”All throughout the book of Mark, the disciples just don’t get it. They approach Jesus from a posture of hubris and show us that they don’t see straight. The literary counterpoint is the blind beggar, Bartimaeus, who sees rightly. Bartimaeus is blind. The disciples try to mute him. But his sense of hearing is strong.”

I may be a bit late to what’s been happening in pop music culture worldwide because of my recent transition to Duke but I am catching up on it now and I’ve been hearing a lot about “Gangnam style,” which is the title of a musical single by South Korean rapper Psy. Gangnam style is a Korean neologism that refers to the hip and trendy lifestyle of the Gangnam district of Seoul, Korea, which is supposedly the Beverly Hills of Seoul. This song was released on July 15, 2012, as the lead single of this rapper’s sixth album. Just to give you some sense of the buzz it has created—“Gangnam Style” debuted at number one on the national record chart of South Korea and as of October 23, 2012, the music video has been viewed over 530 million times on YouTube and is the site’s third most watched video and most watched Korean pop video. Guinness World Records has indicated that is the most ‘liked’ video in YouTube history.

There’ve been numerous parodies and reaction videos to Psy’s initial music video. Psy has demonstrated Gangnam style on Saturday Night Live, at Dodger Stadium, on the Ellen Degeneres show, and I’m contemplating whether to invite him here to Duke Chapel for a demonstration with the Chapel choir (I’m just kidding!) What’s drawn some of the most attention is the song’s dance moves which have been performed by different kinds of people all over the world. This musical phenomenon has been drawing and calling people to try out its dance moves. Just last weekend I saw a young man at the Duke football game against UNC doing the “Gangnam style.” I did not realize what I’ve been missing these last few months! Even Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt, and the British Prime Minister David Cameron, and the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon have been seen dancing “gangnam style”!  Who would have thought?! What we expect is not always what we get.

We expect the disciples to have their religious act together with every i dotted and every t crossed, to have every hair in place and to know the exact time to do the sign of the cross. We expect them to do what is right and what is holy and what is just and what is Christ-like. But in last week’s passage in Mark, we find something else out about the disciples. They just don’t get it. When Jesus asks James and John the same question that rolls off his lips today, “what do you want me to do for you?” we might expect them, disciples of Jesus the Christ, to ask for something admirable and deeply pietistic. Instead, they try to control the boundaries of God’s answer by telling Jesus to give them whatever they ask for and what they ask for is to sit at his right and left hand in glory. They want the Trinity to take in two more members and become a Holy Pentagon. They seemed to have been mentored by Joel Osteen’s book, Your Best Life Now. They want glitz and glamor and prestige and power. Didn’t Jesus just predict for a third time his death and resurrection? And the only thing that James and John can worry about is their own glory? Little do they know what they are asking for because as Jesus implies, the irony is that God’s glory is gory and his imminent future entails a baptism in blood. The disciples, those who are supposed to be in the know, a part of the gnostic insider clan of Jesus, are actually spiritually blind, blinded by their own ambition. All throughout the book of Mark, the disciples just don’t get it. They approach Jesus from a posture of hubris and show us that they don’t see straight.

The literary counterpoint this week is the blind beggar, Bartimaeus, who sees rightly. He approaches Jesus with a posture of humility. He asks for mercy as we do in many Sunday services in our communal prayer of confession (Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy). His approach to Jesus is a correction to the distorted discipleship of James and John. Bartimaeus desires to be freed from an affliction; he’s not seeking authority or affluence. This man, an outsider in society, usually overlooked in the community of humanity, and whom people order to be quiet, like the disciples said to him, is the one who models Christian discipleship. The unlikely outsider understands over against the insider-information disciples. Two blind characters in Mark, the man on whose eyes Jesus puts saliva in Mark chapter 8 and Bartimaeus, frame the conversation about discipleship and the blindness of the disciples. These two blind men see with eyes of faith. This is the paradox of the gospel and it should always surprise us because what we expect is not always what we get.

Bartimaeus is blind. The disciples try to mute him. But his sense of hearing is strong. “When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out…” so that Jesus could hear him. I don’t know what he heard. I don’t know if someone said something to Bartimaeus. I don’t know if he heard the shuffle of Jesus’s feet or the tone of Jesus’s voice.  I don’t know if there was news coverage about Jesus. As far as I know Jesus was not one of the topics at the presidential debates. But Bartimaeus hears that it is Jesus without any mention of a sound in the biblical text. And because he knows who Jesus is, he cries out loudly for mercy on his misery.

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* this post is part of the june synchroblog, which was focused on “what is in our invisible knapsack”–the unearned privilege that many carry and how we can participate in changing deeply grooves systems that are built on it. i wrote this post almost exactly a year ago, previously called white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, economic privilege, but thought i’d repost it as part of this conversation. other links are at the bottom of this post.  my feeling on the topic is still the same–any  hope for change starts with listening, really listening, to each other.

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i will never know what it’s like to be a person of color.  i can only listen and learn from my friends & family who are.

i will never know what it’s like to be gay.  i can only listen and learn from my friends & family who are.

i will likely never know what it’s like to be poor and live in section 8 housing.  i can only listen and learn from my friends & family who are.

but i do know what it’s like to be a female leader in a man’s world.  what it feels like to be excluded. what it feels like see doors open & checks written & support given to men-with-the-connections while i struggle and scrape.  what it’s like to be on the underside of power and how it creates a lot of shame.

and those who are men in similar positions can never know what it’s like.  they can only listen and learn from their friends & family who are women.

white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, economic privilege are real.

i’ve heard it dismissed sometimes, heard white people talk about “the minorities get all the jobs and get to go to the top of the line now”.  heard men talk about “i don’t know what women are talking about, we ask them to be part but they always say no.“  heard straight people talk about “gay people have more rights now than i do” and economically stable people talk about “if those poor people would just work harder & smarter they wouldn’t have so many problems.”

it’s so easy to talk when we don’t know what it feels like to be another person, to walk in another person’s shoes.

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one thing i am struck with, more than ever, is just how counter-to-the-ways-of-the-world-and-so-often-the-church, too, a life of descent really is.  it just isn’t all that popular.  it doesn’t sell.  it is hard.  it is messy.  it is costly.  it’s a sure way to shrink a church.  but in so many ways, as Jesus reminds us of in the beatitudes, we’re somehow blessed living down here. in all kinds of weird, wonderful, unexplainable ways, once we’ve tasted it, nothing else really satisfies.

some of what’s in this post is in the chapter in down we go called “we may look like losers.” it was based on this original blog post with the same title.  this past week as i’ve been reflecting on how much i love my little beautiful refuge community & all i learn through it each and every day, i have been reminded just how easy it would be to miss what’s going on if you only looked on the outside.  honestly, we look like losers.  we really do.

but when it comes to relationships & community & learning-to-live-in-the-trenches-of-real-life-together, oh, there’s a lot of beauty & healing going on!

i sometimes tell friends that i wish i had “church amnesia” so that i could erase most of what i formerly learned about “success,” “ministry,” “leadership” and what makes things “viable.” in my old circles, valid ministry means constantly “growing,” “getting financially stable,” and “building up new, stronger leaders.” when i look at the refuge against this list, i tend to get a little embarrassed. i hear the words of successful Christian leadership books and see how we are
falling short.

slowly but surely i am learning that none of the old rules apply.

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“There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” This is a paraphrased quote attributed to George Bernard Shaw  that fits with my thoughts today.

Over the years I have struggled to understand what my call is. I sometimes think it’s just to have fun with Mathare kids or help them go to school through sponsorships. Sometimes I think I should enter politics to change the institutions of power. I guess I still do not know precisely what my call is. Five days ago I received solemn news from one of the single mothers in the slum of Madoya which is next to Mathare. Her son, who was 11months old, had passed away while she went about looking for job. As is often the case in my community, she is a teenage mom heading the family as the child’s father is also deceased.

I gave my contribution as usual and offered my condolences to the bereaved. The family had invited a “pastor” who had agreed to conduct the burial ceremony. The so called “pastor” wanted to be paid for his services and had even offered to provide transport for the family to the cemetery for a “small” fee of $60 (which is double the normal price.) I am sometimes ashamed to be called a pastor since my predecessors and peers have not lived up to the name. The “pastor” in question backed out on this family at the last hour. Last year, I was ‘privileged’ to conduct my first burial ceremony for a father of one of the boys at Inspiration Centre. The same issue now faced me again. I was called by the family in tears, three hours before the burial. I guess I was the only wild card they were left with.

To me, it didn’t matter that I was the last choice and had not been given enough time to prepare. I wonder if God wants us to serve him when we are ready or not – wearing a great suit, nice tie, or just jeans and sneakers, using an amazing vocabulary or ghetto slang?  The list is endless and I am very sure that I am totally unqualified to fit in this league of who a “pastor” is. For starters, I rarely wear suits, ties, office shoes and always use “sheng” (slang) even when preaching. I guess the family was right for not putting me as their first choice.

Conducting a ceremony to bury baby Easter (who was born on Easter) was special to me since it confirmed to me that as much as I may try to shy away from being called “a man of God”, it is evident that I can run but I can’t hide. It reminded me of a quote I heard that says “knowing others is intelligence but knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.”  My prayers are that all men and women will know their call and trust that the God who called them to His duties, like He did in ancient times, will be gracious enough to provide them with whatever needs they may have in the present.

Moses Okonji is the director of Inspiration Center located in Mathare Valley in Nairobi, Kenya. He is also a member of the CTM Nairobi Cohort working toward his Master of Arts in Global Urban Mission from Bakke Graduate University in partnership with CTM.

When I took up the cross, I recognized its meaning….  The cross is something that you bear, and ultimately that you die on… And that’s the way I’ve decided to go.                          

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. May 22, 1967, Penn Community Center, Frogmore, South Carolina

Happy New Year!

I’d like to share a slightly irreverent and indelicate quote from Leo Bebb who is the main character in Frederick Buechner’s delightful series of novels called the Book of Bebb.

Leo Bebb is a “plump and implausible man” with a distinctive fluttering eye. He is the ex-con pastor of a very odd church called the Church of Holy Love Inc. Bebb is something between charlatan and a spiritual genius. Bebb runs what appears to be an entirely fraudulent degree-granting mill that offers mail-order ordinations to all who want one. And yet Bebb’s enthusiasm for God and Bible is completely infectious and real. In spite of himself (or perhaps because), people connected to Bebb undergo grace at profound levels. Beuchner surrounds Bebb with a colorful cast of misfits, whose quirky lives leave the reader feeling strangely comforted. One of those misfits is Brownie.

Brownie is Bebb’s main disciple and right-hand man. Brownie is as odd as Bebb, only in a different direction. They are like Mutt and Jeff…Ying and Yang. There is great love between them, but great tension too. Apparently, Bebb once raised Brownie from the dead in Knoxville, Tennessee after being struck by lightening many years ago. Bebb has a bigger than life spirit of adventure. He does not mince words and does not care for subtleties. Brownie is undersized and is cut from a different cloth, which irritates Bebb to no end. Whereas Bebb’s dives into life head-first and has a knack for making the smooth places of Scripture rough, Brownie holds back and has a knack of “making the rough places of Scripture smooth.” Brownie’s timid spirit frustrates Bebb’s come-what-may approach to life.

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Editor’s note:  This was first published as a Word from Below email on February 23 2009. At the start of a new year -  a time of hope, a time of resolutions that are often forgotten a few days after they are made, this is a timely reminder of a faith and spirituality that doesn’t call us to a false perfection.  To receive the weekly Word from Below by email, click here.)

For the last 12 years our friends at Northwest Leadership Foundation have been hosting a weekly gathering known as Theological Roundtable. Each week about 15 leaders gather for a conversation that seeks to hold the Bible in one hand and culture in the other. It is a simple and powerful tool for leadership. We have adopted this as part of our strategy for leadership development in the cites that we serve. We have been encouraged to see similar roundtables formed in places like White Center, WA., Camden, NJ, and Denver, CO, Guatemala City, Santo Domingo and Nairobi, to name a few.

Not long ago, the Tacoma group invited a local Catholic priest named Father Lantry, to talk about “Recovery Spirituality.” Each week the group sends out a recap of their discussion. I am including a brief summary of their discussion with Father Lantry. I think it gets at something important for the communities that we serve. Here it is…

…Father Steve Lantry from St. Leo’s Church guided the table through the implications of what it means to take seriously addiction and recovery as it relates to our own spirituality. We talked of addictions in the conventional sense—substance abuse—as well as the more subtle, but no less serious addictions in our thoughts, behaviors, and destructive patterns that control us.

In light of this shared struggle, Lantry suggested that one of the most tragic responses to the reality of addiction is the natural but dangerous attempt to strive toward perfection. He suggested that a spirituality of perfection, which is a seemingly godly endeavor, is destined to leave us disappointed.

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Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination is one of the assigned books for students taking the Image is Everything intensive offered by CTM. Dr. Brueggemann is widely regarded as one of the most influential contemporary Old Testament scholars today. In the following sermon delivered at Duke Chapel in Durham, North Carolina on December 5 2010, Brueggemann speaks of the power of poetry. Brueggemann reminds the listener of the Mothers of Israel who did poetry – celebrating the impossible – while the men among them parsed logic and drafted briefs and memos. Brueggemann states that Advent is a  time for struggle between the poem and the openness of God – and the memo that attempts to keep control. He challenges us to relinquish control in order to receive the impossible from God. Of course, as he says, it’s not just any poem, but poems from prophets who said wild things like “Unto us a child is born” and “I know my redeemer lives.”  Using Isaiah 11:1-10 and Matthew 3:1-12 as his texts Brueggemann challenges us that we “cannot get to the Christ Child without getting to these poems.”

During this season when we can be easily inundated with commercial trappings and hectic schedules, if you need something to remind you why we celebrate, I encourage you to spend 18 minutes with Walter Brueggemann and his thoughts on “The Poem: Subversion and Summons.”

What would you think if a group of women with a scandalous profession blessed your church? What if a group of prostitutes prayed for your Church? Could you imagine these women entering your Church to bring blessing? This doesn’t seem holy, does it? But this was what we saw in our little church, and what gave us a great moment of worship and sanctification.

In November 2009, we started a program in a partnership with Casa Jóven (Youth House, which is our church,) Build a Bridge, and La Estrategia de Transformación (The Strategy of Transformation, the name of CTM in Central America and the Caribbean.) We began a seven week jewelry course for the sex workers from the streets of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. These women gathered at the church every Thursday to explore the possibility of taking this handcraft as an alternative micro-business that would allow them to abandon the culture of sexual commerce and to look for a different way forward toward a more worthy job.

Each Thursday was packed with surprises and a lot of stress. We never knew how many women would show up to the workshops. That’s why every time we saw them crossing the church’s threshold, smiles were drawn on our faces. After the class we had the regular Thursday prayer celebration. At the beginning it didn’t seem to work, but we had no alternative so we decided to do it. How could we have these women in the church right before the prayer celebration? I don’t know how, but we did!

Each week after the jewelry class ended some of the women stayed in the Church to pray with the members attending the prayer celebration. One Thursday – an unforgettable Thursday, eight sex workers were waiting for the prayer service to start. The night started with songs and an atmosphere filled with the presence of the Holy Spirit. Loly, my wife, who was leading the worship, paused the service and told those who were there that the microphone was open for whoever wanted to pray for any area or ministry of our church.

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