TheyCallMePastorBryan

If you believe the only way the gospel can sound great is by telling people just how screwed or...

Tue, 22 May 2012 03:21:26 -0400

If you believe the only way the gospel can sound great is by telling people just how screwed or depraved they are first, you’re doing marketing, not evangelism.

"Teresa (of Avila) and John (of the Cross) both say that we easily become so attached to our feelings..."

Sun, 20 May 2012 16:49:35 -0400

“Teresa (of Avila) and John (of the Cross) both say that we easily become so attached to our feelings of and about God that we equate them with God. We forget that these sensations are only speaking to us of the divine One. They are only messengers. Instead, we take them for the whole of God’s self, and thus we wind up worshipping our own feelings. This is perhaps the most common idolatry of the spiritual life.”

- The Dark Night Of The Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection Between Darkness and Spiritual Growth

My buddy Eric posted this picture and I’ve had some…...

Mon, 14 May 2012 22:14:42 -0400

My buddy Eric posted this picture and I’ve had some… um… interesting conversations about it on facebook already, but I want to put it forward. I know somebody is going to say that I’m intentionally misconstruing scripture, but any thoughtful approach to the marriage dialog going on right now must also deal with a number of approaches to marriage that are reported on in scripture that are outside of our current view of the nuclear family - 1 man and 1 woman who freely choose to enter into a covenant together.

The ironic part of this conversation is 1) many of the families represented, primarily in the beginning of the Bible read more like backwater hillbillies than good, decent, middle class Americans and 2) the Christian tradition and particularly American Evangelical Christianity’s definitions of marriage have morphed over time.

My posting of this is neither an endorsement nor a stance against gay marriage, but rather a means of trying to add a level of complexity and thoughtfulness to a discussion that badly needs it.

Check out this video that some folks I share office space with...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 16:16:57 -0400

Check out this video that some folks I share office space with made for a band called My Goodness. It’s pretty awesome.

mike daisey, literary truth and the bible

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:29:33 -0400

Earlier this year, This American Life posted an entirely haunting episode of their radio show called “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” The episode centered around story-teller Mike Daisey’s experiences of traveling to China to visit Apple factories and learn what the conditions were like in which his favorite products were made.

It was an absolutely captivating and haunting experience to hear the story.

However, a few weeks ago This American Life posted a retraction of a number of elements of the story. Why? Because Daisey’s story telling did not live up to the standards of journalism. Particularly he named other people’s experiences as his own and embellished some points to make certain aspects of the story stand out more.

Much has been written about Daisey lying and fact checking and so on. I’m not interested in exploring that, but I found myself utterly fascinated with a conversation that happened between the host of the show, Ira Glass and Mike Daisey. It centered around the nature of truth telling and featured Glass arguing that truth is largely found in journalistic integrity and Daisey arguing that while there were parts of his story that weren’t true, he wouldn’t say that the story wasn’t true. In essence in the middle of an otherwise pretty sad discussion of why one would lie about a story living up to journalistic standards, a very interesting discussion about truth and story or truth and literature emerged. For Daisey, in story telling it was okay to claim other people’s experiences as his own because it fit with the point he was making and was a true experience - the only lie was this it was his own experience. Obviously, this story doesn’t live up to the standard of a journalistic account, but it’s true.

I find this fascinating because this same issue often emerges in discussions about the Bible. Particularly being people living in the modern era we have a built in expectation that all literature that is true also lives up to this standard of journalistic accuracy. And so we apply that built in expectation to scripture and end up making the Bible argue things that it’s never intended to argue. I’ll give two examples- one from a skeptical friend and another from well intentioned “biblical” Christians.

So a friend posted this image on facebook the other day.

On the surface this is a clever barb at Christians for believing nonsense. However this only works when held up to the standard of journalistic accuracy. It is not for me to say whether or not the talking snake in Genesis is true, because I think that argument largely misses out on the truth being driven at in Genesis. Speaking about a dragon in Revelation is even more nonsensical as Revelation is clearly an apocalyptic text not meant to be taken literally but symbolically.

Tied in to the argument about the talking snake is the argument many Christians make against evolution - namely that the world had to be created in 6 days because that is what Genesis 1 says. First, this is a misreading of Genesis, because Genesis offers two creation narratives. One which states that the world was created in 6, the other which says the creation process was a day. Interestingly from an interpretive standpoint this shows the wideness of the Hebrew word for day as it can both note a 24 hour day and a larger segment of time. However, both the argument that we should ridicule scripture for featuring a talking snake in Genesis and that creation HAD to happen in 6 days fail to understand the nature of truth in text.

These stories are both myths. To be clear myth in this case is used in the academic sense - not as a story that is not true, but in the sense of exploring how things have gotten to be the way they are. So for instance the point of Genesis 1 is not worrying about whether the world was created in 6 literal days (in fact many early Christians believed that the world was not created in this manner) but to explain that behind the ordering in this world is a God that works to bring order. Similarly in Genesis 3, the story is not concerned about asserting whether or not the talking snake is literal in a journalistic sense, but exploring why humanity seems to have broken relationships with each other, creation and God.

Trying to apply our expectations of journalistic standards does not hold up because the journalistic process did not exist in the times that Genesis was written and as such it makes no sense to expect it to live up to being a journalistic document.

And so this debate between Ira Glass and Mike Daisey is incredibly interesting because it underscores this theme that happens in a number of places when reading scripture. For a more in depth read on the nature of Old Testament scripture that deals with much of this tension, make sure to read Inspiration and Incarnation by Peter Enns

"“Certainty is an illusion! A delusion!” Lotto says. Or, as Clint Eastwood once said:..."

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 16:57:02 -0400

“

“Certainty is an illusion! A delusion!” Lotto says.

Or, as Clint Eastwood once said: “If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster.”

”

- Great line in an article exploring whether we have a bias against creativity |

My friend Kyle sent me a link to a worship album that he and his...

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 20:31:05 -0400

My friend Kyle sent me a link to a worship album that he and his church are releasing. Since I’m really into deep lyrics and congregationally formed worship expressions, I’m quite excited about the album. I’ll have a review coming out soon, but in the mean time, check out this song from the album.

"Not waiting even until the epiclesis, Christ got up, slammed the big book shut, screaming to the..."

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 20:18:52 -0400

“

Not waiting even until the epiclesis, Christ got up, slammed the big book shut, screaming to the startled senior citizens, “Let’s go do it, not talk about it.”

We were just sealing him safe and sound in the tomb, just making sure that the gravesite was tidy, just getting adjusted to life without him, just obeying the soldiers, just accommodating ourselves to death and defeat.

Not waiting for dawn, Christ got up, rolled away the stone, strode forth shining before our fearful faces and commanded, “Get up!”

He wouldn’t stay anywhere long — peripatetic, frenetic, rabbi on the run — nor will he be deterred, even by death.

I declare to you this Holy Week what I have learned in 40 years of ministry: The most curious quality of salvation by Jesus is his refusal to stay put. If we will worship him, be with him, we must go with him. We must be willing to relocate. All ministry in the name of Jesus is itinerant.

Get up.

”

- Christ Got Up | Will Willimon | I’m really fascinated by this article by Willimon. Would love to hear your thoughts.

bahahahah!

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 16:45:30 -0400

bahahahah!

"From his prison cell, Bonhoeffer penned Letters and Papers from Prison. Bonhoeffer wrote about the..."

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 15:08:02 -0400

“

From his prison cell, Bonhoeffer penned Letters and Papers from Prison. Bonhoeffer wrote about the God who is with us today as the God who has forsaken us in terms of our false expectations of deliverance from tribulation at the hands of evil forces. Bonhoeffer finds our God-forsaken God hanging on the cross identifying with the world in its plight. While filled with angst over the situation in which he found himself, Bonhoeffer also experienced inner resolve: we must not try to escape the problems of life and look to God to rescue us out of them. We must not try to find a gap for God to fill in our increasingly secular age. We must accompany Jesus to the gallows, as the community of the man for others and face evil head-on and conquer it through redemptive suffering.

Christianity only has Jesus to offer. Our organizations, practices and rituals only have value as they are centered and founded on him. Any religious trappings not centered and founded on him aren’t worth keeping. Some might think compassion can be separated from Jesus. But what kind of compassion would one find? Can the kind of compassion displayed by Jesus in the canonical gospels be separated from Jesus and his relationship with his Father? Jesus’ compassion is aimed at the unlovely, and at those who don’t love him, but rather hate him. Christian love is enemy love. If only we Christians were to love as Jesus loves more often! But we cannot do it in our own strength. We cannot love like Jesus loves apart from Jesus and his Father in the Spirit. Jesus’ love of his enemy is sustained by his Father’s love of him in the Spirit. The Father’s love led him to the cross erected by human hatred. Jesus’ love goes beyond altruism. Not only is there no benefit to be gained through Jesus’ self-sacrifice for his enemies, but also there is actually increasing injury to be suffered as he loves his enemy to the death at his enemy’s hands and rises from the dead to bring them life.

”

- Religion For Atheists and Religionless Christianity | My friend and mentor, Paul Louis Metzger, wrote this post exploring Bonhoeffer’s view of religionless Christianity and how that applies to Religion for Atheists, a book that was recently published. This is especially helpful if you found Pete Rollins’ exploration of this theme in Bonhoeffer to be a little lacking theologically.

With that said, I greatly appreciate both Metzger and Rollins’ exploration of this theme of religionless Christianity. I have learned much from both of them on the purpose of Christianity being not in the sense of the divine lottery machine God but rather that the call of Christ is to betray a desire for delivery and instead seek to, like Jesus, forsake ourselves for the sake of others.

"In 1974, when Colbert was 10, his father, a doctor, and his brothers Peter and Paul, the two closest..."

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 19:25:45 -0400

“In 1974, when Colbert was 10, his father, a doctor, and his brothers Peter and Paul, the two closest to him in age, died in a plane crash while flying to a prep school in New England. “There’s a common explanation that profound sadness leads to someone’s becoming a comedian, but I’m not sure that’s a proven equation in my case,” he told me. “I’m not bitter about what happened to me as a child, and my mother was instrumental in keeping me from being so.” He added, in a tone so humble and sincere that his character would never have used it: “She taught me to be grateful for my life regardless of what that entailed, and that’s directly related to the image of Christ on the cross and the example of sacrifice that he gave us. What she taught me is that the deliverance God offers you from pain is not no pain — it’s that the pain is actually a gift. What’s the option? God doesn’t really give you another choice.””

- How Many Stephen Colberts Are There? | If you know me, you probably know that I’m a huge fan of Stephen Colbert. I just read a very, very interesting article on him and his character that he portrays. In the middle of that was this quote about his faith that I find so intriguing. I love that Colbert takes faith seriously while also having the ability to laugh at some of the things done in the name of faith. I think that is a quite admirable quality.

And one more - Hipster Batman… oh twitter… | If...

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:17:10 -0400

And one more - Hipster Batman… oh twitter… | If Superheroes Were Hipsters

Since it involves Portland and hipsters, here you go - Hipster...

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:15:24 -0400

Since it involves Portland and hipsters, here you go - Hipster Aquaman | from College Humor’s If SuperHeroes Were Hipsters

white man's burden lifted

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 02:33:05 -0400

white man's burden lifted:

Click the title above to read a reflection on Uganda and “white man’s burden” by my friend and mentor, Paul Louis Metzger.

clearing temples, taking names

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 03:39:56 -0400

The Gospel reading in the lectionary last Sunday was John’s account of Jesus clearing out the temple. It is fascinating to me that in recent years, this story of Jesus driving out money changers and animal sales has been used to push an agenda of an over-masculinized Christianity in which Jesus is more cage fighter than man of sorrows.

The urge of many to increase the masculine rep of Christianity is one driven by good motives but that ultimately tends to miss what’s going on scripturally. The account of Jesus clearing the temple is not one of Jesus throwing haymakers at a bunch of people he disagrees with and is much more a prophetic act, similar to what we would call guerrilla theater. This is not to say that Jesus did not cause a scene, in fact he did, but that scene was in working animals up to get them to run out of the temple and in displacing booths for changing money, not in all out assault on people in the temple.

This story still goes beyond the mild-mannered Jesus that is some sort of Zen master and never has emotions. The early Christians went out of their way to illustrate the mystery that Jesus was God become man, and this experience meant that he ran the gamut of emotions. It is however important to note why Jesus was angered at what was happening in the temple.

The temptation however to need to make Jesus into some sort of Rambo figure is in my opinion a failure to have a fully orbed view of masculinity that goes beyond being defined by violence and putting women in their place. A full exploration of masculinity is beyond the scope of this post, but I assert must be based in something better than violence and subjugation of women, particularly because neither of these tend to be anywhere near substantial in the life of Jesus.

i don't want to believe, tell me what to believe

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 02:53:36 -0400

Yesterday, I explored my experience of faith, not as something I’ve chosen due to hope of reward, but more as a story and a God that won’t leave me alone.

One of the byproducts of having this experience of divinity that will not give up on you is that it leads to all kinds of wrestling and asking questions. And this is how faith ought to be - faith has always been the act of wrestling and being in conversation with God, with others, with ourselves and with tradition.

It is however, quite tempting to want to avoid this acting of faith, for to constantly be wrestling and in conversation is tiring. Is it no surprise then, that we seek out those who seem to be quite firm in their answers to everything? A friend today relayed a story to me about a large church and how people who attend that church constantly want to know the pastor’s views on all issues theologically. While perhaps this is out of the best intention and is a part of their own voyage of wrestling with who this God is, I suspect that for many it is more a desire to seek out the “holy man” to receive the absolute answer.

This desire to be given answers instead of wrestling with belief tends towards a desire to not truly believe. For if we assert that God is a personal god, we must also assert that truth is first and foremost rooted in personhood. And there’s a strange thing about knowing people - namely they tend to defy our definitions of them. It is quite often that we see others break out of the mold which we believe they are in and in turn we learn that there is a deep mystery wrapped up in personhood.

This unwillingness to be totally defined is also worked out in the realm of belief, so often our desire to have an answer rather than wrestling with the person lies in our desire to not have to constantly be exposed to the mystery of personhood. And many times our desire to be told the right answer in terms of faith is actually the wrong solution to the wrong problem.

There is something deeply existential about faith, a wrestling and owning that has to be done in each person. This faith is shared in community, yes. But there is a deep need for us as individuals to truly own what that faith is. This is because as Eugene Peterson puts it “there are no dittos with souls.”

So then the role of the pastor or of anyone engaged spiritually is not so much to offer the singular answer in regards to faith, as if faith is a riddle which can be puzzled out. It is instead to co-journey, to share our stories and our learnings and to prod each other into further exploration of the divine. And it is in this regard that I speak of Jesus, for my journey is that it is the story of Jesus and the way of Jesus that is central to the spiritual life.

I often experience the phenomenon of friends looking at my devotion to Christianity as some sort of...

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 05:50:55 -0400

I often experience the phenomenon of friends looking at my devotion to Christianity as some sort of oddity, as if I am someone who just really wants to believe in a story where if I’m just good enough I may get to fly off to some sort of paradise when I die. And when I realize that that is what many believe I believe and that that is why I believe what I believe, I think that I too must be some sort of oddity.

But the truth of the matter is that most of us who would call ourselves Christians are not because we want to believe in a divine force that orders the world and makes everything that we want work out in the end. No, for many of us, we are Christians because God won’t leave us alone.

This is an odd thing for someone who’s seen as a pastor to say, but I feel it needs to be said: if it were not for a sense that the divine would not leave me alone, I would not do what I do. I wouldn’t feel compelled to lead a community, to constantly insist on really loving our neighbors and get weird looks by my friends who think my beliefs are crazy while also being misunderstood by people who don’t get why I think loving neighbors and being engaged in the neighborhood is an essential part of Christian faith.

There’s this part of one of the gospel stories where Jesus says to his disciples “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” And I’ve always heard this as a sort of encouragement - “no matter how bad things are, Jesus is there.” And while I think there is some validity to this take, I wonder if it’s also a bit of a threat “hey remember, regardless of what happens I’m going to be there!”

This sense in which the divine won’t leave us alone is part of the reason many of us practice faith. It’s something that I think many outside our faith don’t understand - Christianity is about more than just getting what we want and a world where everything is ordered and there’s some sort of cosmic justice. It’s even more about a God that shows up in people’s lives and says there’s a good way to live, and at the center of it is self-sacrificing love and my presence is ever going to push you towards that way of being even if it’s not what you want.

There is a certain existential crisis in being shown that self-sacrificial love is central to the good life, in that it is so opposite to everything we’re taught and we see and everything that’s inside of us screams for. Yet it’s an existential crisis that doesn’t go away when seen. And certainly there’s a part of this story that is about what Jesus did enabling us to live that life more fully but yet this is not really a story of our choosing. Rather it’s a story that we are given.

So it doesn’t surprise me when people think I’m crazy, because the truth is, to everything natural within me, this story is crazy. But this story and this God do not stop invading my life, and so I continue to persist within it.

I so love how into the Timbers this city is.

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 19:59:08 -0400

I so love how into the Timbers this city is.

some thoughts in the wake of #kony2012

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 18:26:06 -0400

It’s been an interesting week in tracking with the whole buzz stirred up by the Kony 2012 campaign. Before anything else, I want to affirm that it is a brilliant and beautiful thing that Americans are being made aware of things happening elsewhere in the world. I think it is quite important that we be aware of what is going on elsewhere in the world.

And with that said, I want to offer a few warnings that have come to mind for me this week as I’ve read about where the situation currently stands with Kony and the LRA. For starters, it was very interesting to note that in the last 5 years, the Ugandan army has been successful in pushing Kony and the LRA out of Uganda. The LRA appears to be mostly operating in the Democratic Republic of the Congo now and is a bit on the ropes with most estimates being that the army is under 1000 people. This doesn’t change that Kony ought to be brought to justice, and in fact he has been indicted and the militaries in these various places are pursuing him.

It was interesting to hear the opinion of a journalist from Uganda on everything that’s happened this week (video above). The primary things that stood out to me in hearing her thoughts on this - there is a danger of this taking on a very colonialist/imperialist vibe, the type where the narrative ends up being how those poor Africans just can’t do anything by themselves and need us advanced white people from the west to come save them. When I started to think about this I realized just how arrogant it sounds to hear things like how travesties in other places wouldn’t be happening if Americans were just aware of them. I also hear in this video a desire that people would understand that it’s not just the story of a bad man who needs to be brought to justice.

And that’s what I’ve been realizing the most in this whole thing. When talking with a friend this week I made the statement that “sometimes the solution to the problem is not the solution to the problem.” Which is to say, to just bring Kony to justice is putting a band-aid on a gaping wound. I think to be thoughtfully engaged in this means that we need to be willing to hear and empower the voices of those on the ground in Uganda and Sudan and DRC. It means understanding the lack of development and issues that led to the rise of the LRA and it means that our caring about this issue must most be about how we can support these countries and not come in and attempt to solve the issue for them. If there’s anything I’ve found in my reading, it’s that there are a lot of complexities to actually bringing peace to the region that extend well beyond just making people aware that Kony is a bad man that needs to be stopped.

If this awareness campaign leads people to understanding that this is more than just a story of a bad man and to a willingness to let the people of this region tell their own story in their terms, this can be something really good. But that type of story telling just can’t happen in a well produced 30 minute video. So by all means raise awareness, but beware the oversimplifying of a quite complex issue and beware the easy temptation to default to a colonialist/imperialist solution that really hurts both us and the residents of this part of Africa.

I’ll share one very important point of action that I found in reading Rosebell’s(the journalist in the video above) blog. One of the prevalent problems currently in Northern Uganda is a disease called nodding disease. Learn more about it and how to act on Rosebell’s blog

"My concern is that most of the actually existing church acts as a type of drug den with the leaders..."

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 17:31:00 -0500

“

My concern is that most of the actually existing church acts as a type of drug den with the leaders being like the nicest, most sincere, drug dealers. What we pay for are songs, sermons and prayers that help us avoid our suffering. These drugs are very appealing because of the quick fix and powerful high they offer, hence the success of such communities. However they do not help us face up to, speak out and work through our pain.

In contrast we need collectives that are more like the professional mourners who cry for us, the stand-up comedians who talk about the pain of being human or the poets singing about life at local pubs.

In other words, what if the church could be a place where we found a liturgical structure that would not treat God as a product that would make us whole but as the mystery that enables us to live abundantly in the midst of life’s difficulties. A place where we are invited to confront the reality of our humanity, not so that we will despair, but so that we will be free of the despair that already lurks within us, the despair that enslaves us, the despair that we refuse to acknowledge.

”

- Peter Rollins | The Contemporary Church is a Crack House