Soulgardeners

The mathematics of love

Tayla is now almost three years old. When I study her comings and goings it opens a whole new vista for me. In her childhood innocence she’s illuminating the meaning(s) of a kingdom of God life for me. She is guiding me to return to what Paul Ricoeur calls a ‘second naïveté’ – refreshment after times of critique.

She can now count to six, almost flawlessly. Yet, with six numerical tools in her pocket she never, and I want to emphasize this, never ever counts her way through life. Instead she has adopted a peculiar way of structuring her actions and gatherings.

Where I would use numerical categories to organize, label and make sense of life, she counts in terms of the relational structure(s) that have impressed her most. When she collects flowers, rocks, leaves, balls, grass blades and basically any object, she makes sense of it by naming it in terms of relations.

She doesn’t pick up two rocks; it is a 'daddy rock' and a 'mommy rock', a 'daddy ball' and a 'mommy ball'. Accumulation, for her, is relational. She teaches me, what I now call the ‘mathematics of love’.

When her brother was born she expanded her relational categories. She now picks up a daddy, mommy, sister and brother 'whatever-she-can-find'.

The other day I officiated at a marriage and talked about this ‘mathematic of love’. I realized that Tayla is living in a relational narrative that is giving her sense and security. Some days I think about children who don’t have a mommy or a daddy and it saddens me to think that they’re not living into this loving mathematics.

I also think of church leaders and how this new mathematics could potentially change our hearts and attitudes towards the people we serve. Pastors are notorious for reducing people to numbers. I sometimes call it the ‘excel syndrome’ – we shrink people’s glorious lives into spreadsheets designed to impress and dazzle.

Taking my cue from Tayla I sometimes wonder….

What if we started dealing in this ‘mathematics of love’? It could be amazing. Instead of answering the question “How are your church doing?” with a numerical answer like “Fantastic we are now 200!” What if we told stories about Lollie, Suzette, Schalk, Jacques, Anne-Marie, Louise, Dewald, Tayla and Liam? I think it might just help us to inch closer to our God who, if you read through the endless genealogies, also speaks in the mathematics of love.

A most interesting compliment

On Sunday evening I preached on the theme, "How to emigrate to the real South-Africa". The word, emigrate, was deliberately chosen. With our country's fledgling democracy a lot of people haven't left the old South-Africa and therefore we have to emigrate to the new South-Africa.

After the sermon a huge Afrikaner man approached me, and I must confess that I was a little scared. He said to me, "your sermon made me feel like a 'poephol' - Afrikaans for asshole." He then said that he is a huge racist and that he felt God tugging at his heart. I could only respond that God loves poephol's, like me and him!

Sorry for Apartheid

A few of us are discussing what an embodiment of sorry really would look like. You can join the conversation here.

Spotted in the Apartheids-museum (click to read the Script)

Freedom day

Today is a public holiday in South Africa - Freedom day. We commemorate our first democratic election in 1994 on the 27th of April. I still remember that day. I was 18 and stood in a line for five hours in order to cast my vote. It was an amazing day of palpable excitement and a doorway into the "New South Africa".

Yesterday at our church I preached on 1 Peter 3 (the lectionary reading for the weekend). As a background text we looked at Jeremiah's letter to the exiles in Babylon found in Jeremiah 29. Most Christians are familiar with verse eleven of this chapter - it famously states that God "has a plan for you, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope." The only rub of this verse is that it was written to a group of exiles who were told that they would stay in exile for another 70 years. What are the options for people in exile?

4 options for people in exile:

- Start a rebellion
- Accommodate and assimilate
- Start a sectarian community
- God's advice via Jeremiah :

Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce.  Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

"Seek the welfare of the city"

For Jeremiah (and Peter) believers, who find themselves in exilic situations, should seek the shalom of the city. The reason for this is very pragmatic - when you bring shalom, it will also envelope you. A lot of white South Africans find themselves in an exile of sorts - the old is gone and the new is becoming.
There is an ongoing debate raging about emigration. So yesterday we talked about "should I stay or should I go?" Next weekend I'm speaking at one of the local churches on the topic of "How to emigrate to the real South Africa". The overall theme is "Is there a future for us in this country?"

The last question's answer depends largely on whom the "us" is, and also what the definition of the future is.

Peter and Jeremiah connected the exiles of their community to a narrative that superseded their own individualistic stories. I'm shocked by the fact that the rhetoric for and against emigration is basically the same for followers and non-followers of Jesus. It basically consists of similar lists of pros and cons. Shouldn't God play a role in our emigration debates?

I strongly believe that we are servants who are in a geographical situation to bless - to seek shalom.

Peter gives very practical advice for exiles in chapter 3:

Participate in a community (v8)
Live a rhythm of blessing (v9-12)
Be eager (zealous) to do good (v13)
Be ready to suffer (v14, 16-17)
Develop the language of hope (v15)
Grow in an attitude of gentleness and reverence (v16)

Vistas of the Spirit

As we’re slowly moving towards Pentecost I’m troubled, encouraged and challenged by a specific thought. Do we understand the work of the Spirit? Asking the question more specifically: how do we understand the work of the Holy Spirit for today? And then even more geographically specific for me: what is the work of the Holy Spirit in South Africa today?
I grew up in a church tradition where, as someone else once said ‘the Holy Spirit was the orphan within the Trinity’. For me this meant that a few years into my Christ-journey I was introduced to the Spirit (if I could do sound effects Spirit would be accompanied with the wind in the background). My conservative theology was built on a rock-solid (or so I thought) foundation of how to refute those tongue-speaking Spirit-intoxicated Pentecostals. And then I became one of them. You can imagine how excited I was to discover new continents of the gifts of the Spirit. With this also came the disappointment of feeling conned by people of the likes of Benny Hinn and all the other cronies that have been chronicled in so much depth. Since then I’ve been in a constant struggle to keep the balance between being open to the Holy Spirit and not being duped into a Gnostic-Disney-spirituality.
This year I’m using the weeks building up to Pentecost to think/pray/read my way into the centre of this storm. This brings me to the thought I referred to.
In the New Testament we are confronted with three window openings into the Spirit’s activity in people’s lives, these people are the teenage girl Mary, the newly baptized Jesus and the freshly anointed disciples (and friends) in the book of Acts.

Mary.

The first appearance of the Spirit in the New Testament is in Matthew when we read that Mary “was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit” (1:18, 20). This sounds very nice when one reads it in the Bible but when we place it in the actual flesh-and-blood life of Mary it looks a bit different! The first act of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament is to inaugurate the seed from which Jesus would emerge. For Mary this meant shame and disgrace with her family and the community at large. The Spirit here serves to highlight Jesus even if it brings discomfort to the one who is implicated in the process. Here the Holy Spirit serves to initiate Jesus’ mission and as a result places Mary in between a rock and a hard place.

Jesus.

When Jesus was baptized, we read that they saw the “Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him” (4:16). This picture reminds me of those paintings where Jesus looks into the distance with a far-off expression, in the background a perfect white dove comes to nestle on His shoulder and sings a beautiful song. It's all very esoteric. But before we can dose off into a goose-bump pietism Matthew tells us that the Dove led Jesus “into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” Once again the Spirit is associated with anything but comfort – and epitomizes – an agenda bigger than just a specific individual. Don’t get me wrong, I like the dove image but that’s not the only one we’re given in this introduction to the narrative. As an aside, when Mark recounts this, he uses a very strong word for the Spirit’s activity – he uses the word drove – it’s once again a missional word.

Early Church.

In Acts we are told that the Spirit would enable the disciples to become witnesses (martyrs) of Lord Jesus. The Spirit would empower them to take the message of Jesus’ Lordship into Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the whole world. Not only is the geographical scope of this command startling, but also the implications for the crossing of ethnic, religious and race boundaries. When the Spirit was poured out on them they received tools that would transcend entrenched boundaries, for through language we can cross-over easier into the worlds of other.

Us.

Pentecost then is the beginning of an ecclesial narrative that unites the nations under the banner of Jesus. Raniero Cantalamessa notes that “The ‘new language’ is a sign and a manifestation of the ‘new heart’ that the Spirit has created in them. These men have broken the barrier of their language, symbol of all the barriers that divide human beings from one another – the barriers of race, culture, sex, class, wealth, and the like”(p13)
Now I know this is not the full story. There are several other windows offering different vistas. The Spirit is also the Comforter, and helps us to relate to Pappa. Yet it is undeniable that the Spirit is also missional. NT Wright commented that,
"Let’s put it like this. The whole point about Pentecost was that the disciples, up till then hiding away in an upper room, were blown out on to the street by the rushing mighty wind to speak the truth of God in Christ in public, and to do so boldly and unashamed. If Pentecost is simply all about us having new private religious experiences, however exciting and dramatic, we are turning Christianity into a private hobby. The gospel of Jesus Christ is nothing if it’s not public truth, issuing a costly and dangerous challenge to the world’s conceptions of truth. The world of the first Christian centuries was full of competing and clashing cultures, religions and tongues, and the followers of Jesus discovered that the tongues of fire which rested on the apostles enabled them to address these different cultures with a fresh judging and healing word of truth. May it be so again in our day."

Rationalizations for not becoming involved with the poor

Today we return to our conversation on rationalizations we use for not becoming involved with the poor.  Last week a friend gave me NT Wright’s book “Surprised by hope”. The book blew my mind and really excited me towards a resurrection-drenched imagination. It’s a meaty book that reframes our mistaken images of ‘life after death’.

In masterly writing and brilliant exegesis Wright rescues the gospel from being defined as an ultimate ‘going to heaven’. He shows how, for Paul and the early Christians their hope was a resurrected body on a new earth and heaven and not a Platonic idea of a disembodied soul somewhere in the skies. Heaven is therefore not a non-physical domain where souls sing praises to God.

For the early Christians life after death was an intermediate stage, followed by the great resurrection. In Wright’s own words, “The ultimate destination is not ‘going to heaven when you die’, but being bodily raised into the transformed, glorious likeness of Jesus.”  Resurrection then is life after ‘life after death’.

Wright shows how your theology of the end will influence your current practices in this life.  Take for instance your stance on the destiny of planet earth. If your theology allows for you to do whatever you want on earth because God will eventually discard it like a flattened coke can – then that will automatically define your stance towards ecological and other related issues.

If you believe that God will redeem creation as well as individuals, and that this redemption started with Jesus’ resurrection then you’ll join in the already-started-project (Wright believes this and I do too). So what does this have to do with our rationalizations for non-involvement with the poor? Everything! 

In one of his most lucid passages Wright talks to people who say that given all the evils in our society there is not “very much they can do”. He also mentions how people get out of their responsibility towards the poor with terms like, "it's a tricky and many-sided subject", he writes:

"Our response must be that because we believe in the resurrection of Jesus as an event within history we believe that the living God has already begun the process of new creation, and what may seem impossible in human terms is possible to God." p.229

And also,

“What would you say to someone who said, rightly, that God would make them completely holy in the resurrection, and that they would never reach this state of complete holiness until then – and who then went on to say, wrongly, that therefore there was no point in even trying to lo live a holy life until that time? You would press for some form of inaugurated eschatology. You would insist that the new life of the Spirit, in obedience to the lordship of Jesus Chrsit, should produce radical transformation of behavior in the present life, anticipating the life to come even though we know we shall never be complete and whole until then.” p.233

This defeatism - a line of thinking that either think the problem is so big that we cannot solve it, or that it's no use starting because God will take care of it in heaven, must simply be challenged.  I find this rationalization impregnated and birthed in the statement, "Didn't Jesus say that we'll always have the poor with us?"  To this statement we will turn our attention later in the week.

PS)  You can read a short intro by Wright here, and a Time magazine interview here.

Being a Christ-follower in South Africa

[I posted this earlier today on our church's website]

At this critical junction of South African history we need thoughtful theological reflection on the major issues facing us. Almost everywhere conversations are taking place about the issues of emigration, crime, violence and other related issues like BEE and quotas in sport. What disturbs me most about these conversations is that the content and basic trajectories of the conversations are not different between Christ followers and those who are not professing to follow God.

This is of course due to the fact that we are experiencing the same external circumstances. Christians are not privy to an easier existence (contrary to some ‘theologies’). Yet there should be a marked difference in response – otherwise our following of Jesus has not changed us and is therefore useless and rendering us as un-useful.

Take the issue of emigration as an example. When Christ-followers are discussing the reasons for leaving the country and God is not mentioned once, can we not then say that their Christianity has not immersed them into a different narrative? I think so.

One of my dear friends is a self-professed agnostic. We meet weekly to do life together. It’s definitely one of the highlights of my week. He has a peculiar phrase that always strikes me as true in its wit. He delineates between Christians and those who practice Christianity as a hobby. Sometimes he’ll say “I know such and such a guy his Christianity is nothing more than a hobby.”

I believe that at this critical junction in our history there is an immense need for imagining what a Christ-follower, in contrast to a hobbyist, will do here in our country. To this end I would like to start a conversation.

Seasoned with salt and being salt

Our responses and our lives, to use a Jesus image, will have to be salted if we are to be of any good.

As a starting point let me paint two portraits; both involve a perpetrator and a victim:

A few weeks ago one of our Kleipot friends was in Cape Town for business. As she stopped at a certain intersection a small boy grabbed her phone out of her hand and ran away. She phoned her husband who told us to pray for her. As followers of Jesus we are called to not just pray for her, but astonishingly for our enemies as well! We did so. In doing this we reclaimed the humanity (in our eyes) of a twelve year old boy – we discussed the issues facing street children and were connected with a deeper narrative than this single incident.

Later in that week a similar incident took place in Boksburg. A man stopped at an intersection and a boy grabbed his phone. From here on out the stories diverge in radical fashion! The man jumped out of his car in order to accost the thief. As they ran the man fired a warning shot and the boy dropped the phone. The ‘victim’ of the crime ignored the phone, and continued in pursuit of the boy. After he caught him, he pointed a gun to his chest and killed him. The cycle thus went from perpetrator, victim towards a place where the victim became the new perpetrator.

Same circumstances, different outcomes.

Last week when I reflected with my friend about the incident that happened to his wife he told me this story. Then he said something that showed immense levels of theological reflection. He said to me that when he read about the man’s revenge killing he was reminded of the fact that Jesus said that he who hates, has also committed murder. The two stories show different trajectories, one towards love and forgiveness, the other towards hatred and murder. As followers of Jesus we simply have to imagine ways of living the way of love. If you want to read more about the other trajectory, read the responses of people on the boy’s death here.

I want to applaud my friend for his internalization of what happened to them, this kind of reflection is what is needed in our country. God, theology and our calling simply cannot be lived in the realm of hobby anymore. If it is we should rather get something that we can exercise with fewer restrictions.

What I propose is that we share our thoughts on this website and meet once a month to discuss the following issues (if you’re interested in being part of such a conversation please email me so that we can keep you informed regarding the venue).

Proposed issues:

- Should we ‘still’ apologize for Apartheid and if yes how?

- How do we have a Christian conversation about emigration?

- How do we love our enemy here in SA? What does it practically entail?

- What is a Christian response to affirmative action (BEE, quotas in sport etc…)

- Any other issues that you want to put on the table?

The Father of the prodigal

Yesterday a good friend gave me an amazing postcard, a picture of a sculpture depicting the Father of the prodigal.  It's one of my favorite parables.  Tayla also loves it.  When I tell her the parable she wants to hear it at least 5 times.  Her favorite part is the embrace-moment (and I must confess when she wraps her two-and-a-half-year-old arms around me it is one of my most precious moments too).

A random thought

The often used word "outreach" is soaked in colonial and patronizing acids.  Paul's philosophy found in Romans 1:12 is a more appealing way - the way of mutual encouragement, of learning together - a way that leads to relationships and friendships.  It refuses to turn people into projects.