"Why white folks focus on dogs and yoga, while people on the low end trying to ball and get over" – Common

This quote has been on my mind ever since I started reading Shane Claibourne’s book The Irresistible Revolution. And last night I saw a picture – that looked something like this:


and the thought came to mind – what in the World is going on with the church of Jesus of Nazareth?

There are a ton of thoughts in my head tied around this one central thought that I just can't get out of my head, so I am going to put a few on the screen.

There are dogs that have health care plans and people who don’t. I thought a lot about dogs and what they have come to represent about America and our self indulgent nature, but I don't want to come across as "anti-dog" because I am not, I love dogs, and I have wanted a dog for a long time. I don't want to get caught up in a dog argument - I want to talk about our isolationist and self serving ways of living and how we avoid any reminder that people in this world are dying of preventable diseases like bad wells and malaria in Africa while we buy sweaters for our dogs.

I was watching the Jay Leno show and they were interviewing people at a Nascar event, and they asked one guy if he would rather have world peace or meet his favorite driver, and he chose meeting his favorite driver. I didn't even crack a smile, because I think he meant it.

There is another fact that haunts me in this situation is from Brian McLaren's Everything Must Change, he states that with just 10% of our US military budget - probably even less now since the book is a few years old - we could end hunger on the planet. This ties in nicely with the Mennonite Church USA's statement on the decision to send more troops into Afghanistan:
http://peace.mennolink.org/resources/afghanistan_bin_11_09.pdf

There is not a problem of scarcity - as much as our society would tell us there is. We have plenty. Plenty of money, plenty of clothes, plenty of square footage all to ourselves, plenty of food - the problem is that those who have are attempting to protect their possessions from those who don't have them or what them. So then we build bigger walls, and bigger guns to keep those who don't have away from our stuff. In many ways, my attachments to my stuff keep me from fully diving in and following God.

I am still processing all these thoughts, and I am trying to be constructive with all this instead of just being preachy. I am not saying that I shouldn't have a house or the stuff it takes to run a house, but I am saying that as Christians we are all called to die to ourselves and take up our crosses. CROSSES! Not just $26 a month to a struggling child in Zambia. I have trouble some times with the cross of using an old and relatively small tv - much less being crucified so that I may be of use to God.

Sharing/Borrowing as a Spiritual Discipine

I have been participating a loosely connected intentional community with several other Christians. One of the practices that we talked about using was sharing resources. With my anti-consumerist leanings, the idea of using products people owned instead of buying additional products sounded very practical and beneficial, and I didn’t see it as a spiritual discipine at all. My wife and I have many of those little things that people only occasionally need: sewing machine, an extra 100 feet of hose (got it out of the trash), some camping gear, etc. We love being able to share our things. It just made sense, but didn’t look like a spiritual practice to me.

That was until some one else had something I wanted. I have just recently taken to bike camping – where you get to the campsite on a bike, and strap everything you need right on the bike. So one family in our intentional community has a wonderful, light, and tiny tent. I used it for my first trip this year and it worked great! The consumer/independent person in me says that I should get one of my own. But they tell me that I am welcome to use it any time (and I am positive that they mean that). The chances that we would both be camping the same weekend is relatively low, but for some reason I can’t help but look at similar tents in my spare time and then look for deals on Craig’s List.

Now that I have wanted to use it for a third time, I realized that I really hate having to ask to borrow things. It is not like they give me a guilt trip, or that I don’t like loaning our things out to other people. There is something oddly humbling about borrowing other peoples’ things. Through this experience, I can see sharing very clearly as a spiritual practice/discipline.

There is a huge difference between loaning out my stuff, and asking some one else for theirs. When you are the loaner, you are the one in some way with the power. We also get to be the “generous” person and not the needy one. When we loan other people our stuff we can kid ourselves and tell ourselves that we are not an obligation, but that is not the case. Children are an obligation to their parents, parents become an obligation to their children, husbands to wives and the body of the church to God.

There are two specific thoughts I have around this whole thing:

1. There are some monastic communities who obtain their food by begging.
2. When we visited Reba Place Fellowship in Evanston Illinois (a Mennonite Intentional Community) we learned a lot about sharing. This community has many members who share a common purse. Their paychecks go directly to the community and they are given stipends. The individuals don’t technically own anything – the community does. As we were talking about the challenging nature of this with members of the community David Janzen said something like “It is easier to let Jesus be Lord over the things that you hold in common.” I don’t want Jesus to be Lord over the tent. I want to be Lord over the tent.

Two Jobs

I have officially been working two jobs for the past month. One is my corporate job - 32 hours there - and the other is the part time interim admin at Solomon's Porch.

It has been great to help get the books and other record keeping information up to date at the Porch and feels good to put together some systems for getting stuff done quickly so that this job can live a little less in the grey area. My head has been spinning a little bit, but I am better busy, than I am with free time - so it is generally a good thing for me.

Needless to say, my job search for another church has been a bit delayed. I talked recently to an existing church - and after a phone call and email was interested in the position. Upon reading their website - I found one of the "deal breakers" in their belief statement. It is something that many many wonderful churches have as part of their fait statement, but is just does not sit well with me. I am sensing less and less that there is a church out there who is looking for some one like me - or that I will find a church that matches anything I am looking for.

I believe the type of Christian community I would like to be a part of - wouldn't be looking out side of the community for their next pastor. If resume qualifications are what they are looking for - then they don't understand the work of God and purpose of the Church universal in they way that I do.

Busy/Exciting Week

We just returned from the annual Solomon's Porch Lake Beauty Fall retreat. It was great. Here are some pictures that my friend Jon White took of the weekend:
http://www.jonwhitestudio.com/photo/07c_retreat.php

I am also preaching at Solomon's Porch this Sunday and next. I am preaching on Acts 13 & 14 this Sunday and next Sunday will be either 15 and maybe 16. We are trying to get a live webcam up in the gathering space, and I just might be the first person live on the internet from Solomon's Porch.

We also have a visitor coming in from Missouri for a Celtic Chrisitanity conference - who has been involved in intentional communities - so we are looking forward to having conversations with him about his experiences in different types of missional life.

Yoga and Christianity

It seems that every one is weighing in on this Christianity/Yoga debate, so I figured I would speak my mind on the conversation. I agree with some of the critiques of Doug that he spoke naïvely about yoga in the new program, and about yoga’s potential to distract people from God. I believe that we must be aware that when we borrow/reappropriate things from other cultures, belief systems, and religions that they can have elements which distract from God. I believe that Doug’s apparent naïveté comes from the great experience he and others around him have had with using yoga stretches and poses to connect with the goodness of God’s creation – and with the harmony of God’s love for the world and all that God has created.

It is very good for our faith and our experience of God to be more than just intellectual, but to also be physical. The problem is that much of the Judeo-Christian practices of physical prayer and meditation have been lost. Many of these practices didn’t fit in to Christianity any more because neo-platonic equations were imposed on Christian thought. Simply put the thought goes something like this: God = good And earth = bad. Thus: God has little or nothing to do with our physical existence here and now. This is how MacArthur lays the foundation of his argument against yoga. God’s separation from us is not a Biblical concept, but instead based on Greek philosophy (I will talk a little more on that later.)

If we have lost our traditional physical ways of connecting with God in our world and with God’s creation (part of which is our bodies that are created in the image of God) we should find ways to do that: being fully conscious that this practice is for the Glory of The One True God. The Triune God. There is no other God before God.

The main argument against yoga is that it distracts people from God, because Yoga is the product of another religion/philosophy. This for me is where the argument against yoga loses all of its steam. Christianity as most of us modern day Christians express it is anything but pure in origin.

We can look at Neo-Platonism and how it completely changed Christian thought: Augustine’s neo-platonic background colored deeply all of his theology, which has in turn shaped nearly all theology since then. This was a religion/philosophy that was part of a polytheistic society, which lead many away from Christianity and justified persecution of our Christian and Jewish forefathers. We can look at the celebration of Easter. The word “Easter” comes from the name of a pagan fertility Goddess, hence all the eggs and (fertile) bunnies – we attached the birth of Christ onto a pagan festival so that the Christian faith could reach more people. Good or bad, this is where our current faith stands.

Christmas’ rampant materialism clearly distracts people from seeking God. Many of us Christians are more upset by stores not saying “Merry Christmas” then we are about the fact that our High Holy Holiday celebrating the birth of our Lord is used to increase profit margins. We can even look at the philosophy of pure reason which underlies much of science. This philosophy has taken many people’s thoughts and eyes away from God, but very few are the Christians who won’t use electronics, cars, mobile phones because they grow out of a culture that make logic and reason its gods.

The purity of Christian practice is a myth, so arguing against yoga from that foundation is extremely flawed. However, if we borrow poses and stretches from other cultures/religions/philosophies we must not ignore their source completely (as it Doug appears to do in the interview) but we must be honest about where they come from, and how we are allocating them for a new purpose.

Not much Theology

I know I have been doing a lot of video posts lately, and haven't babbled on and on about theology. Don't know if any one misses that, but I have been conversing with a friend of a bit more SBC persuasion about a video on the web of my church, Solomon's Porch. If you are thirsting for something a little more heavy and insightful, take a look:

http://caneday.blogspot.com/2007/02/solomons-porch-video.html

The video is right there on his sight, it was done by Allen Keating-Moore, a member of the community - and it looks like he talked to a bunch of people in our congregation about why they are part of our "holistic, missional, Christian community", and not a more traditional church.