The Dreams I Dream
Brian Zahnd
And it shall come to pass afterward
That I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh;
Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
Your old men shall dream dreams,
Your young men shall see visions.
-Joel 2:28
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Reading The Bible Right
Brian Zahnd
(I put this poem in Water To Wine.)
It’s a STORY
We’re telling news here
Keeping alive an ancient epic
The grand narrative of paradise lost and paradise regained
The greatest “Once upon a time” tale ever told
The beautiful story which moves relentlessly toward—
“They lived happily ever after”
Never, never, NEVER forget that before its anything else it’s a story
So let the Story live and breathe, enthrall and enchant
Don’t rip out its guts and leave it lifeless on the dissecting table
Don’t make it something it’s really not—
A catalog of wished-for promises
An encyclopedia of God-facts
A law journal of divine edicts
A how-to manual for do-it-yourselfers
Find the promises, learn the facts, heed the laws, live the lessons
But don’t forget the Story
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Soil With A Soul
Brian Zahnd
“The LORD God formed the human (adam) from the dust of the ground (adamah) and breathed into his nostrils the breath (spirit) of life, and the human (adam) became a living soul.” –Genesis 2:7
Soil is miracle ground — it’s the matrix of all life on earth. As the second account of creation in Genesis tell us, all life comes “out of the ground” — plants, animals, and humans. We did not fall as pure spirits from the realm of the perfect forms and find ourselves imprisoned in contemptible matter (as Platonism claims); rather we were formed from the dust of the earth, breathed on by God, and became living souls. We are humans from the humus, soil with a soul; we are a mysterious synthesis of the dust of the earth and the breath of God. There is a sense in which humans are very complicated, self-aware rocks — rocks so magnificently complex that we are capable of bearing the Creator’s image and sharing the Creator’s spirit. Indeed the psalmist is moved to praise God by saying,
Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!
Your workmanship is marvelous — how well I know it.
(Psalm 139:14 NLT)
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We Need Contemplative Pastors
Brian Zahnd
I became a pastor when I was twenty-two. (In reality I had been doing the work of a pastor since I was seventeen, but by the time I was twenty-two I had been ordained and embarked upon the fulltime vocation of being a pastor.) As I look back upon this, it does appear somewhat ridiculous. A twenty-two-year-old founding pastor! Do I regret it? Yes and no. I admit that it’s probably not the best way to go about planting a church and making disciples, but it’s what happened. It was part of the phenomenon of the Jesus Movement. Young would-be followers of Jesus were looking to me for leadership. It’s the cards that were dealt me. So I did my best. I learned on the job. And the Lord was with us.
But by the time we began to have the success of numerical church growth in the 1990s, we were fully locked into the charismatic evangelicalism that too often appears committed to an elementary level of faith. Later I would discover just how difficult it can be to lead a large church beyond a quasi-fundamentalist and largely reactive Christianity. It’s not impossible, but it’s very difficult. And always painful.
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L’Chaim!
Blindman At the Gate
Water turned to wine
The miracle is the time
That it did not take
For common to turn extraordinaire
Tap water transformed to carménère
Drawn from pots of ritual purity
Taken to the master of the party
Hints of plum and kingdom come
Salute!
In Nazareth he was called the carpenter
In Cana he became a master vintner
Sommelier said it’s a hundred point wine
The miracle-worker did it without a vine
A whole barrel of vintage year thirty
Better than the best from Cape Verde
All so the feast would not cease
A toast to Mary for her idea
L’chaim!
We walked from Nazareth to Cana
In the fall of my fifty-fourth year
Talking Jesus all along the way
Took us the better part of a day
Every other store up and down the line
A Christian selling some kind of wine
Call it a entrepreneurial witness to—
Jesus’ first miracle
Cheers!
Water turned to wine
The mystery is the time
It takes for my own transformation
A slow and painful fermentation
With a soul like crushed grapes
I’m a dusty bottle in God’s cellar
But the winemaker knows his craft
He makes all things beautiful in their time
Hallelujah!
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My Problem With the Bible
Brian Zahnd
I have a problem with the Bible. Here’s my problem…
I’m an ancient Egyptian. I’m a comfortable Babylonian. I’m a Roman in his villa.
That’s my problem. See, I’m trying to read the Bible for all it’s worth, but I’m not a Hebrew slave suffering in Egypt. I’m not a conquered Judean deported to Babylon. I’m not a first century Jew living under Roman occupation.
I’m a citizen of a superpower. I was born among the conquerors. I live in the empire. But I want to read the Bible and think it’s talking to me. This is a problem.
One of the most remarkable things about the Bible is that in it we find the narrative told from the perspective of the poor, the oppressed, the enslaved, the conquered, the occupied, the defeated. This is what makes it prophetic. We know that history is written by the winners. This is true — except in the case of the Bible it’s the opposite! This is the subversive genius of the Hebrew prophets. They wrote from a bottom-up perspective.
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Reading The Bible Right
by Brian Zahnd
(An old poem resurfaces. It’s best read aloud.)
It’s a STORY
We’re telling news here
Keeping alive an ancient epic
The grand narrative of paradise lost and paradise regained
The greatest “Once upon a time” tale ever told
The beautiful story which moves relentlessly toward—
“They lived happily ever after”
Never, never, NEVER forget that before its anything else it’s a story Read more
Eye-Deep In Lies
by Blindman At The Gate
Why is it that if we dare to envision a world without war
(A hope offered humanity by the prophet Isaiah bar Amoz)
We’re considered hopelessly naïve or even treasonous?
Why is it that everyone knows Jesus taught the way of nonviolence
(Just read the Sermon on the Mount and you’ll see what I mean)
Except those who most vociferously call themselves Christians?
Why is it that a clear renunciation of war is called cowardly
(Suggest killing enemies is not the way and see what happens)
When following the crowd has never required any courage?
Why is it we’re suspicious of those called peacemakers
(Ask brave Daniel Ellsberg, he’ll tell you all about it)
When the One we worship is called the Prince of Peace?
Why is it we believe the coming of Christ will bring the reign of peace
(For we do confess that someday the lion will lay down with the lamb)
But in the mean time act as if we must preserve war as long as possible?
Why are those who renounce war and embrace peace called stupid
(“The poor dolts don’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain”)
When Einstein said, “I’m not only a pacifist, but a militant pacifist”?
Why am I even bothering to talk about the topic of peace
(“Shouldn’t he be preaching the gospel or something?”)
When I know good and well it will only cause me grief? Read more
“And in the distance the Jesus-lovers sat with hard condemning faces and watched the sin.”
–The Grapes of Wrath
Thus John Steinbeck depicts the world-denying Pentecostals in The Grapes of Wrath as self-righteous , self-appointed morality police who take perverse pleasure in condemning the Saturday night square dance in the California migrant camp. Steinbeck’s terse portrayal of the “Jesus-Lovers” is unflattering, but not an unfair invention of fiction. Unfortunately, such people do exist, and in their existence they horribly distort the good news of Jesus Christ.
The worst way to define ourselves as Christian is in the negative: What we are against. Steinbeck’s migrant camp Jesus-lovers were against dancing (and most other expressions of humanness). Of course, it is a caricature, but only in that it is perhaps an exaggeration. There remains the misguided tendency to identify ourselves by what we condemn.
And we have made this quite clear to the wider society. Ask a non-evangelical to define what evangelicals believe and odds are they will not speak in terms of a personal salvation experience (the classical marker of evangelicalism), but will give you a summary of political positions and a list of items evangelicals are opposed to. And that these items may indeed be real evils and not the innocent dance of Steinbeck’s novel is beside the point. The question remains, do we really want to be primarily identified by what we are against? Don’t we have some good news to identify us?
Here’s the question: What do we think of the world? Are we part of the world or not? Do we love the world or not? Do we have hope for the world or not? Read more