Practicing Resurrection...

NOTE: After getting Eugene Peterson's new book, I sensed it wise to use it in an in-worship Bible study series throughout the Sundays lead up to Lent. So, here goes with round number one. I am grateful to Peterson - and Peter Santucci - for their study guide. If you are in town on Sunday, January 23, 2011, please join us at 10:30 am.

Shortly before Christmas I bought myself a copy of Eugene Peterson’s latest book: Practice Resurrection. As some of you know, I am a real Peterson fan and his latest title caused me to revisit the books that have had the greatest impact on my almost 30 years of ministry.

• When I first read his book to pastors, Working the Angles, I was blown away with the clear, practical and spiritual advice he offered me concerning the importance of Sabbath keeping, serious reading, prayer and walking in nature with my wife for the well-being of my inner life.

• The encouragement I found in The Contemplative Pastor – where he insists that the work of pastoral ministry must always be unbusy, subversive and apocalyptic in our gentle pursuit of shepherding ordinary people through the traps of the mundane – was a gold mine.

• And I still find myself drawn to the clarity of God’s grace present in his reworking of the Bible – especially the Psalms and the letters of Paul – in what has come to be known as The Message.

No question about it, I am a Peterson fan. So, I was curious about what else Brother Eugene might have to say to me in his new opus; besides, I found the title intriguing: Practice Resurrection. What does that even mean?

Well, he tells us very clearly in the book’s introduction through the story of an unnamed friend who came to faith at about the age of 40. The way Peterson tells it, this woman had her roots in a “harsh fundamentalist atmosphere in abusive circumstances… as she grew up in Arkansas poverty.” When she escaped her family to California, it wasn’t long before she found herself alone and pregnant and 18 years old – but she loved this because she felt alive and free and connected to everything ecstatic in life. And then, a few weeks after the joy of her baby’s birth, life crashed in on her with a vengeance:

She started drinking and became an alcoholic. She moved onto cocaine and became an addict – and it wasn’t long before she was a prostitute… where she remained on the streets of San Francisco for another 20 years… And then one day she wandered into a church. The church was empty and she became a Christian. She didn’t know exactly how it happened, but she knew that it had happened.

Another pregnancy – another sense of life growing within her – spiritual life that thrilled and encouraged her; so, in time she started to worship regularly. And then Peterson brings it all home with these words: “But do you know what she found most difficult? American churches. Not that she wasn’t welcomed, she was… No the real problem was that these churches seemed to know everything about being born into Jesus’ name but seemed neither interested nor competent in matters of growing into a measure of the full stature of Christ.”

• They remained baby Christians – children of God rather than adults of God – with lots of doctrines and ideas and Bible studies but precious little insight and help into how to “grow up and mature into the way of Jesus Christ.”

• St. Paul puts it like this in today’s text:

(You were called into a way of living with) No prolonged infancies among us, please. We'll not tolerate babes in the woods, small children who are an easy mark for impostors. God wants us to grow up, to know the whole truth and tell it in love—like Christ in everything. We take our lead from Christ, who is the source of everything we do. He keeps us in step with each other. His very breath and blood flow through us, nourishing us so that we will grow up healthy in God, robust in love.

And that is what it means to practice resurrection – it is to grow up and mature in the way of Jesus in this life – listen carefully:

The practice of resurrection is an intentional, deliberate decision to believe and participate in resurrection life, life out of death, life that trumps death, life that is the last word, Jesus life… Practicing resurrection, by its very nature, is not something any of us are very good at… (Mostly because) it is not an attack on the world of death; it is a nonviolent embrace of life within the country of death that is all around us. It is an open invitation to live eternity in real time. (Peterson, pp. 14-15)

So is that first insight clear: that this in-worship Bible study – and the point of Paul’s writing to the church in Ephesus – is about growing up and maturing in the way of Jesus in our real and very ordinary lives? This is NOT so much about being born again – which has its place – and is something we need to talk about. Rather this is about living into the resurrection right now while surrounded and even obsessed with death. I love the way Peterson reworks Paul’s words from Romans 12:

So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

The first insight has to do with Paul’s purpose – to help us mature and grow up from baby Christians into adult people of faith – and the second is this: God has created the church to be the place where this happens.

I know that sounds crazy – even problematic given what the church is really like – but that is how Paul sees it. The Holy Spirit has been poured out upon creation and given birth to the church – the new body of Christ for our time – to be “a colony of heaven in the country of death” and a living witness to the kingdom of God. That’s what chapter four of Ephesians tells us, right?

I want you to get out there and walk—better yet, run!—on the road God called you to travel. I don't want any of you sitting around on your hands. I don't want anyone strolling off, down some path that goes nowhere. And mark that you do this with humility and discipline—not in fits and starts, but steadily, pouring yourselves out for each other in acts of love, alert at noticing differences and quick at mending fences. You were all called to travel on the same road and in the same direction, so stay together, both outwardly and inwardly. You have one Master, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who rules over all, works through all, and is present in all. Everything you are and think and do is permeated with (unity in Christ Jesus.)

Our other readings speak to us of being called this morning, too, just like St. Paul. Isaiah tells us that the people who walked in darkness have been called into a great light. Specifically he is addressing what will happen to the two broken and captured tribes of Israel, Zebulun and Naphtali, who had been overrun by Syria but now anticipated the Lord’s liberation and healing.

And in that very same region, the broken down places of fear and death called Zebulun and Naphtali, Matthew tells us that: Jesus “moved from his hometown, Nazareth, to the lakeside village Capernaum, nestled at the base of the Zebulun and Naphtali hills… to complete Isaiah's sermon” with his words: "Change your life. God's kingdom is here."

For walking along the beach of Lake Galilee, Jesus saw two brothers: Simon (later called Peter) and Andrew. They were fishing, throwing their nets into the lake. It was their regular work but Jesus said to them, "Come with me. I'll make a new kind of fisherman out of you. I'll show you how to (lure) men and women (into the kingdom of God) instead of (just capturing) perch and bass." And they didn't ask questions, but dropped their nets and followed.

It would seem that we can’t grow up and mature as people of faith in the way of Jesus all by ourselves. We need others – we need accountability and encouragement – we need a place to practice resurrection and receive both instruction and correction. And this ought to tell us something crucial about the church that many people get wrong: while we are, to use the poetry of Taize, a parable of hope in the world, the church is always the broken and crucified body of Christ in the world. “We are not a utopian community. We are not God’s avenging angels.” (Peterson, p. 14) We are a collection of wounded souls hungry for grace.

A lot of people – perhaps most – have a hard time remembering this truth and grow disillusioned with the church – of every stripe and variety from Roman Catholic and Protestant to Orthodox and Anglican because the church is so human, so shabby and so utterly incomplete.

• Throughout time – and now is no different than then – baby Christians choose to believe that the church: “is a disciplined company of men and women charged to get rid of corruption in government, to clean up the world’s morals, to convince people to live chastely and honestly, to teach them to treat the forests, rivers and air with reverence; and children, the elderly, the poor and the hungry with dignity and compassion.”

• But it hasn’t happened, right? “We’ve been at this for more than two thousand years and we have just been through the bloodiest and most violent century in recent history – and the present century is hard at its heels on being hell-bent at surpassing it. Clearly, we are not making much headway in eliminating what is wrong in the world and making everything right: so what is left?”

Paul’s third insight has to do with how we comprehend – and practice – being the church in the world. It is NOT ideal. It is often wrong – and cold.

• In chapter two of the book of Revelation there is a list of seven of the early churches – Ephesus included – and we’re told something about the soul of each congregation. Do you know what it says about the church in Ephesus? The church Paul founded and gave three years of his life to shepherd and bless?

• What does it say in Revelation 2: 2-5? They have become loveless – people who don’t practice grace and kindness and compassion – a church that knows the rules but has forgotten all about forgiveness.

So let’s be clear: perfection, social justice or even spiritual wisdom is not why we’re asked to look at the church in Ephesus. Rather it has to do with calling – specifically, to use Paul’s letter, “the invitation to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called.” There are three foundational insights here that are inter-related happening here:

First, scholars tell us that the word worthy – axios in Greek – has to do with a scale – a balancing scale. On one side is a standard weight, on the other an unknown ingredient with the goal of the scale being equilibrium. Paul is telling us that life will be in balance – holy and sacred – only when our actions – our walking and talking and breathing ordinary lives – are held in balance with God’s calling.

Second, this suggests that we won’t know how to live in balance without first knowing about God’s calling: if we are the only measure of things, life will be out of balance – filled with chaos – Koyaanisqatsi as the Hopi Indians put it about life in the fast lane where there is no time for love and forgiveness and beauty. God’s calling essential.

So first balance, second calling and third our ordinary lives – “lived congruently with the way of the Lord” so that we are worthy and mature and healthy and whole – this is what Paul begs us to grasp. Begs – pleads – aches and yearns for us. So that our ordinary – mundane – regular lives are connected with God’s grace from the inside out. It would seem, my friends, that St. Paul is telling us that we can only learn something of God and God’s calling – to say nothing of walking in God’s balanced way – from within the church. The church is where we will come to learn of God’s blessing and calling in a mature way – and I’ll be exploring God’s blessings with you next week – so I hope you come back.

• But understand that this notion of the church is humbling. It is also, to use Peterson’s words, just as miraculous, scandalous, surprising and overlooked in our day as was Mary’s conception of Jesus in her own.

• For just as Jesus was first born among the forgotten and marginalized, so God continues to choose those beyond the elite and talented to form our congregations in the shape of Jesus.

No wonder Paul told us that the good news for today was found in these words:

No prolonged infancies among us, please. We'll not tolerate babes in the woods, small children who are an easy mark for impostors. God wants us to grow up, to know the whole truth and tell it in love—like Christ in everything. We take our lead from Christ, who is the source of everything we do. He keeps us in step with each other. His very breath and blood flow through us, nourishing us so that we will grow up healthy in God and robust in love.