So what happened: I must not have had anything that I really wanted to blog for about a week and a half after my last post, and then I got pretty sick about 2 weeks ago. I had a bad viral sore throat, and the doctor prescribed me a broad-spectrum antibiotic because other people had gotten worse without it. But the problem is that I didn't know what broad-spectrum antibiotics do, or I might not have taken the darn thing. You see, it wiped out all the good bacteria in my intestines. We normally have a 80%/20% ratio of good to bad bacteria living in there, but all mine, good and bad, got lysed, i.e. killed. When I quit taking the antibiotic, the bad bacteria started repopulating first, and this really nasty breed called Clostridium difficile overpopulated. Guess what that gave me...diarrhea. Bleck, yuck, and major misery. :P So I got it about two Tuesdays ago, and by Sunday the first of June, it was so bad I came down with a fever. I was laid out from Sunday afternoon through Thursday on the couch, basically just sleeping on Monday and Tuesday, and reading on Wednesday and Thursday, and not eating much of anything at all. Finally got the test results back from the doctor this Monday saying that it was C. dif. not rotavirus like he initially thought, which is a problem, because I had been taking anti-diarrheal meds, which is exactly what NOT to take when you have C. dif...way to go doc! Needless to say, my mom is a bit fed up with him for the two boo-boos he made, and when he prescribed me another antibiotic to get rid of the C. dif. she wasn't willing to take that answer, so did some sleuthing and decided to call a friend who knows a lot about natural medicine. So we got up with her on Tuesday morning, and she set us straight about what I should eat and take to get my intestinal bacteria back in balance. So I'm much better now! :) The prominent God-thing in all this is that I had put on about 5 extra pounds for some reason in the past month (never could really figure out why), but God knew I needed them: I lost about 7 pounds while I was sick because I couldn't eat/didn't feel like eating. I'm pretty glad I lost them, so I'm going to watch what I eat carefully and get a lot of exercise so I can keep at my current weight.
Alrighty, so that's probably much more than anyone wanted to know about intestinal bacteria, but I'm a nerd, so I just had to explain it all. :)
As for other interesting developments in my life, I've been enjoying being my best girlfriend's confidant on her developing romance :), and I've discovered I love snail-mail letter-writing, so if anyone wants a pen pal, let me know and I'll write you epistles as long as you can make interesting conversation! ;) More seriously, I've been reading two more really provocative books that are changing my whole way of thinking and the way I'm living my life/going to live my life. The one that I've finished is Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope by Brian McLaren, and I'm about half-way through Jesus For President: Politics For Ordinary Radicals by Shane Claiborne & Chris Haw.
Everything Must Change was a great follow-up to Claiborne's Irresistible Revolution because it is more structured and less anecdotal and lays out a whole new theory of viewing the world and the Gospel as a first-century Christian would see it...kinda a "what Jesus really meant in His own political/historical/social/economic context" thing. McLaren explains the world's system is built on "the imperial narrative", a narrative being the framing story the people use to view their lives. The big lie of the imperial narrative is that we as human beings are unlimited; that is, we don't have to live within the limits of our environment, and we can consume as many nonrenewable resources as we want and produce as much waste as we want and live however we want, without having to deal with the consequences, whether they be things like global warming or things like an unplanned pregnancy. McLaren also explains that a way to understand our world is to break it down into three system that are all interconnected: the prosperity system, the security system, and the equity system. The way our world does things, these three systems interact to form what McLaren calls "the suicidal system" because it's in a rapid downward spiral that can't be changed using the world's own remedies. The prosperity system has created a gap between rich and poor that keeps widening because the rich use the security system to keep their wealth safe from the poor, who are oppressed and jealous of the wealth of the rich and resort to violence to get it. And thus, the equity system doesn't really bring equity at all. We keep living under the illusion that we don't have any limits, so we keep consuming resources and producing waste to increase our wealth, exploiting the poor to do so, and then continually building bigger and bigger weapons systems to protect our wealth from the poor, who then turn to violence and crime to get what they want/need.
There are other narratives too: the counterimperial narrative that runs opposite to the imperial narrative, but still uses the empire's methods, i.e. violence and dominance; the dual narrative, in which people keep their faith in their "private life" and use the suicidal system to their advantage in their "public life"; and the withdrawal narrative, in which people retreat from "public life" because they think it is hopeless to try to change things with their faith. Needless to say, Jesus rejected all these different narratives - imperial, counterimperial, dual, and withdrawal - to propose the Good News.
And then Claiborne & Haw's Jesus For President is another great follow-up because they take the whole imperial narrative theory back to Scripture and do a short exposé of the theme of empire throughout the whole Bible, and show how Jesus' message was neither counterimperial nor withdrawal, but a third way...neither resisting imperial violence with violence nor retreating from it, but responding with a creative nonviolence that forces your persecutor to acknowledge your humanity...responding with love and peace, not with dominance and violence, because it does no good, affects no change, to deal with the imperial system on it's own terms. We are to disobey the empire when it runs counter to God, but we are to be subordinate to it when it seeks to punish us for our disobedience. We are to live in God's economy of love, never responding to anything with bitterness or hatred, and living in God's system of jubilee - debt cancellation, unprecedented generosity, extending the love of family to everyone. Claiborne & Haw show just how political Jesus' message really was: words like "Christ" and "Lord" and "Good News" and "kingdom" and "Son of God" and "faith" were all used to refer to the emperor and emperor worship during Roman times, and Jesus took them and was using them subversively to refer to Himself. No wonder people got so mad and wanted Him to shut up...and eventually did shut Him up...or so they thought. So essentially, when Jesus is talking about not being able to serve two masters, He is saying that our allegiance to one must should destroy our allegiance to the other. So here comes the clincher: today, we as followers of God in the Way of Jesus, should place our allegiance to a King and His Kingdom, to the Slaughtered Lamb, not to our nation-state, because the community that we have been reborn into is so much bigger than our country, and why would we want to pledge allegiance to an empire that is part of an unjust, violent suicidal system anyway? Maybe the patriotism that we've been taught growing up in the church isn't very important after all...maybe it's actually wrong, partially because we make it more important than our allegiance to His Kingdom of love that doesn't have borders of nation, race, age, sex, or socio-economic status, and partially because we are pledging allegiance to a nation that operates counter to the Kingdom of God.
I have to admit that all of this really appeals to me, because I've never been interested in politics and government and power. So for someone to show that it isn't necessarily my "Christian duty" to be involved is nice. What I'm not saying is that I won't work for justice in our country and my community, but what I am saying is that I'm not going to work for justice on the system's terms...I'm going to do it lovingly, peacefully, creatively on God's terms, not just working respectfully through the system for change - like trying to change unjust legislation - but doing things creatively outside of it - like having lunch weekly with a homeless person and hopefully using some of my own resources to effect equity between us...now that's a revelation! sharing my wealth in common to work to eradicate inequity! :) But honestly, I'm more interested in loving the people than being involved in politics...but if loving people means getting involved in politics, I will, but I'm never going to make or let politics be my focus.
That being said, I'm not really sure if I going to vote or not...regardless of whether I do or not, one thing's for sure: I'm not going to let politics rule my life during the election process; I'm not going to live my life in a way that pledges more allegiance to the nation than to my King, because I know that I'll affect more change working in creative ways outside of the system than trying to put new wine in the old wineskin of the flawed system.And all that being said, one of my favorite songs remains Derek Webb's A King and a Kingdom:
~
Who's your brother? Who's your sister?
You just walked past him, I think you missed her
'Cause we're all migrating to the place where our Father lives
Because we married into a family of immigrants
So my first allegiance is not to a flag, a country, or a man
And my first allegiance is not to democracy or blood...
It's to a King and a Kingdom
There are two great lies that I have heard:
The day you eat of the fruit of that tree you will not surely die
And that Jesus Christ was a white, middle-class Republican
And if you want to be saved, you have to learn to be like Him...
So my first allegiance is not...
~
And I've been listening to a lot of other Derek Webb too...his lyrics are very cut-and-dry and prophetic, but loving...and I like the folk style of the instrumentation and harmonies...great music!
Oh, and one more thing - I just got on the Emergent Village website today, and I'm poking around to see if I'll be helping start a cohort in Greenville...there were some people from eastern NC going to the Raleigh/Durham one, but they were interested in one closer to them, so I suggested Greenville, 'cause I'd love to be a part of a cohort, which is basically just a group that meets to discuss new, creative ways of following Jesus in a different way than conversations in the church normally occur...check it out at www.emergentvillage.com
No comments:
Post a Comment