Wisdom is a tricky concept to define, in part because of the meaning field it shares with words like intelligence, or understanding. Teasing what distinguishes Wisdom from those words requires careful consideration.For my part, I’ve been thinking about Wisdom over the past few years as the quality of knowing how to live in the present because of an understanding of both the past and the future.In other words, wise people understand that their actions today shape the future…and that helps them live well. Furthermore, they often gain that understanding because they have reflected upon the past. They understand the trajectories that led yesterday to become today, and that will carry today into tomorrow and beyond.

I’ve been thinking lately about the evolving spiritual and religious landscape, and more and more come back to the presence of choice. Choice strips us of illusions that are easily carried in days where religion has the cultural power to impose the facades of faith on the crowd. Instead, in the face of genuine choice, whether or not we believe/trust in Jesus becomes something that matters as much externally as it does internally.

“Of course, some people do not like choices; it makes their head hurt. Coffee, black. They always order the same thing. But when presented with new or different choices, many people take the chance and pick—in amazingly creative and innovative ways, which usually threaten those still following the old paths. In religious circles, choice is often viewed negatively as a violation of tradition, a break with custom, rebellion against God or the church, heresy: “We’ve never done it that way before.” Critics assail religious choice as selfish, individualistic, consumerist, narcissistic, navel-gazing, disloyal, thoughtless. But, if for a moment, you strip away all the judgmental religious language, it is just choice. The economic, social, and political world in which we live has opened up the possibility for eighty-two thousand choices at the coffee shop and probably about ten times that many when it comes to worshipping God and loving your neighbor. Some will choose well, others badly. Some will choose thoughtfully, others not so much. Some choose something new, others choose what they have always known. In the end, however, everybody chooses. Contemporary spirituality is a little like that line at the coffee shop. Everybody makes a selection. Even if you only want black coffee.”― from Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening by Diana Butler Bass

Psalm 9, part of today’s group of psalms in my prayer cycle, contains plenty of difficult images of the Lord. There, the Lord erases the names of the wicked for all time (vs 5). Verse 6 contains an absolute version of vengeance:

”Every enemy is wiped out,
like something ruined forever.
You’ve torn down their cities—
even the memory of them is dead.”
(Psalms 9:6 CEB)

But it’s important to note that this vengeance isn’t capricious or random. It is in service of justice, particularly God’s desire to take up for the oppressed:

“But the Lord rules forever!
He assumes his throne for the sake of justice.
He will establish justice in the world rightly;
he will judge all people fairly.
The Lord is a safe place for the oppressed— a safe place in difficult times. Those who know your name trust you
because you have not abandoned
any who seek you, Lord.”
(Psalms 9:7–10 CEB)

My squeamishness (and that of many of us in the wealthy west) for the vengeance described in the text ignores the very real nature of God’s desire for justice in the world. Injustice cannot be tolerated, and God’s action is not just action against, but action for…specifically, for the poor and oppressed people who suffer at the hands of unjust power. Despite the sensitivities of comfortable, wealthy people, God will not simply turn a blind eye to those who have suffered, nor those who have caused it.

Who knows, maybe God will indeed have some sort of way of dealing with those who acutely perpetuate violence and oppression so that they too may repent and be reformed. But my hope for them can’t be allowed to trump the cries of those who really have suffered and cry out for vindication. Today, my prayers are for them…even if they are against myself, and this psalm calls out for me to align myself with those who suffer, and thus with the Lord,

“Because the poor won’t be forgotten forever,the hope of those who suffer won’t be lost for all time.”
(Psalms 9:18 CEB)

Amen!

Finally released from my doctoral studies, and the required reading, this year allowed me the opportunity to read more freely and broadly, and I’m appreciative of that. I’ve been pleased with much of what has come my way this year, and want to share some of the texts that have played their part in my intellectual life over the past year. I don’t think this is quite a complete list, but it’s close to the sorts of things that caught my attention over the past year.

Poetry

Counting Descent by Clint SmithApplication for Release from the Dream: Poems by Tony HoaglandThe Works of George HerbertI really enjoy reading poetry, when I can get my mind in the right frame for reading it. Tony Hoagland has been a favorite for a few years, and this little time didn’t disappoint, though its a shade darker than his earlier work. The poems by Clint Smith are often fantastic, and I look forward to seeing what comes from him later. Herbert’s verses take a little more work for me, but I was daily struck by the way he used poetry as a pastoral tool. In 2018, I’m starting off with some work by Mary Oliver, but hope to greatly increase my intake of good poetry this year. Suggestions are solicited!

Biblical Studies and Theology

Psalms Old and New: Exegesis, Intertextuality, and Hermeneutics by Ben Witherington IIIBinding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus by Ched MyersChrist Plays in Ten Thousand Places by Eugene PetersonDesiring the Kingdom by James K.A. SmithFaithful Presence: Seven Disciplines that Shape the Church for Mission by David FitchReaching Out by Henri NouwenAmong these, the book by Nouwen was a reread—it’s a top 3 book for me, ever, and I could read it annually. The books by Peterson, Fitch, and Smith are each striking and useful, and I think many people would benefit from hearing each author. The Peterson book is a particular masterpiece, and I hope will someday be seen as a true classic.

Non-Fiction

Just Mercy by Bryan StevensonWriting Tools by Roy Peter ClarkThinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel KahnemanH3 Leadership by Brad LomenickMastering Leadership: An Integrated Framework for Breakthrough Performance and Extraordinary Business Results by Robert Anderson and William AdamsPeak Erik Anders and Robert PoolGood to Great by Jim CollinsThe Ideal Team Player: How to recognize and Cultivate the Three Essential Virtues by Patrick LencioniStart with Why Simon SinekDrive by Daniel PinkThe Leadership Challenge by James Kouzes and Barry PosnerA stack of leadership books was in the cards for this year, too. Of those, the Sinek book and Mastering Leadership were probably the most useful. However, Just Mercy might have been the best book I read in 2017, period. It’s just an amazing piece, full of story and meaning and mission. Can’t recommend it highly enough. I also found the Kinnamen book eye-opening, as a reflection of the way we humans think and the kinds of biases we are prone to in our decision-making.

Fiction

Ready Player One by Ernest ClineA Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’EngleI need to read more fiction, too. Here I come, 2018!

This last week, the Missio Dei journal published a conference paper I presented last summer reflecting a piece of my doctoral research, which was mostly written in 2016 ahead of finishing off my program and graduating in May of 2017. Cleaning up that article represents the last bit of publishing (at least in this direct form) I intend to do for this particular research project, but I intend to leave it in digital form here on my site, in case somebody might find it useful. Really, the value of a DMin project like this is mostly in the learning process of for the researcher, something which was of great value to me, and I hope will continue to yield fruit as I work in the church.The finished versions are available here.I really appreciate all the people that helped me work through that process. I had a great village.

Nota Bene: The following contains mild spoilers for Star Wars Episode VIII, The Last Jedi. Read at your own peril.

My fellow fans of Star Wars and all that its universe has offered us over the past forty years have been a bit divided over the latest offering, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi. Director Rian Johnson carved out his own path for the series here, to the delight and/or scorn of many. For the record, I liked the film, mostly because of the wonder it set alight in my oldest daughters. This was the first live-action film I’ve ever taken them to see in the theater, and they were delighted and swept away into this universe which has delighted me throughout my life. My most significant feeling for the movie was the profound gratitude of a Dad who got to sit and share something fun and moving with his kids.There is an aspect of the film I thought deserved a little bit of extra thought. We’ll see if it persists in the last film, but Johnson’s contribution to the canon has a distinct effect on how we think of the force—something Spencer Kornhaber’s article on the film in the Atlantic noticed, too. Kornhaber writes:

And the long-troubling notion that a person’s significance is simply a product of heredity is vaporized with the reveal about Rey’s junktrading parents, cemented by a coda that sees a force-wielding slave-kid dreaming of a rebellion.

Of course, the child Anakin Skywalker’s journey to becoming Darth Vader began with him born into slavery as well. However, the difference here is that the Anakin was discovered as someone special, as a one-in-a-universe boy whose connection to the force was a part of his unique destiny. The short clip witht he slave child at the end of The Last Jedi feels different to me—as though maybe, just maybe we are entering an era when the force works through anybody open to its power.There are other pieces to this egalitarian vision of the force in the film as well. For instance, Luke rebukes Rey’s imagination of him as a lone hero who would swoop in to save the galaxy. It also seemed like a moment of Force action/intervention when Paige Tico (Rose’s sister), has her moment of sacrificial heroism in the film’s opening battle. (I’m going to have to see that scene again.) See, part of the film’s vision of “heroism” is that the hero’s journey is now open to everybody, from once upon a time storm troopers to mechanics. The resistance is open to everyone, and any who wish may play a part, and find the force helping their journey.In our own universe, the prophet Joel has a vision like this

“Then afterward I will pour out my spirit on all flesh;your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,your old men shall dream dreams,and your young men shall see visions.Even on the male and female slaves,in those days, I will pour out my spirit.”(Joel 2:28–29 NRSV)

This is the text Peter cites on the day of Pentecost, a moment in which God’s spirit would be active not simply in a few special people, but on the whole community of God’s people. For what it’s worth, if your vision of Penetecost was that only the twelve apostles were gifted by the spirit, note that Acts 1:15 speaks about the whole company of disciples being about 120 people, and 2:1-4 certainly reads as though the fire event rested on each of that whole company. Verse 4 reads “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. “Pentecost was an inclusive event—the spirit given wasn’t just for a few, but for all the disciples of Jesus.Christianity isn’t a way simply for a few spiritual heroes—the spirit is given to all, and each is given the grace of participating in God’s work. As much as we have masked that fact, it remains true—God’s spirit will not be contained to only a precious few, but is always broadening God’s reach, and draws the most unlikely characters—indeed, wishes to call everyone—in to join God’s mission and community.

It is super lame to put a veneer of intellectualism on something stupid, and to pretend something evil has a layer of morality. There is no nuancing away racism: if you feel like your race is superior to the others, or should have more rights or privileges or power than others, or will to side with people whose skin looks like yours, or think its best that your empowered race maintains institutional preference or control until things simmer down, those things are signs of the sin of racism. It’s a foolish affront to the Creator, and has caused massive injustice to flourish. Whenever we find it in our hearts, or face the shame of having someone else point it out in us, we are compelled to repent.I hate it when I find it in myself, and I’d rather explain it away. But instead, I have to confess it, again and again. I have to repent, again and again. Oh Lord, may it, and all sin, be rooted out and destroyed!

Threat.Customer.Challenge.Helper.Savior.Sinner.When we encounter other people, our incredible brains rush to process what they mean to us. It rushes to categorize the person, using the categories that we’ve set up over time. “Like Me”, “Not Like Me” are the most basic ones, and I heard a study that even infants show signs of using these filters. Over time we develop more sophisticated versions, although most of us retain that primal dichotomy as the “root directory” of our system. People fall into the “Like Me” or “Not Like Me” categories for a breathtakingly wide variety of causes, ranging from ethnic distinctions to the type of music the prefer, the sorts of foods they eat and the ways they would imagine our shared public life together. Not all of these are trivial.J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter universe played with this pretty well with the “sorting hat” scenes. Sure, there’s some trivial stuff there, sorting people based on style—but it also carried character implications as well. One of the fascinating turns in the series was how Rowling later played on the stereotypes of the sorting—it turned out that the lines between good and evil weren’t laid out precisely as the early scenes seemed to portray. The failure of both heroic and villainous characters to realize that gave the stories serious emotional weight to play around with.Our own propensity for categorization extends deeply into our religious lives as well, and we’ve been remarkably creative in our invention of divisions and distinctions. Dogma and practice each have their own way of cutting the deck, and style has its say as well in how we perceive the categories of religious practice and the communities that pursue them. Not all of these are trivial either—although some of them are.Even within religious communities, within congregations, people who are gathered together, presumably with substantial common ground, there are plenty of ways to chop things up. Although Luther’s claim that each of us is simultaneously sinner and saint certainly has merit, we generally see the sinners and saints as different categories of people, and can find people in the church that match our conception of each without difficulty. Perhaps its the type of sin that we use to create the dividing line, or perhaps the intensity of its effects. I think the public/private nature of wrongdoing has often been a categorical marker, and there are others, too. It’s easy to peg a brother in the “sinner” category if he has some other “Not Like Me” markers.One of the incredible features of the story of Jesus is his propensity to cut against these divisions, or to upend them. Jesus reminds the  baffled religious folk that Zacchaeus is “also a son of Abraham”. He proclaims that he has not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance—while making those very sinners his most trusted disciples.Jesus has a different way of seeing people. He seems to have a particular way of cutting through the externals, the masks that hide people, and he has a way of seeing something more essential, more human. He ignores the lenses that would cast people in a favorable or unfavorable light, and sees them for who they really are. This shouldn’t be that surprising; we’ve known since the time of David that “humans look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Sam 16:7).Perhaps it’s too much to ask that we learn to do the same; after all, we don’t have the same kind of access to the heart, do we? But maybe it’s enough for us to at least hold our judgements in check a bit, to recognize that what we see about people isn’t necessarily the whole story. If we can do that, we keep the door open for not only what God might do in their stories, but through us in their story. Holding back our judgements (or at least knowing that our conclusions are at best provisional and shouldn’t be held too tightly) allows us to be open to participating in God’s work. It puts us in a posture of missional readiness, so that we’re more ready to respond to possibilities. We’re ready for the opportunities to bless their lives that might come our way.

The word “missional” has been terribly abused in its first couple of decades of wide circulation. Theologically, the word simply describes God’s ongoing work in the world—and the church that intentionally participates in that work. There are multiple of facets to that work and our participation in it, and perhaps this explains why the word has been stretched around so many different kinds of churches or styles of discipleship. We understand ourselves to be participating in God’s mission as we spread the news of Jesus’s redemptive work in our community and around the globe, as we encourage each other to follow Jesus, and as we pursue the conditions of justice, righteousness and peace. None of these the full breadth of what God wants for this world, but in each of them we engage with values near to the heart of God!Our churches pursue each facet collectively, working together for the purposes of evangelization, transformation, and justice—and churches can implement structural shifts to facilitate progress in each cause. We can create systems that create opportunities for faith sharing, venues in which transformation is more likely to occur, and initiatives that push against standing systems of injustice. Whether we’re the leaders fashioning the new programs or congregants supporting and participating in the moves, we can too easily begin to think that the structural changes mark us as “missional”. However, those structural shifts can only move us so far! Church programming and structure may create the conditions in which we move towards mission, and poor structures can get in the way of such practices or implicitly devalue them. Structure has its place, and should be approached with intentionality. However, creating the structures should not be understood as the heart of the work itself—the work itself is a matter of flesh, blood and spirit.

Flesh, Blood, and Spirit

The missional work of evangelization occurs when flesh and blood humans filled with the spirit of God reach out to their known and loved neighbors with the good news of Jesus. The missional work of discipleship takes place when people of flesh and blood, acting by the power of God’s spirit, encourage and teach each other about the way of Jesus, giving testimony of Jesus’s work. Justice progresses as spirit-driven people stand in solidarity with the oppressed, whom they have come to see and love because of their transformation in Christ. The heart of missional christianity isn’t a matter of organization, but of embodiment. While the church’s programming might provide the sort of vehicle or venue in which these things happen, the structure itself won’t succeed until it is filled by the right kind of transformed people—the new humanity, formed from the inside out for the purposes of God’s mission in the world. That formation takes places when we, both as communities and as individuals, nurture the sorts of mentalities and habits that encourage people to align with the mission of God and to engage in it.The inventory of those mentalities and habits is surely diverse and contains some familiar things, like the virtues of faith, hope, and love that the church has long sought to nurture, and the habits of prayer and listening to the word that have been a part of both the gatherings of God’s people and the classical understandings of their individual devotional practices. These are well and good, and contribute to our transformation into people aligned with the mission of God, but I want to suggest a further practice, one that I see both in the life of the early church and in the missional movement of our own time: the nurture of a particular obsession.

Obsessed with the Missio Dei

The Missio Dei is a fancy latin phrase meaning “the mission of God”. It’s a bit of shorthand meant to point us towards what God is doing in the world—something we train ourselves to discover by drinking deeply of God’s story in the scriptures, and which we prayerfully seek by the spirit of God in our own time. Becoming obsessed with the Missio Dei means that at every turn in our lives, we are always asking, “What might God want to happen here?” or “How can I join in what God might be working towards by what I say and do in this moment?”.These are the sorts of questions the early church obsessed over. Missional churches have these questions embedded in their culture, whether or not they ever use the fancy latin phrase or have super-sophisticated “missional” structures. Missional people can’t help but ask what God wants in the world, and how they can bear witness to God’s desires and God’s work towards fulfilling those intentions. Each encounter with the word, each gathering with the church, and every moment in the neighborhood is an opportunity to deepen our understanding of God’s mission in the world. That obsession is planted deep within our hearts, and keeps gnawing at our souls. Like a deep mystery, it holds us in vigilant tension, so that every moment we are ready to perceive the clues that might shed light on what God is really at work doing. The seed of that obsession grows from the inside out, until its fruit becomes apparent in the world. It is an internal drive that fuels every external step we take.