Kerygma: the Greek word used in the New Testament for preaching (see Luke 4:18-19, Romans 10:14, Matthew 3:1). It is related to the Greek verb κηρύσσω (kērússō), to cry or proclaim as a herald.
I'm making my way through Eugene Peterson's "Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places" far more slowly than I care to. Not that it's the author's fault, but the book is a bit more slowly evolving than the other two. Might just be that I'm (once more) reading a series of books completely out of order. Might be that I've had every sort of distraction to get in my way of reading time. No telling. But the book is still a rewarding read each and every time I do manage to find the time for it.
The section I'm pulling out for highlighting today is one that speaks to a number of realities that I see in front of me. Specifically, a variety of communities that I have the thrill and joy of joining in with at Lakewood. As a slight aside to the book's revelation in this regard, I have to confess that I'm more convinced now than I ever was about churches being hospitals for people rather than museums for perfectly saved individuals.
By way of confession, I've had it on my mind lately to contemplate withdrawing from one such community. Thought about it long and hard. Gave myself a plan of action to more or less come up with some verdict based on a few preset criteria. Then, I managed to listen to Joel Hunter's sermon on the book of Jonah (Week #38). There's a lengthy - and growing - list of things I take from that sermon. But one relatively minor one was this. Sometimes all that's asked of us - or required of us - is just that we show up. I found myself asking what I was getting out of a certain endeavor. Sure, the people I was around were good people. But was I getting anything from the teaching? ... other than air conditioning? Wouldn't my time be better spent finding a nice, quiet nook to just seclude myself and catch up on some already hard-to-find reading time? I'd be lying if I said there wasn't something appealing about the thought.
Hunter's point in covering Jonah was, basically, that Jonah didn't want to go to Ninevah to preach, as God told him. So much so, that when he eventually found himself in Ninevah, his "preaching" was short and to the point: essentially "Repent!" Not much more. And repent, they did. Hunter's point, revisited, is that God used that. The pagans at Ninevah repented, fasted, turned from their evil ways, and God spared them His judgement. Jonah just showed up. A prophet with a chip on his shoulder toward the people of Ninevah ... just showed up to a group of people he literally could not stand or tolerate. And the Holy Spirit moved in that.
My own scenario is far less extreme. But wasn't much less self-centered. Hunter's point, again, was that if we merely just let our body "do the right thing" (his words), that our minds run the risk of catching up (my synopsis).
Peterson adds to this, a bit more verbosely, by framing how it is that we seem to find ourselves in a group of Christians that, even though we think our community should be as close to Eden as we can create, isn't even close. He begins this section of the book retelling how, as a child, he romanticized over the history of the French Revolution. But by the time he studied it in college, he realized how much of it he had wrong. The comparison he makes from this more youthfully naive moment is that his adult realization that being a pastor demonstrated another critical error - that the people he was now led to call, weren't quite the Edenites he had romanticized about either.
I chop off a bit here from both the beginning and the end. All to arrive at a beautiful dissertation of how we find ourselves in such odd community ... and how that's often where God has called us to serve. People aren't perfect. Not even church people. Heck, not even Lakewood people (can I at least claim that we're better than average?). But Jesus didn't arrive here to deal with the perfect people - or even the people that could be perfected with his tutoring. After three years with his disciples, at his more critical juncture - praying in the garden, he arrives to find that his support troops have been sound asleep the whole time. I can just imagine what He might have felt for a brief moment about his immediate community.
Anyways, we pick up on Peterson after his French Revolution awakening, and just as he finds himself as pastor. Enjoy the rest, below the fold.
Exploring the Neighborhood of the CommunityA few years later I had become a pastor and was astonished to find men and women in my congregation yawning. Matt Ericson went to sleep every Sunday; he always made it through the first hymn but ten minutes later was sound asleep. Red Belton, an angry teenager, sat on the back pew out of sight of his parents and read comic books. Karl Strothheim, a bass in the choir, passed notes supplemented by whispers to Luther Olsen on stock market tips. One woman gave me hope - she brought a stenographic notebook with her every Sunday and wrote down in shorthand everything I said. At least one person was paying attention. Then I learned that she was getting ready to leave her husband and was using the hour of worship to practice her shorthand so that she could get a self-supporting job.
These were, most of them, good people, nice people. They were familiar with the Christian faith, knew the Christian stories, showed up on time for worship each Sunday. But they yawned. How could they do that? How could anyone go to sleep ten minutes after singing "Blessing and Honor and Glory and Power ..."? How could anyone sustain interest in Batman when St. Paul's Romans was being read? How could anyone be content to practice shorthand when the resurrected Christ was present in word and sacrament? I had, it seemed, a whole congregation of saints and sinners who knew everything about the Christian life except that the gospel had redefined everything and everyone, set everything and everyone in a participating relation to the holy God. It came to me that holy was to Christian what revolution was to the French in the eighteenth century, the energy that created a community of free men and women plunged into a new life. The community that I was working with knew the word "Christian" pretty well, and identified themselves as Christian. But holy? Holy Spirit? Something blazing? A community bonfire?
I knew I had my work cut out for me. When I was ordained and then called to be pastor of a congregation, I had supposed that my task was to teach and preach the truth of the Scriptures so that these people would know God and how he works their salvation; I had supposed that my task was to help them make moral decisions so that they could live life happily every after with a clear conscience. I had supposed that my task was to pray with and for them, gathering them in the presence of a holy God who made heaven and earth and sent Jesus to die for their sins. Now I realized that more than accurate learning was at stake, more than moral behavior was at stake, more than getting them on their knees on a Sunday morning was at stake. Life was at stake - their lives, their souls, their souls-in-community. People can think correctly and behave rightly and worship politely and still live badly - live anemically, live individualistically self-enclosed lives, lived bored and insipid and trivial lives.
That's when I got seriously interested in the word "holy" as an attribute of community, what Gerard Manley Hopkins described as "the dearest freshness deep down things." I became interested in what "holy" meant in my workplace, my congregation, the people of God community to which I was assigned as a pastor. When I sensed that "holy" to congregation was what "revolution" was to French politics in the eighteenth century, it didn't take me long to realize that I was as ignorant of this world of church in the twentieth century as I had been earlier of the world of France in the eighteenth, an ignorance perpetuated by romanticizing fantasies. Just as I had little idea of what was involved an actual revolution, I was similarly unschooled in the holy. I started looking for signs of the holy, evidence of the holy - holy lives, holy community, Holy Spirit. And I started paying attention to what Scripture and theology told me about what was involved in being a part of this Holy Spirit-formed community. After a good bit of casting around, I found the place to begin was the resurrection of Jesus.
Kerygma: Jesus' Resurrection
The gospel, while honoring our experience, doesn't begin with our experience. We don't begin a holy life by wanting a holy life, desiring to be good, fulfilled, complete, or wanting to be included in the grand scheme of things. We have been anticipated, and the way we have been anticipated is by the resurrection, Jesus' resurrection. Living a holy life, the Christian equivalent of revolution, begins with Jesus' resurrection.The resurrection of Jesus establishes the entire Christian life in the action of God by the Holy Spirit. The Christian life begins as a community that is gathered at the place of impossibility, the tomb.
Just as Jesus' birth launches us into the creation and Jesus' death launches us into history, Jesus' resurrection launches us into living in community, the holy community - the community of the resurrection. Jesus' resurrection is the kerygmatic life-off for living in the community of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus' resurrection is the final kerygmatic "piece" that, together with his birth and death, sets the good news, the gospel, in motion and creates the Christian life. Everything necessary for the Christian life is now laid out before us and put into action in us. The way we live our lives, the impulses and desires we have to get in on what God is doing in the wonders of creation and the mess of history, is activated now by Jesus' resurrection. There is no living worth its salt that is not the consequence of the action of God in Jesus through the Holy Spirit: "If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you" (romand 8:11). Paul is tireless in the variations he plays on this theme. George Steiner speaks of the "rich nuances of the resurrection." This is the kind of living that we designate holy living in the holy community. A resurrection life.
I am using the word "kerygmatic" to identify those pivotal moments in the life of Jesus - birth, death, resurrection - that so clearly reveal God to us, for us, and now in us. They are kerygmatic because they are an announcement, a proclamation of something that has happened quite apart from us but that makes present the reality in which we live. And makes it present in such a way that we realize that it is wonderfully good and that it is at hand for participation - ourselves no longer reduced to ourselves, having to take charge of ourselves and everyone around us, "to make something of ourselves" as we are so often told. Nor do we any longer understand ourselves as having to put up with everything that comes to us and makes the best of it, because the resurrected Christ, raised by the Holy Spirit, is doing something about all of it.
Each of these moments is a proclamation: this - this birth of Jesus, this death of Jesus, this resurrection of Jesus - is something we cannot do for ourselves, cannot take credit for, cannot take over and run with, cannot reproduce in any way. It is done for us. We can only hear and believe and enter this God-for-us reality that is so generously given as both the context and the content of our lives.
There are symmetries in the birth/death/resurrection stories but there is also this difference: we experience birth and death, at least biologically, in what appear to us as natural conditions; but the resurrection is wholly supernatural. Jesus did not raise himself; he was raised. And we do not raise ourselves; we are raised.
* * *It is critical that we get inside this and make it our own, critical that we realize not just that the resurrection happened but that it happens. Too often we make the resurrection only a matter of apologetics and melt the resurrection accounts down into an ingot of doctrine; for Jesus (and Paul interpreting Jesus) resurrection is primarily a matter of living in a wondrous creation, embracing a salvation history, and then taking our place in a holy community: receive the Holy Spirit (John 20:22). Receive this Holy Spirit by whom Jesus has just been raised from the dead so that you can continue to participate in Jesus' resurrection life in your prayers and obedience.
It happens, we do not make it happen. The more we get involved in what God is doing, the less we find ourselves running things; the more we participate in God's work as revealed in Jesus, the more is done to us and the more is done through us. The more we practice resurrection the less we are on our own or by ourselves, for we find that this resurrection that is so intensely and relationally personal in Father, Son, and Spirit at the same time plunges us into relationships with brothers and sisters we never knew we had: we are in community whether we like it or not. We do not choose to be in this community; by virtue of the resurrection of Jesus, this is the company we keep.
2 Comments
Thanks for posting Week # 38 here. I could not access it on G'sO.com.
I hope to have time later in the week to comment more on this. But, for now, to reiterate one of the key points made,
believers are all WIPs (works in progress). On a daily basis, we are all being slowly and surely refined by God's holy fire.
Thanks for the Outtakes. Other than in paperback form, they are the next least expensive way to read the book. :-).