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Easter things I came across that you might appreciate

Banksy’s new mural:

Banksy's stations of the cross mural

Kester Brewin’s new book After Magic.

This tweet:

Let us be very clear about this: God is not the one who demanded crucifixion. God is the one who was crucified. — Brian Zahnd

which led me to this really excellent article: How did Jesus understand his death?

Finally, Reverend Richard Coles’ surprising and poignant stations of the cross:

Station I: Jesus is condemned to death
Station II: Jesus takes up the cross
Station III: Jesus falls for the first time
Station IV: Jesus meets his mother
Station V: Simon of Cyrene is forced to carry the cross
Station VI: Veronica wipes the sweat from Jesus’ face
Station VII: Jesus falls for the second time
Station VIII: Jesus consoles the women of Jerusalem
Station IX: Jesus falls a third time
Station X: Jesus is stripped of his garments
Station XI: Jesus is nailed to the cross
Station XII: Jesus dies on the Cross
Station XIII: Jesus is taken down from the Cross
Station XIV: Jesus is laid in the tomb


29 March 2013
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Of course, Jesus isn’t around to do this, but maybe someone else could?

Religion News Service photo: gay marriage demonstrators debate.

I imagine Jesus going to the Supreme Court building and setting up a long table between the two sides of demonstrators and laying out a really nice picnic. He invites everyone to sit down and eat. That’s the rule: you have to sit down. No takeaway. And it’s food that you eat with a knife and fork – or chopsticks – so you have to set down your sign to eat. All the food is in big dishes, no individual servings, which forces conversations with people on the other side of the table. ‘Could you pass the casserole, please?’ At first, not too many people sit down, but the food smells so good and we are so hungry from our demonstrating that it doesn’t take long for more and more and more people to sit down. Just when some of us are shifting in our seats, thinking about getting back to our signs and our deeply held convictions, Jesus serves another course or passes around another basket of fresh rolls and another bottle of wine. When the meal finally ends, everyone is too relaxed to pick up the signs, and anyway they look a bit garish now, so we all wander off home or back to our hotels. It’s only as we are drifting off to sleep that we realise we shared communion with the enemy.


27 March 2013
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Triumphalerest Entry

It’s almost like Matthew read Mark’s account of Jesus’ triumphal entry to Jerusalem and thought, what this story needs is More Awesome.


4 March 2013
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Merry Christmas stuff

Farmer, preacher, theologian and anti-racism activist Clarence Jordan:

Jesus has been so zealously worshipped, his deity so vehemently affirmed, his halo so brightly illumined, and his cross so beautifully polished that in the minds of many he no longer exists as a man. By thus glorifying him we more effectively rid ourselves of him than did those who tried to do so by crudely crucifying him.

Thanks to Daniel Sturgeon for the quote, which goes along rather nicely with some sermonising I did at my church on Sunday.


21 December 2012
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Page 8: words of Christ in red

The Reverend and Amy, page 8

Turns out that kick was just Timothy’s last gasp. And now we have reached the end.

Of the introduction.

This page takes us to where my original idea for The Reverend and Amy started. I’m hoping to do some genuine character development of the Rev and Amy now. I’ve also got a story or two starring Boopi Gloryface.

Best of all, for me at least, I bought a Pentel brush pen that is amazing – so fun to draw with. The lines on this week’s strip look more like what is in my mind than anything so far. The colour is a bonus. The comic will probably be back to black and white next week.

Finally, I realised yesterday how wrong, character-wise, Amy’s words were in last week’s sketch. I’m sorry about that. I’ve fixed them now. Also, (s)he – not sure which pronoun to use because the demon is male and the dog is female – should have been carrying the wig.


13 March 2012
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You are not to be called Leader, unless, you know, you want to be

Should Christians obey Jesus’ instruction in Matthew 23:8-12?

But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi’, for you have one Teacher and you are all brothers. And call no one your ‘father’ on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. Nor are you to be called ‘teacher’ [or, leader], for you have one teacher [or, leader], the Christ. The greatest among you will be your servant. And whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. (NET)

It is nearly universally ignored by the current versions of Christianity. In the western evangelical world the most admired pastors are the ones who are indistinguishable from visionary leaders in the business world. It seems a very impractical instruction to obey. After all, without a vision, people are unrestrained and they perish (Proverbs 29:18).

Paul, if he knew of this instruction, did not obey it or at least had a unique interpretation of it:

The pastoral epistles have an overall feeling of approval of hierarchical systems in the church. Two explicit examples:

The writer of Hebrews did not seem to go for the no-calling-people-leaders idea:

Did Jesus mean something other than the obvious reading? Is the ‘do not be called…’ triplet a rhetorical device that Jesus is using to emphasise the upside-down nature of the Kingdom of God and not meant to be taken literally? Do these passages that seem in disagreement harmonise somehow? Is it just too impractical an instruction to obey? Is the church getting things badly wrong? What do you think?


14 February 2012
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The strength and frailty of hope


13 December 2011
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Good with(out) God

It is not hard to be good without God. Lots of people are good without God. The tricky bit is being good without convenience. Or good without reward. Or good without the promise of nice feelings after. I think that is why Jesus is still so compelling to so many people. His cross-shaped goodness is something we aspire to in our best moments. It’s too bad that we (Christians, atheists and everybody else) so often fail to live up to that aspiration. When one of us actually does act like Jesus, it is so beautiful that it seems easier to explain it away or just kill them than to accept the goodness.


13 December 2011
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Encounter with Jesus

My church has been doing a sermon series about people’s encounters with Jesus. I have been thinking about the difference between some of the encounters in the Gospels and the stories that church members have been telling about their encounters with Jesus. I’ve also been thinking about John Michael Greer’s recent posts about binary thinking and about Peter Rollins’ retelling of John 9 (Jesus healing the blind man) in his book The Orthodox Heretic. Once I stirred it around enough, this poem came out. I performed it this morning at church.

Listen:

I never knew Jesus when he was a man
with a plan for the planet of a kingdom that would span it.
I didn’t watch him walk on water
or tell Jairus’s daughter,
‘Little girl, I say to you arise.’
She rose,
but not while I was watching.
The blind guy with Jesus Mud in his eye who washed and could see –
That wasn’t me.
I wonder what did happen to me that made my blind eyes see,
even though my eyeballs are 38 and not what they used to be?

You see,
Jesus lived and died and was resurrected 2,000 years before
my folks went to bed unprotected
and theologians detected – are God’s stories
historical
or metaphorical?
I can’t be categorical about what really happens at the moment
when the darkness passes.

When you took off your dark glasses,
whether you were taking classes
or smoking grasses
or making passes at lovely lasses,
in that moment –
whether you were in a cathedral singing,
standing under the cold rain stinging
your face, in a café wringing
your heart out to a dear friend –
in that moment
something changed.
Everything changed.
Everything stayed the same.

BUT SOMETHING CHANGED.

And it is
so real but you cannot see it,
so solid but you can’t grasp it,
so you clasp it to your heart,
these words that sound so absurd
when heard aloud among the madding crowd:
‘I was blind but now I see.
Jesus rescued me.’
This is why we try poetry;
science will never fully explain or contain
the refrain of a heart that has been set free.
You see?


6 November 2011
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Ready? No? Good.

Jesus didn’t wait for disciples to be born again, baptized, trained theologically and supervised under a safe religious system with guaranteed controls before He was involving them in leadership. He got them out telling others about Him within a few weeks of being with Him

Floyd McClung makes a very important (and counter-intuitive, to us) point about how this Jesus thing actually spreads. I found the article tough reading because of the nearly nonstop cliché slinging, but worth the effort.


23 September 2011
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A crucifix for now

Inspired by the fact that 48% all the money that the world spends on its militaries is spent by the United States, more than all its potential enemies combined. One little thought: a four dollar apple pie will do a lot more to sort out problems with your neighbour than a 400 dollar AK-47. (High resolution version here. Jet photo by Rob Shenk. Image of Christ: The Crucifixion, painted in 1627 by Francisco de Zurbarán)


4 August 2011
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Matthew 6:25

Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Absolutely, yes! But if your food and clothes aren’t sorted out properly, it’s hard to get on to the ‘more than’.


13 May 2011
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Easter winning

Calvin and Hobbes Sunday strip

This comic strip was my text for my Easter Sunday class of 10-13 olds, mostly boys. I think it brilliantly explains an aspect of the mechanics, if not the love, of Jesus work on the cross. It’s also good at showing how a nonviolent response a la Matthew 5:38–48, Gandhi, MLK actually works.


29 April 2011
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Guess what, kids! I've totally got Jesus figured out.

After Christine read the “article I linked to”: in my post yesterday, she said, ‘That’s such a man response,’ to what Aric Clark wrote about Rob Bell’s story.

And I said something about a wider cultural point.

And she said yeah, but he doesn’t understand girls.

And I said something not very convincing.

Today, I thought, Actually Jesus probably would be where Aric Clark said AND where Rob Bell said AND a bunch of other places that we haven’t thought of. Or he might not have even gone to the dance because who seriously wants to go to a middle school dance? Also he would have had to turn the water into punch.

Which brings me to this: Jesus shows up in unexpected places. e.g. this very Jesusy way of seeing people…

Sometimes while I ride the subway I try to look at each person and imagine what they look like to someone who is totally in love with them. I think everyone has had someone look at them that way, whether it was a lover, or a parent, or a friend, whether they know it or not. It’s a wonderful thing, to look at someone to whom I would never be attracted and think about what looking at them feels like to someone who is devouring every part of their image, who has invisible strings that are connected to this person tied to every part of their body. I think this fun pastime is a way of cultivating compassion. It feels good to think about people that way, and to use that part of my mind that I think is traditionally reserved for a tiny portion of people I’ll meet in my life to appreciate the general public. I wish I thought about people like this more often. I think it’s the opposite of what our culture teaches us to do. We prefer to pick people apart to find their flaws. Cultivating these feelings of love or appreciation for random people, and even for people I don’t like, makes me a more forgiving and appreciative person toward myself and people I love. Also, it’s just a really excellent pastime.

…came from here.


29 April 2011
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Jesus would have been the freak in the middle of the dance floor...

Jesus doesn’t choose to love despite a risk of rejection, Jesus acts to demonstrate that love is not defeated by rejection.

Most importantly, the choice to love despite the certainty of rejection, even a rejection in the form of abandonment, torture, and death, is vindicated in the gospel by God’s resurrection of Jesus. The message is not that loving is risky, because we might get rejected. The message is… love wins.

The most beautiful thing I’ve read all day: Christ on the Dance Floor from Two Friars and a Fool.


28 April 2011
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I'm special, so special / Gotta have some of your attention / Give it to me

I’ve been thinking about what it is that makes Christianity unique, because everybody wants to be special. I came up with a lot of things that aren’t unique to Christianity: community, a strong moral code, monotheism, heaven, hell, our own music, a linear understanding of history, instant healings, ecstatic experiences, prophecy, a historic human founder, a resurrection story, a proselytising impulse, a paradigm for understanding all of life, nonviolence, scripture (Plus fundamentalism, being Right, tribalism and killing for your god.) Etc. All this stuff is quite common in and out of Christianity.

Note: Could this be why denominations, religions, organisations and tribes are so intent on focussing on their differences? If you start noticing how much isn’t unique, you may become aware that you fear a loss of your identity. And your audience. And your income.

But there is something that I think is unique, or at least exceptionally rare: living and dying for the sake of, not just your friends, but also (especially!) your enemies. This is what Jesus did. This is what he invites us to do.

Lots of people will kill for what they believe.

Many people will die for what they hold dear.

Very few people are willing to die for someone who stands for the opposite of what they love.

Please tell me if I’m wrong. Tell me that there are a lot of things unique about Christianity. Tell me that there are other religions/philosophies/tribes for which suffering (with abandonment, with no guarantee of success) to save the life of an enemy is a core value.

?


25 March 2011
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Have you heard of this whole non-violence thing?

Guys! Guys! There’s this guy called Leo Tolstoy and he’s written a book* about Jesus and non-violence and resisting evil. Apparently it’s a huge influence on these other guys called Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Anyway, it’s like a Christian anarchist thing, and it’s a bit dodgy in some places, but also super-good. Also, there’s this theologian guy called Walter Wink. He’s written a book too.** It’s called The Powers That Be, and it’s got this whole thing in it about The Myth of Redemptive Violence that says good must use violence to defeat evil. He thinks that’s totally the opposite of Jesus, and I think he’s right or whatever, but the implications of that are like, whoa! So that’s the latest from me, Jeff Gill, your source for everything on the bleeding edge of the zeitgeist.

*in 1894
**in 1999


17 June 2010
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Things that are hard to do while carrying a cross


14 May 2010
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In case you are not out partying this Saturday night

I’ve got a list of things to write about abundance culture, but I’m finding it very hard to make myself carve out a bit of time and do it. So instead, here are three provocative questions that have been swirling through my brain for a while.

  1. Is patriotism idolotry?
  2. Does the doctrine of annihilationism have any validity?
  3. If they had the chance, would Jesus and Paul oppose each other’s theology?


6 March 2010
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Qualified to follow Jesus

If some guys named Barker, Cleese and Corbett do a sketch together, it is pretty much the law that you have to steal the idea and repurpose it for church, so I have. Here is the script:

Keep reading
8 February 2010
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I made another film

This one is a parable about the meaning of Christmas and incarnation.


11 January 2010
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