Who are the Mennonites?

The following are three key convictions making up what I think it means to be Anabaptist or Mennonite. These are not in any way limited to Mennonites, but I think they represent the witness of that tradition to the broader church. And I do not think they can be written off as some quaint characteristics of an obscure denomination! These are why I am committed to keeping this tradition alive...

a) The Lordship of Jesus Christ. His lordship encompasses all of life and demands that every aspect be submitted to Him. There are no “spheres” or “domains” in which and over which He is not Lord. This has more ramifications than we would at first think, for if Jesus is Lord then the quality of that Lordship does not change even if we want to distinguish between public/private or spiritual/temporal. All of those dualisms are done away with if Jesus is Lord.

b) Non-violence/peace as faithfulness to Jesus. Non-violence names the practice of rejecting the means of power that the world relies upon to determine the outcome of history. Anabaptist faithfulness is eschatological in that it relies on God to determine the future, thus enabling the rejection of violence and other coercive means of control. Peace names the practices of reconciliation that enable the community of disciples to embody the substance of God’s righteousness and to work for that righteousness in the world.

c) The community displays the nature of the reign of God. The Anabaptist community is a community that displays to the world what sort of God it is that rules the world. And it is in our worship of the slain Lamb that we participate in His rule (Rev 5.7-10; Cf. John Howard Yoder, “To Serve Our God and to Rule the World” in The Royal Priesthood.)

waiting as a mark of discipleship

The following is part of the rough draft for this afternoon's sermon. I never got to finish it as a written sermon, but am offering what I have here in case it can be helpful.

What does it mean to a people who wait? I am going back two weeks to the epistle reading from 1 Thess 1.9-10 that we missed, but that I alluded to last week: Paul writes, “For the people of those regions report about us what kind of welcome we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescues us from the wrath that is coming.” Waiting is a theme of the Bible, repeated especially throughout the book of Psalms as an appropriate disposition one ought to have toward the Lord. Psalm 27.13- 14:

I believe that I shall see the goodness of the LORD
In the land of the living.
Wait for the LORD;
Be strong, and let your heart take courage;
Wait for the LORD.

Or Psalm 43 from today’s reading:

Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.

Hope in God. Wait upon the Lord. Wait for his Son from heaven. This attitude of waiting has been criticized in the people of God as a motivation for inaction. Christians, it is said, are a people who wait for their “pie in the sky, by and by…” We sit on our hands while people suffer around us. We wait for heaven, rather than trying to bring a little bit of heaven to earth. I especially hear a version of this when people criticize our stance of non-violence, as if our unwillingness to bear arms against our enemies were somehow a failure to take seriously a responsibility to do everything we can to make sure that good triumphs over evil.

On the other hand, there are countless Christians who have decided that waiting really has nothing to do with how we live in this world, and are impatiently trying to gain as much power in Washington as possible in order to create a Judeo-Christian nation. For these Christians waiting is entirely spiritualized. So, on the one hand we have those for whom waiting means doing nothing, and on the other hand there are those for whom waiting in no way limits an aggressive attempt to gain power to change the course of the world (even though, presumably, their theology teaches that things will get worse and worse until Jesus returns). At several points in our nation’s history the Christian assumption was that the things would actually get better and better and the Millennium would be ushered in through the hard work of either evangelists or those working for a progressive notion of social justice. A Civil War, two world wars, and Vietnam put a decisive end to most of these Christian movements.

So, does waiting mean sitting around on our hands, or does it mean actively pursuing power to change the world? Or something else entirely? I will suggest that it means something else entirely.

Let me give an example from history that might help clarify what I am saying. In the early history of the church the Roman emperor Constantine I decisively ended the brutal oppression of Christians and led the way for Christianity to be the official religion of the Empire. For many Christians this represented what they had been waiting for. The emperor becomes Christian and the Empire soon follows. And yet, this is very different from the Thessalonian church being praised for their willingness to wait for God’s Son from heaven. Constantine was not God’s Son. And the subsequent history of the church after Constantine ought to make us question what sort of victory was really won when the Empire became Christian. The emperor is not the Messiah, nor is the President. Yet this hope is alive and well today. I heard a young woman interviewed this week who was eagerly waiting for Sarah Palin to run for president in eight years. Christians, especially in light of history since Constantine, should not be looking to national politics or to any state for a savior. This is what I take waiting for the Son of God to mean. It may mean other things, but it at least means this.

But how do we describe our waiting? I would differentiate between living faithfully while waiting, and an impatience that seeks power so that waiting is unnecessary. As Christians we do not take the power to determine the outcome of history into our own hands, rather we live faithfully in the meantime—seeking justice, peace, mercy, and hope—while rejecting the tools of power that would coerce those ends. And so the rejection of violence is justified by this just to the extent that violence represents an unwillingness to wait upon the Lord. I can picture the Thessalonian church in their faithfulness, caring for the sick and the poor, bringing equality between differing groups to realization in their fellowships, advocating on behalf of the abused, but trusting on the Lord for the outcome of their actions and hopes....

By being a community that is willing to wait, that is willing to reject the coercive means of control offered to us, we bear witness to the Lord who will come, and we might even convince a few that He is the living and true God who has already come....

Recovering the Good News...

Part of a sermon from this afternoon, reflecting on 1 Thess 2.1-8.

In our text this afternoon we learn that what is most important to Paul and his companions is the Gospel. They have endured persecution, they have forsaken the pressures of the world, especially the approval of those from whom most would seek approval, but it is the Gospel that is of utmost importance because it is only the Gospel that brings true meaning and hope to life. Paul and Silvanus and Timothy did not come with flattery or greed because the Gospel is enough—who needs the praises of men in the face of what God has done? Who needs the prestige of multiple degrees in the face of what God has done? Who needs worldly success in the face of what God has done? Who needs to cling to the old ways when the new ways have been demonstrated in Christ, given the stamp of resurrection, and made available to us?

The problem is that we have been duped in the ways of greed. We have become soft to the ways of the world. There is a poem of Wendell Berry’s that gets very close to what I am trying to say this afternoon. It begins with the line “We who prayed and wept for liberty from Kings, and the yoke of liberty, accept the tyranny of things we do not need…” This is the American story. The struggle for freedom from tyranny ends in freedom that has become complacent. Consider the poem:

We who prayed and wept
For liberty from kings
And the yoke of liberty
Accept the tyranny of things
We do not need.
In plentitude too free,
we have become adept
beneath the yoke of greed.

Those who will not learn
In plenty to keep their place
Must learn it by their need
When they have had their way
And the fields spurn their seed.
We have failed Thy grace.
Lord, I flinch and pray,
Send Thy necessity.

The same may be true for the church in America. “In plentitude too free, we have become adept beneath the yoke of greed.” In our prosperity and our freedom we have lost a sense that the Gospel is good news. We don’t understand what it means to give up our idols and, like the Thessalonians, let the word of the Lord sound forth from us. Belief is too easy while our idols are too much a part of who we are for us to recognize them as idols. Instead we spiritualize the Gospel, domesticating it to the comfort of our private selves, filing it away as the correct assent to certain propositions, and fitting it neatly into lives we have learned to live from others for whom the Gospel is only an oddity. Religious freedom may be a blessing, but it carries with it a curse. And in that curse we too easily lose the goodness of the Gospel.

But, thank God for Paul. Thank God for the scriptures. For through them we can come again and again to catch a glimpse of the way the world really is. We can come to be challenged and reminded that Gospel is good news. We can come and be challenged if only to consider how we might have lost the sense that it is good news, and struggle to recover what it would require giving up for it to ring true again. We can be reminded by Jesus’ sermon at the beginning of his ministry that good news is proclaimed to the prisoners, the blind, the lame, the oppressed. We can be reminded that the Gospel is good news for the poor, for the least of these, for the outcast. We can be reminded through the telling and retelling of the story of Israel that without Israel Jesus makes no sense. Without God’s promise to his people, the fulfillment of which came in Jesus of Nazareth, there would be no good news, no salvation, no revelation, no hope. We need to tell the stories, too, of our Mennonite tradition: stories of Menno Simons, a bishop on the run, shepherding little churches all over northern Germany and the Netherlands, not for the sake of Anabaptism, or Mennonites, or the Swiss Brethren, but for the sake of the Gospel. Not for the honor, prestige, and position it offered, but because something in the story of God saving humankind in and through the Incarnation of Jesus Christ—his life, death, resurrection, and ascension—is good news worth risking all to tell. We need to preach this good news to one another, to our families, to our friends, and to our neighbors.

But like Paul and his companions, we need to share ourselves with our neighbors. “So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.” This is, of course, a proper analogy of the Gospel, because what is the Gospel but God caring so deeply for us that he gave himself for us. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son….If God has given himself for us, we then ought to give ourselves for one another. If it takes a new season of trial and difficulty for us to relearn this, then so be it. If it takes, as Wendell Berry put it, the fields to spurn our seed, then so be it. We may indeed need to “flinch and pray, send Thy necessity.” But we must learn, in plenty or scarcity, in freedom or oppression, the exceeding value of knowing Jesus Christ our Lord so that the church, this church, can continue to proclaim in faithfulness and conviction, the good news that is the Gospel.

A Defiant "Nevertheless!"

If there is one word that continues to dominate public discourse, it is “confidence”. There is this game that the government is playing with the markets and a major part of that game is to do things that will encourage banks to lend money to other banks again. So far the game isn’t working and confidence is sorely lacking in the worldwide economy. Without confidence that money loaned will be repaid, the banks won’t lend money. If the banks won’t lend money, the economy can’t grow. If the economy can’t grow, we all feel the pinch. Confidence is a sort of faith, faith that things will turn out as we think they should, but confidence—and faith—is placed in something or someone. Banks place their confidence in the market—that in the marketplace things will naturally sort out for the benefit of the market. It’s faith in the process; a confidence in the system. The market has become a “power” in the Biblical sense of Paul’s “principalities and powers” and that power is coming under deep suspicion as it seems to be faltering. Paul, in last week’s text, had placed his confidence in himself, viz., in his lineage and his ability to follow Jewish teaching with consistency, integrity, and zeal. The transformation that affects Paul is that in knowing Christ he discovers that his own righteousness is futile compared to Christ’s righteousness and that Christ has offered his own righteousness for Paul. Therefore, Paul is freed from his own efforts and instead can rest in the righteousness of Christ! Paul’s confidence is transferred from himself to Christ. It is this confidence that Paul recommends to the Philippians and to us:

Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ [or, the faithfulness of Christ] the righteousness from God based on faith. (Phil 3.7-9)

For Paul, it is not that suffering had ceased, or that hardships were done away with, but rather that he had gained a new way of seeing the world as he saw it in the light of Christ. Instead of seeing life as a challenge to be overcome through hard work and zealous effort at following Torah, he discovered in the faithfulness of Jesus that it was God at work in the world—not himself. Life was not about Paul and what Paul would accomplish, but rather it is about God and what God had accomplished in Jesus. And beyond this, it is about what God is accomplishing in and through people like Paul and us—disciples of Jesus—for the sake of the world. Because of this, Paul was able to place his confidence in God—the only one truly worthy of confidence. What you and I are supposed to see in this is that the turmoil of the markets, the back and forth of election politics, and the uncertainty of many confusing circumstances in our own lives, are put in right perspective by the story of Jesus. For in Jesus God is at work redeeming and reconciling the world to himself. And this touches ground in the particularities of our lives. It offers a critique of our misplaced confidence in the markets. It critiques our misplaced confidence in ourselves. It critiques our misplaced confidence in our political process. It draws our lives into the story of Jesus and only in that story do we truly find hope and peace—and joy.

This week’s text introduces another word that may seem odd at this time: rejoice. Paul calls us to “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice!” [here I'm following Stephen Fowl's commentary on Philippians] The difficulty we usually find in following this exhortation is most likely because we think of joy as an emotional response, a spontaneous emotion that is the result of happy circumstances. But this is not how Paul uses it. Consider Phil 1.18 in which rejoicing is in the context of false motives of preachers, or his own deliverance. In Phil 2.17-18 he writes, “But even if I am being poured out as a libation over the sacrifice and the offering of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with all of you—and in the same way you also must be glad and rejoice with me.” Here we see rejoicing in the context of suffering. In Phil 4.10 we see Paul rejoicing even in the context of his having need—or being content when others would be attentive to their lack.

I know that I find rejoicing hard to do when the bills are piling up, when the prospects for the economy look so bleak and our house continues to sink in value, when the kids throw fits, when I’m not sure where the next job will come from…all of these things make rejoicing hard. What circumstances in your own lives make rejoicing hard? Yet these are just the same or similar circumstances that surround Paul’s exhortation to us to rejoice. So Markus Barth tells us that “Joy in Philippians is a defiant ‘Nevertheless!’ which Paul sets as a full stop against the Philippians’ anxiety.” Joy is what comes when we consider the circumstances we are in and compare them to the goodness of the world seen through the story of Jesus.

Essential to understanding this story is not that by rejoicing and releasing our anxiety then all our problems will go away. It is that the future is in God’s hands. This is what Paul means when he speaks of the Resurrection. To rejoice is to defiantly claim the Resurrection in the face of the economy. To rejoice is to defiantly claim the Resurrection in the face of illness. To rejoice is to defiantly claim the Resurrection in the face of uncertainty, persecution, and suffering. To rejoice is to see the world as the arena in which God is working his salvation.

In what community is your faith embodied?

Again, this is a portion of this past week's sermon. I was preaching on Rom 12.1-8 and, as I was studying the text, became acutely aware that this familiar text (vv. 1-2) is situated in a very specific context--Paul teaching on the gifts given to the church and the unity of the body of Christ. It is also dense with the language of grace.

But let us also notice something in this text that is extremely significant for understanding what this sort of thing looks like. Paul writes that we should present our bodies, plural, as a living sacrifice, singular. I’m not sure how many bodies you have, but as for me, I only have one! Paul is talking here to the church! To the gathered body of believers who, together, are called to offer their bodies as one sacrifice, he is making his appeal. He is not asking you to make one herculean effort alone to be the most pious person you can be so that your body can be a living sacrifice, but he is rather requiring that together as the church, as the community of God’s people gathered together, our lives are to be offered to God. There is no room here for the solitary individual standing holy before God. There is only room for the community, for the body of believers, for the real, tangible, gathered assembly of Christians that we have come to call the church.

And this is just where Paul goes in the following verses of our text for this afternoon. Verse 4 reads, “For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.” In this sense when Paul writes of a sacrifice , he writes of one sacrifice, to which we are to add our bodies, that is our lives. We are to live our lives together as one sacrifice to God. What this makes problematic is those lives of Christians that have no reference to any particular, local, community of believers. It makes problematic the assertion that “I like Jesus, but not the church.” It makes no sense of the claim that “I am a follower of Jesus but not the church.” It drives us to ask the question, “In which community of Christians—that is, local and particular—is your faith embodied?”

On Joseph and Not Voting

Here's another portion of a recent sermon, this one was dealing with the story of Joseph...

It is not too extreme to suggest that each of our presidential candidates offers some sort of vision of salvation--perhaps not in an ultimate sense, but at least in a political sense. Then again, the line between these two is quite blurry. The rhetoric we hear often crosses the line between the temporal and the transcendent. That the political sense often becomes ultimate should remind us that we have lost a sense of the transcendent in our common discourse. We no longer recognize a need for ultimate salvation. Politics is all that there is.
In the face of this lie, the story of Joseph reminds us that God is Lord over all—families and even empires. It is God at work through the faithfulness of His people that He will accomplish His purposes. If we doubt this, remember Joseph. Joseph went from the eleventh of twelve brothers of a generally nomadic family to slavery, to being accused of rape, imprisoned, then, through his gift of the interpretation of dreams, he becomes Governor of Egypt.
Egypt is at this time a grand empire. Yet we discover through Joseph’s life that Egypt and by extension, all great empires, are subject to the Lordship of the God of Israel. While Joseph is in prison in Egypt, the Pharaoh has a dream. Joseph is able to interpret this dream and tells the Pharaoh that a famine is coming and that in order to survive the famine the Pharaoh needs to store grain over the next seven years. The Pharaoh takes Joseph’s advice and puts Joseph in charge, taking the very ring of his authority and pacing it on his hand. In all of this the empire is saved, but only because God has gifted Joseph with the ability to interpret dreams.
We learn also of the precarious nature of the position of empire. Famine could destroy Egypt, a reminder that even empires are at the mercy of nature, and we know that God is Lord over nature. Incidentally, this is why we should interpret Jesus’ miracles over nature—healing the sick, calming the storm, increasing the catch of fish—as political signs. God’s kingdom is not like the fragile kingdoms of this world that have no such control and authority.
So we learn that even in our own day, while the choices seem limited to two candidates, we are wrong to think that God’s purposes are bound up in one or the other—in John McCain or Barak Obama. No! His purposes are bound up with Ron Paul….Just kidding! God’s purposes are accomplished as he sees fit to accomplish them. That is why it is our task to discern what it is God is at work doing in the world.
It may be the case that we decide not to vote this November. It seems radical, but I can think of reasons why I wouldn’t vote for either candidate. Such a position may be interpreted as apolitical, that is, uninterested in political questions and solutions, but it could also be seen as radically political. As a friend of mine wrote in an essay recently regarding the church’s calling to engage in mission to concrete political concerns, “the church may have to carry out this task by refusing to endorse one party or another, but its neutrality is not benign. The church’s neutrality is an open rebuke against the self-deifying claims and dehumanizing practices on both sides.” [See G. Scott Becker, "Serving by Abstaining: Karl Barth on Political Engagement and Disengagement" in Electing Not to Vote: Christian Reflections on Reasons for not Voting (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008).]

J=L

I recently heard an interview with Cambridge physicist and theologian John Polkinghorn in which he described the beauty of mathematical equations. The simpler they are the more elegant they are and yet in their simplicity they can contain a profound and deep set of relations that have a direct correlation with the way the world is. Einstein’s E=mc2 is, perhaps, the most famous example. It is helpful, I think, to see the Kingdom of Heaven-or the Kingdom of God—in a similar way. The equation that makes sense out of all of Jesus’ teachings on the Kingdom is the simple equation, “Jesus is Lord.” Or, J=L.

Plumbing the depths of “J” we find this interesting contrarian revelation. We look for a cedar and find a shrub. We look for palaces and find a manger. We look for royalty and find peasants. We look for a following of the powerful and prestigious and instead find beggars, lepers, tax-collectors, fishermen, murderers, and prostitutes among his friends. We look for the war-horse and instead find the young donkey. We look for a throne and find a cross. We look for the Lion of the Tribe of Judah and behold, we see the lamb who was slain (Rev. 4.5,6).

What this tells us about “L,” or “lordship” is significant. John Howard Yoder writes, “Jesus was, in his divinely mandated . . . prophethood, priesthood, and kingship, the bearer of a new possibility of human, social, and therefore political relationships. His baptism is the inauguration and his cross is the culmination of that new regime in which disciples are called to share.”

The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. That is enough to shake up our imaginations and set us on a path of discovering the radical—and hopeful—nature of God’s rule, His kingdom, and the depth within the equation “Jesus is Lord.” In this time of ours with its high stakes political campaigns, the posturing of the powerful, and the promise of a hope through change that is still a hope based upon the promise of empire, we will do well to remember that the Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed. This means we will look for the Kingdom in places we don’t normally look. It means that God’s rule will often be very different from the rule that governs the nations of the world. It means that submitting to the lordship of Jesus will cause us to look like contrarians and non-conformists, following that greatest of contrarians, the Lord himself.

On giving up control of the future

I'll try a new posting strategy...

Here's a snippet from a sermon I gave recently and if it strikes you as interesting or provocative then make a comment and we'll see how this blog thing progresses.

The story...reaches its climax as Abraham binds his son and raises the knife to kill Isaac, his beloved son. In this moment we see Abraham offer his son back to God and along with Isaac’s life is Abraham’s future, the future of his family, and the future of God’s people—the people through whom God had said the entire world be blessed. Do we go too far if we say that the future of the world is given back to God as Abraham raises the knife to slay his son? Do we go too far to say that in that great and terrifying act of faith, the hope that the history of the world will turn out for the better rather than for the worse is given over into God’s hands? I say this because the promise to Abraham was that the nations of the world would be blessed through his offspring (Gen 12.1-3; 22.18).

“And by your offspring shall all the nations of the earth gain blessing for themselves, because you have obeyed my voice.”

What Abraham did was to relinquish control. First he relinquished control over his son, then control over his family, and then, ultimately, he relinquished control over history. As his hand is staid, and the ram appears in the thicket, he discovers that this God that has called him out, is a God who will provide; that he is a God who in his mercy and grace will give back his son, his family, the future of his people, and through his people, the world—as a gift. If there is a future, it will be God’s future. If there is a people, it will be God’s people. If Abraham is to have a family, it will be God’s family. If he is to have a son, it will be because God has given him a son.