the drum|rob fairbanks

The Reconciliation of All Things

"The Church is not to be defined by what it is,

but by that End to which it moves."

Lesslie Newbigin

What will the end times be like? Not the tribulation, scary stuff, frightenly described in Revelation…or the “Left Behind” series. A bloody moon, catastrophic wars, demons thrown into lakes of fire…not that part, but afterwards when God makes all things right. It says that there will be a new heaven and new earth and all that is broken will be righted, that which is out of joint with creation will be healed.

Fortunately, we get a few glimpses. For example, in Revelation 21 we find these words:

“Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away,and there was no longer any sea. ² I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bridebeautifully dressed for her husband. ³ And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ⁴ ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes.There will be no more death’or mourning or crying or pain,for the old order of things has passed away.” ⁵ He who was seated on the thronesaid, “I am making everything new!”

In the next chapter, John the Revelator says, “No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. ⁴ They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.”

It requires what I call Kingdom imagination. With a bit of intentionality we (most people) can summon a picture of ultimate human flourishing. The Bible calls that "shalom" and it is at the core of reconciliation. Paul says that in Christ we are a new creation, the old has gone, the new has come.

The problem though is where we are and what that picture is seems like a million miles away. The way Scot McKnight would put it is the beautiful image that God wonderfully created is cracked, subsequently, there is estrangement with God, ourselves, others and ultimately creation itself.

I believe that the mission for every Christian, every community, is to recognize and humbly acknowledge the brokenness of our world, but not be satisfied there. We must live into the future reality that is to come. We pray that direction every time we recite the Lords Prayer, “Your Kingdom Come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” What is it we are praying? We are praying the ultimate flourishing that exists in heaven into our realities?

We recognize our quest whenever we see things out of joint. Poverty? Can we imagine poverty existing in the New Heaven and New Earth? Absolutely not! Inequality between men and women? Between different nationalities or races? Will that exist when all is righted? Certainly not! An injured planet? No, it will be healed or, as Paul says, “redeemed!” Do you see how it plays out? Anywhere we see a discontinuity or misalignment between where we are and what will be illuminates elements of our mission. Ultimately, that includes estrangement with God. In sum, the Bible describes this as a picture of reconciliation.

This fall, at Immanuel Church will embark on a journey grappling with how we can be a community that lives out our life attempting to fulfill the Apostle Paul’s words,

“All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christand gave us the ministry of reconciliation: ¹⁹ that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them.And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.²⁰ We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.”

Below are the dates and speakers for the series. As a pastor for 30 years now, I am fully aware of the shelf life of sermons (they are usually forgotten before lunch is over), but I truly believe that this has a greater potential for impact then any other series I've been a part of.

This Sunday, Immanuel Church has two services - 9 and 11 am, and we meet at The Bartlett (228 W Sprague Ave), in downtown Spokane. Why don't you join us!

Declaring Christ

I love this verse from Psalm 45:17.

“I will perpetuate your memory through all generations; therefore the nations will praise you for ever and ever.”

It almost feels like a mission statement for me.

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The Preaching Event - Finally Comes the Poet

 I am reading a book right now entitled, Finally Comes the Poet, by Walter Brueggemann. It’s not a new book. It was actually written in 1989, but so far it has truly captured me. Brueggemann writes with such elegance and fluidity that it seems like I can’t read enough of his stuff.  The book is about the daring and important work of preaching the word of God.

A couple of days ago while Robi and I were driving to Seattle, I read a portion of the book to her out loud.  It was a strong experience – I literally was gushing as I read, being moved by the ideas.  In the book he talks about the need for the poetic in preaching. When he says poetic, however, he is actually referring to the idea of being prophetic. He relates the poet to the idea of the prophet in the Old Testament.

He identifies four partners in the preaching event. He writes, “The meeting of the community of faith is a speech meeting. We gather for speaking and listening of an odd kind. That meeting has the potential of evoking the new humanity. There are four partners who need to be present in the meeting so that the new reality can be birthed.”

He says the first partner is the text. Part of the problem for most Christians is that they gather with too much familiarity with the text. They’ve heard it before, so they have become desensitized to its effect. Brueggemann writes, “All week the ideology of our nation, our class, our sect, our sex has seemed closed, settled, and ready for defense. We trust excessively and vigorously in our ideological commitments, which we accept as a rendering of the text.” In other words the text gets co-opted, or reduced to fit into our ideological framework.  We see that all to readily with folk from the political right and left seizing the text to squeeze it into their small-box, small-headed perspectives.

The second partner is the baptized. He refers to the gathered people who are weary, but needful of the recalibrating of their lives to a different, wilder story.  He writes, “The community gathers to be shaped by text that addresses us, an articulation of reality that lies outside of us that we cannot conjure and need not defend.  The ones gather have been baptized.”

The third partner, he would call the specific occasion. Brueggemann explains; when the music stops and the rheostat (I have no idea what a rheostat is, but the context seems to suggest the idea of lighting or heating – your guess is as good as mine) is turned down, then there is this precious, awesome movement of speech. It is not time for cleverness or novelty. It is not time for advise or scolding or urging, because the text is not any problem-solving answer or a flat, ideological agent that can bring resolve. This moment of speech is a poetic rendering in the community that has come all too often to expect nothing but prose. It is a prose world for all those who must meet payrolls and grade papers and pump gas and fly planes. When the text, too, has been reduced to prose, life becomes prosaic that there is a dreaded dullness that besets the human spirit. We become mindless conformists or angry protesters, and there is no health in us. We become so beaten up by prose that only poetic articulation has a chance to let us live.”

The last partner, he would say is this better world given as fresh revelation. He explains, “Something is revealed, we know not how: a probe behind the closed parameters of religion too-long settled and politics too easily comfortable.  It is not only truth disclosed, but it is life disclosed… As I am addressed by the Gospel, I hear anew that possibility overwhelms necessity in my life. The only available absolute given me is a fiction to which I must trust myself–a gracious fiction on which I stake my life, authored by God who also authors the text and speech.”

 He breaks out in this beautiful picture of what happens in this preaching event when he declares, “…again, as the word is spoken one more time, we move through the wearisome death ridden days of our life and come back once again to Easter to be stunned in disbelief, and then beyond disbelief, to be stunned to life, now filled with fear and trembling.”  He goes on, “The meeting involves this old text, the spent congregation believing but impoverished, the artist of new possibility, the disclosure. The Prince of Darkness tries frantically to keep the world closed so that we can be administered. The Prince has such powerful allies in this age. Against such enormous odds, however, there is the working of this feeble, inscrutable, unshackled moment of sermon. Sometimes the Prince will win the day and there is no new thing uttered or heard. Sometimes, however, the sermon will have its say and the truth looms large–larger than the text or the voice or the folk had any reason to expect. When that happens, the world is set loose toward healing. The sermon for such a time shames the Prince and we become yet again more nearly human. The Author of the text laughs in delight, the way the Author has laughed only at creation and Easter, but laughs again when the sermon carries the day against the prose of the Dark Prince who wants no new poetry in the region he thinks he governs. Where the poetry is sounded, the Prince knows a little of the territory is lost to its true ruler. The newly claimed territory becomes a new home of freedom, justice, peace, and abiding joy. This happens when the poet comes, when the poet speaks, when the preacher comes as poet.” 

It seems so often; in today’s church the preaching of God’s Word takes a backseat to many other things. In fact, for many it just isn’t cool to teach the Word of God, but I think that we may be missing something in this regard. Something genuinely mystical and sacramental happens when the Word of God is declared with clarity and beauty. It doesn’t have to be cutesy, or clever, or funny, but it does have to be truthful and passionate. When a person speaks from the Scriptures people should come away from the meeting having truly grappled with text…the mystery of God spoken in the body of believers.