a theology of resurrected bodies

Decades ago, I learned a theology of "resurrection of the body" that told me that someday I'd be in a resurrected body that was identifiably me but also not.

New creation means a new body - which is a whole new interesting thing. My body works as most bodies should work. Maybe it's not as pretty or as sexy or as shapely as our society thinks a woman's body should be, but it does pretty much all the things I've needed to, and when it 'malfunctioned', it was something that could be dealt with.

What about the friend I have who died twenty years ago, wheelchair bound? The theology of resurrected bodies that I learned wasn't one with a space for non-standard bodies. Does Abby get a 'new body', too? Will it still be her body? Was her body - her physicality - innately sinful, then, for being "non-standard"?

Or does her body just do all the things she needs it to do in the new creation, her physicality no longer a binding upon her in the next life as it was in this life?

Abby died around two decades ago. My fully-abled and very physically-capable cousin Tina died around one decade ago. Both Christian women, from very different traditions, with very different bodies, but very steadfast faiths. And one night I dreamed of them both dancing before the Throne - Tina as she loved to do, Abby as she never had the opportunity to do. Did I see what kind of body Abby had? Nope. Apparently it was beyond my comprehension as limited by this world, and so my brain lacks the ability to think beyond the bound of the society it was raised in - where Abby's body was "wrong" for not being capable of all the things that my body and Tina's body were capable of doing and being.

Or maybe I just made it all up in my head. Always possible.

A theology of disability - of "differently abled bodies" - is an interesting one, because it forces us to confront that if the flesh is not inherently sinful, then having a body that doesn't fit our social expectations isn't a sin either.

OT laws vs NT laws vs Laws Of Love

Not eating shellfish? Isn't a matter of "love thy neighbour". Providing opportunities for those who aren't born into them? That's a matter of "love thy neighbour".

The NT Laws we recognise as being more about 'loving people around us' than the OT Laws, but also, the NT laws are rooted in a culture and a time and a place and issues that the church was facing at the time when those answers were given. They give us the shape of "loving our neighbour" but not necessarily the specifics.

The way the OT law worked was a lot of ancient society wisdom - not eating things that were risky-disky in terms of cleanliness or biosecurity, or which could be mistaken for the religious practices of the peoples around them - AND a lot of stuff that went against the codes of the ancient societies around them. Slaves and servants being granted a rest day off? The sexual abuse of a woman being punishable by either her legal right to your entitlements (as happened for women through the contract of marriage) or your death? Welcoming those who flee their lands of origin?

Those are pretty weird by the standards of the day. And sure, we can argue that 'people should have known better' but we have the experience of some nine-thousand years of human thought and experience and knowledge, transmitted by myth, legend, story, and parable, and then by fairy-tale and epic narrative and collective chant, and most recently by print and recorded media. So, yeah, we know now, but we didn't know then. Just like children start off with very simplistic understandings of the world and grow into complexity with adults. (Sometimes. Sometimes they don't. That's part of the issues we're facing right now: people who want childlike solutions to problems that have been woven by generations of humanity.)

Basically, the OT laws that carry on to the NT, and the NT mandates that we still cling to today, are entirely and without exception those that dignify our relationship with God and with other human beings. We have corrupted them in the modern world with our legalism and our tricksy wordses of online defensive discourse, but in the end, what we are asked to do is to love and care for and succour and support others in ways that lift them up in everything they are, not merely 'spiritual'.

Which is why we don't take the entire literal books of the Torah as our laws. We take the spirit of what they say in them and not the specifics - to respect our fellow human beings as co-created by God, to do right by the created world He gave us to look after, and to do right by the other created beings He put in the world with us, and to give due place and presence to the creator God.

I don't think that we should be focused on "the spiritual" so much as "the spirit".

When "Colourblind" Is Still Blind

(And why Jesus came to make the "colourblind" see the full spectrum of His image)

--

You've heard it. I've heard it. You've even said it. Some of you have said it to me.

"I don't see colour."

It's supposed to be an encouragement - a declaration of equality. "You're just like me, just with different skin." 

And at one level it is. At another, it's just blindness.

I grew up in a church of people like me - East Asians, mostly, out of South China in the waves of immigration that preceded and succeeded the Communist Takeover.

Some were born here, bred here, like my father and myself. Some came to Australia and converted to the faith from their ancestral spiritual leanings, like my mother and two of her brothers. And some came from Christian families out of Asia - a great panoply of believers by way of James Hudson Taylor and CMS and all other missions throughout the Asian archipelago. A wondrous history and culture of believers.

In my childhood, we all worshipped together before the Lord - we were one, we were many, and from all the lands of Asia we came.

But we also understood that our different pathways to come here meant that we thought differently about things. That the Chinese-Malaysian family out of Kuala Lumpur had a different perspective on nation-states than did the brother-in-Christ out of Singapore. That the Indonesian sister had a different experience of bigotry to the Chinese sister. And yet, we were all one family of God worshipping together on a Sunday, sharing meals together at social events on weekends, calling each other during the week.

This is what it means to "see colour".

My experience of being an Australian Christian differs to a white-passing Australian Christian's experience. My understanding comes from my incarnation as a non-white body, female and Asian, and the presumptions enfolded into a culture which prizes and prioritises whiteness and maleness, even in the church and often from the pulpit. And so, you might not see me as "different" to you, but my experience of humanity, of society, of culture is entirely different to yours.

I've experienced racism. Both the nasty kind and the nice kind.

The nasty kind is easy to deal with. But the nice kind? That really cuts. And it's difficult to explain, because the nice racists can also be nice people, who don't realise that they're part of the problem.

Maybe you think this doesn't make a difference - after all, the gospel is the gospel, right? And yet Paul's teaching is both very specific to the cultures he was writing to - some of them culturally Jewish, some of them Greek, or Macedonian, or some of them a mish-mash of whoever had been baptised in the household when Paul came - their hang-ups, their idealisations, the way they looked at the world. "The Jews want to see fantastic signs and wonders, and the Greeks think Knowledge Is Everything, but we preach a Christos Yesous ('saviour' in both language groups) - who the Romans consider a criminal!" 

Paul lived in a cultural melting pot as much as we do, and closer to it, I think. So reading him with the lens of a 'melting pot culture' is surely a better way to think of his teachings than the monochrome culture of eras past?

I've attended Anglican churches since I was 18. Moved away from home, joined a local church that was Anglican, ended up sticking with the Anglican denominational churches since. Solid teaching, good people, a certain type of worship and service and expectation... Those things suit me, brought up in Sydney Evangelicalism as I was (my childhood church was in the Sydney Evangelical union of churches) but they may not suit someone from another background. It's not for everyone, and sometimes more important than the particularity of the teaching and the preaching is the ability of the congregant to connect with the pastor who is their church's spiritual guide week after week. 

For someone of a non-white background who needs this, they're not going to find it in the Anglican church. A high priest who is able to sympathise with our sorrows and struggles... Not so much at the (very excellent) church I attend. That *is* okay, you know. The reason there are so many churches done so many ways is so that the broad and multitudinous People Of God can find somewhere that they can be comfortable in...before they go out and work on their discomfort.

When I was young, I imagined that there was something like a 'waiting room' for heaven. You know, after you die, while you're waiting for the judgement day, we all get around to talking to the people who are also waiting for Jesus to come again and get to know each other. (Look, I could only think in linear time in those days, and I'm an ambivert. Getting to know and chat with people sounds like a lot of fun to me, while to others it probably sounds like a version of eternal torment.) 

These days, I think heaven is going to be an eternity of not only meeting other believers from all times and spaces, but learning their languages and praise songs, sitting in their cultures and hanging out, worshipping God the way they worship God, loving each other the way they were taught to love their neighbours. Only, you know, perfectly. 

I do not want an eternity of Anglicanism. Apologies to any and all ministers I have known and listened to and served under and been ministered to by! But, yeah, nah.

A whole world history of new culture and new practices, of people who have new depths to give the gospel and the preachings and teachings of the ages? A whole new understanding of who God is, of the Father, of the Christ, of the Holy Spirit? Of who my brothers and sisters are? Of who we were made to be in His image? All of us, varied and different, through the aeons, from Rahab running her inn and wondering at the God who welcomed a non-traditional woman into his people, to Selina who lives in a world where she can be non-traditional in so many ways Rahab couldn't have imagined and still not stand out?

WOOHOO. Sign me up, for lo, I am there!

And that's why "colourblind" is such a problem to me. Because to not see the variety, the wondrous expanse of God's creativity in making people different, in guiding our cultures, in enabling all of us to come before him dressed in robes of the finest grace? Is, to me, to be truly "blind" to the Kingdom of God - an empire not defined by borders of geography, but by those who open the borders of their heart to a God who requests entry, and who accept Him and his multitudinous family with Him.

All the 'little children' of God's world.

validity, fangirling Jesus, clickbait headlines, when the rubber hits the road

What if Christians didn't have a huge chip on their shoulder about validity?

Like, what if we didn't feel we had to prove ourselves?

Arguing doesn't work. We know this - anyone who's engaged in political discourse knows this - but nobody actually acts as though they know it. We love the idea that arguing the right things brings people into the kingdom. But really, I think that loving and caring for people in ways that the world can't replicate brings people into the kingdom. I'm not sure that we do that so much anymore - we have outsourced it to government, but the solution is not to stop the government outsourcing, but to step in and fill what the government cannot - with the personal and intimate care that all humanity desires.

--

Joseph Yoo's video about "fangirling Jesus" rather than "following Jesus" hits the mark a bit close...

--

ONLY CHRISTIANS CARE ABOUT THESE FIVE THINGS! (NUMBER THREE WILL SHOCK YOU!!!!)

TODAY, I LOVED MY NEIGHBOUR (BY CRITICISING HER LIFE CHOICES AND TELLING HER SHE NEEDED TO FIND GOD)

HOW TO BRING YOUR FRIENDS TO CHURCH (INSTEAD OF BRINGING THE CHURCH TO THEM, WHY WOULD WE WANT TO DO THAT? EW!)

THE ONLY WAY FOR OUR SOCIETY TO THRIVE IS TO TURN TO GOD, AND IF PEOPLE DON'T, THEN WE SHOULD DESTROY ALL OPPORTUNITIES FOR THEIR FLOURISHING BECAUSE IF THEY WERE WORTHY PEOPLE, THEY'D BE CHRISTIAN

I feel deeply cynical about Christianity right now. A lot of "we need to tell people about God". No. No we don't. I know that we have some very nice white men in charge of our church, but either they don't understand how tired the majority of people outside the church are of first being told about God by 'the church' and then afterwards Christians are kind to them.

Sure, they want the kindness first and not to hear about God. I guess I just remember the 'love them until they ask why' framing.

Except that if the only 'love' we can show them is talking to them, then that's not really a very effective love, you know? And yeah, I know our personal-interaction segregated society doesn't want to deal with the messy reality of people who don't think and believe exactly as you do, but fences never actually keep livestock in, while the idea is that fresh and living water does.

Are we fresh and living water? I mean, we say we are, simply because we're the people of God. But can we ask what "the people of God" have done lately for society? Recently. As a big group? Online or off?

I mean, there are charities, yes. But even the charities running under the name of a church are usually "one step removed" from the actual church.

This puts me in mind of a conversation I had with a friend last week, about how many leaders of churches are theologians, but they are not pastors. That our zone of Christianity is right now so concerned with people pushing the correct theology that they're pretty terrible at pastoral care. But the wretched of the world do not care about our theology, whether it's the correct sort or the right brand. The 'lost' of the earth gives less of a shit about whether tradwife submission is the God-ordained way of living, and more of a shit about whether anyone cares that they have less to eat, fewer opportunities, and no kindness anywhere.

--

I used to think that I could trust my white church friends to protect me.

I don't anymore.

There'll be a lot of huffing and puffing about this, I'm sure, but the fact of the matter is that White People Have No Practice At Resistance.

You know how you develop muscle? You use that muscle. You work that thing, slowly at first and then with growing understanding of what it can do, what it can take.

--