Last night my oldest son and I watched John Stewart’s reaction to the news Bid Laden was dead. In the middle of Stewart’s quips about the demise of the enemy of New York, he made a powerful observation. Al Qaeda failed, in part, because it lacked a constructive agenda. The terrorist organization was able to vocalize who it hated and to destroy buildings and people. Al Qaeda, however, lacked the capacity to actually create anything.  The uprising in the Arab world that Al Qaeda yearned for came to pass this year, but not by their hands. The uprising came in a more secular form, from young Arabs who had a vision for having more participation and voice in their respective governments. Al Qaeda’s creative medium was Chaos and could not create the change it vocalized.

Our Creation Story in Genesis One suggests that there are two mediums from which to create: Chaos and Order.

Chaos is mentioned briefly at the opening of the chapter. It is amorphous and void, dark and barren. Throughout the chapter we see God transform that Chaos into order. The Spirit doesn’t fear Chaos. It hovered over its shapeless surface. The poetic structure of the chapter communicates that the Father spoke designed creation with  deliberation and order. Chapter Two provides us with the relational implications of this order: Shalom. Adam and Eve are created to live in intimate harmony with each other. They are at peace with God and in deep relationship with him.

Their relationship with the earth captures the tension by Order and Chaos. Eden is the paragon of perfect order. But Eden is just a “starter kit” to steal a notion from N.T. Wright.  The first couple is to be fruitful and multiply and to extend the perfection of Eden across the whole planet. This is God’s way of allowing humanity to experience the god-like joy that comes with being creative.

Unfortunately, we know what happened. Adam and Eve chose to create with a medium other than the one God intended. They wanted the knowledge of right and wrong apart from an ongoing relationship with God. They bit the fruit and painted with chaos. Instead of expanding Eden’s order, they unleashed Chaos on the garden and themselves.

Al Qaeda’s demise was inevitable, because the moral medium of their creativity was Chaos and not God’s Order– that elusive Shalom. And like Adam and Eve they were destroyed by their own art.

I think that many of us who expressed ambiance over the killing of Bin Laden did so because even though we believe that his death or imprisonment was necessary, that we were forced into triage: We painted with Chaos to defeat Chaos. The venerated Dietrich Bonheoffer was confronted with the same situation when he chose to participate in the failed bombing plot to kill Hitler. And this decision made Bonhoeffer deeply reflective. He wondered out loud if he sacrificing his salvation in order to save the Jewish people. His life and writings lacked bravado but not bravery. He was willing to help extinguish a great evil from the earth. But he fully appreciated the moral and spiritual price of doing so.

I picked up Richard Dahlstrom’s new book The Colors of Hope: Becoming People of Mercy, Justice, and Love this week. I’m about a third of the way through and loving it so far. Shortly, I’ll be making a few posts on the book. Dahlstrom offers a positive vision of what it means to be an individual who paints with the medium of a creator. He breaks down this notion of painting  Shalom into three primary colors: Mercy, justice, and love. I’m looking forward to interacting with this book because even though we paint with small brushes than governments or terrorist organizations, we’re all still painting with our lives.

I’m almost embarrassed to admit it. My first reaction to the news that Osama Bin Laden had been killed by our special forces was not one of jubilation. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that bringing him to justice was the proper thing for our government to do. I’m grateful to the brave men and women who worked unceasingly for nearly a decade to bring the man responsible for the atrocities of 9-11 to justice. I’m thankful for President Bush starting the hunt and for President Obama having the will to bank his presidency on the success of this mission.

But I’m not feeling the sense of jubilation that I’m observing on Twitter and Facebook.

At first I thought that this was because Amy woke me from a deep sleep to see the news on Sunday evening. I was engrossed by President Obama’s speech. At one point I welled up in tears, but not tears of joy.

I thought perhaps that after a full night of sleep that my emotions would be re-calibrated and that I’d catch up with the rest of the world. A friend told me  that he saw a tweet that read, “I’m feeling so patriotic that I’ve become a NASCAR fan.” That’s the emotion I wanted to experience, but no such luck.

Instead, I was left with a profound sense that our world is no less broken after Bin Laden was double-tapped by a U.S. assault weapon. Evil was not inside the body bag that slipped into the sea and sank into the depths. Evil merely lost a willing host. The assault was, perhaps, necessary but did not have the power to restore. Our relationship with the Islamic world continues to be conflicted and tense. America continues to be changed by our own responses to the threat of terror. Al Qaeda might be broken, but the clock was not rolled back to 9/10/01.

The planet remains broken.

…

The whole thing has me thinking about the Christian narrative of ultimate justice. Sean Gladding, in his book The Story of God, The Story of Us points out that our story does not begin at the Fall and end on Judgment Day. It begins in the garden and ends with a New Heaven and a New Earth. Our is a story of restoration, of all things being made new.

Jesus will return and, yes, he will pull down every government and power that stands in opposition to his rule. But if the story ended there, ours would be a hollow one. We’d be worshiping a character in a Clint Eastwood movie, someone who could stop the rise of a particular embodiment evil but who ironically was consumed by the weight of a larger form of brokenness. Our story is not one of a Messiah who conquers evil but leaves a wake of rubble behind him. Our God doesn’t return to earth long enough to smash the forces of darkness and then airlift the faithful to another place. If that were the story, the credits would roll, and the camera would pan to Earth reduced to rubbish and ash, pulverized by the Last Battle. Tragedy would be bound up in the story forever.

Gratefully that is not the Christian Narrative, contrary to Left Behind theology. Our savior stays and restores. All things are made new.

The events of this weekend made me ache for a form of justice that will never be fully possible until Christ returns and judges and begins to set things right.

In honor of the Orange Conference this week, a re-post:

How to start a movement: Reggie doesn’t primarily offer a curriculum, a conference, a strategy, or a tactic. When someone registers for Orange they are accepting an invitation to join a community of pastors who are committed to re-imagine how faith is passed from generation to generation. Orange participants remind me of Apple aficionados. Reggie’s “product” is a tribe for innovative pastors willing to break the mold in order to reach families.

How to lead process change: There are dozens of books that champion the family. Each book references the same key Bible verses and affirms the parents are central in a child’s faith development. Reggie’s book “Think Orange” stands out because it provides advice on how to navigate the departmental structures that get in the way of a church providing a unified strategy for helping families.  For my money, this is the genius of the book. Children and youth pastors are at the bottom of most church’s org charts. Reggie has provided a blue print for leading up well. If I ever had lunch with Reggie, I’d pick his brain about process leadership.

How to recruit “evangelists”: During the week’s that lead up to the Orange conference, Twitter and the blogosphere lit up with post about Orange. Pastor raved about their past conference experiences and what they were looking forward to experiencing this year. These “evangelists” created a buzz that made other’s curious. After each Orange conference, has a meeting with influential bloggers to get their opinions and to enlist their help in casting the Orange vision.

It seems to me that these three skills are invaluable for any leader. If I could learn from Reggie, I pump him for information on those three things.

By Jeremy Cowart. Saw this at donmilleris.com. Inspiring. This makes me want to work at my craft harder.

You don’t plan for resurrection. You can’t circle a box on your calendar and then train your way to it.

You can’t muscle your way to a resurrection.

You can’t “moral” your way to one either.

Playing church doesn’t provoke a resurrection. In Jesus’ day there were two religious groups that were trying to prepare for the resurrection. They strove to be religious and make their nation a place where a savior would want to come.

Both groups completely missed the resurrection.

Resurrection is not a topic to master. Nobody gets a Ph.D. in resurrection. There are no experts.

Resurrection is a surprising gift that overtakes you.

That’s how it was for the people closest to Jesus’ resurrection. They were dealing with a death and God surprised them with a life.

That’s how it was in Jesus’ day. That’s how it is now.

What needs to be resurrected in you?

What parts of you are dead?

Are there relationships that have become cold and stiff?

What about your relationship with God?

What would it look like for God to surprise you with a resurrection?

Adapted from words by Eugene Peterson.

On September 26-27, 2010, popular author and speaker, Donald Miller took to the stage of the Amory Theater to host his first Storyline conference in his hometown of Portland, OR. Storyline was Miller’s vehicle to explain how individuals can create meaningful lives for themselves by applying principles from good story telling to edit their lives. On the second day of the conference, Miller illustrated the concept of a story’s climax—the emotional turning point toward which everything is pointing toward—by bringing the conference to an emotional climax.
In the weeks leading into the conference, Don invited attendees to submit their stories of how his bestseller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, challenged them to write better stories with their lives. The prize for the winning entry was an all-expense paid trip to experience the conference for the winner and a friend, along with a few other unspecified prizes.
Don explained the concept of a literary climax and then invited the contest winner, Lori Ventola, to the stage. Lori won the contest for her dream of starting a mobile after-school program that would help the children of the homeless in the Denver area transition into school. Don called Lori a few weeks before the conference, but he had no idea that her dream had already died. The Storyline team carefully scripted every minute of the conference but had no idea that the contest “reveal” would be more than a climax. It would be a resurrection. Continue Reading…

Last week I mentioned Eugene Peterson’s book Practicing the Resurrection. One of his emphases in the book was how resurrection was experienced as a community. The post-resurrected Jesus appeared to a community of friends,  doubters and cynics and ready worshipers.  Jesus was happy to reveal himself to Thomas and Mary Magdalene  as we was Peter and John. This motley band of friends hung together until they sorted this whole resurrection thing out as best they could.

In the past week I received two reminders that resurrection continues to be a team sport.

The first comes in the form of a dear woman, Lori Ventola. The more I talk to her the more I wonder if I’m actually a Christian. Her trust and faith in Jesus is remarkable. I’ve been interviewing her writing an article on her non-profit, Plumfield Learning Systems, and how God used the Storyline Conference to resurrect her dream of providing literacy education to the children in the homeless population. The very abridged version of events is that Lori won a contest that included an envelope with enough money to fund Plumfield Learning Systems for several months. It was the second prize item that actually resurrected her dream. Don Miller had a stack of index cards past through the audience and invited conference goers to write down ways they could help Plumfield. Some offered the gift of writing. Others had contacts in rescue missions. Still others had expertise in fundraising or running boards. Lori recalls the feeling of coming back to life as she watched hundreds of smiling people write down ways they were willing serve her vision.

The check resurrected Plumfield’s bank account. The index cards resurrected a part of Lori.

The second example was an autographed Blue Like Jazz Movie poster I received in the mail this weekend. Most of you know the story. After years of banging their heads looking for movie backers for the movie adaptation of Blue Like Jazz, Don Miller and Steve Taylor saw the writing on the wall and called it quits. Two fans, Zach Prichard and Jonathan Frazier, mobilized Don’s readers and raised over a third of a million dollars toward the funding of the movie. This ended up being the largest open source funding of a creative project on Kickstart.

Both of these stories remind me that I’m not so strong that I don’t need community to experience resurrection. I tend to be a go-it-alone person when it comes to goal setting. That’s fine, to a point. Except that resurrection is always and unplanned gift and nothing like a self help project. And as these stories remind me that God tends to use his body-on-earth, the community of Christ-followers, to do that resurrection work.

I think that BLJ Movie poster is going to end up framed and in my office as a reminder that resurrection is a team sport.

Here’s a chance to join Lori’s team:

Lori is flying to LA to start help Union Rescue Mission improve their efforts in helping the children of the homeless learn how to read. And she needs our help.

This series of blog posts are for people like me who never plan their lives well enough to observe the liturgical calendar as intended. Ash Wednesday came and went without notice. If you spend more time preparing your receipts for the IRS than you do preparing your heart for worship, this series is for you. I’m offering some books that have helped me focus myself on Jesus’ work on the cross. Skim through the series and pick one to read to help you prepare for meaningful Easter worship.

Today’s recommendation is Scot McKnight’s A Community Called Atonement. McKnight is a professor and a prolific author. He has the gift of presenting complex theological truths in understandable terms without cutting intellectual corners. In this book, McKnight wades into the “atonement wars” that are occurring in some church. There are debates about which metaphors are the most valuable in understanding what Jesus did on the cross. McKnight points out that while these are important concerns the most important question is “Do we have evidence that atonement is actually happening in our world today?”

It simply doesn’t matter what we think about atonement if atonement is trapped in the world of theory and not real force in our world. There must be evidence that God is reconciling people and communities to himself.

McKnight reconnects atonement-as-theory with atonement-as-reality by his emphasis on the kingdom of God. God’s kingdom on earth is the primary means that God drawing all people to himself. The church then isn’t called to just think lofty thoughts about atonement. It’s called to do the gritty work of connecting all things back to God and each other.

This is because sin is relational. McKnight writes:

“Sin transcends guilt before God, sin transcends even the disposition to sin– what theologians have always called “original sin”– and sin even transcends guilt before God. Sin is, in other words, hyperrelational, or “multi-relational. It is active corruption in all directions.” (p. 22)

Sin is an force that is anti-relationship in nature. This is bad news for a humanity since God designed us to function in a dependent relationship on God and interdependently with other humans.

Enter the church, the community God intended to embody God’s kingdom order on earth– a sort of learning lab were we train ourselves to live in peace with God and each other. McKnight spends his book exploring the various atonement metaphors and then imaging what it would look like for God’s people to embody that particular word picture.

McKnight reminds us that atonement is the work of the church. We apply the work of Jesus to every relationship, one at a time, with the goal of repairing the alienation that hides us all from each other and God.

I hesitated to list this book as a Lenten favorite for all the obvious reasons. First, this is a book about human sexuality and the purpose of Lent is to remind us about Christ and his sacrifice. At first blush, the two don’t seem related. Secondly, the planet–myself included– has spend the past month dissecting the author’s theology of his latest book, Love Wins. Listing Sex God as a valuable Lenten book seems too cute of a move.

Expect for the fact that one year the book had a strong impact on me during the Lenten season. I had read the book without our youth pastor. He used the book to prepare for a retreat. I read the book just to acclimate myself to Rob Bell. I read the book and found myself forgetting that it was a book about sex and found myself in worship.

That’s because, as Bell masterfully pointed out, that sex is one of those topics when “this really about that.”  We’re all experts at enjoying the double entendre– those expressions with two meanings; one straightforward and the other an ironic reference to sex. Examples have been found in our literature as far back as The Canterbury Tales.

The ultimate irony, is that while we impress ourselves with our cleverness, God intended sex to be a double entrende. The difference being that in God’s use the sexual reference is straightforward and the double meaning points to the spiritual. Sex and sexual were gifts given by God, in part, to help us understand the spiritual realm.

This is about that.

Bell points out that our urge for sex reminds us that we are alienated and disconnected from others. He points out that our sexuality is good because its a reflection of the emotional connected of the Trinity. My favorite chapters in this book are toward the end, where he makes the case that the best sex stem from mutual servanthood. Bell is looking at both sex and sexuality. He explores Ephesians 5:21 and the calling for husbands and wives to “submit” to each other, not only in the bed room, but as a holistic lifestyle. Bell affirms that Paul did call the husband the “head” in the relationship but defines the job description in a way that defies patriarchal instincts. The head is to take the lead in serving, sacrificing, and loving as Christ did.

This is where the book takes its Lenten leaning. Because good sex and good sexuality is about self-emptying and sacrificing yourself for the other. The call for men to love their wives as Christ loves the church makes the mind wander to Paul’s song about Jesus’ servanthood:

Philippians 2

Imitating Christ’s Humility

¹ Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, ² then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. ³ Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, ⁴ not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.

⁵ In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

⁶ Who, being in very nature^[a] God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
⁷ rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature^[b] of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
⁸ And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!

⁹ Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
¹⁰ that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
¹¹ and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

So if you are late in observing Lent and need a quick book to help catch yourself up, you could do worse than purchasing Rob Bell’s Sex God.

Each year I tell myself that I going to properly observe Lent. I endeavor to start on Ash Wednesday and spend forty-days spiritually preparing myself to worship on Easter Sunday.  I also tell myself I’m going to train to run a half-marathon. Neither have  happened to date.

In that spirit, I offer the “Late for Lent” series in the less-than-two-weeks leading up to Easter. I’ll share some books that have been valuable to me in preparing for Easter. I also want to hear what you’ve used to prepare yourself as well.

First up, Eugene Peterson’s Living the Resurrection. I’m about halfway through this book. Peterson uses this book to explore what the resurrection has to do with how Christ is formed in us. The answer, not surprisingly, is everything. The first chapter was worth the price of the download. Pastor Peterson emphasizes how resurrection reminds us just how beyond our control spiritual formation is.

Resurrection flies in the face of our DIY culture. In Peterson’s words, “Resurrection is not something we can use or control or manipulate of improve on…resurrection is not available for our use. It’s exclusively God’s operation.”

Peterson emphasizes that just as we can’t master Resurrection we also can’t master spiritual formation. We can cooperate with God’s work in us, but we can’t manufacture it. He makes several key observations that remind us that resurrection is a gift of God.

• Nobody saw Jesus’ resurrection coming. In spite of the prophesies everyone was surprised.
• Nobody prepared for the resurrection. The Pharisees and the Essenes were convinces of the reality of the resurrection but “they were looking the other way. They totally missed it.” Resurrection has no experts.
• The marginal people in the culture got to experience the resurrection. Mary Magdalene, who had been possessed by seven devils, and was a woman in a patriarchal society, was among the first to experience the post-Resurrection Jesus.
• The Resurrection was a relatively a quiet business. God did nothing to catch the attention of outsiders. (Peterson notes that God didn’t provide an explanation to the earthquake mentioned in Matthew. People would have felt tremors but have known how that the central episode in history caused them.

I mentioned I’m halfway through the book. Peterson is exploring the implications of “the style” of Jesus’ resurrection for us. I’m currently in chapter three where Peterson is arguing that spiritual formation is not something that Christians should be deferring to clergy. He notes that Mary Magdalene and the “other Mary” were ordinary friends who experienced the resurrection and then were enlisted to be witnesses. I’ll leave you with these words of wisdom from Peterson:

“Spiritual formation not only should not be– but also cannot be– professionalized. It takes place essentially in the company of friends, peers.

Jesus’ resurrection takes place in the company of friends who know each other by name, some of whom we know by  name. The resurrection is not an impersonal exhibit put on display before crowds. Resurrection is experienced in a network of personal relationships. The named people remind us that the resurrection talks place among men and women like us– puzzled, bewildered, confused, questioning, and even stubbornly doubting friends. And yes, also singing and believing and praying and obeying friends.” (p.50)

What about you? What books have help center your mind on the Resurrection of Christ?