More on the Kingdom: Like Yeast

Yesterday I blogged about Jesus' parable of the Kingdom being like a mustard seed; I just couldn't ignore the subsequent parable of the yeast. As a keen home bread baker who uses lots of natural leaven (the above picture is of my first "sourdough" loaves), I get the image of a tiny amount of yeast affecting a large amount of dough.

However, Joel Green makes a point that I would have totally overlooked:

(Jesus) asks people - male or female, privileged or peasant, it does not matter - to enter the domain of a first-century woman and household cook in order to gain perspective on the domain of God.

He highlights the basic point of the invasive character of the leaven, and then says:

Set in relation to the healing episode of (Luke 13) vv 10-17, this parable declares that satanic domination is being repealed and the kingdom of God is made present even in such inconsequential acts as the restoration of an ill woman who lived on the margins of society.

What a King! Jesus not only demonstrates concern for a marginalised woman, but he also draws one of his key points of illustration from such a counter-cultural source - the household kitchen.

The Kingdom is Like a Mustard Seed

I was talking to a friend about the nature of God's Kingdom; decided to give a bit of thought to Jesus' parable of the mustard seed (found in Mark 4, Matthew 13, and Luke 13:18-19). Luke's rendition (from the ESV):

18 He said therefore, “What is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it? 19 It is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his garden, and it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.”

Search the web and you'll find a number of interpretations, each of which seems to assume that the significance 0f the mustard seed is self-evident. Many seem to see this as a promise that the church will grow large, others go so far as to apply it to individuals - "what kind of seed are you?" - which strikes me as missing the point entirely.

Here are a few of the thoughts I came across in my reading on it:

• G.E. Ladd is emphatic that the Kingdom is not the same thing as the church, and the parable can therefore not be about the church. We should avoid interpretations that see some specific movement or ministry growing into something huge.
• Ladd also points out that the point is not about it becoming huge - otherwise a different metaphor (such as oak tree) would be used. The point is about the tiny size of the seed.
• I think we can easily miss the centrality of Jesus in this - it speaks firstly to explain Jesus' own ministry. Luke says "He said therefore...", connecting the parable with the context of the healing of a woman in the Synagogue on the Sabbath and the subsequent shaming of Jesus' opposition.
• It must speak to false expectations of how the Kingdom would come - Jesus was proclaiming the coming of the Kingdom - and this raised lots of questions to those who would follow him. Could the Kingdom really come in an itinerant Nazarene who was opposed by most of Israel's leaders?
• Herman Ridderbos sees in all of the "kingdom parables" a sense of present reality as well as future expectation, in contrast with various scholars who see either a fully-present Kingdom or a reality that is completely yet-to-come.
• Joel Green, in typical style, gives some really useful commentary on Luke 13:
  

  In the healing account, some are caught off-balance by the nature of Jesus' restorative activity: out of place, out of time, and directed at the wrong sort of person. Jesus' commentary on this healing episode comes in the form of parables that also set conflicting images - royal rule and peasant existence - side by side. In this way, Jesus seeks to legitimate his work in the synagogue as kingdom activity.

• Green goes further, and I think he's making a super-important point:
  

  God's kingdom is established through means other than the coercive power and intrigue usually associated with the establishment of a new order, and his dominion purposefully seeks out persons who do not represent the socially powerful and privileged.

• Ben Witherington, in his Mark commentary, draws out some more of the specific significance of mustard seeds. Apparently mustard had a reputation of being fast growing and impossible to eradicate once your field was full of it. Witherington sees this as significant in Jesus' ministry; the Kingdom comes as a mustard seed - some people view it as a weed and oppose it!
• The idea of birds perching in its branches seems to be drawn from O.T. imagery, and likely signifies the blessings that the Kingdom brings to people. This makes a lot of sense in light of the woman who was healed.

I've been thinking a lot of this over during my day today, and one of the primary points of application I've found is to keep the mustard seed in view. What I mean is, we can too easily assume that this thing kicked off with a mustard seed but now it's a big tree. I think the challenge is to really grasp the nature of the Kingdom as a mustard seed - as still being like a mustard seed! The Kingdom still comes counter-culturally, it still attracts opposition, it still brings blessings to the "wrong" people.

Gospel and Agriculture: Is God's Purpose for Humanity Urban?

I know I started this series in April; I'll see if I can pick it up again now.

Some time back, Tim Keller wrote a piece called "A Biblical Theology of the City", and in it he says:

This city is the Garden of Eden, remade. The City is the fulfilment of the purposes of the Eden of God. We began in a garden but will end in a city; God's purpose for humanity is urban! Why? So the city is God's invention and design, not just a sociological phenomenon or invention of humankind. (Emphasis added by me).

Now, I want to begin by saying that I really appreciate Dr. Keller's thinking (and action) around urban church mission, and I also understand that he's countering a widely-held view that sees cities as inherently negative and causes Christians to try to avoid them. I'll also say that I was profoundly influenced by his thinking on this to move my family from the rural fringe to an urban area a few years ago.

However, I want to propose three reasons why I don't feel comfortable with an understanding of the grand storyline of the Bible being bound up in a move from garden to city - why I don't think that God's purpose for humanity is urban:

1. The Bible gives us a more complex picture; cities are not always presented as arising due to the will of God.
2. For most of human history prior to 2010, and for most of the world's population, life is more rural than urban.
3. Dr. Keller's thesis fits like a glove for the American cultural scenario, but that may not make it God's purpose.

1. The complex Biblical picture:

The first city we see in the Bible is established by Cain, and named after his son Enoch. Interestingly, Cain used work the soil and Abel herded animals. When God cursed Cain, he said the soil would be hard to work - Cain then moved from being a farmer to an urban dweller. There's a rural -> urban trajectory going on here, but it's not all a result of righteousness.

2. Human History is Mostly Rural

This is statistically obvious:

• Prior to 2007, more people were rural than urban. Around 2007 marked the 50/50 tipping point.
• In 1900, only 13% of the world's population was urban!
• Many countries still have high levels of rural population, while most "developed" countries have very low levels of rural living. All the global statistics are here.
• The current trend globally is a very, very rapid urbanisation which is one of the great risks to humanity. Some see it becoming self-regulating:

From this very informative Wikipedia article:

French economist Philippe Bocquier, writing in THE FUTURIST magazine, has calculated that "the proportion of the world population living in cities and towns in the year 2030 would be roughly 50%, substantially less than the 60% forecast by the United Nations (UN), because the messiness of rapid urbanization is unsustainable. Both Bocquier and the UN see more people flocking to cities, but Bocquier sees many of them likely to leave upon discovering that there’s no work for them and no place to live."

3. The American Scenario

In 1790, America's population was 95% rural, and it remained mostly rural until the 20th century. The population of the USA is now well over 80% urban, and this is still increasing at 1.3% per year.

It makes sense, in that culture, to plant churches in big cities - but this doesn't mean that the demography is that way because of God's will! And it certainly doesn't mean that it's God's will for every country to become almost entirely urban!

In such an urbanised country, food is either imported (as in the case of many countries at the top of the list), or it is grown by a few massive industrialised companies using unsustainable energy-hungry, water-hungry techniques. The latter is the case in the USA.

Wikipedia articles like this one are useful in understanding some of the concerns, such as the dependence of modern agriculture upon fossil fuels which are fast running out. Movies like Food Inc. are also good ways to understand problems such as the USA's subsidies for corn, which then goes into an unbelievable number of products as well as being fed to cows in ridiculous feedlots, creating bacteria-ridden meat (which is solved by washing in ammonia!). It's a system that depends upon chickens being grown in such crowded conditions that they never move and cannot even walk, and a system that depends upon gross injustice in huge abattoirs where illegal workers are paid tiny wages and work with so much meat that their fingernails fall out - then are herded up and arrested when it is politically expedient.

Do we understand this to be God's will, and the trajectory of the Biblical story from Eden to New Jerusalem? Is it really OK to move from having farmers and artisans to having food and goods produced by massive industrialised processes and the majority of the population doing desk jobs? There was a time when people went for holidays to farms; now laws are being passed to protect the secrecy of the food industry in the USA because it is too hideous for the public to know about!

No, I don't believe God's purposes are urban at all. God loves city-dwellers, and he loves farmers, and Christians should definitely establish churches in areas with high population, but we must never use our own cultural scenario as a template through which to view God's purposes for the world.

Review - "The Jewish World around the New Testament"

Richard Bauckham's book "The Jewish World around the New Testament" is a large (500 pages) collection of 23 essays from 30 years of research. The introduction begins like this:

Most New Testament scholars would now agree that the New Testament writings belong wholly within the Jewish world of their time... Their God is unequivocally the God of Israel and of the Jewish Scriptures that they treat as self-evidently their own. Jesus for them is the Messiah of Israel and the Messiah also for the nations only because he is the Messiah of Israel.

There is so much in this book that is helpful in shedding light on our understanding of the New Testament through better understanding Jewish though of the time; I'll mention some of the highlights from my perspective:

Chapter 4 on the Rise of Apocalyptic was facinating and really helpful; the idea is presented that Prophetic gave way to Apocalyptic in particular because it became apparent that the return from exile had not really come about, and there needed to be another way to convey God's involvement in the world. Bauckham is very clear on this in a number of his essays - the expected signs of return from exile (aka New Exodus) most certainly hadn't come about in the second temple period. This essay probes both the historical question of the rise of Hasidic apocalyptic as well as its theological legitimacy.

Chapter 12 is an essay called "The Parting of the Ways: What Happened and Why" - obviously regarding the reasons for the eventual separation between Judaism and Christianity. Bauckham is not content with the popular models regarding this, and he also thinks that there were different reasons for this happening inside Palestine than outside. In Palestine, he sees the Bar Kochba revolt (in the 130's AD) as a primary factor; namely that the Christians could not participate in their fellow Jews' attempts to rebuild the Temple. There's so much useful thinking contained in this essay regarding the Christian understanding of the Temple - it also helped me think some more about how Christians might approach Ezra/Nehemiah.

Chapter 17, "What if Paul had Travelled East rather than West?" is a clever piece of speculation that manages to throw enormous light on the Jewishness of Paul's missionary journeys, and his reasons (mainly regarding concentrations of Diaspora Jews) for going to certain cities. Given the amount of talk there has been about strategic church planting based on the evidence in Acts, I think it would be helpful if the "missional" crowd could have a read of this essay.

There is some specific interaction with N.T. Wright - the controversy around Wright's "still in exile" views is presented as part of the introduction to Chapter 19, "The Restoration of Israel in Luke-Acts". This is an amazing essay; it most definitely casts the book of Acts in an uncommon light, and Bauckham must surely be correct that this is a dominant theme in Acts. I think this essay alone would have been worth the book price for me.

There are many other essays that I found useful, particularly "Life, Death, and the Afterlife in Second Temple Judaism" and "The Relevance of Extra-Canonical Jewish Texts to New Testament Study", which takes James 4:13-5:6 as an example. I hadn't really seen the prophetic/apocalyptic aspect to James before.

The thinking contained within this book is radically different from that which seems pervasive in the church at a popular level - the church needs to hear what some of these scholars are presenting! There are some challenges in seeing that happen. I thoroughly recommend this book, provided you're OK with reading academic-style papers, and as long as you have some basic understanding of extra-biblical writings.

An amazing pizza story

Another post on Scot McKnight's blog that you've just got to read - "Missional Pizza".

McKnight on Anabaptism

Scot McKnight has a review of an interesting-sounding book called The Naked Anabaptist. He gives this superb list of seven elements that "make up what Anabaptism is":

1. Jesus is example, teacher, friend, redeemer and Lord. Anabaptism is Jesus-centric; he is to be followed and worshiped.

2. Jesus is the focal point of God's revelation. Jesus-centered Bible reading and a community of followers is how the Bible is to be read.

3. Christendom, characterized by collusion and compromise, distorted the gospel and marginalized Jesus and left churches ill-equipped for mission.

4. Wealth and money have distorted the church; connection to the poor, helping the powerless and persecuted is part of the anabaptist approach. Such may lead to opposition and martyrdom.

5. Churches are to be committed communities of discipleship and mission and worship ... gifts are for all and baptism is for believers.

6. Spirituality and economics are related.

7. Peace is at the heart of the gospel.

Nice list :)

Gospel and Agriculture: Problematic Narratives

Continuing the series on gospel and agriculture, we're thinking about problematic narratives: unfortunate readings (or failure to read?) of the Biblical story.

Example 1

Recently, on an online discussion forum, a fairly mature Christian remarked that if animal species were wiped out but it enabled his kids to play safely in that area, then so be it. When pressed on God's ownership of the earth, he stated that "God gave it to us".

Example 2

There was a documentary about the Rift Valley in Ethiopia shown recently, A Thousand Suns. It was proposing organic farming methods over some of the other methods being introduced, and then it turned its attention toward the rising number of Protestant churches in the area. The pastors seemed to be calling people to cease worshiping natural things, like land and trees (and so they should - idolatry is wrong), but they seemed to be advocating the consumption of resources as God's provision to man to use. The outcome, if the documentary is to be believed, has been rapid degradation of the land.

What's wrong here?

• Did God give the earth to humanity? No, the earth is the Lord's and everything in it! According to Colossians 1, it was made by Christ and for Christ.
• What did God give to humanity? According to Genesis 1, God gave the fruit-bearing plants to humanity - prior to the fall. Interestingly, the leafy greens were given to animals, indicating that animals were given some rights - they're lower down the order, but they were given rights!
• What kinds of reactions are going? In response to tree-huggers and environmentalists who elevate the rights of animals over people, I think there's a Christian tendency to react and make ecology (i.e. the created order, God's good creation) dispensable so long as man's needs are met. In response to pagan religions worshiping nature, I think there's a Christians tendency to react and fit nature into a Western consumerist paradigm - something for people to use up.

Hopefully in future posts we'll get to investigate the Biblical narrative in this regard. There has to be a more careful reading of the text if the church is going to be in any way relevant to some of the most pressing issues in the world today - and that reading needs to consider the creation account, the law of Moses, the Hebrew prophets, the New Testament revelation of the Messiah, and the eschatological hope of restoration.

Gospel and Agriculture: Examples of Sustainable Agriculture

Second post in my series on Gospel and Agriculture - perhaps it might be beneficial to get rolling with some real-world footage to illustrate something of what we're talking about here, before digging into the Biblical narrative.

First up, Geoff Lawton's funky video on their initial project in Jordan. This is a Permaculture project that involved turning around a 10-acre piece of salted desert into something beautiful and productive - the kind of thing that Christians could most certainly skill up in. If the word "Permaculture" doesn't mean much to you, have a watch of this:

Secondly, a quick video on tea growing in Kenya. This relates to the whole issue of the use of land throughout the world - lots and lots of land is given over to growing tea, coffee, tobacco and chocolate for consumption by the West. Tea is apparently only a quarter of the price it was 30 years ago - and there's not enough food grown in the world to feed everybody:

And finally an interview with Vandana Shiva, a fascinating Hindu thinker, where she gives an introduction to issues of seed patents:

Gospel and Agriculture: A Blog Series

I'm interested in sustainable agriculture - I have been for around 20 years, with varying levels of interest over that time. One thing that I've consistently noticed though, is that it's an area that the church lacks interest in.

Recently, I've had an increasing interest in this area - the global needs are massive! We were all exposed so clearly to the deforestation in Haiti in the media coverage of the quake, there have been very prominent statistics about the number of starving people in the world reaching 1 billion, and climate change has been all over the news. Yet there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of Christian engagement in agricultural issues.

My goal here is, time and health permitting, to probe some of the agricultural issues that we should be thinking about, to consider how the Biblical narrative might speak into these issues, and consider some of the unfortunate thinking that seems to cause the church to shy away from literally "getting our hands dirty".

My Book Released

Cool; my book's available now - I'm just waiting for my copies to arrive.

The title is "The Gospel: God's Power for Salvation", and it is a study (in 10 parts) for small groups.

Anyone who was with us at Chayah Gospel Church will recognize the content (under a different name) - this book comprises 4 "units" covering the gospel itself, an overview of the Bible story, the nature of idols, and some ways to approach Scripture with the gospel at the centre.

I've packaged it up like this for maximum convenience for anyone who may wish to use it as a study curriculum. LuLu are the printers; I've set the price at their minimum (meaning I receive exactly zero for every copy sold), but it seems sensible to get hold of professionally-printed and bound books rather than print out 76 pages per person and put them into folders etc.

This material has been used by a variety of churches in several states (and even in a couple of countries), and has proved itself useful. From the LuLu link you can also download it as a PDF (for free) so you can check it out.

Note also that LuLu print in multiple locations (including Australia), so the shipping tends to be really reasonable. They have some major discounts for bulk, but the discounts only seem to kick in at 25 copies.

Tending to Eden - a book worth checking out

I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've participated in a "Blog Tour" - I love new blogging experiences! But that aside, I'm really excited about a new book that's just been published called Tending to Eden: Environmental Stewardship for God's People.

Tending to Eden is written by Scott C. Sabin, who is the Executive Director of Plant with Purpose, a Christian organization who recognize the link between poverty and the environment and are committed to sustainable solutions.

According to PwP, the book

"...offers a global perspective on the theological foundation for caring for the earth and its people. Throughout the book, Plant With Purpose Executive Director Scott Sabin recounts his personal journey of helping the poor and the environment and brings the reader into poor rural communities in Haiti, Mexico, Tanzania, Burundi, the Dominican Republic, and Thailand through compelling language and eloquent story telling"

I really can't wait to read the whole book, as I'm genuinely excited to see organizations like this who are motivated by the gospel to engage in agricultural issues in places where there is poverty. One quote from the book that has particularly got me thinking is this:

"The lie of the world, reinforced by the media and believed by millions, is that the poor are worthless. The global economic system measures worth in dollars—you are paid according to how society values your contribution. The message is that as a Haitian farmer, no matter how bright you are, and no matter how hard you work, you will never be worth more than a few hundred dollars a year."

There's a huge fault in the traditional economic thinking that links worth and income; in reality, subsistence farmers can live with little or no income provided they have land, water, seed, etc. By taking someone's income as the measure of their worth, we can overlook some of these indicators of essential resources.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll have more to say on this book in the future - be sure to check it out.

The gospel and agriculture

There are some huge, desperate, urgent issues in the world related to agriculture - I suspect that the church is not engaged with them as much as it could/should be, and I would like to blog about that if I can manage it.

For now, some links to some organisations that seem to be "getting their hands dirty":

• Foundations for Farming, in Africa.
• Plant with Purpose
• ECHO

Check 'em out!

Clean-burning stoves

There's an enormous need for improved cooking stoves in the developing world - this video shows off a stove I made recently along with some Aussie cooking:

A dying word to dying men

The "Internet Monk" Michael Spencer, who has cancer, posted something quite profound this week regarding the good news of resurrection - read it here.

One of my goals for this year to read and listen to some voices from the two-thirds world, particularly theologians. This message from Oscar Muriu (Nairobi, Kenya) is impacting, as he draws lines from Christ's incarnation to our missional calling:

Money and Power: Oscar Muriu from Urbana 09 on Vimeo.