Tim Keel's Blog

Face to Face

We've been navigating a series on the Holy Spirit through most of this summer. Several weeks ago I talked about the Spirit as Presence. I talked a lot about the human need to "face" and "be faced." Scripture is filled with references to God's people seeking God's face. Internally, eternally, we are made to face and be faced - with other humans beings, but ultimately with God.

I've always wondered if this is what the Psalmist references when he writes, "But you, Lord, are a shield around me, my glory, the one who lifts my head high" (Psalm 3:3). The image of a person's face downcast, for whatever reason it might be so, and then of God gently placing his hand under the chin and slowly lifting it so that that person's face is looking into God's own...it compels me.

You can listen to the message here - scroll down to the message titled, "Coming Face to Face."

My good friend Isaac Anderson sent me a quote he read from Miroslav Volf that speaks to this very thing.

"I have always been fascinated by the phrase 'The Lord make his face shine upon you.' God's blessing, God's protection, God's peace, God's grace - all part of that same benediction - are great goods, and if I had to choose between them and God's shining face, I might well opt for them. But God's shining face outdoes them all. For God's blessing, protection, peace, and grace concern things that we possess, do, and suffer, while God's shining face concerns our very being. It stands for God's sheer delight that we exist and live before him. Yet I rarely 'see' God's face shining upon me, and given that I am an inveterate sinner, it is not easy to know exactly why God's face should shine on me."

Volf's right - it is not easy to know exactly why God's face should shine on me, apart from grace. Grace. How little we apprehend it. And yet...

Richard Rohr writes:

"Most myths include belief either in a benevolent universe, a hostile universe, or one that is indifferent. Until we accept that ours is a radically benevolent universe, we are not Christians...We cannot stay in the indifferent universe for long. It will soon deteriorate into the hostile universe. Instead, if we are lucky, we will finally meet what we call grace, the notion that someone is for me more than I am for myself."

Face to face with Grace, the lifter of my head.

To Love What You Command

I recently read this quote from N.T. Wright:

"One of the great Prayer Book collects asks God that we may 'love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise.' That is always tough, for all of us. Much easier to ask God to command what we already love, and promise what we already desire. But much less like the challenge of the Gospel."

Amen.

Parsing the Global Context of Mission

In the first chapter of his book, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission, Lesslie Newbigin gives a brief but nuanced history of Western civilization, particularly against a backdrop of the dominance of Islam by the end of the ninth century. Newbigin does this to set up the historical context of how "missions" developed in the church of the West in order that he might (re)construct a more robust theology of the missional nature of God's people, particularly for the time in which we live.

Integral to this work is an assessment of the current state of the world, particularly relative to where it has been. Newbigin describes the global cultural hegemony of the West since the time the Enlightenment, but then goes on to describe how the West's power has waned over the last several decades. By the way, Newbigin is writing in 1974.

"To look at only the most recent chapter of the story shows that the rejection of Western leadership by the rest of the world has developed though various stages and is not yet complete. A century ago the Western nations so dominated the world that most of the rest of mankind stood in awe of the white man and accepted his claim to political, cultural, and religious leadership. Even when the movements for political emancipation began, the leaders of national movements accepted in large measure the cultural leadership of the West, using Western languages, political ideas, and forms of organization."

Those forms of organization, by the way, are a good part of what I am seeking to address directly and indirectly in my book, Intuitive Leadership: Embracing a Paradigm of Narrative, Metaphor, and Chaos. Newbigin goes on to say, however, that it was not long before the West's cultural influence began to wane as well. Newbigin's argument becomes clearer at this point: the West has enjoyed unquestioned power and influence for a very long time, and that includes the church. In a globalized and increasingly sophisticated world such privilege and all the assumptions that accompany it are being deconstructed and dismantled. The challenge the becomes to "...learn afresh what it means to bear witness to the gospel from a position not of strength but of weakness." And to be honest, there is nothing surprising there. He and many others have been saying for a very long time. But then I think he makes an interesting turn.

"One almost universal feature in the world scene, however, seems unlikely to change in the near future. It is what has been described as the revolution of rising expectations. People in every part of the world are agreed in making demands upon society which in former ages were made only by a small segment in each nation. The French and American revolutions opened a radically new chapter in human history by establishing governments committed to the restructuring human life on the principles developed during the Enlightenment."

So while the political, martial, economic, and organizational biases of the Western world are being rejected or renegotiated, the standard of living it created and then glorified  is not. It is against this backdrop that Newbigin introduces one of the many challenges of mission in our world today. It goes to the fundamental nature of how we understand, and perhaps more importantly, incarnate the gospel.

"Everywhere people demand and governments promise 'the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,' and everywhere people grow impatient and rebellious when the promise is not fulfilled; if there is one generalization about the human situation today that is almost universally valid, it is surely this. The inner relationship between this expectation of a new world and the Christian gospel of the reign of God is one of the issues that must be discussed in any contemporary theology of mission (italics mine)."