Occasio

Another day at Fuller

Day 3 -- Today I presented my dissertation proposal. I was on the hot seat in front of my colleagues and doctoral advisers for about 80 minutes. Pastor James Bergen was able to make it down from Fresno to show support, ask questions and help me with the presentation. Thanks James!

My proposal was dismantled fairly thoroughly, but a number of elements survived. I’ll now have to work hard at reshaping the eleven-page document and then resubmitting it. In general, I’m proposing to help North Fresno Church begin to think about diffusing the kinds of things we’ve been doing in the church neighborhood into the neighborhoods of individual congregants. We have engaged in such wonderful missional practices on North Fresno Street, we need to understand how members of NFC can engage their own neighbors. My plan is to gather several families from different areas of town and begin some simple experiments with missional practices on their blocks. The practices might include walking and reading a neighborhood, Appreciative Inquiry interviews, lectio divina in their homes, and the practice of hospitality. The actual practices will be decided on by the families who covenant together to participate in this project. One of the outcomes will be a Sunday school class that is taught by the participants. Hopefully that will be a way to pass on what we have learned.

A lot of the details are missing because my next task is to redesign my proposal and fill in the blanks. If you would like to follow my progress or are from NFC and would like to participate in this project just let me know. Say a prayer for me to if you think about it as well.

My stay at Fuller

I’m spending the week at Fuller Theological Seminary enrolled in the final seminar of my DMin program. I have completed all of the course work and am now ABD – All But Dissertation. The main task this week is for each of us doctoral candidates to present the first draft of our dissertation proposal, then listen to our colleagues and doctoral advisers deconstruct and tear it apart.

Day 1 – I arrived Sunday late afternoon after a fairly uneventful drive. I had fun listening to some of my old albums-now-on-CD, and I even got to hear the broadcast of Dinuba Mennonite Brethren Church. The five hour drive is never a problem because I love listening to music and radio. The day ended with a meal for the ten of us students hosted by our doctoral advisers, Mark Branson and Alan Roxburgh. We spent a couple of hours fellowshipping and catching up. I’m so blessed to have such wonderful colleagues, friends and conversation partners.

Day 2 – We started the day, as we always do, with lectio divina. Our passage for reflection this week is Acts 2. (For a brief description of this “dwelling in the Word” see my blog about last year’s Fuller experience here.) Acts 2 records the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. It’s full of rich imagery: violent wind, tongues of fire, miraculous languages, amazed people, a sermon, repentance, baptism and the birth of the first church. One of the things that we reflected on is the context for this message. The believers are gathered together and are driven out into the streets after receiving the Spirit. They immediately begin speaking the languages of others in the city. Jews from various areas had moved to Jerusalem, and even though they would have spoken Greek, the newly Spirit-filled believers speak to them in their own native languages. These people used to live in communities and territories that were established during the Babylonian exile. These are the descendants of the post-Persian exiles. It's amazing to see that the Spirit chooses to speak in the native tongues of the people.

With regard to this context, we must ask, Why did the apostles speak to them in their native languages and not Greek, the dominant language that they all would have understood anyway? What was God up to? What was God doing by including all these nationalities and languages in the emergence of his new church? Or, as the people in Jerusalem asked, “What does this mean?” Surely God was redefining his kingdom community to be inclusive and open. The believers were ministering the gospel of Jesus Christ as any missionary would, in the native languages of the people. Our challenge today: What would happen if we walked our neighborhoods asking some of the same fundamental questions: How can we speak the language of these people? What signs and wonders are already evident in the neighborhoods we live in? Might we be “amazed and perplexed” with what God is already doing and ask with the first-century Jews, “What does this mean?” There’s a lot more to unpack in this passage….

The remainder of the day was spent listening to two dissertation proposals and then discussing them. The dismantling and reconstructing of our proposals is the primary task of this week’s seminar. I’ll say more about that after I have my turn.

Get On Your Boots

Okay, gotta do a quick post on the new U2 song that was released today entitled "Get On Your Boots" from the soon-to-be released album No Line on the Horizon. Here are a few links:

Listen to the song on U2.com's site.

Listen to a better quality version on 103.7 "The Mountain" from Seattle. They're playing it every hour on the hour.

"Get On Your Boots" lyrics here at U2Wanderer.com.

If you missed the band's two songs at the We Are One Inaugural concert check out this YouTube video. "Not just an American Dream, also an Irish dream, a European dream, an African dream, an Israeli dream... and also, a Palestinian dream! Sing!!" "Blessings not just for the ones who kneel, luckily."

And then there's this cool candid video of the band practicing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Thanks to @U2 for posting this (Matt and team have been out of their minds giving us updates the last few days!). Here's the link (scroll down the page).

Finally, check out Beth Maynard's take on "Boots" along with a number of comments here. Below are some initial comments I threw out on her blog about the song.

"First impression: Bono's melody line in the verse draws me immediately back to the eighties with Escape Club's "Wild Wild West" (Forty-seven dead beats living in the back street/ North, east, west, south all in the same house...) Now I gotta work real hard at getting that outta my head.

Second impression: "Boots" sounds way better on 1037themountain.com (top of every hour today) than on U2.com's stream (VERY cluttered with a small stream and equally small speakers).

Third impression: juxtaposition throughout, in classic U2 form, but definitely feeding from a Pop-style "Vertigo". It feels like it takes off from the Jacknife Lee version, "and fear has taken over every thought". Also, reminds me of "Fast Cars."

Fourth impression: lot's of second person plural in this song. I'm hearing a plural "you" in the chorus. Kind of a "city on a hill" thing with glimpses of "Yahweh" and "City of Blinding Lights". Ancient Israel never understood the power of their beauty, presence and witness in the world- do we?

Fifth impression: I'm not focused on "the sound" as much as the cry to "let me in". I think people are hungry and desperate for a community of peace, and the very communities (i.e. church) that claim to have peace tend to negate it by their very presence. The theological point is this: if we were living in radical alternate communities of love as Christ's followers, people would be busting down the doors to experience it. And I can imagine 100,000 people in a stadium screaming "Let me in... Let me in...!" akin to the irony of joining voices for "I still haven't found what I'm looking for" or "I will sing, sing a new song".

But then again, I could be way off. Heck, it's art and that's what hit me initially. No doubt I'll see it differently in the future. Sorry for the long comment, I should've done a post."

MLK Day

I'm not sure if anyone's noticed but I've been gone for awhile. I've mostly been recovering from hepatitis but also catching up at school, starting a new semester, working on my doctoral studies, playing my mandolin and, very importantly, spending time with my family.

I'm getting ready for another doctoral seminar at Fuller Theological Seminary beginning next week (watch for posts from Fuller) so I've been reading in preparation. A recent text I worked through is by one of the best theologians of our day, John Howard Yoder. In his book, For the Nations: essays evangelical and public, Yoder (not "Yoda" as my nine-year old assumed!) picks up his familiar themes of peace, reconciliation, servanthood and justice, but applies them directly to the church as it lives in tension with its American culture. He suggests that the church's role as an alternate community, faithfully living out a biblical witness as first presented in the Hebrews and then lived out and fulfilled in the person of Christ, has enormous implications for our contemporary situation. All of his essays are twenty to thirty years old but find new life in the twenty-first century.

One of the essays is relevant for this day, the day we honor Martin Luther King, Jr. In "The Power Equation, the Place of Jesus, and the Politics of King" Yoder points out King's ability to have the same kind of faith that the Hebrews would have understood. In the book of Hebrews we read that "faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen" (11:1). It is this faith that led both our ancestors of the Old Testament and King to believe that suffering will bring about good, though that good might not be immediately evident. One of the critiques of the American Dream is that in its current manifestation it negates suffering and replaces it with a type of utilitarian power that is righteously wielded by those who somehow know right from wrong. This is not what King had in mind.

King understood that the suffering at hand was not entered into because it would foster the outcome he hoped for in his lifetime, but because it was the right thing to do. Pondering whether suffering is worthwhile even when the sufferer sees no signs of success, Yoder writes:

What is the validity of our cause when we are not winning? Does it change the affirmation of the human dignity of the adversary when (in the foreseeable future) the adversary will not be won over by our suffering love but keeps on unrepentantly oppressing? Does it reverse the pragmatic ethical commitment of the activist to truth telling, to breaking the law only in very exceptional circumstances, and to rigorous nonviolence, when those tactics achieve less?

Yoder notes that King often referred to the need for love, nonviolent resistance and suffering even when no particular fruit was immediately evident (which is why he continued to opt for "the power of suffering" instead of Malcolm X's "black power"). King:

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. (Nobel Peace Prize acceptance, December 1964)

The cross we bear precedes the crown we wear. To be a Christian one must take up his cross, with all of its difficulties and agonizing and tension-packed content and carry it until that very cross leaves its marks upon us and redeems us to that more excellent way which comes only through suffering. (National Conference on Religion and Race in Chicago, January 1963)

Yoder continues commenting on this view of faith and suffering:

If the Lamb is worthy to receive power, then the only rational worldview, in a cosmos where we have no control, will be apocalyptic. ...The Lord's coming "to judge," i.e., to set things right, will be soon, but not right now. It does not bypass our ongoing struggle; yet the criterion guiding us in the struggle is not whether we win, not whether we can implement lesser-evil calculations to get there, but whether we keep the faith.

So, I would ask the church, "What does it mean to be a faithful people, or to keep the faith?" "Why do we oppose suffering, or at least put up with it only when we see the product of our suffering at hand?"  "When will we understand that repaying good for evil is not simply proverbial, but the way the Creator has designed the universe to work?" "When will the church become the presence and foretaste of God's kingdom with regard to suffering?" Or finally, "In an age of declining membership, might the church in America grow once again not through any growth strategy, but through suffering and sacrifice as all churches have under such circumstances?"

How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever.
How long? Not long, because you still reap what you sow.
How Long? Not long, because the arm of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. (King in Montgomery, March 1965)