zombie apocalypse?

i couldn't help noticing this easter that one or two remarks have been made online concerning the whole zombie element to the easter story. however, rather than be shocked by the 'irreverence' of this idea, i decided to push the metaphor a bit and see where this led me... mainly because, as leonard sweet recently said in a talk that i attended:

"our currency is no longer words, but images,

and the essence of change is reframing with new metaphors."

so here's some evangelical spin on the zombie heresy that i left on my facebook page:

Christ rose from the dead, beginning a movement of spiritual transformation which begins with an albeit symbolic death to self, offering its adherents both a fearless existence and immortality in exchange for their autonomy. these followers are everywhere, inviting others to enter into the same experience which appears, to all outside of it, to be a form of spiritual fanatacism at its best, super-holy madness at its worst...

before Jesus’ resurrection, life led to death...
after Jesus’ resurrection, true life begins with death:

not a physical death, but a death to the temporal in exchange for the eternal... to self-satisfying behaviours and habits and all that crap that we cling to which inhibits the expression of the life and light within us that has been put there by Almighty God.

some of the zombie culture rhetoric refers to zombies as 'life-impaired.'

in this new metaphor, i almost wonder if the life-impaired are those of us that still insist on running things ourselves, informed by incomplete or otherwise flawed intel and powered by emotional, neural, cardiovascular and respiratory human batteries that eventually run down to expiration.

please tell me life isn't simply the sum total of our biological processes and body functions. please tell me there is something more- something eternal that continues on even after we have, as shakespeare put it in hamlet and monty python's john cleese shouted it in the parrot sketch, "shuffled off this mortal coil"!

one final thing occurs to me as i consider the zombie Jesus. within zombie literature and films, there is this time coming when everyone in the world falls prey to the zombie disease and unity is once again established. it is called zombie apocalypse.

however, if Jesus is patient 0 or, as we read (and warp a bit here) in revelation 1.5 firstborn of the dead, then what is the zombie apocalpyse but an event of unprecedented revival?

there's a new world coming

;)

to believe or not to believe

we're all familiar with thomas. even if we haven't read his story, we know his name. although scripture reminds us that he was also called 'didymus' (john 20.19-31) we have a different d-word for him.

doubting thomas

poor guy. makes one simple statement that anyone might make and is stuck with a deprecatory nickname for millennia to follow. just doesn't seem fair.

a statement that anyone might make.

see, thomas requires hard data. he isn’t a pessimist- he’s a realist. it’s not that he doesn’t believe in Jesus... it’s that he doesn’t necessarily believe in his friends. after all, they’ve been under a lot of stress lately.

he does NOT say ‘It’s a lie.’

he simply says ‘prove it.’ (20.25)

so Jesus returns at the end of the week

challenging Thomas to make a choice:
‘to believe or NOT to believe- that is the question.’ (20.27)

gazing upon the scars of the passion of just a little over a week earlier, thomas’ lordship issue is broken, and the breaking resulting from the collision of his skepticism with this incredibly hard data prompts his confession of faith: ‘my Lord and my God!'

for doubting thomas, this visual proof not only establishes Jesus’ credentials as the Christ, but also this Christ’s divinity.

thomas is now ready.

it's interesting that scripture does not share whether tom takes Jesus up on the challenge and extends a timid finger into the wounds of his master or hangs back, sheepishly. i suspect the latter. after all, Jesus has not only exposed his lack of faith, but also his hyperbole. more importantly, perhaps, Jesus gives him another opportunity to believe without physically experiencing. Jesus invites thomas to further experience the proof, or simply believe his eyes. the choice is his.

and the choice is ours.

it is always ours.

recently, a friend sent me a note that sounded a bit like, perhaps, the kind thomas might have sent in that moment. my friend was facing a personal situation that was pushing him beyond the natural realm where the causalities are certain and control is sure and into the supernatural, where everything is bigger, faster, more absorbent and therefore all consuming. life, it seems, has the capacity to drive even the most self-assured of us to our knees:

Essentially I've depended on sound logic and self-reliance to guide me through life because I knew those things would never let me down. I've had a long relationship with God that has gone well with logic, and I could always rely on my own strength and determination to translate that logic into action.

I realized today that God has seen (my) situation before and he has a plan for recovery. Unfortunately the path he has laid out for the broken to walk on isn't designed to be walked alone. In order to walk this path I have to cast aside logic and accept true supernatural intervention. And instead of just pounding through the problem myself I'll have to rely on the wisdom and care of others. I'm not ok with this. I'm private by nature, and given any task, any mountain to climb, I know I can power through it most efficiently by myself. But this path isn't designed for that. If I wasn't so awesome I might even say I was scared.

to believe or disbelieve... that is the question

***

one of my favourite bands of the 90's was a band called the prayer chain.

their song 'dig dug' puts it this way:

It comes creepin...

Can you hear me?
Do you even know me?
I'm just like the rest
Need to stick my finger in your wrist

Dig in deep...

Can you hear my heart beat?
Do you even know my heart?
When i hold the doubts of thomas
As hard as i hold your promise?

Dig in deep
And bury me
Let it grow
Let it believe

(sadly, this recording is from 2003. the youtube vid from their heyday back in 1994 is so out of sync that it is unwatchable... in my view)

the way out

there are words in songs that we often get wrong, and getting it wrong can change the whole message of the lyric. here are some faves:

Great is my faithfulness, Lord unto thee...

(from 'Great Is Thy Faithfulness')

Then sings thy soul, my Savior God to me: How great thou art...

(from 'How Great Thou Art')

He arose a victim from the dark domain...’

(from 'Up From The Grave He Arose)

the first couple are just ridiculously self-centred, unconsciously betraying an egocentricity that probably needs to be explored on its own in a separate post. however, the third one says something different about our worldview and, more importantly, how we see ourselves and Christ as victims in this big mean place.

Jesus was NOT victimized.

Jesus stepped into this calamity with a spoiler alert:

he knew where the story of redemption had to climax.

that's the big difference between being the victim and the victor...

Jesus wasn't a helpless puppet.

Jesus was the man in charge.

one of the most dangerous things about films like The Passion of the Christ becoming more frank about how Jesus was treated is that it becomes easy to forget that Jesus was the one in charge... we are so emotionally moved by the lamb being led really roughly to the slaughter that we lose track of the ultimate victory that God is orchestrating there.

but it's an easy mistake.

we often forget that God is God.

once again, we are dealing with the scandalous and confusing message of God's grace on human terms and, in our pathos, find ourselves occasionally even feeling sorry for God, as though the almighty creator of the universe was some big old guy sitting on a cloud somewhere all depressed because he is constantly misunderstood, mulling over the unfaithfulness to the point of murder of his crowned of creation and wondering where he went wrong as a diety. our post-Genesis3 understanding of the way things are makes it difficult for us to actually see what’s going on because our perspective is so clouded by the inescapability of sin and its wages.

and yet untying the knots of our fallenness is the whole point of the resurrection.

Up from the grave he arose with a mighty triumph o’er his foes

He arose a victor from the dark domain
And he’ll live forever with his Saints to reign
He arose! He arose!
Hallelujah, Christ arose!

(Robert Lowry)

the challenge of response...

...is to discern the difference between the needs that exist in our field of vision and those which are actually in our path because attending to every need within our field of vision will result in a really random path.

is finding/navigating God's will for a life or a church simply a matter of connecting the dots or does this approach actually impede progress?

and what is progress anyway?

lost passion

so in reflecting a bit on easter, good friday, lenten fasts etc, i was drawn back to an old blogpost from 2005.

i have a question: why the recut?
mel gibson's controversial film 'the passion of the Christ' has been recut with the more 'offensive' stuff removed.

i have another question: feel better now?

once again we have opted for a tidy retelling of the story- as if there aren't already enough of those. about a month ago my marcy and i were tossing around some of film's more comical (:-0) portrayals of Jesus' story.

***
marcy said
This all started when I started asking people who they thought the worst ‘Jesus Actors’ of all time where. I mean, we’re talking from Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion’ on down through ‘The Robe’ and what-not, the worst Jesus Actors of all time.

We’re talking the worst method actors known to cinema: “A November Boston Globe review of Jesus Christ Superstar called the non-Equity show "so unspeakably awful it's enough to make a writer give up theater criticism forever and set up a shoeshine stand in the middle of a mudslide."

Anyways, here’s a partial list of Jesus Actors:
Willem Dafoe in The Last Temptation of Christ
James Caviezel in The Passion of the Christ
Jeremy Sisto in Jesus (made for tv)
Brian Deacon in Jesus (from '79)
Claude Heater in Ben-Hur
Kenneth Colley in Life of Brian
Ted Neeley in Jesus Christ Superstar
William Powell in Jesus Of Nazareth
Max Von Sydow in The Greatest Story Ever Told
Jeffrey Hunter in ‘The King of Kings’ (61)

Okay, but Willem Dafoe also played the mad scientist in the Spiderman movie. Enough said there.


to which i felt compelled to reply:
as for willem dafoe, thank God actors play roles, rather than live them (another plug for "Jesus of Montreal" yay!) because a bunch of the guys on this list have either taken bizarre/embarrassing parts somewhere along the way, or have never worked again...

ted neeley played 'curly' (the creepy cowboy with a glove full of vaseline) in the 70's version of john steinbeck's "of mice and men"

"max von sydow was 'brewmeister smith' (a deranged scientist who goes for global mind control by adding hallucinogens to canadian beer at oktoberfest)in bob and doug mckenzie's "strange brew" (major canadiana piece there) and has portrayed mostly malevolent authority figures ever since, in mind-bending psychological films like "minority report" and "shutter island"

jeffrey hunter went on to be commander pike in the "star trek" pilot, returning to the little screen in a recut version of it called "the menagerie"

there's probably many more great laughs we could have over the aesthetic folly/curse (it's kinda interesting that in casting the new superman, both jim C and willem D were not even considered because they had both already played JC. darned do-gooders!) attached to playing Jesus- i just don't have my big fat cross-referenced movie book handy to go digging further.

i am just glad that malcolm mcdowell has never played the Christ (unless you include "a clockwork orange"- but that one's probably just conjecture) because i don't think that i could see "Caligula Christ" without becoming really uncomfortable.

and on it went...
***

point is, there are already a bunch of 'biblical epic' type portrayals of Jesus' passion which just don't rate, and clearly it's not about visual desensitization, because desensitized people would dismiss the flogging scene as merely running too long without moving the story forward...

it's about letting love in. we hate that a good person could be so cruelly treated; or we hate that people will watch a film and weep, but will eat supper on the couch while watching wars and their atrocities chronicled on cnn; we hate the idea that such horrific torture could be undergone by the son of God on our behalf (although that is still too personally and spiritually problematic for many- let's just stick with the good person part; it permits filtered consciencing.) telling a story is one thing, but depicting a troubling historical event in such extreme detail is somehow too much.

give us 'kill bill.' we know that that's silly. we know that that isn't supposed to get into our hearts. we know that people are not, as presented (brilliantly, i might add) by tarantino, huge sacks of blood just waiting to explode, and therefore we can laugh at our mortality rather than fear losing it to face a loveless forever, completely absent from the presence of God.

don't kid yourself- none of us has any idea how dark the darkness really is. how dark can you imagine? does it compare to what we find offensive about the original cut of the film?

Jesus said 'forgive them, for they have no idea...'

sometimes it feels like we've given up truth for lent.

setting captives free

(click here to view this dramatic piece by edward poitras in the context presented)

it's always interesting to monitor just how things link up.

a deterministic theology? perhaps.

here's the thing: whether we believe in coincidence or co-incidents, there is a challenge for us to do something with events, words etc that seem to harmonize with each other, taking us in a single direction. just as many streams form one great channel to the sea, these complimentary happenings serve as invitations to consider glory, design and the will of God.

for him who has ears, let him hear, right?

so this sunday, as part of our 'turning towards the kiss of God' we were moved to look into 2 Chronicles 7.1-16 and meditate with singing upon the words:

If we'd ask, you would come.

Lord send your rain on everyone

That we'd see your glory here.

and on monday i received the email message below which deals with a movement across the country to set the captives free: free from the bondage of non-forgiveness.

what might God be whispering through these co-incidents?

if God is speaking, what can we do to be part of the great channel of unity, restoration and deep social, spiritual and cultural healing that God longs to bring to this land and these peoples,

regardless of ethnicity,

regardless of shameful backstory,

regardless of the obscene injustices that have been inflicted in his name by one people upon many others...

the restoration of broken relationships and identity sets those on both sides of a conflict free by God's grace.

***

If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

(2 Chronicles 7:13, 14)

Saskatchewan call to 3 days of prayer and fasting
February 11, 12, 13, 2010

February 13 Gather corporately to pray

Regina
Healing Hearts Ministry
766 Angus St
Saturday February 13, 1-4 pm

This tour is to present the message of forgiveness as a national response to the Prime Minister's apology in 2008 to Residential School Survivors and their families. Several national leaders have felt the need to offer a national response and will do a 3-day summit in Ottawa in June 11-13, 2010. This tour is to simply bring the message to people across Canada who have experienced Residential schools and the families who have also been affected. This is seen as a way to bring healing to our people as an opening step for our community as well as others in Canada to embrace the healing we all want and need.

(Jean Hill, provincial co-ordinator)

"The release of forgiveness will not only be a major landmark in the journey of Canada towards our destiny to bring healing to the nations, but it will be a new beginning in covenant relationships within the family of God for kingdom authority purpose for our nation; and Canada will be a blessed nation under God even more!"

(Gathering Nations International leader, Kenny Blacksmith)

Saskatchewan House of Prayer is calling the province to seek the Lord for three days February 11, 12, 13.

• As we humble ourselves to pray "Forgive us as we forgive those who've sinned against us" FORGIVENESS will be released in the spirit realm.
• Pray for Jean Hill and her team.
• Pray for Kenny Blacksmith and his team, those travelling with him.
• Cry out to God for healing upon our 1st Peoples, the people of this province and upon our land.

Words/visions/dreams can be sent to freedomwords2010@gmail.com

Gather together in your local areas to pray with others on February 13.

"If My people will . . . . then I will"

raise and release

so the struggle with sharing vision is to try to translate this sharing into different media. all fine and good to speak passionately before an assembled crowd, quite something different to post those same thoughts somewhere to be read without the benefit of all the things that make listening to an inspiring speaker inspirational.

the benefit, however, is the hindsight that is afforded in the process of somehow transcripting spoken words into written ones. there are shining sparks of revelation not found in the notes which take on major significance as God moves in the live moment of interaction, making apparent to all assembled (even the one speaking) that this is what he wanted someone to say.

example: a three word phrase that did not occupy a whole lot of space in the wildly scribbled, footnoted, annotated and even roughly illustrated notes that i brought with me to the front at a recent gathering of our people:

raise and release

that was it. so simple. buried amidst gathered quotes and ministry opportunities and examples to be shared with our missionally-minded, yet progressively active crowd at the annual 'society meeting.'

yet these words say so much.

raising requires investment work. it requires a discipling/mentoring relationship to be forged which is, at its centre, collaborative.

releasing requires trust and affords validation. whether the release is internal, releasing one to pursue his/her piece of the mission locally, or external, being allowed to leave the shelter, comfort and safety of the nest, that the larger picture would be realized.

yes, to raise and release is to invite, inspire, equip and empower. it is to place words of vision and challenge before people, then to walk alongside them, all the while sharing your pieces of the picture with them, that their own would be informed by it while not being controlled or restricted. it is to afford people the opportunity to meaningfully engage in the ongoing work as part of their own journey to self actualized, entire sanctification. to boldly go where no man has gone before...