Grow Mercy

God’s Non-violence

Posted on June 25, 2006 by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

I have appreciated the comments and questions from Len in a few of my "atonement" posts. I'll attempt to respond to some of his questions over the next number of posts.

There is however a question about God's nature that touches every question about Christ's death, any question about atonement. It is this: Is there violence in God? Did God command the wholesale slaughter of nations, the wiping out of false prophets, the killing of first born, and so on?

If yes, then God's supposed institution of rites and ritual sacrifice, both to recall some of these events and for obtaining virtual purification makes sense. As well, with respect to purification, the recognition that sacrificing bulls and goats is a temporary solution until the ultimate (human/god) sacrifice could be enacted, also makes sense.

In this case God is a good God but with a violent and sacrificial side. A god, in other words, that is not unlike the pagan gods, except, perhaps, much stronger. To equate God's violent side with God's acts of justice, as is sometimes done, seems to me, only adds to the confusion.

If however, Jesus is the perfect ontological reflection of God, or as the New Testament has it, "the exact imprint of God's very being", then the sacrificial mechanism, that is, the mechanism of doing away with others to preserve and solidify the group or nation, needs to be exposed and undone. And the Hebrew sacrificial system of formal rites and rituals, needs to be re-storied.

If Jesus, who prayed for and loved his enemies, is "the image of the invisible God", then there is no violence, retribution, or vengeance with God. Jesus in fact is God moving toward us, standing in as ultimate victim, not as payment, but as self-gift. As such the substitutional atonement which is violent at its core, asks to be reinterpreted in light of God's having-nothing-to-do-with-sacrificial violence.

To call Jesus' self-gift as the "ultimate sacrifice" is of course legitimate as long as sacrifice is understood rhetorically and not as sacrifice as payment or appeasement.

Christianity/Poverty

Edmonton’s Christian Care Centre

Posted on June 24, 2006 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

Things are changing. Evangelical and orthodox and mainline churches are getting together to care for the unfortunate in their nieghbourhoods.

And it's happening in our own city. Check out the story here.

To my mind this is truly a hopeful sign for the church: One, that different churches are working together, and two, that their collective attention is upon people in need of social care.

Christianity/Peace

Empathy for Victims

Posted on June 22, 2006 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

For he delivers the needy when they call,
the poor and those who have no helper.
He has pity on the weak and the needy,
and saves the lives of the needy.
From oppression and violence he redeems their life;
and precious is their blood in his sight. (Psalm 71)

We live in a time when our ability to empathize with "victims" comes easily, almost naturally. We don't question this. We think it has always been this way. But doing so discounts two millennia of the leavening effect of the Sermon on the Mount.

In a era where people were at fault for their station in life, in other words, when the question, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?", made perfect sense, there probably would not have been something like a Hope Mission.

Identification with, and empathy for, "the victim", is a remarkable thing. And as far as I can tell, biblical revelation is responsible for this. The cross is the cause.

Reading successively through the scriptures, we are slowly but progressively awakened to the suffering of the victim, where finally, everything culminates in Jesus, the innocent victim.

The cross exposes our victimizing ways. Our scapegoating method of making peace through having, "one man die for the people than having the whole nation destroyed."

Now that Christ has exposed this mechanism as an idolatrous lie, we are left with only two options to deal with violence. The first is more violence. The supposed redemptive or sacred or "good" violence, that sets things in order through visiting violence upon violent ones. This only creates victims out of victimizers. And of course, the same old mechanism is at work here. So really, this option is an impossibility. It has been tried ad nauseam and it always leads to more violence–finally apocalyptic violence.

The other option is almost as impossible. It is the renouncing of all violence and vengeance. Our model here is Jesus and all those over these millennia, who in the face of violence, have imitated him.

They were able to imitate Jesus in non-violence because they discovered that they had taken part in his lynching. But then, in some way, perhaps in many different ways over time, they were visited by his forgiving presence. And they were cut to the heart; and the nearly impossible became possible.

Spirituality

The Art of Observance

Posted on June 21, 2006 by stephen t berg / 1 Comment

_{The pictures in this post were all taken during my walk to work this morning.}

Several weeks ago, Randy Loewen, a Chaplain at Hope Mission happened to mention to me that he enjoyed one of my posts. He said it was fairly observant. (Well, one out of a hundred-plus is not exactly major league, but Iâ€™ll take it.)

We talked more and agreed that the attention given to the art of observance was scanty. True, some people are more observant than others. Perhaps more accurately, different people observe different things. And this is a good thing; in fact crucial for community.

But in the broad sweep, we thought that our powers of observation were wanting. Certainly there will be things that always escape us. In fact good filters keep us from information overload. Essential for psychological health, especially in our time.

But this is something other than our waning ability to live within our bodies, present to the moment. I know my own experience is that self-occupation, in all its guises, easily becomes preoccupation and keeps me from engaging the stories, the events, the moments of genuine life going on all around me.

And thatâ€™s the thing. So much life goes on around us, and only in pausing do we pick it up. Weâ€™re often guilty of having eyes and ears but not seeing or hearing.

I remember becoming wide awake to this. It was ten years ago. I was sitting in a lawn chair, appropriately on the front lawn of our acreage in Stony Plain, reading Thomas Mertonâ€™s, "New Seeds of Contemplation". And I remembered several childhood moments as as if Iâ€™d been transported through time. My observance of life was strong then. What I didnâ€™t remember was how I lost this.

So for the past decade Iâ€™ve tried, with varying degrees of success, to be intentional about observance. And I have placed things in my life that hopefully cultivate this. For example, I have belonged to the same small group for the past six years. Our watchword is, “Come and See“. Also, I continue to read Thomas Merton and authors like him. And my mentor, Father James, always helps bring me back, demonstrates in his own being, that a discipline of observance can become the art of observance.

All these things help me appreciate even a brief and simple moment, standing talking to Chaplain Randy and hearing his own reflection on observanceâ€¦which woke me up yet again to its importance.