Give me hope, Give me hope
That emptiness brings fullness
And loss of love brings wholeness
To us all.
– The Indigo Girls
How often we view God as the Law-Giver, as the Morally Perfect One. God, the Giver of Commands. God the one who is never fully satisfied but always demanding more of us.
Well, come, let us reason together, what is the command that is given more than any other command in the bible?
Do not be afraid.
Fear not.
Be not afraid.
Strange that I don't hear too many sermons preached on the Law of Fearlessness. How is this the command issued more than any other? Because it is a command that essentially reveals the character of the God of the bible. That God of the bible is the God of hope, of new creation, and of resurrection. The God of the bible, revealed in Jesus, is the God of love. Thus, our fundamental response to this God is to be one of trust. It it because we trust in the unshakable and irrevocable love of this God that we are able to live fearlessly.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil,
For thou art with me.
– Psalm 23

In Matthew 1.23 Matthew quotes the now notorious verse in Isaiah 7.14 saying:
Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and shall bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel which translated means God with us.
This verse has been the subject of quite a bit of controversy. It has regularly been used as a proof-text to argue that the immaculate conception was prophesied by Isaiah of Jerusalem. Of course with the rise of more serious scholarship this view has been called into considerable question. Such an translation of that passage in Isaiah takes the verse completely out of context. Besides the Hebrew word for “virgin” that is used in Isaiah simply refers to a young woman that is old enough to marry. There is another word that literally means “virgin” in the technical sense and that word is not used. These scholars then go on to argue that Matthew misuses the Hebrew Scriptures to make the point he wants to make. So the debate rages between these and those committed to more traditional forms of Christian apologetics.
The thing is both sides miss the point. Matthew is not concerned with using this passage as a proof-text for the immaculate conception. Rather he is picking up on the Emmanuel motif as it is employed in Isaiah and applying it to Jesus' ministry. Let me explain that.
In Isaiah 7 the prophet goes to king Ahaz and warns him about trusting in the military might of the world nations for salvation instead of trusting in God.
In frustration he says that Ahaz should ask for any sign from God so that he will know that God is trust-worthy. Hiding behind false humility (which is really a cloak for his lack of trust) Ahaz refuses to ask for a sign. It is then that the prophet declares that the unknown (to the contemporary reader) woman will bear a child named “God With Us.” Yet there is a tragic irony at play here. Where before God's presence was being offered as the means of salvation (the prophet said to trust in God being with them for salvation), now God's presence has come to mean judgment. Because Ahaz rejects God the presence of God becomes a presence of harrowing judgment. God will still come but, because his people have rejected him, God's coming will be far from pleasant.
It is this motif that Matthew is appropriating. For the first half of his Gospel Jesus, as Emmanuel, is offering a way of salvation, a way of peace, to Israel. Yet they firmly reject Jesus' way and so increasingly in the second half of the Gospel, “God With Us” becomes a message of judgment. Thus, the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple (that occur 40 years after Jesus' crucifixion) become inevitable. God comes, finds a rebellious people, and so his coming takes the form of judgment.
Of course this view is radically different than the traditional view announced by Christians, especially around Christmas, that celebrate the idea of Immanuel, God With Us.
I think we would do well to learn from this. Perhaps we should not be so quick to pray, “God come. God return to us.” Perhaps God is absent now because, given the current state of his people, if he were present he would only be able to be present in judgment. Maybe God's silence and absence are actually extensions of grace. Instead of praying for God to come perhaps we should be praying for repentance. We should be praying that we first return to being who we are called to be so that God's coming can be a glorious message of salvation and liberation.
After all, Jesus only comes after John the Baptizer first proclaims a message of repentance. Without John's work I doubt Jesus would have found even the few who embraced his message. So, as much as we long for Jesus to break in to the contemporary context I think we need to first heed the message of John the Baptizer.

On Valentine's day a march was held in the downtown east-side of Vancouver as part of V-Day activities. The march was a response to ongoing (and increasing) violence against women in Canada. Here in Vancouver the focus was particularly upon violence against women in the sex trade. In recent years as many as 70+ female prostitutes have “disappeared”. The bodies of many of the women have been found, the whereabouts of many others remains unknown.
As usual for the police force of a large city (hell, probably any police force) the Vancouver Police have continually downplayed the issue of violence against women and the media has been happy to tow their line.
And so people march. Not many, but some do. On Valentine's Day a small group gathered, marched, held signs, and gave speeches in front of the police station.
Not long after the march a female prostitute was picked up by an unknown john. She was raped and tortured – and told that what was being done to her was being done in response to the march.
Then, last Thursday, a large amount of blood was found in an alley between Hastings and Pender and the word on the street is that another prostitute has been “cut-up” and killed.
The Vancouver Police Department has refused to respond to calls made by Community agencies. It has refused to comment on these events and the media has also deemed these events not newsworthy.
It seems Chomsky's critique of worthy and unworthy victims applies to our own backyards.
I wonder how much press there would have been if large pools of blood had been discovered around a dumpster on UBC's campus. I wonder how the media would have responded if a female professor was “cut-up” in response to the march. I wonder how the media would respond if female students were regularly disappearing from UBC. And I wonder how it would respond if men, not women, were the victims.
I was rereading excerpts from The Story of Jane Doe: A book about Rape (required reading for pretty much anybody but especially for people from Ontario and the GTA) and was once again overwhelmed by the magnitude of violence against women in our society.
As I was looking at the statistics on the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter website (www.rapereliefshelter.bc.ca) I was struck by this statement (which I fully affirm):
Virtually all men want to be treated by women as if they were in the category of protecting us from those “other” men. They expect us to begin with an assumption of trust. In a media interview last year, Lee Lakeman from Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter stated, “Every man is a potential rapist.” There were several letters to the editor in response – all from men – disclaiming their responsibility for rape, insisting that they can be trusted, calling for men's liberation and declaring Lee a “menace to her own cause.” Whenever this statement has been made, the response has been similar.
So what is a man to do?
First of all, men need to stop dictating the terms and allow women who are involved in this area to have their voice. Men need to listen. Then men need to affirm what is said. Men need to submit to women's voices in this area – even when they find those voices hard to listen to. Even when they don't find themselves in agreement they need to submit. It is from a position of listening, of respecting, of coming alongside of, and of affirming, that men are to begin to think about the actions they are to take. Basically I'm saying that I don't give a shit if men find their “manhood” offended by female voices in this area. Shut the fuck up and do what you're told.
But really, in light of the magnitude of this issue, I can't really say I have a lot of hope. I'd like to but there is not much out there to give me hope. I don't have much faith in the media, or the police, or the broader society. Sadly, I also don't have much faith in the church as it exists currently. And so, I think we need to engage in genuine mourning. Mourning is something we can do.
Yet I do hold out hope in what God can do. As always I find myself going back to calling the church back to being the church – not the perversion that it has come to be. Who knows what could happen if the church once again became the community it is called to be? Of course, until that happens, it seems to me that this situation is fundamentally hopeless.

(This entry also posted at www.livejournal.com/community/abortiondebate.)
Jennifer Baumgardner, a noted feminist activist, has recently designed and marketed a t-shirt that has sparked an (inter)national response, becoming a lightning rod for the emotions that surround the abortion debate. The shirt simply declares:
I had an abortion.
Baumgardner created the t-shirt to “combat the stigma that still shames and silences those who have had an abortion” (for more on this see the article entitled “Full Frontal Offense” by Rebecca Hyman in bitch, Winter 2005). The goal is to radically personalise the abortion debate. “To be vocal about abortion – not by supporting an abstract 'freedom of choice,' but instead by naming abortion as a fact of women's experience – is thus to break the dual threat of political and public shaming that keeps women silent.” Of course there has been a rather mixed response to the shirt (to say the least!) – even with feminist circles.
So how should Christians who seek to journey in love relationships with the suffering and the marginalised respond to this shirt? I can deeply empathise with Baumgardner's desire to see shaming and silencing overcome. Too often Christians have damned others for engaging in activities that they disagree with thereby creating devastating structures of shame that result in deep hurt and brokenness.
Yet I cannot embrace abortion as a morally neutral (or positive) act. Not because I believe that the human fetus is a “person” from the point of conception or whatever. The point at which a fetus becomes human seems somewhat irrelevant to the debate (in part because it is insoluble). Rather abortion seems to clash with Christianity because Christianity is an affirmation of the goodness of creation and life. Conception begins a genuinely creative process that, at some point, creates new life. To terminate that process seems to be an act of hopelessness that contradicts, or at least misunderstands, the Christian hope.
As well Christians tend to miss the point of the cause of abortion. If the majority of abortions are performed for (1) financial reasons (the woman or the family is too poor to be able to sustain another child) and (2) health reasons (the fetus has displayed some sort of physical or mental disability) then Christians are called to commit themselves to journey in love relationships with the poor so that there is enough for everybody and (2) re-affirm, in both word and deed, the value and humanity of people with disabilities. If this were done the vast majority of abortions would be avoided altogether. A third category should be added, but I suspect this is the minority: (3) those who have abortions because they are pursuing wealth, power, and influence, and having a child would result in a major blow to these objectives. In response to (3) Christians should be modeling a commitment to radically different objectives such as peace, justice and reconciliation.
Of course there are always exceptions. We can all imagine nightmare scenarios where an abortion may be the best solution but even then it is not something Christians celebrate – rather they journey alongside the woman, grieving the tragedy she has experienced with her, and providing her with the strength and support to overcome.
So how does one hold this view of abortion and not contribute to the shaming and silencing of women who have abortions? The first step is recognising that as long as we don't journey alongside of the poor or affirm the humanity of the disabled, or live for radically different objectives, we are all complicit in the act of termination. The first step is taking personal responsibility, recognising how there were so little genuine alternatives available (certainly there are always options but how realistic, how genuine those options actually are can vary greatly).
The second step is to become an open and welcoming community to all those who engage in activities that Christians do not condone. This is somewhat complicated for it means being welcoming without sacrificing the genuine Christian vision or identity. It seems that contemporary Christians have mostly been unable to find the balance here. Either they drift too far to one extreme, developing a laissez-faire attitude to all things moral and adopting the “whatever works for you is the right thing” attitude that is so prevalant in our society. Or they drift too far to the other extreme and stigmatise and excommunicate those who engage in actions that the church cannot support. It is the second extreme that has come to shame and silence women who have abortions. Yet those who belong to the first extreme are equally complicit for developing a morality that contributes to an apathetic and self-absorbed lifestyle.
Simply put, Christians need to model communities where all are welcome to come as they are and openly share their experiences – whether that be things that have been done to them or things they have done themselves – and find a tender, loving embrace in response. Perhaps most importantly Christians are called to model God's forgiveness, announcing that God's love has broken into the world and cannot, and will not, be defeated. In this situation Christians are called to take suffering onto themselves, not impose suffering on others.
Therefore, although I empathise with Baumgardner's motives I will not buy her t-shirt. Often, in response to shaming we can go the extreme of reveling in the acts that have caused shame in an effort to overcome it. Indeed, much of the discussion revolving around individual rights seem to do just this. Individual rights is a brilliant way to avoid any sense of corporate responsibility. “I am entitled to security, to comfort, to self-fulfillment, therefore I don't have to plead the cause of the needy, I don't have to concern myself with where I spend my money…” and so on and so forth. I can't wear Baumgardner's shirt because abortion is the result of some grievous problems in society. I can't celebrate abortion because I can't celebrate the abandonment of the poor. I can't celebrate the dehumanisation of the disabled. I can't celebrate the pursuit of power, wealth and influence – and I certainly can't celebrate the rape of a teenage girl that results in pregnancy. What I can do is learn to love people the way that Jesus loved and not define them by certain acts. Why do we so often define people by one or two specific actions? Let us learn to see the beauty, the worth and the wonder that fill all people. When we see people in this way we will treasure them not damn them.

I will be completing a paper on hell/annihilation/universal salvation today. I'd like to post it here but I don't know how to do that without taking up a ton of space. Curious? Let me know and I'll email it to y'all – if I have your email address. If you do read it and want to question/comment it would be neat if you did so under this post (instead of emailing me) so that we could talk about it as a group.

In Romans 12.20, Paul writes,
Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath [of God], for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” says the Lord.
Whereas human vengeance is often motivated by hatred, God's vengeance is an act of love. Human vengeance is destructive, God's vengeance is creative. God's vengeance, while liberating the oppressed and healing the wounded, also brings restoration to the oppressors and liberates them from their acts of oppression. God's vengeance results in the new creation of all things. Thus Moltmann can write,
The 'Last Judgment' is not a terror… It is a source of endlessly consoling joy to know, not just that the murderers will not triumph over their victims, but that they cannot in eternity even remain the murderers of their victims.
That is why we are not to take vengeance into our own hands – we have profoundly misunderstood it and when we have taken it into our own hands cycles of violence, destruction and sin have only been perpetuated. This is why Paul goes on to say in Romans 12.21f,
“But if your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he is thirsty, give him a drink; for in doing so you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Evil is not overcome through human instruments of punishment and subjugation. Evil is overcome through the doing of the good, through a willingness to continue to suffer, through a refusal to hate and through the embrace of love. By living in such a way we become a witness to the final restoration and reconciliation of all things in Jesus. After all, Jesus is the Judge. Yet, as Hans Urs Von Balthazar says, Jesus crucified is the revelation of the Judge who puts himself on the side of the those who would damn themselves.
Let us leave vengeance to God. For in the consummation of the kingdom we just might discover that vengeance looks very little like the ways we have imagined it. Leaving vengeance to God is not waiting for those who have caused us suffering to finally be subjected to suffering. Rather leaving vengeance to God is waiting in hope for all to be liberated from brokenness, pain, and sorrow.

For Francis [of Assisi] religion was not a thing like a theory but a thing like a love affair.
– G.K. Chesterton
And that's just what is lacking. Over and over I see Christians who relate to God like they relate to an idea. I see Christians who know God like they know math, physics, philosophy or any other area of knowledge. I see Christians who pray with rhetorical devices and formulas. What I rarely see are Christians who know God like they know a person. Christians who talk with God not just to or at God.
Increasingly I have begun to think that this is the problem that lies at the very root of the plethora of problems that exist within North American Christianity today. Ultimately, at the bottom of it all, North American Christians miss the mark because they've never truly known God. Despite all their talk about “personal relationship with Jesus” I wonder how many of them have actually met him.
But Francis was right – true religion is a love affair. It's passionate, it's intimate, it's genuinely knowing and being known. Without that intimacy, without that very real personal relationship, Christianity is bound to become twisted into perversion or wither into nothingness.
It is this relationship that lies at the heart of Christian mysticism. That's why C. Ringma can say that Christians in the West in the 21st-century will become mystics or cease being Christians. This is what Kierkegaard never grasped. “Mystics,” he said, “have not the patience to wait for the revelation of God.” Contra-Kierkegaard mystics are not those who give up on understanding. Rather they are those who are rooted in love relationship and are so grounded in trusting the one they love that they do not need a complete answer to everything. They possess the understanding that only intimacy grants. Kierkegaard would reduce God to a proposition. Of course, this only makes sense as relationships – interactions between the self and the other – are increasingly impossible within Kierkegaard's existentialist framework.
This is why I am also increasingly thinking that Christians need to stop trying so hard. Christians are involved in a mass of activities seeking to transform the world, bring the kingdom of God, build the church, etc., etc., etc. But, outside of genuine relationship, these activities will be futile, like matches struck in a midnight thunderstorm. A flash of light, the smell of smoke, then darkness and rain, darkness and rain, darkness and rain.
The first thing Christians should do is cry out to God. Cry out for a genuine encounter, cry out for God's in-breaking into their lives and into the world. Until God comes everything is useless. Yet Christianity is marked by the guarantee of God's coming. God will come. God is not just the God of the past or the God of the future. God is the God of all of history, and that includes the present.
And when God does come, when God breaks in and transforms our present we will realise then that God is, after all, our Lover.

The authors of the Left Behind series turn eschatology into scatology. That is to say: instead of talking about the consummation of the kingdom and the new creation of all things they just end up talking a lot of shit.

I've often said that I feel like Jesus' disciples around the time of Peter's confession. Yes, I get that Jesus is the Messiah but I'm still unpacking what that means. It's like the miracle that immediately precedes that account. Jesus heals the blind man the first time and he only sees people “like trees walking around”. So Jesus heals him a second time so that the blind man can see properly. Well, I've often said I feel like I'm at the stage of seeing walking trees.
However, I stumbled on another way of looking at things.
I was reading the story where Jesus is speaking in a house and a paralysed man is lowered down (through the roof… poor home-owner!) in front of him. Jesus looks at the man and says, “Take heart, your sins are forgiven.” Of course everybody is astounded that he would presume to forgive sins and so he asks, “What is easier to say, 'Your sins are forgiven' or 'rise up and walk'?” Yet Jesus does demonstrate his authority to forgive sins by healing the paralysed man.
I've been thinking of myself as that paralytic. I feel that I've heard the first affirmation, yes, my sins are forgiven. Not simply in some other-worldly sense of a ticket out of hell, but in the sense that I have been restored into right relationship with God. Yet I'm still awaiting the second part, “take up your mat and walk”. I'm still figuring out how this right relationship with God translates into right relationship with others in the contemporary context.
Yet this is a more encouraging model than the first one. To begin with there is a sense of joy attached – a relationship has been restored. There is also a sense of assurance. The second statement will follow the first. In a sense this way of looking at things provides more freedom along the way. It is liberating because ultimately it is awaiting God's action, the in-breaking of God's creative Word. It allows me to recognise where I am paralysed, and to be okay with my impotence to overcome that paralysis. After all, it's only a temporary thing. I will continue to cry to God and rest in the assurance that one day I will discover myself walking. Not only walking but dancing.