First Light – Week 4: Collaborative Eschaton

Crossan takes us into the heart of Jesus’ program this week. Crossan’s sees the program built around a repetitive set of actions taken by Jesus and his followers: heal the sick, eat with the healed, announce the arrival of God’s kingdom.

We had a lively discussion around Crossan’s view of Jesus’ healings. Rather than miracle cures, Crossan argued that Jesus was both symbolically and literally healing the ill by bringing them back into the larger community. Crossan held a skeptical view that the healings involved any actual reversal of physical ailment.

Much of Jesus’ ministry was centered on shared meals. The story of the loaves and fishes and the last supper are just two examples. These meals served as a reminder of the God’s abundance.

Finally, Jesus formalized his message in announcing the kingdom of God was present in these collaborative acts of community.

First Light – Week 3: God’s Great Clean-Up

This week we focused on the differences between the baptismal movement of John and the kingdom movement of Jesus.

Summarized, John had an eschatological vision of an imminent coming of God which would include a great “clean-up” of the man-made empire of Rome. John envisioned a punitive God punishing those who oppressed. John’s program of baptism was a re-enactment of the Exodus. Purification was achieved by a baptism/crossing of the Jordan. Each baptism was a step toward purifying Israel and a call for God to intervene. When Antipas beheads John, the movement is beheaded as well.

In contrast, Jesus argues that kingdom is not just imminent, it is present. Jesus insists we don’t need to wait for God; we need only to join in. Crossan calls this “collaborative eschatology.” Jesus views God as non-violent. There are consequences to sin and mistreatment of others, but the consequences are not punitive. Finally, the Jesus movement is collaborative unto itself. The movement will survive Jesus’ death.

First Light – Week 2: The Advent of the Messiah

As evidenced in the Dead Sea Scrolls, by the time of Jesus’ birth, many Jews have begun to associate the “one like the son of man” who, according to the book of Daniel, will rule over the Kingdom of God, with the long sought Messiah. Many versions of the Messiah are described in the Dead Sea Scrolls and other texts of the time but nearly all paint a picture of a warrior king. This paradigm would be turned on its head by the time the Gospels were written.

Jesus grew up (and might have been born) in the town of Nazareth. Historians estimate Nazareth to have had a population of between 200 and 400, probably on the lower end of the range. All were Jewish and most would have lived their entire lives there. It was a small, tight-knit Hebrew community.

The economy was changing from one of subsistence farming to commercial agriculture. Three families owned approximately 50% of the arable land in Galilee. Families that had owned small plots of land for generations were now relegated to tenant farming or, worse yet, to working as day laborers. The barter system that had long supplemented subsistence farming was being monetized. If landless peasants couldn’t purchase enough to eat with the coinage they were paid, they were out of luck.

In this environment of growing injustice, the Jesus movement took root. Jesus’ followers were young; most would have been in their twenties or even late teens. And they were restless for change.

First Light, Week 1: The Matrix of Jesus

In this introductory session, John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg introduced the idea of the matrix of Jesus. The matrix can be viewed as the context of Jesus’ life and ministry and is crucial to understanding Jesus. Try to imagine Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. outside of the time and place of their lives. So it is with the gospel of Jesus.

The book of Daniel provides a lead-in to Jewish theology regarding the Kingdom of God in the first century CE. Daniel is primarily written during the time of the Maccabean revolt against the Greco-Syrian Empire in the 160’s BCE. The story tells of the coming kingdom which will usher in an age of divine rule and the end of evil and empire – eschaton. By the time of Jesus’ arrival, the Roman Empire is in ascendance. The Hebrew people have spent most of the last 600 years under the yoke of foreign powers. A yearning for the Kingdom of God is building.

It is the coming, inevitable clash of empire and eschaton that is the matrix of Jesus.

Generation Attitudes

I have been writing and thinking about the generational attitudes. Generational attitudes are classified as Baby Boomers born 1946 to 1962 (some authors will close that generation at 1964); Generation Xers born 1963 to 1980, and Generation Y or Net Generation or the Millennials (depending on who you read) born 1981 to 2000. As I think about reaching these generations in my professional teaching experience, we also need to think about them in the church. If you want to learn more about the Millennials, Pew Research published some interesting findings. Read their report Millennial's Judgment About Recent Trends.

2010 Adult Education Year

The Adult Education Team at St. Paul's has been working hard to create learning experiences for our attendees. In 2010, we do not expect to slow down. We just finished two weeks of "Serious Answers to Hard Questions" video series. The first week started with "Science vs. Religion". Lecturer John Polkinghorne is an Anglican priest, past President of Queen's College at Cambridge, former Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Polkinghorne suggests that science asks, "How do things happen?" and religion asks, "Is there meaning and purpose at work in the world?" This Sunday the topic was on "Resurrection" by N.T. Wright. Also coming with a long resume, Wright is a well-known, somewhat conservative and respected New Testament scholar, and also a gifted speaker. He currently serves as Bishop of Durham, England. Bill Tammeus, former religion writer for the KC Star, quoted Wright in a recent blog about the Christian view of death, dying and the afterlife. I would like to thank Marti for facilitating these two sessions.

I would like to hear from the readers of this blog if you would like to have more of this series offered on Sunday mornings.