Re-framing Peace pt. 4

Jesus message worked, although not in the way the people wanted with peace instead of violence, to deal with evil, and we can learn a whole lot if we follow that framing story instead of our own...

Jesus entire kingdom message was/is counter intuitive. Instead of Jesus "picking up a sword" and fighting (which is what some read when they read Revelation, but is what I believe to be an inaccurate reading of that text), he told Peter to put down his sword, he talked about blessing peacemakers, he said things like if his kingdom was was of this world that his followers would fight to protect him, etc. Jesus sounds like a wimp, or at least his contemporaries would have thought so, and I think that we must think so too, because we still insist on using violence to solve our problems. The real problem is that following Jesus creates a sort of cognitive dissonance with living in the world, or by the worlds means.

The kingdom of this world tells us that violence is a form of power and that if we do not have the power then someone else does and they can use that power against us. That is why we think that our way of doing things is the only way to do things. It seems that more and more, Christians are rejecting the kingdom of God for the kingdom of this world. We end up boiling Jesus message down to a ticket to a disembodied existence somewhere away from the world.

Through all of these posts on re-framing peace, objections have been raised about both peace in the Hebrew Scriptures, and about peace in Jesus own life (usually based on the "temple cleansing" passage, which has more to say than what we place at its face value). If we want to know more of God's character, we need look no further than in the incarnate, God became man, so that the powers of this world would not have the power. What appears to be weak is actually strong enough to defeat evil at its worst. If God did not fight true evil with violence, then why do we need to fight perceived evil? God always wins, not through violence, but through peace.

To understand what our role in peace is, perhaps we should re-frame what we define as peace and how we reach that, when Jesus re-framed what Messiah-ship looked like to the first century, so too did he re-frame what it means to be in him. Let us live in him, and let his ways overcome the way of the world. Let Peace overcome violence in all respects, that we may be as we are called to be and not be of the world.

I'm a Social Justice Christian because...

I came across an interesting video on Brian McLaren's blog today that deals with issues that I have been discussing with friends for a while and in my Sociology class while working on my undergrad. You can watch this video and Brian's response here. I feel that I need to respond to, so here is my response:

I'm a Social Justice Christian because I believe that the Gospel is more than just my individual salvation.

I'm a Social Justice Christian because Jesus said that whatever we do to the least of these, we do to him.

I'm a Social Justice Christian because God loves everyone.

I'm a Social Justice Christian because we are all created equal.

I'm a Social Justice Christian because discrimination of all kinds to more harm than good.

I'm a Social Justice Christian because I believe in the hope of resurrection.

If you are a Social Justice Christian too, I would like to know why?

Resurrecting Easter Hope

Over the last few weeks I have heard people talking about loved ones that have died, some of whom have died recently. My heart goes out to those people because it is very difficult to lose people that have been so very close to them. What does someone say to someone that has just lost a loved one? This is what I heard: "They are in a better place", "They are happier", "They no are no longer suffering". Hearing all this made me think about what hope we have in the future. It is funny that we can find the answer in the Easter narrative, yet it is less celebrated than Christmas, there is no season only one week, but even then we really only talk about the last day, which is supposed to be about resurrection, but that is a difficult topic so we just talk about Jesus' death, again. Do not get me wrong, his death is important, but why talk about such a depressing topic, when his life is so much more interesting?!

It seems to me that we tend to stop at Jesus' death even on the day that is about his resurrection. I think the reason is partly because dead people are supposed to stay dead. Even in the traditional view, if all Jesus did was "die for our sins" then we are still living in sin because death was not defeated. Now that we know that Easter is more than just Jesus' death, what do we do now? If Easter is not about my own personal salvation as we have been taught, then what is the point? In order to understand this question we need to start at the beginning and work our way forward.

Genesis talks about how God created the creation and said that it was good. He then created humans, in his image, to take care of the creation and help keep things in order, but what happens when that part of creation messes up, who do you turn to then? The answer is the Creator, but instead of just fixing the problem by himself, he entrusts his creation, created in his image to restore the "natural order" of things. He then calls a group of people to fulfill the responsibility of renewal, but they fail over and over again, finally he takes matters into his own hands and becomes human so that his image bearing creation can at last do what they were intended to do, and save the creation, restoring the goodness that it had begun with. This act was greater than personal salvation, it was a counter imperial, counter sinful, and counter deadly; it required actions along with a change in mindset and ideology. This is where Jesus' death comes in because by allowing death to exhaust its full power on Israel's representative, it no longer had a hold on Israel and thus on the creation as a whole. The Creator did not just stop there by showing the world the first step of a two step dance. He ushered in the second step, resurrection, again using his image bearing creation. Resurrection is about new creation, the Creator working with and in his creation to restore the beauty that once was, heaven has begun to come to earth and we are part of that transaction.

One thing I have noticed is that our eschatology (our view of end times) has a huge impact on how we view the present. If we truly believed the Easter message, then we would be acting in a very different way today. If we read Luke and Acts together as one act we can see this happening. Luke talks about Jesus' life, setting the stage for what the new creation will look like and giving his follows instructions on how to start living the new creation at the right time, through his death and resurrection. Act picks up there, showing the first century church living the new creation way to help renew all of creation, and setting a pattern to what this should look like down the road, but sadly many of us have lost view of new creation and have watered the gospel down into a personal escape instead of a collective renewal. It is a sad experience when someone dies, but instead of focusing on that person's death as a "happy escape", it should be a somber reminder that creation is not fully renewed yet, and that we should continue to bring that new creation to the forefront so that death does not have the final say, but that the Creator does through his renewing and empowering spirit.

If we believe that Jesus was raised from the dead and is not still in the grave, our life should be transformed to live accordingly. May our Easter hope inspire us to help bring heaven to earth and create a true Easter season!