Liam Byrnes

“..On one of my trips I worshipped in an African church where nobody knew me. After the service I talked to two boys who had also attended.

“How many brothers and sisters do you have?” I asked the first one.

“Three.”

“Are they all from the same stomach?”

“Yes, my father is a Christian.”

“How about you?” I addressed the other boy.

He hesitated. In his mind he was adding up. I knew immediately that he came from a polygamous family.

“We are nine,” he finally said.

“Is your father a Christian?”

“No,” was the typical answer, “he is a polygamist”

“Are you baptised?”

“Yes, and my brothers and sister too,” he added proudly.

“And their mothers?”

“They are all three baptised, but only the first wife takes communion.”

“Take me to your father.”

The boy led me to a compound with many individual houses. It breathed an atmosphere of cleanliness, order and wealth. Each wife had her own house and her own kitchen. The father, a middle-aged, good-looking man, tall, fat and impressive, received me without embarrassment and with apparent joy.

I found Omodo, as we shall call him, a well-educated person, wide awake and intelligent, with a sharp wit and a rare sense of humor. From the outset he made no apologies for being a polygamist, he was proud of it. Let me try to put down here the essential content of our conversation that day which lasted for several hours.

“Welcome to the hut of a poor sinner!” The words were accompanied by good-hearted laughter.

“It looks like a rich sinner,” I retorted.

“The saints come very seldom to this place,” he said, “they don’t want to be contaminated with sin.”

“But they are not afraid to receive your wives and children. I just met them in church.”

“1 know. I give everyone a coin for the collection plate. I guess I finance half of the church’s budget. They are glad to take my money, but they don’t want me.”

I sat in thoughtful silence. After a while he continued, “1 feel sorry for the pastor. By refusing to accept all the polygamous men in town as church members he has made his flock poor and they shall always be dependent upon subsidies from America. He has created a church of women whom he tells every Sunday that polygamy is wrong.”

“Wasn’t your first wife heart-broken when you took a second one?” Omodo looked at me almost with pity “It was her happiest day,” he said finally.

“Tell me how it happened.”

“Well, one day after she had come home from the garden and had fetched wood and water, she was preparing the evening meal, while I sat in front of my house and watched her. Suddenly she turned to me and mocked me. She called me a ‘poor man,’ because I had only one wife. She pointed to our neighbor’s wife who could care for her children while the other wife prepared the food.”

“Poor man,” Omodo repeated. “1 can take much, but not that. I had to admit that she was right. She needed help. She had already picked out a second wife for me and they get along fine.”

I glanced around the courtyard and saw a beautiful young woman, about 19 or 20, come out of one of the huts.
“It was a sacrifice for me,” Omodo commented. “Her father demanded a very high bride price.”

“Do you mean that the wife, who caused you to become a polygamist is the only one of your family who receives communion?”

“Yes, she told the missionary how hard it was for her to share her love for me with another woman. According to the church my wives are considered sinless because each of them has only one husband. I, the father, am the only sinner in our family. Since the Lord’s supper is not given to sinners, 1 am excluded from it. Do you understand that, pastor?”

I was entirely confused.

“And you see,” Omodo continued, “they are all praying for me that I might be saved from sin, but they don’t agree from which sin I must be saved.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the pastor prays that I may not continue to commit the sin of polygamy. My wives pray that I may not commit the sin of divorce. I wonder whose prayers are heard first.”

“So your wives are afraid that you become a Christian?”

“They are afraid that I become a church member. Let’s put it that way. For me there is a difference. You see they can only have intimate relations with me as long as I do not belong to the church. In the moment I Would become a church member their marriage relations With me would become sinful.”

“Wouldn’t you like to become a church member?,,

“Pastor, don’t lead me into temptation! How can I become a church member, if it means to disobey Christ? Christ forbade divorce, but not polygamy. The church forbids polygamy but demands divorce. How can I become a church member, if I want to be a Christian;~ For me there is only one way, to be a Christian without the church.”

“Have you ever talked to your pastor about that?”

“He does not dare to talk to me, because he knows as well as I do that some of his elders have a second wife secretly. The only difference between them and me is that I am honest and they are hypocrites.”

“Did a missionary every talk to you?”

“Yes, once. I told him that with the high divorce rate in Europe, they have only a successive form of polygamy while we have a simultaneous polygamy. That did it. He never came back.”

I was speechless. Omodo accompanied me back to the village. He evidently enjoyed to be seen with a pastor.

“But tell me, why did you take a third wife?” I asked him.

“I did not take her. I inherited her from my late brother, including her children. Actually my older brother would have been next in line. But he is an elder. He is not allowed to sin by giving security to a widow.”

I looked in his eyes. “Do you want to become a Christian?”

“I am a Christian.” Omodo said without smiling.

As I walked slowly down the path, the verse came to my mind: “You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel.”

What does it mean to take responsibility as a congregation for Omodo? I am sorry that I was not able to see Omodo again, because I had met him while I was on a trip. I just report to you the essence of our conversation because it contains in a nutshell the main attitudes of polygamists toward the church It is always healthy to see ourselves with the eyes of an outsider.

I asked myself: What would I have done if I were pastor in Omodo’s town?

From Walter A. Trobisch, “Congregational Responsibility for the Christian Individual,” in Readings in Missionary Anthropology II, ed. William A. Smalley (South Pasadena: William Carey Library, 1978), PP. 233-235.

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I know I’m a few days late, but do you know who I like in the Christmas story? Simeon. He doesn’t get much press in the story but I love who he is.

The longer I live this Christian life the more appreciation I have for faithfulness. For as Nietzsche coined and Peterson published; the christian life is “a long obedience in the same direction.”

Lots of passion, little faithfulness

When I was in the younger throes of my christian life I sang with emotional abandon about how I would give my life for God, how I would set all other things aside for His kingdom. Now you may expect me to say that that was misled enthusiastic youthfulness, but actually I took it as seriously as I could, and sought to muster as much sincerity for each word as I could find. There is no doubt that it was a formative time in my life. But after being around christians for a while I began to notice, not exclusively, but often, the same ones who would be up on the front row singing out their abandon with as much emotional intensity as could be found were the same ones who within two months would be nowhere to be found and wallowing in bad choices and doubt.

Now fortunately, God is fairly into those people wallowing in bad choices and doubt, but this was no sincere fall on the wayside. Because this type of unrooted emotional enthusiasm can only throw you on the high waves of sentimentality and then plunge you into the depths of your own lack of emotional energy.

Don’t misunderstand me here, emotions and times of worship should be intermingled as freely as possible, but when it is solely our affections that are moved, and it doesn’t translate to a change in our way of seeing and being in the world that orients our lives towards the kingdom of God then something is very wrong. This is why I have grown to appreciate dear old Simeon. He is faithful.

Faithfulness is about as un-sexy a trait as somewhere dare have in the 21st century. More often than not it is the compliment that is found when one reaches down into the metaphorical bag of adjective’s to find someone who’s presence is so bland yet so consistent it is the only thing worth saying. But true faithfulness, Simeon-like faithfulness is much stronger than that, much more intentional. So how do we apprehend simeon-like faithfulness rather than the fleeting affections of worship experiences? It gets built through rhythms of remembrance.

How do we build Simeon-like faithfulness? Through repeating the story…

Simeon had waited. But he had waited with intentional faithfulness. He had participated in weekly, maybe even daily repetitions of the story of His people (reading of creation, exile, and prophets)and he had made that story, his story. Notice what the text says about him;

“Now there was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon, who was righteous and devout. He was waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him.

He is righteous and devout, his life is ordered, day in, day out towards the consolation of his people. Simeon’s life had been shaped by, every week, maybe every day being drenched in the story of Israel and the longing for a coming king. I don’t mean simply that Simeon ‘turned up for church’, or synagogue in his case, this is not a post to bolster church service attendance. No, Simeon ordered his life around the story of Israel, and waited with longing to the release of his people. He had made their story, his story.

How do we get inside the story? Well, we repeat it. That is really why the wisdom of the history of the church is to order the year around rememberance of the story, so it becomes our story, advent, christmas, lent, easter etc. The yearly entering in to these stories form us in deep ways that are not penetrable from momentary worship experiences. They literally order our lives by the christian story.

Not quite as easy as simply repeating it..

Now surely if all it takes is repetition then the church traditions which observe the church calendar should be the best disciples living on earth today, right? Well, of course it is not quite as simplistic or robotic as just repetition, what it takes is a much more engaged entering in.

When we read we have to take the time to close our eyes, to reach out to feel what the characters feel, hear how the words land in their lives, to even smell what they smell, we need to hop through the page and when we do we discover many of these characters are immortalised in scripture because they are experiencing things common to the human experience. There is an old name for this ‘Lectio Divina’, but it could just as easily be called ‘reading by the Spirit’. (see my post from a few weeks ago here).

Reading the advent story

I’ve entered into advent with a fresh enthusiasm this year partly because of my realisation of the importance of formational rhythms that I am speaking about here. Rather than rushing to proclaim: “Jesus is born!” or even to rush further ahead and shout; “Christ is risen!” it is important to be slowed down and once again enter in to the millennia of waiting for a messiah.

It is so we can enter into their story and let it overthrow the narratives of our own age that seek to disconnect us from God’s story and the identity He wants to give to us.

Our instantaneous culture loves to skip to the end of the story, especially when it’s already been played out and we feel like we are simply playing catch up. But when we play a single key on the piano or even repeat the last line of a poem, the context is lost, the power is lost and the phrase that was once so filled up with fulfillment and significance becomes empty and dry. As Debussy the composer once said “music is not in the notes, but in the silence between the notes”. So, we enter in during advent, we sit in the longing, because although it was Simeon’s story and although it was Israel’s story it is also our story.

Not just because we inherited the longing of the Israelites, but because our story is an ever protracted longing for deliverance from exile. In the same way as the Israelites were waiting for the first coming of Jesus, the season of advent teaches us to remember their longing so that we have hope and fervour in our own expectancy of the return of the messiah.

Simeon is a quiet voice in scripture really, but He gives us a glimpse into a life of obedience in one direction, the direction of longing, of waiting and anticipating. While certainly we are in an age where the kingdom of God is at hand, we are still longing, I’m not sure anyone every expected us to be longing a full 2000+ years after Jesus’ ascension, but we repeat the story, like during the recently past season of advent to encourage our longing to be marked by faithfulness.

Although you, like me, have likely not read the entirety of german economist and sociologist Max Weber, you have likely, even unwittingly come across its intellectual legacy. Weber in this foundational book for sociological economics is trying to discern the correlation between nations that prospered through capitalism in the 20th Century and those that didn’t. In his time, it was commonly stated that it was because they were protestant and that is why. But the rest of the sentence was rarely completed, and certainly not backed in any meaningful way. Weber travelled extensively and was not convinced that, “because God is blessing them” was a clear or careful enough answer and instead takes to re-reading the happenings through the impact of how people in the nations which prosper lived, and more importantly to his thesis how they read the texts which were foundational, namely the new testament, and lived from those readings.

Max Weber was a bourgeous academic, and in many ways an inter-disciplinary academic of genius proportions. That being said the book he is most well known for (the one in question), is hotly contested and rarely whole-sale endorsed among modern readers.

That being said, it truly is a foundational text for sociology, political and economic thought and finds the practise of Christianity as the source for these outcomes. Weber’s conviction is that the only source for ethics, that is, a way to live, can be religion, it is the only source powerful enough.

Weber, though is by no means an evangelical in a way that we might understand it. Weber is reading the new testament under the influence of german liberalism and even unitarian understandings.

Weber sees capitalism as a broader way of life not simply an narrow economic system. Weber argues that there is a religious basis for rational calculated thinking in economics. Of course, it seems obvious today that you would apply arithmatic calculating (accounting) to your business, but this originally was a significant inter-disciplinary cross over. Numerically attested profit becomes an aim rather than simply the sense of wealth and well-being of the owner with capitalism.

What Weber was interested in, in it’s essence was; What is it about protestantism that brings around capitalism as opposed to catholicism?

In many ways Luther, the oft-awarded father of the reformation, creates the idea of vocation as a job in the market place and was very keen to dissassemble catholic monastic ways of life that simply live apart from the world and pray for a world to come. In that sense Luther lays the ground work for religion and economics to intersect so closely.

What God requires, Luther as read by Weber would say, is not that you live a monastic life being filled up by God in a cloistered lifestyle but that you live out your ‘worldly vocation’. To be a tool in the hands of God rather than a vessel to be filled by God.

This gives a religious justification, to a religious calling to live out work in the world.

Following this, Calvin’s doctrine of double-predestination, affirms that God intends for some to go to heaven and to go to hell, and that God knows who this will be yet we don’t. Weber argues the kind of psychological tension this creates in protestant life leads people to work out their salvation in fear and trembling by becoming religiously passionate workers into an economic system. In one of the most ironic untintended consequences of the reformation, Weber argues protestants work to affirm if not earn their salvation.

By the 20th century, with increased secularisation, Weber contends that what results is what can be seen as ‘a corporation man’ where someone continues to ‘live to work’ and retains the sense of work ethic but it has become entirely detatched from the original sense of religious vocation that gave it rise.

Weber is not so much looking to describe the origins of capitalism but instead to give reasons why it has found a grounding in certain nations and less in others.

Weber’s detractors argue his thesis, if it works, only goes so far. For example how do you account for the rise of capitalism in non-Christendom nations such as japan? Those seeking to uphold Weber’s thesis contend that capitalist flourishing in non-christian nations solely attests to the power of the ‘Spirit’ or ‘ethic’ weber describes reaching beyond it’s historical and cultural heartland in western europe.

Whether Weber’s analysis is correct or not, what is clear is that we live in economic systems that have their philisophical roots and sociological fruits in Christian thinking and christian practise. If we are discontent with our current economic realities, it is worth thinking what theological resources may help us articulate more just and Godly alternatives.

This time of year we are drawn to wonder at the incarnation; the word become flesh in Jesus. Many of us are perplexed by the incarnation, mostly because if, like me you have come from traditions that emphasise the cross heavily, Jesus’ life is somewhat of an awkward unintelligible preamble.

In the past my best guess (although I may never have stated it so bluntly) is that the Father sent the Son to become Jesus in a dusty, dirty, evil earth to show us the way we can believe in God again and get back to heaven (where I presumed we belong). More recently I have seen that Jesus’ incarnation was not an unfortunate practically of saving our disembodied souls but in fact a reclamation of the same dust and earth that God breathed into to make friends to walk with in the garden.

God becomes flesh gives meaning to our lives in the flesh ¹

In the beginning, God breathes into dust, makes humanity and along with all of the created matter calls it ‘very good’. As I’ve mentioned before, my understanding of the narrative of scripture is one where God intends to reclaim and recover everything lost in the fall and inhabit a renewed earth and finally dwell with His people. This is an eschatology rather than ESCAPE-ology where we dodge fireballs on the way to an ethereal cloud based existence in heaven forever. This way of reading scripture makes serious claims on how we live this life and contribute to the renewing of creation (both humanity and it’s surroundings) as a pre-empting of the work God wants to do through His people not just for them.

The Incarnation teaches us there is meaning in inhabiting our in-bodied world

The incarnation, God made flesh is very confusing if we think of a un-embodied future. Jesus is still a human, He still has the resurrected body and he still resembles his mother mary! If we consider the ongoing importance of Christ’s incarnation it fills created matter with meaning, intention, and value and we see it importantly as the first and significant step of redeeming created things.

If this is our understanding of the narrative of God’s world, of which the gospel is a part then how does that affect how we live, minister and worship?

Worship is Formational

As someone who pretty regularly leads people into sung worship, and helps guide an initiative of regular prayer for our church community, I’ve thought alot about how these practises, the words embedded in them, and even the forms themselves form us. Because Make no mistake, these practise do form us. Jamie K.A. Smith in Imagining the Kingdom; ² How Worship Works makes a compelling point that worship informs our social imaginary, a term coined by Charles Taylor.

Our social imaginaries are the place we live from, the places we respond and react from. We like to think that changing our thinking, more specifically our logical thought, our statements of belief etc. change how we live. But in fact, we live from a much broader place of our pre-concious or the ‘way we see the world’, I spoke about this in passing early on in writing this blog by talking of practise.

Learning to drive a car is a good analogy for this; when someone is learning to drive every moment is conciously processed and this ‘over-thinking’ becomes a terrifying reality for everyone else who joins the learner in the car! When someone has learnt to drive a car, the process becomes a pre-concious intuition, the feel of the pedal, the signalling. Most importantly, a driver begins to process dangers such as an oncoming car pre-conciously, they brake and swerve without having to look down at the pedals and decide which one will accomplish the task. Our moral lives, which is really our entire life lived with Christ, operates in this way. What is significant is that within the driver’s pre-concious is a way of seeing the world that responds intuitively, because the pre-concious is formed by a vision of the world where an oncoming car is a very likely threat of death.

Does our worship teach us to inhabit our lives or escape them?

Our Worship practises are what inform the way we understand the world at this pre-concious level, so the words and forms we use become of upmost importance. Do the words we use, and the forms we encourage reflect what the incarnation is telling us? Jesus came close, He engaged and inhabited the place He was called to reconcile and renew. Do our practises, prayer language and forms encourage us to inhabit the world God has given us to cultivate into new creation or to escape it? We have to pay attention to this if we are going to be formed into the likeness of the Christ who came to engage and inhabit the World he was present with at the time of creation (John 1:1).

Sometimes it seems like the eye-roll inducing protest of theological-types to call into awareness of the power of the words we use, but we are made in image of the God who speaks in order to create realities. Do the words we use, and the stewardship of our reality-creating speaking abilities help forward or inhibit our lives in God’s Kingdom, as our families prayer says; “On Earth as it in heaven.”

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