Why agrarians?

David Rice has been asking this question throughout his time at Mars Hill Graduate School. David is finishing up his MDiv degree and has been focusing on what the farmer and the earth have to teach us as pastors and ministers. Part of David’s work has culminated through a paper he wrote for Independent Study. Below is an excerpt:

What I wonder about though is the loss that is incurred when a people move in a certain direction, toward advancement and development, that causes them to choose new paths while forsaking some of the old ones.  In a culture obsessed with innovation and advancement, it can be easy to forget the good that is still present in the old paths and ideas.  What is lost, for instance, when eaters no longer want to purchase the lettuce that is grown on the family owned farm a few miles away because it costs a quarter more than what they can get at the supermarket?  What is lost when, over time, that family farm cannot stay afloat because eaters ultimately value the single bottom line of short term economic value over the triple bottom line of long term economic, communal and environmental health?  What is the cost of individuals and families forsaking the parish of their childhood for the mega-church community across town?  What is the cost of a pastor who no longer cares for one hundred families in her neighborhood but who oversees an organization that ultimately cares for over one thousand families throughout her community?  What is lost when local churches are consolidated into regional churches?  And what is lost when pastors trade in their role of spiritual shepherd for organizational leader and manager?  Put differently, what is lost when pastoral work becomes industrialized?

Pastors need to learn a different way of pastoring from someone who has not been conditioned by industrial culture to look at things from its perspective.  Agrarian minded women and men are voices crying out in the mostly rural parts of our culture, speaking truth to the powers that be, those who run our culture from an industrial stance.  Most of these folks are farmers who moonlight as writers and speakers.  Some teach at seminaries, others raise grass and good soil.  What they have in common is their ability to wade through the empty promises of industrial culture, those of progress, advancement and development, pick up a few good tricks along the way, yet mostly stick to their traditional ways of living, relating, and taking care of the earth.

Download the full text here.

David is a fourth year MDiv student and enjoys urban gardening cooking with his wife and new son.

Andy Cheung is a couple of weeks into the Master of Divinity program at Mars Hill Graduate School. He writes about this beginning and of transitioning into life away from home.

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The Texas heat had subsided to a relatively manageable 95 degrees.  Inside we remained unaffected, enjoying the luxury of modern air-conditioning.  This was one of my last nights with friends in Dallas, and we spent it like so many nights before.  Sitting on the couch, watching TV, and enjoying each other’s company.  For me this was perfect.  I was in my element, fully at ease and completely comfortable.

In a couple of days I would be leaving for the unknown.  The thought of which filled me with a small sense fear and anxious anticipation.  I had never lived outside of Texas before and knew only a couple of people in Seattle.  How was I going to adjust?  Was I going to make any friends?  What if choosing to move turned out to be a mistake?    As I allowed my mind to travel back to these thoughts, the feeling of unsettledness would grow.  But tonight I was in my element, fully at ease and completely comfortable.

As the evening winded down, one friend asked, “What expectations did I have for the next few years?  It is the kind of question that can bring you back to that place of fear and anxious anticipation, as it did that night.  However as the first day of classes draws near, I’m growing more aware of a sense to set aside the expectations and fear, and to start enjoying the journey.

Like any other journey it will be filled with its lows and highs.  There will be times of joy and triumph, as well as times of trials and heartache.  There will be new stories and experiences, all of which will help to shape and transform the person I am today.  Most importantly, amidst all the fear and overwhelming expectations the journey is also full of possibility and hope.  So rather than project how I hope this journey might turn out, I am choosing to take it all in stride.  I am choosing to capture the moment, rather than anticipate the future.

Back home in Texas we would often close our worship gatherings by sending people off to start a new week with a blessing written by Larry Hem.  As I prepared to leave Dallas and start this new journey, I was reminded of this blessing once again:

“May all your expectations be frustrated.  May all your plans be thwarted.  May all your desires be withered into nothingness, that you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child and sing and dance in the love of God who is Father, Son and Spirit.”

EmergingChurch.info interviewed Steve Dancause, a recent grad from the Christian Studies program at MHGS. The interview is in response to Steve’s master thesis on the Trinity as symmetrical, integrative and dynamic. From the interview:

The divine community of the Trinity is often held up as the ideal human community. Some would even say that the Trinity is the revelation of perfect communion. This is why egalitarians and subordinationists both look to the Trinity for justification of their social worldviews. I was interested to learn for myself why various scripturally sound Trinitarian models that are used to legitimate human social systems (including church ecclesiologies) were incompatible. This led me to follow the idea that the Church may be looking at the Trinity in an incomplete way.

The question boiled down to the contradiction between the Egalitarian Trinity held to by some in the Emerging and some other forms of church and the Patriarchical/Subordinationist Trinity of the more traditionalist church. The former is a theological necessity in that it is the very definition of Trinity. To deny it is to undermine the entire Christian faith because Christianity relies on the fact that the Son and the Spirit are fully God. The cross has saving power only because the person on it was fully God. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit is only profound because we are indwelled by the person of the Spirit who is fully God. To deny the egalitarian nature of the Trinity is to deny the saving power of the cross and everything that makes Christianity a religion in its own right.

Yet the latter view of the Trinity is scripturally grounded. The Son did indeed submit himself to the Father. The theological problem with the patriarchal Trinity is that the Father is ultimately God above the Son and Spirit – implying that the Trinity is not ultimately God. I see this view as undermining the Trinity at the most basic level. So the project then became one of seeing divine subordination not as a static or eternal state, but seeing it as part of the larger trinitarian life of mutual submission and egalitarianism. Essentially, my interest was to integrate the subordinationist Trinity into the egalitarian Trinity, and in doing so remove the contradiction and see that the Trinity is indeed egalitarian. This was done by imagining the absolute divinity of God not solely as the person of the Father but as all three divine persons of the Trinity. And this required the integration of the economic and immanent trinities within a dynamic system.

You can read the rest of Steve’s interview here and even read an excerpt of Steve’s original thesis.

This fall, Professor Dwight Friesen is releasing his first book on how the church can take  page from social networking in learning how to connect with people. Dwight’s work comes from years of studying network theory along with Scripture and theology, bringing us a new way of seeing the world relationally.

Prof. Friesen explains why he wrote this book:

We have been fooled into thinking our world is ‘us’ versus ‘them.’  We think in terms of individualism or small group protectionism or other similarly destructive ideas.  We’ve lost sight of God’s networked Kingdom.  God’s vision is that everything belongs and the reconciliation of all things is possible and already underway.  Failure to see the interconnectedness of our world is ignorance of reality.  Division and divorce, though they physically separate things, do not end a relationship.  Deep connection penetrates all of creation and people are rediscovering this truth.  The use of recent social networking technologies like Google, Twitter and Facebook are opening doors for greater and more creative connectivity.

I want to re-orient how we see the world. Where we once saw division, we will see a chance for reconciliation.  Disconnection will open us to linking missionally.  Thy Kingdom Connected presents a relationally connective paradigm of God’s networked Kingdom which will better enable you and me to see God, humanity and all of creation as interconnected. Live an ‘And’ life, not an ‘Either/Or.’  Don’t feel like one denomination, or business, or neighborhood is what you have to have.  Connect with others in other places.  Life can flourish in connected areas.  May you see a vision of God’s networked Kingdom and glorious beauty of the indigenous, localized Kingdom expressions that are churches interconnected in God’s glorious tapestry.

The MHGS community is proud to celebrate Friesen’s accomplishment. You can read more of Dwight’s thoughts on his blog , and pre-order Thy Kingdom Connected today.

In a recent Essential Community course, students were asked to engage contentious issues such as religion, race, gender, and war. These writings are the fruit of their hard yet unfinished work.

“I spoke with my dad yesterday about the violence that’s been going on. My parents live in Naivasha, [Kenya] which is where the latest violence has been concentrated. In fact just yesterday they witnessed as about 100 young men came to a neighbor’s house, she’s from the Luo tribe, and set it ablaze, luckily she had left a few days earlier when the violence had started. My dad said that at one point they had to call neighbors to help them put out the fire as it was threatening to spread into their compound.

As many of you know my parents run an orphanage and just recently took in 26 orphans who now live in a rental house they own, and needless to say they are very worried for the children and wanting to make sure they are well protected and have enough food. At this point dad said they have food for this week, but he was going to try and get out to find more, which made me so nervous. My parents have also taken in 3 of my mom’s sisters and their families as they were all living in unsafe places, so they have over 30 people they are trying to take care of.

I’m pretty baffled at my own people. I’ve run out of words to explain why someone would burn children and women, hear them screaming and not even moved by their cries. I can’t understand how a man can stone another man to death just because he belongs to another tribe, hear him beg for his life and be unmoved. I don’t know how to explain my people and it hurts me and breaks my heart and it angers me. If I had a chance to speak to these men, this is what I would say to them:

You’ve seen him more than a thousand times
And you know he’s just like you, tell me what has changed
And where is it you lost your soul, to see a man like he’s the devil
And it’s your place to wipe him out

But just like you, he cries when he’s sad, and laughs when he’s happy
Is it so hard to see that?
And just like you, he wants to make his woman smile, make his child feel
Like they’re somebody

You force her down to the ground; hear her scream but you never stop
What kind of soul do you have?
You walk away with a grin, like you’ve shaken the hand of God
And he gave you a big smile

How badly can your soul be detached?
You can’t even think, what if this was my sister
And now she’ll walk around like Tamar
Disgraced and undefended
God’s poor soul.

What is it that happens to the heart of a man
For him to act like that?”

All war, all conflict, seen through the eyes of those most closely involved becomes a tragic statement of suffering and loss. Why then, as individuals, nations, tribes do we agree to participate in the agony and destruction of war over and over again?

War and conflict are never simple. In Kenya, the current problem did not begin with issues surrounding the December 2007 elections, which resulted in the death of over 800 civilians and the internal displacement of more than 250,000 people in the span of four short weeks.

One has to understand that this violence, which seemingly broke out from nowhere, has been steeping in tension for the last 40+ years as Kenya’s three dominant tribes, Kikuyu, Luo and Kalenjin have interchanged political, social and economic power. Prior to Kenya’s gaining her independence, “the Kenya Emergency of 1952-59 resulted in the imprisonment, detention, and restriction of Kikuyu. In Nairobi, they were removed from ethnically mixed housing estates . . . Luo increased their hold on small business enterprises . . . [and] the proportion of Luo in Nairobi, and in the labor force, increased markedly”. However, after Kenya became independent, the system was inverted and the Kikuyu began to dominate.

“In the 1960s and 1970s, Kikuyus from the central highlands of Kenya acquired large farms, some legally, some questionably through their connections to Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu. That planted a grudge with local groups like the Kalenjin and Masai. Kenya’s president in 1991, Daniel arap Moi, exploited the hard feelings for his own agenda. Moi, a Kalenjin, was facing re-election, and he used his network of police chiefs and tribal elders to attack Kikuyus and other ethnic groups affiliated with the nascent opposition movement. The clashes claimed more than 1,000 lives, and though they had subsided by the late 1990s, they never really stopped.”

It became clear that whoever held power would ensure that their own tribal group would be the primary beneficiary of that power.

In Kenya, we are seeing played out one more episode of human civilization’s obsession with war. We see economic and political issues: issues of right/wrong, true/false, power/victimization all intertwined to provide impetus and justification to the current conflict. We see the unwillingness of the parties involved to set aside their personal agendas. We see opposing sides prioritizing their own personal beliefs over those of the other, both believing themselves as being in the right, acting according to what they think they deserve or are owed. Neither participant in a conflict sees himself as the initiator of an evil but rather as the advocate of justice. Consequently, the opposing parties determine truth and justice separately. Words spoken by one Kenyan are, “The Kikuyu are our enemy because they are on our land. It is not good to kill their women. But to kill one of their men, that is an achievement.”, and from another, “Our opponents are the ones using ethnic violence [not us]. It’s terrible”.

Those in conflict never see themselves as the ones in the wrong. Volf suggests that this is because all conflict is the result of “my” truths and sense of justice coming up against “yours”. He writes that “we are caught in a vicious cycle: competing truths and justices call forth violence, and violence enthrones the truths and justices of its perpetrators”. Volf calls this a “Spiral of Vengeance”, saying, “When one party sees itself as simply seeking justice or even settling for less than justice, the other may perceive the same action as taking revenge or perpetrating injustice . . . the inability of parties locked in conflict to agree on the moral significance of their actions.”

Individuals, nations, and tribes should have the right to maintain and the responsibility to uphold their values and identities. They should have the right to seek justice. But when these pursuits result in hatred, violence, and war, a middle ground must be found that honors the rights of the individual yet provides a place for opposing sides to move toward each other. Opposing sides will be required to enter into a form of self-denial.

“First, [they] must give up some of [their] own understanding of the other in order to listen to them describe their needs. Second, [they] must give up some of the effort directed toward [their] own success in order to act for others…third, [they] give up satisfaction of [their] own needs to provide for others. They have to postpone [their] gratification.”

First: If opposing sides are able to find a way to approach each other with authenticity, there will be the possibility of entering into a space of genuine encounter. In genuine encounter, there will be a relinquishing of oneself, and each side will approach the other with a sense of wanting to understand where the other is coming from. A middle ground will form, providing a space into which both sides may enter, bringing who they are, and acknowledging, without accepting, the biases that they perceive as defining the other. There has to be an understanding that there is a need for the other and that one cannot live alone in order to enable change. The movement into this understanding will provide a place where forgiveness happens which can then lead to reconciliation.

By no means does this forgiveness call for a forgetting of the harm that has been done. Nor does it ignore the issues of right/wrong, true/false, power/victimization which are part of all conflict. On the contrary, forgiveness must deal with the pain that has been caused; it must look that pain in the eyes. Anger and rage will be named and addressed in a way that will no longer be turned upon those with whom we are angry. Our opponents, those who have perpetrated harm, those with whom we are angry, cannot take away our hurt, calm our anger, or redeem what has happened.

“Deep within the heart of every victim, anger swells up against the perpetrator, rage inflamed by unredeemed suffering…our cool sense of justice sends the same message; the perpetrator deserves unforgiveness; it would be unjust to forgive…and so both victim and perpetrator are imprisoned in the automatism of mutual exclusion unable to forgive or repent and united in a perverse communion of mutual hate.”

So where must we take our anger? Our anger must be turned towards God, the same God who created the world and has been in control of it ever since. This God loves people, all people, and in spite of our greatest efforts to hurt, violate, and destroy, God loves, secures, and redeems. God acts out of love and service, and does so with regard to justice, and not the type of moralistic justice that we comprehend. Volf claims that, “…by placing unattended rage before God we place both our unjust enemy and our vengeful self face to face with a God who does and loves justice . . . in the light of justice and love of God, however, hate recedes and the seed is planted for the miracle of forgiveness.”

Jesus, the Son of God, was sent to this earth not only to redeem humanity for eternity, but also to spread a radical message of forgiveness while he was alive. It is this God who has repeatedly forgiven humanity, and similarly desires that we as humans forgive each other and ourselves. It is only by realizing how much we have hurt this earth, each other, and God that we can begin to understand that forgiveness is as inherent in history as is hate, pain, and violence. If we enter into this reality and begin to think what it might look like to forgive others and ourselves, then movement out of Volf’s “Spiral of Vengeance” is imminent. He claims,

“But no one can be in the presence of the God of the crucified Messiah for long without transposing the enemy from the sphere of monstrous inhumanity into the sphere of shared humanity and herself from the sphere of proud innocence into the sphere of common sinfulness…and when one knows that God’s love is greater than all sin, one is free to see oneself in the light of God’s justice and so rediscover one’s own sinfulness.”

Second: Opponents, in order to move toward each other, will need to relinquish power. Power begins at an individual level and then extends to the community at large. At a very basic level, power is the freedom to know, act and feel. Power is accentuated by the ego, which “has a natural tendency not only for self-preservation (maintaining its existence), but also for self-development (expanding its existence).” When power is used in this manner, it means that whatever group has dominance will seek to maintain their existence, most often by oppressing the minority, in an effort to expand their identity.

This kind of control needs to be released if opposing sides are to find genuine encounter. Volf writes, “How can truth and justice be anything but deception and oppression to those who have been brought to insight by violence?” The opposing sides will need to no longer focus on their individual power and how it benefits them. They will need to embrace their own distinctiveness without negating their need for, or the identity of, the other. This means that each will use their power to serve the other. Opposing sides may have different customs, perceive different needs, hold different views of justice and truth, but they all share a common humanity. They are part of an interdependent system, where much can be learned from the other. In an ideal world, opponents would mutually submit to one another and relinquish the power they covet. They would begin by “exchanging power with [the other] under an implicit or explicit contract for both the mutual sacrifice and mutual benefit of each other . . . the special feature of cooperation is an agreement of reciprocity that guarantees shared effort to assure fair cost and an agreement of reciprocity to assure fair benefit.”

We are all unique individuals who belong to communities with their own identities, customs, boundaries, and communal traits, often separating one group from the other. But we share a common humanity that has, does, and will continue to violate others.

Third: Those who are in opposition to each other are in a stance of isolation and exclusion. There is no movement towards each other. Each is focused on the satisfaction of his own needs. For opponents to find common ground between them and move into a peaceful embrace, they will need to acknowledge that there is a place within all of us which is designed to “long to be restored to those who have betrayed us and to those we have betrayed. It is the siren call of shalom.” They will need to enter into forgiveness.

“Forgiveness is the boundary between exclusion and embrace. It heals the wounds that the power-acts of exclusion have inflicted and breaks down the dividing walls of hostility. Yet it leaves a distance between people, an empty space of neutrality, that allows them either to go their separate ways in what is sometimes called “peace” or to fall into each other’s arms and restore broken communion.”

Forgiveness may enable peace; however, we must not view peace as the end goal. Forgiveness opens the way to reconciliation and reconciliation restores communion. Reconciliation is the key to healing the deep wounds inflicted by the violence of war. But reconciliation will not happen through enlightened reason, or by seeking religious common ground. Attempts to coerce, to shame, to move by guilt will never do more than bring conformity of action.

In seeking reconciliation, we must be confident that change can happen and believe that reconciliation can be realized. We will not focus on the past, but rather on a different future in which we can place our hope, and thereby be enabled to persevere. “Hope takes the experience of loss and powerlessness and uses it as the raw material for writing a new and unexpected story”. It enables us to release any offense, real or perceived, and initiate restoration of relationship. This is possible only to the extent that we are able to access that place within us that desires reconciliation and that remembers the God in whose image we were created. Not only do we have a choice to embrace our commonality and to forgive others, but we also have the opportunity to move into this rich relationship that is enabled by forgiveness.

It is the nature of this God to move toward us, to heal broken hearts and broken bonds. God does not require forgetting the past, but instead by acknowledging the past is able to redeem the present, and give hope for the future. It is this God who reconciled the world to God’s self and removed the enmity between God’s self and mankind.

“God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:  that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.  We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.”

“God’s passion is to weave glory out of the broken shards of…any [past] experience of powerlessness or sin”. We, mankind, have a choice to make. We may seek reconciliation, make God’s passion our passion and become willing to relinquish ourselves in our encounters. In so doing, we step into the experience of genuine embrace with another, able to receive the individual diversity of others without compromising our own communal identity.

Forgiveness enables movement toward reconciliation. While there remains to be forgiveness within the nation of Kenya that will enable others to move into that empty space, the beauty of what it is to forgive and move into reconciliation awaits. Currently, the Kenyan people are living amidst violence, but hopefully a day will come when they will have a decision to make, a decision that is much bigger than themselves. This decision will be for their country, for their communities, and for their families. Will they choose to forgive? Will they embrace the common humanity that they share as Kenyans? Will they be able to walk through the pain and loss that must be revealed, raged over, and redeemed?

Written by Johny Barbosa, Austin Locklear, Fran Vazquez, and Naomi Wachira.

In a recent Essential Community course, students were asked to engage contentious issues such as religion, race, gender, and war. These writings are the fruit of their hard yet unfinished work.

A cursory scan over Amazon.com’s best selling books list over the past few years is telling of the rise of critical assessment of religion. Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have become popular figures, each publishing bestselling and scathing accounts of what religion has cost humanity. Ironically what they assert is that religion blocks humanity from its humanity, that it stokes the fires of violence, isolation, and impoverishment of mind and soul. While thinkers like Dawkins and Harris have justifiably attacked religious belief for its intellectually stifling nature, we would like to extend their critique beyond the intellectual capping of wonder to a relational suffocation that the world has been suffering under for too long. The weight of humanity is too great, the problems we face too immediate, and our thirsts for beauty and truth too real to continue on this road of imagined self-importance that states that bitter line: “our truth is greater than your truth”. Instead, religion should, at the very least, connect us to our human experience instead of having our nature alienated from us.

The inescapable reality of history is that religion and specifically Christianity has at times caused great harm. The reasons for such acidic attacks of religion are, the rational believer must admit, honestly understandable. Christopher Hitchens, journalist and public intellectual, surmises that there is simply too much at stake to continue under the bondage of a religious master, that he argues, poisons everything. He exclaims that religion forms a concoction of piety and fanaticism that has impeded the forward motion of civilization. Noted atheist Daniel Dennet discusses how religion propels humans toward such a destructive dynamic that it has become imperative to study religion with the same ardor that we use for the natural and social sciences. Dennet writes:

It is high time we subject religion as a global phenomenon to the most intensive multidisciplinary research we can muster, calling on the best minds on the planet. Why? Because religion is too important for us to remain ignorant about. It affects not just our social, political, and economic conflicts, but the very meanings we find in our lives. For many people, probably a majority of the people on Earth, nothing matters more than religion.

Does this mean all is lost? Has the harm of religion truly eclipsed the beauty and goodness of religion? Is it only a force that stifles the wonder inherent to the human mind and heart?  Our hope is that not all is lost but we must acknowledge that perhaps now more than ever, we are bound to each other’s humanity. Religion can become the force that drives us to free ourselves from sectarianism and the fear of tainting our groups with the presence of the “other”. If there is anything that the broken state of the world has begun to teach us is that none of us are invulnerable to the strokes of tragedy and the perils of chance in this world. Religion can inform us of our dependence on each other and help us foster both a local and global identity that builds solidarity based on common humanity. Yet what does this look like? Is reconciliation within religion even possible?

Mutuality, reciprocity, and authenticity are values that have been lost to much of our individualistic, rational society, especially with regard to difference. We find difference threatening and uncomfortable. As Christians, we often struggle to have life-affirming conversations across denominational lines let alone participate in dialogue that encounters different racial and religious identities. Most people, on all sides of the spectrum find conversations like these difficult to pursue.

In response to this antagonism and confusion, German theologian Jürgen Moltmann asks boldy, “Which god motivates Christian faith: the crucified God or the gods of religion, race and class?” Perhaps what is so painful about watching the Christian build walls of division between ethnic, religious, class, or other lines of human demarcation is the despicable irony of it all. Not only are ostracizing and marginalizing actions from Christians antithetical to Christian teaching, it shows, as Thomas Merton writes in Life and Holiness, “…contempt for the humanity for which Christ did not hesitate to die on the cross.” It is hard to read this and not be stunned at the terse truth Merton has made clear. Christ, on the cross, willfully chose to put to rest the viability of all human sin, degradation, and violation. Somehow the beauty of this Gospel message has been lost in the madness of establishing and defending so-called “Christian truths” often at the neglect of the marginalized, the poor, the imprisoned, and the environment, all of whom are God’s creation.

Christ, taking human form is not merely symbolic of God’s recognition of the plight of humanity, but Christ is the living, breathing, bleeding promise of God’s solidarity with humanity at its precise reality here and now. God through Christ initiates this incarnation, or “en-fleshment”, and the invitation is extended to those who would take on the title “follower of Christ”. To be Christian is to continue on as the body of Christ, living incarnationally as Christ had and has. Theologian Ray Anderson continues: “The kenotic community, therefore, cannot be distinguished from the world by splitting the solidarity of all humanity in Christ, and thus cannot take the form of one entity within humanity set against another.” In other words, it is the call of the Christian to counter all social strata and enter into the deep, dark, unknown streams of life and embrace the totality of humanity.

As Christians we believe humanity to be made in the image of the Trinitarian God, an all-embracing, all-encompassing, all-loving God who exists in perichoretic movement between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. What does it mean to see the intrinsic value of life, and the image of God in all the faces we encounter, no matter how different, broken or wounded? After all, as psychologist and spiritual writer Alan Jones writes:

We are what our brothers are. They and we stand and fall together. If they are contemptible so are we. If we are struggling after higher things so are they. One fate; one flesh and one blood; one story; one strife; one glory- this is the underlying secret of humanity.”

What does this encounter look like in practice? Yale Divinity School professor Miroslav Volf has outlined the seedbed of a third way in his work Exclusion and Embrace by demonstrating that we have competing justices between us, which is the cause of much human tension. Yet justice, by its very definition, should be for all peoples, for all time. So we must undertake the work of understanding the mindsets and perspectives of others in order to create a new understanding of what justice- or as Volf would say “God’s justice”, that we must utilize. He encourages us to welcome the voice of the other:

Let it suffice here to note that we enlarge our thinking by letting the voices and perspectives others, especially those with whom we may be in conflict, resonate within ourselves, by allowing them to help us see them, as well as ourselves, from their perspective, and if needed, readjust our perspectives as we take into account their perspectives.”

This means we must follow where Christ lead, in that both the oppressor and the oppressed must acknowledge a need for repentance. Volf’s work calls for the redemption of dignity from all camps of injustice, marginalization, and “otherness”. The oppressor needs to repent for what they have done to their victim, and the betrayal of their own inherent dignity that the act perpetrated. The oppressed need to consider the sin of withholding forgiveness from the oppressor. The notion of radical change being required from all lies at the heart of the Gospel. There are no camps, sides, or oppositions in the Kingdom of God. The crucified God’s arms stretch open like the father of the prodigal, welcoming home enemy and friend alike.

Christianity is not the only voice that shares such ideals and truths. We turn to the Eastern voice of Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, who published Living Buddha, Living Christ. In it he remarks on his peacemaking efforts both during and after the Vietnam War. He recounts the insanity of Christian killing Buddhist, North Vietnamese killing South Vietnamese. Using Psalm 46:10, Thich Nhat Hanh explores how similarly both Christianity and Buddhism are able to exegete the verse, and brings to us the idea of a settled “interbeing”. It is a state of concentration that allows the existence and comprehension of difference. “When we see the nature of interbeing, barriers between ourselves and others are dissolved, and peace, love, and understanding are possible. Whenever there is understanding, compassion is born.” Though it may seem to the more cynical or jaded reader that he speaks in abstract imagery, it shows us that a reasoned and human approach to interfaith dialogue can happen and the spirit the author possesses can move us beyond civility into fraternity.

We see this dialogue happening again through the work of Canadian journalist/advocate and practicing Muslim Irshad Manji. Manji, in the post September 11th era, made it her goal to report on the abundance of good news that came in the form of interfaith services, between Jewish clergy extending their support of marginalized Arabs.  It was the Christian leadership in her native Toronto that contacted her directly, expressing concern for her safety and concern over the fear for her life. It is in this context that Manji writes, in her work The Trouble with Islam Today that love via praxis does not recognize a necessity to mark, analyze, study, or deconstruct the other before acting. It recognizes the human being staring back at itself.

The shared hope found in both of these voices, Buddhist and Muslim, shows how deeply seeded Gospel tendencies are set in hearts around the world, and that we are not as far away from each other as we so often assume. Take also the gentle words of the Dalai Lama who writes:

To reduce hatred and other destructive emotions, you must develop their opposites- compassion and kindness. If you have strong respect from others, then forgiveness much easier. Mainly for the reason that I do not want to harm another. Forgiveness allows you to be in touch with these positive emotions.  This will help with spiritual development.

Consider also Jesus’ words for which we have all heard, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and how they are far more complicated than they seem. The complexity of religion is in learning how to love when it means loving in difference. Love is most definitely not safe.  Especially in areas that are most precious to you, namely your faith.  It will shake you, maybe you will question what you thought before, and maybe you will change. And how can you not? As Moltmann proclaims:

The art of loving has to be learnt. We learn it through joy in each other, through forgiveness of guilt we experience, and through the continually astonishing miracle of the new beginning. In that ‘wide space where there is no cramping’ we accept one another, grow with one another and unfold from one another. Part of love is friendship, which knows how to combine affection with respect for the other person’s liberty. That means respect for the mystery of the other, and his or her still latent and unrealized potentialities. If love stops, we make a fixed image of each other. We judge and pin each other down. That is death. But love liberates us from these images and keeps the future open for the other person. We have hope for one another, so we wait for one another. That is life.

Any authentic relationship has the capacity to free us into spaces of mutual renewal.  However, without a willingness to risk our dogmas, our comfort, and our individuality, true relationship is nearly impossible with those we love, much less with those who are strikingly different.  Are we willing to risk all, as Christ did, even our faith itself in order to contemplate and hold the voice of the stranger?

Karen Bergquist, from Cincinnati folk-pop band Over the Rhine sings: “Except for this confession that is poised on my lips, I’m not letting go of God. I’m just losing my grip.”  This speaks not of a request to give up God or religion, but to instead loosen our fearful fingers from around our idol of God in order to embrace the other. Spiritual writer and Catholic priest Henri Nouwen writes: “We can only perceive the stranger as an enemy as long as we have something to defend. But when we say, ‘Please enter-my house is your house, my joy is your joy, my sadness is your sadness and my life is your life,’ we have nothing to defend, since we have nothing to lose but all to give.”

One community in Manhattan, Faith House, has attempted to step into this complexity of religious difference by establishing an intentional community where people of different backgrounds and religious philosophies eat, work, and play together. In their mission statement they write:

We want to start a new kind of community in which we can discover The Other (individuals or groups other than those we belong to), deepen our personal and corporate journeys, and together participate in repairing the world. In this endeavor we will honor and learn from teachings, practices, and suffering of people from religions, philosophies, and worldviews, different from our own. Instead of isolating ourselves into like-minded groups or melting together into a single-minded organization, we will learn to live together with our differences and in a way that contributes to the wellbeing, peace, joy, and justice in the world. In this endeavor we will always be a courageous, hospitable and learning community.

The mission of Faith House demonstrates that the movement beyond civility and tolerance does not merely lie in the minds of naïve and starry-eyed peoples. It can lie in the minds, hands, and kitchens of ordinary life. May we continue to find glimpses of these subversive happenings of shared life that transcend the platitudes and niceties that block us from encountering the full humanity of our neighbors.

Religion does have the potential to free us to hear the many voices alive today and it can bring us to places of liberation, embrace, and community. We can no longer accept the violence we inflict on one another because of difference. It is imperative as Christians that we hear these voices and herald religion accordingly- as an agent of healing, welcome, and embrace.

Much of astronomer Carl Sagan’s work in the 1980s came to us as a warning of how so many of our endeavors have lead us not just down paths of folly, much of our doings have lead us, plainly, to death. So we conclude here in the beautiful spirit of that staunch agnostic: we are indeed one planet. Our religions must serve our solidarity and global identity so that we can live out communally in a way that transcends civility and tolerance. In a way that is utterly human. Is that not what Christ came to do? To free us to be ourselves under God? Let us remember, let us hope, and let us live, together.

Written by Stephanie Abram, Rachael Clinton, Tim Tetrault, and  Sara Vander Woude

In a recent Essential Community course, students were asked to engage contentious issues such as religion, race, gender, and war. These writings are the fruit of their hard yet unfinished work.

We, in the West, experience time linearly in the sense that we look to the future always planning, saving and dreaming- believing that more is better. So we acquire advanced degrees, better jobs, bigger SUV’s, larger homes- and in the getting our hunger becomes all the more insatiable and we again aim higher- what will finally stop us? We focus so one-dimensionally on the future that we spend little time remembering or being. We pretend to own time and forget that it is a gift and in response, time turns its back on us- we feel disconnected and disembodied. Our nutrition and eating habits are divorced from earth cycles; our livelihood has nothing to do with the natural seasons of planting, waiting and harvesting. There is nothing that paces our lives other than the anxious ticking of the clock and the continual onslaught of the work-week followed by evenings or weekends of exhausted dissociation. There is a sense that time mocks us even as it is getting away from us.

The task, oddly, is not to catch up with time or get it back, but to enter into it submissively instead of trying to control it. It seems as though the only spiritual category we know to give us access to a more humane experience of time is the Sabbath. In my Protestant/Evangelical tradition, Sabbath is handled rather loosely for being the fourth member of the Decalogue. I was taught that Jesus had abolished the Sabbath and Sunday replaced it as the Lord’s Day- a day to attend church and “rest.” Most Evangelicals know of Sabbath in two ways. First, we know that it bears deep cultural and historical meaning for the Jews as a day familial celebration and religious ritual. Secondly, we know that it has been legalistically distorted in many traditions that value it, giving us righteous justification for not participating in such a works-oriented and burdensome activity. For us, the true significance of Sabbath is for us theologically remote.

I do not believe the Christian can merely “import” the Sabbath as a spiritual discipline that will “fix” our sense of being overworked and at loss of time. Long ago we lost and no longer have the communal systems and theological categories around the Sabbath that can infuse it with meaning. We need a bridge to give us access to the Sabbath- and for that we turn to the sacrament of time- the Eucharist. But what does the Eucharist have to do with time? And what does the Sabbath have to do with the Eucharist? Our Protestant crisis regarding time is circular- we have an anorexic view of the Eucharist because we have an undefined view of time and we have an undefined experience of time because we have a shallow theology of Eucharist. We need something that times us and our lives so we turn to Sabbath through the only door available and find ourselves seated at a great and good Table.

Theologically, we cannot separate Sabbath from the Lord’s Day yet we find that in many Protestant traditions Sabbath is but a footnote, if that. In order to step towards a theology of Sabbath, we must first note that what is needed is a deepening, widening, or broadening (an increase of meaning) regarding our theology of Eucharist as an eschatological reality.

Two brief personal vignettes. My tradition taught that the Lord’s Supper is about remembrance, yet a cultural sense of the past remained unarticulated. As a child, I was instructed to prepare for Communion by remembering and confessing the sins of the week and acknowledge the action of Christ on my behalf. I remember feeling forgiven yet very much alone as I would eat my neatly parsed cracker and drain my tiny cup of juice. Somehow we are more familiar with remembering in the context of shame and regret than in the category of gratitude, much less joy or delight- we know memory only in the first person and ours is a culture of amnesia.

In Bible College I recall the many intense discussions around the elements; we would try to explain, argue or defend ideas about what “happens” to them. Even the term “the elements” conjures images of Scientists picking apart something natural in order to analyze and understand it. It seems preferable to refer to Christ’s body and blood, as Alexander Schmemann makes a point to do, as “the gifts.” Who tries to understand a gift? It has only to be received. We no longer try to understand- we merely enter and receive because whatever happens “to bread and wine happens because something has, first of all, happened to us, to the Church… we have entered the Eschaton, and are now standing beyond time and space.”

Abraham Heschel speaks of the Sabbath as the window into eternity, even the source of it. When time is entered with such a degree of intentionality and ritual, it allows time past, present and future to become available to the participant in the sense that time opens itself up, or unfolds. In the Jewish tradition, time is seen as thick, layered, rhythmic and eschatological, it opens and closes and every moment is pregnant with promise and possibility. Jewish philosopher, Walter Benjamin once said the reason the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future was because “every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.” For this reason, it can be noted that time is the only thing that we partake of equally. To be preoccupied with time is to be preoccupied with inclusion for not a single moment belongs exclusively to one being- the heart of the Sabbath is communal.

Christian Orthodox theology uses similar language to describe the Eucharist. “In the Eucharist we are standing in the presence of Christ, and like Moses before God, we are to be covered with his glory.” The call to remembrance that is embedded in Christ’s Eucharistic instructions necessarily requires a communal and eschatological perspective. The mysticism of Orthodoxy requires this liturgical practice to be more than merely a symbol- the Eucharist is not the honoring of an event, but rather, the fulfillment of that event in present time. As much as it is an opportunity to contemplate gratefully one’s personal experience of being saved, it is “the sacrament of cosmic remembrance: it is indeed a restoration of love as the very life of the world.” As much as memory may be personal, an act of co-mmemoration is profoundly communal. As we participate in the Eucharist together, “we return each other, in Christ, to God” and enter his love.

A deepening theology of Eucharist will consist of an Orthodox understanding of joy as the primary category through which to engage the Table. Schmemann notes that joy cannot be defined or analyzed, rather, one has only to enter it, and the only way to enter into joy is through “one action which from the beginning has been for the Church both the source and the fulfillment of joy, the very sacrament of joy, the Eucharist.” Similarly, the Sabbath is the structure within time that requests our submission and requires us to let go in order to fully experience its power.

Both the Eucharist and the Sabbath hold as their central themes the deep notion of delight- joyful gratitude in response to the being and action of God on our behalf. Both are invitations to worship, both provide sustenance, both serve as counter-narratives that specifically address the drivenness and consumerism of our society. One author has said of the Eucharist, and I will say the same of the Sabbath, that its celebration “challenges some assumptions of contemporary American society. The demise of regular patterns of family dining in fact diminishes Catholic notions of sacramentality and the way we experience Christ’s presence at the table.”

The Jewish Day of Delight was a festal day, one that admittantly became clouded by tedious ritual in Israel’s post-exilic history that continues to this day, but nonetheless was profoundly connected to the time beyond time when one would feast eternally in and with God. The theological significance contained in the Eucharist for Christians parallels the theological significance of the Sabbath for the Jews because they are so theologically linked through a relationship in time that is no mystery, per se, but that often goes unnoticed. The Eucharist does not replace the Sabbath for Christians; it does however, join it in the category of the eschatological feast, through which the meaning and significance of the Sabbath bursts into Christian theology. Moltmann says plainly that the Lord’s Day (Sunday) does not abolish or supplant the Sabbath- “The Christian feast-day must rather be seen as the messianic extension of Israel’s Sabbath.”

“Time always points to a feast, to a joy, which by itself it cannot give or realize.” There is no question that both the Sabbath and the Eucharist are feast oriented, both propose a rhythm of the practice of communal feasting that is eschatologically unfolding. They move us forward and yet each time we participate, the experience is never the same for it is a rhythm that celebrates difference. Kierkegaard writes about the idea of “non-identical repetition” which David Ford applies to the Eucharist in that it can be understood as a repetition “recollected forwards.” Time in this sense is neither circular nor linear but something of both; time in Sabbath and Eucharist is eschatologically rhythmic and its destination is a feast.

Developing views of the Sabbath understand the command to rest as having more to do with ancient Hebrew notions of delight as opposed to our exhausted and dissociative modern notions of “rest.” Sabbath is far more about the creative engagement of the sensory in community that doesn’t shut us off from others but opens us up to them making possible a more just and sustainable world. For Heschel, it is the intentional engagement of the sensory in the context of feasting and delight that deepens one capacity to feast more deeply in heaven. Keeping the Sabbath is essentially a preparation for the feast of the Kingdom of God- the eternal and inexhaustible feast that “should be anticipated by a wealth of diverse forms of celebration.”

Ritual and repetition are not Evangelical words, in fact we are bored with ritual. We anxiously await the latest fad book around which to construct a sermon series instead of submitting ourselves to the Lectionary. We want new songs because we long ago tired of singing the same old Psalms. We pray our own prayers because the prayers of the Saints are not personal enough. Yet, in our resistance to ritual, we create new ritual because we cannot live without it- it is a most anthropological phenomenon. In fact, it has been suggested that “every time we encounter something that transcends the human person we ‘humanize’ it with ritual.” It is ritual that protects us from “unmediated religious experience.” Ritual and repetition decelerate and delay the numinous so that we are not consumed in the encounter- perhaps we have this to keep in mind when we become bored by the monotony of ritual- we are grateful that it ensures our survival while at the same time we want nothing more than to be consumed by the Divine.

The beauty of ritual is that it is never truly the same. Ford argues that the more “decisively and gloriously” the ritual is completed each time the more it is able to compel us to a deeper and more precise articulation of praise. This is why Kierkegaard is able to say that ‘repetition is always transcendence’ and the by definition, the Eucharist “is the eternal repetition of the great act of love accomplished for us” that forever moves us closer to God. Such is the language of love in that it “remains endlessly unvarying yet it is experienced as fresh and new each time it is spoken.” We move closer to the heart of God, indeed, as Orthodox theology will articulate, the hope of humanity is to be united in Christ and it is the Eucharist that connects us most deeply with the eschatological union of all in Christ. The Feast is the context of love, a space for the development of a human freedom and free play that liberates the people of God because what we move towards is not a retirement or payday, but a rich celebration of diversity.

Ritual must exist in order for a community to come together and celebrate. The rhythm offered in the Sabbath and the Eucharist in the context of feasting and worship make community possible. We often forget that we come to a table that is not ours to host or lay out- we attend at the invitation of God. It “is not a feast we laid out for ourselves, according to our own personal preferences. It is God’s feast. We attend by invitation and not simply to satisfy our own particular needs.” The community can only unite around a ritual to which we all submit. In this repetition we delight in each other in the presence of God because at His table, we are at leisure.

Joseph Pieper writes in his seminal text, Leisure as the Basis of Culture, that humankind is most human in the context of leisure, a condition that he articulates with precision as one that finds it’s locus in the religious festival, whose foundation is worship and sacrifice. Similarly, I argue that it when we are leisure in this sense that we experience time in such a way that we are timed not by the endlessly inhumane rule of the clock but by the seductive, non-identical repetition of the Feast that doesn’t leave us feeling disconnected but integrated. One Orthodox theologian has referred to this table as “the eternal repetition of the great act of love accomplished for us.” Love invites, whispering a command through which Sabbath and Eucharist give us the ability to sit down and resist the demand of the world of work upon our souls as resources to be used up. “When we sit down to eat, we are consciously removing ourselves from the world of work and means and industry, and facing outwards, to the kingdom of ends. Feast, festival, and faith lift us from idleness and endow our lives with sense.”

If ordinary time leaves us feeling disconnected, than the Feast does the opposite because if it is a table “spread by God and hosted by Christ, it must be a table with many connections.” We find ourselves, each other and God in the integrative spaces of the Sabbath and the Eucharist. The habit of feasting is the beginning point for the healing of the world. It is because of this that the Evangelical tradition needs to increase its theological meaning around the Eucharist as only then will we be able to harness the healing power of the Sabbath. Together, these gifts impact our experience of time and offer us the possibility of hope in our driven society that there is a deeper rest beyond the dissociative down-time of the weekends- there is a great and good Table that awaits and this is an invitation to prepare ourselves, deepen our capacity for joy- so that we will know how to feast with God. Come, the table is ready.

Phillip Nellis is a recently graduated with his MDiv from MHGS. This paper was birthed out of his research work for Dan Allender’s recent book, Sabbath.