Looking Back Over the Last Year

It has now been a year since we re-formed outside of the WCG. First came the sadness because the organization we had all been a part of for so long did not want to be seen with us any more. Then came the realization that we were now free of restrictions placed on us for so long.

We saw it coming a long time ago. The clues were there early on: Scare-mongering about the possible death of our church if we didn’t change radically. The marginalization began long before the Saturday service became the minority in the congregation. First it was supposedly about making the church friendly toward new people. Then it was about getting rid of “Old Testament legalism.” Then it was about “removing Old Testament festivals from the ’storefront’.” It was blatantly obvious that “finding our level” in that organization meant having no level at all.

Yet along the way, we also experienced the same changes as WCG did. We shared many experiences, both positive and negative. We are continuing to learn from these experiences, too.

We are learning that God works in our individual lives. Because of this, we need to be open to one another’s calling and gifts. He works in mysterious, diverse and wondrous ways in every person He has called. We need to hear each other, especially when we don’t want to. The lone dissenting voice might be the one that prevents us from doing stupid things in God’s name. We are (we hope) learning to promote each one’s work without judging each other.

We are learning that God works in our community life. We have a common bond of memories and a community life that evolved together over time. Our community works hard to come to operate on a consensus basis on principles, practices and activities. It is less difficult than one might think.

We are also learning that the work and gifts of individuals must be balanced by the needs and work of the church, and vice versa. There is just as much harm if the fellowship ignores the individual as there is if the individual ignores the needs of the fellowship. It is one thing to voluntarily offer one’s work and will for the good of the group, and another thing entirely for a group to enforce submission. Encouraging the group to work in certain ways is also very different from demanding compliance by the group to an individual’s whims.

Our new beginning allows us to take our time growing into what God would have us be. We can reject a current management approach would have us attempt to “get the wrong people off the bus and get the right ones on it.” In the church, there are no “wrong” people – just redeemed people.

We don’t know yet what role God will have for us in the future. Many different kinds of gathering can be formed by our Creator. God even sometimes lets His people wander in the wilderness for a while. We count on Him to be our cloud of protection by day and fire of warmth and light by night. Jesus’ original disciples were gathered together on that fateful Pentecost day, yet the tongues of fire danced on them individually. We therefore count on His “individual, yet together” guidance as we learn to be what Jesus would have us be through His Spirit. We travel, as Evelyn’s mother taught her, “backwards never, forwards ever.” This does not mean that we must forget (or worse, try to hide) what we have been. You cannot learn from mistakes you wilfully forget.

In some ways, it seems easy to follow a pattern someone else has made. Many churches want to be cookie-cutter copies of certain popular mega-churches, for instance. Almost all of them fail. They try too hard to be what they are not. We are thankful that WCG helped us break out of patterns of a dying church – both by its former persuasive Old Testament law-keeping and its worldview-jarring subsequent embracing of grace over law. Both have helped us see the negative consequences of black-and-white thinking and cookie-cutter Christianity.

It takes an Artist to form new patterns that nobody else has made. We will trust the Artist who made the heavens and the earth to form us into a new pattern, whether it be a tapestry, a sculpture or a landscape. We can take the joy that God has given us in patterns He has already created, such as biblical festivals, and forge new celebrations of Jesus and His salvation around them.

We can also reject the need to try to force the way we express our joy on those who do not see what we see in those ancient patterns. (To the legalist, all things that are “not required” are are a burden. To the free, all things “not required” may be freely chosen. For instance, Christmas and Easter are no more “required for salvation” than Passover and the Festival of Tabernacles, yet almost no Christians seem to have a problem with the former two observances. Why should it be any different for the latter two?)

We think there are many ways to be Christian that can add depth and diversity to the church overall. If God clothes the grass of the field with a bewildering array of coloured flowers, why should we accept a bland, one-size-fits-all format of Christian personal and community life?

[Note: We are not talking here about condoning behaviour identified as sin by Jesus Christ. We are talking about human rules that attempt to give us control over other Christians.]

This year has been a good trip. There are many good things to remember from both our distant and recent past to forge/weave/mix together into what we will become as Jesus works in and through us.

Walking In Jesus’ Meekness

The first step for Larry McCall in defining walking like Jesus did comes from last week’s passage: Matt.11:29, where Jesus describes Himself as “meek” and “lowly in heart.” Meekness is generally regarded as a sort of self-effacing and submissive demeanour. It is also generally seen as a negative thing: “weak, powerless, ineffectual, inadequate, chickenhearted, lily-livered and lacking courage.”

One might be forgiven for finding that idea difficult to reconcile with a Jesus who threw out the moneychangers from the Temple area and who publicly denounced the religious leaders of His day. (Not to mention claims to being more important than Abraham or the Temple.) What did Jesus mean about being “meek”?

We were taught in our church background that it means “teachableness,” and there is a great deal of truth in that. Yet that is not all. Christians often see it as being “mild, patient, longsuffering.” (And they would be correct!) Jesus was able to take all of the abuse heaped upon Him, including a hideous death, in a patient and even forgiving manner. Is this really weakness?

Or is it strength? What does it take to take all the punishment that the world can dish out, including death, and come out of it with a forgiving and redeeming attitude? (Not to mention, ALIVE!) Surely these take a toughness that is beyond normal human ken, a strength that is literally superhuman.

But it is not just tough. It is also very tender, such as in Isaiah 42:1-4 (applied to Jesus in Matt. 12:15-21). The reed symbolizes a weak, fragile person, whom Jesus treats with gentleness and tender care. He strengthens the weak by treating them with respect and lifting them to a higher plane. The smoking flax candle wick emits a smoke that irritates the eyes and lungs, symbolizing an annoying and immature person. Jesus does not rudely snuff out that person’s last spark of hope or helpfulness. He doesn’t “stomp on weak, obnoxious, problematic, immature people!”

A Bible lesson online offers this analogy: “A horse, before it is tamed, is strong but, being wild, is useless to man. After being tamed it does not lose its strength. It just becomes tamed, controlled, and useful. A good definition for meekness is ‘strength under control.’”

The balance between tough and tender seems to be the line between taking abuse heaped on the self and refusing to stand silently by as abuse is heaped on the weak and helpless. Jesus helped the weak and spoke up when the strong placed heavy burdens on the weak. Yet when it was his turn to be abused, He turned the other cheek. Clearly this is strength, not weakness.

The question for us is whether we will allow ourselves to be tamed and render ourselves useful to God. (We are fortunate that, unlike the horse, He supplies our strength through the Holy Spirit, too.) Can we learn to return good for evil? To practice gentleness and equality in our dealings with the poor, weak and oppressed around us? Can we learn to do what we can lift others out of helplessness and invite them into the true freedom of the children of God?

Walking As Jesus Walked: Introduction

This week’s session was inspired by the introduction of Larry E. McCall’s Walking Like Jesus Did: Studies in the Character of Christ (Winona Lake, IN: BMH Books, 2005). All Scripture quotations in this post are from the New King James Version.

Many Christians are familiar with the statement in Matt. 11:28, “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” We probably think of this in terms of laying our burdens down before Jesus in prayer, and being given rest from them.

What most of us don’t do is read the next two verses, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” We may forget that there is, in fact, a yoke. A horse that has its yoke exchanged for another one probably does not assume that the workday is over – and neither should we.

Jesus seems to want us both to learn from Him and to take responsibility for the mission He has called us to. The Apostle John seems to say the same thing in 1 John 2:5-6. There seems to be a sense in which we learn from Jesus’ teaching as well as from His actions.

Romans 8:28 is another often-loved passage that talks about how “all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” The next verse talks about that purpose. “For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son.” It seems that the Apostle Paul wanted people to make sense of Jesus’ example for believers by appealing to believers’ sense of their ultimate calling of “conformity” to the “image” of Christ (Romans 8:29-30).

Human beings were originally made “in the image of God” (Gen. 1:26). Yet in Adam and Eve we lost our dominion (Heb. 2:6-9). Hebrews 2 describes what should have been, yet is no longer – except that in Jesus Himself humanity regains what has been lost. This makes perfect sense if Jesus is indeed the very image of God Himself as attested in places such as Col. 1:15, Heb. 1:3 and 2 Cor. 4:4. In order for human beings to be in God’s image we must be conformed to Jesus Christ’s image.

In fact, it makes even more sense if we go on to Heb. 2:10, where the author notes that Jesus is the one “for whom are all things and by whom are all things.” If all things are for Him, it is not much of a stretch to suppose that it had been “predestined” for Him to become human and live among us whether or not we needed salvation. In other words, we were always intended to be in Christ’s image. Being conformed to Jesus Christ’s image is, in effect both our calling and our destiny (1 Cor. 15:45). (For instance, if redemption is the family business, what role do we have now that we are part of the family?)

This engendered a great deal of discussion within our group about how much of this calling comes about entirely by grace and what, if anything, we must do to make our calling and election sure. If Jesus refers to His calling for us as a “yoke” it may behove us well to take this lighter burden and continue working. Next time we’ll begin examining some aspects of Jesus’ teaching and work to see if we can understand more fully how to “walk just as He walked.”

Romans 2 and a Law Written on Our Hearts

It has been a long time since my last post on this site. Some heating problems in our apartment building spiralled out of control, leading to a sudden move just before Christmas and a resulting long disconnection from phone and internet. This post is from this week’s Wascana Fellowship service. The others leading up to this week will be posted in random order as I have time.

I owe a great deal to Randy Olds for putting N.T. Wright’s website on his blogroll and reacquainting me with this Anglican Bishop and New Testament scholar’s work. He has done a lot of original work reconstructing the world of the Apostle Paul and helping readers understand Paul’s motivation (both prior and after conversion) as well as getting a grip on Paul’s teaching vis-à-vis law and grace. The technical details about what follows on this post are available for reference on Wright’s web page about Romans 2.

Romans 2:9-29 follows a chapter that highlights how nobody in the world can escape God’s judgment, whether Jew or Gentile. All are berated for not following God’s will and instructions. In v. 9-11 Paul talks about how Jew and Gentile are ultimately judged by their actions, whether good or evil. Verses 12 & 13 go on to make a distinction between Jews, who are judged by Torah, and Gentiles, who are judged apart from Torah. The ones who are righteous or justified are the doers, not the hearers of the law. (It turns out that at the time, there were pretty much no doers, just a lot of hearers.)

Somehow, in v. 14-16, there seem to be some Gentiles who in some undefined way are keeping Torah, and whose consciences seem to be confirming their need to “demonstrate” its “work” (v. 15) as if it is written in their hearts. In some way, their conscience agrees with the law, yet there is an ambivalent feeling about whether they will be justified or condemned by the law when Jesus returns.

Wright suggests that these are Christian Gentiles, rather than non-Christian Gentiles who just happen to instinctively obey the law by being good people. In many places Paul indicates that he expects Christians to obey what the law says. (See Wright’s paper for details, though he offers Rom. 13:8 and 1 Cor. 7:19 as examples.)

Perhaps the best way to see these Christian Gentiles as “keeping” the law is to note what Torah was intended to accomplish. For instance, in Deut. 4:5-8 obedience to Torah was intended to show God’s wisdom and grace to “the nations.” It would have identified the Israelites as a people with two wonderful and awesome things on their side:

1) An unusual wisdom and discernment of the right things to do – and how to do them right – in a world that had lost its way.
2) An amazing closeness to a God who would hear and answer them – a God who keeps His promises and His covenant with them.

The intended effect is that Israel would draw Gentiles to God as a light to the nations because of the wisdom and graciousness of His own special people.

It becomes likely that, for Paul, the witness of Christians about the Lordship of Jesus in repentance, baptism and the forgiveness of sins – coupled with a completely regenerated lifestyle (holiness directly from the Holy Spirit as lived out in a gracious and sin-overcoming way of life) – was the way that Gentile Christians were accomplishing the intended effect of Torah. They were drawing “the nations” to Jesus as Lord the way Israel was supposed to have been drawing them to Yahweh.

In other words, Gentile Christians (along with their Jewish brethren, of course) were faithful to the vocation of the Covenant People. They were “keeping” the law by giving God the fruit that the law was intended to provide – Gentile converts.

This general sketch brought out many comments about the ambivalent feelings about Torah observance as our former denomination changed its ways. We had never felt the need to circumcise our males, and were therefore never Torah-observant in the sense that that Paul spoke against.

[As an aside, Once members of our group realized that we had never been Torah-observant in the first place, we agreed among ourselves that appearing Jewish/Hebrew was not a faith-requirement. On the other hand, our new understanding did not logically require us to abandon every custom that appeared to be based in the Old Testament, either. It is this latter understanding that ended up creating the differences that led to our leaving our former denomination. Being required to hide our meeting times of Saturdays and Old Testament Festivals from the general public because the denomination wanted to make a show of freeing itself from OT law did not strike us as the healthiest way for the church to go forward in “freedom.”]

Like the Christian Gentiles Dr. Wright speaks of, we at Wascana Fellowship hold the Torah in high regard. Unlike them, many of us observe portions of it that are generally regarded as Jewish boundary-markers. Many of us avoid pork products and many of us keep sabbath from Friday sunset to Saturday sunset. Some of us do not do either of those things, but prefer to meet on Saturday because of Jesus’ example (he was Jewish, after all). Either way, it’s not about how well we keep the law, but rather how well we serve one another.

The key for people like us is to remember that the intended “work of the law” is the harvest of followers of Jesus Christ. It is one thing to be counter cultural, but another thing entirely to be so sour about the culture about you that you cannot bring people to Jesus. The key is not to set up “the law” as a set of restrictions. Many denominations have managed to set up their own versions of church law (often based on fanatically narrow interpretations of the 10 Commandments) as standards of membership. They can suck the life out of the believer by joylessly regulating every aspect of life (such as the original WCG’s strict law-keeping police: the pastorate).

Most members of our group tried not to offend family and friends regarding their beliefs during their days in WCG. They recall the most avid purveyors of the attitude of “letting them have it” were in fact their ministers. I suggested that the ministry may have been taught that attitude in order to keep members separate from their families and friends. Most Wascana members were more charitable about this than me. Some think that was because they were called so young into ministry and never had a chance to mature. They have a point. It does seem to be younger people who get caught up in idealism about the purity of their beliefs. Some may well still have been young and immature enough to have pushed through well-meaning (though frequently ill-conceived) reforms in ways that alienated current members.

Most of us in Wascana Fellowship find that our own family and friends respect our slightly out-of-the-ordinary customs. We are learning to speak of them in ways that convey God’s love rather than our own coercion or guilt-tripping. In speaking of them at seminary I was pleasantly surprised to find two fellow students who love the Old Testament festivals and observe them with groups of Torah-observant Jewish Christians in two different Canadian communities. There seems to be increasing respect for ancient modalities of worship in the society around us. We need neither to be ashamed nor haughty about worshipping in various Old Testament modes.

If the Holy Spirit has written the law in our hearts, why should we be ashamed of its spoken/written version? We suspect that Christians, whether Jew or Gentile, should instead have a warm place in our hearts for the Old Testament, its stories, and its laws. These are testimonies and stories that stand at the heart of our faith in Jesus Christ, the one and only Son of God, our Lord and Saviour. We may need to remember that He is the promised Jewish Messiah who saves both Jew and Gentile as promised to Abraham, the father of the faithful. Paul makes all of these points in this Letter to the Romans, in ways intended to keep both Jewish and Gentile believers on their best behaviour with one another. Maybe we can learn something from that, too, while we are trying to learn Paul’s theology.

A Refreshing Revelation – Part 19

Come to the Feast!

I found it useful to compare at least three prior Biblical images with Revelation 19. The first, in Joshua 5:13-15, refers to the time when Joshua was about to lead the Israelites into battle to conquer the Promised land for the Israelites. He is met at his camp by a man with a drawn sword. When challenged about being either friend or foe, he responds that he is the captain of the armies of God (what we would now call a General), and that he is now standing on holy ground. The statement about standing on holy ground is the same as what God had told Moses from the burning bush. Joshua responds by worshipping and asking what he can do to serve Him. The drawn sword represents God’s intent to conquer on behalf of His chosen people as He had promised them centuries before.

The second and third Biblical images are related to each other and are found in Daniel 2:31-45 and Matthew 21:33-46. In Daniel, God has promised to destroy the idol representing Gentile world-dominating empires by crushing its last incarnation with a “stone not cut out by human hands.” This stone would crush the Gentile empires to a powder, then fill up the whole world with God’s Kingdom. In Matthew Jesus is essentially telling the Jewish religious and civil rulers that their rule would also come to a similar end by similar means. Each of these prophetic words suggest that only Jesus’ true followers, whether Israelite or Gentile, will have a place in the new order to come. Matthew 22 follows, beginning with the parable of the great wedding supper invitation.

Here is an irony. Nebuchadnezzar’s response is to worship the messenger. The response of the Jewish leaders is to try to kill the messenger. John ends up trying to do the same as Nebuchadnezzar in Rev. 19:10 after he hears a similar proclamation.

The sword of the rider of the white horse in Revelation 19:11-16, while seemingly coming out of his mouth, is certainly not in a sheath. It gives “an edge,” as it were, to the proclamations of the destruction of Babylon the Great in Revelation 18. As the Commander of the Armies of the Lord, Jesus has come to conquer on behalf of His saints to establish them in peace and security in a world He has reclaimed for His own proper abode. Not even the gates of hell are going to be able to stand up against this Conqueror!

The Beast and False Prophet are cast into the lake of fire, and all of their minions are killed by the sword of the rider of the white horse. Interestingly enough, He seems to do all the fighting, just like in the days of Jehoshaphat and Hezekiah in ancient Israel. His robe is dipped in blood, but His armies wear the “armour” of simple white linen.

Revelation 19 begins with two great responses by the heavenly armies to the announcements of the destruction of Babylon the Great. The first, 19:1-4 is about God’s justice in avenging His martyred saints. The second, 19:6-9 is a praise proclamation with a choral-like response of the multitude that becomes an invitation to join the great marriage supper of the Lamb to the Bride who has made herself ready (the saints as a whole body of believers). (The marriage imagery is straight out of prophetic commentary about Israel’s covenant-relationship with Yahweh, such as Jer. 31:32 and Is. 54:5) Like the parable in Matt. 22, those rejected by the world are the “guests of honour” (actually, the bride) at the wedding.

Meeting a far different fate, however, are Jesus’ adversaries – those who murder and persecute Jesus’ emissaries. John ironically invites the birds of the air to attend “the great supper of God.” (19:17-18) Those who worshipped the Beast and its image are “invited” for the main course.

So, for the original readers of this letter in the seven churches John once again offers the choice. The invitation to the Banquet is out. Who are you going to be? Bride or buffet?

What about us, today?