Eugene Peterson: the plagues and temple cleansing as exorcism of evil imagination

 Eugene Peterson:

The ten plagues were employed to expose the emptiness of evil, to purge the Hebrew minds of all envious admiration of evil, to systematically demolish every god-delusion or god-pretention that evil uses to exercise power over men and women. … Each of the ten plagues was an ammonia-laced scrub-bucket of suds for just such a cleaning. … 

The ten plagues were an elaborate exorcism, a casting out of the demons, that freed the imagination of the Hebrews form domination by evil so that they were free to hear and follow their Savior and worship God “in spirit and truth” (John 4:24). When Moses began his work with his Hebrew brothers and sisters, their spirits were “broken” (Exod. 6:9) and the only “truth” they had access to was this huge Egyptian lie. But Egypt and Pharaoh were not the “real world.” They were the real world defaced, desecrated, demonized. …

 The exorcising drama of the ten plagues freed the Brews from this Egyptian way of understanding reality, clearing the mind to accept God’s revelation reality, energizing their spirits to live in the world of salvation. The intent was that by the time they left Egypt, they would not only be physically free of the evil oppression but mentally free of the evil imagination that had crushed the life out of them for so long. The ten plagues would cleanse the “doors of perception” so that Israel could see life in a totally different way – the unreality of Egypt exposed; the untruth of Egypt laid bare – and would set them free to live a different life when they get out of Egypt, free to live the freedom of salvation..

Jesus in his temple cleansing compressed the eight-month drama of the ten plagues exorcism into the work of  a single day..

....In the act of cleansing the temple, he cleansed people’s understanding, purged their imagination--an exorcism so that the people, clear-eyed on the matter of God’s sovereign authority, would be able to embrace salvation without distraction, without clutter.  We carch a clear echo of the ten plagues in the temple cleansing.

...The work continues, the work of the ten plagues...the cleansing of the temple.. This is a  major and never-ending task, this exorcism of the culture's lies
and pretensions from the Christian imagination so that God’s sovereignty in history can be received in a life large with salvation  --Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, pp. 165-169
Read this whole section here

"I go to prepare a place for you": 'many mansions' on earth?

Barbara Rossig:

John 14:1- 2

"In my Father's house there are many dwelling places.  If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?"

Rapture proponents like to point to Jesus' farewell words in John 14:1 & 2 as the first teaching about Rapture in the Bible.  They argue that Jesus' statement that He is going away to "prepare a place for you" means that He is going away to heaven to get a place ready for those who will be raptured.  "In my Father's house are many dwelling places," Jesus says, using a Greek word that means "resting place" or "way station."  The Greek word is mone which comes from the verb meaning to "abide" or "remain."  But the problem is that Jesus does not specify where the Father's house is located.  Is it in heaven, as Rapture proponents argue?  Not necessarily, or at least not exclusively in the Gospel of John, because later in the same chapter Jesus says that He and the Father will come and make their "dwelling" in the believing person.  In John 14:23 Jesus says "We will come and make our dwelling (mone) with that one. He uses the same word. Here is image surely means God's mystical indwelling in the believer.  John's Gospel is the most mystical of all our gospels, and it is very hard to pin down locations or chronologies in this Gospel.

Robert Gundry, a conservative evangelical scholar, cautions against assuming that Jesus’ ‘many dwellings’ or ‘many mansions’ are rooms up in heaven. For Gundry, the crucial clue is that Jesus never promises that, upon His return, Jesus will take the disciples away to the ‘dwellings’ or ‘mansions’ in the Father’s house…Rather, what Jesus promised His disciples is that ‘Where I am, you will be also’’

I must caution against assuming that Jesus' "many dwellings" or "many mansions" are rooms up in heaven.  The crucial glue is that Jesus never promises that, upon His return, Jesus will take the disciples away to the "dwellings" or "mansions" in the Father's house, as one would expect in the Dispensationalist's literalist scenario.  Rather, what Jesus promised to the disciple is that "Where I am, you will be also."  The key to chapter 14 is the two parallel occurrences of the Greek word mone in verses 2 and 23.  These verses provide a reciprocal relationship as believers have abiding-places in Christ, so Jesus and the Father have an abiding-place in each believer.

Within the context of John 14, the term "Father's house" is not so much heaven as God's household or family on earth.  Indeed, the word "house" is probably better translated as "household" both here and in John 4:53 and 8:35.  In a strong sense John wanted to underscore that we are already in some sense living in the "dwelling places" in the Father's household that Jesus says He has prepared for us.  The passage is not about mansions in the sky, but spiritual positions in Christ.  To use the same phrases and image Jesus said in John 15 that He is the vine and we are the branches who "dwell" or "abide" in Him already.  It is not a matter of being taken away from planet earth, up to the Father's house in heaven.  The dwelling Jesus is preparing for us is something quite different.

In John's gospel, imagery of ascending and descending has a rich, double meaning that makes a strictly "heavenist" interpretation impossible.  Far more important than going up to heaven in John's gospel is the "in-ness" and "one-ness" Jesus wants us to experience already with God.  The gospel's focus is on the rich relationship of mutual indwelling and eternal life that is already ours.  To know God is to have eternal life - "this is eternal life," Jesus says in His great farewell prayer in John 17:3.

Never would John's gospel say that Jesus and God are now up in heaven, waiting until the end-times in order to come back to earth and take us away to heaven in the Rapture and then in the Glorious Appearing.  God dwells with us now, on earth, in our hearts.  He dwells in us through the Holy Spirit.  To impose the linear timeline of Rapture followed by tribulation and then an earthly return imports a chronology that is totally foreign to the Gospel of John.

Does the Bible contain a prophetic clothesline or a blessing?  The Bible is difficult to understand, and apocalyptic passage such as the Book of Revelation and Matthew 24 and 25 are some of the hardest.  The temptation is to make up a system to give answers - to create that so-called "prophetic clothesline" and then hang biblical passages on it.  But the Bible gives us neither a clothesline nor a timeline nor a system.  Instead, it give us a relationship with God!  To read the Bible's hardest passages is like wrestling with God, much like Jacob who wrestled through the night at the river Jabbok.  You grapple to make sense of the words, you hold on, you struggle for clarity, you seek to wrest answers for all your questions.  What God gives you instead of a system of answers is a blessing, a new name - a living relationship.  You are forever changed by the encounter.  You have seen the face of God.

There is no two-stage or three-stage return of Christ in the Bible, no escapist Rapture from earth for born-again Christians. Instead, Jesus will return - ONCE.  Until then, we are always with Jesus and He is with us - Emmanuel.  Our life is held in God's time.  And we are called to live in wakefulness, to pray as the final verses of Revelation do, "Amen, come Lord Jesus."  -link (strangely, gives no credit to the source: Rossig, The Rapture Exposed, p  184-186, it seems to give credit to  a Seventh Day Adventist writer Steve Wohlberg)

“I quit because I didn’t want to run the damn church"-Eugene Peterson ( video interview by Rick McKinley)

Catalyst West 2011: Eugene Peterson from Catalyst on Vimeo.
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Notes on this talk by Tony Morgan:

• on starting a church: “I want to make sure these people know about God and know each other.”
• “I had an adrenaline problem. I loved adrenaline.”
• on faking it as a pastor: “I made motions that I was doing something.”
• “How can I expect them to know what a pastor does when I was trying to figure it out myself?”
• on resigning to become a “pastor”: “I quit because I didn’t want to run the damn church.”
• on the elders running the church: “They made stupid decision sometimes.”
• “I stopped looking at people as problems to fix.”
• “Being a pastor is a pretty modest job. We’re not very important in the economy of the world. But we’re pretty important in the economy of the Kingdom.”
• “Don’t let the culture define our position.”
• on reading about previous pastors: “We need to pay attention to the people who have done it well.”
• on the church: “We’ve never been successful. Yet, all through this, salvation is being worked out.”
• on being a pastor: “It’s not glamorous… It’s hard, but it’s glorious.”
• ---------------------

 Notes by Tim Schraeder:

• A lifetime of influence always reflects a person of character.
• A pastor is not a job description, it’s a life that’s shaped in a certain way.
• We are all shaped by our environments.
• To try and model yourself after someone else is almost always a mistake.
• Being a pastor is the most context-specific vocation there is.
• As a pastor, your life is your vocation.
• As a pastor he knew what he wanted to do but didn’t know how to do it.
• He didn’t want to be an “entertainment” pastor.
• He didn’t want to be Presbyterian, that was like doing bookkeeping.
• He wanted to makes sure people knew about God and that they knew each other.
• A Holy God, a holy congregation.
• He knew he needed to be insistently local, the congregation is a local place.
• It has to be personal, you have to have relationships with all of the people.
• There was still a church building to be built and funds to be raised.
• He realized he had an adrenaline addiction… he liked to compete.
• He realized he didn’t know how to be a pastor but realized his congregation didn’t know what was a pastor was either… so he was proactive to make sure they knew who he was as a pastor and so he could know who they were as a church.
• He didn’t want to run a church, he wanted to be a pastor.
• All of us learn how to do what we are doing while we’re on the job.
• None of us are exempt from learning how to be a pastor on the job and to trust the people who are with us on the job.
• We need to let other people be ministers along with us.
• You need to give people responsibility and authority to create a holy community.
• Determine not to look at people as problems to fix.
• Do not look at people as resources to use.
• Doing either of this is dehumanizing.
• Treat people with dignity and as eternal souls, not as ways to make a living.
• Most of the leadership models we have given to us in our secular culture have to do with getting something done.
• Making money, building something, going on a mission, etc.
• A pastor’s chief job is not to get something done but to pay attention to what’s going on and to be able to name it and to encourage it.
• We live in a secularized world where leadership positions almost entirely do with having to get something done and figuring out how to do it.
• A pastor has a unique position in the church of Christ to be on the ground and local in a community, paying attention to what God is doing and helping people see it through the exposition of Scripture and teaching.
• People pay more attention to listening.
• The Bible is our Story.
• The pastoral vocation has to do with being available to people, to lead them into maturity and in the life of Christ without mimicking you.
• People need to grow in Christ in the context of who they are, in their vocations, etc.
• Being a pastor is a modest job. We are not important in the economy of the world… we are, however, important in the economy of the Kingdom of God.
• Worship, teaching, silence and being present are major parts of being a pastor.
• Everybody has a story.
• Spiritual formation doesn’t mean getting a bunch of disciplines together and doing them, it means paying attention to what’s going on in your life.
• The caution: don’t let culture define our position and our vocation.
• Secular culture infiltrates the church… we live in a sea of secularity, it’s hard not to be influenced by it.
• Think deeply, pray deeply, read widely in the literature of pastors.
• Steep yourself in the community and company of pastors.
• This is a unique vocation and we can learn from a lot of people and we need to pay attention to the people who have done it well.
• Understand the inner-workings of the pastoral life.
• Steep yourself in the literature of the life of faith.
• Keep your guard up against the secular stuff going on around us.
• There is a lot of pessimism in the church today.
• We’ve been in this position so many times … for 2,000 years, and for 2,000 years before that as a Jewish community.
• We’ve never been successful at it.
• Israel was only faithful every once in awhile…
• All throughout it, though, salvation is still working out in spite of us.

talking bad about the church

Check out Miguel's post:

The Bride of Christ, She’s A Hot Mess.

Excerpt:

I remember once preaching in a small church about fidelity.  At one point I asked the congregation while pointing at them, “How many of you are cheating on your spouse?  Raise your hand.”  An overwhelming number of them raised their hands.  Spouses were crying, people were moaning and yelling.  It was as if someone exploded a grief bomb in our midst.  It was an intensely painful moment. 

."What we love about Pope Francis is what our own hearts can’t stand"

Joel Miller on the pope:

...What we love about Pope Francis is what our own hearts can’t stand. We’re like the sedentary man hooting the runner from the lazy shade of the front porch. But the runner is calling over his shoulder. And he’s saying, “Join me.”  link

The Steeple and the Gargoyle: Muggeridge, Carnival and The Simpsons

This is a version of  chapter 3 of the amazoing David Dark book, "Everyday Apocalypse":

The Steeple and the Gargoyle: Celebrating The Simpsons
by David Dark
Mystical ecstasy and laughter are the two great delights of living, and saints and clowns their purveyors, the only two categories of human beings who can be relied on to tell the truth; hence, steeples and gargoyles side by side on the great cathedrals.
Every Christmas (or thereabouts), William F. Buckley sees fit to fill his Firing Line slot on public television with a re-airing of an outrageously strange conversation with Malcolm Muggeridge. Buckley customarily introduces the segment by observing that this is, by far, his favorite episode of Firing Line, and what’s remarkable is the utterly undignified and awkward aspect of the interview that follows.
It’s not an argument, exactly. Both men seem to be deriving a great amount of pleasure from one another’s company. But the stakes strike the viewer as, somehow, alarmingly high as Muggeridge, covering his smile, gazes at Buckley with his Obi-Wan Kenobi-eyes and Buckley shoots back furtive glances of disbelief at what’s being proposed.
Muggeridge, you see, contends that everything, under Heaven, is laughable, and he does mean everything. Chartres Cathedral, the Sistine Chapel, Bach’s B Minor Mass, Mother Theresa, whatever we can propose for the status of dignified and noble and true. Buckley, as we might guess, is scandalized. How can this be?
Muggeridge: “Let’s think of the steeple and the gargoyle. The steeple is this beautiful thing reaching up into the sky admitting, as it were, its own inadequacy—attempting something utterly impossible—to climb up to heaven through a steeple. The gargoyle is this little man grinning and laughing at the absurd behavior of men on earth, and these two things, both built into this building to the glory of God.”
But what is he laughing at? Evil? Pomposity? “He’s laughing at the inadequacy of man, the pretensions of man, the absolute preposterous gap—disparity —between his aspirations and his performance, which is the eternal comedy of human life. It will be so till the end of time you see.”
Till the end of time. This is where Buckley (like a great many of us) can hardly help but hesitate. But the alternative, a worldview that allows for some finalized perfectibility of human nature in the Here and Now (the steeple without the gargoyle, Babel, what-have-you), is hopelessly off as well, and we all know it. What Muggeridge so profoundly understood and what Buckley had such trouble seeing (to the former’s respectful amusement) is that the state of affairs we’ve found ourselves in is really quite wonderful. No one, as it turns out, has managed to plateau. No one has successfully dotted every “i” and crossed every “t.”
And there’s a glory in this imperfection. Mother Theresa knows she’s simply doing what she can, and this, according to Muggeridge, is precisely what makes her such a beautiful person. The word is modesty. The fact that Muggeridge is no longer with us (the date of his departure is transmitted across the screen half-way through the interview) somehow serves to heighten the comedy as mortality gets a word in at his “expense.” Television has never looked so good.
And yet, it does occasionally come close. I’m referring to the closest thing I’ve personally found on the airwaves to a Muggeridgean tragicomedy: The Simpsons. It is a work of art. It’s also a cartoon. I won’t stoop to pretend you’ve never heard of it. What it offers is very likely the most pro-family, God-preoccupied, home-based program on television. Statistically speaking, there is more prayer on The Simpsons than on any sitcom in broadcast history. After all hell has broken loose over the Simpson family’s Thanksgiving dinner, Homer offers thanks for the food while interjecting, “Lord, are we the most screwed up family in the whole universe or what?” Later, when the runaway Bart has returned home and a haphazard order has been restored, they convene again for a late-night meal and Homer ends the show praying, “Thank you, Lord, for another crack at togetherness.”
The Simpsons’ creator, Matt Groening, puts it this way: “We try to put real human emotion into it. Most other cartoons, except the Disney Films, don’t seem to do that. They are just about surface emotion. The show has a rubber-band reality. We stretch it way out into the far reaches of human folly, and it snaps back to relative sanity.”
As a kind of celebration, The Simpsons fulfills, in part, the role that Carnival played in medieval culture. Russian literary critic, Mikhail Bakhtin gives this description: “Carnival laughter is the laughter of all the people... It is directed at all and everyone...The entire world is seen in its droll aspect...It is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives. Such is the laughter of carnival....It is also directed at those who laugh. The people do not exclude themselves from the wholeness of the world. They, too, are incomplete, they also die and are revived and renewed.”
The purpose of Carnival is to overcome or provide momentary relief from the death-dealing seriousness of the status quo, the official. On The Simpsons, all societal personalities are pushed together into a normalizing proximity in which the prerogatives of power and class and celebrity are dropped. George Bush moves into a house across the street, Sting assists in getting Bart out of a well, and Michael Jackson appears as a huge, white mental patient with a shaved head. Everyone comes to know everybody, and any appeal to aloofness or superiority from any quarter is subject to the heaviest lampoon and ridicule. The playing field is leveled, and the forum is open. The Simpsons is customarily subjected to a false evaluation for a variety of reasons, but its status as a kind of stumbling block is not, primarily, as an enemy of family values but, rather, as its advocate. The necessary, much-needed, life-giving gargoyle, if you will. It refuses to take seriously our proudest efforts, the various instances of self-centeredness and idiocy which fall so hopelessly short. That our presumed goodness is so devastatingly shabby is not a cause for outrage, but is, rather, a major part of what we profess (for those who do) when we claim Christianity. An acknowledgment of the ongoing persistence of our frailties is, after all, the central groundwork for what is called comedy. And we need comedy like we need the gargoyle. We need a sense of humor. Without it, we lose the ability to criticize ourselves.
Seriousness, after all, can be an excruciatingly inhumane task-master. Its vision is very often too small. It doesn’t want to know, for instance, that the person disagreeing with us or whose very existence offends has, as it turns out, a really nice smile. It certainly doesn’t want to hear that a Samaritan would do a thing like that. No time for it.
We’ve got to keep an eye on seriousness. It can make us treat people very unkindly. As Walker Percy says of sentimentality, it leads to the gas chamber. Seriously. On The Simpsons, everybody’s soft and funny-looking. No exceptions. Everybody’s invited.
Everybody fits, because nobody does. They’re all weird and getting weirder. Moe, the bartender, is just about consigned to a stereotype when, suddenly, we see him reading stories to children in an orphanage, a weekly activity he goes to great lengths to conceal. The writers of the program are kind enough to violate our prejudices at every available opportunity. And occasionally, through one child punching another on the arm or Marge gently stroking the back of Homer’s hand, we get to hear the strange, delightful sound of this silly-putty flesh-on-flesh. They’re ridiculous. They can’t seem to get away from each other. And the kindness and compassion that works its way between them is always funny but never ridiculed. They’re alive like us.
Is this making sense? It’s certainly okay to wince or to be a little bit bothered. But we probably ought to be careful about deciding we’re feeling offended. It can get old after awhile. We become offended in all the ways God isn’t. And the seat of offendedness (like the seat of judgement) can be a real tricky spot to occupy. Before we know it, it can become a twenty-four-hour-a-day job. It becomes all we’re known for. And when we’re all caught up in all the things we’re against, we forget the beauty of the things we’re supposed to be for. We forget what the kingdom of Heaven looks like and all the wonderfully odd characters taking up residence there.
I’ll end with another Christmas story. I was sitting in a corner at a Yuletide gathering when one of our hosts decided it was time to sing Christmas carols. Why she picked my own personal corner as the place to commence with this activity I neither know nor understand, but I was stuck.
So I sang. Me and three women and another fellow who’d suffered a similar fate. Softly at first, and with face reddened, I tried to do my part without sticking out too much and wishing all the time that enough people would join up and I could excuse myself. But no joy.
Eventually, another guy entered the throng and this one saw fit to sing real, real loud. He’d been drinking, but he knew how to harmonize, and he knew he knew, and he knew it was funny. So we all started going for it. Entirely too loudly. And we belted it out as the false reverence gave way to parody. This was a delight.
We ran out of carols, but we wanted to keep on going, so we reran the ones we’d started with. We were still going pretty loud, but we’d worn ourselves out somewhat, and although it was still funny, it didn’t have to be. The words were beginning to take on meaning (for me anyway) that hadn’t been too accessible before. And what I can only describe as reverie seemed to settle on the whole lot of us. We’d started with a kind of purported earnestness shot past seriousness into burlesque, and now we’d broken out of orbit. We’d made our way into authenticity. Maybe. In any case, I think all of life should be lived that way. I want to shoot past seriousness more often. As often as possible, actually. Keep an eye on the gargoyle. Just do it. Thank you for your time and attention.  link

Free excerpts:N.T. Wright's"Paul and the Faithfulness of God," including chapter 1 on Philemon

Excerpts of N.T. Wright's "Paul and the Faithfulness of God" linked below

•  Table of Contents,
•   Preface (note the chiastic structure of the book:"The way up and the way down are one and the same."
•  chapter one  complete  PDF  (outlined below)

-------------------------------

Chapter 1: Return of the Runaway? 3

1. A World of Difference 3

(i) Pliny and Paul 3

(ii) The Runaway Slave? 7

(iii) The Request 10

(iv) The Central Argument 16

2. Philemon and the Study of Paul 22

(i) Introduction 22

(ii) Philemon among the Worldviews 24

(iii) From Worldview to Theology 36

(iv) Questions in Context: History, Exegesis,Application 48

(v) Sources 56

(vi) Worldview, Theology and History 63

3. Philemon as Allegory: Theology, History and Reconciliation

See also:

•  new N. T. Wright video: Paul and the Faithfulness of God

• Older video: NT Wright  video sermon on Philemon

  • N.T. Wright on Philemon (from new book PFG)

  • posts tagged "Wright" and "Philemon: below