"Jesus From Below"

Our friends at the Center For Transforming Mission do amazing work in Guatemala City, in La Limonada (in partnership with Lemonade International), throughout Central America as well as in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Each month they distribute an e-newsletter called "Words From Below".

I had to share this from the newsletter they sent out today. It really connects with my post from yesterday:

The following is a simple portrait of Christ that we use in our training. We call it "Jesus from below." It is the Jesus that emerges when we read the Bible with and for those who have been labeled the least. It is a decidedly different image from the one that emerges when we read the Bible from the position of power, which often yields a Jesus that justifies us.

The portrait deserves more explanation, but hopefully you will be able to see its biblical roots. The inset facts represent those who might find comfort in this messiah. May it be so this Christmas.

ASIAN-BORN

• The Middle East is Asiatic
• Nearly 60% the world is Asian born

MIXED RACE HERITAGE

• See Matthew's genealogy
• Multi-racial is fastest growing demo in the U.S.

SCANDALOUS GRANDMAS OF CHRISTMAS

• Grandma Tamar (prostitute)
• Grandma Rahab (prostitute)
• Grandma Ruth (Incest survivor)
• Grandma Bathsheba (Murderous Affair)
• 4 million women, children victims of sexual slavery and trafficked as sex slaves in world worth $20 billion annually.

SHAMEFUL BIRTH

• Not everybody bought the virgin Birth story.
• 79% of births to teenagers in U.S. are outside marriage resulting in bastard children.

TEENAGE MOTHER

• Mary was probably 13
• One million teenage girls become pregnant every year in the U.S.

POOR

• Temple offering of the poor
• 1.7 Million U.S. children are in families that live on less than $6645 a year for family of 5.

POLITICAL REFUGEE

• Flees persecution to Egypt
• 50 million people in the world have been forced to flee their homes in the last 10 years.

IMMIGRANT

• Returns to Israel
• 8.7 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.

DRUNKARD & GLUTTON

• Friend of sinners
• 8 million suffer from alcoholism and 15 million from drug dependency

MENTALLY ILL

• Jesus' family thought he was "out of his mind"
• 45 million suffer serious mental illness

URBAN

• Went through cities of Galilee
• By 2020 over 60% of the world's population will be urban, young and poor.

HOMELESS

• No place to "lay his head"
• 3 million homeless men, women and children, last year in US

OUTLAW

• Broke Sabbath Laws
• 25% of Young Adult African American Males are Incarcerated or on parole.

DESPISED & REJECTED

• Seen as cursed by God
• The leading motivations for hate crimes in U.S. are "race" 53% religion 16% and sexual orientation 15%

INNOCENT VICTIM

• Blameless
• Every 11 minutes a child is reported abused or neglected in the U.S. - nearly 3 million.

FORSAKEN BY FATHER

• "My God, My God..."
• Of 72 million young people in US, almost 25% live w/o their father. 50% for African-American

MURDERED

• Crucified
• Black males (14-24) make up 1% of the U.S. population but 30% of all homicides.

RESURRECTED AS "WOUNDED HEALER"

• Shows Thomas his eternal wounds
• 150 million suffer from a chronic medical condition. 5 Million suffer chronic pain. 15% of vets suffer severe depression/PTSD.

Letting The Bible Live Again

I think I will resurrect this blog in the coming weeks, but in the meantime I had to share a quote from something I am reading.

First, I will say that I have been reading the Bible regularly for the past thirty years of my life. I have been hearing Bible stories for more than than... starting with the classic flannelgraphs from Sunday School. And, to be honest, there have been times over the years that the Bible has become stale -a static book that tells old stories rather than something alive, engaging and to be interacted and wrested with in my life... now, today.

Over the past few years, I have often wished I could erase all the preconceived ideas I had of the Bible and read it as though I had never heard of God or Jesus... and to see what I would think of it.

I have become frustrated with the white male, elitist, republican, conservative, narrow-minded, always-have-all-the-answers, 21st century, American version of the Scriptures.

In that time I have hungered to explore and comprehend the first century, Jewish, poor commoner, illiterate, Samaritan, leprosy-covered, female version of the Scriptures.

Books such as Reading The Bible With The Damned by Bob Ekblad and From Stone To Living Word: Letting The Bible Live Again by Debbie Blue is helping me to do just that (in a figurative sense more than a literal sense).

In chapter eight of Blue's book, as she unpacks John 1:14 which says, "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.", she says:

"The incarnation is not something you can believe in like you can believe in the solution to an equation or dinosaurs or penecillin or the US victory in Iwo Jima. The incarnation is the foundation of our faith, and yet you can hardly think clearly about it enough about it to begin to comprehend it. You can look at it and look at it and still never get it in focus. It's blurry and puzzling and enigmatic and inapprehensible. Unsysytematizable. If it is somehow the greatest truth, the most important revelation, it's not something you can grasp. Kierkegard called the central tenet of Christianity, that God became a human being, an absolute paradox. It's not something you "get" through reason; it's something that challenges reason. It doesn't fit into a logical system."

Life around us can be so out of control that we seek for things that can be explained, reasoned, controlled.

And I am reminded that our faith is not something that is figure-out-able. It is alive and active. It is not static. It cannot become contained... even in a book (if we think so maybe we practice"Bibliolatry" - I know I have at times). It doesn't always include "answers, stability, certainty, clarity, and comprehension" (Blue p. 44).

It is (or it's meant to be) messy, something we get our hands dirty with. It should make us tilt our heads and say, "Huh?" as much as it makes our eyes light up as we say. "Aha". It should create as many questions as it does provide solid answers. And we should be honest with others about that.

Thanks to the words of Debbie Blue, I am reminded that the Bible is inspired: "to rouse latent energies, to inhale, to breathe into, to make alive".

And it is coming alive in my heart again...

More on this (hopefully) in the weeks to come.