Cheerfulness Is a Choice

Note: It may be helpful to read my introduction to this series in order to have some context and understand my disclaimers. You can find that post here.



I’m not sure I would add much to this conversation at all. I will just say, “What Mike said!”

In all honesty, I feel like if I were to write a few paragraphs, I would be trying to manufacture some deep, profound thoughts pulled from the pool of post-conventional wisdom.

So I won’t! There it is. Cheerfulness is a choice. May we all be challenged by the application of this in our own lives.

PULL UP A CHAIR: Stories on Church

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (in the fourth week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

For the last two years, Alex VanDuyne has served as ICM's team leader at the University of South Florida in Tampa, FL. Alex, Emily, and Samuel have demonstrated a very thoughtful presence amongst the students at USF and have been very intentional about their engagement with the local church and its ability to help them minister to young adults. I knew that with Alex's passion for teaching and communication, he would be a great staff person to ask to share his thoughts about our value of church. 

I love the theology of the church universal. Almost everyone believes in it, though some people talk about it more than others. It means that the Church—the “big C” Church—is the communion of all Christians, across every country, across all time. We are an incredibly tiny part of a great chorus of praise to God that involves every Christian who has ever lived and ever will. But part of the beauty of this idea is that it’s so big and abstract and that it does not actually require anything of us. It’s just a certainty. It’s clean and beautiful like looking at the earth from space.

For our purposes, for the practical now, the “real church” is the local church. This is where the action happens. Our local churches are the hands and feet of God. The local church is much different. It gets messy and dirty and complicated. Churches are inherently messy because they’re made of inherently messy people. Sometimes we act like messy churches are a sign that the gospel isn’t working, but messy churches are like hospitals with sick people—neither surprising nor something to condemn, but entirely natural.

Churches are where God lives. We think of the Holy Spirit as living inside each believer, but the primary metaphor for the Holy Spirit dwelling within us is not as individual believers, but as believers assembled. We like to say, “We don’t go to church, we are the church.” This is partially correct. It is better to say that we become the church when we gather as the church.

The local church is to the universal church what a brick is to a wall. It’s what a cell is to a complex organism. It’s what a nutrient is to a meal. The local church is the least common denominator, the base unit that makes up the greater Church. And this is simply the way it is. There’s no alternative. No competing design. God has ordained to work primarily through local churches. And thus so do we as Christians. And thus so does Impact.

There’s no biblical precedent for a solo believer. Neither the Bible nor church history suggests that a Christian should be a Christian apart from membership in a local gathering. Are there exceptions? Probably. Thought experiments show it to be possible. Life certainly yields people on the outskirts who cannot leave their home or who live in countries with few believers. But these people are the exception, not the rule, and certainly not the ideal.

Impact values church. We value church because church is the native language of God. Church is primarily how he speaks and acts. We cannot preach “Pursue” without calling people to do so in the context of a local body of believers when possible. And it’s nearly always possible. For our staff to say we are pursuing God if we are not invested in a local church is problematic at best. Students, more than anyone, require the stability of a healthy, multigenerational church if they are to nurture a serious and significant relationship with Jesus. Impact doesn’t try to supplant this because it’s fundamentally impossible. A student who treats Impact as their church is a like a sick person on a ventilator. Sometimes it is necessary, and it might be helpful during times of crisis, but eventually you need to start breathing on your own.

Ultimately I have not done my job if I don’t direct our students into the local church. Ultimately one of the clearest signs of whether I have been successful with students is whether they insist on membership in a flawed, messy, beautiful local church after graduation. My own serious input on a student’s life lasts only about two and half years. I hope this sets the foundation for a lifetime of church membership, where my own strengths and failures in each student’s life will be rounded and smoothed and balanced out in the beauty of Christian submission.

This hard commitment to churches made of broken people is one of the core signs of Christian maturity. But it’s also one of the key paths to Christian maturity. Church is where we learn submission, and submission means submitting to not only those we acknowledge are right, but also to those who we think might be wrong, and those who are definitely wrong. We have to work out what submission means in each instance, but it usually means staying in your community and fighting for unity, peace, and a passion for God. Remember, Christ’s great act of submission was not submitting to the crowds who called for him as a king, but submitting to the crowds who called for his murder. This is the model for the backward gospel ethics that we learn about in the Bible, the model of life we call students to at Impact, and the attitude we learn to live out in the local church.

PULL UP A CHAIR: Stories on Excellence & Compassion

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (in the fourth week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

Andrew Hodges is the Team Leader for our ICM team in Indianapolis at the campus of IUPUI (Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis). He and his wife, Samantha, as well as their beautiful children have been ministering in Indy for years and reaching out to the campus for the most recent of those years. Andrew is a driven and committed minister who leads a high-octane and "excellent" outreach. However, he is also shaped by the grace and way of Jesus. I knew that his thoughts about this tension would be worth reading, so I invited him to write this installment for our PULL UP A CHAIR series.

One of the things I’ve struggled with more than anything in ministry is the balance between excellence and compassion. For example, picture me feverishly working away on tasks in my office. In walks a college student last semester wanting to show me a cat video on YouTube in which the cat is speaking what I believed to be Russian. Do I really have time to watch the cat video? Do I really want to watch the cat video? No is the answer to both of those questions. Yet there is a third question to be asked in the midst of that scenario. How can I afford not to watch this video? By watching this cat-speaking-Russian video, I will be able to connect with the student on a deeper level and this will lead to even more opportunities for discipleship. A week later, that same student was then able to trust me enough to ask for my advice about a fraternity brother who was struggling with suicidal thoughts.

All from a cat video?

Kinda.

I recently read the following quote from Rick Warren: “You may have heard it said, ‘If it can’t be done with excellence, don’t do it.’ Well, Jesus never said that! The truth is, almost everything we do is done poorly when we first start doing it—that’s how we learn. At Saddleback Church, we practice the ‘good enough’ principle: It doesn’t have to be perfect for God to use and bless it. We would rather involve thousands of regular folks in ministry than have a perfect church run by a few elites.”

I believe this is where excellence and compassion meet.

Two examples in our ministry at IUPUI that immediately come to my mind are our Worship Team and our Student Leaders.

WORSHIP TEAM

When we first moved toward a fully-student-led band for our worship times on campus, I nearly had a mental breakdown. What songs would they choose? Would they sing in the right keys? Can we really have two violins playing at the same time? Was that the right chord?

Yet the teams we’ve had since then have done an incredible job leading.

The students have loved it.

I have loved it.

I did not have a mental breakdown, entirely.

We valued the worship team over their ability to play or sing, while at the same time encouraging them to step into a place of serious preparation for each night of praise to God. The good enough principal has been used in full effect.

STUDENT LEADERS

It was during our second year on campus that we started to have student leadership positions. These students would assume more responsibility and help us disciple other students. At first I really didn’t know what I was doing (I still mostly do not), but what they allowed us to do was to be organized in our effort to Pursue, Model, and Teach in so many more areas to so many more students. We’ve expanded into vision casting, service projects, intentional hangout times, small groups, intramural sports, worship, art, social media posts, and so much more.

My prayer was (and is) constantly, “God, help me not to underuse them, but help me also not to overuse them.” I’m not sure I’ve figured out where that balance is yet, but I know that the more I care for them and their souls, the more God reveals that sweet spot with both excellence and compassion.

The more I’ve invested in the few, the more God has allowed us to invest in the many.

What we will find is that discipleship requires both excellence AND compassion.

We let people see glimpses of what they are capable of (through God’s power) and we give them affirmation all along the way.

To do something with excellence is to do something “according to your ability” (see Ezra 2:69) and to do something with compassion is to “see the huge crowd” (Matthew 14:14) the way Jesus did before he fed the five thousand.

Ultimately, we are stepping into the very footprints of our Savior, Jesus.

I leave you with this last thought from Philippians 2 that lays out our mission and purpose so well:

Is there any encouragement from belonging to Christ? Any comfort from his love? Any fellowship together in the Spirit? Are your hearts tender and compassionate? Then make me truly happy by agreeing wholeheartedly with each other, loving one another, and working together with one mind and purpose. Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves. Don’t look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too. You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had. Though he was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to. Instead, he gave up his divine privileges ; he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. When he appeared in human form, he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross. Therefore, God elevated him to the place of highest honor and gave him the name above all other names, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue declare that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

A DAY IN THE LIFE: Real Life on the Palouse

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (in the second week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

One of things that has defined my weekly work presence over the years has been my family’s relationship with Real Life on the Palouse. It’s been an incredible blessing to have a church family that we love as much as we do here on the Palouse. Those of you who know me know that I don’t qualify as “normal” (easy with the jokes). The church has often struggled to know what to do with those who lie outside the bounds of typical. But RLOTP has been incredibly accepting of me and all of my quirks; there are days when I still can’t believe the level of involvement they’ve encouraged (not just allowed) us to have.

Becky and the kids love serving in the children’s ministry here. They have been a fantastic encouragement to my children, identifying their ability to lead and encouraging their involvement at every level of the ministry. They treat my kids as true volunteers, inviting them to the same events and awards they would offer to any other volunteer.

When I first arrived on the Palouse in 2011, I was certain I would not be welcome in the faith community. Instead, I was ushered right into staff meetings and invited to staff retreats; I was immediately given a seat at the RLOTP table and was never forced to “earn” a voice at the table. I found my first place to serve as I always have in church — behind the drums. I enjoyed helping lead worship on almost a weekly basis for the first few years.

Eventually, I was invited to fill the pulpit for a Sunday when Aaron was gone and that led to a place on the teaching team. For years, we have met for what we call “Sermon Club,” a weekly get-together where we plan upcoming sermons and sketch out the message for the upcoming week. We share ideas and give feedback on how to design each message and what we think might be important. It’s a wonderful practice. Obviously, preaching and teaching are my greatest joys and most prominent gifts, so I love to get to use them on a regular basis. I know I’m playing my part in the body in a way that blesses others.

We have served the community in different ways throughout the years — leading small groups and helping establish accountability and mentoring — but what I mention above has definitely been the places where we have found our home as members of RLOTP.

With recent changes to my job and the increase in my travel schedule, I have had to continue to step further and further back as I do the things my position requires. This has been one of the most difficult things to navigate in living here on the Palouse. I suppose this kind of connection is a good thing and a testimony to the kind of family we have. I have made some of the deepest friendships I have ever had in my life here in this body of faith, and I’ve experienced acceptance like never before.

Here is a video diary of my weekly time at RLOTP:

MAKING AN IMPACT: Pursue

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (in the third week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

In our last post of this series, we talked about the concept of discipleship and what it means to us at Impact Campus Ministries. I told the story about how we came up with the “in-house” definition of imitating a mentor who imitates Jesus. We expected this imitating would require more than just a one-hour-a-week spiritual check-up over coffee. Instead, we would need to be investing our lives into one another, living life together, and mimicking the walks of our mentors.

So what is it, exactly, that we would want them to imitate?

At the end of the post, I suggested that ICM has been, for years, preparing the soil of this work. Our mission statement has been to pursue, model, and teach intimacy with Christ in the context of Christian community on the American university campus. I believe this statement provides a fantastic roadmap to the process of discipleship and the things we would want our disciples to imitate. So I want to take a look at the first of these words: PURSUE.

ICM’s founder, Dean Trune, instilled within our organization decades ago the belief that true success is a supernatural byproduct of our passion for God. If we focus on pursuing Him and loving Him with all of our heart, soul, and might, He will produce the fruit in our lives that He wants to bear in the places and ways He wants to bear it. As Jesus taught us in John 15, “Apart from me, you can do nothing.”

For us, that means discipleship begins with our pursuit of God. We create intentional space to pursue Him, commune with Him, and be changed by Him. This creates the outpouring work to impact other people — particularly college students. While this sounds incredibly subjective and mystical on paper, it’s actually incredibly objective and practical in practice. In 2013, I wrote a blog titled “Creating a Space”:

Which leads me to my reflection: I believe the construction of the Tabernacle models an unspoken promise that God has made to His people. If you will create a space in your life for God, He will fill it. The question is, will you create a space?

What would have happened if the Israelites never created the Tabernacle? The fascinating thing is that we run around like chickens with our heads cut off, filling our lives with busyness, and then we are flabbergasted that God doesn’t interrupt our days with His undeniable presence.

If we won’t create a space, why should we expect God to fill it?

But if you do create the space, God will fill it.

He may not fill it the way you want or expect, but if you will create a space in your life — a discipline, an hour of listening, a sabbath rest, a location of retreat — I believe God will fill it.

Yes, it is entirely possible that our pursuit of God can become mechanical, lifeless, legalistic, and dispassioned. But so can everything else we do. The heart of ICM is to be people who intentionally and passionately create a space for God where we are pursuing Him and wanting to know His heart so we can give that, in wisdom, to our students.

And so we read the Bible; we don’t just read it to learn, but we listen for God’s heart and His voice speaking to us. We journal in order to have an objective way to hear from Him. We study the Bible to learn more about its context and be able to interpret it better each day. We memorize Text each week, believing that if we put God’s Word in us, it will not return void.

We fast and pray. We strive to become better and better at praying. We want to intercede on behalf of others and look inwardly, offering prayers of humility, confession, and repentance. We create space for personal worship. We pursue spaces of sabbath, solitude, and silence. For most of us, these pursuits started small and grew over time — as with our passion for God.

But this is our craft at ICM. We want to be experts in spiritual formation. We want to be well aquatinted with the faithful pursuit of knowing God. We want to understand and experience true Bible study and meditation. If anyone has questions about fasting or prayer journaling, we want the world of campus ministry to be able to point toward us (among many others). For us, the daily pursuit of God is not something we do so we can get on to the “important work” of ministry; for us, it is the important work of ministry.

It’s important because it is the most foundational part of discipleship and the foremost thing that we would want imitated. Of course, it can only be imitated if it can be observed. So if we simply pursue God by ourselves, on our own, very little discipleship is going to happen.

This is where the idea of MODEL shows up.

MY BLOG IN 2018: Week Three

We’ve now talked about my four-week rotation for every calendar month of 2018. We talked about how I’ll be using the first week of the rotations to talk about the Top 12 Blog Posts of Covered in His Dust. We’ve also spoken about how I’ll be using the second week to bring you a little series titled A Day in the Life. Now it’s time to talk about what we’ll be covering in the third week of our monthly rotations.

While I don’t think it’s a secret to my readers, my vocational calling is one where I serve as the President of Impact Campus Ministries. At ICM, we believe in the work of campus ministry because we believe that if we can impact the university campus, we can impact the world. We truly believe that tomorrow’s great leaders are studying on campuses all over this country; we believe there are students here that will be called to all kinds of international destinations and jobs to make an impact in their particular contexts. In fact, the largest growing demographic of students is the international student — what better chance to impact the world on the global scale than to shape tomorrow’s leaders on today’s campuses?

Here is a video we made that talks about all of that:

One of the reasons I love ICM so much is because of the culture and the vision of our organization. Some of that culture was built into Impact from its earliest years of ministry. Amazing people like Dean Trune planted a counter-intuitive belief in ICM that true success is developing intimacy with God. I love working for an organization that runs against the current of mainstream thought — thought that believes all we need is a little more hard work — and says that true success is a fruitfulness that comes from what God wants to do through us. And maybe it has to be “caught not taught,” but just listen to this definition of success that was written long before I ever worked for ICM:

Success is developing intimacy with God and community with each other through a living relationship with Jesus. We believe an individual, who is developing intimacy with God, in the context of Christian community, will make an impact for the Kingdom of God.

A team of individuals, who make an impact for the Kingdom of God, will have a fruitful ministry. Though we do not aim for “making an impact,” and we do not aim for “fruitful ministries,” we recognize that these two situations will supernaturally occur when individuals develop intimacy with God in Christian community.

Ministry is the product of our love for God, and an expression of a heart devoted to God. We must not allow “ministry for God” to crowd “intimacy with God” out of our lives. We cannot control “making an impact,” and we cannot control “fruitful ministries,” but we have absolute control over developing intimacy with God and being devoted to one another.

I love that!

Out of this core belief, those who came after Dean and before me created a mission that still excites me. We exist to pursue, model, and teach intimacy with God in Christian community on the American university campus. Out of this mission statement we built a “common language” that we believe, over time, helps foster a culture to make ICM great. ICM is indebted to the leadership of Bill Westfall for this guidance.

We created eight core terms we use to talk about the discipleship process; we also have a list of six values on which we build our organization. We wanted to have shared definitions of what these words mean to us as an organization because we believe words are powerful. We created short definitions for disciple and discipleship. We found it to be very beneficial to identify exactly what pursue, model, and teach mean as ideas. And we also decided it would be helpful to expound on the importance of message, mode, and milieu. All of this is built upon the foundation of our values: passion [for God], community, character, excellence, [the local] church, and compassion.

Now, it’s important for me to state that this is simply our culture at ICM. This is not some seminar on success or how you can follow our formula to greatness. We don’t travel around the country putting on conferences about these terms and why they’re so great — “and you can do it too!” In fact, the mentality of ICM runs against this big box, perform-and-impress idea about church.

No, this is simply a conversation that means a lot to us. To be honest, I’ll be using this third week to write about these ideas for my staff and those connected to our organization. If Dean Trune instilled a definition of success — the spirit and DNA of ICM — and if Bill Westfall helped create a vision and mission for the future, then my job is to help us take ground and continue becoming the organization these great leaders dreamed about. And that means we need to keep talking about these ideas and pushing into them. Every day, every year — moving forward.

But these conversations are not something we want to keep secret. We want to share them with you. I will be posting a monthly article on one of our core terms and casting a little vision of what it looks like to pursue these ideas. If they bless you and help you in some way, we are excited and thrilled to be a part of what God wants to do in your life. If they don’t, that’s fine too. We have no plans for world domination.

So for the third week of every month, I invite you into the conversation of Making an Impact.

MY BLOG IN 2018: Week Two

I have been wanting to take some time each month this fall to share with you a little bit of what to expect on my blog in the coming year. Starting in January, I will begin a weekly rotation of blog themes that will drive the conversation in 2018. In the last post, I spoke of how I will be taking the first week of each month to share the Top 12 Blog Posts of Covered in His Dust. We’ll look back and see what posts have been used the most and I’ll enjoy speculating as to why they are the favorites.

The second week of my rotation will be dedicated to a series I’m going to call “A Day in the Life,” and it should be a collection of different things I do in my job each day. For many of my supporters, they have commented on how nice it’s been to see updates and the occasional video where they get to see what I do secondhand. It’s just one more way we can make our world a little smaller and I can invite you to see what it’s like to be a campus minister and/or President of Impact Campus Ministries.

Some examples of this might be the work I do with students or showing you some of the groups I teach here on the Palouse. I might do a post on discipleship and “take you on a walk” with one of my disciples. I might show you a meeting or two, such as those with the staff of ICM. I might introduce you to some of the staff at Real Life on the Palouse and talk about my partnership with the church there. And maybe I’ll even do a post on what I enjoy doing with my free time. There are so many things to invite you into!

None of these posts will be designed to be instructive or profound in any way — they’re just a fun trip into my day-to-day life where you get to see a little bit of things from my perspective. Of course, I’m sure there will be some cameo appearances from my family (they are who everyone really wants to see, I know) and we’ll have some fun.

So I look forward to inviting you into my life next year as we explore “A Day in the Life.”

CHURCH HISTORY: Telling a Story

We left our last conversation (and finished our study of the Scriptures) with this nagging question: What happened?

Now that we are done with our study of the God-breathed Text, we are entering a very sticky and dangerous realm of my own personal thoughts and opinions. While my thoughts and opinions have certainly been at work in the previous discussion, I have taken solace in the fact that we were working on a discussion centered around the life-giving biblical narrative. But this question is incredibly important, and as a Bible teacher who works with college students, I’m deeply convicted that if we don’t wrestle with these questions, we have done a great disservice to our study of the Text.

One of the things we talk about at Impact Campus Ministries is what we call “Message, Mode, and Milieu” — an idea introduced to us through the dissertation work and leadership of my personal friend, mentor, and former ICM president, Bill Westfall. When we speak of Message, the idea we are trying to communicate is that we need to have an understanding of “the whole story of God and His invitation to join” that story. There is no way we can adequately address this invitation if we don’t have an understanding of what happened in between the world of the Bible and the world you and I traverse today.

Because of this, I would like to wrap up our study by engaging that now. It is important to know a few things.

1) I am not a historian or an expert in the field of church history. Have I studied church history considerably? Yes. Am I an expert? Not at all. I am indebted to the work of real experts, some of whom I’ve been able to study with personally, and some I have only read from a distance. Please don’t quote me as a source in this regard. I am simply trying to take some of the things I have learned and think critically with all of you. Nothing more; nothing less.

2) Every historian, whether they are an expert or not, tells a story. There simply is no such thing as an unbiased rendering of history. Each one of us sees history through the lens of our own culture, language, experience, opinion, and conviction. I want you to know up front that I will be taking the parts of history I believe tell the story in the most useful manner for our culture in this place and in this time. It is completely intentional and biased. But please, do not ever believe anyone who doesn’t affirm that. All renderings of history have a story to tell, and all historians are storytellers. We should not run from that, but embrace it. And we should allow it to challenge us to think critically about our past(s).

3) My intent with this last portion of our study is not “the history of the church.” I will not even begin to deal adequately with any portion of church history in a comprehensive way. I will not be doing a study on the reformers, or the desert fathers. I simply want to take a broad look at where we’ve been and how our Christian world has been shaped. This means I will be overgeneralizing at times. I will try my best not to do this in a misleading or disingenuous way, but I want to stay within the scope of my intent here.

In this regard, there are many, many great sources for church history. I would recommend books like Constantine’s Sword and Bruce Shelley’s Church History in Plain Language. These recommendations do not mean I agree in full with these works or their many nuances, but they are a great way to get started.

Now, as I pointed out, the early Christians seemed to believe the return of Christ was imminent. Were they wrong? I don’t believe they were.

As I said earlier, I believe Jesus taught us about a proper three-part understanding of the coming of the Age to Come. I do not believe there is a fixed date for which Jesus’s return is set. On the contrary, I believe God is inviting us to partner with Him in restoring a broken world. At some point, as this “redemptive arc of history” is bent closer and closer to the intent of God, God will snap the last few pieces into place — maybe just as the apocalyptic prophets paint the picture, or maybe differently.

This understanding runs congruent with the Jewish understanding Peter seems to promote in 2 Peter 3.

You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.

Apparently the “day of God” is not fixed, but stands in relation to us. Our obedience somehow speeds up its coming. And just as we saw in the end of our study of the New Testament, this commitment and radical obedience by the early believers was working. I don’t believe they were wrong to think the coming of Christ and the new heaven and new earth — prophesied by Isaiah, re-announced by Peter, Paul, and John — were speedily approaching.

But then something happened…

We seemed to lose the plot. I want to look at what that something might have been. Join me as we begin to walk through the last 2000 years.

REVELATION: Pergamum and Satan's Throne

The next church addressed in Revelation is the church in Pergamum. Pergamum was a cultural center in the early Roman empire, and Augustus even declared the city his capital in the province of Asia. Sitting atop the acropolis of Pergamum to this day are the ruins of the vaulted platform that held the temple to Caesar Augustus (later redone under the name of Tiberius and other later emperors). This temple to Caesar had an altar that doubled as a “throne” (very common in Greco-Roman altars; the altars were often shaped like thrones to communicate the rule and presence of the god). Some historians spoke of how you could see the shining temple atop the acropolis in Pergamum from miles out to sea.

Because of the political prominence of Pergamum, the city was also given what was known as poteste gladii, or “power of the sword.” The Romans had a double-edged sword known as the symbol of power. If a city or colony had the “power of the sword,” then they had been given the right to make decisions with the authority of Caesar. Their rulings were as true as if they had been uttered by Caesar himself.

But this wasn’t the only throne residing on Pergamum’s acropolis. In fact, decades ago, the gigantic altar to Zeus was moved to a museum in Berlin (you can see pictures of it by doing a Google image search for "pergamon altar of zeus"). This altar sat just a couple hundred yards away from the temple to Caesar. Covered in gold leaf, this “throne” stands 44 feet tall from the base of the stairs (which still sit in Pergamum), and would have been another attribute to make the acropolis visible from miles away.

But there aren’t only two thrones that sit in Pergamum. No, Pergamum also served as the neochorus (think “capital”) of Dionysius, the Greco-Roman god of wine and orgy. The temple to Dionysius served as the starting point for what was called “the Sacred Way,” and also warranted the construction of the tallest theatre in the ancient world, still an acoustic marvel to this day. The Sacred Way weaves its path down the acropolis and past some seventeen other temples to major Greco-Roman gods. Without a doubt, the pagan worship present in Pergamum was second to none. This Dionysian worship culminated in the annual festival to Dionysius every year where there would be consumption of raw meat, drinking of incredible amounts of wine, and indulgence in rampant sexual immorality. Local law stated that a woman was not free to marry in this pagan culture unless she had lost her virginity in the Dionysian festival. One of the stops I make with participants on my trips is at the ruins of a three-story storefront. The first floor had the remains of giant wine vats (used for serving, not for storage or selling), the third floor has tricliniums (the three-sided banquet table of the first century), and the second floor has large vats that are plumbed for drainage. The archaeological team that did the work there believes these storefronts, found on the Sacred Way, were used during the Dionysian festival to serve wine and raw meat to the public. They would dine and party until sick, at which point they would descend to the second floor and vomit into the vats.

The view from the Dionysian temple, looking towards the Asclepion

And this wasn’t the only pagan worship that found itself centered in the city. Pergamum was also home to the largest Asclepion in the ancient world. Asclepius was the god of healing, and the Asclepion was their equivalent of a hospital. One could think of the Asclepion in Pergamum as the “Mayo Clinic” of their day — the best of the best medical treatment the pagan world had to offer. One would check in to the Asclepion, wash themselves for spiritual purity, make offerings and gifts to the gods, and proceed to treatment. The treatment was incredibly holistic and included education (each patient had to study their disease/condition in the massive library), entertainment (the drama of the Asclepius myth was displayed twice a day in the theatre on the grounds), medical diagnosis, and spa treatments at the bathhouse and mud treatment center. When patients were healed, they would return to write their name and their healed condition on one of the many white stone pillars that stood in the courtyard. In the center of this courtyard, to this day, sits a spring they plumbed throughout the facility in order to give the acoustic ambient sound of rushing water, which they believe was the voice of Asclepius himself and had healing properties.

We could easily write three times as much about the relevant context of Pergamum, but that should set the stage for us to look at the letter to Pergamum:

“To the angel of the church in Pergamum write:

These are the words of him who has the sharp, double-edged sword. I know where you live—where Satan has his throne. Yet you remain true to my name. You did not renounce your faith in me, not even in the days of Antipas, my faithful witness, who was put to death in your city—where Satan lives.

Nevertheless, I have a few things against you: There are some among you who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin so that they ate food sacrificed to idols and committed sexual immorality. Likewise, you also have those who hold to the teaching of the Nicolaitans. Repent therefore! Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.

Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who is victorious, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give that person a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it.”

“… who has the sharp, doubled-edged sword.” or “… fight against them with the sword of my mouth.” These are references to the poteste gladii that was present in Pergamum and a cross-reference to the power and authority of Christ. While we didn’t have time to unpack the temple and library of Athena that sits on the acropolis, as well, the “sword of my mouth” reference only gets juicier as we realize the power of words — or, more particularly, God’s Word.

“I know where you live — where Satan has his throne. … where Satan lives.” Whether this is a reference to one of those particular thrones we mentioned (Caesar, Zeus, Dionysius, or the myriad others), or a blanket reference to this incredibly pagan city, the cultural reference is unmistakable.

“…the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin so that they ate food sacrificed to idols and committed sexual immorality.” John nails the message to the neochorus of Dionysius right on the head. This annual festival was steeped in idol meat and sexual immorality. To live in Pergamum would be to reject the daily temptation to give into the cultural narrative of your day.

“I will also give that person a white stone with a new name written on it…” This is a reference to the healing God offers and a subversive reclamation of the practice so prevalent in the local Asclepion.

By now we should be getting the idea that Revelation is deliberately playing off of the cultural context of its original audience. These aren’t vague references to future entities, but direct references the original audience completely understood without hesitation. But there is a new idea we need to introduce ourselves to, one likely to make our minds explode as we realize what John is doing in the writing of this incredible letter. It’s one thing to use the culture to brilliantly craft a teaching the audience needs to hear. We would call that clever.

John is doing so much more than that.

Besides culture, where is John pulling his material? While we hinted at this earlier in our discussion of Revelation, it’s time to bring it back and put it to work here in our study. John is getting all of his content from the Hebrew Scriptures. Everything John is writing about in his references to culture also comes from the Tanakh! And often, these references are coming from other pieces of apocalyptic literature — books like Daniel, Ezekiel, and Zechariah. This is almost impossible to grasp immediately, and I had to study this concept in Turkey for some time before it finally settled in my consciousness.

Here’s an example from Pergamum: Why does God choose to use Balaam as his reference to the people of Pergamum? Because the book of Numbers provides the contextual (think remez) material for the lesson John is trying to teach. As we mentioned in our study of Jude and 2 Peter, Jewish tradition teaches that Balaam was the one who told Balak to entice the Israelites into sexual sin (Numbers 25). By using Balaam as his reference to the Tanakh, John teaches an entire sermon without writing it down. Every Jew who hears that reference is going to understand that John is saying, “Hey! We’ve been here before! We can’t fall into temptation here in Pergamum!”

The same principle could be used for every reference. “Sword of my mouth” or “where Satan has his throne” or “a new name” written on a white stone. Where is John getting his material? Obviously from the culture, but each one of these references comes from the Old Testament!

Next we will take these principles and apply them to the letter written to Thyatira.

Uncut Corners

One of the next stories we run into is the story of Pentecost. There are so many tantalizing aspects to this story when seen through the Text. Let’s pull out a couple of them.

First, the setting.

The story of Pentecost is set within the biblical festival of Shavuot. Shavuot (the Festival of Weeks) is the celebration of the harvest (more on that in a moment) and the giving of Torah on Mt. Sinai. When the Jews did the math of the Exodus story, they came to the conclusion that if the Israelites left Egypt on Passover, arrived at Sinai ten days later, and Moses spent forty days with God in the cloud, then the giving of the Law would fall on Shavuot — so they celebrated the giving of the Law at the Temple that day. If you go back and review the details of the story of Mt. Sinai, however, you will find some striking similarities between the story of Pentecost and the story of Moses and the Law.

In both stories, you have the people coming to the Mountain of the LORD (Sinai/Zion). In both stories, there is thunder/tongues (in Hebrew, the word for “thunder” in Exodus 19 is also the word for “tongues”). In both stories, God is going to establish His temple: the Tabernacle in Exodus and the temple of His people (made of “living stones,” as Peter will tell us) in the book of Acts. In the Exodus, fire will come out from the temple and consume the sacrifice as God dwells in the Tabernacle; in Acts, God’s fire will come out and settle on people as God takes up residence in a new temple.

In Exodus, Moses will come down the mountain with a message from God and find the people in sin at the Golden Calf. We are told Moses will sanction the slaughter of about 3000 people. Peter stands on the steps of Mt. Zion with a message from God and the people will find themselves pierced. And about how many were saved that day?

3000.

It’s in the Text! The story of Pentecost is the redemption of the Golden Calf story. Brilliant.

Second, the content of the celebration.

Not only are the Jews celebrating the giving of the Law, but biblically, the festival is put in place to celebrate the wheat harvest. In the biblical world, there are two harvests each spring. The barley harvest comes first; barley is often referred to as the “poor man’s grain,” with barley loaves being the bread for the commoner. The second harvest is wheat; this grain is much more desirable and fine than that of barley. In the biblical calendar year, God told you to celebrate the Festival of Firstfruits with the barley harvest. You would bring the first of the barley harvest and remember how God brought you into the Promised Land.

Then, fifty days later, God told you to bring “an offering in proportion to how the LORD has blessed you” for the festival of Shavuot. Not only this, but you were commanded not to cut the corners of your field during the wheat harvest, leaving it for the alien, the orphan, and the widow. What I love about that is God tells you to offer your best to those in need — even after you offer a gift to the LORD in proportion to His incredible blessing on you.

My teacher used to jump up and down and say, “If there are no uncut corners in your celebration of Jesus, you are not Pentecostal — I don’t care how many of you are speaking in tongues!” In the Jewish mind, it’s not Shavuot unless those in need are blessed. How does the story in Acts end?

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

They had true Pentecost. Not only this, but the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus play into this story, as well. Jesus dies on Passover, is resurrected on the Festival of Firstfruits (the “firstfruits” even for the poor man), and God saves the greatest harvest — the fine and desirable harvest of the wheat — to be the fragrant generosity of His people, partnering with Him to put the world back together.

Mmm. Delicious tidbits from the Text. It’s an epilogue of an early church that got it!

As the Jews continued to study the story of Shavuot over the centuries, they began reading the story of Ruth each Shavuot. The book of Ruth is basically written to encompass all of the principles we discussed above. There is the giving of the Law and Ruth reminding Boaz of the covenant he carries and the call he has to take care of the alien, orphan, and widow (of which Ruth is all three). There are the uncut corners she gleans from. We are told she shows up during the barley harvest and gleans through the wheat harvest. And we are confronted over and over again with the generosity of Boaz.

Will this movement of God-followers, set apart for the task of partnering with God on Shavuot, end up providing a home and a welcoming community for the mumzer — the outsider, the foreigner — and seize the call of Abram to be a blessing to all nations?

Will we see an example of a community of people who understand how to partner with God in putting the world back together?