Prodigal Kiwi(s) Blog

A Wright Appreciation

“…Reading Wright has stimulated my thinking in many areas. More importantly, it has fed my soul…”

Douglas J. Green, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Old Testament
Westminster Theological Seminary
Philadelphia, PA

I very much echo Douglas Green’s comment with regards to Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright. A recent aeroplane journey within New Zealand gave me a few uninterrupted hours to catch up on some reading, in this case a wonderful mix, writing from Steve Taylor ‘mixed together’ with online writing by Tom Wright, the latter being available by following the links below. I particularly want too draw attention to two wonderful little “Q&A” sessions with Tom – one from January 2004, so perhaps check back in May).

For me, anyway, both were really interesting – condensed reflections (important when you’re flying and have only a short period of reading time) on his thinking at key points. I especially liked this statement from his March Q&A – “[sin =] fractured humanness.” This was included as part of his response to this question (itself a very evocative reflection on “gospel” which I like):

“Would you address the following question in the light of the following two points:

The gospel is an announcement that the God of Israel has made Jesus both the Saviour and the King of the planet;

The crucifixion and resurrection have decisively spoiled all political, economic, and all other power systems, bringing them into his service;
With those points in mind, would you role play (or define) how you would lead a person into an ongoing, love relationship with Jesus? I'm asking you to be very practical and down to earth here…”

Friends and Art

Well. I’ve just had a great weekend.

Two days work down in Christchurch gave me a needful opportunity to spend some needed and important time with wonderful friends, Steve and Lynne Taylor. Their relocation to Christchurch from Auckland earlier this year means we don’t get as many chances to embody that friendship over and against the virtual ways that we keep in touch…one of the ongoing issues for me around church is isolation – isolation arising ‘living’ in the margins between more ‘traditional’ expressions of church and different, emerging, growing, exploratory and experimental expressions of church; isolation arising around communication – dreaming different dreams, speaking a different ‘language’; isolation arising from walking, questioning, exploring, being stretched and growing in different ways and in different kinds of ‘spaces’; and finally, isolation that arises from a different perspective on the issues and challenges facing churches more broadly with a New Zealand context.

So, all that to affirm the importance of my friendship with Steve and Lynne, and the ways in which that friendship affirms, challenges, stretches, encourages, resources, and accompanies me (and I them) on this journey. We all need fellow wayfarers, we all need friends.

Raw Truthfulness - The Psalms of Lament

I am leisurely reading (i.e. when I get a spare moment) through sermons in my recently arrived copy of Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalog wonderfully edited by Raewynne Whiteley & Beth Maynard (nice to see in Raewynne's acknowledgment thankful appreciation of Bishop Penny Jamieson from here in NZ. Penny was the first female Anglican Bishop - a pioneer, who I see in Sunday's newspaper is due to retire this year).

The first sermon that grabbed my attention was The Psalms, The Blues, and the Telling of Truth by Jamie Howison (song reference - U2's "40" / biblical reference psalm 40). Here's a section I really connected with, and have had reason to reflect on in a special way over the last 24-hours:

"...The Psalms [keep our] imaginations open and [our] lives in Christ authentic...They are 'faith in the raw," or at least they are once we peel from them the layers of religiosity and numbness with which they have been laden...they are not genteel. They are not the prayers of nice people, couched in cultured language...

Bridges not Barriers

I was reading a transcript of Dick Staub’s interview of Craig Detweiler, screenwriter and co-author of A Matrix of Meanings: Finding God in Popular Culture (linked via U2 sermons blog). One part particularly grabbed my attention – Detweiler saw himself as “someone whose job was to build bridges, not barriers.” This statement was made in the context of Detweiler’s wanting to affirm and “celebrate” what’s right with post-modern culture, trusting that God is in it, rather than “critiqu[ing] everything that’s wrong with it.”

That sums my time up @ Bridges (the church I belong too) quite well. I’m working really hard to “build bridges, not barriers;” bridges that take Scripture and our context seriously. I’m trying to build contextual bridges to help us imagine meaningful ways for us to live into and out of the Jesus story. Rather that build “barriers,” I’m wanted to remove barriers, to pull down the walls that enclose us and prevent us from engaging as God’s people with the various cultures of our context. That’s also meant lowering (to varying degrees), at the cost of increased vulnerability, the protective ‘walls’ around my own life. I’m trying to form identity (mine as much as anyone else’s), a sense of who we are and how we might live as a distinct gospel-people. I’m building bridges not barriers. I’m faithfully telling the Jesus-story, re-mixing that story, encouraging it to be listened too and engaged with in fresh ways, contemporary ways that take seriously the incarnation. I’m worked to broaden thinking and practice. There’s more to this Jesus-following life, there’s more to our relationship with God, there’s more to our relationship with each other, than our gathering in one-place on a Sunday morning, once a week. There's more to being an increasingly mature Jesus-follower. I’m worked to nurture and encourage imagination and creativity. I’m experimented publicly, pushing out expectations with different ways of teaching, different ways in which we might resource and nourish a Jesus following life.

Isaiah 57:14 seems appropriate.

"Build up, build up, prepare the road!
Remove the obstacles out of the way of my people."

Lost in Translation

Amended - Point 3 added after the original post

I went to see one of my favorite "Kiwi" bands - Salmonella Dub last night @ Raglan. I drove the 50 minutes to Raglan, only to find that the gig had been sold out. It was @ a pub, so I had just expected to buy a ticket at the door. How wrong I was. So, it was a 50 minute drive back home, going in the opposite direction, watching the stream of cars heading back to raglan and the gig @ 9.00pm. I was quite disappointed actually. So, I returned home via Hamilton, and took in a quiet Guinness, watched a little rugby, and then went to a session the wonderful movie, Lost in Translation. I loved it's quiet entering in to the tensions of two lives lived out of context - out of their comfort zones. It was a powerful, unassuming movie. A "feeling" movie. It is a film about two people experiencing life crises.

The Hollywood Jesus synopsis and review is here

I was reading an interview with Director, Sophie Coppola, in the magazine UNCUT. The interviewer asked:

Do you think some viewers will be disappointed that Bob and Scarlett's character, Charlotte, never quite click?

"...I think they do click. When they meet they have something in common, and they do click. But they're in this suspended reality, away from real life , and it was about that moment - they can't really be together. It's something that you can't make a part of your daily life, but you have a moment..." [emphasis, mine].

For me this movie seems to connect in at least three ways if seen as a way of also thinking about church:

Preaching 'Sound tracks'

Whiteley and Maynard write the following in their introduction to Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalog. Available from Bean Books (if you live in the US):

"...We also trust that in working with U2 material in the pulpit we are honoring the fact that U2's art is itself consciously interactive, crafted so as to encourage personal appropriation and contributions. U2 clearly loves to break down the...wall and draw ordinary audience members in to interact with the spectacle, after all, they names their band after the concept..."

Beth writes in her acknowledgement: "Without U2, my spiritual life would have a much less interesting soundtrack." I like that.

If a similar book was published: "XYZ: preaching the XYZ catalog" - Who would that band be? (i.e. who has made your Jesus-following life a much more interesting "soundtrack"? And what song would you want to highlight and interact with in a sermon?

Mine would be Radiohead - song....hmmmm, maybe "Karma Police" or "Motion Picture Soundtrack"

To EZ On or not to EZ On, that is the question

As some of you will know, we've been struggling @ Bridges (our church) for some time now. I was re-reading my journal the other night. I've increasingly been feeling out on a limb - on a different page and speaking a different language. That's no-ones fault per se. People can only be themselves, but I've been wondering whether I belong at all. People seem so different in their "inlook" and "outlook." For my part there's a lot of selfishness - I want to be part of a deep community of diversley gifted people, a stimulating and creative environment...I want to deepen my experience of God in community, I want to work out the missionary challenge in the company of innovative, outside of the box, courageous others etc. Lot's of really hurtful comments have been floating around as people, for their own reasons, are reacting to CHANGE (even if it's in reality been only very small change. It's not easy being an INFJ @ times like this. I'm not very brave). I've been feeling really "unsafe" (not in a physical sense)...but "unsafe" in terms of being in a particular environment, one that despite a profound orthodoxy (on my part), has just felt really constricting, unhealthy (for me) and narrow. Like Maggi, in her post yesterday / today said, I too have been growing. I've been asking questions. Questions have become stepping stones. I'm not in the same place I was 1-year ago...This Jesus-following life has been just that - a following of Jesus...a journey, a changing landscape. The journey has changed me. It should change me, because following Jesus is a growing experience, a deepening relationship, in which we are changed.

Anyway, for a long while, I've been wrestling with what to do..."stay" or "EZ ON." I still don't know, but I read the following yesterday (from the 2004 published book/report - Mission Shaped Church - pages 91 & 92). I'm going to make no comment on how it reads to me in my context, but I want to 'record' it as it's saying something important:

Mark Pierson Moving to Melbourne

Now the news is in the public arena. Mark Pierson is transitioning out of Cityside and moving to Melbourne. Mark has been a large influence on my ecclesiology and sense of what church could be...he's a been a great person to talk too and a big encouragement. Life moves on and new possibilities become realities as the wind of the spirit "blows inside and outside of the fences."

"The Urban Seed job involves working with around 25 outstandingly gifted and committed young adults who all work part-time in various street level ministries. While there is some general management work to be done, my emphasis will be to build a pastoral, worshipping community of faith among the staff and others in downtown Melbourne. I will be bringing a different style of leadership to that previously."

Karl Rahner – Every Day Mystic.

German Karl Rahner (5th March 1904 to 30th March 1984) was a Jesus-follower who thought deeply about God, who experienced God deeply within the Christian tradition (and the Ignatian sub-tradition). Fellow Jesuit Harvey Egan has referred to him as “the mystic of everyday life.” Helping people experience, more deeply experience, or recognise their everyday experiences of God, is a significant challenge facing many a church today. In many ways the new age / new spirituality practices have filled the gap between the worlds of enlightenment science and a Christian tradition that has to varying degrees ‘sold out’ to cold, clinical, rationalism. Ironically this new age or new spirituality has so saturated mainstream culture it has ceased to be a fringe phenomenon, whereas the church is increasingly fringe and marginalised. As many of us recognise, people today are looking for ‘spirituality’ (whatever that might mean to them). This interest in "spirituality" is filling both a need and a vacuum.

“…Participants [in this 'new spirituality] have discovered that they can draw upon a diverse range of spiritual practices and techniques to give direction to their lives. They can create their own rituals, rites and ceremonies without recourse to institutional forms of religion like church…”

Anyway, back to Rahner. I was warmly encouraged (while on an Ignatian retreat), last year, by American Fr. George Drury S.J. to read Rahner. What do I like about Rahner? – Here’s my response to a comment by Maggi Dawn yesterday:

Something's Borrowed

"Jesus was someone who stretched the faith of people around him. He contantly dared people to see things differently, to act differently and to take steps of faith toward God."

A statement from the ReJesus site (linked to via Jonny Baker) - Encounters: Taking Steps of Faith

Also, this quotation from Jason Evans' site really connected. I've been deeply touched by the small "steps" that two women from church have taken in the last couple of days - one sent a lovely handmade card honoring the small things we can all do for each other - in this case the gifting of a smile and the collecting of an empty communion 'cup' (she used a portion of this quote which Jason had posted - the message is now doubly reinforced for me); in the latter case, yesterday I was telephoned at work by someone who wanted to show care for me and my family.

We must not think that our love has to be extraordinary. But we do need to love without getting tired. How does a lamp burn? Through the continuous input of small drops of oil. These drops are the small things of daily life: faithfulness, small words of kindness, a thought for others, our way of being quiet, of looking, of speaking, and of acting. They are the true drops of love that keep our lives and relationships burning like a lively flame.
- Mother Teresa