Category: Podcast

What would you expect from a beat poet? Certainly not someone who stays on the beaten path. One of the ways in which Tony “The Beat Poet” Kriz goes off the beaten path as a Gen-Xer raised in the Evangelical Christian tradition is by finding spiritual value in what those from non-Christian traditions have to say and how they live. He wrote about this recently at Leadership Journal. It also shows in his book, Neighbors and Wise Men: Sacred Encounters in a Portland Pub and Other Unexpected Places. Here he differs from many Evangelicals from a previous era.

The other is by finding spiritual value in the Evangelical tradition in which he was raised and in closely aligning himself with his tradition, including its weaknesses. As an evangelist, Tony is shaped in part by his years with CRU (Campus Crusade for Christ) and holds a special place in his heart for the late Bill Bright. While he does not see them as exhaustive, Tony believes CRU’s Four Spiritual Laws are beneficial for evangelism and highlight key facets of the gospel. Not only though does Tony identify with what he takes to be strengths in the Evangelical tradition, but also he identifies with what he takes to be weaknesses and problematic forms of engagement in our witness to a watching world. In seeing value in traditional Evangelical institutions and also identifying with Evangelicalism in its weaknesses, he differs from many younger Evangelicals of the emergent sort today.

I have found Tony’s off the beaten path responses refreshing and missional. On the one hand, if we don’t see connections between Christians and those who don’t yet profess Christ, it is hard to build bridges for serious conversations about Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life.  On the other hand, if we don’t value our own tradition and also identify with it in its weaknesses (such as how it has often demeaned the religious and sexual other over the years), we won’t be able to be taken too seriously by those beyond our movement’s walls. To be precise, if we think of ourselves as better than those who come before us, we show ourselves to be as or more self-righteous than they may have been and won’t be able to guard against falling prey to further abuse when it is least expected.

In these and other unexpected ways, I find The Beat Poet to be a great dialogue partner in helping the church go off the beaten path and engage other paths well in Christian witness.

This piece is cross-posted at Patheos and The Christian Post. Comments made here are not monitored. To join the conversation, please comment on this post at Patheos.

No idea is bigger than a little life snuffed out. Eight year old Martin Richard was waiting yesterday with his mother and sister for his dad to cross the finish line at the Boston Marathon. Now we are waiting for information as to why someone or some group would set off bombs that would intentionally kill innocent civilians like Martin and seriously harm his mother and sister. No matter the explanation—no matter how big the ideology—the idea is still too small. Martin’s life was so much bigger.

I listened to U2’s song, Peace on Earth, the other day as I was driving one of my children and her friend home from an afternoon at the zoo. I looked in the rear view mirror as the song played while they played, thinking of Bono’s words about the violence in Northern Ireland where he grew up and how the people killed in the blasts and whose names were read over the radio were so much bigger than the ideas that led to their deaths. I was thinking of how ideology can drive us in the name of peace or justice or some other value to run over innocent bystanders whose faces and names we don’t even care to see. I pray that you and I will not allow our ideologies to consume us to the point of consuming others—those closest to us and those far away yet close to others.

The true marathon race to justice is a very long haul. There will never be true peace on earth as long as we destroy the lives of precious individuals for ideas we hold dear.

This piece is cross-posted at Patheos and The Christian Post. Comments made here are not monitored. To join the conversation, please comment on this post at Patheos.

This piece was originally published at Patheos on April 11, 2013.

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It is off-limits—illegal—in some circles to look at the faces and listen to the personal stories of undocumented workers. Many in these circles fear that if you move it beyond faceless, nameless policies, you will make exception after exception. On this view, the claim is made that you should never base laws on exceptions, so you ignore the exceptions. But the exceptions have faces and names, wives and husbands, children and parents, fears and hopes, just like we do.

Jesus’ answer to the question—“Who is my neighbor?” (in Luke 10)—is not intended for generic policy position papers, but for each of the people who cross our paths. In Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes about monumental doctrinal themes like transcendence and the grand omnis of orthodox theology. Regarding relationship with God and our framing of these categories, he writes: “Our relation to God is not a ‘religious’ relationship to the highest, most powerful, and best Being imaginable—that is not authentic transcendence—but our relation to God is a new life in ‘existence for others’, through participation in the being of Jesus. The transcendental is not infinite and unattainable tasks, but the neighbour who is within reach in any given situation…” (Letters and Papers from Prison, Touchstone edition, 1997, p. 381).

Speaking of “the neighbour who is within reach in any given situation,” Jesus does not tolerate the religious scholar’s attempt to justify himself in Luke 10 by raising the question, “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29) Jesus’ answer suggests that the question is off-limits to Jesus, even illegal in view of the scholar’s intent to distance himself from taking responsibility for his neighbor. Jesus then tells the scholar who had come to test him on the essence of the law and its requirements for gaining eternal life (Luke 10:25) a story in which religious leaders like himself failed to care for their neighbor, who was within their reach in a given moment and situation. While it may have been ceremonially illegal for the religious leaders in the story narrated in Luke 10 to care for the man beaten and robbed and left for dead, Jesus does not let them off the hook. Only the seemingly illegal and immoral Samaritan fulfilled the law by acting mercifully in the moment (Luke 10:30-35).

We can live the entirety of our lives according to transcendental and legal policies that leave people dying on the road, but fail to care for the transcendental reality of the illegal person lying there before us. Such systems of justice will not judge us, but the transcendent Jesus who is dying on the road as the discounted exception to our rule will.