Deconstructing The Great Commission – Part Two

‘To be a witness means to offer your own faith experience and to make your doubts and hopes, failures and successes, loneliness and woundedness, available to others as a context in which they can struggle with their own humanness and quest for meaning.’   --Henry Nouwen (Spiritual Direction)

I didn’t get a lot of response to my previous post Deconstructing The Great Commission  but here’s some rambling in response to one of the comments:

Ken Bussell pointed out that the verses associated with The Great Commission don’t say anything about “sharing the gospel” – instead the verses speak of making disciples and teaching them to obey Jesus’ commandments.  Thinking about that and taking into account what Jesus said and taught I start to get the sense that The Great Commission is not so much about converting people to a particular belief system but much more about teaching a way of life.  Of course it is easier to tell people what to believe than to show them how to live.  Living life is a lot messier – it often seems to pull the legs out from under absolute statements that belief systems are typically built on.  I notice that people were always trying to pin Jesus down about what they should believe about all sorts of things, but Jesus didn’t seem that concerned with absolute statements that could be spouted off.  In fact, it seemed that he went out of his way to show that life would more often than not turn those statements on their head.  Just when someone thought they were being obedient Jesus would demonstrate that their form of obedience violated the very essence of what he was all about.

I guess at this point I would say that I am getting a picture that living out The Great Commission is much more alive and fluid than traditional teaching conveys. 

Random Thoughts

(A friend sent these to me via email today)

1. I think part of a best friend’s job should be to immediately clear your computer history if you die.

2. Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you’re wrong.

3. I totally take back all those times I didn’t want to nap when I was younger.

4. There is great need for a sarcasm font.

5. How the hell are you supposed to fold a fitted sheet?

6. Was learning cursive really necessary?

7. Map Quest really needs to start their directions on #5. I’m pretty sure I know how to get out of my neighborhood.

8. Obituaries would be a lot more interesting if they told you how the person died.

9. I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t at least kind of tired.

10. Bad decisions make good stories.

11. You never know when it will strike, but there comes a moment at work when you know that you just aren’t going to do anything productive for the rest of the day.

12. Can we all just agree to ignore whatever comes after Blue Ray? I don’t want to have to restart my collection…again.

13. I’m always slightly terrified when I exit out of Word and it asks me if I want to save any changes to my ten-page research paper that I swear I did not make any changes to.

14. “Do not machine wash or tumble dry” means I will never wash this — ever.

15. I hate when I just miss a call by the last ring (Hello? Hello? Damn it!), but when I immediately call back, it rings nine times and goes to voicemail. What’d you do after I didn’t answer? Drop the phone and run away?

16. I hate leaving my house confident and looking good and then not seeing anyone of importance the entire day. What a waste.

17. I keep some people’s phone numbers in my phone just so I know not to answer when they call.

18. My 4-year old son asked me in the car the other day “What would happen if you ran over a ninja?” How the hell do I respond to that?

19. I think the freezer deserves a light as well.

20. I disagree with Kay Jewelers. I would bet on any given Friday or Saturday night more kisses begin with Miller Lite than Kay.

Deconstructing The Great Commission

 

As many of you know I’ve been doing a lot of deconstructing of Christianity over the last few years – examining what I’ve been taught, what I believed about God, Jesus, and scripture, and what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ. 

Let me tell you…it is a very, very, very long process – especially for someone with no formal theological training.  Not only is it a long process but at times it is a very uncomfortable process – living with the questions, the doubts, the “not knowing” – dealing with people who proclaim you are going to hell, saying you shouldn’t call yourself a Christian and assigning all sorts of negative labels to you.  At times I want to give up, but I don’t – not because I am this great person who is pushing themselves through this process, determined not to give up, committed to persevering (blah blah blah) but more because it is what is happening to me.  I am trying to follow Jesus and as I live my life these “things” keep coming up – it’s sort of like “shit happens”.  So, here I am today with another “thing” that I am trying to understand – and it has to do with “The Great Commission.”

I was taught that every Christian is commanded by Jesus to be a witness for him and that means telling others about the gospel (i.e. how he died on the cross to pay for our sins and how believing in him can save you from going to hell) and that our ultimate goal is to convert as many as possible and win the world for Christ – this was called “The Great Commission.”

When I first began to deconstruct this teaching I focused on “the gospel” – I deconstructed what I had been taught and began to try to understand what scripture had to say about “the gospel” (what was the good news?) – I eventually came to a different understanding from what I had been taught all my life but that is not what I want to talk about today.  Today I want to ask some different questions.  I want to ask:

“Is the Great Commission a promise or a commandment?”  “Was Jesus really speaking to all Christians or just to the apostles?” “What was the goal of the instruction that Jesus gave to the apostles?”  “What about all those things that Jesus said would happen – casting out demons, picking up snakes with their hands, speaking in new tongues, healing the sick?” “Are these passages relevant for me today?”

You see, when I read the first chapter of Acts it sounds to me that the only commandment Jesus gave was the one to wait in Jerusalem until something special happened (the Day of Pentecost).  When I read Acts 1:8 it doesn’t sound like a command as much as a promise.  It sounds like Jesus is explaining what will happen after the Holy Spirit comes upon them.

And when I read Matthew 28:16-20 and Mark 16:15-20 in context it sounds like this is a contextually limited instruction given only to the apostles and that there is a political aspect to the instruction that has to do with the Roman Empire.  I also sense that the purpose was much narrower than what I’ve been taught and that there may have been some  immediate urgency to make something happen before something else happened.

Could Jesus’ instructions to the apostles serve the purpose of creating communities that would “be” the “new creation” among all the nations and these communities would be the witness of Jesus because of the way they functioned?  Was there an urgency to do this before the destruction of Jerusalem – was that the reason for all those special signs?

I sense that there is a past, present and future wrapped up in these passages.  I believe that there is something in these passages that is relevant for me today but that it is different than what I have known up to this point. 

I have more questions and thoughts but I want to stop here for now.

I could use some help thinking these things through and so I am inviting you to come here and have a conversation that I can listen in on.  I am interested in all feedback but please be courteous.  (And not to be rude, but I already know the traditional teaching very well and feel that it is incomplete in some ways and embellished in others – I am looking for some new perspectives and insights that might help me to explore my questions.  Oh – and I am better with “not knowing” than trying to simplistically explain away my questions.) 

Singing Horses

 

I could play with these singing horses all day.  Go here and click on each horse to hear them sing to you and harmonize with each other.

A Labor Of Love

My husband and I participated in this last year and it was great.  Unfortunately we were not able to participate this year but plan on joining in again next year.  It is truly a labor of love.

A group of volunteers gave four Haltom City homes a makeover. In just 24 hours, some 1,600 volunteers completed home renovations for the much-deserving families.

The home makeovers come courtesy of the NorthWood Church in Keller. This is the third year that NorthWood has provided home makeovers for families in Haltom City.

The families being helped were all selected based on their need. “There’s something about the time frame and the urgency of it that makes it that much more,” said volunteer Andy Wallace.

Those involved with the project say the renovation isn’t only for the homes, but the soul as well. “God said, ‘Go out and help the needy and the poor’, so what better way to come out and serve the Lord than to help these folks out?” Wallace asked.

The makeovers include painting, replacing flooring, landscaping, decorating, new furniture and decorative items, appliance replacement or repair and other things you would expect.  This year mini-makeovers were added for the houses on the streets where the home makeovers were taking place.  The mini-makeovers included yard work, exterior painting and other small jobs.

The teams start working on Friday afternoon and work through the night and into Saturday.  The big reveal happens about 5PM that Saturday.

Be sure and click on the picture above to see CBS coverage.

Rush Limbaugh: Mindreader

Conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh got all worked up Friday by this fake quote attributed to the Columbia University thesis of President Barack Obama.

 “… the Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy.”

Conservative author Michael Ledeen had posted the phony quote on his blog last Wednesday. Ledeen reports that he found it on another site and didn’t notice that it was tagged as satire.

The Rush Limbaugh Show did not properly fact check the quote and rushed to the airwaves with it so Limbaugh could use it as a launching pad to berate President Barack Obama.

Do you think Limbaugh apologized to his listeners and to Obama when he realized it was a fake quote? No. He said what he did was okay because that’s how Obama thinks anyway.

It seems that Limbaugh can now read minds. That power is going to make his job a lot easier.

Climate Change – Asking The Right Questions

This post is for Blog Action Day 2009: Climate Change

In 1988 “Beds Are Burning”, Midnight Oil’s infectious rocker, brought the issue of reparations for indigenous peoples to the global spotlight, and now Time For Climate Justice has gathered musicians and movie stars to transform the song into an anthem that demands action for the upcoming climate conference in Copenhagen.

In December of this year, the United Nations will meet to decide on the replacement of the Kyoto protocol, a defining agreement that will determine the future of our planet in the face of the climate crisis. People around the world are dying today as a result of climate change and without our collective action, this will continue. The people who are suffering the most from climate change happen to be those who have done the least to cause it and have the least resources to do anything about it.  In other words, climate change is above all a justice issue.

For example Ally Ouedraogo has been farming his land on the edge of the Sahel in Burkino Faso for two decades, but in recent years climate change has made it much more difficult for him to grow his crops. As the dry seasons in the region have got dryer, the quality of the soil has deteriorated dramatically. It’s a familiar story everywhere for farmers and their communities in the developing world as climate change begins to take a heavy toll.

Scientists predict that at the current rate of carbon emissions tens of millions more people will go hungry in the next couple of decades as agricultural yields diminish across the globe.  And if nothing is done to stem a rise of 2°C in global average temperatures by 2050 they say 250 million more people will be forced to leave their homes, 30 million more people will go hungry as agricultural yields go into recession across the globe, and one to three billion people will suffer acute water shortages.    

I hear many Christians asking “should we care about climate change and the environment?”  But I think those are the wrong questions to be asking ourselves.  Instead I think we should be asking “as Christians, should we care about people who are forced to leave their homes, who will go hungry and suffer water shortages due to climate changes that they did not cause and cannot do anything about?” 

In other words we should be asking ourselves… “should we care about justice?”

Go here to find steps you can take to limit greenhouse gas emissions

Go here and here to find out how to take political action. 

Go here to donate to help those who are suffering the most from climate change.

We Never Recover Until We Forgive

Catching up on all the great stuff in my google reader this week and just had to share this great video I found over at Missio Dei where Jonathan Brink wrote a great post about True Justice.  The video is about forgiveness with Mary Karen Read’s last words in her journal entry before her death at the Virginia tech shooting.  I have to warn you – it will probably make you cry.

 

A Modern Telling Of The Beatitudes

Rob Bell recently tweeted a modern telling of The Beatitudes and my friend Jonathan Blundell (@jdblundell) gathered them up and posted them on his blog “Stranger In A Strange Land“. Here they are:

Blessed are those who don’t have it all together.

Blessed are those who have run out of strength, ideas, will power, resolve, or energy.

Blessed are those who ache because of how severely out of whack the world is.

Blessed are those stumble, trip, and fall in the same place again and again.

Blessed are those who on a regular basis have a dark day in which despair seems to be a step behind them wherever they go.

Blessed are you, for God is with you, God is on your side, God meets you in that place.

The gospel is the counter-intuitive, joyous, exuberant news that Jesus has brought the unending, limitless, stunning love of God to even us.

via @realrobbell

More Flawed Opposition To A Public Healthcare Option

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it has become common for people who are against a public healthcare option to use everything they don’t like about the government as their defense.  Just yesterday I heard a radio personality on some Christian radio station say that because he didn’t like the way the speed limit was being set and enforced on a local toll road he was against a public healthcare option.  In other words, if the government has done anything that doesn’t seem right or smart it is scary to think about your healthcare being managed by the government.  This kind of logic is flawed in more than one way.

First and foremost, this kind of defense is fear based.  The people who are using it are in one of two camps – either they want you to be afraid or they are afraid (some may actually be in both camps).  Fear is never a good foundation for making rational decisions.  Fear keeps a lot of good people from doing the right thing everyday.

The logic is also flawed because it compares apples to oranges.  Our government is already involved in several levels of healthcare and seems to manage it fairly well.  That isn’t to say that there are no improvements to be made, but all in all it works.  My mother-in-law lived with us for seven years and I saw first hand how great medicare worked.  My dad was a war veteran and his VA health benefits were wonderful.  My mother-in-law and dad would have been much worse off without these government run programs.

Another reason the defense doesn’t hold water is because other countries make government run healthcare work just fine, and if they can do it, I say, “so can we.”  The opponents of the public option would like you to believe that people in other countries don’t like their healthcare, but time and time again this is proven to not be true.  Because of the wonderful way we can connect with people around the world through online social networking these days, I have friends in Canada and the UK. These friends love their government run healthcare programs, see them as a birthright, depend on them.  The systems work so well that the typically don’t give them a second thought and even take them for granted. We heard what British citizens thought of the NHS, their government run healthcare program, when the twitter hashtag #welovetheNHS trended on Twitter for several days as Brits of all ages and backgrounds tweeted their defense of the NHS.  And shortly after that Matte Black (@Shoq on twitter) and a friend took their video camera on vacation to interview Canadians about their health care system. Watch the video above for yourself.  (My favorite part of the video is the “deer in the headlights” look they get on their face when asked about a copay.)

It’s true – the government is far from perfect, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t need the government or that the government can’t do anything good…and it certainly isn’t a good defense for opposing a public healthcare option.