some year of my high school experience, can’t recall which year nor can I recall which production this was. But here is the cast and- in true Where’s Waldo form- somewhere in there is yours truly.
Try to find me. Before I take this post down 🙂
0 10 Problems with Left Behind Theology
Yesterday, as President Obama was sworn in, the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir sang ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.’
As catchy as is the chorus of that hymn, I’ve never enjoyed singing it in church. Whenever you conflate the Second Coming of Christ with the justness of an American war you’re on dangerous theological ground. Anyways, more on that later.
This weekend we conclude our Razing Hell sermon series talking about the Second Coming. Perhaps no other Christian doctrine is so fraught with popular misunderstandings and willful, fanciful misinterpretations of scripture.
You know what I’m talking about: guys like Jack Van Impe making dire predictions about current events, identifying politicos like Obama with the Antichrist, interpreting Middle East Politics according to the coded schema of Revelation. And don’t even get started on the rapture.
These ways of reading Revelation, popularized in our own day by the Left Behind novels, are actually quite new and modern ways of interpreting, beginning with the rise of the modernist movement in the late 19th century.
These readings distort John’s original hope. Typically, such movements join visions of cosmic, final warfare with political action, divide the world into good and evil, demonize all who disagree, and are convinced of the rightness and righteousness of their view.
Such groups differ in the extremity of virulence of their views but all of them see present world events as fulfillments of biblical descriptions of the end time and as heading, by God’s predetermination, toward the cataclysmic end of history.
There’s a reason this way of reading Revelation is appealing. It gives gravity to the events of our own day. It makes scripture ‘exciting’ in that Revelation becomes like a treasure map or crystal ball, and it raises the stakes of my own individual belief.
As you’ve probably been exposed to before, contemporary apocalypticism predicts an exact timetable leading to the awful end ordained by God and predicted in the bible. It sees the beginning of this end ushered in by the modern state of Israel and it will culminate in a final battle of Armageddon. The faithful, however, will be ‘raptured’ to the Lord, escaping the tribulations and destruction. Evangelization before the final destruction will be done by 144,000 converted Jews. This will happen in our lifetime, according to such groups.
The problems with this way of reading Revelation are many and it departs from an authentic hope in Jesus Christ in significant ways:
1) It depends on and feeds fear.
2) The ‘rapture’ is based on a solitary biblical text (1 Thessalonians 4.17).
3) The notion that the faithful will be exempt from tribulation or suffering is alien to the Gospels.
4) It elevates the power of Evil to almost godlike proportions.
5) The timetable is deterministic. God’s set it in stone from the beginning. There’s nothing we can do to change history nor does our faithfulness effect it.
6) The world is divided between believers and infidels.
7) Jews are not sisters and brothers in the covenant nor are they people whom God loves and we must love too. Israel is important only for the role it plays in a timetable towards Armageddon.
8) Reconciliation of sinners is impossible.
9) The real object of hope is not Christ or New Creation but rapture.
10) Most importantly, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus are secondary, in this view, to the apocalypse. The Cross is less decisive than a final, cosmic war. Armageddon is more significant than Golgotha. Christ’s work on the cross was not ‘finished.’ Moreover, the Cross is no longer the full disclosure of God’s character or nature. In the Cross, we see a God who suffers wrath in our place: ‘while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.’ By contrast, contemporary apocalypticism sees it as ‘while we were still sinners Christ smote us in a cosmic battle.’ What emerges from this view is an almost schizophrenic Jesus.
2 You Don’t Have a Soul
No, that’s not an accusation someone threw my way though, no doubt, the thought’s occurred to some of you.
It is instead a statement of (theological) fact as attested in scripture.
When it comes to sifting out the biblical view of eternal life from the quasi-pagan notions that have encroached upon popular Christianity, I think a critical difficult comes from our use of the word ‘soul.’
Most believers and non-believers simply assume we come equipped with an immortal, eternal soul that then leaves our material bodies when we die. But if we have an immortal soul that proceeds from our mortal bodies when we die then we’re also implying that we have an immortal soul that precedes our mortal bodies. We would then pre-exist our incarnate form in the way the Son is preexistent with the Father.
That might sound romantic (a la Cloud Atlas).
It’s also heresy.
Mortality is a gift freely given by God’s grace (Genesis 1).
Immortality is a gift of God graciously offered in Christ (1 Tim 6.16). To suggest we have an immortal soul that precedes our material existence is to argue that our createdness is not gift but necessary.
Do we have a relation to God that exceeds or transcends categories of space, time and matter? Absolutely. Does our sharing in the presence of God exceed or transcend what we experience in our material, bodily selves? Again, absolutely. Do we have continuity with God even after our material existence is disconnected. Yep.
But do we have something within us that is eternal, immortal that precedes and proceeds from us is thus detachable from the rest of our created self?
No.
This is what distinguishes Christianity- and Judaism- from the Platonism and pop-Eastern religions that abound in Western culture.
Chad Pecknold, a theologian and neighbor, articulated it on my FB this way:
“We don’t have souls, we are souls. The problem with reincarnation — which is an idea that Christians should firmly reject — is that is lacks a proper teleology for the soul which has been ripped from the body at death. Rather than a cyclical return of the soul to various forms, Christian faith confesses the resurrection of the flesh only in the presence of Christ, who is the end to which our humanity is rightly ordered: body and soul.”
In other words, if Christ is the image of the invisible God in whose image we’re made then our ultimate End, in whatever mysterious, ineffable way it happens, is to restored in his likeness- body and soul, spirit and matter.
0 Feeling Like A Grinch This Christmas Season
Here’s a wonderfully written Christmas meditation from Jaime, the Worst Missionary.
The whole “holiday season” thing has me on edge.
I’m tired, I’m broke, I’m a terrible gift giver, I’m a super procrastinator, and when you add all that together, you get a stomach ache and a bad attitude and a bunch of people calling you a grinch (which we all know is just a polite way to tell someone they’re an a-hole).
But I can’t help it. I just feel like the commercialization of Christmas has stolen too much, and now it’s a mere shell of what it ought to be. It makes me squirm when people say, “Jesus is the reason for the season!”
I want to say, “It’s hardly fair to blame this mess on Jesus.”
0 Rosemary Ricotta Donuts
0 An Olympian Faith
As much as I like the NY Times, it’s not usually overly friendly- or comprehending is a better word- towards Christianity.
Here, however, is a great article on Gabby and the faith. Click here to read…