REVIEW: Fire by Night

This review was written for and published in the July 2019 issue of The Burning Bush, the monthly newsletter of Franklin District of Lancaster Mennonite Conference. 

One of my favorite stories in the Old Testament is the story of the golden calf. The Israelites, having been miraculously freed from slavery in Egypt, start their journey to the promised land. Moses goes up to the mountain to consult with God, and the people waiting below grow restless and fearful.

They cannot handle the uncertainty. They were promised safety and prosperity in a new land. Why hasn’t God given it to them? Eventually they settle on a very human solution. They create a god who will serve them.

The Old Testament presents us with a collection of complex narratives centered around a complex God and too often we take the golden calf approach to the Old Testament. We melt down these ancient Hebrew stories and reform them into something more comfortable for modern American life. Like the Israelites, we want a god who will serve us. A god who thinks the way we think and values the things we value. 

We have a tendency to reduce the Old Testament to a series of parables instead of wrestling with the narrative as a whole, and that is why we need books like Fire by Night: Finding God in the Pages of the Old Testament by Melissa Florer-Bixler.

The author does not ignore the ancient context, but wraps it within her own experiences with her community in Raleigh, North Carolina where she pastors a small Mennonite church. The messiness and brokenness of humanity is a constant from age to age, and so is the need for a God who speaks to that messiness and brokenness. 

With chapter titles such as “God of Victims,” “God of Wanderers,” and “God of Darkness” Florer-Bixler draws close to the characters in the Old Testament who were lost, cast aside and forgotten. She does not offer easy answers, but instead circles around the theme of God’s constant presence and intervention on behalf of the oppressed. 

My favorite part is how the book ends with the story of Ruth and Naomi. The author points out that unlike many of the stories in the earlier chapters there is no divine intervention for these two widows. There is no manna from heaven, there is only the local welfare system standing between them and starvation. 

But then Florer-Bixler reminds us that God is present in Ruth, who could have abandoned Naomi and gone back to her own people. God is present when Naomi rails against the unfairness of a society that sees her as a burden. God is present when Boaz shows kindness to a foreign woman. Ruth, the ancestor of David and later of Jesus, reminds us of the presence of God in our actions and in our relationships with one another. The Old Testament, as Florer-Bixler concludes in the final pages, is “a story with flesh and bone.” 

Fire by Night is frequently a surprising book, drawing parallels and exploring themes in the Old Testament that remind us that God’s ways are not our ways. The way the book is structured makes it well suited for a discussion group or a Sunday School class, and is sure to provide new perspective on familiar stories.

Mary Knew

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about as the Christmas songs start to pour into my life. “Mary Did You Know” is is a Christmas classic, but the premise is pretty silly. Because according to Luke 1:30-33, Mary knew, ya’ll. Mary was told God’s plan from the start. Mary knew, and incredibly, she believed.

But what did Mary’s parents believe? What did her family think had happened to her? What did her friends believe? None of the gospels say, but we know Joseph’s first response was to quietly and politely call off the betrothal.

He didn’t believe her. Why would he?

It would have been so much easier for all of them to simply believe that she was lying to get out of trouble. Or to get attention. Or that she was mentally unwell. There must have been people who knew her well, who were once her friends, who turned away from her and rejected her because of the scandal she represented.

At Christmas we often focus on Mary’s obedience, but that obedience came with a price. She believed, and was disbelieved by those around her.

Lately the news have been full of stories by women who were disbelieved for years, even decades, and only now are able to tell the truth.

And people will still find a way to disbelieve them, because according to the ways of the world, women are less valuable than the institutions that we feel obligated to protect.

They’re less valuable than a successful Hollywood producer. They’re less valuable than an acclaimed comedian. They’re less valuable than a U.S. Senate seat.

But when God came to earth to live among us, he went to a young unmarried woman. Someone with no wealth, no power, no authority. The angel said “God chose you,” and Mary said “let’s do this.”

Mary had to have known that she wouldn’t be believed. She had to have known that good, religious, upstanding people in her community would turn their back on her. She had to have known that this road would only lead to suffering.

And this is what she said:

With all my heart I praise the Lord,

and I am glad because of God my Savior.

He cares for me, his humble servant.

From now on, all people will say God has blessed me.

God All-Powerful has done great things for me, and his name is holy.

He always shows mercy to everyone who worships him.

The Lord has used his powerful arm to scatter those who are proud.

He drags strong rulers from their thrones and puts humble people in places of power.

God gives the hungry good things to eat, and sends the rich away with nothing.

Mary, pregnant and unmarried, defiantly declaring that she is blessed. A woman with no power declaring that God will drag the powerful from their thrones and lift up the poor, the sick, the homeless, the refugee, the outcast. A woman with no influence calling for the hungry to be fed and the rich turned away from their gluttonous consumption.

Mary, the revolutionary. The rebel. The resistance.

God chose her for a reason. God was pleased with her.

It’s also worth noting that the first person to believe Mary without being explicitly told by an angel was Elizabeth. A woman who was stigmatized and dismissed most of her adult life for being childless. She blessed Mary and praised God and Luke 1:42 says she did it “loudly.” Loud enough that the neighbors could hear. Elizabeth knew shame, and she was not about to let anyone shame her cousin.

My mother reminded me recently of an old song we used to sing in Christmas plays, “How Should a King Come.”

Jesus didn’t have to do it this way. He didn’t have to be born in a barn to parents who were temporarily homeless. He didn’t have to be a refugee fleeing to Egypt. He didn’t have to experience hunger and temptation in the wilderness. He didn’t have to face scorn for eating with tax collectors and prostitutes. He didn’t have to be rejected by his people. He didn’t have to experience violence, injustice and death.

Jesus took his place among us. And it started with Mary, proclaiming the truth and carrying it, no matter what it cost her.

Listen to the women. Believe them. God will scatter the proud and drag our modern day rulers from their thrones, and we might not like it. But sooner or later we have to recognize God is at work.

And God is among us.

Merry Christmas.

Dare to be a Daniel

This is a guest post written by my husband Andrew, my very favorite Anabaptist.

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I went to a religious school, which meant that between music classes, and Sunday school, I learned a lot of Christian children’s songs.  This past weekend, watching Twitter, Facebook, and TV, one of the ones we sang all the time kept running through my mind.  I will put the words of the chorus here:

Dare to be a Daniel.

Dare to stand alone.

Dare to have a purpose firm.

Dare to make it known.  

Every Christian kid knows the story of Daniel and the Lion’s den.  Daniel, an upright, God-fearing man is in a foreign country, serving a foreign king.  Despite all this pressure to fit in, to go along to get along, Daniel remains true to his God.  The king puts out a decree (tricked by those who hate Daniel) that anyone who prays or worships anything but the King for the next 30 days will be cast into a den of Lions.

Daniel ignores the decree, and continues to pray in front of an open window that faces Jerusalem, where his home and heart truly is.  Those who set this trap for him turn him in, and the king is forced to cast Daniel into the den of lions.  But God shuts the Lions’ mouths and Daniel emerges unharmed.

Its rare we get a modern example of a Biblical model as close as we got last Sunday.  We had a “king,” who declared that those who would not honor an idol made of cloth were sons of bitches who deserved to lose their jobs.  We had multiple Daniels, who chose to honor their principles and beliefs rather than obey their king.

And we had an audience, watching what was happening from home.

I realize a lot of my Christian brothers and sisters are going to argue that Kaepernick shouldn’t be slotted into the Daniel role and respectfully, I disagree.  While Kaepernick may not have made his protest an act of worship, he was kneeling for an important Biblical principle: the rights and equality of all people before their country and their God.  The fact that Christians would claim they believe in that principle, then vilify Kaepernick for using his platform to stand for it is terrible.

Christians need to recognize that blind nationalism is an idol, and just because it is a flag and not a statue we worship, it makes us no less guilty.  The Bible says that we are strangers in a foreign land that is not our own.  We cannot allow ourselves to buy into the story our nation tells us about ourselves.  Our first loyalty isn’t to a flag or a statue or a nation.  Our first loyalty is to a Kingdom, and its principles should animate our actions.

It’s telling that up until this Sunday, it was only black athletes who chosen to kneel on the NFL field.  It’s also telling that only one owner joined his players in kneeling yesterday.  That owner was an immigrant as well.  Christians must open their ears  to the stories of those who do not walk the same path as us.  If they are showing us that something has become an idol, then we need to take that very seriously.  

We also need to view this as an opportunity to demonstrate to our children both the strength it takes to stand up for right, and the potential cost.  When power blusters and threatens, the image of a man or woman on their knees is a powerful example for the next generation of what it really means to belong to a kingdom.  We tell our kids that they need to emulate these Biblical examples, and we now have an opportunity to put our words into action.  

As for me, I will be on my knees Sunday, and I hope you will too.  

November 9, 2016

So, the election is over and I’m going to say a few things.

Like a lot of people, I was surprised by the outcome of the election, but that’s democracy. It’s one of the great strengths of our country.

But there were a few other things that surprised me during this past year. I was raised by principled Republican parents who told me over and over again that the character of the people we elect matter. Even as my own politics shifted from Red to Blue, I held many Republicans in high regard, knowing what their heart was for their country.

During my lifetime I’ve voted for Republicans and Democrats, but always for people I believed to have character. People with the qualifications of a good leader.

When Donald Trump took the Republican nomination I really felt for my R friends and family, because I was sure he didn’t represent them or what they wanted for their country. I watched people like Mitt Romney and Ana Navarro take a stand. I watched people like Ted Cruz waffle back and forth. It was a pretty good show from the outside.

But when it came right down to it, to the people I personally knew, I really thought most of you would take a stand and make it clear to the Republican party that you would not support such an unqualified, dishonest and inflammatory candidate.

And I was genuinely surprised by how many of you went to the polls and voted for a man you claimed you didn’t respect. I understand why you did it. You made the pragmatic choice, and your party won. But it still surprised me.

On a national scale, 81% of white evangelical Christians turned out to vote for Trump. That’s a higher percentage than Romney, McCain or Bush got. Trump owes his victory to white voter turnout, and the contrast between the votes of white Christians and nonwhite Christians in this election couldn’t possibly be starker.

It’s not really a secret why, is it? Anti-immigration and racial rhetoric was a huge part of Trump’s campaign from the beginning. He was literally endorsed by the KKK. I’m going to say that again, for the people in the back. He was literally endorsed by the KKK.

I realize most white Christians are willing to brush that off. After all, it’s not like Trump can help who endorses him, right? It’s unfortunate, maybe even regrettable, but a small concession for those conservative Supreme Court justices.

But if you think that, I don’t think you understand what this feels like to nonwhite Christians.

Over the past few months as support from white evangelicals fell into line behind Trump, I’ve heard anger, I’ve heard frustration, and I’ve heard betrayal from people of color who share our faith. But probably the hardest thing to hear was the people who gave a fatalistic shrug and said “I knew they would. They always do.”

Because white Christians choosing to ally with white supremacists over their nonwhite brothers and sisters is, if nothing else, a historically consistent position.

So this is my plea to my fellow white people, and it would have been exactly the same plea if Hillary had won. Because this racial divide is A Problem, and it’s going to have a big impact on the future of our churches and our communities and our country.

Can we please stop assuming that we know what’s best for people of color? Can we please acknowledge that we don’t always have a full understanding of the issues that affect them? Can we please listen more? And can we please not insist that only we can decide what is and isn’t racist?

I didn’t sleep a lot last night. This election has one pretty significant consequence for our family, and that’s that we’ll more than likely be losing our health insurance early next year. With Andy back in school, we have a lot to balance and lot of uncertainty. Pray for us.

While I was in the process of writing this, my 7-year old came home from school and said that one his classmates told him that Hillary wants to kill all the newborn babies. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to talk to him about the things he hears on the playground.

Our children are watching and listening.

We’ve tried to be so careful about what we’ve said to them. We’ve talked about the process of elections, and respecting a person’s right to vote, even when we disagree. The election is over, and I have a lot to think about and lot of process. I’m sure many of you do too.

We’ll see what happens. My job hasn’t really changed. One foot in front of the other. Do justice. Love mercy. Walk humbly before God. Fail repeatedly at those three things. Try again.

Love before Judgment

It can be hard, in a house with three small children, to have any kind of adult conversation. That’s why when my husband I do manage to talk, these conversations often take place in pieces. A few minutes here, a few minutes there, a handful of texts exchanged during the day.

Often we’ll start a conversation on the way home from church that spans into the week, and this week we’ve been talking about judgment. It started because of something Andrew said in our adult Sunday School class. I might be paraphrasing here, but he said “Jesus started with love. Until I can love someone like Jesus does, I can’t judge them.”

“But…”

Because judgment is one of those topics in faith. We say “well, we can’t judge” as we’re judging someone. We can judge someone for being too judgmental. We can spin it into a slippery slope argument (well, if you can’t judge, how are you supposed to know right from wrong?). It’s very easy for conversations about judgment to get tangled up and go nowhere.

Much like my garden hose.

This is the famous “judge not” verse in the gospel of Matthew (7:1-2, Contemporary English Version):

Don’t condemn others, and God won’t condemn you. God will be as hard on you as you are on others! He will treat you exactly as you treat them.

It’s the second part that always chills me. The NIV version talks about being judged by the same measure, which always makes me picture a scale where all the judgments I’ve made are piled up on one side, dragging the ground.

So here’s a straightforward, unambiguous commandment. Don’t judge. Great. Conversation over.

Except that it’s not, because everyone will invariably respond with, “But what about pedophiles? What about murderers? What about people who throw their trash out of car windows? It’s okay for us to judge them, right?”

I think part of this is a language issue. “Judgment” in our context, is not always a bad thing. I try to exercise good judgment with my money. I weigh a lot of factors before making a large purchase, and I try to make sound decisions that will benefit our household. We call that judgment.

But that’s not what Jesus is referring to in Matthew, which is why I like the CEV better than the NIV. Jesus is talking about condemnation. He’s talking about the human reflex that allows us to rationalize our own flaws while looking down the weaknesses of others.

So can we condemn pedophiles? Murders? Litterbugs?

Andrew and I continued talking about this through the week and this is the answer that he came up with. He said we absolutely can condemn the actions. We can and should condemn the sexual exploitation of children. We can condemn murder. We can condemn littering.

But we can’t condemn the person.

And this is where it really gets tricky, because what does that look like in practice?

Jesus condemned the actions of the money lenders and the people who were economically exploiting others, but when he saw Zacchaeus, a dishonest tax collector, he called out to him and invited him into his presence.

And yes, Zacchaeus repented, but Jesus reached out in love first. It wasn’t conditional. Jesus didn’t say “repent and then I’ll eat with you.”

Of course, Jesus, being Jesus, knew Zacchaeus’ heart. We might reach out in love and never see it followed by repentance. The only repentance schedule we really have any control over is our own.

This is my repentance schedule.

I came across this passage in Romans this week (13:8-10, CEV again):

Let love be your only debt! If you love others, you have done all the Law demands. In the Law there are many commands, such as, “Be faithful in marriage. Do not murder. Do not steal. Do not want what belongs to others.”

But all of these are summed up in the command that says, “Love others as much as you love yourself.” No one who loves others will harm them. So love is all that the Law demands.

It’s a shame that “love,” much like “judgment,” is also a word that we can’t seem to agree on the meaning or the application of. I’ve heard many people argue that judgment IS love, and they would want someone to point out their sin if they were the one sinning.

That is, of course, a steaming load of horse manure.

Because there is no “if.” We all have plenty of sin in our lives. And most of us go to the church on Sunday safe in the knowledge that no one will call us out on it.

And that’s what we want, isn’t it? That’s how we want to be treated. We want to be given the benefit of the doubt. We want time and space to work through our issues. We want to be accepted as a flawed, complicated human being.

We want to be loved.

It’s so much easier to accept that grace than it is to give it.

Revisiting The Visitation: Chapters 1-2

Frank Peretti is generally defined as an author of christian fiction, but in terms of a broader genre, most of what he writes is supernatural horror.

The prologue of the The Visitation is all supernatural horror. An unidentified person suffers through an agonizing crucifixion, and his cries to God go unanswered.

He cried out, but in the cauldron of his sun-boiled mind he heard only the voices of his accusers and the ringing, ringing, ringing of the hammer – sounds that would forever haunt his memory and echo through his nightmares.

“You’re a child of the devil,” they said. A child of the devil who needed to be contained.

A child of the devil?

He cried out once again, and this time, a voice, a mind, answered and a power coursed through him. Suddenly, he could bear the pain and make it fuel for his will. With burning will, he determined he would live.

And living, he knew what he would do.

The first chapter brings us back to reality, back to a soothing rural scene somewhere in Washington state and a young woman with real life troubles.

While on a walk, she sees someone. A young man who knows her name and offers a cryptic message: “Your answer is on his way. Be looking for him.”

In the next scene, an elderly parishioner of the local Catholic church is cleaning the sanctuary and sees the tears running down the face of a wooden crucifix. When he touches the damp wood, his arthritis is miraculously healed.

In the final set-up scene, we’re introduced to the congregation of the Antioch Pentecostal Mission. Some of the women gathered in the parking lot see Jesus in the clouds, holding a dove (but not everyone sees it. At least one person sees a rooster).

Then the book jumps to first person narrative, and I had forgotten that Peretti switches back and forth between first and third person in this book. The first person character is Travis Jordan, the former pastor of the Antioch Pentecostal Mission church. The new pastor, Kyle Sherman, is filling him in on the vision in the clouds.

And here’s another thing I had forgotten about this book. It’s a lot of inside baseball. Two pastors discuss various personalities within the congregation with the kind of brutal honesty that’s seldom seen in christian fiction.

“Dee is a follower with followers. Meg Fordyce has a little prayer and praise meeting at her house once a week, and Dee gets over there pretty often. Just put it together from there.”

I could see a lightbulb coming on, but Kyle apparently wasn’t comfortable with my drift. “I’m not sure I follow you.”

“Kyle, it’s simple. Meg told Dee about Sally seeing an angel. That means someone else is getting a special visitation from God that Dee isn’t getting. You don’t get something from God without Dee getting it too. She won’t allow it.”

Their meeting ends when Travis’ sister Rene arrives. This is where the reader learns that Rene has been cooking and doing laundry for Travis since the death of his wife ten months ago. She’s no longer happy with that arrangement. It’s time for Travis to pull himself together.

After Rene leaves, Travis glances out his window and sees a man, with long hair and a beard, dressed in a white robe. He runs outside, but the man is gone.

In Chapter 2, we get a little more insight into Travis’ life since his wife’s passing. He goes to a local tavern (a place he never would have gone while he was a pastor, because they serve alcohol) and talks with the locals while he eats.

They’re all talking about the strange occurrences that have been happening all over town, but Travis keeps his to himself. Peretti goes to great lengths here to show the division between Travis’ life within the Pentecostal Mission bubble and outside of it. Here, he’s eating with people who are not “church people.” They wouldn’t feel welcome in a Pentecostal Mission church. But Travis feels welcome among them, because he no longer sees himself as “church people” either.

There’s also a flashback to his first meeting with Kyle Sherman.

Imagine a tired old dog, lying in the road, suddenly finding itself wrapped around the axle of a speeding truck. That’s how I felt my first five minutes with Kyle Sherman.

Kyle is young, idealistic and on-fire-for-the-Lord. He reaches out to Travis with the best of intentions, ready to “take this city for Christ!”

Travis doesn’t respond well to this.

“Now you listen to me.” I said it slowly, and I know I sounded downright vicious. “Have you even asked this town if it wants to be taken for Christ?”

He goes on to pour out his frustrations. The fruitless attempts to evangelize and revive. The day-to-day grind of just trying to keep his church running and whole. Kyle is nonplussed by this. He chalks Travis’ tirade up to bitterness and continues on his way.

Coming up in Chapter 3: Things get real at the local minister’s meeting and stereotypes of mainline clergy are vigorously applied.

 

 

Revisiting The Visitation

One of the things I really enjoy on other blogs is when the author re-reads a book they remember from their childhood or adolescence and writes about the things that stand out to them now. For example, Samantha Fields has taken a critical look at Joshua Harris’ I Kissed Dating Goodbye, former homeschooler Libby Anne has been working her way through Michael Farris’ Anonymous Tip, and Fred Clark wrote a scathing and hilarious commentary on the popular Left Behind series.

I’ve decided to give it a shot, and so for my retrospective review I decided to dust off (literally, we need to clean off the bookshelf more often) Frank Peretti’s The Visitation. I was an avid reader of Peretti when I was growing up. His tension-filled supernatural horror stories were by far the most exciting thing you could find on the shelves of the local Christian bookstore.

My copy of The Visitation actually belongs to my dad. He got it as a “thank you” gift from the Bible club at the high school where he taught (I know this because it’s written on the inside of the cover). The book was released in 1999, which was the year before I went to college. I must have packed it up and taken it with me, and my poor father never got it back.

It’s one of those books that I kept, all of these years, through multiple moves and bookshelf purges because it was very meaningful to me at the time that I read it. As I was considering doing this, I was trying to remember what exactly it was about the book that spoke to me at that place in my life and the only thing I could directly remember was a quote from one of the minor characters of the book.

I’m probably paraphrasing here, but she says, “I never gave up on God. I just needed a break from all the church stuff.”

And that’s where I was in 1999. At the ripe old age of 17, I was totally and completely burned out on church. I didn’t talk about it much, because I assumed that endless optimism was the ideal, and that cynicism reflected some moral failing on my part.

I didn’t go to church much while I was in college. I tried a few things, a few places, a few campus groups, but they all had the same feel to me. They all had the same resounding message that I just needed to go back and do it better. Love Jesus more. Read my Bible more. Pray more. Aquire the fire. Be a crusader for Christ.

None of it spoke to me. But The Visitation did.

Coming soon, Chapter 1-2: supernatural horror, real people, and tired old dogs.