A seasoned pastor, friend and great customer told us this was one of his favorite books of the year, and as I’ve read through it, I keep thinking how it ought to be better known.  This is radical stuff, meeting us in our places of deep hunger, and yet calling us to invite others to the table.  With quotes from authors as diverse as Dorothy Day, Hans Kung, Lewis Smedes,  Annie Dillard, Rowan William, Barbara Brown Taylor to Lee Camp, you can see this guy has an eye for good writing and mature, evangelical faith, with a bent towards radical discipleship in the nitty gritty of social ministry.  Wonderfully written, challenging words, about taking Jesus seriously, and offering His bread of life to a needy world.  Thank goodness for this lovely publisher, out of Abilene Texas.

Lunch is the most spiritual part of my day. How could I get more spiritual than chips, salsa, and a prophet? On day, I was having lunch with a group, listening to Jeff, who was bringing up everything from preaching to politics, immigration, and evangelism. I just wanted good Mexican food, but I learned that with Jeff you get more than you bargained for.

At one point in the conversation, Jeff asked the group: “Did you know the ten largest churches in the world are not in the West? They are in places like China, South Korea, Peru, and West Africa. In the United States we are impressed if a church can cram a thousand people into a building on a Sunday morning. Some of these churches have tens of thousands meeting several times a week in homes, underground and above.”

Little did I know that the conversation was about to get more interesting.

After I sipped on some (okay, a lot of) Dr. Pepper, Jeff turned to me and said, “Imagine this scenario. A man walks into your office completely at the end of his rope. He’s hit rock bottom. His annual salary, before losing his job, was two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. In a span of just thirty days, this man spent over one hundred thousand dollars on alcohol, gambling, and food. That’s one hundred thousand dollars . . . . His wife leaves him and takes their children. He’s lost his house, cars, everything. He now lives on the streets and in shelters in Philly sorting rags for twenty- five dollars a week. This guy walks into your office and tells you this information, asking for your help. How would you respond?”

I thought for a minute, cutting through all the weak answers I could offer. One person at the table chimed in, “I’d tell him to call someone who cares.”

I immediately felt something inside saying, “That’s not the best answer.”

So I attempted to craft a response to my prophetic peer. “I would ask him if he wants to stop drinking.” I come from a family where alcohol addiction is talked about openly. I know the first rule to addiction is that the addict has to desire change. “If he’s serious about changing, then I can help him.” I was quite satisfied with my answer.

The third person at the table declined to speculate. “I don’t even know what I’d say . . .” All the votes were in. I had a feeling Jeff was not impressed with his lunch company.

Jeff abruptly responded, “You are true Americans. I asked my friend from Africa, a pastor, what he would do, and he said he’d grab the man right then and there in the office and start praying that God would release his soul from the bondage and captivity that was oppressing him. I don’t care if he wanted me to or not. I’m a Christian and I believe in the power and authority of Jesus. Sure there’s room for psychology and practical treatment for addiction. First and foremost, Christians believe in the power of God.”
He continued, much to my dismay.

“So, the next time this guy came into my office, that’s what I did.”

Apparently this case study was a real situation! “I grabbed him and started praying for the Holy Spirit to invade his life and create transformation, real change.”

“What happened?”

“I grabbed the guy as hard as I could, hanging on to him, praying with passion and fervor.”

“Then what?” I was quite the reporter.

“He ran screaming into the night,” Jeff said with some amount of enthusiasm.

“Oh,” was all I could muster. In that moment, I thought to myself, “Is this how Christian counselors are trained these days?”

Jeff seemed to be aware of my inner monologue: “But you see, Josh . . . it’s not always about being successful. Oftentimes it’s about being faithful.”¹

Over guacamole and Dr. Pepper, Jeff taught me that risk and foolishness are essential in the life of following Jesus. All of a sudden, I felt like one of the disciples, reclining at a table with Jesus, trying to comprehend the word of God in my midst. Grace calls us to discipleship.

Discipleship requires risk.

Judah arranges a marriage between Er and Tamar. Er dies because he’s got moral issues. The writer of this story seems more comfortable than I am in ascribing death to God’s judgment. Regardless, Er is dead, and Tamar now needs a husband, according to Jewish tradition. This is a little part of Torah known as the “levirate law” (see Deut. 25; Ruth 3–4), which states that the next oldest surviving brother should marry the widowed sister-in-law in order to preserve the dead brother’s lineage and to give the widow a place in the social schema. Onan becomes the lucky guy to take on his brother’s wife.

Apparently he goes along with the arrangement publicly. But his private acts of nonconsummation (for lack of a better word) have earned him his own noun, “Onanism.” (Just thought you’d like to know that little factoid, if you didn’t already.) God is not pleased and strikes him dead. Two dead brothers, a woman twice widowed, and a whole lot of confusion. Judah, the patriarch and leader, looks around and does the obvious math: Tamar is the common denominator. To protect the son he has left, Judah sends Tamar back to live with her parents, sending the message to anyone watching that this woman is dangerous. In Judah’s eyes, she’s a pawn and a problem more than she is a person.

The story then reads “after a long time,” which in Scripture means the story is about to get really interesting. Judah goes through his own hard time when his wife dies, and he takes a buddy with him to Vegas once he’s finished his mourning period. Okay, it wasn’t Vegas, for those who read your Bibles carefully. It’s Timnah.

Somehow Tamar finds out about her father-in-law’s travel plans, and she decides that, if she is to get what she needs to survive and have any social value, she must take matters into her own hands. Tamar decides to play “the whore” (the Hebrew indicates) by wearing a veil. The veil points out that Tamar knows exactly what she’s doing: she’s seducing the man who’s denied her respectability all this time.

Judah must not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, because he does not recognize her upon approach, which could be a testimony to how drunk he is. (As an aside, this part of the story reminds me of Jacob with Rachel: after all that hard work, how does he not know he’s been given the wrong sister? How drunk are you when you are unable to distinguish between the hot sister and the one with “weak eyes”—a Semitic way of saying, “not as pretty”?) Or perhaps Judah’s failure to recognize Tamar is a testament to how little he’s paying attention. He’s treating Tamar not as a person, but as a thing to be consumed.

Either way, the story makes things pretty clear: Tamar is approaching this encounter as a business proposition. Judah is approaching it as a “boys will be boys” experience. Both know what they want, and both get it. Because Judah cannot pay Tamar for her services rendered, he leaves his drivers’ license and credit cards with her. Actually, the seal he leaves with her is his proof of identity encased in a cylinder he would have worn around his neck. Like Esau, he’s willing to trade a great deal for a moment of indulgence.

Three months pass. Judah finds out Tamar is pregnant and becomes incensed, demanding her punishment for misconduct in a moment of thick irony. According to Torah, she could be hanged, burned, stoned, strangled, or beheaded. One scholar reminds us of the seriousness of the moment: “Criminals who were to be burned or strangled had to stand in dung up to their knees.”¹ But Judah is specific: Tamar must be burned.

And then, Tamar sends a prophetic word back to Judah. Like Nathan’s conversation with King David, Tamar exposes Judah for the Torah violator he really is and not the public do-gooder he claims to be. Judah has made a mess of his role in the story. Tamar is not afraid to bring his transgressions to the surface, despite her own obvious sins.

Only the Bible would continue with this sordid story. Tamar gives birth to twins, a familiar twist in the Genesis narrative—one of these twins will be in the lineage of King David, and of Jesus.

The mess becomes the place for God to do God’s mysterious work. We still tend to think that God works best with perfect people, whose hair is cut just right, who know all the right language. But the Bible continually reminds us that God isn’t interested so much in people who look the part. God’s interest lies in people who make a mess of the part. People who, like Judah, are more interested in appearing virtuous than practicing virtue by protecting the innocent and vulnerable, granting justice to a widow who’s lost two husbands, abstaining from giving in to lust and physical longing that turns a woman into “the sum of her parts,” a far cry from the image of God that Genesis declares women to be. No matter how often we forget, God keeps working with lyin’, cheatin’, whorin’ jerks.

This story says something about power. Those who have power, like Judah, usually act quite different in public than they do in private. The narrative details of this story prove the point. Judah only deals with his misuse and abuse of Tamar once he is publicly exposed. People in power so often wait for a public shaming to become truly authentic in their real messes of sexual exploitation, gender bias, injustice, abuse of power, public persona versus private reality.

Enron. 9-11. Abu-Ghraib. Mortgage crises. But big messes occur when little messes happen in the midst of our daily choices and actions. Adultery, abuse, betrayal, gossip, and hate. The big messes and little messes cannot be separated. Recognizing this entanglement gives us a place from which we can begin rebuilding our faith. God is interested in the messes we’ve made. God decides to enter into the mess, and makes sense of our world.

“A writer, whose name I’ve since forgotten, once wrote that the two great religions in America are optimism and denial.”

—Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk

The soul of American Christianity is malnourished. We are in constant need of having our imaginations raised from slumber. Feasting together on the words and stories of Scripture is the way this happens. If I’m correct that America’s religious soul is starving, starvation is the symptom and not the problem. The problem is that many of us lack a diet of the Gospel in our lives. We fill our hearts and minds with the junk food of social pop-psychology and shallow entertainment. Our souls atrophy because we do not feast on the teachings of God’s story. The following chapters provide a few recipes.

The atrophy of Christian spirituality is ironic, of course, because the Judeo-Christian Scriptures are packed with “feasting” language and imagery. The prophet Jeremiah declares, “When your words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart’s delight,” (15:16). God commands  Ezekiel to eat the book he’s been given (Ezek 2:8ff). Jesus tells the crowd that real spiritual life is reserved for those who are willing to eat his flesh and drink his blood (Jn. 6). John the Apostle is instructed to eat the little scroll which will “turn your stomach sour but in your mouth will be sweet as honey” (Rev 10:9-10). Eugene Peterson inspired me to dig deeper into this image in Eat This Book:

Christians feed on Scripture. Holy Scripture nurtures the holy community as food nurtures the human body.     Christians don’t simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus’ name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.³

Digesting the teachings of Scripture is one way Christians can actually embody the good news of God in our chaotic world. In my own consumption of the Scriptures, I often see God as priest to the outcast and prophet to the religious. As I write this I live in the inoculated suburbs of Detroit. Scripture has proven to be a powerful remedy for indifference and apathy, prompting me to go into all the world as I try to heal, evangelize, practice justice, and raise hands in adoration to God, the Father.

* * *

As a collective whole the church has fallen short of this lofty vision, for more humans died violent deaths in the twentieth century, the alleged height of Christendom, than in all previous centuries combined. Genocide in Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, Darfur, Northern Uganda, Rwanda, Kosovo, and Srebrenica, along with the devastation of WWI, WWII, and the Holocaust crushed the optimism that characterized the West at the onset of the twentieth century. By 1930, due to war and an unprecedented economic turmoil now known as the Great Depression, the spirit of progress began to give way to a spirit of disillusionment.

Modern Christianity did not fare well because it failed to feast primarily on Jesus and Christian Scripture. Many of the aforementioned atrocities took place in “Christian” nations or nations closely affiliated with the Christian religion (including Nazi Germany, which at the rise and reign of Hitler’s Third Reich, was overwhelmingly Lutheran).⁴ Or, in the words of one poet: “After two thousand years of [Christian] mass / We’ve got as far as poison-gas.”⁵

The following statistic reinforces my claim that American/Western Christianity is in a state of decline: according to Alister McGrath, though almost two-thirds of all Christians lived in the West in 1900, two-thirds of all Christians in the world now live outside the West. Hence the phrases in popular parlance regarding the seismic shift in religion as we know it—the United States is now post-Christian and postmodern.

In the last fifty years, Christianity shifted to the far corners of the world: China, South America, and Africa. Scholars now note that there are more Anglicans in Africa, for instance, than in all of Great Britain.⁶ The largest Christian congregation in the U.K. is Kingsway International Church, started by two African leaders, and Africa now boasts more Christians than the United States. Conservative estimates indicate that less than one half of one percent of China is Christian, though as one spiritual guide points out, “one half of one percent of infinity is a lot of people.”

My own religious tribe, Churches of Christ from the American Restoration Movement, has been slowly declining for the last three decades.⁷ This trend mirrors what’s happening in most of Western Christianity, which—with the exception of two major segments of Protestant faith, Pentecostalism and Independent/Community Churches—is in a season of stagnation and severe deterioration.

Yet just as so many are losing the faith that has been a source of comfort and direction in ages past, more chaos marks the twenty-first century global landscape. The devastation of America’s 9-11, the Indian Ocean tsunami, tragic earthquakes in Pakistan and Kashmir, the horror of Hurricane Katrina, and the latest surge of wars in the Middle East should cause Christians to ask two important questions: “Is God present and working in the face of such pressing evil?” and “How can Christianity be ‘good news’ for those who do not ‘believe’?” These two questions undergird this entire book. I’m convicted that Christianity’s real genius and power rests in its ability to bring healing, justice, and equality to all people. The real test of Christian theology is the result it brings for those who do not subscribe to the Christian faith.

* * *

The Feast engages the discussion of what Christianity, as a spiritual movement rather than an institutional religion, can sound and look like in a pluralistic society like the one emerging in the United States.

For the last several years I’ve been teaching religion courses in Spirituality, New Testament, Gospel and Culture, and Christian Faith at Rochester College (Michigan) in the department of religion. I’ve also served as the teaching and young adult minister for a large local evangelical church. During this time, I’ve struggled to connect the power of the Jesus Story to people who, perhaps for the first time in American history, are learning what it might mean to be Christian in a post-Christian context. These students come from all segments of American Christianity: Catholic, Protestant (mainline and evangelical), and even some Anabaptists (though they might not use this word). And yet, together we’ve discovered that as real as the differences might be, the similarities are even greater.

As nationalism, apathy, idolatry, and indifference runs rampant, I’ve become passionate about the project of connecting the world of Scripture with today’s world. This book is written out of my struggle to live in the world of Scripture. The realms of this struggle include academia, preaching, teaching, and personal study, as well as my own journey as a person trying to figure out what it means to be a Christian, following the ancient teachings of Jesus in a modern and complex society. The Bible reminds me that the word for this is disciple.

I am convicted, as I listen to various thinkers (including my students), that Christians are in the midst of  re-imagining the  meaning of sacred words like gospel, salvation, church, justice, sin, worship, grace, evangelism, and faith. Christians do not play according the rules of the world, for we are people of the Way and we take seriously the opportunity to embody the teachings of Jesus in our particular time and place. We choose the other option, the path “less chosen.” The name the church has given to us for this other way is incarnation. We don’t wage war, oppress, acquiesce, flee, or compromise—filled with God’s Spirit, we are committed to enter into the world redemptively. One of my professors at Columbia Seminary, the legendary Hebrew Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, once said in a class lecture, “The church always appears to be dying. When’s the last time the church wasn’t in crisis? That is the context into which we enter to do the work of God.” If he’s right, I hope The Feast will awaken heads, hands, and hearts to the imaginative vocation of being the church for the sake of our neighbors and our world.

1. Voice. The reviewer raised the question of how much of my own voice was in the book. This is a subjective matter that I cannot comment upon with any sort of objectivity. One of the reasons I chose to tell so many stories from my own life was precisely to make sure my voice came through. Perhaps I will look back in five years and see this point more clearly.

2. Atonement. There is an intense discussion per atonement right now happening in the Protestant (and I suspect Roman Catholic) world regarding the meaning of Jesus’ death. While conservative Christianity tends to focus on the meaning of Jesus’ death in penal substitution language (”Jesus took one for the team so I didn’t have to”), I believe the NT is much more nuanced. As others have noted, Jesus’ cross is both the source and shape of salvation. Of course, I betray an assumption that salvation (in Jewish circles, “to be rescued”) is a process. Scot McKnight, N.T. Wright, and others have written some very helpful and holistic material on the beauty, depth, and richness of the cross as it translates to various cultures.

3. Kingdom. Jesus preached the kingdom more than anything else. The gospel, according to the four gospels, was not “sinners prayer” or “naive understandings of escapist views of the after life”–the gospel was the announcement that in Jesus, God had shown/was showing what it looked like to really be the man or woman we were created to be (forgiven and empowered). This is what Jesus called ‘the kingdom’ (think “rule”, “way”, or “reign”). The Lord’s Prayer, in Matthew’s Gospel, is the epicenter of Jesus’ understanding of how things work. That is, Jesus taught his disciples and subsequent generations to pray that the things of God be done in realm of earth as it was happening in the realm of heaven. So, yes, the kingdom is about here, and now (time and space) with real flesh, face, and blood.

By C.E. Moore

GENRE: CHRISTIAN LIVING
PUBLISHER: LEAFWOOD
PUBLICATION DATE: SEPTEMBER 1, 2009

Debut author Joshua Graves’ The Feast is a book dedicated to taking a compartmentalized Christianity and introducing people to a faith that charges all of creation with the grandeur of God. Does it make the grade, though? That is the real question.

What I like about this title is that Joshua Graves has a gift for story-telling and asking probing questions that won’t let you go just because a person has moved on to the next chapter. This book has the bite of a pitbull for someone who has been living out their faith lethargically. Even for someone who has been living out their faith in vibrant, Christ-exalting ways, Graves still manages to ask some dangerous questions.

A few samples.

In Chapter Two, titled “Theotokos,” Graves tells the story of Joseph and Mary in a way in which most people likely have not heard it before. Graves brings out the weight of the situation. Joseph’s position in life is threatened if he believes Mary’s story and Mary’s reputation and life are both threatened if Joseph chooses not to believe her. Excavating Hebrew customs and Greek understandings, Graves paints this story in a light that I had never understood before.

In Chapter Four (alone worth the price of the book itself), titled “The Greatest Risk,” Graves juxtaposes a personal story of learning to be bold in his faith against the Parable of the Talents. In this chapter he poses this poignant conundrum for the clean-cut Christian mind: “Why is the master so hard on the man? After all, Jesus uses the phrase “outer darkness” and “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” I don’t think the master is upset because the servant is afraid. I think he is upset because the slave allows his fears to carry more weight than the commission of the master. Fear God or fear everything else….The greatest risk, in the economy of Christ, is to take no risk at all.”[1] Far from the self-help masquerading as Christianity that fills the shelves of our bookstores, Graves asks meaty questions that latch on and refuse to let go.

The whole book is like this. Story after story after story of people meeting with or being used as means by God to accomplish His purposes in the earth.

Some difficulties exist, however.

First, a weak difficulty. The Feast reads like a lot of other books of the same ilk, like Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis or Skye Jethani’s The Divine Commodity. While imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I’d like to have heard Graves’ more distinct voice. As this is his first title, I’m sure this will work itself out in time. Having had the pleasure of hearing the man preach several times, I can pretty much guarantee he’ll be writing more.

My strong difficulties with The Feast stem from my decidedly different theological outlook than Graves, so some will need to take this with a grain of salt.[2] First, is Graves’ adoption of Dallas Willard’s distaste for the practice of “Vampire Christianity”—the evangelical’s tendency to “only want Jesus for his blood.” While neither Willard nor Graves’ position openly attacks the traditional understanding of the atonement of Christ, there is an ongoing assault from within Christianity itself that is downplaying the necessity for and paramount importance of Christ’s blood shed for us. Graves calls to account evangelical Christianity’s love affair with comfort, but also seems to be espouse a works-based maintenance of one’s faith (diametrically opposed to Paul’s theology and James’ understanding of “faith without works is dead.”) In fact, a person cannot be a Christian without good works showing a living faith. But, those good works are impossible without the redeeming work of Christ accomplished through the shedding of his blood.

Second, there is also the theme running throughout the volume that asks us to “imagine what it would be like for things on earth to be as they are in heaven.” This is “missional” language that currently tends to defy description. And, while I am not critical of all things missional, I get the distinct feeling that The Feast espouses more social gospel/kingdom expansion than it does the gospel of Jesus Christ as preached in Scripture. As Kevin DeYoung writes in Why We Love The Church, “…there is no language in Scripture about Christians building the kingdom. The New Testament…uses verbs like enter, seek, announce, see, receive, look, come into and inherit….We are given the kingdom and brought into the kingdom. We testify about it, pray for it to come, and by faith it belongs to us. But in the New Testament, we are never the ones to bring the kingdom.”[3]The seeming social gospel in lieu of the gospel of Jesus Christ espoused in The Feast is problematic. Additionally, several times throughout the title I got the sense that “Jesus doesn’t seem so concerned with ‘x’ cause over there as he is with ‘x’ cause over here” is some sort of license to not care about both, as if solidarity with the poor is more important than caring about drinking and gambling (two contributors to vast poverty).

Overall, The Feast is a good title. It’s not the best I’ve read, but it’s not the worst. Despite my strong misgivings about some of the things said, I think the good far outweighs the bad. I really think people should be reading Joshua Graves’ work. Too many people have been sitting in the pews listening to sermons week-in and week-out, nodding, and then shuffling out the door to…do nothing. Graves is not content with this and he invites you to stop living a compartmentalized version of the Christian faith and to come feast with him at the table and take Jesus to a famished world.

Review copy provided courtesy of Leafwood Publishers.

[2] Graves is Church of Christ. I am Reformed. Though, I am sure both of us would argue that neither of us fit nicely into the categories laid down for us.

[3] DeYoung, Kevin & Ted Kluck, Why We Love The Church: In Praise of Institutions and Organized Religion, (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2009), 49.