For a while now one of the big critiques of the emerging church from scholars has been that it lacks a robust or thoughtful engagement with Paul.  And let’s be honest, as postmoderns we really do gravitate towards the narratives of Jesus more than the somewhat more abstract theology of Paul.  In my own ministry I probably preach/teach on Jesus over Paul something like 15:1.  Not that a heavy emphasis on Jesus is bad!  Far from it.  I think we’re long overdue on returning to the teachings of Jesus in many of our churches!  Looking back I would guess that I got a lot more Paul than I did Jesus growing up in the churches where my faith was really formed.  But that being said, we’ve probably let the pendulum swing pretty far towards the gospels and have neglected the writings of Paul… at least I know I have.

I don’t see this as a Jesus vs. Paul kind of thing, but you definitely get different things from each of them (even if Paul is constantly pointing to Jesus).  Maybe it’s just a preference for the concreteness of narrative over the abstractness of Paul’s letters, but as a movement we’d do well to really engage Paul and dig into his Epistles.  To ignore his letters or to teach from them so rarely does a disservice to our people and to our own understanding of the faith.

Some emerging church leaders are taking this critique seriously and along with my Alma Matter they have put together a conference on the emerging church and Paul.  It will be held at a well known church in the emerging church landscape, Jacob’s Well.  Can I just say, way to go NTS!  I’m proud of us.

This is also the 2008 Emegent Village Theological Conversation.  Not to mention that my wife, Kara, will be moderating one of the sessions!  So if you’re in Kansas City next week, check it out, it’s not too late to register.

Brian McLaren recently posted his thoughts on voting, saying that the most important thing to him was what kind of a framing story each candidate lived by. In his book Everything Must Change, McLaren talks about the importance of the kind of framing story we live by. There are a few stories that keep popping up in human culture. Here are a few of the stories Brian mentioned when he visited the Bronx this year…

1. Domaination Story - legitimizes the powers that be.
2. Revolution Story - explains the situation for the oppressed and stirs them to revolt.
3. Scapegoating Story - explains the situation by blaming an outside party.
4. Withdrawl Story - justifies non-participation and isolation, rejecting other stories.

He said that in every one of these cases, Jesus offers a different story. For the domination story, Jesus subsitutes the story of humility and serving others. For the revolution story, Jesus subsitutes reconciliation and loving your enemies. For the scapegoating story Jesus subsitutes taking our own sin more seriously than the others. For the withdrawl story Jesus subsitutes incarnational love that isn’t afraid to get it’s hands dirty.

In Brian’s post he suggests that John McCain is still living by an us/them story, much like the story of Domaination and the Scaptegoating story. In contrast Barack Obama is living out of a reconciliation narrative. Interesting thoughts. Check out the post, I think it’s one of the most thoughtful endorsements of a candidate I’ve encountered.

So I’ve been on quite the blogging hiatus lately. I’ve been traveling quite a bit this summer, to the streets of Philadelphia with some amazing people for a weekend mission, to Kansas City for some youth ministry observation/spiritual retreat and of course to Malawi, Africa. Other than the travel I’ve tried to take it easy this summer and take some Sabbath before youth group kicks off again this Fall. I know that many of you have been waiting for me to blog about Africa, and believe me that’s coming. I want to do it justice and be thoughtful in how I write those posts… so be patient, they’re coming.

But that brings me to tonight’s post. One thing I inherited from my parents was an intense interest in politics. And despite my intention to abstain from this election, I’m still watching a lot of political coverage and am interested in the race. Last week Kara and I watched Barack Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention and were very impressed by it. Barack’s vision for America is one that seems healthy for the country and fair to “the least of these.” The last part of the speech where he spoke about moving beyond the partisan extremisim and towards a shared common purpose was SO GOOD.

And as a political junkie and one who is committed to being fair and non-partisan I tuned in tonight to see Sara Palin and others speak. I thought Huckabee’s speech was fair and decent for the most part. Huckabee has been consistent and dependable in not getting into dirty politics and I respect him for it. Romney and Giuliani were another story. I felt like their speeches were the kind of dishonest partisan speeches that are more demonizing the opponent than speaking about what they’re for… and I’m so tired of it. I’m tired of it when Democrats do it and I’m tired of it when Republicans do it. Because Romney’s speech came first it’s the one that I was the most upset with so I thought I’d just vent publicly a bit tonight. I’m including a few of his most troubling quotes and my responses to them here. His speech is in red and is indented.

Click here for the full text of Mitt Romney’s speech.

Last week, the Democrats talked about change. But let me ask you - what do you think Washington is right now, liberal or conservative? Is a Supreme Court liberal or conservative that awards Guantanamo terrorists with constitution rights? It’s liberal!

The people in Guantanamo Bay are HUMAN BEINGS. Human beings, who like Americans deserve the right to habeas corpus. How can we ever tell if those human beings are terrorists if they are never charged and are never allowed to see the evidence against them? Is Mitt Romney against trying suspected criminals? Does Mitt Romney think you are guilty as long as George W. Bush thinks you’re guilty? Does he think that if you aren’t born in the United States you should not be “rewarded” with basic human rights?

And I’ll say this, YES, it IS liberal to extend all human beings basic human rights. It IS liberal to try suspected criminals instead of capturing people from all over the world and then locking them up indefinitely. Those are liberal principles. Principles the United States was founded on.

Is a Congress liberal or conservative that stops nuclear power plants and offshore drilling, making us more and more dependent on Middle East tyrants? It’s liberal!

It seems to me that investing in renewable, green energy is the best way to break the addiction to foreign oil… and OIL in general. I don’t see Republicans wanting to break the addiction to oil, just the addiction to oil from other places. Drilling offshore will only bring that oil online in TEN YEARS. It’s a commitment to a dying form of energy in a time when we need to be moving towards the future of energy.

Is government spending - excluding inflation - liberal or conservative if it doubles since 1980? It’s liberal!

Does spending billions and billions on invading foreign countries factor into government spending? Does spending 50% of the nation’s budget on the military factor into government spending? Let’s just be honest about the ENTIRE budget. If we weren’t spending billions on new ways to kill people we’d have enough to pay teachers more AND lower taxes.

We need change all right - change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington! We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington - throw out the big government liberals and elect John McCain!

Who has been running all three branches of the government for 6 of the past 8 years? Hmmm, it’s conservatives. Now they only have 2 of the 3 branches of government and they’re complaining as if they were in exile!

They think we have the biggest and strongest economy in the world because of our government. They’re wrong. America is strong because of the ingenuity and entrepreneurship and hard work of the American people.

Straw man argument. I’ve never heard a Democrat say that, and Mitt Romney is not a mind-reader.

We strengthen our people and our economy when we preserve and promote opportunity. Opportunity is what lets hope become reality.

Yes, when it’s promoting opportunity for citizens. We don’t need any more “opportunity” for Exxon.

Opportunity expands when there is excellence and choice in education, when taxes are lowered, when every citizen has affordable, portable health insurance, and when constitutional freedoms are preserved.

Constitutional freedoms? Like the ones Bush has trampled on?

Liberals would replace opportunity with dependency on government largesse. They grow government and raise taxes to put more people on Medicaid, to take work requirements out of welfare, and to grow the ranks of those who pay no taxes at all. Dependency is death to initiative, risk-taking and opportunity.

Straw man argument again. Obama has worked on programs moving people from welfare to work.

It’s time for the party of big ideas, not the party of Big Brother!

Big Brother? Like wire-tapping? Sounds like Bush to me.

Did you hear any Democrats talk last week about the threat from radical, violent Jihad? Republicans believe that there is good and evil in the world. Ronald Reagan called-out the Evil Empire. George Bush labeled the terror-sponsor states the Axis of Evil.

Democrats talk about “fighting terrorism” but no, they don’t use your unhelpful and ever evolving scare-tactic labels. Implying that Democrats don’t talk about fighting terrorism just because they don’t say “radical violent Jihad” or “extremist militant Islam” or whatever is misleading.

And at Saddleback, after Barack Obama dodged and ducked every direct question, John McCain hit the nail on the head: radical violent Islam is evil, and he will defeat it!

Dodging and ducking every direct question? More like being thoughtful and reflective… and humble. And seriously, John McCain is going to defeat a religious movement? Are you kidding me?

Republicans prefer straight talk to politically correct talk!

Then why does the Defense Department call dead Iraqi civilians “collateral damage?”

To this we are all dedicated and I firmly believe, by the providence of the Almighty, that we will succeed.

President McCain and Vice President Palin will keep America as it has always been - the hope of the world.

In the span of two sen
tences Romney invokes God and then says that America, this country at this point in time is the “hope of the world.” (Which by the way Obama says too) That is just so wrong. The Kingdom of God is the hope of the world, and the Kingdom of God is NOT the United States. When Romney and others say this, they’re worshiping themselves.

All this devotion to America and the flag is in effect a way to worship ourselves and worship what we stand for. It’s idolatry.

It’s election year and once again I find myself rethinking what it means to be Christian in the midst of presidential campaign season. But before I get into what I’m currently thinking I’d like to take just a moment to rewind and give you a quick history of me, my faith and presidential elections. I realize it’s a short history but nonetheless…

2000
This was the first presidential election I was old enough to vote in. In the primary I was rooting for Dan Quayle and in the general election I voted for George W. Bush. And let me tell you, I voted FOR Bush. It wasn’t an ambivalent vote or a “lesser of two evils” vote. I believed in George W. Bush. I thought he was going to be great. I had a big cut out of his head taped down in my CD case along with other pop-culture paraphernalia. While I never saw Al Gore as “unChristian” (he’s Baptist) I definitely understood Bush to be the “Christian candidate.” This was my freshman year in college and I was still deeply influenced by a fundamentalist understanding of Christianity. As I walked through the halls of the Christian ministry department at my college I saw that one professors had a Clinton/Gore bumper sticker on their door. It shocked me. I had never encountered a Christian who was “pro-Clinton.” Another professor had a sign in his office saying “Jesus was a Liberal.” At this point in my faith and in my college carreer such moments were logic-defying for me.

2004
My second go-round found me much less optimistic than before. My views on politics had changed drastically thanks to Christians like John Howard Yoder - a Mennonite pacifist, Stanley Hauerwas - a Methodist theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer - an underground Lutheran pastor in Nazi Germany… and many others. I no longer had any “hope” in the American government, I was becoming more and more enchanted with God’s kingdom and God’s restoration of creation and at the same time less and less impressed with the American kingdom and it’s attempts at fixing the world by dominating it. During this election the driving issues for me were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I shrugged my shoulders and voted for Kerry. I didn’t expect Kerry to buy into God’s radical plan of change and shalom but he was the “lesser of two evils” from my perspective. So I half-heartedly tossed a vote his way in 2004. Just FYI, Nader wasn’t on the ballot in Missouri.

2008
Here we go again, round three. As I’ve posted before, I don’t plan on voting this time. Partly because I was getting really excited about Obama. I kept finding myself really hoping he would become president and bring some fundamental change to our country. It scared me. It was easy to get caught up in the hoopla of Obamania… and lose sight who I really believe will bring fundamental change in the world. Thanks to Obama’s subtle shift to the right, I’ve become much more skeptical of him and am frustrated with enough that I no longer have such temptations. This kind of detached skepticism is where I would want to be as a Christian in the voting process, but at least this year I’m still planning to give away my vote to someone who is voiceless.

More and more I’m beginning to appreciate the political perspective of people like Dr. Martin Luther King. His idea was, don’t endorse anybody. Endorsing a candidate just makes it easy for them to count you as a part of their base and then move on and ignore you. Instead, King advocated inviting politicians on both sides to endorse your movement, your platform and to do so all through the campaign and on through their time in office. I think this way guards us from the danger of getting yanked around by parties and also guards us against buying into their agenda as a compromise for the influence we think we have.

Shane Claiborne has a great article about this way of engaging politics as a Christian called “Advise Everyone, Endorse No One.“ Check it out here. I think Shane’s take on it is a healthy blend of King’s emphasis on being influential without being co-opted and with a robust skepticism of American politics in light of the Kingdom of God.

Zack Exley over at Revolution in Jesusland recently posted about McLaren and the Matthew 25 Network’s endorsement of Obama. While I’m not one to champion Christian groups endorsing (I like Shane’s approach better), this is the way to do it if they must.

Over the years I’ve encountered several metaphors for sin and how it separates us from God. Here are two common ones.

Sin is a giant chasm that separates us from God.
Sin is a giant wall that separates us from God.

These metaphors are usually accompanied by commentary about how “God can’t handle sin,” or how “God just can’t be in the same room as sin.” While I understand the language of separation when talking about sin, I’m finding these metaphors really unhelpful because they limit God, and inevitably make sin the stronger force. I don’t think any of us want to say that, but these metaphors imply that. As if to say that sin is something you could use to ward off God, or that sin is God’s Kryptonite. I think what we really want to be saying is that sin cannot handle God, or that sin couldn’t bear to be in the same room as God, etc.

In light of that, help me to think of some new metaphors that would speak of the separation caused by sin but still have a robust theology of God’s dominion. What metaphor would you use?

Brian McLaren was in town last night speaking about his new book Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope. It was an excellent presentation, one of those “big idea” kinds of presentations that just build and build. I thought he did a great job of packing all of these concepts into a 1 1/2 hour presentation. While I felt like I was keeping up with him, tracking with where he was going, I still left with my head spinning. There was just so much that he covered and the implications are innumerable.

Later in the evening Brian joined us at the Princeton Emergent Cohort and we were also joined by the North Jersey Emergent Cohort. We packed 20+ people into a small corner of the Yankee Doodle Tap Room. It was a great time of informal conversation and we picked Brian’s brain about Narrative Theology, Stanley Hauerwas, Radical Orthodoxy, global economies and local economic practices, Wendell Barry, Plato, eschatology, N.T. Wright, Andrew Perriman, terrorism, the presidential election, pastoral care, dealing with conflict in the local church and the writing process. It was a great conversation with a great thinker.

I’ve loved all of Brian’s books that I’ve read so far but I had Everything Must Change on the backburner. No more. After last night I want to dig deeper into what Brian’s getting at in this book because I think it’s going to be incredibly important for the church as we quit playing “intramural games” as he put it, and start addressing how the Gospel frames and narrates our lives in such a way that we are sent into the world in a posture of serving, reconciling, compassion and healing.

If this stuff excites you like it does me, be sure to check out the Deep Shift tour. Brian will be in the Bronx May 2-3rd. If you can’t make it to the tour be sure to check out everythingmustchange.org where people are contributing and dreaming of ways to change the world one act at a time.

As I’ve been preparing for an upcoming series on sexuality in our High School ministry I’ve been trying to read some fresh stuff that engages sexuality from a theological point of view with special attention towards discipleship. I’ve been pretty underwhelmed by so much of the church’s teaching on sexuality for so long. I’ve used curriculum that I felt went straight for the “what’s over the line” question and felt schizophrenic in it’s mixture of guilt and affirmation of sex. As I teach on sex I wanted to really do an excellent job of engaging sexuality, theology and discipleship this time around. So two books immediately hit the top of my “must read” list. 1. Rob Bell’s Sex God and 2. Lauren F. Winner’s Real Sex. I’ve heard Winner speak on the topic of chastity in a break out session at Youth Specialties this past year and she was great.

I’m really glad I took the time to read Bell’s book before engaging this subject with the youth at our church. Bell’s style of writing is so conversational that it belies the deep theological work he’s doing in this book. Bell’s catch phrase quickly becomes “this is really about that.” And over and over again he makes connections between sexuality and spirituality and about how “this” is really all about “that.” Bell’s definition of sexuality alone was extremely helpful.

“For many, sexuality is simply what happens between two people involving physical pleasure. But that’s only a small percentage of what sexuality is. Our sexuality is all of the ways we strive to reconnect with our world, with each other, and with God (42).”

Hmm, sexuality is all the ways we try to reconnect? That means that even the celibate can practice and express their sexuality. And on the very next page Bell makes this point saying,

“Some of the most sexual people I know are celibate.

They sleep alone.

They have chosen to give themselves to lots of people, to serve and give and connect their lives with beautiful and worthy causes (43).”

Bell takes this understanding of sexuality to deconstruct our culture’s definition of sexuality. Some of the most overt expressions of “sexuality” in our world are the exact opposite of real sexuality. To illustrate this Bell describes the infamous “Red Light District” in Amsterdam where women sit in store front windows advertising themselves for prostitution. The transaction that happens between a man who goes to one of these prostitutes and the woman herself is just that, a transaction. Physical sex happens, but there is no reconnection. Indeed this kind of sex only serves to further divide and isolate the two parties. The man uses the woman for his own physical gratification and the woman falls deeper into the darkness of her situation. This is the exact opposite of two human beings reconnecting, and we still call it sex.

Bell’s treatment of pre-marital sex is good. As far as I remember he never even used the term “pre-marital sex.” Instead Bell contrasts “taking your clothes off” and “getting naked.” Anyone can take their clothes off and have sex, but in the end this is not true reconnection. Real reconnection happens in physical sex when both parties can be naked with one another. Being naked is about way more than taking off clothes, it’s about trust, it’s about security, it’s about accepting the other person with all their faults and still loving them. It’s about being willing to die for the other person and the promise to remain faithful. Getting naked requires the commitment of marriage, the commitment to serve one another as Christ did the church. As always, “this” is really about “that.”

I could go on and on… needless to say, I thought it was a great book.

A few days ago I finished Jesus for President and I’ve already lent it out to the first person on the growing waiting list. What a magnificent book! If you went to seminary and constantly had your nose stuck in a Hauerwas or Yoder book but wished you could lend a more accessible version to someone… this is that book. It isn’t dumbed down, let me be clear about that, it’s just that this book was really written for the church. This isn’t the kind of conversation that takes place in the ethereal upper layers of academia, this is the best Kingdom-of-God theology taken to the streets. And what would we expect? Shane & Co aren’t professors, they’re subversive prophets living in the abandoned places of the empire. Making their own clothes, living with the poor, dumpster diving for food… always pointing to Jesus. They are living at the margins pointing us to Jesus. They are shouting with their lives (and this book) that the America we live in is a pitiful and fallen Kingdom not worth our allegiance.

The Eagle is fake, the Eagle is dead.

Follow the Lamb!

Last week I picked up a book that I’ve been looking forward to reading for several months now. I didn’t even know that it had been released until I was wondering the isles of my local Barnes & Noble and bumped into the display for Shane Claiborne & Chris Haw’s new book Jesus For President. I’m about a third of the way through it now and it’s everything I was hoping it would be. Claiborne & Co have taken theologians and biblical scholars close to my own heart and made them scandalously accessible to an general audience. The book (so far) is tackling our own ideas about empire by taking a look at God and the people of God and their relationship to empire. The book is a creative mish-mash of art and prose and Kingdom Propaganda. This book provokes us towards a Christian imagination of politics and calls us to seriously rethink where our hope and allegiance really lay. Go pick it up now!