Living Out Theology Topic for January

Image-bearing + Fallenness: Jan Living Out Theology Topic

The 4^th Wednesday of last month, the Living Out Theology Group met at my house [Seneca House] to think about and discuss “Image-bearing and Fallenness.” I said I would try to blog about our discussions each month and here we are at the end of the month again and I’m finally posting. The format for our group is a short teaching time [that I taught this month] and then a longer time of discussion. So this blog is part my thoughts on the subject and part the ideas of the other folks meeting with us. Unfortunately, I can’t offer you the amazing peanut butter or butterscotch brownies that accompanied our talk, but we meet on the 4^th Wednesday of every month at 7p at the Seneca House if you want to get the full experience. This week [Feb 25] is our next meeting and we will be discussing Sin + Repentance.

At the core of our beliefs is that we have been created in the image of God, that the display of that has been marred by sin, and that Jesus—in his life, death and resurrection—is in the process of freeing us from sin and restoring the image of God or Christ in our lives.

The implications of being created in the image of God are many. Genesis 1 tells us that …God created [us] in his own image, in the image of God he created [us]; male and female he created [us] (1:27). So early on we get this idea that our identities as a man or a woman is involved in our reflection of God. I’m inclined to think that one of the reasons our sexuality is so attacked, abused and distorted is that it’s so core to our identities.

Another suggested implication is later in Genesis 9:6 when God explains the reason murder requires such a harsh penalty as being because man is created in the image of God. It seems like our status as image-bearers should call us to treat each other as valuable and worthy of dignity. Jesus highlights this in Matthew 22:34-40 as he identifies love for God and for one another as the core meaning of all the law and prophets. We’re inclined to give honor to those who do something that seems good to us; God declares us worth pursuing and freeing while we are still in rebellion against him.

The presence and value of creativity is also implicit if we consider ourselves as created in the image of such a creative God. We involve art and our own music into our worship service because our creativity is big part of who we are and what we offer to the community and to the world. Our tendency is to think of creativity as being limited to art of some kind or music. True creativity includes these and more, if we think of the incredible, complex creation that God produced. In our community, there are those who are creative computer programmers [our unique website is a community offering of this], cooks [coming now into our post-vespers meals], gardeners [will be seen as we develop our community garden] and much more. As we offer these things in concert along with our spiritual and other gifts, our community itself will reflect something of who God is that will stand as a witness to the world around us.

In Genesis 3 when Adam and Eve yield to the temptation of the serpent in the garden to try to be like God, they find themselves ashamed of their nakedness and hiding from God. All of us in our own way make this same choice. We try to be our own God and we hide who we are in shame. It’s telling that Adam doesn’t say I’m hiding because I know that I disobeyed you, but because he’s naked and ashamed. Like Adam and Eve, the thing we’re most ashamed of and trying to conceal is often not our actual sin, but something that we think is wrong with who we are. Our sins and the sins perpetrated against us mar our identity. As we walk with Christ and allow him to transform us into who we’re created to be, our own sinful patterns and the impact of others sin must be peeled away. Sometimes this happens in our intimate interactions with God, but most often this happens in the context of community, where we rub against each others’ sin and get a glimpse of someone else’s true identity and encourage them toward it.

I guess another element of this battle that we’re in is that there is a larger spiritual battle that is taking place around us [Ephesians 6:10-20]. As we fight against our own choices, our struggle isn’t just against ourselves. Like Adam and Eve and the serpent, we have Satan roaming around our world looking for who he might “slurp up” [as Eric likes to interpret 1Peter 5:7-9]. Often the way this plays out is in a battle against lies that Satan perpetrates. We’re on a path of trying to hear from Jesus what’s true about ourselves, about God, about each other, about the world, and so on.

A key part of our identities is found in our gifts that we’re given when we come to faith in Jesus and the Spirit of God comes into us [Romans 12:1-7]. We’re hearing a lot about this at Vespers this month as we go through 1Corinthians 12. These are the gifts that we’re given to join together as the Body of Christ in this great spiritual battle as we usher in the kingdom of God. We use these gifts to fight for each other as believers and to fight for those who have yet to believe. Christ v. Satan or another way to say it would be the Embodiment of Truth [John 14:6-7] against the Chief Liar [John 8:45].

As we walk out of our sin and the lies that cover us and into new identity in Christ and the correlating freedom to be who we were created to be, we each display unique aspects of God. Together we are the Body of Christ; we together reflect who God is. [Colossians 3:9-10] In this process, we seem to vacillate between feeling like we have nothing to offer and thinking more highly of our selves and our gifts than we ought.

If a man thinks himself great, I show him his wretchedness
If he thinks himself wretched, I show him his greatness
And continue to contradict him
Until he realizes
He is an unfathomable beast.

[Pascal, VII. Pensées, #130, alternate translation]

We need a community to help us see the full picture of God. We need people to be honest about their Fallenness and willing to invite each other on a path to repentance. This requires that our community be a safe place to confess sin and explore who God created us to be. When left to ourselves, it’s difficult to see our actual sin and not just the surface shame. We need people working in concert with God to help us. This requires a deep authenticity [especially in us leader-types] that understands that we’re all in this sin-boat together. When we can see past our judgments and love our brothers and sisters, we will see deeper acts of repentance and fuller expressions of the Image of God among us. But I’m getting ahead of myself; this is more for the topic we’ll cover this coming week: Sin + Repentance.

Kelsea

My dear friend, daughter, sister... was in a terrible car accident on Monday morning. I want to blog and I don't really know what to say. I have walked with Kelsea on a journey of faith and healing and emerging. It's been beautiful to see her becoming more of who God has created her to be and to see her shedding the lies that have kept her down and acting on the truth that God has been revealing to her. She has become a big part of our family. Her bright smile and tender affection and loving humor lighten our hearts.

Now we're not sure if she'll be able to walk again. I keep having the vision of her with her skippy walk and lovely red hair coming down the sidewalk at her apartments when I would come to pick her up for church or bible study or to come hang out at my house. I pray fervently that God will let her dance again. She loves to dance. I have seen over this past week [it's not even been a week.] how God has healed her at a medically surprising rate. She's gone from many tubes and neck brace and ventilator with collapsed lung and head trauma and broken arm and multiple fractures in her hands and crushed spine in 9 hour surgery and ICU limitations to ventilator removed, neck brace removed, chest tubes removed bleeding in head stopped and yesterday a move to a regular room. She's talking to and joking with her friends [our pastors Rod + Eric have gone up from Arizona where we her community are to Boise, ID where she was visiting her family when this happened] and her family. She's exhausted and in pain, but she's still the same Kelsea and miraculously she is alive. I want to know that God will let her walk and dance again.

She feels so much like a daughter to me and I just want to be up there with her. I don't think it's fair that it happened so far away and yet when I cry out to God about that, he speaks more clearly than I'm used to that it happened there for a reason. I submitted to the wisdom of clearer heads to wait while Rod + Eric went up to pray for her and her family, while I wait until she's more in need of friendly faces and conversation. Spread out our visits so she's got us throughout what will probably be several months of recovery and rehabilitation. Rod said in one of his blog updates that he put his hand on her head when she was sleeping and prayed for her; I felt both jealous and grateful because he was doing what I so longed to do and I felt a part of it as he did it. So I'm here waiting each day for her parents or Rod to post their daily updates at http://www.villagersonline.com [our church's website] and at http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/kelseashuldes [her family's update site]. I read all the things that people write in the Guestbook on her family's site and all the responses to the village blogs. I spend time playing with her dog and trying to figure out what logistical things need to happen here, but I just want to be up there. I don't even disagree with the decision to wait. I'm continuing on with my life here--caring for my two kids [who also want to go up to see Kelsea], spending time with my husband [who also wants to go up to see Kelsea] and meeting with the people I meet with for pastoral counseling [mostly to discuss how they're doing with what's happened to Kelsea], and doing the other mundane things that are a part of life. I have moments where I'm focused on my kids or husband or some other thing and then my mind returns to Kelsea, sometimes remembering things that we did together or things that she really loves or sometimes worrying about how she is and what's going to happen. I'm afraid she won't know how much she means to us because we're so far away. I'm afraid she won't be able to return to Tucson. I'm afraid she won't be able to walk and dance. And then all the sudden I'm overwhelmingly glad that she's alive and that her mind and personality seem unaffected by this all. Even though I'm notorious for not crying very easily, I cry off and on throughout the day. I think I've cried more in this last week than I have in the last 10 years combined. Maybe next week I can go up.

Compassion v. Freedom

I'm rereading Henri Nouwen's book Compassion. He looks at the root of the word and translates it "to suffer with," which is one of the things that was transformational for me back 20 or so years ago when I first read this book. I was in college and found that as I opened the reality of my own suffering and wrestled with others in theirs, God's answer was not to remove our suffering but to suffer with us. I come back to this often as I work with suffering people and return to the WHY of it all. Whenever I rage against God because I don't know why a god of love would allow such suffering, he always brings me back to Psalm 22 which is a psalm about David's suffering and a prophesy of the suffering of Christ. So often I want a God of vengeance, forgetting that I would be destroyed under such a god. Instead, he shows himself as God who suffers with us. Now, I have to say, sometimes this is meaningful and sometimes I still pound on God's chest about it, but this is actually a bit of a side note of what Nouwen got me thinking about.

He was talking about how our society emphasizes personal freedom at the expense of compassion and leaves compassion as a side note to mitigate the harsher elements of competition. At first I was wondering about my own tendency to talk about freedom as being something God invites us into. Does this run contrary to compassion? Then I realized that what I think is important on the path of healing and receiving the gospel is something different than personal freedom, but might sometimes get confused with it—especially with us coming from such cultural indoctrination as we come by in the USA. I think the thing that God wants to invite us into in Christ is the experience of communal freedom. It's not about ME being free, but about US finding freedom to live a life of love and compassion. I think this will include an experience of life that is substantial and meaningful for me, but if that becomes the point then I've lost something. My relationships become something where I am looking for you to do something or be something to me to make my life better or easier or less painful or less lonely and in the end you will disappoint me and I will get angry and lash out at or withdraw from you. The path I think we are offered in Jesus is one where God meets me in the midst of my loneliness and suffering and pain in his compassion and then he invites me to bring that to others even while I am still suffering. Without Jesus this seems kind of impossible, with him seems pretty hard. My natural bent is to twist things in order to get something for myself, even if it's a good feeling that I've helped someone and made a difference. I might use that to ease my own suffering by focusing on yours and fall back into relationships where I'm trying to get you to somehow make me feel better. I'll grant there's a catch-22 in there. I mean, even if it's Jesus working through me for his good purposes, I might still get that good feeling. so how am I supposed to know if I'm trying to make my own world work or if I'm involving myself in some path of communal freedom? I don't know, I get caught in this all the time. I keep coming back to the idea that this is a messy path and we won't get it right. I will say that as I do this in the context of a loving, compassionate community of believers, I am lifted out of my sin and selfishness a lot sooner than when I was more going it alone. I think one of the toughest elements in this for me is letting myself actually feel my own suffering and pain, because I have a host of options for shutting that out or numbing myself to the pain. When I get like that, I feel myself more distant from the comfort and compassion that Christ wants to offer me—either mystically or in a physical way through another person—and I in turn have less to offer my companions on this journey.I guess when I am struggling in a relationship, I should stop and consider what it would be for me to let go of what I want from my friend and look for how I might suffer alongside that person.

ps - I also think rejoicing together is a part of communal freedom, but that will have to wait for another day...

The Father of Compassion and God of all Comfort

Walking with women through painful, abusive memories as I do, I have often seen 2Corinthians 1:3-11 as a verse that pertained to my role in the body of Christ.

2 Corinthians 1:3-11 [NIV]

3Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, 4who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. 5For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. 6If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. 7And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort.

8We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. 9Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. 10He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us, 11as you help us by your prayers. Then many will give thanks on our behalf for the gracious favor granted us in answer to the prayers of many.

I've come out of a history of sexual abuse and over the past 20 years of struggling along the healing path, God has shown me things to offer to others who are newer to the journey. The catch that I've been struggling with lately is that I often refuse to be comforted. It's easier to comfort others than to receive comfort. I guess part of what I have learned about this process is that we can often see the severity of others' pain and still minimize our own. It is still terrifying to me that I might entrust myself to someone's care, it will feel good and then BAMM I'll be rejected and mocked. This plays itself out in my intimate relationships [especially with men] and strains the level of intimacy that I will allow. More significantly, it works deeply in my relationship with God. I can easily see myself as a tool to be used for God to work good things into other's lives, but refuse to feel the longings of a child wanting the love and care of a father. I mean, my dad died when I was 2 and the only real replacement was a wicked, abusive step-dad accompanied by a wounded, abusive step-brother. Any longings I had for affection from a father left me feeling foolish and ashamed. And yet I believe these longings are integral to our humanness and denying them requires that we shut ourselves off from really living fully into ourselves and our lives. At least this is what I've seen in my own life and in the lives of others on this journey with me. In the times when I have allowed myself to be comforted [either mystically by God or through the arms of one of his people], he has brought me to a new level of healing and new freedom in areas of my life. And so I offer this as I minister to others and I get to see the beauty of God at work in the lives of my friends. Then, as happened this week, I have some of my own memories surface and I struggle to believe that I'm worth caring for or that anyone would really want to comfort me. And when God sends friends to walk with me in my sadness and grieving, I wrestle with the terror that they don't really care and I'll be left a fool if I entrust myself to them. And then, as happened yesterday, I join with the enemy in pouring contempt on myself and on the ones God has given me to care for me. And now today, I'm brought back to the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort and I have to repent of my running away from his care. And look for the ways he is wanting to comfort me and let myself grieve again some of these losses of my childhood and believe that he sees me as a beloved daughter, not a tool for his use.

Sabbath

I was hanging out with my pilgrim group the other day and we were reading one of the passages where Jesus heals someone on the Sabbath. The Pharisees get really pissed off because he was breaking the Sabbath, which he seemed to make a point of doing. It brought me back to thinking about the Sabbath and how much God emphasizes it in the Old Testament, but then Jesus seems to be going around redefining it and taking it out of the legalism of the Pharisees. One of the times Jesus says, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." [mark 2:27-28]. It makes me think that God wants something for me in the business of keeping the Sabbath. And whatever that is, I think I'm missing out on it because in my life right now it feels like I don't have room for a Sabbath. Kelsea also made the point that a part of taking a Sabbath is recognizing that I don't have to hold everything together. It's ordering myself under God. And the point of it all isn't about God pressing his authority, but about him giving me rest and restoring me. So I'm here at a coffee shop because I was wearing a bit thin and Keith told me to go get some time away. And it's not about making sure I do some Sabbath-like things or that I can't be contacted by anyone while I'm getting this alone time with God. In fact one of the things Jesus says is that it's lawful to do good on the Sabbath. I think sometimes I get all this pressure to do all the "right" things when I have time to be away. [Journal, read the bible, don't talk to anyone, etc] I think that misses the point of resting and being still before God. Sometimes those things will be what I do, but tonight I'm just drinking a cup of tea, thinking about ideas that have come up over the past few months. Anyways, I'm trying to get a little Sabbath rest and I'm enjoying it.

Anna

This is from when my daughter Anna was 4. She used to come sleep with us when she would wake up in the middle of the night. I remember how she loved to talk about God and what she thought and her ideas about conversations she overheard. I was struggling with major depression back then and she was a fabulous bright, pink spot in my life. She would repeat things that she heard with wonder and quiet consideration that often reminded me of what I believed. I've learned a lot about God from her simple, loving spirit and her beautiful enjoyment of life and herself and people. She's 8 now and still a happy delight.

Anna

by Julie Brunson, 20 July 2004
I lie silent, still beside you
As you toss, touch,
Search for sleep
In dim twilight before dawn.
Deep scent of earth
On your little body
Calls to mind silt sparkling
On your tender skin,
Eyes flashing blue
In Arizona-bright sun,
As you present me a dirt-pie
And spin your theology of the Trinity
With the same string of child faith.
And I believe,
More in this moment
Than my fluctuating faith usually allows,
That this Triune God
Means for us to experience life
as richer, fuller and deeper
Than we adults often grasp.

lies and truth

i keep hitting on this thing in my conversations with my friends as we struggle to fight the lies we believe about ourselves or our lives.

if i struggle with thinking that i’m a bad parent; i want to say, “no, i’m a good parent.” and try to find examples of good things i give to my kids. the truth is it’s not about whether i’m a good or bad parent. God invites me to see the ways i care for my kids and the things i do that i hurt them in the particular ways my wounds pour out on my family.

i get so caught up in “getting it right” that everything shakes out in a good/bad dichotomy that is ultimately false. i don’t think that’s how Jesus looks at me. i think He wants me to walk into freedom to move beyond that. to be free to see that i can turn away from areas where i currently hurt people with my selfishness without it pouring contempt on my identity. it’s not “i’m so selfish” but “these are ways i’ve been selfish that God can free me of.” i’m forgiven and can walk a path of repentance that will bring better things in my relationships. i get it wrong and i feel so condemned that no one can talk to me about what freedom might look like.

seems like walking in to freedom requires me to look at specific choices that i make to hide or protect myself from people that i’m supposed to love and support and let into my life. then i actually know what i might ask for forgiveness for and maybe can even see where those situations touched on old wounds and fears to trigger the hide and protect response.