All posts tagged theology

Road Trip Epiphanies

Road trip! There was a time when those two words had a sense of great excitement for me. I guess they still do under a certain set of circumstances. But those circumstances do not include a trip that you make because you have to make, as opposed to one you want to make. Nor if you choose to make it as quickly as possible, even if it means traveling every day. Nor if it occurs in the dead of winter and in the midst of the dreaded snow and wintry mix. Nor if you encounter subzero temperatures along the way.

It being the season of Epiphany, however, I’ve been trying to find some of those “Aha!” moments that are what Epiphany is supposed to be about. And I found them. In spite of all the circumstances above, I got to spend it all in the company of my granddaughter. I enjoyed that very much. Then I wished I could do the same thing with each of my grandchildren. I seldom get to spend one-on-one time with them, and never for almost a whole week. But not in winter and not because we had to. Maybe when we had more time. One of my grandsons even posted on Facebook this week that he missed the day-long trips in the car listening to Peter, Paul, and Mary. Old Stewball was a race horse …. Coincidence? I think not!

We already had a very tight and demanding schedule, but then we were thrown a wicked curve that required an additional two-day stay and two more travel days. But we had no choice, so we simply decided we’d have to make the best of it. As it turned out, the delay will save us a repeat of the road trip in about five weeks and would delay our return home by two days. Those two days gave the sun and the plows time to clear the roads of the 12+ inches of snow that fell on the day we originally would have been arriving home. I’m not suggesting that God delayed things in order to provide us with those two benefits. I don’t believe that God works like that. But I do believe that life is a wonderfully complex journey that includes the interaction between choices we and others make and circumstances over which we have no control. Very little in life does not have a whole continuum of pluses and minuses. We get to pick the places in which we search for our “Aha!” moments.

I had a major “Aha!” moment all by myself. I went to get the car to bring it around and pick up my granddaughter at the entrance to the building. The temperature was approaching Absolute Zero. Ok. Ok. But it was cold. And that wintry stuff was everywhere. As I walked to the car, I stepped on a patch of clear ice. My feet flew up in front of me as the rest of me started over backwards. For a brief moment I found myself suspended parallel to and about three feet above the cold, hard, ice-packed parking lot. Clearly a metaphor for life itself. In that moment, I actually had the thought, “This is not going to end well.” It didn’t take long for gravity to bring me down. After all, I offer a pretty good target for gravity. My landing was not gentle, and it knocked the breath out of me. As I lay there trying to catch my breath, I was afraid to try and get up. I was afraid that my hip, which had taken the brunt of my hard landing, would be broken. I took my time, moving slowly, and found that everything was functioning well. At least as well as anything functions in my sixty-nine-year-old body. I was a little sore, but as functional as I had been before the crash landing. Just wait until tomorrow, I thought. I’ll hurt in places I didn’t now I had places. I was wrong. A couple of additional tender spots the next morning, but nothing like I was worried about. Sometimes things turn out as bad as you expect. Or worse. But sometimes, like this time, your worst fears are not realized. Be grateful. I was, and I am.

The truth is any journey, including life, will have its good moments and its bad ones. Falls will come, but most of them could be worse. Storms are always around and can be dangerous, but virtually any storm could be worse than it was where you were. Circumstances we cannot control will impact our journey in both positive and negative ways. The road trip we call life is full of all kinds of experiences, any of which – whether positive or negative – can be one of those “Aha!” moments. But you’ve got to be listening and expectant in order to hear. I am grateful. For life. For all of its complexities. For epiphanies. For those along on the journey. Grateful. Maybe, in light of everything going on, that is the most significant epiphany of all.

Leadership is a Call to be Prophetic and Reframe

“No future can be stuffed into this presence except by being dead.”1 Resurrection is impossible without prior death. Scriptural imagination is often difficult to perceive until one has the eyes to see and ears to hear and is simultaneously shaped by the cosmic scope of authority, power, and kingdom that Jesus claims is to be made on real on earth as in heaven (Matt 6:10). Leadership, inspired by scriptural imagination is helping to provide an alternative view on reality, that is, creating the particular space for change and the in-breaking of God. Leadership is submitting to the radically subversive lordship of Jesus that challenges every presupposition, the tendency to see through the lens of binary options of how to participate in the world (choices between naive hope and despair), and ultimately to take on the task of becoming a reframer. This kind of leadership, that both attests to the in-breaking of the future into the present and is capable of providing an alternative view of reality, is only made possible through the path of suffering and cross; because, without the cross there is no resurrection.

Situating Matthew’s Gospel as a prophetic text, and Jesus as a prophet in Matthew’s narrative, reframed the scope and function of the text for me and helped me to have new eyes to see. It also helps to explore Walter Brueggemann’s description of prophetic imagination as:

The task of prophetic ministry is to bring the claims of the tradition and situation of enculturation into an effective interface. That is, the prophet is called to be a child of the tradition, one who has taken it seriously in the shaping of his or her own field of perception and system of language, who is so at home in that memory that the points of contact and incongruity with the situation of the church in culture can be discerned and articulated with proper urgency.2

The prophets are not loose canons looking to dismantle the tradition and break down boundary markers of identity unless those boundary markers and traditions have become inconsistent and divergent from the memory that birthed the contemporary incarnation of the community and shared story. In this sense, Jesus is not only a prophet, but also a reframer, whose memory of the tradition and story of God is reoriented to new possibilities, and is a fulfillment of the spirit of the memories of the past. Jesus did not come to abolish the law or prophets; no, Jesus came to fulfill them (Matt 5:17). Fulfillment is only possible with knowledge of what came before so that it may be actualized in the present. Peter Rollins describes this process of reframing in order to fulfill as learning how to ask “circumcision questions”, i.e. questions which ask us to “remove something previously thought of as vital in order to help unveil, in an apocalyptic way, the central scandal of Christianity.”3 Reframers must be willing to help find out what must die so that new life might be able to emerge.

However, reframing is not simply an ideological endeavor that is meant only to shape imagination. The telos of reframing through the development of scriptural imagination is for transformation of the community where “the glory of God in Jesus Christ that makes itself visible in fleshly communities conformed to Christ’s image.”4 Leadership then is the ability to attest to the in-breaking of God who writes on our hearts and bears witness to the covenanted community “whose lives, transformed by the Holy Spirit, bear undeniable witness to the truth of God’s work in their midst.”5 Reframing is all-encompassing and cosmic in scope as all of creation is groaning towards the making right of all things. Leaders reframe perspectives by attesting to an alternative reality and way of participating in the world that is a signpost of the manifestation of God in our midst.

Leadership and the art of reframing is truly a gift, but a gift that is not to be enjoyed by oneself, but is instead a gift leading us back out into the larger context, a gift given to us so that we might be a blessing to the entire world. We are invited to reframe the larger cultural story, with a new story rooted in the faithfulness of God. Dr. Hays writes in his commentary on 1 Corinthians, “What we have to offer instead is the story of Jesus. To believe that story is to find one’s whole life reframed, one’s questions radically reformulated. Therefore, much of the work of Christian apologetics will be to say to people, ‘No, you are asking the wrong questions, looking for the wrong thing.’”6 Leaders help us work together to ask the right questions and be open to how God might reframe us and reorient us to become the transformational communities God has called us to be. And let us pray for the courage to ask the right questions to help each one of us to reframe the story in the luminous darkness of the mystery of God, who is the author of the words on our heart, lest we mistake ourselves to be the Word ourselves.

Strangely enough, leadership and the invitation to become a reframer is a calling that I sought to avoid, because while the truth may set me free, it does so by turning my life completely upside down.7 It seems to me that one of the most pressing tasks for Christian leaders today is to “sketch a portrait of an alternative Christianity, one that is as ancient as it is new…a work of memory and imagination, of dangerous memories as well as daring ways to imagine the future.”8 But this task will inevitably lead to suffering, or if Wendell Berry is right as quoted above, the future cannot become the present without death. And while the good news of Jesus is that through the resurrection the kingdom has come, as leaders we must learn how to help cultivate and proclaim scriptural imagination so that our churches can bear witness to the presence of the Holy Spirit that is seeking to “create communities that prefigure and embody the reconciliation and healing of the world.”9 And it seems to me that the battle over our imaginations whether through national identity, consumerism, war, corporations, rampant individualism, and ceaseless connection via technology is a perpetual struggle for leaders today in the church. For me, to accept the call to lead in the church today is in essence an acceptance of the call to weakness and seeming foolishness: “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Cor 1:25)”

If you are looking for a way to dream of an alternative reality that seeks to imagine how the power of Jesus can change systemic injustice you won’t want to miss the event hosted by The Leland Center this weekend:

Journey to Justice is a daylong spiritual formation event focusing on the ministry of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other great people of faith during the civil rights movement. This inaugural seminar will be held on Saturday, April 27 from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the John Leland Center for Theological Studies in Arlington, VA. Dr. Jim Melson, Leland’s Director of Spiritual Formation, will moderate Journey to Justice in 3 formative sessions. For more information about event registration click here.

Josh is the Pastor to Students and Director of Creative Technologies at Cornerstone Baptist Church in Warrenton, VA. He’s also the author of Sacred Hope a book designed to foster conversation around the role of hope in our lives. Josh is currently pursuing his Doctor of Ministry degree at Duke Divinity School while raising two boys and loving his entrpreneurial wife, Shey. Josh blogs at joshuarhayden.com.

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1 Wendell Berry, Given: New Poems (Emeryville: Shoemaker Hoard, 2005), 27.

2 Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 2.

3 Peter Rollins, Insurrection (New York: Howard Books, 2011), xii.

4 Richard Hays, Echoes of Scripture in The Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 146.

5 Ibid., 150.

6 Richard Hays, First Corinthians; Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville: John Knox Press, 2011), 38.

7 John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, 30.

8 Ibid., 35.

9 Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation; A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics. (San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 1996), 32.

Reframing the Story

As the spring semester begins tonight at The John Leland Center, new courses will commence, new questions will be asked, new books will be read, new friendships will be made, and hopefully each one of us will experience God in new ways as our eyes open to new colors and textures and our ears pick up on new sounds and tones. For many, with each new semester it isn’t hard to get swept up in a fresh excitement to study, learn, grow, and think. Yet, once the semester is well on its way, we can get bogged down in the details of the work, forgetting the gift that it is to study and embark on the journey of seminary education.

Education and theological training at its best is a journey to become a reframer and interpretive guide in whatever vocation God has called you to explore and lead, whether a teacher, non-profit staff, pastor, branding strategist, lobbyist, FBI agent, stay-at-home dad, community organizer, artist, etc. In this sense, inherent in our eduction is this beautifully artistic endeavor to learn how to become reframers and interpretive guides in our specific contexts. In Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership by Lee Bolman and Terrance Deal, they write that all leaders are artists and interpreters of context which leads to reframing:

“Artistry is neither exact nor precise. Artists interpret experience and express it in forms that can be felt, understood, and appreciated by others. Art allows for emotion, subtlety, ambiguity. An artist reframes the world so that others can see new possibilities.”1

Each one of us, students and professors alike are on a journey together to create space for mutual growth and reframing, guided by the Spirit of God to see new possibilities for the spaces we inhabit. We must struggle together to resist the temptation to get an education without really learning anything, of hearing but not really listening.

Together we must also become reframers, people who develop an alternative lens through which to interpret a situation, experience, passage of Scripture, worldview, relationships, God…or really anything. Reframing is an artistic endeavor, that creates space for ambiguity, complexity, and generosity towards the “other”. No matter what degree track you are in, or vocation you are called into, reframing is not a static endeavor with a fixed end. Reframing leads to new understanding which stirs up new reframing, which leads to new understanding, which leads to reframing and so on, in perpetuity for the rest of our lives. This doesn’t mean that we don’t believe anything, but rather that our posture of believing remains open to the in-breaking of the Holy Spirit and one another and how they are expanding the frames through which we interpret the narrative of the scriptures, our lives, relationships, work, and world.

A temptation that arises with education is a kind of pride leading us to forget that our entire experience and learning is rooted in the power of God, not merely our own striving. As Dr. Toom guided me in my first class at Leland years ago with the help of Helmut Theilicke in A Little Exercise for Young Theologians, our education, if we are not mindful, can become a dangerous source of arrogance:

“Truth seduces us very easily into a kind of joy of possession: I have comprehended this and that, learned it, understood it. Knowledge is power. I am therefore more than the other man who does not know this and that. I have greater possibilities and also greater temptations. Anyone who deals with truth — as we theologians certainly do — succumbs all too easily to the psychology of the possessor. But love is the opposite of the will to possess. It is self-giving. It boasteth not itself, but humbleth itself.”2

So, as this new semester begins, each of us should take some time to recall to mind that our story and experience together is bound up with one another and given meaning by the power of God. We must learn to identify with Christ like Paul when he writes to the Corinthian church, “When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. 2 For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. 3 And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. 4 My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5 so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.”3

The opportunity to study together is truly a gift, but a gift that is not to be enjoyed by oneself, but is instead a gift leading us back out into the larger context, a gift given to us so that we might be a blessing to the entire world. We are invited to reframe the larger cultural story, with a new story rooted in the faithfulness of God. Dr. Hays writes in his commentary on 1 Corinthians, “What we have to offer instead is the story of Jesus. To believe that story is to find one’s whole life reframed, one’s questions radically reformulated. Therefore, much of the work of Christian apologetics will be to say to people, ‘No, you are asking the wrong questions, looking for the wrong thing.’”4

This semester, let us work together to ask the right questions and be open to how God might reframe us and reorient us to become the transformational leaders God has called us to be. And let us pray for the courage to ask the right questions to help each one of us to reframe the story in the luminous darkness of the mystery of God.

By Rev. Josh Hayden

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1 Lee Bolman & Terrance Deal, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership; San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997; 17.

2 Helmut Thielicke, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians; Grand Rapids: Wm.B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1962; 16-17.

3 The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. 1989 (1 Co 2:1–5). Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers.

4 Richard Hays, First Corinthians (Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching); Louisville: John Knox Press, 2011; 38.