Category: Blog

“There are two ways through life, the way of nature and the way of grace.  We have to chose which one we’ll follow. Grace doesn’t try to please itself.  It accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked.  Accepts insults and injuries.  Nature only wants to please itself.  Get others to please it too.  Likes to lord it over them, to have its own way.  It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things.”

These are the words that fall from the lips of Mrs. O’Brien in Terrance Malick’s latest film, The Tree of Life. There are not many words I can use to describe this cinematic adventure except to say that it is something that must be experienced rather than explained.  The Tree of Life is a very important film.  It features an all-star cast of Brad Pitt (Mr. O’Brien), Sean Penn (Jack O’Brien), and Jessica Chastain (Mrs. O’Brien).

Serving as a prologue, Malick begins by quoting of Job 38:4 and 7 where God asks Job where he was when the foundation of the earth was laid.  The opening sequence suggests a family member has tragically died.  As time passes, we find a very candid Jack O’Brien as a successful New York business executive.  During a phone conversation with his father, Jack expresses that he thinks about his brothers often and loves his family.  However, it is apparent by Jack’s tone and mannerisms that he is struggling with the meaning of life and the love of God.

The film then switches gears and by creating a visual masterpiece Malick follows the evolution of nature starting with the cosmos and ending with the birth a human (Jack O’Brien.)  If Malick’s tour-de-force doesn’t get an OSCAR nomination for it’s cinematography, myself and many critics alike will be quite shocked!  The film’s use of imagery is absolutely breathtaking.  For the first 30 minutes, we see a visual depiction of nature.  Malick displays (at least I think so) that nature doesn’t care about the others involved but instead let’s survival of the fittest run its course (here we even see Dinosaurs!)

While the film relies on little extensive dialog, Malick weaves a stunning masterpiece of aesthetics that go beyond the limits of story, while the limited dialog presents the two proposed dualities as experienced by a young Jack O’Brien in his boyhood.  From the beginning of the film we can see that Jack believes that God is love.  In one particular sequence we see an infant Jack and his mother pointing to sky and exclaiming, “that’s where God lives.”  Jack wrestles with nature and grace, life and death, and love and pride.  A young couple, Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien model the polarity of nature and grace to young Jack.  Mrs. O’Brien models a life of simplicity, beauty, and love, and reminds her sons “unless you love, your life will flash by you” whereas Mr. O’Brien is a stern authoritarian who demands his sons call him “Sir” when addressing him and tells them that “it takes a fierce will to get ahead in this world.”

Throughout the film we see a battle of Jack’s affections.  He is torn between his desire to embrace the love and gentleness of his mother and but to also gain the approval of his father, who isn’t so gentle.  He holds his parents in tension, exclaiming “Father. Mother.  Always you wrestle inside me.  You always will.”  After his first experience with pain, loss, and suffering Jack begins wrestling with who God is, asking how a loving God could allow such affliction and why he has to endure the hardship of his father’s rule.

We are then returned to the opening scene of an adult Jack, but this time walking through the frame of a doorway into a desert like terrain.  Malick, I believe, is visually illuminating  the O’Brien family’s emotional subconscious, and displaying “the way of Grace.”  The final twenty minute sequence appears this way.  Some may say the story is open ended and leaves you hanging, but in terms of the nature/grace polarities the film flows quite well, almost like movements in a symphony.

As mentioned before, The Tree of Life is best described as something that must be experienced rather than explained.  It blurs the lines of narrative between word and picture and written and visual.  I think it has much to offer us in our Christian walk.  As we see the experiences of a young Jack O’Brien, we cannot help but see ourselves in his place.   The film wrestles with questions that have been asked for centuries and it sheds light on what the love of God might look like if we were able to see it and can’t help but make us think of life in the Kingdom of God.   In our most vulnerable state, God finds us and brings us into a family of eternal and communal love.  As fallen humanity, we wrestle with submitting to God’s love or submitting to our own nature of selfishness.  Just as grace “doesn’t try to please itself, it accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked”, so it is with Christ.  Christ didn’t seek to please himself, but he accepted being forgotten and disliked so that we could enjoy a restored relationship with Him.  I suppose if I were to rephrase the opening quote, it would read,

“There are two ways through life, the way of selfishness and the way of Christ.  We have to chose which one we’ll follow. Christ’s way doesn’t try to please itself.  It accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked.  Accepts insults and injuries. Selfishness only wants to please itself.  Get others to please it too.  Likes to lord it over them, to have its own way.  It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it.  And Christ’s love is smiling through all things.”

God desires to extend his grace to all of us through Christ, and The Tree of Life gives us just a mere snapshot of that grace.

The Tree of Life at IMDB

Some of us at New Wine, New Wineskins were discussing God’s triune being of communal love the other day. In thinking through the implications, I said to one friend (which I also posted on Facebook):

In short, as I see it, God is a holy, loving communion of divine and eternal persons. At the core of God’s being, we find holy, interpersonal love. God is relational to the depths of his being. Love always requires an object. In the divine life, there is mutuality and reciprocity. Such love flows out from the Godhead into the world. While God does not need us, God does not use us either. God longs to have communion with us, for God is communal, and God’s glorious love is expansive and inclusive. The church as a Trinitarian community is first and foremost being-driven, not purpose-driven, as Brad Harper and I say in Exploring Ecclesiology. The church’s purposes and activities must flow out of this sense of relationality. Instead of “I think, therefore, I am” or “I shop at Wal-Mart and Macy’s, therefore I am” or “I have a job, therefore I am,” the model here is “I am loved by God, therefore I am.”

The following post is a reflection based on my recent trip to the San Francisco Bay Area. New Wine, New Wineskins and I were invited to explore the development of relational networks there in the Bay Area with local leaders.

I received the news a few days prior to the New Wine, New Wineskins San Francisco Bay Area trip scheduled for May 17th-19th that my Dad might pass away within a week’s time. When I spoke with my Mom about my Dad’s condition and about my upcoming meetings in the Bay area, she urged me to move forward with the trip. She emphasized that my Dad would not want for me to cancel; she added that my Dad worked and prayed for me for years in terms of God’s calling on my life and saw his own life and ministry flowing through me. My Mom’s encouragement and exhortation moved and mobilized me. Her words from above gave me the strength and focus with which to proceed.

My Dad died a few days earlier than we had expected. He passed away into the presence of the Lord on Wednesday the 18th, when I was in San Francisco. Soon after I received the news, my friends and fellow New Wine, New Wineskins Advisory Council members Gloria Young and Cooky Wall encouraged me to be alone with the Lord and pray and reflect. They went out to buy lunch and bring it back to Gloria’s office for us to eat before our afternoon meetings. As I prayed and reflected in the presence of the Lord, the words “the table” were impressed upon my mind and imagination. There I was kneeling and crying out to God and saying, “The table, …the table, … the table!” What did these words mean?

One of the things that stands out most to me about my Dad is that he always invited people to “the table”—at home, at church, in the neighborhood, and elsewhere. No doubt, his life has shaped my writings on matters pertaining to the Lord’s Table. I believe his life will continue to shape my life so that I will invite others to “the table” and receive their invitations to table fellowship, too. I thank God for my Dad’s life and love. May his life—a legacy of love—continue to flow through me.

I believe my Dad’s legacy of love will be alive and well in New Wine, New Wineskins’ ministry in the San Francisco Bay Area. Why? Because I believe New Wine, New Wineskins is being invited to the table there as a member of the family and as one whose task it is to make sure everyone else in the Bay Area is invited to come and remain at the table of Jesus’ love by faith. As long as we proceed in prayer and in sacrificial love for those around us—whoever they may be—rich and poor, conservative and liberal, large and small, cool and un-cool, Black and White and Hispanic and Asian and Other (no longer treating them as other but as us), we will be drinking from the Vine who is Jesus and bearing biblical witness to my Dad’s living legacy who with all the saints drinks from Christ’s cup and who eats the same broken bread. O Lord, O Broken Bread, O Vine, as I consume you, break me! Break me and flow through me. Flow through New Wine and replenish these wineskins! There is such a need for brokenness on our part, such a need for prayerful repentance and renewal, such a need to eat the Broken Bread and drink from the Vine. Only as we eat this Broken Bread and drink from this Cup will we make relational space for others to feast, too, in the Bay Area and beyond.

A few overlapping comments shouted out to me during the trip and bear witness to the pressing need for being intentional on making relational space for others at the table. I had shared with a Chinese American pastor in San Jose on Tuesday of that week what the African American pastor couple in San Francisco who had invited me to San Francisco on behalf of New Wine, New Wineskins had shared with me: the white Christian establishment in San Francisco has not invited people to dine at “the table” with them. If anything, they are sometimes invited as guests who can only return when invited again. They are not really seen as part of the family. When I shared this painful statement with the Chinese American pastor, he quickly claimed that “We aren’t invited to the table either. So, we have made our own table.” The next day, Wednesday, the day of my Dad’s passing, a young white emerging church leader led us up on a high hill that overlooked the city and outlying region to give us an aerial perspective. As he pointed to various sectors below us, he spoke of how disconnected and isolated the various Christian communities were in the Bay Area. He also noted in one of our recent conversations that it is not only the African American Christian community that feels vulnerable. In San Francisco, all Christian groups feel vulnerable. After all, it is post-Christendom there and the Christian table appears to be getting smaller and smaller and the number of chairs at the table appears to be dwindling. No doubt, the various Christian groups are trying in conscious and unconscious ways to make sure they have a place at the table. Perhaps, as a result, table fellowship ends up looking there (and in many other places, too) more like the game “Musical Chairs.” Only it is not a game.

The African American pastors who invited New Wine, New Wineskins to come to the table in San Francisco had indicated to me that as we grow in our friendship and partnership, we will share with one another our relational networks. At the table where we celebrate the bounty of the Lord Jesus’ love, we will find that we no longer have to fear scarcity. We no longer have to compete or guard our turf or make sure that we are seizing a sliver of the increasingly smaller religious pie in post-Christendom America. We no longer have to worry about not having a place to sit when the music stops. When we’re at the Lord’s Table, we’re no longer playing at Musical Chairs. There’s seating for one and all.

One event in particular served as a microcosm of hope for what can transpire where there is seating for one and all. I am referring to the final meeting which took place on Thursday afternoon, just hours before I returned to Portland. One leader present later wrote, “The group was small but represented an interesting cross section of the city. Various denominations and church personnel showed quite a variety. The discussion needs to broaden to include many more church leaders. Many of the shakers and movers of the city need to be invited to the table.” Another leader present at that meeting and with whom we interacted the previous day wrote about our efforts: “It is clear that the people involved in the conversation are high caliber people who see what is at stake and who are ambitious for the Kingdom of God. I enjoyed hearing people’s stories and feeling their passion. It is great to see people take time out of their busy schedules to prioritize being together in a listening posture to each other. This is the way of Christ! I believe that doors will be opened that would not have been were it not for the proactive servant-leadership demonstrated by the New Wine, New Wineskins team.”

No doubt, as we celebrate at Jesus’ table, we will be mindful of our need to be good stewards of what God has invested in us. We won’t hide our talents in the ground. Instead, we will make sure that we are investing relationally as we pour out our lives with and for one another as Christ’s body and for the world in the Bay area and beyond. The new wine of the kingdom will flow through New Wine, New Wineskins as we sit at the table to which we have been invited in the Bay area and at which we continue to dine and as we continue to pass the cup and break the bread together and as we make sure that everyone else is invited to the table, and there remain as cherished brothers and sisters, cherished ministry partners and friends. As we live into this reality, I will be offering day in and out a toast to my Dad and a drink offering of sacrificial praise to the Lord.