Category: Blog

This piece was originally published at Patheos on March 17, 2013.

Listen to this piece.

My wife, Mariko, has shared beautifully about the rainbow of love of her multi-ethnic experience. My rainbow of love experience is a bit different, and it breaks on through or rather past Jimmy Fallon’s impersonation of Jim Morrison of The Doors singing “Reading Rainbow.” The only books Morrison ever inspired me to read were those by the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche, Aldous Huxley, and Arthur Rimbaud.

I grew up in a strong Christian home and received Jesus into my life as a small child, but rebelled against what I would call “Churchianity”—a lukewarm and bourgeois Christian faith—during my high school years. The life and lyrics of Jim Morrison were significant forces that shaped me during this time. Even today, I appreciate Morrison for seeking to follow his convictions wherever they would lead him—perhaps even seeking to “break on through to the other side” through death.

After a few brushes with death and nihilism and the death of a friend, I came to realize after high school that what Jesus said was true at a very personal level: the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy, but Jesus has come to give life to the full (John 10:10). The potency of Jesus’ words woke me up after attending the wake of that late friend and I gave my life to bearing witness to Jesus who broke through death to the other side through his resurrection to bring us fullness of life. I went from being intoxicated with reading about the life of Jim Morrison to being inspired to follow Jesus from taking to heart the words of the martyred missionary Jim Elliot, who wrote of the Christian life in his journal: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”

Churchianity would have us try to hold onto our comforts at all cost whereas Christ’s church always calls us out and beckons us to take up our crosses, die to our comforts, and find our comfort through union with him and those shaped by the crucible of Jesus’ reconciling and life-fulfilling love. Fullness of life in Jesus involves being reconciled to God and one another. That is a tall order, especially in an alienated world where people who are different than us and who view us as strangers appear strange and ugly, as Morrison sang. It is very hard to find sanctuary in a world like this, where everyone who is different appears to lock you out and you return the favor.

We all need to be called out from our comforts that isolate and alienate us. We all need to be called into community, where we are no longer strangers and where we can find a home among friends who, whether or not they are like us, really work hard to love us. I am grateful for Irvington Covenant Church, where we are being called out from strangerhood today as members of this body. Irvington Covenant Church on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Portland, Oregon is committed to offering reconciliation rooted in Christ where those who were once strangers—“those who are other”—can now become friends. Our church is a grand experiment—not with drugs and alcohol—but with tenacious love.

What brings us to Irvington and keeps us here is not its call to be Facebook friends, but friends in the biblical sense. Biblical friendship entails more than “likes” and “shares” and hanging out with those who belong to the same fraternity. It entails personal sacrifice and building community with those least like you. Through faith in Christ we are baptized by the Spirit into his death and raised through the Spirit into the fullness of his resurrected life so that we can break on through comfortable lives to his all-comforting love that gives us the courage to become what we already are—one in the rainbow of Jesus’ love—in community.

In the song “The Soft Parade,” Jim Morrison claims to have gone to seminary school. While I doubt he did, I undoubtedly did. Morrison claims to have heard in seminary that one could petition the Lord in prayer—a claim that he rejects. When I was back in seminary school, I also heard of petitioning the Lord in prayer. Now as a seminary professor, I speak of petitioning the Lord in prayer to make us one in view of Jesus’ prayer:  ^“I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:23). I want to believe with all my heart that I can petition the Lord to make this prayer come true. Irvington Covenant is a church I have always admired from afar. From afar, it is known as a beautiful experiment in race reconciliation. Certainly, it is beautiful. However, it is also very messy. Irvington Covenant—this beautiful and messy experiment—is not centered in a psychedelic supper but in Scripture and the Lord’s Supper, which beckons us to our Lord who got messed up to make us one.

The rainbow of Jesus’ messy, beautiful love (rather than Jimmy Fallon’s Jim Morrison’s “Reading Rainbow” or Levar Burton’s own rendition of “Reading Rainbow”) calls us to imagine and invest in the biblical vision of a world in which there are no divisions between Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free (Galatians 3:28). It calls us to envision and inhabit a kingdom that will appear in its fullness, where people of every tribe and tongue and nation will worship and commune together at the throne of God and the resurrected lamb (Revelation 7:9-10). I am grateful that our church is willing to take the risk and inhabit the Scriptures together and travel to that throne whose rainbow of promise and providential, holy love assures us that God will bring us through trials and tribulations (Revelation 4:3). Our story is still being written, as we find sanctuary here to ride through the storm and journey home.

This piece was originally published at Patheos on March 16, 2013.

Listen to this piece.

I was blessed to read that the new pope, Pope Francis, asked the people to pray for him before he blessed them. He also refused to be elevated above the cardinals on a platform. Not only that, when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires, he determined not to live in the archbishop’s palace, but in an apartment, and passed on taking a chauffeured limousine to work in favor of the bus. Known for his simplicity and for being a voice for the poor, it is quite fitting that Jorge Bergoglio chose as his papal name, Francis (in view of St. Francis of Assisi)—the first time this name has been used for a pope.

The new pope’s symbolic actions and characteristic traits are no doubt welcome signs to many. Among other things, the name Francis suggests that he sees his role as one of rebuilding the church, which includes embracing the traits already noted as modeled by the pope. For example, the heart-felt posture of humility noted above, which is essential to rebuilding the church, entails regard for dialogue. Although the new pope is known for being a resolute conservative on social issues, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said of Pope Francis that he shares common aims with the U.N. over advocacy for social justice and peace and that they “share the conviction that we can only resolve the interconnected challenges of today’s world through dialogue.” Certainly, concern for meaningful and sustained dialogue is key to addressing the various interwoven challenges the world faces today. Among other things, dialogue entails going beyond confronting ideological platform positions with ideological platform positions.

While I appreciate fellow Evangelical Gary Bauer’s affirmation that Evangelicals should care about the new pope, his reasoning for why Evangelicals should care about the new pope is based primarily if not exclusively on his conviction that “Catholics are our best allies in important cultural and political battles,” as his USA Today article’s tagline conveys. Indeed, there are many areas of agreement between Evangelicals and the Catholic leadership on social issues, for which I am very grateful. Moreover, Evangelicals have a long way to go in terms of developing a consistent and comprehensive theology of life and could learn a great deal from Catholicism, whose teachings on social ethics are exceedingly robust. Still, we may also be able to learn a thing or two about how to dialogue from the new pope, if as the U.N. Secretary says, he is committed to approaching the world’s many interconnected challenges in this way.

One area where dialogue is needed is with the Muslim world. With this point in mind, I wasn’t sure what to make of Bauer’s claim that “Catholics and evangelicals (and to a lesser extent orthodox Jews and Mormons) have formed a formidable partnership in recent decades against the threats of secularism, relativism and Islamism.” How is such a statement not read as fighting words to Muslims? Evangelicals have a long way to go in terms of building trust with Muslims in pursuit of resolving longstanding conflicts involving religion in our world today.

I would hope the main reason why Evangelicals would affirm the new pope is not his social conservative platform, but his posture and lifestyle of humility, simplicity, and care for the poor, along with what the U.N. Secretary-General claims is his commitment to dialogue. If his papal name is any indication, he wants to listen first and understand before being understood. The prayer attributed to St. Francis titled the Peace Prayer includes the lines:

O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled, as to console;
To be understood, as to understand;
To be loved as to love.

This past week, I was part of a dialogue involving Evangelicals and Buddhists on the subject of abortion and related social issues. What was striking was that for our various metaphysical and lifestyle differences, we chose to listen to one another wrestle through the issues based on our personal narratives and histories, not merely ideology. As a result of taking time to listen and share and complicating the issues, not as ideological opponents but as people with complex lives, we were in a better position to work through difficult topics and come to a greater sense of mutual understanding of one another’s positions and what needs to occur if we are to make headway on social ethics rather than label one another in the extreme.

The preceding statements should not be taken to mean that theology and ethical foundations don’t matter; they matter greatly. But the only way we are going to be able to make progress on divisive social issues is when we get to know our supposed ideological opponents as people, for whom the issues before us matter to them at a deeply personal, existential level, just as much as they do to us. By humanizing issues and complexifying ourselves, we are also able to simplify life to an extent: the solution to many difficulties involves cultivating greater understanding of people’s lives and positions rather than painting them in ideological terms of opposition, whether they are Muslims, Buddhists, secularists, Catholics, or Evangelicals.

Power religion paints people and positions in ideological terms. Why I welcome the new Pope most is because of his posture of humility, simplicity and the selection of his name Francis, which conveys the effort to understand and love before seeking to be understood and to be loved. In a world poverty-stricken for understanding and love, this pope may very well be a welcome sign.