Monthly Archives: February 2012
Lessons Learned in Prison — Part 1
“We can never achieve this ‘wholeness’ simply by ourselves, but only together with others.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote these words while experiencing an intense lack of daily Christian community during his time in prison. In honor of Bonhoeffer’s birthday this past Saturday, I’ve decided to take you lovely readers on a tour this week of Life Together, The Cost of Discipleship, Ethics, and Letters and Papers from Prison to discover what Bonhoeffer had to say about what it means to live in community as the body of Christ.
Bonhoeffer has so much to say about community, but I’ve chosen to break down his requirements for healthy community life into three categories. We’ll look at the first one today.
1) Jesus as the mediator
This sub-theme is prevalent throughout Bonhoeffer’s writings, so its importance to his understanding of community cannot be denied. In Life Together, his manual for living in community, Bonhoeffer writes, “Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ” and later reiterates, “Only in Jesus Christ are we one, only through him are we bound together. To eternity he remains the one Mediator.”
In his book Discipleship, Bonhoeffer describes this concept in more detail: “But it is precisely this same mediator who…becomes the basis for entirely new community….He separates, but he also unites. He cuts off every direct path to someone else, but he guides everyone following him to the new and the true way to the other person via the mediator.”
This concept of Jesus as mediator has a profound impact on the way we interact with others. Bonhoeffer writes that “everything should happen only through [Jesus]. He stands not only between me and God, he also stands between me and the world, between me and other people and things…between person and person, and between person and reality.”
The effort to continually invite Jesus to stand in our midst and mediate between us and whoever we are with has the opportunity to make us increasingly mindful of Jesus’ presence in our lives as we live among fellow Christians. If Jesus mediates for us not only with God but also with people, then all the commands and requirements of a holy Christian life are made possible.
Suddenly, it is not the effort in our own power to intellectually strive for righteous living. “This [realization],” as Bonhoeffer explains, “leads us away from any kind of abstract ethic and towards an ethic which is entirely concrete.”
Community is, then, the conscious invitation to Jesus to enter into our lives in this physical, tangible way and be the filter through which we live and experience life. With Jesus standing between us and the world, we are able to guard our tongues and practice self-discipline because our words and actions must pass through Jesus to get to the world.
Likewise, we are able to forgive, to give up our own rights, and to suffer injustice because the words and actions of the world must pass through Jesus to get to us. What a different way of experiencing life!
Bonhoeffer notes, “The way to one’s neighbor leads only through Christ. That is why intercession is the most promising way to another person, and common prayer in Christ’s name is the most genuine community.” When we are interacting with each other through Christ, we are in community the way Jesus exemplified when he came to live among us.
Truly this intentional living in community through Jesus is the way to understand the freedom and abundance of life that Jesus arrived in human flesh to make possible for us. Truly this is how peace, grace, mercy, and agape-love are made manifest on earth. As Bonhoeffer stresses, “Jesus Christ alone is our unity.”
Tomorrow, we’ll look at the second category: discipleship.
Forward Friday: Tell a Story; Hear a Story
This week we’ve been talking about sharing our stories as part of what it means to be the body of Christ, the community of God, in the world. For today’s Forward Friday, let’s remain mindful of growing into a more holistic body theology by participating in the body of Christ through story. Here are two ways you can keep moving forward.
1) Tell a Story
And by this I mean tell your story to someone else. If you have a deep, vulnerable story to share, something that’s been weighing on your or burning in you, find a friend with whom you feel safe and who will keep your story confidential. Notice how, as you share your story, you are sharing a part of who you are with another person. Allow the story to help foster community between you and strengthen your friendship.
If you aren’t ready to share something deep and vulnerable, don’t give up. Share a funny story, your most embarrassing moment, or your favorite childhood memory. Not every story has to be deep and vulnerable or about sin and shame in order to foster closer community. As we share our stories with others, we create space for others to share their stories in return. Learning more about who we are as a community of God helps us to be more connected and more real as the body of Christ in the world.
If you aren’t comfortable sharing your story with a member of your church community, come back and share it here in the comments section. This blog is a safe space, too. Or you are welcome to email me at lauraknowlescavanaugh@gmail.com if you prefer to share privately. I always enjoy making new friends and strengthening existing friendships!
2) Hear a Story
And by this I mean hear the story of someone in your community. It’s all well and good to watch films like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, but unless you bring that experience of story home to your community, you won’t see any real change. Make time to hear the story of someone you know. Notice how, as they share their story with you, they are sharing a part of who they are with you, too. Allow the story to help foster community between you and strengthen your friendship.
Before you hear someone else’s story, create space for that story to be told. This can happen in a number of ways.
If you are a small group leader, you might have a “story night” and ask all your participants to think of a story that shares something new about themselves with the group and have popcorn and soda to help keep the atmosphere light as people share. (If people are sharing vulnerable stories, be sure to state up front that you are creating a safe space and that everything shared in the group will be kept confidential. Encourage participants to listen with openness and love and to avoid judgmental facial expressions or responses to any story shared.)
If you are part of a more relaxed church community, try having a “story night” as part of your worship experience.
If you prefer a one-on-one experience, invite a friend or fellow community member over for coffee or tea.
Remember that as we create space for others to share their stories, they may be more open to hearing our stories in return. Learning more about who we are as a community of God helps us to be more connected and more real as the body of Christ in the world.
Following the Example of Jesus
Community is about being part of each other’s stories. When God decided to break the 400-year silence and reestablish communication with humanity, God didn’t just bellow from heaven. God actually came to earth to share in our story, becoming one of us to relate to us on our most intimate level—relationally. John’s gospel begins with the announcement of the best news we’ve ever received: the Word became flesh and lived among us. We are relational creatures, designed to respond to the incarnation of Christ in the person of Jesus. We are created to relate to each other through story, so Jesus related to the Jewish community in just that way: he told stories.
The gospel writers preserved for us in written form examples of the stories among different Christian groups about who Jesus was and what he said and did that was so life-changing. These books are not police printouts with Jesus’ specifics so that he can be recognized wherever he goes. They are stories, narratives—each written from a different perspective and with a different purpose according to the communities each author was a part of.
Mark, whose gospel is generally accepted as the earliest written record of the oral tradition about Jesus, wrote his story to Gentile believers who had little understanding of the Jewish tradition. Luke was also probably concerned with a Gentile audience, but Matthew, on the other hand, clearly geared his story toward Jewish believers who needed no such explanations. John’s gospel is probably the most obvious example of the way a story can affirm a community’s identity since most scholars agree that he wrote for a particular group of Jewish Christians who had been ostracized from the synagogue.
Stories not only help us relate to each other, but they also give an account of who we are; our stories are part of our identity. The gospel writers chose carefully what to include in their accounts of Jesus’ life in order to preserve and perpetuate the identity of each community. But this technique is not lost on us today. Think of all the memoirs written in recent years. As we get older and reflect on the wisdom of our lives, we don’t want to share a list of dos and don’ts with those who will come after us; we want to preserve our identities as a legacy, the story of our lives for those lives coming after us. We are not designed to relate to rules of behavior; we want stories, understand stories, think in stories, and relate to each other through the shared story of our lives together.
Story is universal. The desire to connect with others, the desire for community life and personal relationships, the desire for spiritual encounters that involve experience rather than knowledge—these desires are not being filled in today’s consumerist society. All around the world people are seeking relational fulfillment. If we weren’t, online networks like Facebook wouldn’t be so successful. We yearn to share ourselves with each other. Stories are the entry point into the vulnerability necessary to wipe out loneliness and the burden of shame so many people carry in secret. It is the call of the Christian community to build relationships by following the example of Jesus, by telling stories and by becoming part of the story of humanity.
The gospels invite readers to enter their world, to listen to Jesus’ words, to watch his great deeds, to appreciate their understanding of him, and to ask ourselves the same questions as the people in the text…In other words, they are portraits which invite us to respond by joining in the picture. ~ Richard Burridge, Four Gospels, One Jesus?
We, as the community of God, need to learn how to tap into that vision and invite people to join in the picture. We do that by practicing telling our stories, personal and biblical, that join into God’s story—the one we are all a part of, as a community of believers. If we really want to know each other, and if we really want to know God, we have to tell our stories. Without them, we lose the power of truth discovered together. And without them, the Christian community is nothing more than a building with a bunch of chairs facing all in one direction.
Community truly is about being part of each other’s stories. Relationship requires interaction, vulnerability, and the space to share with one another in the one way we all relate to: story.
Why Jesus Taught In Parables
Yesterday we looked at how story can be used to share truth in a way that can be more easily received or just more beautifully and creatively shared. Today, let’s look at the example Jesus gave us for sharing truth through story: parables.
There are a lot of scholarly arguments out there for why Jesus spoke in parables, and I encourage you to study up if you’re interested in further analysis. For my purposes regarding holistic body theology and what we do with our bodies in the world, I have four reasons to share with you today.
Jesus spoke in parables…
1) so that only those whose hearts were ready would understand. Part of Jesus’ reason for sharing truth in parables was to fulfill the Isaiah’s prophecy that some would hear and not understand (Is 6:9-10; Mt 13:13-15). In fact, Jesus even used a parable to explain why he spoke in parables in Luke 8:4-15. As he later explained to his disciples, the hearts that were ready to hear God’s truth would understand, and the seed of truth would take root in their hearts and grow (vs. 15).
Sometimes we’re not ready to hear a truth from God. Maybe we’re locked in sinful behavior. Maybe we’re overcome with guilt and shame. Maybe we’re already wrestling with different truth from God, and adding one more would be too much all at once. God knows us intimately, from the hairs on our heads to the deepest secrets we won’t even admit to ourselves. God knows just when to reveal truth to us, when we’re finally ready to receive it and make use of it in our lives, and that revelation will never come too soon…or too late.
2) so that there would be more room for people to relate to the story in different ways. Most of the time, when Jesus told a parable, he was speaking to a crowd of people. These people were made up of both men and women, children and adults, poor and wealthy, religious leaders and laypeople. Often when Jesus was teaching, he had a different message for each audience, but rather than address each group individually, which would have taken forever, Jesus told one story that would teach each group a different lesson.
Take, for example, the parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10:25-37). Now, Jesus is speaking to the “expert in the law,” so the most obvious meaning of the parable is directed at people who fit in that category. But not everyone listening to the story was an expert in the law. Should they have just watched a fly land on some bread or pick blades of grass while Jesus was teaching a lesson that didn’t apply to them?
Consider the characters in this story:
a traveler – the victim of multiple crimes
a group of robbers – the perpetrators, motivated by greed (maybe hatred or anger) but not brave enough to act alone
a priest – the “man of God” who was more concerned about keeping the letter of the law (blood was considered “unclean” and required purification rituals) than showing compassion
a Levite – the member of the “priestly” clan, see above, also a man of importance and influence in the community
a Samaritan – the member of a group hated by Jewish people for their conflicting beliefs on correct worship of God who provided sacrificially to help the traveler despite racisim
an inkeeper – the man who provided the means to help the traveler heal, but only because he was paid
Ask yourself, who would you be in the story? Be honest. Maybe you take advantage of people when they’re vulnerable. Maybe you feel working with victims is beneath you or too much trouble. Maybe you are willing to help, but only if you get something back.
Jesus’ parables are multidimensional, multilayered, and designed with every member of the audience in mind–not just the people present on the hillside that day, but the people who have been reading the parables for centuries after.
3) so that he could get to the deeper truth behind the black-and-white Jewish law in a short time. For all his 33 years on earth, Jesus only spent 3 years in ministry. In only three years, Jesus had to squeeze in all the truth and promise and love available to the community of God in the present time and in all the time to come. Jesus had only three years to usher in the kingdom of God. And that was before the Internet and Skype and media and blogs and all the technological advances of our day. Jesus had only three years to bring the truth to the world, and he had to depend on human minds and hands to remember his teachings and write them down for future generations.
At the time that Jesus was teaching, Jewish law had expanded from the 10 Commandments of Moses’ time to hundreds of detailed, specific laws for every daily action, word, and thought. If Jewish law were a funnel, the 10 Commandments would be at the broad end at the top, and the law in Jesus’ day would be the little tip at the bottom. They had a law for everything, an exhaustive list of dos and don’ts that spanned a person’s entire existence from birth to death. So when Jesus showed up in town and started teaching, the experts wanted to know what laws Jesus was upholding, what laws he was breaking, and why.
But Jesus reminded his listeners in Matthew 5:17 that he had come to fulfill the law, to bring God’s truth for righteous living to its fullest completion, in freedom. That’s a tall order for only three years of ministry. Jesus’ parables were a way to reach down into the deeper truth of God, cutting through the black-and-white theology of their day. By refusing to engage in endless debate, Jesus was able to leave a timeless message of love, grace, and mercy through story.
4) so that human beings with human ears could through a human story relate to the divine truth in the human/divine Jesus. More than anything else, Jesus’ parables are a reflection of God’s choice to relate to us through the Incarnation. God sent Jesus–the Truth–in human form to walk like us, talk like us, and be like us. Jesus, the divine/human being, chose to speak to us in story, with human characters and a divine message. Our Emmanuel, this God-with-us, chose to bridge the gap between divine truth and human understanding with stories that allow us to meditate, ruminate, debate, delve, dwell, and finally discover some kernel of the Truth that God loves us, knows us intimately, and designed us to love and know God and each other in just the same way. The story of God is more than just written words in the Bible; the Word of God came as living flesh to live out the story of God among us.
If that doesn’t get you excited, I don’t know what will. Tomorrow we’ll take a look at how we can follow Jesus’ example to love and know intimately our brothers and sisters in the community of God, the body of Christ.
Holistic Body Theology 