The Gift of Sacrifice

We took communion at church this Sunday. I wanted there to be a sense that we are part of the sacrifice, so we broke a cracker in everyone's hands. That way we could all feel it breaking. Here's how I introduced it:

Frequently in Acts, the apostles make it clear to their audiences: “you killed Jesus” Even the Apostle Stephen here in chapter 8 says boldly, “You stiff-necked people… You have betrayed and murdered him!”

Today we each understand that “Christ died for me. IT was my sins that nailed him to the cross. It was me that killed Jesus.”

But then there is the gift of Communion. Instead of feeling guilty, we are invited to take part in the sacrifice. As Eleanor Krieder puts it, “Abba God calls out to us, ‘Come to me. You are my beloved people. Listen to my great passion. Join me as I work to restore the whole creation into wholeness and peace.’”

“Taking into ourselves the bread and wine—gifts of Christ’s very life—we present ourselves to be transformed.”

“How do we respond? By committing ourselves to self-giving love in the service of brother, sister, neighbor, and enemy.”

“Nourished at the table, we become co-workers in God’s great mission of reconciliation, justice, healing and hope.”

On the night of the Passover, Jesus, knowing he would be betrayed took bread and broke it apart. Giving it to his disciples, he said “This is my body given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” [1]

In the same way, after the supper, Jesus took the cup, and he said “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for me.”[2]

As you come forward, I’ll ask you to come up the two center aisles, and we will serve the elements to you. I’ve asked those serving to break the cracker in your hands. As you feel the cracker break, reflect on Christ’s broken body. Will we allow ourselves to be broken for others?

Then as you take part of that broken cracker and dip it into the juice, remember Christ’s love poured out on the cross. Will we pour out our love for others?

For our children and seekers not yet baptized, we have some grapes and crackers also available if you come through the line.

Finally, for anyone interested, John will be in the back of the sanctuary for anointing prayers of healing and hope.

After communion:

Today we are invited to take part in the sacrifice. It’s not easy, but we know that the resurrection is coming and that we can be a part of God’s redemptive work in the world. Thanks be to God!

---

[1] All of these quotes come from : Eleanor Krieder’s article, "Communion questions: Communion and mission can go together." The Mennonite17 Feb. 2009. .

[2] Scripture is from Luke. Since we’re looking at acts right now, I wanted to quote the same author.

A Mighty Smiting

I started writing this a couple weeks ago when John by the story of Ananias and Sapphira found in Acts 5.

¹Now a man named Ananias, together with his wife Sapphira, also sold a piece of property. ²With his wife's full knowledge he kept back part of the money for himself, but brought the rest and put it at the apostles' feet.

³Then Peter said, "Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land?⁴Didn't it belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, wasn't the money at your disposal? What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not lied to men but to God."

⁵When Ananias heard this, he fell down and died. And great fear seized all who heard what had happened. ⁶Then the young men came forward, wrapped up his body, and carried him out and buried him.

⁷About three hours later his wife came in, not knowing what had happened.⁸Peter asked her, "Tell me, is this the price you and Ananias got for the land?"
"Yes," she said, "that is the price."

⁹Peter said to her, "How could you agree to test the Spirit of the Lord? Look! The feet of the men who buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out also."

¹⁰At that moment she fell down at his feet and died. Then the young men came in and, finding her dead, carried her out and buried her beside her husband.¹¹Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events

(NIV)

I hate this story and stories like it. I've noticed that typically this story gets interpreted as "Ananias sinned. God killed him." In the world of Kyle, I want my God to be loving and compassionate and gracious-- Not the "Mighty Smiter" as Bruce Almighty put it...

This interpretation also seems really ironic to me. (Now's when the exegete in me comes out)

The first phrase of this passage: "Now a man named Ananias"

You've got the conjunction, "now,"to separate this story from the one about Barnabas before it, the specifier, "a," showing that its a specific person their talking about, then "man," ...the person is male... "named" -- the same "named" that Jesus got when he was born, the "named" that is meant to evoke emotion and represent so much more than just a word to refer to a person, and finally "Ananias," which means "God is gracious."

So maybe its not the "Mighty Smiter" but the "Gracious Smiter..."

Perhaps, though the way that God has been gracious to Ananias is with material blessings. We at least can gather that he has a beautiful wife. "Sapphira," like a Sapphire, connotes beauty.

Okay, now we know the characters: Beauty and Wealth.

Ananias talks it over with his honey bunny and they decide to sell a possession, just like Barnabas just did with a field that he owned a verse or two back in Chapter 4. From what I gather, selling possessions was not a requirement for Early church members, but was something people did as "loving acts of compassion and generosity" (I really like that phrase. I stole it from Rob Bell and used it in my sermon a couple weeks ago...) so in the story, God wasn't requiring Ananias and Sapphira to give anything-- let alone everything.

Some say that Ananias sin was "stealing" from the Church

With his wife's full knowledge, Ananias "kept back part of the money for himself" There is a sense that Ananias is embezzling this money. The only other place the greek word shows up is in Titus, where the NIV translates it as "steal:" "Teach slaves to be subject to their masters in everything, to try to please them, not to talk back to them, and not to steal from them, but to show that they can be fully trusted, so that in every way they will make the teaching about God our Savior attractive."

There is that sense looming there that maybe Ananias was intentionally embezzling money for himself, but I do find it interesting that the only other passage where the same word gets used is in a passage that tells slaves not to steal from their masters...

But what the passage doesn't give us any reason to believe that Peter knew Ananias was holding back some money, which makes his immediate accusation seem really heinous to me. Ananias sets down his offering-- the one he didn't have to give and Peter says "HOW IS IT THAT SATAN HAS SO FILLED YOUR HEART?!!?" If that happened to me, I'd probably have a heart attack. No wonder he died!

Then once he's kicked the can, men come in and bury him immediately, almost like they were prepared for this to happen...

Then a few hours later Sapphira comes in and pretty blatantly lies about the ammount thats sitting there, and Peter doles out another heinous accusation and she suffers the same fate as her husband.

I certainly don't want to take this story as an historical account of actual events because that makes everyone look really bad, including God. like I said earlier, this passage typically gets interpreted as Ananias sinned, Peter noticed, and God smote. Ananias looks bad because he's the embezzler-- he probably should look bad-- Peter looks bad because he is pretty quick to Judge Ananias for something he technically didn't have to do-- plus he doesn't even flinch when Ananias croaks which makes you think he almost wanted it to happen-- God looks bad because Ananias gets the death penalty for merely giving less than he could have-- and Sapphira looks bad because she straight up lied-- she should probably look bad for that too. I'd like to think that "the rock" on which Christ built the church is a good guy, and I'd especially like to think that God has a little more grace than that. Otherwise, we should all get a good smiting every once in a while...

I like that Pastor John didn't take that angle. He said that this story shouldn't teach us that God is the nagry smiter, but that greed kills things like christian community and the spirit of generosity, and that Greed should be removed from our lives immediately. That makes a little more sense to me.

So if I were going to look at this story as a story about values rather than about history, I think I'd look back on the metaphors their name represents: Ananias as wealth, and Sapphira as beauty. Wealth and Beauty weren't satisfied with simply being rich and looking good. They wanted to stay that way and gain the great reputation that Barnabas got in the preceding passage.

I think we can learn from this that it is important for us not to hoard stuff for ourselves, because the lust for things like beauty and wealth will eventually lead to bad news-- death by one of the seven deadly sins.

I hope my life looks a little more like the end of acts 4 than the beginning of acts 5.

Any thoughts?

Searching for a Creative Compromise

I went to a meeting at the church yesterday with only one thing on the agenda... Sharing Time. I guess the Pastoral team had put out a survey this past summer about different parts of the worship service, and the question about sharing time had very split results. I won't go into details, but some people love sharing time, and some people really don't. There wasn't much in the middle.

So how do you make everyone comfortable?

I've heard stories from different churches about people that hog the microphone during sharing time by elaborating on problems like groin rash or in-grown toe-nails... Or, less extreme, there often are trends at churches where you see the same people sharing every week and spending a lot of time doing so.

I also understand that there are very real things that people want to tell the congregation, like this past week when a member of PMC announced that he and his wife are excited to have a third member of their family on the way. People often want to share exciting things or sad things or scary things, and having an accepting congregation rally around those things in prayer can be a very loving gesture.

I understand both sides. Now how do we come to a compromise?

I think part of the problem we face is that the corporate church only comes together once a week. In the past, churches like PMC used to get together on Wednesday or Sunday nights for a prayer meeting where people would share the things happening in their lives and pray for each other. Most of the congregation attended these meetings.

But for better or worse, we don't do that any more, so if we're going to do sharing, we have to squeeze it into the hour on Sunday morning.

I suspect we also get some people through our doors that come from faith backgrounds that put a lot of emphasis on how sacred a time worship is-- not for things like broadcasting groin rash. For instance, I suspect that if you were to walk into a Catholic church, there would never be a sharing time during mass.

I think another part of the problem might be that some people are reminiscent of the very small and intimate past of PMC. Pittsburgh Mennonite Started out as a gathering at a house of a few Mennonites that had moved to Pittsburgh for various reasons. I think some of them even lived together. In that intimate setting, sharing time was probably a lot more natural.

In the meeting we were asked to start thinking of creative ideas of how we could have a venue for people that desire to share their struggles and triumphs but at the same time make worship bearable for those that cringe every time "groin rash lady" is handed the microphone. (please note that the groin rash example is only an example I made up, not something I've actually experienced, even third party...)

Some thoughts people had were that we could use notecards to write down joys and concerns that could then be summarized and read aloud, or we could a separate time before or after the worship service where people could share their hearts out.

My thoughts went to a few things I've seen in the past. I thought of the "Wailing Wall" I saw the few times I've attended New Hope. People could post pictures or newspaper clippings or written prayer concerns that they wanted to share with each other, and this wall represented a "wailing" prayer to God.

I also thought of my time at the Open Door when small groups were emphasized, even in the worship service at times.

I even thought of Mosaic Community Church during my time at the Pittsburgh Project, where every Sunday those celebrating a birthday are told emphatically "When God made you, he was showing off!"

It makes me sad to see congregations so split by such seemingly trivial but obviously emotional issues. I hope we can come to a creative compromise.

Any thoughts that might help?

The Church Under the Influence

For those of you who don't know, I'm back in Pittsburgh again, this time for a year-long term of service with an organization called PULSE. I have two placements with the PULSE program. one is with an organization called Wireless Neighborhoods. The second is with Pittsburgh Mennonite Church. Pastor John, the pastor at PMC started a series on Acts last week called "The Church: living under the influence." He's in Honduras this week, so I filled in. This is more or less the sermon I gave on Acts 2:

Luke- Author:

• Historian: Meticulous
• Prove the innocence of Christ
• Argue for toleration of Christians

• Apologetic: Challenge political and theological issues
• Challenge “Caesar is Lord”
• Shows Virgin Birth, miracles, and resurrection ßNot New…
• Shows that Jesus is true salvation… Not Caesar
• Challenge Religious Authority
• Inclusion of Gentiles

The book of Acts takes us on an adventure with the apostles through 3 decades of church history.

We start off In Jerusalem in the upper room waiting for the Holy Spirit to come,

then visit places like Judea, Samaria, Syria, Cyprus Asia Minor, Macedonia, and Greece, until the gospel arrives in Rome.

On the journey we will see preaching and miracles, but we will also witness imprisonment and shipwreck and other roadblocks along the way.

All of it however, shows the birth of a church that is living under the influence of a wild but gentile Holy Spirit.

(As a former youth ministry major, that gets me excited! It’s so wild and wonderful!)

…

Last Week Pastor John reminded us of the importance of Waiting for the Holy Spirit to guide us, just as the Apostles waited for the spirit to come in Chapter one of Acts.

This week we see that exactly what they’d been waiting for has come—rather triumphantly.

We all have heard the story of the Pentecost in Acts 2: the great wind, the tongues of fire, the speaking in non-native languages—it’s a really celebrated story in the Christian church. But just in case, Here’s a little refresher: It was the day of Pentecost.

As I understand it, Pentecost is a Jewish festival, held fifty days after the Passover as a celebration of Moses receiving the Law from God on Mount Sinai.

A bunch of believers had gathered for prayer on the day of Pentecost when a violent windstorm seems to appear—this wind- breath- spirit fills the house—tongues of fire split onto the apostles, and they start speaking in languages they don’t know…

Because it was the Pentecost feast, there were a bunch of devout Jews that were in Jerusalem—pilgrims from all over the world. They came running to this house to see where these gale-force winds had come from- and they hear this group from Galilee speaking in their language so they could understand.

This was big for the apostles. The spirit they had been waiting for—that they committed themselves to prayer for, that had seemed so distant and static, this spirit came alive! They could feel the spirit, see the spirit, hear the spirit. God was real and among them!

What I find so intriguing is the response of everyone that came running to see the commotion. Verses 12: “They were all amazed and perplexed…” I can imagine one of them saying to another… did you hear that? He sounds like he’s from Libya…

Some people apparently thought they were drunk, or “filled with new wine” I mean they were at a giant Jewish party…Peter gets up pretty quick to answer with his refutation to this claim… but first I want to focus on this drunkenness.

Perhaps it was the greeks that said they were drunk. Drunkenness was common among the greeks. To the greeks wine gave a feeling of ecstasy and aided in prophetic speech.

Or Perhaps it was Jews from Palestine, where drunkenness was considered obnoxious and sinful. Either way, The actions of this group of disciples was so irrational and unusual to ordinary life that the only way people could explain it was drunkenness. Everyone else was just perplexed.

I wonder if there are things that the Spirit calls us to today that are irrational to everyday life. In a world that tells us to take, we are to give. In a world that tells us to live extravagantly, we live simply, in a world that tells us to be competitive, we are to put others above us. In a world that is violent, the peacemakers are blessed, and in a world that hurts, we are to be a force of love.

…

So now for Peter’s response—a great sermon, one of many that will come in the book of Acts. Peter, who was once the guy that denied Jesus thrice, is now apparently filled with the spirit and speaks boldly, making claims that Joel’s prophesy in scripture is being fulfilled. In Joel’s words, God said that in the last days the spirit would be poured out and the people of God will prophesy. Peter is saying THIS IS WHATS HAPPENING NOW!

And Peter is quick to connect this occurrance with what happened to Jesus. Death has lost its power on Christ, just as king David said: Hades could not hold him. But the Israelites’ Beloved King David is dead never to come out of the grave. Jesus, on the other hand, is ALIVE and moving through their midst in this wild and wonderful moment. God is doing something New and Exciting, and as Peter says in Verse 32: “All of us are witnesses.” … Witness, translated from the greek “martus” the same word from which we get the English word martyr”

…

People’s Response

Finally, my favorite part of the scripture is the people’s response to what has happened and to what they have heard. The scripture tells us that about 3000 people repented from their old ways and were baptized—were washed clean—into this new life as part of the church. They ate together, held everything in common, and sold their possessions so that they could give to each other as there was need. Everyone was loving and generous and compassionate toward each other and life was good for everyone. The Church was born.

This was salvation. This was church. This was the kingdom the people of Israel had been praying for. The spirit of God moving amongst the people inspired them to respond with loving acts of Compassion and generosity. They were being the body of Christ. They were living out the good news to each other. They were the church.

Folks, I feel like the number one thing I learned in college was that I don’t know anything at all, but one thing I am so very confidently certain about as that we are called to be witnesses, and not just the kind of witness that says “Jesus loves you,” but the kind of Witness that is like that of the martyr—that takes on the life of Jesus. The kind of people that know that God is love, and when we are inspired by the spirit of Love himself, we respond with loving acts of Compassion. Church, I hope we find that the confidence to do what is irrational to our neighbors. I hope we are able to find the New and Exciting things God is doing around us. And I hope that we find that we are living out the gospel of Christ and that Christ is alive through us.

Creator God, you are good. Teach us to share your goodness. Create in us a passion to be your force of love and compassion and generosity in the world.

Amen.

Celebrating the blown popsicle stand

Its a shame that seemingly every time I post I have to make some sort of comment about how long it has been since I have posted last. I won't do that this time...

A lot has happened since February, though. And I won't be able to recap all of it, nor do I really want to attempt such a feat. However, a few highlights should suffice:

I have joined a band called the Anabaptist Bestiary Project that rocks on about creatures. My ethics professor started it last year and had a pretty awesome band, but since some of them graduated, he had to add a few new people to play new songs. It's been a great deal of fun, and we've already had 3 shows with a few more coming up this summer. You can hear some previews of the songs they recorded last year and even buy the CD if you should feel the desire by clicking on this link.

After much drudgery, I made it through the final few months of my undergraduate college career, and I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I am really going to miss the college life. I liked living in the dorm where I could walk down the hall to hang out with my buddies. I liked the deep conversations I would have with friends around the dinner table in the cafeteria, and I liked the mind-stimulating stuff we talked about in the upper-level religion courses. On the other hand, however, I realize that I don't make a great student. While I love learning, I hate grades. They're so artificial. I also don't like reading very much and writing essays isn't really my favorite pastime either... so when graduation time came, I was so very ready to blow that popsicle stand. (where did that phrase come from anyway?) As you can well imagine, Commencement made me pretty happy. I finally got the degree I had been working at for so long! Then to add to that excitement, my family was there, Andie's family was there, and some of my best friends all showed up to give a nice loud "WOOHOO!" when I walked across the stage. It was so awesome to have them all there. The speaker was pretty good too. I really liked the benediction he read. You should probably read it here (Andie's dad liked it so much he put it on his website). I'm not sure how ready I am for whatever is supposed to come after graduation, though. For the next year and a few months I'll be in Pittsburgh, but after that I don't know where I'll be or what I'll be doing when I get there.

Since I had a few weeks between graduation and when I start in Pittsburgh, I decided to take a trip to Florida for a week to visit my Grandparents. I hadn't been on an airplane since I was a baby, so I didn't really know what to expect and consequently I was a little nervous for what seemed like my first flight ever. It was nice to get stuck between two really nice young ladies (I would guess they were in their 50's maybe in their 60's... I'm not a great judge of age, though) because they warned me about all the stuff that might make me feel weird and made fun of me when I tensed up at every shake of the plane when it hit turbulence. It was interesting to get to talk to them because one of them lived in the Orlando area and was returning there after visiting her son in the Y-town area while the other one lived in the Y-town area and was flying south to visit her son in Orlando. Even more interesting was that the one that lives in the Y-town area happened to work at the Allegheny General Hospital which is pretty much right down the hill from the Pittsburgh Project where I lived for a semester my Junior year and where I will be working this Summer. Small world? I'll let you decide.

I made sure I got to go to the beach while I was down there. Though it wasn't for very long. We went out to the New Smyrna beach and walked for a while with our feet in the water. It was nice even if it was short-lived. I did enjoy the little birds that were there. Every time a wave would come they would run really fast to chase it back toward the ocean and peck into the sand, probably looking for food, then they would have to run away again really fast when the next wave would come. They stuck together in groups of like 10 or 15 so it was funny to watch these little groups of birds scrambling toward the ocean then scrambling back a few seconds later.

Most of the rest of my time was spent at my grandparents house hanging out with them and doing odd jobs around their house. On sundays my grandparents go to two churches, so I went along with them to both. The first was a Mormon church where my Grandma has attended for over 20 years now. It was certainly interesting to experience a faith perspective that is pretty different from my own. The second one was a Baptist church and this past sunday happened to be the awards night for the Awana kids program.

For the sake of the sanity of those that read my blog, I'll keep this short and end here, though there is a lot I could write about. As a final note, I've added a new link in my "friends" list that is the Young Anabaptist Radicals. I stumpled upon their blog a few days ago and read some interesting posts, so I thought I'd share the link if you feel bored and want some good controversial Anabaptist reading.

Thanks for stopping by my blog even though I've been absent for a few months.

Scapegoat Mechanism

I took an exam today in War Peace and Nonviolence in which I had to write an essay about Rene Grirard's work on "the scapegoat mechanism" I think it is a very intriguig account of the reason behind a lot of the violence of our world, present and past. My response looked something like this:

The idea of the scapegoat comes from leviticus 16:20-22, describing a goat that is driven into the wilderness to die during the celebration of Yom Kippur in a ritualistic way of releasing the guilt of sin. (scapegoat is actually a mess up in the translation of what literally means "escape goat" but has since become

Rene Girard claims that the scapegoat concept can be used to explain all of society's love of violence and attempt at order. In order to understand his theory of the scapegoat mechanism, w must first understand Girard's theory of mimetic desire. According to Girard, our desires are not driven by natural, internal forces as we tend to think. Instead, we look around ourselves to see what others are desiring and form our own desires around the others' desires. In other words, we imitate desire (a couple examples would be celebrity worship and pop culture). This mimetic desire causes jealousy and eventually creates a culture of rivalry, conflict, and violence, where we fight each other for what we desire (much like two men fight over the same woman).

Here applies Girard's theory of the “scapegoat mechanism:” to keep the world from exploding in violence, societies have to use a scapegoat, a (usually innocent) victim onto which all violence and emotion get channeled. If people do away with the scapegoat, they get rid of the guilt and violence they had toward each other and can become united in mutual hatred.

An example of the scapegoat mechanism can be found in the death penalty. Though those on death row are often guilty of terrible crimes, execution still has a kind of sacrificial aspect about it. Instead of dealing with the violence we have toward each other, we in the United states channel violence on murderers in an attempt to wipe our hands clean of the violence that pervades our society. We think that if we can only get rid of the “evil people” like those convicted of rape or murder, then our society will be less violent and generally more good. Those we execute become scapegoats for our society.

A second example can be found in the holocaust. Antisemetic Nazis in Germany untied themselves by channeling all of their violence on Jews. Through Genocide, Hitler and the Nazis were attempting to make the “perfect” Aryan race through the expulsion of the “evil” Jewish race. The Jews were scapegoats for the Nazis.


I realize this is a pretty poor explaination of the scapegoat mechanism, but I assure you Girard's work is very interesting. He has a couple books out, so if you happen to be really curious about this subject, you might look him up on amazon.

Peace.

Debatable

This past week we had a "debate" in my creation class about the creation/evolution continuum. You can find a description of the continuum here.

This was my opening statement:


In his address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on October 22, 1996 entitled “Truth Cannot Contradict Truth” , Pope John Paul II made the statement that:

“new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory.”

He knew very well that that the theory of evolution had evidence to support it and therefore could be regarded as truth. Yet as the highest leader of the Catholic church, some might regard his statement as heretical. However, what the pope was doing was connecting his christian faith in the Bible to science, much like the theory of evolutionary creationism seeks to connect the foundations of Christian faith with the scientific evidence for the theory of evolution.

In the realm of truth , science and religion serve different purposes. Science seeks to provide logical, accurate answers to questions through observation and experiment. Religion seeks to provide truth by pointing to a higher power. by connecting the two, we are able to view the world holistically and in turn we are able to find the whole truth.

Specifically in the study of origins, Science tells us we came about through a long line of genetic changes known as evolution. Archaeological digs reveal fossils that show lines of transition species while animal anatomy dealing with vestigial structures and homologous structures point to common ancestors. It is foolish not to accept the evidence presented by scientists.

Yet evolution falls short is in providing explanations for several questions such as what reality looked like before time and why humans have such a high position in the natural world. Here the Bible fills the gap by explaining that all things were created by a loving God that exists eternally and that humans were created in the image of God. Furthermore, it is difficult to fathom that complexities like the central nervous system in humans can come about without specific design. Therefore, it is important to connect both evolution and creation to get a full account of our origin. In doing so, we find that God reveals through both nature and the Bible.

If I were to stop here, the theory of theistic evolution would suffice. God was the creator that set the natural order in motion. However, that would limit God's effect on creation to one instance of divine action. Yet throughout history, miracles that science cannot account for show that God does indeed intervene in creation. Throughout all of time, God has worked to mould creation into the diverse infrastructure it is today and has been in the past. For instance, the dark skin found on humans in regions that receive a lot of sun offers protection from harmful ultraviolet rays while the light skin of those in the areas that typically receive little sun allows sun rays to penetrate the skin in order to produce vitamin D. Each time a new discovery is made in evolution, we can celebrate the love God has for creation.


Any Thoughts?