in this amazing book ‘Exiles’ by Michael Frost i am reading i came upon this quote today by antoine de saint-exupery – ‘If you want to build a ship, don’t summon people to buy wood, prepare tools, distribute jobs and organise the work. Teach people the yearning for the wide, boundless ocean.’
if they build it they will come kind of idea – another move in the big what is church wrestling currently taking place all over the world…
my friend sean tucker wrote a great note on this – check it out:
busy reading ‘Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture’ by Michael Frost and have little bits of paper and elastoplasts stuck within the pages where i really thort it was profound or spot on (if it was my book it would be folded pages but it’s not – it belongs to the theological library of stellenbosch which has absolutely no relevance so shut up already) and this was one of those pages:
From the chapter titled ‘Following Jesus into Exile’
‘Jesus humility is commended to us insofar as it is expressed in His commitments to identification and relinquishment. First, to follow Jesus’ example means that we should share His profoundly humble identification with sinful mankind (Phil 2.7b-8a). Second, those of us who wish to emulate Jesus should be aware of His equally humble willingness to empty Himself and make Himself nothing for the sake of God’s redemptive purposes (Phil 2.6-7a). The greatest example of both is His humiliating death on the cross (Phil 2.8b). To embrace an incarnational ministry, then, involves a willingness to relinquish our own desires and interests in the service of others. Of course, our suffering doesn’t atone for the sins of others, as Christ’s did, but our self-emptying or sacrificial love will direct people to the higher and more efficacious sacrifice of Christ. The exile will be called to also suffer, relinquishing wealth, worldly power, and position. Pity, condescension, or paternalism misses the mark; only a compassion that acts is acceptable in incarnational ministry. Thus, following Jesus’ example, incarnational Christian witness will include the following four aspects:
[1] An active sharing of life, participating in the fears, frustrations, and afflictions of the host community. The prayer of the exile should be, “Lord, let Your mind be in me,” for no witness is capable of incarnationality without the mind of Jesus.
[2] An employment of the language and thought forms of those with whom we seek to share Jesus. After all, He used common speech and stories: salt, light, fruit, birds, and the like. He seldom used theological or religious jargon or technical terms.
[3] A preparedness to go to the people, not expecting them to come to us. As Jesus came from the heavens to humanity, we enter into the “tribal” realities of human society.
[4] A confidence that the gospel can be communicated by ordinary means, through acts of servanthood, loving relationships, good deeds; in this way the exile becomes an extension of the incarnation in our time. Deeds thus create words.
So, if we take the incarnation seriously, we must take seriously the call to live incarnationally – right up close, near to those whom God desires to redeem. We cannot demonstrate Christlikeness at a distance from those whom we feel called to serve. We need to get close enough to people that our lives rub up against their lives, and that they see the incarnated Christ in our values, beliefs, and practices as expressed in cultural forms that make sense and convey impact.
When one theologian emailed me about what he believed to be my inappropriate use of the term “incarnational,” I replied by asking him what term he would use to describe the biblical, Christian impulse to draw near to those who didn’t know Christ, and for him to give me examples of how he did this in his own life and ministry. He didn’t reply. I’ve come to discover that there is a whole world of professional Christians who live primarily in the church or the Christian academy, and who determine what is the so-called true and proper terminology or the correct biblical procedure for mission, but who never seem to embody the ideas that they describe. On the other hand, there are theologically untrained people who are reading the Bible and intuiting new ways to create proximity with not-yet-Christians. These exiles often don’t feel appreciated or understood by the conventional church. They have been marginalised by their other Christian friends who thought their ideas or lifestyle too radical or too unsafe to accommodate. But they are on to something, and in their unorthodox practice reside the seeds of the survival of the Christian movement.’
i really really really like that, especially the four numbered points and the truth in this last paragraph… deeds thus create words. Mm. Yum
i have just started reading a book called ‘Exiles – Living Missionally in a Post Christian Culture’ by Michael Frost and wow i am really digging it – read it!
christians like to throw around the phrase ‘Jesus was fully man and fully God’ and that has never made sense to me – i understand that a carrot can be fully a vegetable and fully a food because both things are the same and one is actually a subcategory of the other (um if you’re not sure which one is which then this blog probly isn’t for you – go find something with pictures you can ‘ooh aah’ at) – but being fully God contradicts being fully man and vice versa. And so it has never sat well with me and it is also something that can’t – i don’t think – be backed up by scripture – it’s just one of those things that someone heard once from someone else and so it’s true and so we hold to its being true but we don’t really know why and we don’t really question
[and just to fully p.s. myself i don’t think it really matters either way – feels like one of those christian arguments people might fight duels to the death over like predestination and how the end times are going to play out which don’t really have any effect on how we live now so it doesn’t really matter but is an interesting thort to get your head round all the same]
anyways i really like how this book describes the whole concept. picture a picture (ooh, come back picture bloggists, this is for you after all) of a circle with Jesus in it and fully human and fully divine in it – that seems to be how the majority of people view this thing. then, the picture that i ascribe more to [which, yes, really doesn’t matter] is a picture of two circles – one with Jesus as human, one with Jesus as Divine – which overlap each other in the middle – so some bits of Jesus that were simply Jesus as Divine and some bits of Jesus that were Jesus as human and then this middle section which overlaps where Jesus is shown to be a bit of both
Michael Frost talks about how the place of incarnation (divine becoming human, so the overlap) is a dangerous place:
‘Probably the most dangerous aspect of the Christ story is the very nature of the incarnation itself. Jesus models that it is possible to be both God and human at the same time. This is for us, certainly, the most terrifying thought. Throughout history the church has retreated into deifying Jesus so thoroughly that the human Christ can’t be seen [actually maybe this is where this line of thinking actually does make a difference – brett]. If indeed Jesus is too human (or barely human at all) He calls from me a worrying response. He challenges my humanness and demands more from me than I can imagine offering. An overly deified Christ reduces my perceived response. To this otherworldly, superspiritual Jesus I simply have to offer my devotion, my worship, my adoration. By the grubby, human, peasant Jesus I am challenged that maybe it is possible to be human and Godlike after all. Nowhere in Scripture is this more disturbingly presented than in Jesus’ return to His hometown after the beginning of His messianic ministry. There, Jesus began teaching in the synagogue and received what to me has always seemed a deeply shocking response. The locals, His old boyhood friends and neighbours, are offended and say,
“Where did this man get the wisdom and these miraculous powers? Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother’s name Mary, and aren’t his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas? Aren’t all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all these things?” [Matthew 13.54b-56]
How distressing to us that Jesus could be the Messiah, the human incarnation of God, second person of the Trinity for thirty years and no one at home noticed! No one in Nazareth smiles knowingly and says, “I always suspected there was something strange about that kid.” Instead they wonder where he got all this messianic stuff. Somehow Jesus could be fully God and blend into Galilean society – hardly the most pious or sophisticated culture – without creating a ripple. This perspective on the incarnation bothers us because it dangerously invites us to follow Christ in all his ordinariness as well as His righteousness. The incarnation demands that we neither retreat into a holier-than-thou Christian ghetto nor give ourselves over to the values of secular culture. And let’s be honest: this is the most dangerous place of all. It is easier to imagine and embrace a closed fundamentalism that retreats into a Christ-against-culture mindset. We can picture Jesus there, all holy and pure, unsullied by the world around Him. We can also understand the capitulation to our host culture that some christians make. It would be easy to join those christians who abandon themselves to materialism, greed, and selfishness.
When responding as exiles in a post-Christian world, we are used to seeing some respond with despair and grief (the fundamentalists) and others with assimilation to the dominant values. What is much more disturbing to us is the example of a God who does neither, but instead answers with a fresh, imaginative, theological response. Jesus neither slides into compromise and sinfulness, nor fulfils our expectations of the holier-than-thou guru. The fact that both Matthew and Mark include this episode in their biographies of Jesus is remarkable. The story almost completely undermines claims about the divinity of Jesus. It is included because it is a dangerous memory for followers of Christ. We are called, like Christ, to be godly, but we are expected to live it out fully in the midst of others. There is no more dangerous path than the one trodden by Jesus.’
wow. wow. wow.
to sum up my feelings on the circle overlap – for me the fact that Jesus had to eat and drink and go to the toilet makes Him human and not God (God doesn’t have to do that) and the fact that He performed miracles and was resurrected makes Him God and not human (humans can’t do that) but the fact that He did the miraculous stuff while doing the every day stuff while limited to a human body makes Him both God and human with bits of overlap. semantics perhaps but perhaps also not – he showed that it is possible to live that life which is the thing that needs to hit me squarely . between the eyes, and does.
Irresistibly Fish 