Reconstructing #Deconstruction is a bitter sweet endeavor...
If you've grown up under modern western American Christianity, or get introduced to it in your late teens/early twenties and only get exposed to a few similar traditions; and then you begin to suspect that just about everyone you've met is missing something vitally important... It's unsettling.
Cognitive dissonance grows as you hear claims that don't seem to align with the texts they claim to be based upon.
So if you were wise, you dug into the texts yourself.
But an even smaller group moved passed deconstruction... To reconstruction.
We did not abandon everything.
We crushed it all into it's core essences, washed away two millennia of dust, rust, and accumulated impurities...
I'm among those who have looked to find the essentials left to us by the biblical narratives, and through the Holy Spirit, began search for anything he's done in his body world-wide since those early days, and see Him at work in them, despite our imperfect understandings.
If you did, you found the biblical narratives simply do not support the claims of Augustine, Calvin, Luther, or almost anything modern western Christianity claims, at least not the way it's usually presented.
You found out that it's nearly impossible to align the biblical narratives to a Left or Right narrative. Being a Republican isn't better than being a Democrat, or vs vsa.
You found out that the biblical narrative does NOT teach a "young earth creationism".
You found out that Yeshua (Jesus) AND Sha'ul (Paul) were both Torah Observant Jewish Rabbis to their last day, neither "abolished the law", and yet the work of Rabbi Sha'ul based on the life mission of Yeshua did invite gentiles into the family of Yahweh without having them become Jewish by identity markers such as circumcision or Kosher lifestyles.
You found out that Baptism and The Lord's Supper have to do with corporate acknowledgement of this new mission, and not (mostly, firstly) about personal sin.
You find out that Yeshua isn't trying to get humans off earth to a place called heaven, but he's working to being the Kingdom of Heaven TO earth, both now in this reality and eventually fully when he brings Kingdom of God TO earth at new creation.
You found out that he's not coming in a "rapture" to take people away from earth but we're going to meet him in the air to welcome the returning King TO earth, to join us HERE as the King, and we get new physical bodies and renewed physical earth.
The writers of Second Temple Judaism called this hope: New Creation and The Day of the Lord.
So you begin #Deconatructing the truth claims you were given.
And you take Yeshua seriously when he said the Holy Spirit (not me, you, or any other human leader) would lead his people into all truth after he left us...
And then if you take that seriously, you appreciate His work in history.
...
As I type this, I'm in a modern American church, listening to music played with excellence as people undergo a baptism as they understand it.
Sure, they're probably over estimating the individual importance of this ancient Jewish purity ritual, and under estimating it's group collective corporate importance...
They don't likely understand the ritual for what it actually meant to the first JEWISH followers of Rabbi Yeshua, or later to the gentile members of the early Jewish sect called The Way, or what Rabbi Sha'ul (Paul) told his gentile converts that it meant...
They think it's about guilt rather than about purity.
They think it's about making them guilt free, vs what it actually is, a way to become purified to enter The Presence in sacred space.
But they sort of get it... they basically understand, mostly, that:
1. God's got a Kingdom
2 The nation's are invited into that Kingdom. It's no longer JUST for Israel, though it remains "to the Jew first, and THEN the gentile".
3. Anything that would keep a people or person from entering The Presence is now removed as an obstacle. We have been purified for the Divine Presence.
4. Baptism represents the declaration of joining the family of God.
5. Baptism represents a death to the world's ways and a being made alive to The Kingdom of God, and hope of the Return of the King, and a New Creation.
There are many nuances in those that require a reorientation and redefining for a true biblical understanding, over the more common ways those themes are told.
But the core exists.
Here 2,000 years after the birth of this family of God, people all over the world are celebrating this family and demonstrating the addition of new family members by this Jewish symbol of purity rights... A symbol from a small Palestinian town called Jerusalem is now being repeated world wide... That's worth celebrating, even if it's not well understood by many (most) of the practitioners of the symbol.
They sing to the King, and celebrate the ability to enter The Presence without having to travel to the Temple in Yerusalay'im (Jerusalem).
These things cannot be easily dismissed, even if they are imperfectly understood or articulated by the participants.
And maybe it's time to take my personal reconstruction, and begin to work it out publicly.
Maybe it's time to walk people through it, especially those who can't spend the equivalent of a Master's degree in Bible working it out.
Maybe it's time for me to use my gift of making complicated things simple, and help people who feel that tension walk through deconstruction AND reconstruction.
Maybe...
But at the very least, it's time to stop criticism of these people who are doing the best they can with their imperfect understanding. It's time to embrace what's good about this expression of The Kingdom, and not focus on what's broken about it.
Darrell Wolfe, storyteller.
