Success may be the fruit of our commitment, but can never be the basis for our commitment. Instead, commitments are made because we believe that we are called to give ourselves to certain persons, causes, and situations.
~ Charles Ringma, finding naasicaa: letters of hope in an age of anxiety
It is this experience of being “called” that distances the Christian approach to vocation from the secular approach. While secular professionalism is driven by a fundamental pragmatism — that makes success the basis of commitment — Christians are only motivated by success secondarily, it at all. The basic question of Christian living is not: “how can I succeed?” but rather: “how can I be faithful to God's call?” There are two key points in this that I want to draw out in a little more detail.
First of all, the vocation that one fulfills, as a Christian, is not simply a vocation that one chooses for oneself. It is not as if we can simply choose any job that we want to choose. The language of calling reminds us that God calls us to certain specific vocations — and the implication of this is that God does not call us to certain other vocations. Certainly I can be a Christian and work any job under the sun, but working certain jobs contradicts my Christian identity and causes me to live in some sort of fractured schizophrenic realm. For example, I can be a Christian, and I can be a pimp, but the two things are radically opposed to each other. Or, to choose another example, I can be a Christian and work for the Royal Bank of Canada but, once again, the two things are in radical opposition. This is so because, despite our particular and individual vocational callings, there is a general call that God places upon all Christians. We are all called to be Spirit-filled members of the body of Christ (the Church, the Christian faith-community) and, as a part of that body, we are all to be agents of God's new creation amidst the groanings of the world. Because we are agents of God's new creation, we cannot be agents of anything or anybody that stands in opposition to new life. That is why I cannot be a pimp, or work for the Royal Bank of Canada; I cannot be a crack dealer or work for the GAP; I cannot be a member of the Hells Angels or be a soldier for the State. All of these jobs and institutions are death-dealing, not life-giving, and agents of God's new creation should have nothing to do with them.
Secondly, the language of calling reminds us that our approach to life should be governed by faithfulness, not by pragmatism. Unfortunately, Christians have largely adopted a secular approach to life, and so all the activities in which we engage (even charity!) are governed by secular notions of success. This notion of success is foreign to Christian thinking because it has little patience for such things as suffering love, solidarity, and the embrace of weakness. Tragically, Christians have confused this success with faithfulness — and when this occurs we don't even need to hear God's call because we already know what to do.
However, if we do listen to God's call, we discover a very different starting place, because God calls us to truly odd, unexpected, and painful things. Embracing suffering, including sufferings that seem to never end, makes no sense from a pragmatic perspective. Yet, from the perspective of God's call, it is the only thing we can do. And so we do embrace suffering, not in order to succeed, but in order to be faithful.
Of course, in all of this we are motivated by a hope that transcends all other notions of success — the hope that God will bring new life out of death, joy out of sorrow, wholeness out of brokenness, something out of nothingness, and light out of darkness. Consequently, faithfulness is defined by a hope that ventures into the depths of utter hopelessness. Faithfulness chooses to remain in the dark and wait for God's light to come because it believes that we don't know what light is, or what light does, until God brings it. It admits that we are blind and unable to recognise light until we have been granted vision. Faithfulness recognises that, in our pragmatic attempts to bring light, we only end up burning our loved ones and ourselves. Of course, this is not to suggest that faithfulness requires us to do nothing. What it does suggest is that faithfulness requires us to do things that made make sense to nobody else. Like Abraham called away from his homeland, like the Hebrews called into the wilderness, and like Jesus called to take up a cross, our callings will also seem like complete folly to those who are only motivated by success and operate with a pragmatism that knows little of a crucified God, and little of resurrection life.

I do not believe in the salvation of anyone who does not try to save others.
~ St. John Chrysostom
I have spent some time writing various reflections about this quotation but, at the end of the day, I think that it speaks better when left to itself. And so, I will leave the reader to contemplate these words. Coming from a Father like Chrysostom they should be carefully considered and not easily discarded.
I would love to hear what sort of thoughts this quotation brings to the mind of any of the readers of this blog. Don't be shy.

If we really hope for the kingdom of God, then we can also endure the Church in its pettiness.
~ Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline
Many Christians impose wrong limitations upon hope. Hoping for the kingdom of God, yet having had negative experiences within the Church, they tend to continue to affirm the kingdom even as they abandon the Church. Barth is right to realise that such an attitude merely reveals how little we know of hope. Our reliance upon the God of hope — who fills us with all joy and peace in believing so that we may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit (Ro 16) — should lead us to become more deeply committed to the Church.
Yet this must be a critical commitment to the Church. This commitment has nothing to do with a fierce, but blind, loyalty. Alas, many other Christians refuse to see errors within the Church, and refuse to listen to any voices from the margins that ask critical questions. Perhaps it could be said that these Christians also impose wrong limitations upon hope. Unlike the first group of Christians mentioned, these Christians place too much hope in the Church, and not enough in the kingdom of God.
Therefore, there is an important balance to maintain here, a balance between criticism and commitment. Our critiques of the Church, just like Jesus' and Paul's critiques of Second Temple Judaism, must be critiques from within. And these critiques from within must be marked by hope, and the assurance that this hope does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us (Ro 5).

“Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, 'I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'”
~John 20.17
God's only Son is not so dear to him that he cannot give him up for the sake of the world. So also we should not think that we are so dear to God that he will not also give us up for the sake of others. Whether or not this giving-up has its intended consequences strictly depends on our willingness to be given-up. Let us not cling so tightly to a God who desires to abandon us so that his lost sheep can be saved. Let us not cling so tightly to God that we do not end up going to our brothers and sisters with the proclamation that God's new creation is breaking into the world. Let us release our grip from God so that we too can be left in the solitude and the darkness of the empty tomb. Yet let us be confident that our descent into this hell is a victory; let us act with the confidence that our current godforsakenness is the very proof of our future vindication.
We may name this time which broke in with Jesus Christ's Ascension into heaven, 'the time of the Word', perhaps also the time of the abandonment and, in a certain respect, of the loneliness of the Church on earth. It is the time in which the Church is united with Christ only in faith and by the Holy Spirit; it is the interim time between His earthly existence and His return in glory; it is the time of the great opportunity, of the task of the Church towards the world; it is the time of mission.
~ Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline

For Mary, just as for Jesus, the crucifixion represents the culmination of a theme which had been growing within her experience for some while, the complete statement of a tragic melody heard up until now only in fragments… For three years now, not just for three days,* she has sought him sorrowing: and now she finds him at last… He is the prodigal son, off in the far country, wasting his spiritual treasure with harlots, feeding his pearls to the swine, to the unclean rabble, to murderers and thieves… Gabriel had never warned her about this — never let her in on the secret that to carry God in your womb was to court disaster.**
~ N.T. Wright, The Crown and the Fire: Meditations on the Cross and the Life of the Spirit
Within the early Church, Mary was often referred to as the Theotokos, which means “God-bearer.” Mary quite literally bore God within her womb. In her body she carried the God-man, Jesus the Christ. Yet little did she know how disastrous it is to carry God. Gabriel the angel appeared to her and called her God's “Favoured-One,” but she never realised the extent of the sufferings that accompany God's favour. Yet, as this poignant reflection from Tom Wright demonstrates so well, to carry God is to court disaster. Twice Mary goes to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, and twice she loses her son there — first in the crowds, and second on a cross. This son, who was supposed to set Israel free, associated with sinners, he partied with traitors of the Israeli nation, and he delighted in the company of whores. She tried to warn him, to stop him, to bring her homeless son back home, but he would not listen. So she stood one day at the foot of the cross and watched as her firstborn child, naked and bloody as the day he was born, cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And then he died. How hollows the angel's words must have sounded then. “Do not be afraid, Mary; for you have found favour with God”? No, such words would no longer make sense. Perhaps the only words that made sense to her at that moment were those stated by the prophet Simeon, “And a sword will pierce your heart also.”
Carrying God does not mean merely courting disaster, it makes disaster inevitable. It leads us to places where our hearts get pierced in a manner that cannot be expressed in words. For we too, filled with the Spirit of Jesus, are Theotokoi, we are “God-bearers” because we have the Spirit of God within us. This means that our road will also be a road of suffering — the suffering that inevitably comes with love. We too must “court disaster” by celebrating with sinners, feasting with the outcasts, and delighting in the company of prostitutes. If we will not be homeless with the homeless (as Jesus was) then we must, at the very least, invite the homeless into our homes. This will also lead us to a place of abandonment. Just as Mary felt abandoned by her son, just as Jesus felt abandoned by God, so we also will feel abandoned — both by the Church, and by God.
I know something of this feeling. When I see my beloved ones — the homeless, the poor, the abandoned, and the exploited — trampled, despised, or ignored with fatal apathy by those who claim to be the people of God, it pierces my heart, and makes me cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken us?” Yet, even in the midst of all this, I will not abandon the Church or any of those who claim to be the people of God. For, as Hans Urs von Balthasar once asked rhetorically, “Jesus died for and in Israel; why should not the saints do that for the Church?” Yes, I fear that it is the Church that is teaching me what it is like to be crucified. Not, alas, because it embodies the crucified Christ, but because it crucifies me by abandoning me to suffer with those that God loves so dearly.
Yet, even here, there is hope. For Jesus is God with us, even in the midst of our godforsakenness. Balthasar argues that the cross is that which brings together all those who have been abandoned. From the cross Jesus brings together his abandoned mother with his abandoned beloved disciple. To that disciple, John, he says, “Behold, your mother” and to Mary he says, “Behold, your son.” Thus, Balthasar concludes:
the community of the lonely that has been brought together here — Mary and John — is the assembly of two acutely abandoned people gathered together around the Abandoned One.
Therefore, even though we face abandonment, swords, suffering, disaster, and godforsakenness, we may yet gather together at the foot of the cross and affirm the words of St. Paul in the crashing conclusion to Romans 8. As abandoned people gathered around the Abandoned One, we read these words with wonder, with puzzlement, and with a longing that burns us like fire.
Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Just as it is written, “For your sake we are being put to death all day long; we were considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
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* This reference to “three days” is a reference to the three days that Mary & Co. spent looking for Jesus in Jerusalem when he was a child of twelve.
** Emphasis added.

In a recent seminar on preaching Tom Wright argued that it is absolutely essential for preachers to speak with integrity. Integrity, Wright argued, means only speaking of things that have become a part of of you, the speaker. As he emphasised:
Do not try to say things that haven't become a part of you.
Of course, he went on to say, if applying this means that the material on which you can preach is drastically narrowed, then you probably need to be spending more time working on yourself than on instructing others.
Alas, Christians far too often speak about things that have not become a part of who they are. What is particularly tragic is that this is just as true of the key concepts of Christianity as it is of the various details.
I think back to when I was 17 and kicked out by my parents. That was a pretty rough time in my life, sleeping at friends' houses, homeless, depressed, and just messed up in general. I mean, I used to go out late at night looking to find fights that I would lose because I felt like I deserved that — that's pretty messed up. Throughout that time, I appealed for help, or guidance (or anything really) from my various Christian friends and mentors. And so, God forgive them, they tried to comfort me. They essentially told me that, “hey, it sucks that your father seems to hate you but, ummm, God loves you.” Not surprisingly that didn't do a whole lot of good. Looking back on that situation now, I have come to realise that the reason why the words struck me as hollow was because most (perhaps all) of the people I spoke with had never really had a life transforming encounter with God's love. And so they spoke of something that had not become a part of them — and it only furthered my sense of isolation at that time. The shockingly tragic thing is that when I speak to Christian audiences about my life transforming encounter with God's love, I am usually met with a sea of blank faces. It seems that we have churches full of people who have been told that God loves them, yet who have never experienced that love personally.
When this is the case, the best Christian comforters can do is remain silent lest they become like Job's friends — false comforters who only aggravate the sufferings of others. Sometimes silence is the only way in which we can maintain our integrity as faithful witnesses to both the love of God and the sufferings of others.
Indeed, on the cross even Jesus, the very Word of God, is reduced to silence. In death there are no words spoken. Jesus' cry of forsakenness fades into inarticulate groanings and then the Wordlessness of death. Thus, as we journey with the crucified people of today — the marginalised, the oppressed, the abandoned, and the broken — most of us would do well to maintain that silence. Only those who have experienced both the cross of godforsakenness and the transforming Spirit of resurrection life should dare to address the suffering ones — for those who know both cross and resurrection know how to speak with hesitation, with tenderness, and with patience.
It is those who, abiding in the resurrection Spirit and bearing on their own bodies the brandmarks of Jesus Christ, can say to those with fearful hearts:
“Be strong. Be still. Your God will come. He will come with vengeance. He will come with divine retribution. He will come and save you.
And on that day your wounds will be healed. Your tears will be dried. You, too, will be made new.
Hold on, Beautiful One, your God, the God of creation who is also your Lover, will come for you. And until your God comes, I will abide with you. I will weep with you. I will play with you. I will wait with you. I will be a foretaste of the love that is coming to you.”
Maranatha. Come quickly, Lord Jesus, we are dying here without you.

As I stated in my previous posts, I recently attended a conference hosted in Toronto. The main speaker was Bishop N.T. Wright, pastor, author, grandfather, and New Testament scholar extraodinaire. During my time at the conference I was able to participate in some Q&A with Tom Wright, and I was lucky enough to be able to speak with him informally a few times. Since I began reading his books half a dozen years ago, I have had one burning question kicking around in my mind. It was this question that was the focus of our discussion. This is what I asked:
Given the observation that the majority of the contemporary, corporate, Western Church seems to have abandoned the call to be agents of God's new creation, and given the fact that the reason why Israel ultimately collapsed into exile was because God withdrew his Spirit from the Temple, can we then conclude that the contemporary, corporate, Western Church is experiencing the withdrawal of God's Spirit? Could the experience of contemporary Western Christians be appropriately labeled as an experience of exile? Is exile even possible for the people of God after Pentecost and the outpouring of the eschatological Spirit? If the Western Church can be said to be in exile does this lead us into a new dilemma when we are faced with the issue of God's righteousness (understood as covenant faithfulness)?
Wright's answer was both frustrating and encouraging. However, before I post his reply I would be curious to hear how those who read this blog might answer this question, or how they might think Wright answered this question. Anybody want to take a stab at it?

Last week I was able to attend a series of lectures by Tom Wright at Wycliffe College in Toronto. A few of my friends and family members also attended and I was struck by a comment made by a sister-in-law after Wright concluded his series on Romans 8. She sat in silence for awhile after the lecture ended and then she turned to me and said this:
I feel that I have been so inundated with the message that “God loves me” that I have been reduced to the level of a daisy. Like God loves me and all the other pretty little flowers… I don't want to be a daisy.
She makes an excellent point. The contemporary Western Church so often focuses exclusively on a message of individual fulfillment. It's about me discovering how lovely I am. Of course, this is an important part of the Christian proclamation. Individually encountering the all-encompassing, transformative love of God is essential to living the Christian life. But it is only one part of the picture, and not even the main part. When Christianity is reduced to the proposition that “God loves me” then we end up being a bunch of beautiful, but brainless, daisies. This is so because Christianity is essentially a proclamation about Jesus of Nazareth and about the plans that the God of Israel* has for the entire world. Christianity is about being transformed in order to be agents of this God's new creation within the present moment. For, as Wright also said in his lecture series, “salvation is not primarily a gift given to the Church, it is a gift given through the Church to the world”.
Listening to Wright helps us to see how much is lost when Christianity is reduced to some of its present self-indulgent Western manifestations. Listening to Wright reminds us that we are individually members of a corporate body that has a task to fulfill. Wright provides us with a big picture without neglecting the details. And this must be recovered in the whole life of the Church. Serious teaching must be provided from the pulpit. The grand narrative of Christianity and all its intriguing, wonderful (and sometimes contradictory?!) details are not merely topics of discussions for seminarians — they should be topics presented to, discussed by, and puzzled over by the laity and the whole body of Christ. This is so because Christianity is a faith that claims every single area of daily living. Living Christianly requires a certain attitude towards business, towards politics, towards charity, towards family, towards children, and so on.
In 1 Corinthians 3, Paul laments the fact that he must continually go over the basics of Christianity with the Christians in Corinth. He began by providing them with “milk” since they were infants in the faith when he first met them, but he laments that the Corinthians have not yet moved on to “solid food”. A similar lament is made by the author of Hebrews who writes:
[W]e have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God, and you have come to need milk and not solid food.
It seems that the contemporary Western Church has been gorging on milk and has little desire for solid food. Not only that but it seems that our milk has gone sour. It is time that we recovered the foundations of a substantial proclamation — a proclamation that reminds us that we are not daisies, we are agents of God's new creation, commissioned to enter into the groanings of world in order to make all things new.
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*By “the God of Israel” I am referring to the God of the people of Israel as he is described throughout the Old and New Testaments. Israel is the people of God as they are described in Scripture — the descendants of Abraham who, after Pentecost, also include the Gentiles. Therefore, within this post, I am most certainly not referring to the contemporary nation-state of Israel.

Liberation theology gives the gospel back its credibility.
~ Leonardo and Clodovis Boff
The proclamation of the gospel is to be a proclamation of good news. After all, “gospel” means “good news”. As contemporary Christians, it is worth asking the question: for whom is our gospel good news?
Within the world in which Jesus lived there were various gospel proclamations in competition with one another. In particular the gospel of Jesus, the good news of Jesus, competed with the gospel of Caesar, the good news of the Emperor. The word gospel, within the Roman Empire in the first century, would be heard as a political term, a term that related to the question of lordship. The Roman empire proclaimed a gospel that said that Caesar was Lord, while the early Christians burst onto the scene proclaiming a gospel that said that Jesus, and not Caesar, was Lord.
Thus, the gospel of Caesar was proclaimed every time the Emperor won a victory. The triumph of Caesar was good news for the elites — the wealthy, the established, the powerful, and the comfortable. Every victory won by Caesar was good news for the status quo.
However, the gospel of Jesus was proclaimed as good news for the poor. The victory won by Jesus was good news for the dispossessed, the helpless, the outcasts, the persecuted, and the sinners. On the cross, Jesus overcome all the brute force and violence of Rome, he overcome the separation that existed between God and humanity, and in his resurrection he revealed that transformation of an unimaginable sort was now bursting into the present moment of human existence. And this news is somewhat disconcerting to the status quo. It reveals that even the powerful must be held accountable, and resisted when necessary. It displays the corruption that goes hand in hand with wealth and comfort, and it asserts that one day the first will be last and the last will be first.
It is this gospel proclamation that the liberation theology birthed in Latin in America has sought to recover. This is why the Boff brothers are correct to assert the liberation theology “gives the gospel back its credibility”. By “credibility” we must not think that liberation theology makes the gospel more culturally relevant, nor must we think that it makes the gospel more pragmatic, rather recovering credibility means a recovery of true Christian identity. Simply put, liberation theology calls all of us Western Christians to stop living as liars. When we honestly embody the gospel of Jesus that is fundamentally good news for the poor, then we will once again be credible.
It saddens me how far the Western Church (and I include myself as a member of this Church) has strayed from this vocation. I had the privilege of listening to Bishop Tom Wright speak on this topic last week (actually, I'm hoping to blog about Wright's seminars and the discussions I was able to have with him but I'll save all that for later), and he too lamented how much of the Church has drifted. Wright compared much of the Western Church to a lighthouse keeper who decides to set up mirrors in order to keep all the light within the house… and then either turns a blind eye to all the ships that crash or the rocks, or blames the ships themselves for being unable to see in the darkness. Instead, Wright said, the Western Church must become like the early Church — God's groaning place in the midst of the darkest places of the world. He used the example of Christian communities in the first centuries that would remain in plague stricken cities — even after the wealthy (including all the doctors!) had fled — and care for the sick and dying, often becoming sick and dying with the others. This, Wright argued, should be the model that our Church seeks to emulate.
And I agree. When the Church embraces the poor, when the Church returns to the ghettoes, when the Church embraces those who suffer from AIDS, when the Church chooses to journey alongside of all those who are in pain, who are abandoned, and who are oppressed today — and genuinely enters into that pain, abandonment, and oppression — then we will once again be a body proclaiming a credible gospel.