church history

Call In Challenge: the Church & the World

May 14, 2013 by Bo Sanders 2 Comments

On the most recent TNT, Bo threw out a theory that the dichotomy between ‘Church & World’ doesn’t work well anymore.

Part of the thought came from the book Rethinking Christ and Culture: A Post-Christendom Perspective by Craig A. Carter which revisits Niebuhr’s influential 1951 work “Christ and Culture”.

Part of it came from The Argument Culture: Stopping America’s War of Words by Deborah Tannen, and part of it was a critique of The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer In Christian Ethics by Stanley Hauerwas as well as Luther’s famous construct of the ’2 Kingdoms’.

The main point of contention is that what is now called ‘culture’ is a byproduct of Christendom (part of the church) and is therefore not the same thing that Paul was writing about in the New Testament. The church and the world are not entirely alien to each other. The church is filled with people from the culture and the culture is deeply impacted (or has been) by the church.

So when we quote passages like Romans 12: 1-2 to be not conformed to the world, we have a messier delineation of those categories – precisely BECAUSE they have bled into each other so thoroughly throughout history.

Callid had a different take on the issues as a Quaker. I hope that you will listen to the episode and give us your take!

What do we do with these categories in the 21st century? Go to the homepage and use the SpeakPipe on the right hand side of the screen to leave us an MP3 message for an upcoming TNT.

Filed Under: church history, latest, thinking Tagged With: Bible, book, books, church, Culture, God, Hauerwas, history, jesus, Niebuhr, Stanley Hauerwas, world

God Is Not Like Me

May 12, 2013 by Bo Sanders 6 Comments

I grew up in a tradition that said I should be, as much as possible, like Jesus. I get that – and I try to do so.

Yesterday at the Loft LA I had the privilege to say 3 things (among many others) about God:

God is Black (from James Cone)
She Who Is (from Elizabeth Johnson)
God is a Fag ( from Bernard Brandon Scott)

It is interesting because I am none of these three things! I am not black, a women, or homosexual. It is interesting then to present these images of a God who is very much different than I am – even as we, as a community, are being conformed to the image of Christ (Romans 8:29).

It is important that we acknowledge that God is not on the side of ‘the powers’ but of those in need of liberation – that it is equally as accurate and as inaccurate to call God ‘She’ and it is to call God ‘He’ – and that according to 2 Corinthians 5:21

“God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

This is a topsy-turvey business.

Over the last 20 years of ministry I have noticed a somewhat unsettling trend that in order to be like God, I have had to move away from many of the natural strengths that ‘God gave me’.

While I love to be at center stage in the spot light with a microphone – I am fascinated with the cell group, house church, and small group model of church. As a pentecostal, I am obsessed with how the Spirit of God is at work in the People of God.

While I am a big, hairy, muscular man – I am convinced that feminist theologian are right and that Christian history does not accurately reflect the will and mind of God for the world that God loves so much (John 3:16).

While I am white guy – I am writing my dissertation on ‘White Privilege’ and hoping to confront some of the systemic racism that will not do as we move into the 21st Century.

So while I attempt to be more like God, I am very aware that God is not all that much like me.

This is an important distinction. As C.S. Lewis said in his poem “A footnote to all prayers” (it references Pheidias who was a legendary statue maker in the ancient world):

He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshipping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskilfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolators, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.

Take not, O Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in thy great
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.

When we pray, we by nature blaspheme – all of us. The reality is that language , by its nature, means that words are provisional. When the Hebrew Testament speaks of God as a ‘King’ or Martin Luther writes a hymn declaring “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” … these are analogies. They are metaphors. They are temporary place holders.

Anything that we say about God is (in the apophatic sense) both illustrative and, at the same time, not exactly all that accurate. We would do well to get used to saying :

“God is like X … and that, of course, is not exactly true.”

Philippians 2 is helpful at this point. The ‘Kenotic’ Move of Christ self-emptying and descending for the purpose of service, exhorts us to not hold onto anything too tightly (clinging/grasping) but to empty our certainty and expose all of our assumptions to that which is not natural to us. Not an easy task!

If we acknowledge, then, that all language is provisional… that it is just a accurate and as inaccurate to call God she or he… that any prayer is at some level blaspheming … and that I am called to be like God – though I know that God is not exactly like me … then I can begin a kenotic journey of recognizing God while releasing God from my pre-conceived notions.

This is the dynamic journey of faith: to recognize the full moon and the new moon, the high tide and low tide, the Fall and the Spring, the ebb and the flow, the fall and the rise of all that I am familiar with and and all that I am ignorant about. That is what we talk about when we talk about God.

Rob Bell puts it this way:

When we talk about God, then, we’re talking about something very real and yet beyond our conventional means of analysis and description.

The Germans, interestingly enough, have a word for this: they call it grenzbegrifflich. Grenzbegrifflich describes that which is very real but is beyond analysis and description.

When I’m talking about God, I’m talking about your intuitive sense that reality at its deepest flows from the God who is grenzbegriff.

Bell, Rob (2013-03-12). What We Talk About When We Talk About God (Kindle Locations 767-772). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

I would love your feedback and reflections.

Filed Under: bible stuff, books, church history, conversations, emergent, engaging, latest, living, post-something, quotes, sermon, thinking Tagged With: Bernard Brandon Scott, Bible, book, books, C.S. Lewis, church, Elizabeth Johnson, feminist, gay, God, homosexual, James Cone, jesus, kenosis, Phil 2, prayer, Rob Bell, sin

Pannenberg and the Kingdom of God

April 16, 2013 by Bo Sanders 20 Comments

Ever start something that you can’t finish? I got into a conversation with deacon extraordinaire Matthew G. McCracken before he read Wolfhart Pannenberg’s ‘Theology and The Kingdom of God’.

After he read the final chapter, he had some questions – questions that I would love to engage but … I fly out early in the morning and will be without my computer. SO I am turning him over the Pannenberg-man and the heir-apparent: Tripp Fuller and Austin Roberts.

Matt says:

In that final chapter of ‘Theology and the Kingdom of God’ Pannenberg really did turn up the density dial. What the flip!?

The surprise was in the move from three fairly accessible chapters to a fourth that, relative to the others, skirted impenetrability.

Of course, I’m being a little hyperbolic – but it made me work; and I’m still chewing on the “for what?”.

I like that he prioritized appearance/contingency. I guess I’m not sure about the essentialism; whether it’s the Greek form that disparages appearance or his futural version which manifests itself in the plurality of appearances. A related issue here was how confident he was about the facticity of the kingdom to come. That, to me, closes things down; and I’m sceptical enough of “revelation” to really not bite. There really had to be a future to reign in the contingency. I want to be able to say, at the very least, “God really might not have this under control. Anything could happen.”

Pannenberg doesn’t seem to want to say that.

I am about to turn off my computer for more than a week – so Tripp and Austin and anyone else who wants to will have to respond

Feel free to jump in if you have a thought!

Filed Under: church history, latest, thinking Tagged With: book, books, God, jesus, Kingdom, Pannenberg

Emergent Preaching?

April 12, 2013 by Bo Sanders 25 Comments

A good question can stimulate the brain to put together things that one had not previously connected. Stuart Harrell asked my a question about what a course on emergent “preaching” would look like. Here are some of my thought – I would love to hear yours.

My cleaned up tweets are posted as bullet-points with a clarifying thought following.

You would want to immediately address message and medium. It’s not just a repacking of the same old material.

What we are experiencing in a genuinely different expression of the good news. I watch lots of video clips of hip – fashionable – edgy young preachers who are still on an elevated stage using the exact same forms as the past 100 years … only they have added video clips and hair gel.

That is not what we are talking about. That is just lipstick on pig not that I really believe that old-school preaching is a pig, I just love that phrase.

#EmergentPreaching would involve scripture, culture, media, dialogue, experience & impartation to start.

The ‘problem’ with emergent thought is that it is neither reductive nor is it reproducible. It is environment specific (contextual) and organic. It interacts with its surroundings and emerges from its participants. It is a different animal from day 1.

I have given a LOT of thought to Emergent Preaching since my dad is a homiletics Prof. & I helped start The Loft LA recently.

One of our biggest glitches is that our ‘gatherings’ don’t translate to podcasts or video very well. We planned on being media savvy but the ‘sermon’ is broken up into conversation starters, dialogue, small groups, feedback and presentation. It’s kind of messy and we are still trying to figure out how to ‘capture’ it authentically. I think that we are going to start just throwing it out there unedited for members who missed that week in case they want to catch up.

the task of Emergent Preaching would deal with issues of power, voice, dialogue, participation, action, justice & cultural stuff.

This is where the medium must be addressed along with the message. HOW we do something is as important as WHAT we do.

Proclamation is a vital part of the Christian tradition. We don’t want to lose that! We address the form as well.

Why is there one person talking anyway? How is that person chosen? With what authority do they speak? These are essential questions to ask.

Assumptions of culture, the gospel, power, structures, and orthopraxy are vital to address in thinking about.

We are always attempting to do at least two things (this is true for every area of life). Side note: this is why saying that sex is only for procreation is ludicrous. So it is incumbent upon us to concern ourself with present cultural realities as well as desired outcomes – because we preach an incarnational gospel that must be in-bodied (embodied) to survive.

One would have to pull back the curtain & examine the scaffolding (assumptions) that hold the entire project up.

This is the tough job of deconstructing a constructive theology. There is no easy way around it.

It would be part Liberation, Feminism, Walter Wink, masters of suspicion, biblical scholarship & philosophy.

There is just no sense in even attempting to do proclamation in the 21st century under the auspices of emergence without this. Emergent Preaching would need to be well-informed and undeniably self-aware at some level. This seems unavoidable.

But it would also have to be rooted in history, hermeneutics, scripture and praxis. Those are my thoughts on Emergence Preaching.

In the end, we preach the christian gospel and not some form of god-ness or spirit-uality. We are the church after all. Accounting for history, hermeneutics, scripture and praxis is tall order. But what is the other option?

I would love to hear your thoughts on my little list and see if you had any additions.

You can also tweet me & and Stuart Harrell - use the hash-tag #EmergentPreaching

Filed Under: bible stuff, books, church history, conversations, emergent, engaging, latest, living, sermon, thinking Tagged With: Bible, book, books, church, Emergent, emerging, God, history, homiletics, jesus, preaching, science, The Loft LA

The Cross: meaning, redemption and the future

April 12, 2013 by Bo Sanders 4 Comments

Guest post by Renee Axtell –
one of the stars of the Easter Call-In Challenge has sent us her thoughts from the amber waves of Kansas.

Should we stop saying that God sent Jesus to die?

My answer is yes. We should stop saying that God sent Jesus to die, because that implies that God’s intention prior to Jesus’s birth was to send Him to die, and that would be mean. A loving God doesn’t do mean things.

But… if you accept the premise that God knows everything that’s knowable, and the future isn’t knowable (because it hasn’t happened yet), then God couldn’t have known for sure that Jesus would be crucified.

It doesn’t take a Divine Mind to figure out that a person doing and thinking the things that Jesus did and said in first century Palestine was going to get crucified. I think that explains Jesus’s predictions of his own death found in the gospels. But just because you can predict something is likely to happen doesn’t make it your will or your desire.

I’ve got teenagers. I know teenagers are going to do things that are going to have painful results. That doesn’t mean that it’s my will as a parent that they do those things and experience those painful results, but it’s highly predictable.

So the Father sends the Son into a dangerous situation, the worst case scenario happens, and Jesus ends up getting crucified. God sees this and says, “I can use this for something good. In fact, since this evil thing happened to my Son, I’m going to use this to do literally The Best Thing Ever and defeat death and redeem the world.”

That’s just what God does. “We know that all things work together for good to those who love God and are called according to His purpose.” (Romans 8:28) As the Messiah, Jesus had the ultimate calling and therefore God used His death to achieve the ultimate purpose, the redemption of the world.

It wasn’t merely the disciples that ascribed meaning to Jesus’s death after the fact, it was God. Your blog post makes it sound like the disciples were making stuff up and attributing meaning to something that wasn’t really there. The meaning was there because God put it there. The disciples were engaged in the discovery of that meaning, and we continue that process of discovery today.

Thoughts?
Questions?
Concerns?
Comments?

Tripp and I loved that THAT cross had a surplus of meaning from God – the disciples only brought it out and proclaimed it.

What do you think?

Filed Under: bible stuff, church history, engaging, latest, sermon, thinking Tagged With: Bible, call in, challenge, cross, crucifixion, Easter, future, God, jesus, open, redemptions, theology

Beauty, Bodies and Blunders

April 5, 2013 by Bo Sanders 28 Comments

President Obama got in some hot water for a compliment he paid California Attorney General Kamala Harris. He said:

You have to be careful to, first of all, say she is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough, and she is exactly what you’d want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake. She also happens to be by far the best-looking attorney general in the country — Kamala Harris is here. (Applause.) It’s true. Come on. (Laughter.) And she is a great friend and has just been a great supporter for many, many years. [via The Los Angeles Times]

A remark like that is never going to go over well. It was just one sentence but we could talk for days about it!

I know that I am an odd bird in that I often see the silver lining in things that other people think are really bad – like taking the Lord’s name in vain. I like that people do it. It means that the name of God still carries some gravity. No one is cursing Thor when they smash their thumb with a hammer. No one is blaspheming Zeus when they get cut off in traffic. Anyway …

I was happy to see the outrage and level of outcry over the President’s remarks. I love when stuff like this happens outside the walls of the church and I think to myself “Ok, it’s not just us that are sensitive, reactive and protest-ant. Good, I was starting to worry”.

You have to forgive me. I come from a very muscular – testosterone – ‘Wild at Heart’ brand of Christianity. In the last decade I have migrated to a progressive – critical theory – ‘She Who Is’ brand of faith.

The thing that has been most difficult for me is to figure out what to do with the body.

As a contextual theologian and an Ancient-Future practitioner, I am deeply concerned with issues of incarnation and embodiment of the gospel. Our faith can not be merely intellectual, super-natural or institutional. Our faith must embodied, or in-bodied and lived-out.

I have figured out, through 6 years of blogging, how to talk with conservative, evangelical, and charismatic Christians about almost everything related to faith and practice in ways that they can hear. The issues of sexuality remain the most illusive.

The problem seems to relate to a giant pot-hole in the road to understanding that is so treacherous it almost doesn’t leave enough room to move without careening into the pit of ‘natural design’.

What complicates matter all the more is that there is a serious ditch on the other side of the road – one that was dug by Augustine’s legacy (I hate Augustine’s influence on church history) regarding the badness of the body, a specifically sexuality.

Here then is the issue: If I am talking about somebody and I’m listing all of that they bring to the table in areas of smarts, relationship, experience, and capacity … am I to act like they don’t have a flesh container? It asks me to act like they have no body.

Yes. That is what we want you to do. Jonathan Chait at New York explains:

For those who don’t see the problem here, the degree to which women are judged by their appearance remains an important hurdle to gender equality in the workforce. Women have a hard time being judged purely on their merits. Discussing their appearance in the context of evaluating their job performance makes it worse. It’s not a compliment. And for a president who has become a cultural model for many of his supporters in so many other ways, the example he’s setting here is disgraceful. [New York]

Even while I write this I can hear my more conservative Christian brothers saying “That is ridiculous! This is the sissy-fication of our culture.” To which I can only reply,”Yes. It is the leveling of a historically unequal playing field.”

I get why culturally, we don’t want the President even acknowledging her flesh container at all. We don’t want pastors commenting on congregant’s looks. I get it.

But as thinking christians, is anyone else worried about the implications for this kind of willful charade? Do we think that President Obama doesn’t see her? Are we under the impression that he doesn’t notice her beauty? Do we think that she, in her private moments, doesn’t want to be found attractive? Do we think that she doesn’t invest time and energy in her looks?

“It doesn’t matter! Just don’t say it. Not ever ever ever.” And I get that. What I am asking about is the ramifications for the embodied practices of the life of faith. What we have learned from church history (and reality TV)- from fundamentalist pastor’s daughters to celibate priests – is that repression of desires in one place (public) is bound to cause pressure which bubbles up some place else (private).

We have to break the ‘old boys network’ mentality. I get that. I am worried about the secondary effect of perpetuating a deadly dualism between body and mind/soul.

I clearly need help thinking this through. Anyone want to chime in on this?

Filed Under: church history, engaging, latest, media, news, politics, post-something, thinking Tagged With: Attorney General, Augustine, body, book, books, California, church, conservative, controversy, female, feminist, gender, God, hot water, image, incarnation, jesus, Kamala Harris, Liberal, looks, prayer, President Obama, sex, sexual, sexuality

Tiger Woods, Nike and The Easter Narrative: When #Winning Means Nothing

March 30, 2013 by Deacon Case Leave a Comment

Jesus Stripped of clothes. Photo of station at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal in Atlanta, GA.

I’ve been a fan of Tiger Woods for a long time. As a youngster, I aspired to golf like him, and as an adult, I’ve spent hours watching nervously as his putts rolled in – or past – the hole. However, this week, Holy Week, Nike’s self-effacing advert for Tiger has gone one fairway too far.

The controversial Nike ad heralding that “Winning takes care of everything” is making the circuit trans-media. Radio shock-jocks love it, Today Show professionals are confused by it, and those who have ever felt the sting of marital infidelity once again feel enraged by the audacity of shamelessness exhibited by the world’s number one golfer and brand.

Tiger’s indiscretions are not the issue. My concern is what this narrative, this “winning is all that matters” attitude, means in light of this week – the most important week in the life of the Christian calendar.

From Palm Sunday until Easter, many mainline churches in America will have somewhere in the neighborhood of 19 services compared to their usual 4 or 5. This Holy Week, more than all other weeks, winning has nothing to do with who we as Christians claim to be in the world. Rather, if anything is to take care of everything, it is the deep and ancient practice of walking the Way of the Cross – a way that is marked not by what one is able to accomplish or win, but a way that is marked by how we are able to discover and live fully into deep oneness with God in the world.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of Christian triumphalists who will herald that the Nike ad is right on point with the message of Easter Sunday. Many will suggest that the Christian belief in resurrection is a winning, a taking care of everything. Yet what these Christians and Nike mistake in common is what Tiger and those who take the Way of the Cross seriously know best: the road to winning is filled with more self-learning, falling, failing, judgment, support from others, death, and personal inner growth than could ever be imagined. In a sense, victory is nothing if in the process you lose your self.

The Gospel of Luke remembers Jesus of Nazareth as having asked, “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world and yet forfeit his very self?” The radical thing about the Christian narrative of Easter is that Jesus won through losing; he proved that life comes not from conquering first, but from loss.

Tiger Woods has been down this road before. He is again the #1 golfer in the world. But by my read, Nike does a disservice to Tiger and the journey he has been on when they ignore the brutal human and spiritual course he has walked to get back to glory.

This Easter Sunday, at the end of Lent and Holy Week, Christians have the same chance as Tiger Woods did on Monday at Bay Hill: we are invited to celebrate our proverbial return to Eastertide, to winning. Yet, we who walk in the Way must not buy the lie the Nike advertisement suggests, but find truth in the opposite: winning takes care of nothing! New life, even God, is found not on the road filled with personal accolades, but on the journey of self-discovery that leads through pain.

Joshua Case in Oratory of the Holy Family, Holy Innocents’ Episcopal Church, Atlanta, GA

Joshua Case is an Episcopal blogger, curator, and public theologian. Joshua currently works at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal Church in Atlanta. When not curating things religious and technological, Joshua works as a professional golf instructor.

Follow Joshua on Twitter

Filed Under: church history, conversations, emergent, engaging, latest, news, thinking Tagged With: Eastertide, Holy Week, Joshua Case, Tiger Woods

3 Days Left To Respond To The Easter Challenge!

March 28, 2013 by Bo Sanders 3 Comments

You have till Easter Sunday to CALL IN and respond to the Easter Challenge.

We will pick a selection of calls and posts to interact with on next Monday’s TNT – the day after Easter.

Here are the step-by-step instructions:

Read the challenge post below
Think about a response
Write up your thoughts
Use the speak pipe on the front page to send us an MP3 message

Here is the challenge:

Suppose I was to say:

We need to stop saying “God sent Jesus to die on the cross”. The only place the New Testament even talks about God sending Jesus is in John 3:17 – Jesus was sent into the world, not to condemn it but to save it.

The danger of saying any more than John 3:17 says itself is that it distorts our image of God and our understanding of the mission of Jesus.

What really happened is that Jesus died an unjust death. He was nailed to a cross by the Romans – as many threats to political peace and social stability were.

In the years after that weekend’s traumatic/amazing events, Jesus’ followers came to ascribe bigger and cosmic meaning to his death and their experience of his resurrection.

Believers, in those first few centuries, retro-fitted divine intention and design into Jesus’ death.

This comes down to us through the centuries and gets distilled as “God sent Jesus to die for our sins” or ,even worse, “Jesus came to die for our sins”

No – Jesus came for many reasons. He was then assassinated by an unjust regime in cahoots with a corrupt religious system.

God vindicated this injustice with the event we now call Easter. That signals God’s solidarity with those who suffer and are persecuted under unjust systems and structures.

The death of Jesus was seemingly as senseless as any victim of the powers.

It was only afterward that Jesus’ followers retroactively ascribed this kind of meaning and divine intention on his death. Doing so is:

poetics at its best – and very appropriate.
problematic at many levels including metaphysics, nature of time, and child abuse (to name just 3)

The selecting of narrative elements to illustrate a thread is a common way to give meaning and direction to a story. We do it at weddings all the time. We have this couple standing at the altar and we trace narrative threads back to show how they were ‘destined’ to be together or even ‘made’ for each other.

It’s a nice way to talk and it is poetic and beautiful. I am fine with doing it – both for a couple’s wedding and for Jesus’ death – as long we understand that this is what we are doing.

When I say that a couple was meant to bump into each other at the party/parking lot/ dating site … I am trying to ascribe an extra level of meaning or significance to their relationship.

When we say that “God sent Jesus to die for our sins” we are doing the same thing. It is our way of attempting to ascribe an extra-ordinary level of meaning or significance to his life and influence.

What would you say to that?

I look forward to your SpeakPipe calls!

Filed Under: bible stuff, church history, latest, thinking Tagged With: Bible, cross, Easter challenge, jesus, resurrection

Homosexuality: the difference between TV and Greek Tragedy

March 27, 2013 by Bo Sanders 21 Comments

Blogging is a fascinating way to interact with people over an issue or topic.

Once in while a blog will unexpectedly come back to life after months of lying dormant. It usually happens when A) somebody references it month later B) when the topic hits the news again. The dying embers leap back to life in flame!

This week my old post on and Evangelical approach to same-sex marriage has fired back up – for obvious reasons. I’m not going to link there because I just can’t wade into the 195 comments without getting lost. I did, however, want to report about a most interesting exchange that came out of it.

Someone who disagreed with my saying that ‘homosexual’ as we currently understand and conceive of the term, never existed until the 19th century. Some people keep wanting to argue about sexual acts and missing that there are broader issues of orientation and identity that were not addressed in Greco-Roman culture or the greek language of the New Testament.

One such person – let’s call him TM – engaged the issue this way:

For example, the statement “The Bible (the inspired written word of God) is not talking about homosexuality. It didn’t exist.” seems somewhat confusing, even if we only focused on the Roman era of indulgences of the First Century. Are you suggesting that homosexuality didn’t exist in this era… simply because they may have called it something else?

This is along the lines of your attempt to make a point about television – in one sense, it didn’t exist; and yet in another, it did – as plays/theater. Are you suggesting that simply because the presentation was different that there weren’t actors and actresses who presented drama, comedy, tragedy and more to a mass audience? Are you really going to argue that because a word didn’t exist that means the concept didn’t exist?

Do you see the how the analogy works? This is really important to see because those who sincerely believe that they are being faithful to the scriptures are often mashing contemporary experiences into ancient writings in a way that is … how should I say this?
Let’s try it a different way: when your faith is constructed in such a way that you need your sacred text to speak to every area of your life – then you will, by necessity, fit your modern data into the provided molds.

My response to TM included 3 points of departure:

“TV is indeed different from ancient theatre.

1) One can sit alone in a house and watch TV, absent of the social connection and crowd interaction.

2) One can also change the channel when it gets boring. You can not do that at the theatre.

3) Plays also so do not have commercials which deeply influence us.

In those three ways I would say that one can not simply say “TV and theatre are the same” as you have.

You are comfortable mashing modern categories onto the ancient & calling them the same. This willingness to mash is why you are frustrated that the Bible isn’t talking about what we are talking about. TV is a different medium than ancient theatre – I hope that you can see that.”

It seems like a great example of the where the ‘two’ sides are missing each other in this debate.

It reminds me a great deal of the ongoing issues of conservatives ‘starting in the middle’ that I am perpetually having to point out.

That is where Ray Comfort takes the highly refined and cultivated modern banana and reads meaning, design, and intention back into it by the ‘creator’ – even going as far as it’s fit to the human hand, its easy pull tab opening, and its built-in disposal wrapping.

Maybe it would be easier for us to talk about TV & theatre in a categorical way before we wade into the elevated hostilities of the same-sex debate.

Filed Under: bible stuff, church history, conversations, engaging, latest, media, news, politics, public policy, thinking Tagged With: ancient, Bible, church, conservative, court, gay, God, homosexual, homosexuality, jesus, marriage, modern, news, paul, same sex, science, TV

Palm Sunday Is The Most Political Sunday

March 25, 2013 by Bo Sanders 14 Comments

As a children’s and family minister, I love Palm Sunday. At our stained-glass and organ church we do it up big. We get lots and lots of palm branches for folks to wave during the singing of the hymns and we have the kids process down the aisle and march around the sides of the pews. It is quite a visual.

That is the modern version of Palm Sunday. It is kids choirs and photo-ops and lots of fun.

The original Palm Sunday was little bit different. It was not so cutesy and hallmark holiday. It was aggressive and it was deeply political.

The politics of Palm Sunday:

The Jewish people were under occupation. Roman occupation was especially repressive and brutal.

The last time that the Jewish people had been free and self-governed also meant that they had their own currency. On their big coin, a palm branch was prominently displayed.

Laying down palm branches ahead of a man riding a colt/donkey was an act of defiance and an aggressive political statement.

We want to be free. This guy is going to change things and restore what was lost.

Having children wave palm branches in the equivalent to teaching a child to stick up her middle finger in anger… only more political.

I am troubled by the lack of context regarding the palms of Palm Sunday. It reeks of both willful ignorance and religious disconnect.

In so many ways we have sanitized, sterilized and compartmentalized the teaching of scriptures. We proudly and loudly defend the Bible – all the while neglecting the actual reality talked about in that Bible.

We complain that Christmas and Easter have been commercialized and secularized all the while partaking of the consumerism and cultural complacency that those two celebrations are meant to challenge!

Palm Sunday might be the most flagrant example of this ignorance and misappropriation. Palm Sunday is call for revolution against the powers of oppression, the systems and institutions that occupy foreign lands and repress its citizens with unjust practices and economic policies.

Palm Sunday is the most political Sunday of the year – but in our more therapeutic approach that assumes empire and concedes political realities in favor of spiritual ones, the meaning is lost.

This is not just symbolic but emblematic of our watered-down, imperial, and impotent brand of christianity.

We do this with everything. Cornell West and Tavis Smiley are talking about how we will do it with the Dr. King celebrations this coming year. They are calling it the Santa-Clause-ification of MLK. He will be a man with dream but little else … and his politics will be lost in the focus on children not being judged by the color of their skin but on the content of their character.

Just think about this: what would it take for us next year, to teach our children to drop the palm-branches and lift their middle fingers? What would we have to believe about oppression and empire to reclaim the original intent of the palms on Palm Sunday?

I’m not saying that we should do that – I am trying to utilize it to get at how much we have assumed, conceded and ignored about the political realties that we find ourselves caught up in.

What conversations would we have to have with our kids about:

foreign occupation
injustice
politics of empire
economic policies

in order to explain why they were laying down palm branches or raising their middle fingers to the powers the be?

This post was inspired by a sermon given by Rev. Chris Spearman at the Loft LA yesterday.

Filed Under: bible stuff, church history, engaging, latest, politics, public policy, sermon, thinking Tagged With: Bible, church, empire, God, history, jesus, Palm Sunday, politics, revolution, Roman

Claremont School of Theology