I was introduced to Joy Oladokun’s music a few months ago, and she’s an absolute gift. I got to see her live two weeks ago here in Perth, and as she introduced her song Jordan she gave the context: how she had “grown up religious, and very gay”.
Her music is beautiful. I’d encourage anyone to listen, but if you’re involved in any way in leading in churches and shaping their cultures, then you really should. She’s done us a huge favour by putting words and melodies together to capture the beauty and the pain of what it is to have faith, but also to know rejection at the hands of that faith community. And also the beauty of finding love and grace after all that.
Writing this honestly and putting it out into the world, and grappling with the pain and hope and disappointment out in front of everyone – that takes serious courage.
I can’t say it better than she does, but I’m going to share a video, some lyrics, and some links to songs on Spotify in the hope you’ll listen, and get a better feeling of what it’s like to grow up religious and gay. And maybe that’ll help us be kinder when we find ourselves, or the people we’re serving, on the same road.
Jordan
They told me he’s a good lord, as they tied the shackles to my feet. They drowned me in the Jordan, then they walked away from me.
…
I don’t feel so young now I gave the best years of my life I tried to build an institution Instead of trying to keep the faith
…
You kissed the curse from my lips And taught them to rejoice again Now we’re building our own promised land
sunday
Mama says I’m up to no good again I couldn’t make her proud, though I did mybest I feel like I’m a mess, I feel like I’m stuck in the wrong skin I feel like I’m sick, but I’m having trouble swallowing my medicine
Sunday, carry me, carry me, down to the water Wash me clean, I’m still struggling Sunday, bury me under the weight of who you need me to be Can’t you see I’m struggling?
Questions, Chaos and Faith
When my friend Casey died I didn’t drive home for the funeral I was prostrate, as they say to higher minds
Went to my dorm and cried because I still believed in Heaven And I was sure I wouldn’t see her when I die
…
Nothing is certain, everything changes We’re spirit and bone marching to the grave There are no answers, there are only Questions, chaos, and faith
Dust / Divinity
Oh to be a man of faith Never asking questions, never changing your ways I’m a skeptic who still prays If death leads me to Heaven, they’ll recognise my face
Cause though it hurts me to believe, it kills me not to And I am trying to find my way through the middle And I am desperate to receive every good thing From now until eternity, from dust until divinity
Her last album also has some “observations” which feel half way between a podcast interview and a conversation over a cup of tea.
It has not been easy for me to be so vulnerable For so long on such a stage I think there is a part of me that sort of Sees what I’ve given, and sees the places where it hasn’t always been Respected, or treated with care…
…
When I’m looking back on my life I feel like I’ll be able to confidently say That so much of it was motivated by love And actual care for the world around me And hope that I could make it a different, kinder place For people who don’t always feel welcome in it And I sort of saw the world change, you know?
I’ve paid far too much attention to the US election, consuming media and commentary about it for years in the lead up, with addictive behaviours to check-in on news websites and blogs regularly especially over the last few months.
With the result coming in today that Trump has won a second term – despite all the things that I would have wished were disqualifying – I was dismayed. Not surprised – I’d read enough analysis to know it was basically a coin flip chance. But dismayed.
And left wondering how much I should feel with this: it’s not my election. But I’ve followed it so closely, I’m invested in it. And Australia is so closely linked to the US – obviously in defence and foreign policy, but also culturally – that the direction they’re turning worries me. I especially worry for the Ukrainians. And for young women in conservative states. And for the gay and trans communities who are very much being used as scapegoats.
I tried to get through today without doom-scrolling. I cared for my boys, I had a call with a friend, I worked, I went to my piano lesson. I didn’t really know how to process it.
Then while I was driving I remembered an experience I had in 2017, it was a lesson I needed to learn then, and I think I need to remember it now too.
In 2017, I was a several years into trying to do something in education and software and startups. Working in schools, building various educational products, launching a startup, and then when that didn’t work, joining another one that was even more ambitious. I was determined to do something “big”, to make a dent in the universe, as many of us in that scene dreamed of.
Alongside this work/business ambition, I’d also been dreaming big in church circles. First at Riverview (the church I grew up in and have now returned to). But then also with First Home Project, an attempt to not just serve the refugee community but re-shape the Australian culture to be less scared and more welcoming. And then in Melbourne I was part of a small church – only a few dozen people – but that was so determined to be a counter-culture, almost a prophetic voice critiquing what’s wrong with many church communities and painting a vivid picture of what an alternative could be.
Big dreams in work, big dreams in church, but they were all sputtering along by July 2017, and it wasn’t really going anywhere. Our church was soon to close its doors, from burnout and disillusionment amongst those running it, and the startup I worked at was struggling along, and I wasn’t sure if they’d have enough money to keep paying me each month.
The big dreams felt like they were dying. And that’s when we went to visit my aunties in the Southern Flinders Ranges in South Australia.
While we were staying with them, we made a day trip out to the farm Annette grew up on, and while giving us a tour and telling us stories – she tells great stories – I had a “holy ground” kind of moment.
She was telling us the story of the 2014 Bangor fires that had swept through this area. I remember their Facebook updates each night as the fire burned for weeks and weeks, each night filled with fear that it might break containment lines and burn through the bushland, through the farm, through people’s houses.
So that day as we walked through the bush, past trees and dried out creeks, with their dogs running ahead, the leaves crunching under my feet with each step, and the stories still being told, I started to see the evidence of the fire. Scars on the trees. The lack of undergrowth. It had come right through here, right where we were walking.
But there was life. Trees still standing tall. New plants sprouting everywhere. The birds. This place was coming back to life.
The family didn’t operate the farm anymore, they had leased out much of the land, but this land, around “sheep camp hill”, they’d wanted to give back to the country. And so they were letting the bush grow again. And after the fire, it was coming back to life.
And I remember being so inspired by that little resilient ecosystem.
Here I was trying to dream big and change the world, but nature was teaching me a lesson. Instead of grandiose plans to re-shape the world to our liking, there’s something beautiful about loving a small patch of land, and fostering the kind of resilience that can survive and bring new life, even after a fire destroys everything.
And so I had a revelation about love at a small scale.
Love, placed in individual relationships and families and small communities and tiny systems. In sports teams and work teams and social groups. Love that can self propagate and spread. That can evolve to the conditions and that can recover after catastrophic events. That love could change the world, far more than the biggest startup or the most dynamic church.
To quote Jesus and mix my metaphors, a little yeast spreads through the whole batch of dough.
And so today, as I feel disappointed in the failure of the big political movement I wanted to see “win”, and dismayed at the state of the culture that wants this alternative, and a little bit of shame for treating the whole thing like as an entertaining sport with winners and losers but not actually doing anything to help… I’m brought back to this idea that maybe where I need to focus is on building resilient love, self propagating love, into communities at a small scale.
There’s a beautiful interview between Krista Tippett and adrienne maree brown that captures this so perfectly, I want to quote it at length:
brown: So I was doing electoral organizing in 2004 — 2003, 2004. We’re gearing up — it’s post-9/11; we’re going to war with Iraq, Afghanistan, and we’re like, we’ve got to get Bush out of office. We have to. He’s just going to keep perpetuating all these unjust wars with all these people and not help figure anything out. So we’re doing all this organizing, and it clicked for me, in a way that I couldn’t — it’s one of those things, you see it and you can’t un-see it. And I was like, oh, we are trying to just change the top layer of this very layered cake, this very layered process, this system of governance. We think that if we just win the presidency, that then we’ll be able to change the world.
And it clicked for me that actually, it’s a fractal system. And it’s layer on top of layer on top of layer. And if none of us are practicing democracy anywhere, it’s not going to just suddenly work at the top layer. [laughs] And I got it, and then I realized — so I started asking people, because I was touring a book we had written. And I started asking people, Do you practice democracy — anywhere in your life? [laughs] Not even politically, but just in your household? Who makes the decisions about the budget?
Tippett: [laughs] What did people say?
brown: No.
Tippett: [laughs] Right.
brown: Nobody was practicing it, or if people were practicing it, they would be like, oh yeah — you know, there would always be like one really happy person who was like, I practiced it. And then I would be like, okay, in your household, you practice it. Do you practice it with your neighbors? And then they would have to be quiet. Or, do you practice it —
Tippett: Okay, that’s fascinating.
brown: There was almost nobody who was practicing it on their block or in their community or in their organizations or other places. Everyone’s kind of dodging the actual work of democracy, small-d democracy.
So then, of course, we are in this crisis right now where we cannot figure out a way past this political impasse moment. To me, what it reveals is we haven’t been practicing democracy for such a long time anyway. We’ve really outsourced almost every aspect of governance, and the only part we’ve held onto is complaining. People sit in their living rooms, they form opinions, they’re upset about stuff, they don’t do much about it, but they’re apoplectic. [laughs]
Tippett: And they also don’t know what they can do about it, right — at that mega level.
brown: Exactly. That’s on purpose. [laughs] So it’s like, trying to keep people in a place where they’re angry and they think they can buy their way out of it. That’s one of the reasons organizers exist, is to be like, actually, you can’t get out of it that way, but there are ways. We’ll have to work together to figure it out, but there are other practices.
But that’s when it clicked for me, that I was like — something about smallness, I was able to gain respect for, because I was like, every single large system or structure or network or political protocol, all of it is made up of small things — of humans either having or not having necessary conversations, and humans being willing to stand up for what is right and stand up against what is wrong. It’s all these small activities that we need to get great at if we want to actually have anything that would be a real democracy.
Tippett: This way you make the connection between what happens at the interpersonal level is a way to understand the whole society — how we are at the small scales, how we are at the large scale.
On Being with Krista Tippett – adrienne maree brown: On Radical Imagination and Moving Towards Life
I will put my laws in their minds, and I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. And they will not need to teach their neighbors, nor will they need to teach their relatives,d saying, ‘You should know the Lord.’ For everyone, from the least to the greatest, will know me already. And I will forgive their wickedness, and I will never again remember their sins.
I’ve written before about how I think God “is not far from any of us” regardless of what kind of religion and spirituality experiences and communities we associate with.
And here in this poem describing the new covenant, we see God telling the same story: “For everyone, from the least to the greatest, will know me already.”
A lot of Christian service talks about different types of roles – like pastors, who care for those in the church, and missionaries, who reach out to those outside.
How different would it be if in your care for everyone, you didn’t weigh too heavily their prior religious experience, but you assumed that in some way, they know God already?
That in some way, each person has had experiences of something transcendent, something meaningful, a little mysterious. That they’d once felt a love bigger than anything that made sense. That they’d felt a caring spirit staying with them in the most lonely moments.
So much of pastoral caring work is not just to offer your own care and love, but also to help them see where God might be in their situation – because God is a far greater source of love and care, and if we can help them connect to that source, it’s more than we can offer on our own.
If someone I’m supporting doesn’t think of themselves as Christian, but I find myself in their world to offer support, I need to remember: they probably know God too, already, in some way. They might not use the same words I use to describe it, but there will be something in their life, some evidence, that the spirit is close by.
And if I can help them notice that and find that, in the language they use and connected to the experiences they already know… that is beautiful.
It’s transcending the categories of “missional” or “pastoral”, but recognising, honouring, and fostering the relationship between God and this person that’s already there, somewhere, if we’re open to seeing the different ways and finding the different words.
I really appreciated this post from Allison Murray at Women in Theology critiquing evangelical purity culture, and exploring how sometimes overly focusing on avoiding a thing somehow still keeps that thing central, which is its own form of idolatry:
A Bible study teacher I had once tried to get us to think more critically about the idea of idols. She said that idols were, yes, things in life that we gave too much attention or allowed to drive our lives in place of our faith (listing some of the usual suspects in these types of discussions: money, fame, power, sex, etc.). But she also encouraged us to think about how the desire to flee from idols can end up shaping our lives just as drastically as when we centre them. One might, out of a desire to not let thirst for material comfort take hold, decide to live as a modern-day ascetic, and spend their life running away from money. What if, she posited, an idol wasn’t only something we ran towards, but something we ran full-steam-ahead away from? What if we think about idols as something that we give undue power and authority in our lives, either negatively or positively?
In their pursuit of uprightness and sexual morality, the evangelical purity industrial complex still ends up making a negative idol of sex. Fleeing from it makes it present everywhere, but in a haunting, overbearing present absence/absent presence kind of way.
I read the “Every man’s battle” books she critiques at a formative time in my teenage years… I’m grateful I read healthier books about sexuality and the spirituality involved in it too. A few decades later even hearing the name of the book was a throw-back, but the critique I find useful.
There’s probably lingering ways that ideology has influenced me I should be aware of, and there’s still a tonne of people in churches who are being told this worldview is the true one… when it’s not, and it can be pretty unhealthy!
(I will say, those books did have some positive impacts – it helped me learn self control when it comes to the Male Gaze – which aligns with some feminist values: they’re not completely opposite worldviews! But she points out plenty that’s wrong with the worldview and I agree.)
I think I’ve listened to the song “Seasons” by Benjamin William Hastings hundreds of times, it’s been near the top of my playlist of christian songs for years.
Today someone introduced me to Benjamin William Hasting’s 2022 self titled album, and it’s so good.
It’s beautifully written, and engages with a rich faith without being a “church worship” album. It’s artful and self reflective, and dances between faith and parenting and creativity and vulnerability and probably more, rather than just being songs sung to God.
One of the songs “Cathedrals of the Nelder Grove” jumped out at me.
It’s talking about his response to scandal in his church. And in the third verse, he references back to his song “Seasons”, and the lessons we can learn from Sequoia trees, again:
You know, I’ve sang before about sequoias I guess we’re more than just one song alike But as I sit and mourn here in the garden Indulge me please, just one more time We tower high above our brothers We reign the sky, but for a time Alas, we serve beneath the soil Where our death just makes a way for life
And after that, the song samples a recording of an ecologist talking about Sequoias in the Nelder Grove in California after a massive fire in 2017.
We’re here right now in the railroad fire of, of 2017 where four years ago, um, in the Nelder Grove of Giant Sequoias. And, and right now we’re standing in an area that burned at low intensity.
Uh, the fire burned in a mix like all wildfires do. It was mostly low and moderate intensity. But there was a portion that burned at high intensity as well.
And the interesting thing, and for me as an ecologist, the important thing is that in the low intensity fire areas, there is no giant sequoia reproduction, none. None from before the fire, none after the fire.
Because what they need for that is high intensity fire, in other words, it’s fire that’s intense enough that it actually will kill some of the mature giant sequoias. But what you get in the bargain is hundreds of times more giant sequoias
It’s striking and I wanted to share these follow up videos: him talking about the song.
And the original video he sampled, at the time I’m posting this still with less than 2000 views:
This is one of those times nature offers such a striking metaphor for human experience that I’m unlikely to forget it.
This is heartwarming.
I don’t mind saying this as a scientist. I love seeing this.
Luhrmann’s provocative theory is that the church teaches pray-ers to use their minds differently than they do in everyday life. They begin by holding conversations with God in their heads, modeled on the kind of chummy conversations they’d have with their best friends. As they talk to Him, tell Him about their problems and imagine His wise counsel and loving response, they are training their thoughts, much as people use weights to train their muscles. The church encourages them to tune into sounds, images and feelings that are louder or more intense or more unfamiliar or more powerful—and to interpret these internal cues as the external voice of God.
Steve McCready mentioned Dr Tanya Luhrmann’s research on Sunday and I read several articles about it and am going to order a copy of her book. I’ve always been fascinated with descriptions of prayer that try to not shut out those with a material-only worldview, or suspicion of the spiritual, or just a view of spirituality that doesn’t fit “invisible person who speaks english and other languages”. The fact she also studied witchcraft as an anthropologist is just fascinating to me. I’m keen to read more.
The other description of pray I loved was from Danya Ruttenberg’s “Nurture the wow”. The whole chapter was amazing, here’s a sample quote:
It is this outward offering that turns “feeling feelings” into prayer: We don’t just experience them, we offer them up to someone, something. We say, “Here, can you hold on to at least a tiny piece of this anger, frustration, and despair for just a second?” We connect our heart to the great infinite everythingness, the gushing, pulsing stream of life within and around us. We reach out. It’s about tuning in to that which interlinks us all, that which is found within and between us.
I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts.
I will be their God, and they will be my people.
No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.
For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.
Years ago I remember trying to paraphrase this line: “I will be their God, and they will be my people.”
I think I wanted to make it personal, more individual, something I could remind myself in my own quiet prayer time.
But it just sounds wrong, it doesn’t really work: “I will be his God, and he will be my person”?
I’m sure if I tried long enough you could come up with a line that echoes the original and doesn’t sound completely broken… but at some point I gave up because I realised that the plural is intentional.
This covenant isn’t describing a billion small person-and-God relationships. It’s describing a single community-and-God relationship.
The style of Christianity I’ve grown up with has a heavy emphasis on a personal relationship with God, and this has been important to me!
But the covenants, both the one made with Moses to ancient Israel, and the one promised in Jeremiah’s writings that the early church claimed, are not about the personal relationship to God. They’re about the community’s relationship to God.
I’ve never had much sense that the wider community had any sense of unity around matters of faith. After all I grew up in pluralistic Australia. We’re lots of individuals with individual views making individual choices, and we often don’t agree with each other. So when I read something like Daniel’s prayer for his people (in Daniel 9), the use of us and we instead of I and me feels foreign and strange, even though it’s been translated into simple English language. I’m much more used to prayers and confessions being personal.
Daniel prays this heartfelt confession for the whole people: “we have sinned and done wrong”, “we have refused to listen”, “we have not followed the instructions he gave us through his servants, the prophets”, “all Israel has disobeyed… refusing to listen to your voice”.
From the written accounts we have, Daniel was an outstanding citizen and an outstanding person of faith. It’d be hard to look at the things he’s confessing and match them to things we know from his own life choices. Yet he’s confessing and praying not about his own behaviour and actions but the actions of his entire people.
What comes to mind for me as I try bring this to my own life, is the racism that runs deep in this country. I’m tempted to give myself a pass because I try to be accepting of those who look or sound different, I try respect the First Nations that have been here since before the first words of the bible were even written, and I voted “yes” in that referendum. But if the community has done wrong, and I am in the community… If I follow the example of Daniel I should confess our sins as if they were my own.
“God we started with outright massacres, we went on to steal children from their families and try force assimilation away into our culture, destroying their culture, and to this day we continue to hold racist prejudices and support biased systems that keep oppressing the lives of First Nations Australians, who are your children…”
Daniel doesn’t just confess the failings of his community though. He launched into this prayer after reading the prophecies of Jeremiah, which had been written a few decades earlier. And no doubt he’d read this bit with the promise of the new covenant – which celebrates God’s faithfulness to the people, even when the people are not faithful to God.
So he prayed “O Lord, you are a great and awesome God! You always fulfill your covenant and keep your promises of unfailing love to those who love you and obey your commands.” And “the Lord our God is merciful and forgiving, even though we have rebelled against him.”
If framing our covenant relationship with God requires considering the whole community and its actions… that is confronting. But when you remember the mercy and faithfulness of God that are central to this covenant… that is hopeful.
I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts.
I will be their God, and they will be my people.
No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.
For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.
As I’ve continued this series of posts through the book of Hebrews, I knew I wanted to write something on this passage, but it’s so rich it’s hard to know where to start.
So much of the big story in the bible is about the deep commitment in the relationship between God and God’s people – the covenant. There was the covenant with Abraham to make his descendants a great nation, and then the covenant with those descendants shared in the law of Moses. And then in the writings of another Hebrew prophet, Jeremiah, acknowledges both the failings of that covenant, but also the deep love and commitment:
This covenant will not be like the one I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand and brought them out of the land of Egypt. They broke that covenant, though I loved them as a husband loves his wife.
And then Jeremiah describes a new covenant God is making. And the few sentences he writes are elevated by the author of Hebrews to be a key to understanding Jesus’ work as high priest and his purpose here on earth.
So as I’ve been thinking about what to write, the challenge for me was to not jump at the first thing to write, but to meditate on it deeply. Memorise these couple of sentences. And let them do a deep internal work.
A memorized work (like a lover, a friend, a spouse, a child) has entered into the fabric of its possessor’s intellectual and emotional life in a way that makes deep claims upon that life, claims that can only be ignored with effort and deliberation.’ … A memorized text has a peculiarly character-forming effect on the memorizer. The text becomes part of his character; he lives in it and lives it out.
Paul J. Griffiths, Religious Reading
There’s so many things I could write about… but mostly I’d encourage you to meditate on the words of this new covenant and let what you learn about God’s heart go deep, to be placed in your mind and written in your heart.
This post by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg speaks of a spiritual practice for the month of Elul that she learned from her rabbi – Rabbi Alan Lew. It sounds like the whole month has a theme of preparation, reflection, and repentance in the lead up to the high holy days Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. I don’t know much about Jewish traditions – though the Wikipedia page’s section on customs has a decent introduction – but Lent feels like the closest parallel season in Christian calendars – and the practice she outlines I’d love to adopt for lent.
Rabbi Lew would suggest you spend a month paying close attention to one area of your life.
He would often to teach this around this time, as a way of helping people to wake up, to find a way to see their whole lives.
Because once we get clear on what’s driving us– and what we’re resisting, and afraid of, and reacting to, and can start to figure out why– in one area of our life, the whole picture becomes illuminated all at once, sometimes.
He would suggest that you pick one of the following three:
Food, money, or sex.
given that things are– how they are now– I might suggest the following addition of a fourth contender for potential scrutiny. That is, I propose that we broaden the list to:
Food, money, sex OR tech.
Pick one of them. Not all of them. One of those four things, and your relationship with it.
And spend the next month paying really, really close attention.
The specific examples paint a picture of very intentional mindfulness on a particular area, with the view to self understanding, compassion, and maybe repentance.
There’s a lot of talk about hope and promises in the letter to the Hebrews. Even the last two posts I wrote about Hebrews were around this:
Therefore, we who have fled to him for refuge can have great confidence as we hold to the hope that lies before us. This hope is a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls.
Our great desire is that you will keep on loving others as long as life lasts, in order to make certain that what you hope for will come true. Then you will not become spiritually dull and indifferent. Instead, you will follow the example of those who are going to inherit God’s promises because of their faith and endurance.
At some point last year when I was first getting back into reading the bible in general and reading Hebrews in particular, I was thinking about whoever it was that wrote this letter, and wondering what grand hope they had in mind when they were writing words like “hope” and “promises”. Is it the massive saving-of-everything-and-everyone narrative arc in the Jesus story? Is it hope for their nation and restoration after Roman destruction? Is it their own personal hope for Heaven or eternity or something?
There’s a hint right there in Hebrews 6, in between the two paragraphs I quoted above:
For example, there was God’s promise to Abraham. Since there was no one greater to swear by, God took an oath in his own name, saying:
“I will certainly bless you, and I will multiply your descendants beyond number.”
Then Abraham waited patiently, and he received what God had promised.
The New Living Translation even uses the phrase “for example”, which isn’t really in the original language, but does capture that at this point the writer has moved on from using generic phrases like “what you hope for” and “inherit God’s promises” and is now talking about something specific.
They’re not just talking about the grand overall narrative here, they’re talking about an individual promise God made to Abraham.
And that stood out to me, because I’d probably swung the pendulum away from thinking about what God promises to individuals. Having grown up in a church that sat on the edge of Pentecostalism, we were careful not to fall into traps of the “prosperity gospel”, but we could see it in the wider Pentecostal culture. People who were too concerned with God giving them benefits in this life – whether that’s getting the marriage they wanted or the promotion or the private jet or the parking spot.
And along with the rest of my church, in my formative years it felt like we pushed back against that and tried to remember the big picture of what God is doing in the world.
Later in the book of Hebrews this tension is even laid out directly:
By faith these people overthrew kingdoms, ruled with justice, and received what God had promised them. They shut the mouths of lions, quenched the flames of fire, and escaped death by the edge of the sword. Their weakness was turned to strength. They became strong in battle and put whole armies to flight. Women received their loved ones back again from death.
But others were tortured, refusing to turn from God in order to be set free. They placed their hope in a better life after the resurrection. Some were jeered at, and their backs were cut open with whips. Others were chained in prisons. Some died by stoning, some were sawed in half, and others were killed with the sword. Some went about wearing skins of sheep and goats, destitute and oppressed and mistreated. They were too good for this world, wandering over deserts and mountains, hiding in caves and holes in the ground.
All these people earned a good reputation because of their faith, yet none of them received all that God had promised.
I think I probably anchored too strongly on that second paragraph: sometimes you don’t see the promises in this life, so let’s instead hold onto a bigger picture of hope, that we expect to take longer than our lifetimes. (Less chance for disappointment maybe?)
That’s not all bad – I think holding onto the big picture leads to a more selfless and long term approach to life and decision making. It is certainly better than the prosperity gospel style of promises.
But reading this, and noticing that the Abraham example is a personal promise – rather than just his inclusion in a cosmic hope – challenged me.
Are there any personal promises from God that I’m holding onto?
Even using this language felt dangerous to me: I’ve had times in my life where I’ve felt something that I assumed was from God, and thought I could trust it, and then watched it fail.
As a 23 year old when Anna – then my girlfriend, had developed a chronic sickness and we prayed, and something shifted, she felt well for the first time in months, and we felt hope, but only for a night. Over a decade it had good days and bad days and the sickness shifted and morphed but the promise of full healing never really came.
Or when my friend Casey and I started Today We Learned and we felt so strongly God was calling us to have some kind of impact in the education sector through our startup, but it fizzled out. It was great growth for us and I regret none of it – but if I had clung to my sense of what God wanted to do as a trustworthy promise, I think I would have been disappointed.
It’s not all disappointment – other times I’ve felt things and trusted them, and it’s made all the difference. When Anna was really sick and we weren’t surviving off the income from my casual jobs, I was waiting for a job opportunity at our church, when an unexpected offer came from a software startup. I intended to decline it but felt like God was saying “This is me looking after you”. And 12 years later my career in this industry really has felt like being looked after.
So I’m open to hearing promises God has for me, but I’ve had enough experience to not put too much hope in a specific, personal promise – or in my interpretation of such a promise.
So, last year when I read this, and chewed on the idea that the personal promise, like Abraham’s example, is also important, I opened up to it. And while out hiking, sometimes thinking about this, sometimes praying, sometimes just reflecting on how rough life was feeling at that moment, and also just enjoying the view – somewhere in there, I felt like God made me another personal promise.
One of the views from the hike
For now I don’t think I want to share it here. But I’ll say it’s vague enough to not really be measurable or provable. But despite that it’s real and concrete enough that it shifted something for me, and has been an anchor for me to hold onto in one of the hardest periods of my life.
While writing this post I caught up with Allen Brown and we talked about Abraham’s promises. As he is so good at doing, he helped paint the big picture for me – how does this one story about Abraham tie into the big story?
And it was a reminder for me that Abraham’s promise we talked about before – that he would have descendants beyond number, was both something personal for him and part of a deep global story. Personal: the deep desire for him and his wife to have a child after years of infertility – many can relate to that even today. And part of the deep story: through his family, which would grow into a nation, God would demonstrate and orchestrate a different way of life, for the people to live in covenant with God – living aligned with his ways rather than independent and opposed – and through this nation, all other nations would be blessed. That’s the big story.
So when the writer for Hebrews talks about hope and promises that are an anchor for our souls – which promises are they talking about?
There’s no doubt that they had in mind the new way of life, the community in a committed covenantal relationship with God:
But now Jesus, our High Priest, has been given a ministry that is far superior to the old priesthood, for he is the one who mediates for us a far better covenant with God, based on better promises.
But by including the example from Abraham, there is a beautiful reminder that weaved into the big story that spans across generations and continents, there are billions of individual stories, and while God is in covenant relationship with humanity as a whole, God is also connecting with individuals. With us.
And God also offers hope and promises on the scale of our short lives, and these are beautiful for us on their own, but when included as a thread in the bigger tapestry God is weaving, it can be breathtaking.
I need to pause and take a moment to talk a little more directly about God, and the character of God as depicted in the Torah/Bible. Which, at least for me, aren’t necessarily always the same thing.
I know that for some people, it’s really important to be able to track how every verse in the Bible can be totally consistent with every other verse in the Bible and also their theology, but that’s never been my jam, honestly.
…it was already OK with me that God in the Torah wasn’t necessarily always going to be acting like the God I’d begun to meet in prayer, in mystical encounters, in the woods and on my long, winding walks outside at night.
You’re here. It becomes real now. I watched Anna get big. I watched her sing to you, talk to you. I felt your legs kick as I touched from outside. It was real, but it was distant. This is the moment it changes. That’s the way it works for dads. Mums bond for the whole 40 weeks. For dads, it’s when they first hold their baby. In an instant, I’m told. This is the moment.
It’s been 9 hours in this dark room. Apparently that’s quick. It felt like forever. I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad it’s over for Anna. That was a lot.
They’re blowing on your face. “Come on, let us hear your voice!” You’ve only been here for a few seconds. Should I be worr- You let out a cry. Your voice!
They turn the lights on, lay you and your mum on the bed. Oh my god – you’re here.
I’m taking it in, taking you in, you with your mumma, and here with us.
The nurse asks something about a needle. We didn’t want this one. We didn’t want much of what they did today. I try find the word “wait”, but they put the needle in.
Oh well, you’re here. You’re lying on your mumma’s tummy. It’s perfect.
I can’t wait to hold you, but there’s no way I am interrupting this moment.
But the moment is not peaceful like I imagined, the nurses are getting anxious. I hope you’re not stressed. This is your first experience of our world. It’s loud. It’s bright. People are rushing.
One of them starts shouting and a siren goes off. A dozen people come running. There’s people everywhere. Noise. One of the nurses picks you up. There’s so much noise. So many people. I hear so many things, I only catch some of it.
“Time for a cuddle with Dad” “…the placenta is…” “trying to save your life” “this is going to hurt, but we’re saving your life”
I’m holding you for the first time. This is the moment, but this is not it.
I look at Anna, she’s got fear in her eyes. I look at her body, there is blood everywhere. So much blood. It’s like a gunshot wound.
I feel the fear too.
I look down at your eyes. You’re squinting in the light. It’s so bright out here. So loud. But you’re calm, you’re not crying. I think you’re the only one here not crying or yelling.
You’re so tiny.
I squeeze you a bit tighter. Too tight? I haven’t held many babies. I thought I would be nervous about this, but I find my confidence quickly. You’re here and you’re mine and I’m holding you. I’ll hold you your whole life. I love you.
Your eyes settle on my face. I squeeze you a little tighter, and lean you into my bare chest. I don’t even remember taking my shirt off. I cover your ears, turn your eyes from the light, try to shield you. I want to protect you.
I want to protect your mum. I look over again, there’s a big nurse putting her whole weight onto Anna’s torso. She’s crying out in pain. The blood is everywhere. It dawns on me: she might not make it. There’s even more people now. One of them is putting a clipboard in front of her face and asking her to sign.
I make eye contact with your mumma. So much love. We’re both scared. Everyone is still shouting. They start to wheel her out on the bed. All the nurses and midwives and doctors go with her.
Suddenly I’m in the bright cold room, just with you. It’s quiet. You’re still squinting, looking around. At me, at the lights. Struggling to focus those brand new eyes. You’re so quiet. Peaceful.
“It’s just you and me mate”.
I’m talking about the room, calm and silent. But I’m also bracing for the possibility, the fear… I had never planned for that. I am crying. Holding you tight.
“I love you”.
As your eyes continue to wander around the wall, over my face, onto the lights, and I keep holding your tiny body tight to my chest… I know I would do anything to keep you safe. Even if it’s just you and me. There’s a deep well of strength I find inside – I didn’t know it was there, but it’s enough.
This post is my reflection and notes on the book “The Future is Bi-vocational” by Andrew Hamilton (Hamo), a Perth pastor and small business owner / reticulation guy arguing that churches should start shifting away from assuming “full time pastors” is the right way to lead a church community, and arguing that people who can lead churches might have a lot to benefit from having a different non-church job as well. It’s an easy read, well written, full of stories from his decades of experience. The target audience seems to be existing full-time pastors, or students studying to work in church, but if like me you already have a different career but sense a pull to contribute to your church community in a way that’s slightly more than just volunteering… it’s still a great read – convincing and inspiring. Available on Amazon, or probably local Christian bookstores if you’re in Australia.
Before I share my notes and takeaways, here’s a reflection on where I’m at, and what I had in mind as I started reading.
I was only five or six years old the first time I had a sense that when I was a grown up I’d likely do pastoral work, serving and leading a church community.
That sense stayed with me all through school, and into university. Though I chose to study Multimedia Design rather than go to a bible college or seminary, I still kind of assumed that ultimately it was just filling in time until some kind of a church role. By the time I was in uni I was volunteering a lot, leading groups the size of a small church, sometimes even preaching. And when I was doing those things there was a grace to it: things flowed, there was wind in the sails, there was energy in the room.
Of course part of it was some natural talent, some hard work, some early-adulthood energy. But there was also something more than that, beyond what you would expect from natural talent or effort… something undeserved. A grace.
I was so sure I’d end up working in church that I almost turned down my first software engineering job. I’m glad I didn’t.
I was newly married and Anna was sick, I’d become the sole income earner, and I didn’t want to take the job because I thought I was likely to get one at church within a few months. But I felt a sense that God was saying to me: “this is me taking care of you”. So I took the job. Software jobs pay a lot better than church jobs, which helped. A few months later the church had layoffs… it turns out I wouldn’t have gotten that role anyway.
Over in the software industry I found there was a grace that followed me around there too. Yes I had skills, yes I worked hard, but there were also opportunities I wouldn’t and couldn’t have orchestrated. Whether it’s cultural privilege or being blessed or something else, I’m not sure, but it was beyond what I felt I deserved. Again – grace.
And then, 15-ish years into this career, some thoughts start bubbling up, something is stirring, and I start thinking about the church stuff again. About using my skills, and finding that grace, in a church context. Don’t get me wrong, I love my work and career, and don’t plan on leaving… but there’s an internal pull to explore the grace of serving a church community, again.
Both to traditional church – using my skills in leading groups and public speaking to help people connect with each other and with God. But also in less traditional forms of community – facilitating community meetups, speaking at tech conferences. Being friends with people in the community so you’re available to help them find their way in key life moments – births, deaths, sickness and hospital stays, marriages and breakups. Helping kids and teenagers feel a sense of community they can belong to beyond their family and school friends.
It’s all stirring together into something. In amongst still enjoying my career and intending to continue it.
So when my mum mentioned her friend was writing a book called “The Future is Bi-vocational”, my interest was piqued.
Now that I’ve shared part of the story of my vocations – I’ll share what I learned from Andrew Hamilton’s book.
The future is bi-vocational
In the opening chapter Hamo remembers a conversation when he was about to start a new church, and he was given advice that “a viable church had 100 members and that I needed to grow my congregation to that point as soon as possible”. And so begins the unwinding of a bunch of assumptions about how to run a church: do you need to pay the salary of someone full time for the community to be viable?
For most of Christianity’s 2000 year history, we’ve had full time pastors who hold a privileged position in the community. But as society becomes both more secular, and also more religiously diverse at the same time, the assumption that a pastor can work in a church building, and the community will come to them, is not holding up anymore. That’s the mission problem we’re facing – it’s hard to care for a community if you’re in a building and the community doesn’t come to your building anymore. Also our suburban western culture often is suspicious of interactions with strangers, and so just leaving the building and starting up a conversation without a shared reason is also not an effective way to build relationships.
Then there’s the financial problem – as market pressures squeeze small churches in the same way big supermarkets squeeze small corner-stores, we’ll see increasing trends of there not being enough people in the small local churches to sustain a full time role through members giving part of their pay-cheque to the church. Bigger churches get better “economies of scale” for the surface level things people consider when church shopping: the quality of the Sunday preaching, music, and kids programs. A megachurch might be more financially efficient and effective in putting on a good Sunday service, but putting on a good Sunday service was never what church was supposed to be about. So the big churches start to attract people because of their more efficient and higher quality Sunday services, but then they need to spend their staff time on those services. The small churches can’t afford a full time pastor anymore, especially as they keep seeing their people switch to the bigger churches with the better weekend programs.
This feels like an existential problem for Christian churches… but in it Hamo sees a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Once in a lifetime is probably actually too common: it feels like this might be one of the ~500 year moments in church history that Phyllis Tickle talks about. The shift is coming, the cultural forces behind are probably unstoppable, and what church looks like on the other side won’t be what it looks like now. And therein lies the opportunity which he makes the case for.
He’d started his career assuming if a pastor needed two jobs, it was a sad interim state to pay the bills. But his experience has been that the setup is rewarding for a variety of reasons, and in this he sees the opportunity for the church to transform itself and be more true to its values, more effective in serving the community, and closer to the vision of a “priesthood of all believers” that Jesus intended for us.
Here’s my notes on some of the things that stood out to me in the book.
No spectators
Remember the board game Pictionary, where people played in pairs, with one person sketching and another trying to guess what they were drawing, while everyone else watched? Often church is a bit like this. However, it ought to be more like the “all play” moments in Pictionary, where everyone is involved in drawing and guessing and no one is spectating.
One of the significant benefits that can come from a shift into the bi-vocational mode is that a sometimes-dormant church, with minimal congregational engagement, is challenged to step up and function as a cohesive unit. The body metaphor Paul uses in 1 Corinthians to describe the church community means simply ‘attending’ a church should never be an option. Everyone has a role to play, and a job to do, in order to keep the body healthy. Anyone can ‘turn up’. It’s another thing altogether to discover your own unique gifts, and then to serve alongside the others in your community.
I loved this line of thinking. In the same chapter he proposes a hypothetical situation: what if a church got up on Sunday and announced that all the paid staff halved their hours, and would be taking other jobs. How would the wider community respond? Would it do less? Is there work or programs that staff are keeping alive that aren’t really worth it? Or would the rest of the community pitch in and do more? Spreading the load among a wider group, and including a more diverse range of skills, gifts and experience.
Take this example: a church pays someone to coordinate crisis care for homeless and vulnerable people. Does the existence of this role mean people in the community think “that is someone’s job, I can leave it to them?” What happens if that job disappears, or is halved? Does the community step in and fill the gap?
Views of work
I love the way Hamo unpacked some of the prevailing views of work in the church:
Work as cursed: we only work because this is a broken world. We didn’t work in the Garden of Eden, we won’t work in Heaven… we have to do it now, but that’s a shame.From a bible perspective, humans were working even back in the paradise of the Garden of Eden – work was part of the perfect plan, not part of the fallen broken version of reality. Work often is broken and feels cursed now, but fundamentally it’s supposed to be a good, creative, and meaningful pursuit.
Work as income: we only work because we need the money. You also see this in technology-optimist or anti-capitalist thinking: if we just had enough technological automation or free clean energy, we could eliminate all toil. If we just had strong welfare, or universal basic income, we wouldn’t need to work. Another take is that work is about wealth accumulation, the harder you work the more money you get, and more is good.He reminds us that the Christian view is clear that a good day of work deserves good pay, but it’s also clear that toiling your life to earn wealth isn’t worth it. Yes we work to earn money, but making it just about the money strips us of the bigger meaning, and the dignity, in the value we provide.
Work as service: Reminding ourselves that it’s not just about doing the tasks or getting the pay check, but the work we do provides value for someone, and doing it in a way that shows that person honour and respect and love, doing our work to serve them (and of course, still get paid), is a higher view of work.
Work as worship: There’s a Christian work ethic spelled out by Paul in his letter to Colossians: work hard, as if you’re working for God and not just your boss. Hamo pointed out that the link between work and worship actually goes deeper, with a single Hebrew word being used in each of these places:
Six days you shall labor, but on the seventh day you shall rest (Exodus 34)
Let me people go, so they may worship me (Exodus 8)
But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord. (Joshua 24)
All 3 of these verses, the word in italics is the Hebrew ʿāḇaḏ (עָבַד). The same word covers meaning from labour to tilling the ground to service to others to worship of God. I love moments like this, where you realise the language and culture you grew up in had a whole bunch of assumptions, but another language and culture uses words completely differently, and it shifts your world-view. The everyday labour we do can be an act of sacred worship.
Advantages of bi-vocational model
Often Christian ministers call the idea of a second job “tentmaking”, a reference to the second job held by the apostle Paul, who was the most prolific writer in the Christian scriptures. His other job, which helped pay the bills, was making tents. In the chapter “Tentmaking – it’s not about the tents”, Hamo fleshes out some of the reasons why having a role outside the church is actually beneficial even for the work you do in the church context:
Credibility: demonstrating you’re a hard working person with decent values, and you’re not just here to ask for money or to enjoy the status that comes with a leadership role.
Positioning: you’re more likely to interact day-to-day with the kind of people that you’re hoping to serve. If you work in a church your connection with the wider community can be pretty limited because you don’t have natural places to interact with the community around you.
Visibility: people will see how you work, and how your values hold up “in the real world”. It’s a chance to demonstrate the different values we preach about, in a visible way so people know it’s real for you.
Freedom: as a church leader sometimes you need to challenge the community, rather than give them what they want. If you’re relying on them for donations, then you might be afraid to say the hard truths. You see a similar dynamic with politicians and their donors.
Funding: relying on people giving from their income is always going to be limited. If you can sustain an income in a different way, it gives you more options for how you can do the church-based work without being limited by the bank balance.
Flexibility: some roles allow you to move more freely. Either because the skills are in demand in different areas, or because they open the door for visas and migration, or because they allow “work from anywhere”. Some roles also allow flexibility in hours, either at a week-to-week or a seasonal level, which might match the flexibility you need for your work in the church community.
Example: you want the whole church community to treat their work as worship, and a chance to bless the people around them. You can set the example. No one can say “it’s easy for you to say, you’re paid to do this”, when you do it in amongst your other work too.
Generosity: we say “it is more blessed to give than to receive”, and having an independent financial income allows you to live more generously than if you are reliant on receiving other people’s gifts to make your way.
In later chapters he outlines more personal reasons why a bi-vocational approach might suit, or not suit, depending on your particular personality. But these reasons I’ve listed are the competitive advantages he outlines for if someone chooses to do their church work with a bi-vocational approach.
“How do people become like Jesus around here?”
This was one of the reflection questions in the book that stopped and made me think the longest. What does that look like at my church? Do I think the way we operate is effective in helping people live like Jesus?
I particularly appreciated this push towards pastors, as the ones leading the community, leading with the example of their own life:
What is certain is that for your leadership to have credibility, and to form people into Christ, it has to come from lived experience deep in the gut, rather than clever theories of the head. It must echo a genuine encounter with Jesus. If it doesn’t, your people will know, and it just won’t fly. Any competent leader can run a church, organise meetings, and develop strategies, but what is most needed from a pastor is the ongoing experience of knowing and following Jesus, as well as the ability to help others have these transformative encounters.
As a bi-vocational pastor, it will always be tempting to skip the disciplines and practices that form us, and to get on with the various tasks that demand your time. But a pastor who isn’t ministering from a centred life is worse than no pastor at all.
There are countless books that can help you engage in practices that form you and allow you to encounter Jesus, but the bottom line is that it must happen and it has to be real. You cannot rely on your organisational skills, or preaching skills, to get you by. Your energy must come from a life earthed in a relationship with Jesus.
A useful, challenging reminder for me.
Some of the reflection questions at the end of this chapter were also great:
“How do people become like Jesus around here?” How would you answer that question for your own church?
The way a ‘centred life’ looks will depend on your current life stage. How does it look for you at present?
If you aren’t living a life centred on Jesus, then what can you change to put this key element in place?
Describe the culture of the church you hope for. If this is different from the church culture you currently experience, how can you help the church change directions?
Nuts and bolts of leading a team that’s structured like this
There’s a chapter where he maps out some of the pragmatic realities of trying to lead a church without a single full time pastor. First of these is about how you build a team to cover all the bases. Building a wider team of people who are not full time means you get a wider diversity of skills, experience and gifting. This is a good thing! You will have the things you are exceptionally good at, and also things you’re terrible at. Sharing the load means you can focus on your strengths, and find people whose strengths complement yours.
He leans on the work of Alan Hirsch who uses some archetypal roles from Ephesians 4 to think about different skill sets in a diverse church leadership team:
Apostle: the pioneer. Seeing new opportunities and having the drive and initiative to make them happen and lead a group towards them.
Prophet: the truth teller. Questioning the status quo, and calling people back when they’re on a dangerous path.
Evangelist – the recruiter. Drawing in other people to the mission, often focused outside the church community.
Shepherd – the nurturer. Caring and protecting people, helping them grow to maturity.
Teacher – the communicator. Able to teach people things about life and faith in a way that helps them grow.
The other part of the nuts and bolts is the prioritisation – you simply can’t get everything done. This is very familiar to me from a software engineering career: there is always more work that could be done. There’s never a true “finish” point.
He suggests one of the tools we use at work too: a simple Urgency/Important matrix, with these kinds of examples:
Not important, not urgent: organising your desk, archiving emails, useless meetings.
Not important, but urgent: phone calls, texts, some meetings.
Not urgent, but important: forward planning, relationship development, values clarification, strategic teaching prep.
Important, urgent: crisis response, sermon preparation, pressing team or culture problems.
As a part timer, you probably need to accept that the amount you get done will never feel like enough compared to all the things you could do. So you need to focus, and be okay with saying no. You need the things in both “important” quadrants. And you probably need to get used to saying “no” to some things that are urgent, but not that important. Whether you hand it off to someone else, or just accept that it’s okay for it to not get done – that is okay.
Other audiences for the same message
So I found this book really helpful. As someone with a full time career that’s not related to church at all, and as someone who grew up with both parents in full time careers that are about serving the church, having a clear and compelling case made for “why not both” was super helpful.
As I neared the end of the book the degree to which the practical advice in the book was geared towards those who default to full time church work, but are considering bi-vocational, struck me. I’m coming from the other direction, and similarly practical advice would be useful there. If the future really is bi-vocational, we need to not only convince some pastors to take on other jobs, we need to convince a whole lot of people with full time careers to dial back their ambitions there to make some space for a church-serving vocation as well.
The day I bought this book was actually when Hamo came to speak at my church, and I didn’t put together that he was the author of the book mum had mentioned until the end, but I loved his message. It was targeted more at those with existing careers, but from an angle of seeing your work as an opportunity for service and worship, rather than carving out space for explicit work in and for the church.
The sermon is online and well worth a listen. The opening story was so cringe-worthy and I was definitely expecting it to have some corny redeeming plot-twist, and the fact that it didn’t, the story ending without any resolution to the awkwardness, immediately helped me respect where this guy was coming from: no bullshit.
If you’re interested in a 40 minute talk rather than a 200 page book, this is a great place to start:
Then, suddenly again, Christopher Robin, who was still looking at the world with his chin in his hands, called out “Pooh!” “Yes?” said Pooh. “When I’m — when — Pooh!” “Yes, Christopher Robin?” “I’m not going to do Nothing any more.” “Never again?” “Well, not so much. They don’t let you.” Pooh waited for him to go on, but he was silent again. “Yes, Christopher Robin?” said Pooh helpfully. “Pooh, when I’m — you know — when I’m not doing Nothing, will you come up here sometimes?” “Just me?” “Yes, Pooh.” “Will you be here too?” “Yes, Pooh, I will be really. I promise I will be, Pooh.” “That’s good,” said Pooh. “Pooh, promise you won’t forget about me, ever. Not even when I’m a hundred.” Pooh thought for a little. “How old shall I be then?” “Ninety-nine.” Pooh nodded. “I promise,” he said.
Still with his eyes on the world Christopher Robin put out a hand and felt for Pooh’s paw. “Pooh,” said Christopher Robin earnestly, “if I — if I’m not quite —” he stopped and tried again — “Pooh whatever happens, you will understand, won’t you?” “Understand what?” “Oh, nothing.” He laughed and jumped to his feet. “Come on!” “Where?” said Pooh. “Anywhere,” said Christopher Robin.
So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.
The House at Pooh Corner, by A. A. Milne
I first read this beautiful end to a Winnie the Pooh story in Danya Ruttenberg’s fantastic book “Nurture the Wow”. It’s a book that explores parenting from the perspective of Jewish faith, and it was formative for me at one of the hardest points of early parenting, when I felt like I had no time for anything, self care was at all time lows, friendships drifted, and church and faith was something I used to do, and hoped to do again one day, but didn’t have headspace for anymore.
The book as a whole paints a beautiful picture of the mystery of faith, and the wonder of watching new life grow, and the hardships of parenting, and how they are all intertwined.
She quoted the Pooh story to talk about the wonder and play and imagination of childhood, and how soon it’s lost, and that it is a loss, and that we should honour it:
Even if we can’t keep our babies at the age when they’re happily talking to their bear all day — nor, maybe, would we want to — we do have a little power. We can keep the play from being squashed out of their lives. We can make sure they have time to do Nothing. We can guard that jealously for them, and even join them, sometimes, in Pooh Corner, if they’ll let us.
Nurture The Wow, by Danya Ruttenberg
I finished the chapter and closed the book, determined to make that space for play and imagination and Nothing in my kids lives. And presumably got busy again, called back into the demands of a young family.
Later that day, in a quiet moment, a parallel truth dawned on me: it’s not just the kids who lose something when they lose the space for Nothing. Kids get busy with school. And I was neck deep in my own busyness: cooking a meal, cleaning up a toilet training accident, responding to a meltdown, discussing sleep routines and health appointments and trying to still get in enough hours for my job to call it a full day of work. They don’t let you do Nothing any more.
And just as Christopher Robin had the looming sense that he would be so busy – that without the time for imaginative play, he’d lose his closest friend – so I realised how little space I gave to my connection with God.
See one of the beautiful things about the Christian faith I grew up with is the absolute insistence that you can know God, and be known. That there’s not just a spirituality or transcendence on offer, but a relationship.
(Make what you will of the parallels I’m drawing between having an imaginary friendship with a stuffed bear and a relationship with God! 🤣)
Growing up, and through my young adult years, that had been deeply deeply meaningful to me. My relationship with God. A sense of closeness, trust, shared joy, back-and-forth, relationship with the divine everythingness that we called God. The closest relationship in my life was the one with God. And a lot of the richness there came from the quiet times, the times of doing Nothing. Walking out at night and staring up at galaxies. Sitting at home and picking up books from my parents library on faith and history and love. Talking with friends until it was midnight, 2am, 5am, and trying together to sense how God was active in our lives, and how we could tune in more.
And then, life got busy.
And then, almost a decade into a marriage, and several years into hard-mode parenting, I still believed in God, mostly. And I still tried to live in line with the same values, mostly. But I realised how long it had been since I took part in that relationship.
And I started to weep.
I’d forgotten the deepest connection I had known.
And as I wept, I remembered another story, from the movie The Notebook. (Spoiler alert!) An elderly woman suffering from dementia and memory loss is in a nursing home, and a volunteer comes in to read her a story. It’s a love story, and she follows along intently. And only at the climax of the story when she asks what’s going to happen, does she realise that it’s not just a story, it’s her story, and the one reading it is not just a volunteer, it is the love of her life. And she has a few minutes remembering the richness of their love, before the reality of it dissipates again and she’s left wondering who is this stranger she’s with.
It felt like I was having one of those moments. The reality of it, the depth of relationship, the richness of love, came flooding back, and I remembered, and wept. Yes, I remember, I remember you, I remember this.
And the love was still there, intermingled with the grief that I could have forgotten for so long.
And like Christopher Robin asked Pooh, I asked in prayer: Promise you won’t forget about me? Even when I forget about you? Whatever happens, you will understand, won’t you?
And all I felt in response was love, understanding. And the confirmation that God was still there, had never left, and that the relationship was still there too, open for me when I was ready to be open to it.
So if you’re reading this…
… and like me, you have known that love, but when there was no time to do Nothing, it got crowded out by the concerns of life: may you find enough stillness to hear the quiet voice of God again, and when you’re ready, rediscover the richness of that loving connection.
… or if you know the love I’m talking about, and you’re still connected to the source, may you safeguard the quiet moments that nurture that relationship and make it real for you.
… or if you have never known it, may you find it, in the way that resonates with you most. The thing that unites all of us at some level isn’t just an idea or energy or “the universe”, I believe it’s a person. And they are hoping we will perhaps reach out, and perhaps find them, though they’re never really far from any of us. God connects with a thousand people in a thousand different ways. May you notice the small invitations to connect, and have the courage to respond.
Photo by Dave Robinson on Unsplash - https://unsplash.com/@redevo
Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.
The big days of Easter are Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
Good Friday is all about death, suffering, abandonment, sacrifice, grief.
Easter Sunday is all about life, resurrection, power, restoration, hope.
Australian’s even get a public holiday on the Monday for some reason. But the Saturday… it’s just a normal Saturday. Life goes on.
…
As I’ve been walking my own path of grief over the last few months with a relationship breakdown, I’ve had this short teaching from Jesus rolling around in my head: “Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground… it is never any more than a grain of wheat”. For me, I had to let something go, watch it fall to the ground, watch it die. And trust for something new, something with new life, something as yet unknown, was going to emerge on the other side.
But between the death, and the resurrection, is the Saturday. The day where the body is lying in the ground.
It’s not hard to imagine what that day felt like for those closest to Jesus.
The shock of the day before, the grief, the loss. Apparently he’d hinted at a resurrection but it doesn’t seem like any of them were feeling that hope on Saturday. The lifeless body had a finality to it. They wouldn’t see his smile again, hear his voice again, eat a meal with him again.
And just as their friend’s body was lifeless, so too all the hope they had tied up in him as their leader would have felt lifeless… it was over, it was futile. The talk of “the coming Kingdom” felt real at the time, but it amounted to nothing.
The Saturday is rough.
And it’s a key part of human experience.
The thing you knew is dead and buried. And there’s no sign of new life yet. And for now, this is where you are, and this is it.
There’s a certain grace in this story that Jesus’ death came as the Sabbath started… the rhythms of life went on, but the rhythms told his friends and family to stop, to rest. To not try figure out the next steps. Not yet.
There is hope. That’s the Easter story. But on the Saturday you probably won’t feel any of that.
And that’s okay, because the resurrection doesn’t require us to do anything. It doesn’t even require us to believe anything or maintain a minimum level of hope. The new life that is going to come isn’t something we need to organise or lobby for or make happen. It will be given, it will be undeserved, it will be grace.
And that’s good, because when it’s Easter Saturday, we probably don’t have it in us to do anything. The grief is real, the hopelessness is real. We just wait.
Look at the birds. They don’t plant or harvest or store food in barns, for your heavenly Father feeds them. And aren’t you far more valuable to him than they are? … Look at the lilies of the field and how they grow. They don’t work or make their clothing, yet Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as beautifully as they are. And if God cares so wonderfully for wildflowers that are here today and thrown into the fire tomorrow, he will certainly care for you.
In Jesus’ sermon on the mount, there’s a beautiful passage about anxiety and worry, where he encourages us: do not worry about tomorrow, each day has enough worry of its own. Even though in Australia we’re probably safer and more likely to have food and shelter than most other times or places in history… anxiety is high. Many suffer from it. It is crippling.
Jesus calls us to “look at the birds” and “look at the lilies of the field”. In the past I’ve often read this as a rhetorical device: help our brains see the logic, nature doesn’t worry and God takes care of it, God will take care of us, so lighten up.
But I’ve been learning a lot about worry. In my own counselling, and in sessions with psychologists where I learn how to support my kids. So much of anxiety is bodily, yes it is running through your mind, but it’s not just in the mind. And when your body is in a fight or flight or freeze state, the idea of “helping our brains see the logic” really falls flat.
Visualising the worry on each finger tip, and a “peaceful spot” on your palm. And then use a finger from your other hand to trace that worry into the middle finger by finger.And then do a big breath to blow it away, leaving only the peaceful spot.
I’ve been holding a lot of my own worry and anxiety over the future lately, and have been drawn back into reading and reflecting on these few thoughts Jesus shared. To comfort me, to guide me.
And instead of seeing “look at the birds… look at the lilies” as a piece of rhetoric, something to think about… I’m seeing it as guidance, something to do.
Go outside, and find the birds. Find the native flowers that just grow all on their own. And look at them. Long enough for my breath to slow down. Look at them long enough to meditate on them. That they are there, and cared for. Long enough that my heart rate slows down. Long enough to remember that maybe I too am cared for.
“That is why I tell you not to worry about everyday life—whether you have enough food and drink, or enough clothes to wear. Isn’t life more than food, and your body more than clothing? Look at the birds. They don’t plant or harvest or store food in barns, for your heavenly Father feeds them. And aren’t you far more valuable to him than they are? Can all your worries add a single moment to your life? “And why worry about your clothing? Look at the lilies of the field and how they grow. They don’t work or make their clothing, yet Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as beautifully as they are. And if God cares so wonderfully for wildflowers that are here today and thrown into the fire tomorrow, he will certainly care for you. Why do you have so little faith? “So don’t worry about these things, saying, ‘What will we eat? What will we drink? What will we wear?’ These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers, but your heavenly Father already knows all your needs. Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need. “So don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today’s trouble is enough for today.
This post from Jack Lindamood has a format I loved. The decisions and his reflections are interesting, but I think less interesting than the format itself. What I love:
You keep track of all the big decisions you’ve made during your tenure in a particular company / role
You engage in self reflection on if they were good or bad choices, after you’ve had time and benefit from hindsight
You share knowledge with the community (I was exposed to tech I’ve never heard of, and had new takes on tech I use every week)
If we had one of these for Culture Amp, it would go a long way to clarifying not just why we use a certain tech, but if we still like it, separate from the decision of if we’re still using it.
At Culture Amp we do use a tech radar that mimic’s the format from Thoughtworks. But the “radar” UI doesn’t lend itself to reading as a whole.
I also like that he’s captured the decisions he’s been accountable for as an engineering leader. That’s fascinating when thinking about recruiting – how do you convince a new company that you’re going to be a leader with good judgement? And how does the new company evaluate if the way you make decisions – and learn from mistakes – is the right fit for them?
First, a reminder that even if the rabbi of a synagogue is preaching stuff that does not align with your political beliefs–that does not necessarily mean that every single person in that community is similarly aligned. There may be other folks who are much more kindred spirits than you might think at first blush — and it might take a second or two to find them, but that does not mean that they are not there or impossible to find. Synagogues are often comprised of communities within communities, and it may be possible for you to find yours. How? Well, first you have to start showing up to things where you might be able to meet people. Is there a social justice or social action committee doing stuff? Are there other subgroups within the synagogue that feel like they might be more likely to have folks on your wavelength? Is there a younger folks group — even if they call it “Young Professionals“ or some such thing, you may find some true kindred spirits there — you never know. I say this from experience, as someone who showed up to a Conservative synagogue in my early 20s, as the youngest (by about 15 years) and queerest (by far) person I could see for miles. With some patience and digging, eventually I connected with an amazing intergenerational group of people (some of whom knew each other before, some not), some of whom I am still in touch with today, many many many years later.
Second of all, even though it is lovely and comfortable to go to community that has been built, don’t discount your own power to build community. You can (eg) host Shabbat dinner for a motley group of people–some of whom may be Jews, some of whom may not be, some of whom may be familiar with Jewish practice, some of whom may not at all. Make it potluck, or do a simple pot of soup and salad and frittata. Or make a vat of chili get some chips and guac you’ve got dinner. Get some wine or juice and challah– bam! Get this going as a monthly thing and see if you can get enough of a community together to get some text study or prayer action before or after dinner (davening first, study after). Etc. Do a lunch! Make it a picnic when the weather improves! Host holiday things! Get creative! Start slow, build.
This is fascinating. A library was buried in Herculaneum when Vesuvius erupted, and there were 800 or more scrolls buried in ash that crumble when you try to unwrap them.
A mix of advanced CT scans, machine learning and incredible research activity is digitally unwrapping them and finding what’s inside.
They’ve got a first sample of text from the first scroll, and it’s a previously unknown text, looks like Epicurean philosophy.
It certainly sounds more realistic for people in darkness to dream of God’s day of vengeance, finding satisfaction in the hope that at the Last Judgement all the godless enemies who oppress us here will be cast into hellfire. But what kind of blessedness is it that luxuriates in revenge and needs the groans of the damned as background to its own joy? For to us a child is born, not an embittered old man. God in a child, not as a hangman.
…
He will establish “peace on earth,” we are told, and he will “uphold peace with justice and with righteousness.” But how can peace go together with justice? What we are familiar with is generally peace base on injustice, and justice based on conflict. The life of justice is struggle. Among us, peace and justice are divided by the struggle for power. The so-called “law of the strongest” destroys justice and right. The weakness of the peacemakers makes peace fragile. It is only in the zeal of love that what power has separated can be put together again: in a just peace and in the right to peace.
This love does not mean accepting breaches of justice “for the sake of peace,” as we say. But it does not mean, either, breaking someone else’s peace for the sake of our own rights. Peace and righteousness will only kiss and be one when the new person is born, and God the Lord, who has created all things, arrives at his just rights in his creation. When God is God in the world, then no one will want to be anyone else’s Lord and God anymore…
But is this really possible here and now, or is it just a dream?
Jürgen Moltmann in The Power of Powerlessness. I read it in “Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas”. Emphasis mine.
I’ve got an uneasy relationship with Christmas and gifts. I’m not great at gift giving in general. And I don’t feel much on the receiving end – it’s clearly not my love language! The forced-ness of gift giving at Christmas, combined with the overwhelming commercial advertising and expectation, combined with remembering something else that’s supposed to be remembered in that season, combined with thinking about our level of consumption and it’s impact on the environment… I’d personally prefer to opt out of the whole thing but that feels too grinch-like so we continue quietly.
So this reading from “The Gospel in Solentiname” hit home. Ernesto Cardenal the priest apparently “does not believe in sermons” and so facilitated small group discussions to help his people understand the stories. The perspectives they share are from such a different world to my own – they were among the poor in Nicaragua at the height of the cold war.
And the comment from Olivia astounded me with its clarity:
When they saw the star again They were filled with joy. They went into the house; they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they knelt down and worshipped him. Then they opened their boxes And gave him presents of gold, incense and myrrh.
Tomás: “They come and open their presents – some perfumes and a few things of gold. It doesn’t seem as if he got big presents. Because those foreigners that could have brought him a big sack of gold, a whole bunch of coins, or maybe bills, they didn’t bring these things. What they brought to him were little things… That’s the way we ought to go, poor, humble, the way we are. At least that’s what I think”.
Olivia: “It’s on account of these gifts from the wise men that the rich have the custom of giving presents at Christmas. But they give them to each other”.
A very simple observation from Søren Kierkegaard on the difference between knowledge and action (commenting on the story of the Wise Men consulting the scribes in Jerusalem for the location of the Messiah):
Although the scribes could explain where the Messiah should be born, they remained quite unperturbed in Jerusalem. They did not accompany the Wise Men to seek him. Similarly, we may know the whole of Christianity, yet make no movement. The power that moves heaven and earth leaves us completely unmoved.
What a difference! The three kings had only a rumour to go by. But it moved them to make that long journey. The scribes were much better informed, much better versed…
Who had the more truth? The three kings who followed a rumour, or the scribes who remained sitting with all their knowledge?
Søren Kierkegaard (from Meditations from Kierkegaard, edited and translated by T.H. Croxall. I read it in “Watch for the Light”)
At our church this month we’ve been going through the book of Ruth. The series has been good, with the first three messages bringing the story to life, with all of its hard to understand customs, offensive levels of patriarchy, and yet endearing characters. (The recordings are on YouTube: message 1 and message 2 by Steve, and message 3 by my sister Clare.) I’ve also been reading it – it’s only four short chapters and takes me about 20 minutes – it’s worth reading yourself!
One thing that’s standing out to me is the lack of “supernatural” in the story. There’s a famine but no miracles of food falling from the sky or loaves of bread being multiplied, or prophets making it rain or anything like that. There’s death but no coming back to life. There’s infertility but no miracle babies.
What there is, is a story of two women (Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi) choosing to return to Naomi’s home country, her people, her God and way of life.
They were destitute in Moab and running away from famine – for Naomi it is running to her home country, and for Ruth, it is following Naomi to a place she’d never been, where she’d settle in as a foreigner and immigrant.
When they get to Bethlehem, the story narrows in to focus on what they find in that community when they get back. And what they find is a community that’s going about the rhythms of agricultural life – it was harvest when they arrived – but with a few twists that showed they were God’s chosen people who were trying to live according to the laws Moses had given them.
In particular, the harvesters were comfortable making space for Ruth to harvest in their fields (“gleaning”), not attempting to maximise their commercial returns but leaving some leftovers for the poor. This was based off this verse in the law:
When you harvest the crops of your land, do not harvest the grain along the edges of your fields, and do not pick up what the harvesters drop. It is the same with your grape crop—do not strip every last bunch of grapes from the vines, and do not pick up the grapes that fall to the ground. Leave them for the poor and the foreigners living among you. I am the LORD your God.
And Boaz, the wealthy land-owner and love interest in Ruth’s story, goes a step further. Not just following the law as stated – which as Steve pointed out in one of the linked messages – is open to a stingy interpretation. But Boaz leant into the spirit of it, to care for the poor and the stranger:
Let her gather grain right among the sheaves without stopping her. And pull out some heads of barley from the bundles and drop them on purpose for her. Let her pick them up, and don’t give her a hard time!
He was also well aware of his both his rights and his responsibilities for caring for his female relatives in a patriarchal society, and again seemed intent to not just do what was required, but to meet the spirit of the law and do what is right.
And that is one of the miracles in this story, I think. Nothing supernatural, but a community of people actually living with the intent to love each other, and love the strangers living amongst them, as God had asked them to do. And taking a big hearted generous approach to that.
And it makes me wonder, what miracles might be possible if our communities choose to live this way: genuinely trying to embrace God’s heart of love and wholeheartedly embracing that as our guide for how to live. What would we do differently? And what would it mean to the people who wander into our midst, perhaps as destitute as the heroines in this story?
If Ruth and Naomi returned as a poor widow and her foreign daughter-in-law, and found a self-seeking community that didn’t leave any leftovers in their field, and didn’t feel any responsibility of care for their extended family… then this story would have been very different. It would have been depressing, unsurprising, probably not worth writing down.
But instead they found a community committed to living the way God had taught them, and that community made generous space for Ruth and Naomi. And nothing supernatural happened – and nothing supernatural was needed! – because there was a miracle of love, abundance, redemption and hope… entirely because the people choose to live God’s love and make it their way of life.
I want to see that story play out in my church, over and over.
(One of the other miracles in the story of Ruth is the beautiful connection between Ruth and Naomi, and their boldness in taking initiative as powerless women in a patriarchal society… but that’s another post. And covered in the messages I linked above!)
It occurred to me recently that I feel extremely differently about ‘outputs’ via Twitter than blogs. I first came across the notion of the ‘ideas garden’ via Doug Belshaw and it suggests a blog can be seen as a place where you help ideas take root and grow.
This contrasts with the inherently performative feel of Twitter where the focus on immediate feedback means that individual item becoming a focal point for your reflection. In other words I care about the reaction a tweet gets because it is self-standing and immediately public whereas a blog post is an element of a large whole. It is a contribution to growing my ideas garden, for my own later use and whatever enjoyment others find in it, rather than something I have expectations of receiving a reaction for.
The blog itself then comes to feel like something more than the sum of its parts: a cumulative production over 13 years and 5000+ posts which captures my intellectual development in a way more granular and authentic than anything I could manage by myself. Over time I see old posts I’d forgotten about resurfacing as people stumble across them and this long tail heightens my sense of the emergent whole. It’s become an ideas forest which people wander into from different directions, finding trails which I had long since forgotten about and inviting me to explore a now overgrown area to see if I should begin tending to it once more.
Our great desire is that you will keep on loving others as long as life lasts, in order to make certain that what you hope for will come true. Then you will not become spiritually dull and indifferent.
There’s a whole section in the chapter before where the writer is admonishing the readers for being spiritually dull and struggling to understand the concepts they’re being taught:
There is much more we would like to say about this, but it is difficult to explain, especially since you are spiritually dull and don’t seem to listen. You have been believers so long now that you ought to be teaching others. Instead, you need someone to teach you again the basic things about God’s word. You are like babies who need milk and cannot eat solid food. For someone who lives on milk is still an infant and doesn’t know how to do what is right. Solid food is for those who are mature, who through training have the skill to recognize the difference between right and wrong.
So let us stop going over the basic teachings about Christ again and again. Let us go on instead and become mature in our understanding.
Often I would hear or read that admonishment and feel this challenge – am I spiritually dull too? Am I incapable of listening and understanding? What can I do to make sure I’m growing in maturity?
And here the answer is simple: keep on loving others, as long as life lasts.
Not study or exploring mysteries or following rituals or solitude or pilgrimage.
Loving other people is the great pilgrimage, the path to deep and lasting maturity.
Therefore, we who have fled to him for refuge can have great confidence as we hold to the hope that lies before us. This hope is a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls.
Hebrews 6
These words and metaphors have been ones I’ve found myself clinging to and meditating on through what has been a pretty rough ride in my life this year.
Fleeing to God for refuge. A hope that gives us confidence. An anchor to hold us steady.
These images have helped give my soul a sense of stability when life has felt incredibly unstable.
But I’d usually imagine the anchor holding us in place in the storm. Then I listened to Krista Tippett (host of On Being) interview Kate Bowler (host of Everything Happens). Kate was diagnosed with terminal cancer as a young mother at 35. Somehow, she’s still here, and so her take on “Hope” carries extra weight.
Tippett: What at this point is your working definition of hope?
Bowler: I think before I would’ve said it was something like certainty. I might have looked from a doctrinal perspective and been like, “Well, Krista, thank you for asking, I actually have six things about God I’d love to tell you.” Because depending on your story of faith, it’s a long timescale — that it’s the consummation of the earth and the great triumph of good over evil, et cetera, et cetera. But I think hope now feels like God and love is like an anchor that’s dropped way in the future. And I’m just, along with everyone else, being slowly pulled toward it. And that feeling won’t always feel like the details of my life have somehow clicked into place and that I get to feel the fullness of my life. But that, ultimately, that this is a good story. It’s just not only mine.
Not an anchor holding us in place, but “an anchor that’s dropped way in the future. And I’m just, along with everyone else, being slowly pulled toward it.”
You have been believers so long now that you ought to be teaching others. Instead, you need someone to teach you again the basic things about God’s word. You are like babies who need milk and cannot eat solid food. For someone who lives on milk is still an infant and doesn’t know how to do what is right. Solid food is for those who are mature, who through training have the skill to recognize the difference between right and wrong.
Hebrews 5 (emphasis mine, of course. Does biblical greek even have italics?)
There’s a black-and-whiteness that many or most people bring to morality. Some things are clearly good, some things are clearly bad. Often something that’s clearly good for one person is clearly bad for another. Sometimes there’s an internal compass, “it just felt right, and I trust that“. Often there’s some external source of truth that defines what’s good or what’s not for a person. I’ve seen cheesy christian souvenirs that say “the bible said it, I believe it, that settles it”.
Like it’s that easy. 🤷♂️
I appreciate the writer of Hebrews reminding us that knowing the difference between right and wrong is a skill, and a sign of maturity. It’s not all easy and straight forward, it requires training.
It’s interesting thinking about the ethical dilemmas the early church stressed about – divorce and remarriage, eating food sacrificed to idols, sharing meals with different ethnic / religious groups.
In the book of Mark there’s a story where Jesus is teaching on divorce and remarriage:
Whoever divorces his wife and marries someone else commits adultery against her. And if a woman divorces her husband and marries someone else, she commits adultery.
We started with a clear-cut, black and white moral statement. And now there’s an exception. Then Paul, addressing a specific circumstance in a specific church, adds another, for when the other person doesn’t follow the same Christian way of life, and doesn’t see marriage the same way and they walk away:
(But if the husband or wife who isn’t a believer insists on leaving, let them go. In such cases the believing husband or wife is no longer bound to the other, for God has called you to live in peace.)
I feel like more nuance might have come out if you asked either Jesus or Paul about situations like domestic abuse…
They’re trying to make a point: marriage is important! It’s sacred! We should value it way more than the surrounding culture! But there also needs to be maturity to be able to recognise the difference between right and wrong, simple rules interpreted simply don’t always cut it.
Endless equivocating and avoiding moral absolutes, and taking an “anything goes” approach also feels like a trap. The wisdom here is not “recognise there is no difference between right and wrong”. That’s not what was said.
Instead, it’s recognising there is a difference, and that with training and skill and maturity, that for a given situation you can know the difference, find what is right, and you can choose to do what is right, to live righteously.
That’s hard work. But it’s a sign of maturity. Let’s train in it.
“On Being with Krista Tippett” has long been my favourite podcasts, and this interview with Barbara Brown Taylor is a new favourite episode. In their conversation they follow Taylor’s life and some of her teaching, exploring the wandering and wilderness of a life of faith, the idea of the body, ecology and the incarnation being crucial to spiritual life, and what “the death of God” and “the death of the church” look like in a world where churches are emptying but “spiritual but not religious” or “none” just don’t do justice to the new thing that people are seeking and experiencing.
I think it is so true that people are talking about loss of faith, loss of God, and I think it’s loss of church. I really think it’s church that’s suffering now. And it was suffering long before COVID put it in isolation. But I think a lot of people during that couple of years, I’ve talked to them, who discovered either how eager they were to get back or that they weren’t going back. So I do think this is about church. And I didn’t understand Altizer this way, and his colleagues. He wasn’t the only guy. He just got famous for saying, “God is dead.”
But I remember not too long ago looking back into that theology again, and realized that at least some of those people were talking about God emptying God’s self into the world. That’s a familiar thing for people who’ve been initiated into Christian language, that Jesus poured himself into the world, emptied himself into the world. So I am intrigued by the idea of what it means for the church to be emptying now. And I am still naïve enough to believe…
… I trust the Holy Spirit, Krista. That’s where I’m still real religious, is I still trust that wind that blows things around, and you don’t know where it came from and you don’t know where it goes, but it’s going to blow. And it’s blowing all the time.
“Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion, during the time of testing in the wilderness, where your ancestors tested and tried me, though for forty years they saw what I did. That is why I was angry with that generation; I said, ‘Their hearts are always going astray, and they have not known my ways.’ So I declared on oath in my anger, ‘They shall never enter my rest.’ ”
There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from their works, just as God did from his. Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will perish by following their example of disobedience.
When I was a teenager I got a birthday card. There were messages in the card from a few different staff and leaders at my church, but one of the messages was only two words, and they’re the only two words I still remember from it.
Stay soft. -Ads
Adam – a friend and a church leader I looked up to – would often talk about the importance of keeping your heart soft, responsive to God, not being hard-hearted. When he picked those two words to write to me, I took them to heart, and it’s been a formative posture for me, a big part of shaping who I am now.
And that’s the message coming out from this passage in Hebrews too: stay soft.
The couple of verses I’ve quoted are part of the passage I remembered that originally drew me back into reading the bible earlier this year. Our family life has been a real struggle, and we have been exhausted and depleted, and the promise of a sabbath rest, some kind of deep, fulfilling rest, and a call to enter that rest, sprung out of my memory and, like a siren song – so appealing and so urgent – its words drew me back into this passage, and back into the bible.
Do not harden your hearts.
Stay soft.
Not like in the rebellion, the time of testing in the wilderness.
The psalm being quoted actually includes the names “Meribah” and “Massah”, which suggests its probably referring to the twostories where the Israelites have run out of water in the dessert and are wishing they were back in the Egypt, the land of their slavery, because at least there was water there. In both stories Moses strikes a rock with his staff, and miraculously, water comes out – enough for the whole community.1 While much of the commentary on this story is about if Moses did something wrong, Numbers 20:13 puts the focus on the people not trusting God:
This place was known as the waters of Meribah (which means “arguing”) because there the people of Israel argued with the LORD.
And that’s what both the psalm and the book of Hebrews seem to focus on too: the community of Israel didn’t trust God to look after them and give them water.
Despite all the miracles they’d seen so far – “for forty years they saw what I did” – they didn’t trust they’d be provided for. They’d rather go back to slavery because they knew there was an agreement there – they’d do work and they’d get water and food.
All the miracles and provision that came during their time in the desert had not helped them internalise that God would provide for them, and so they kept trying to make other plans. “They have not known my ways, their hearts are always going astray”.
They shall never enter my rest.
Brutal.2
But in Hebrews, the author tries to remind us that they think we’ve still got a better offer open: “Dear friends, even though we are talking this way, we really don’t believe it applies to you.” (Hebrews 6:10).
There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God… Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest…
The point being made in Hebrews is about an eternal Sabbath, a permanent rest, full of joy and liveliness and deep delight, that lasts forever – not just the weekly rhythm and the seventh day. But as I’ve been dwelling on this passage in Hebrews, and this rallying cry to “stay soft”, I realised that a weekly Sabbath practice can be a part of keeping a soft heart.
Here’s how I see it:
God was doing work among their people, and they saw it.
But they did not know God’s ways – they never took it in, never seeing it or beginning to understand who God is and how God works, never internalising it, never learning to live in a way that trusted God’s working.
So they argued with God, and made other plans.
And so they never entered the promised land, or the promised rest.
…
So, we don’t want to harden our hearts. We want to stay soft. What can we actually do?
When I was in my early twenties I ran a fortnightly small group meeting for young adults in my church, and there was about 30 of us, and to facilitate some kind of conversation that attuned us to what God was doing, I would ask everyone to break up into groups of two or three, and ask a question to each other: where did you notice God this week?
There’s a similar question I ask myself in an end-of-day “Examen” reflective exercise I do, at least when I’m not so tired I fall asleep instantly:
Where have I felt true joy today? What has troubled me today? What has challenged me today? Where and when did I pause today? Have I noticed God’s presence in any of this?
And when you do, your heart rate shifts. Your thoughts shift. You stop problem solving and stop rushing and stop striving and … notice things. Notice the things that brought you joy. The smile from a kid, or the sunshine through the window. You notice the things that were really hard. The words spoken that pierce your heart and cause your stomach to churn. You notice where God’s presence was in it all.
You see, when you’re so focused on what you have to do, it’s easy to miss what others are also doing, easy to miss what’s going on around you, or what’s already happened. This is why gratitude is such an important practice. But more than just the gratitude, there’s the stopping. The ceasing.
When we cease our work, we have the opportunity to see what God is doing, and to know God’s ways, and to stay soft.
In Marva Dawn’s classic book on Sabbath3, she talks about what the Sabbath is for:
Its Ceasing deepens our repentance for the many ways that we fail to trust God and try to create our own future.
Its Resting strengthens our faith in the totality of his grace.
Its Embracing invites us to take the truths of our faith and apply them practically in our values and lifestyles.
Its Feasting heightens our sense of eschatological hope — the Joy of our present experience of God’s love and its foretaste of the Joy to come.
Ceasing from “the many ways we fail to trust God and try to create our own future”.
We’re so damn busy trying to create our own future, that we don’t even notice the future God is creating right around us. We have not known his ways.
Ceasing on the Sabbath is an antidote to that, a weekly chance to stay soft, to notice God, and to know God’s ways, and to live in trust. And from there we can move to experience the resting and embracing and feasting too.
And as we practice Sabbath each week, it is indeed practice for that greater rest that is talked about in Hebrews 4.
So I’d encourage you, make every effort to enter that rest. Practice for it by practicing the Sabbath.
One day a week, cease your work.
Notice instead where God is working.
Learn to trust God’s ways.
Stay soft.
Footnotes
The “water from the rock” stories are super interesting. In the Numbers 20 version, Moses is supposed to speak to the rock but instead hits it twice, the miracle happens and water comes out, but for some reason, God is pissed. God says Moses will die in the desert and not see the promised land. But no one is quite sure why God is so angry. This article has a whole gamut of theories from Rabbis who are trying to make sense of it. One particular theory from the 15th century made me laugh:
“Moses and Aaron’s sin was not particularly terrible; they merely made a mistake. However, G‑d did not want them entering the Land for other reasons. Moses, because he sent the spies, and Aaron because of his involvement, albeit unwilling, with the sin of the Golden Calf. G‑d wanted to protect Moses and Aarons’ honour, so He pretended that the rock was the reason for their punishment, to cover up the true reason.”
Also the Numbers 20 story sounds like it happened at Kadesh, right on the border of the promised land, the same place where the Israelites were when 40 years earlier they had spies come back and tell them about the promised land, and they didn’t trust God would make it theirs. In both this story and the water-from-the-rock story, God was trying to give them something good but they didn’t trust it, and wanted to go back to Egypt where they worked for the things they need.
I’ve written before about how my beliefs around hell and eternal punishment are not what most Christians might expect, and I’ve probably had a few years of having a fairly “universalist” worldview, seeing God in all different places, and so trying not to think about the reality that some people live lives in a way that is not just “a different experience of God” but is actually separate from God and that there’s a pain and despair in that. I still don’t think the dividing line of those who experience God and live in line with God is the same as what religion you put on your census form. But this experience of reading Hebrews in depth for the past few months has actually forced me to open up to that: God’s promise of entering his rest still stands, so we ought to tremble with fear that some of you might fail to experience it. (Hebrews 4:1)
One day I was looking at my parents bookshelf and I picked up “Keeping the Sabbath Wholly” by Marva J Dawn. I’m glad I did. Sabbath wasn’t a concept that was well taught in my childhood churches, and so this book was my starting point. Even read the dedication:
This book is dedicated to all the people who need the Sabbath
the busiest, who need to work from a cohesive, unfragmented self;
social activists, who need a cycle of worship and action;
those who chase after fulfillment and need to understand their deepest yearnings and to hear the silence;
those who have lost their ability to play because of the materialism and technologization of our society, who need beauty and gaiety and delight;
those who have lost their passion and need to get in touch with feelings;
those who are alone and need emotional nourishment;
those who live in community and need solitude;
those who cannot find their life’s priorities and need a new perspective;
those who think the future is dictated by the present, who need hope and visions of the future to change the present order;
those who long for deeper family life and want to nurture certain values;
the poor and the oppressed, who need to mourn and dance in the prison camp;
the rich and the oppressors, who need to learn nonviolence, stewardship, and God’s purposes in the world;
those who suffer, who need to learn how suffering can be redemptive;
professional theologians, who need to bring the heart back into theology;
those who don’t know how religion fits into the modern world, who need a relationship with God;
those who are disgusted with dry, empty, formalistic worship and want to love and adore God;
those who want to be God’s instruments, enabled and empowered by the Spirit to be world changers and Sabbath healers.
From “Keeping the Sabbath Wholly – Ceasing, Resting, Embracing, Fasting” by Marva J. Dawn.
