Chris Townley

Striving to love God and love people...

[mandiblepress]

//002

I recently had a conversation with a good friend about just what it means to experience “salvation” in the Christian sense.  At no point did we stop and remark, one to another, “I bet most people could care less about this conversation.”  We probably should have. 

A goal I have in writing is to put some skin around our flapping jaws.  

So let’s start with this word “salvation”. 

The Greek word is something, the Hebrew word is something else. If you really care about what those two ancient words are you most likely already know them so congratulations are in order–well done.  Now try to go about sharing that information in a way that makes you a less exemplary jackass (speaking as an exemplary jackass).  

There are three ways in which “salvation” is used that probably merit mention and then some connective tissue should be either clipped or grafted in. 

1. The way Christian sub, folk and pop culture use the term:  #heavenbound #blessed #getouttahellfreecard #momansionsinheavenlessproblems #gotsavedatchurchcamp #baptism #pearlygatesbitchezzzzzzzzzz 

Full disclosure: I have boiled salvation down to the basic implication of those terms at multiple times in my life both in practice and proclamation.  Salvation in loads of Christian circles eventually revolves around one’s personal standing in regard to future transcendental experience.  Put plainly: will you go to heaven…OR NOT!  There are two byproducts of this functional understanding of salvation.  The first is that it’s personal.  That’s not quite exact.  It is exclusively personal–ahh that’s more precise and more terrifying.  It is up to you.  John Bunyan wrote an awful little book roughly 7000 years ago (estimate) in which a Christian named Christian (my grandpa used to name is dogs “Dog” and his horses “Horse” for what it’s worth) had to overcome an enormous amount of challenges to reach the literary stand-in for heaven.  Salvation was heaven and reaching heaven required a solo trek.   The second byproduct is that the line of demarcation between salvation and it’s opposite (damnation I guess, but that sounds quite similar to “tarnation” which is fun and damnation shouldn’t make me giggle so we’ll say “not salvation”) is easily transgressed.  Some in the Christian sub-group that believes in free will suggest that a person’s bad behavior can spoil their salvation.   I’ve had people tell me that suicide, because it’s murder, removes a person’s chance for salvation.  Wait.  Really?  Some Christians who believe in predestination adhere to the idea that salvation is a whim of God and nothing more.  It’s your personal salvation, but it is dependent on the kind of day God is having. 

Is that the best way to think of salvation?  It doesn’t seem that way. 

In a biography of Jesus called Luke Jesus is confronted by and later celebrates with a miniature tax collector (he collected regular size taxes he just happened to be a smaller guy, I can see how that would be confusing).  At the end of hanging out with this dude Jesus says “Today salvation has come to this house” (Luke 19:9).  Well this pumped the house way the hell up because it knew that it could now go to heaven, and that would make it the first house ever in heaven so it would be a for-real trendsetter.  Jesus was obviously referring to the people who inhabited the house or the household.  However none of them floated off to heaven according to the story.  There are a few stories like that in the bible because the bible is dope but this is not one of them.  Instead apparently everyone just sat around and thought, “wow, well that’s good news”.  Unless when Jesus said “salvation” he didn’t simply mean “go to heaven someday”. 

What if Jesus was declaring that this family was now included in something real and dynamic and animating in the present tense?  Jesus was making clear his belief that this family was now  in the covenant.  The covenant was a relationship God initiated with people that stretched across generations.  God rectified it and remade it countless times.  Sometimes it seemed incredibly exclusive and demanding (cut your penis if you love me!) and sometimes it seemed embarrassingly inclusive (someday the barren woman will have loads of kids, so many kids she has to constantly re-stake her tent–God is the woman in this metaphor found in the biblical book of Isaiah).  The covenant was far less about God granting you special access to the champagne room and more about God’s promise to accompany you every. single. day. 

The Old Testament is lousy with references to folks begging God for salvation in the immediate not the eventual.  Which sounds familiar. Because that’s how people talk about salvation when they aren’t speaking in a religious context. 

Recently I had a conversation with my wife (that’s two recent conversations with two different people–that’s called conversational diversity) in which I started listing people and things that I believed quite literally saved my life in the past year.  I started with her, not because I was pandering but because it’s the truest thing I’ve ever said, and listed friends in Phoenix and Portland and Indiana and my parents and some cousins and my kids and a good friend who hyphenates her last name because she’s a badass feminist like that and our good friends who have known us since before I had any identity to tarnish and decided to love me after I had damn near caused the corrosion of the identity I had.   These people saved my life.  There is no doubt in my mind.  There is a deep and gross and perfect holiness in that.  I feel like there is a power and a gentleness accompanying me every. single. day. because of the way in which these people loved me in a year of poison and shame and failure.  

I believe God moved these people to demonstrate that love.  I believe that God nudged them toward their kindness and honesty and hope they shared with me.  Salvation came to my house over and over again regardless of the three addresses I used in ten months.  Heaven is so damn big, friends, there’s no need to look up. 

So if you are worried that you’re not in, remember there is a divine momma stretching that tent out just a little wider.  If you think your mistakes and failures are disqualifying you please heed the words of a one-time murderous religious fanatic that there isn’t anything you’ve done or darkness you’ve walked through or horror you’ve experienced that separates you from the love of God in Jesus.  If you still feel as though you aren’t “in” remember that when a former prince and shepherd and refugee leader taught about the covenant he reminded everyone that it wasn’t across the sea or miles away or even up in heaven, but instead was at your door and in your life already.  

Salvation is in your midst.   

[christownley]

“Heaven is so damn big, friends, there’s no need to look up.”

[mandiblepress]

//001

8.  Or 9.  There is no way to be certain but I would have guessed the girl to be around 8 or 9 years old.  My daughter is seven so my assumption is based on that comparison alone.  At some point you reach an age yourself at which it becomes impossible to peg a person’s age with anything resembling cognitive proximity.  

So we’ll say 8 or 9.

She was standing outside her house alone.  Usually that would be the beginning of a sad story.  A story about absentee parenting or latchkey childhoods or American decay.  And maybe this is a sad story, but it could also be a profoundly happy story, or a thoughtful story, or a boring story.  To be honest, though, it’s not much of a story.  

So she’s 8 or 9, standing outside her house alone holding a sign.  My goodness is this a poverty story or a homelessness story or an abandonment story?  Well, again, it’s not much of a story.

She’s 8 or 9, standing outside her house alone holding a sign that reads “Halloween Party”.

****

Charles Dickins called a certain story Jesus told the greatest short story in history.  I don’t trust Mr. Dickins because most of what he wrote was garbage and if it weren’t for the acting of Scrooge McDuck A Christmas Carol would just be a story about a rich dude tripping so hard on Christmas Eve that he invades his employee’s Christmas dinner.  I do, however, think the story he holds in such high esteem is of drastic import though.  It’s a story that has melted into our cultural consciousness.  We call it the story of the prodigal son (only pastors/seminarians/bible students call it something different because they have to, it’s part of a secret bible nerd code that’s real and deep) and you know it.  Even if you don’t know you know it you know it.  

Here are the spark notes:

@Boy tells dad he wants his inheritance (all sorts of cultural implications the basics of which are: boy would rather his father be dead than alive and because of such an opinion could be considered better dead than alive himself).

@Boy bails on family and blows his inheritance on first century revelry—so basically just clothes that don’t itch and food that doesn’t have dirt all over it.  And sex workers.

@Boy gets depressed. Resign’s himself to going back home.

@Dad shocks the world by welcoming boy back with incredible affection and even throws him a giant “no big deal you wished I was dead and then you ruined your life so glad you’re home” party without a hint of irony.

@Another Boy, an older brother, is understandably upset about the party.  Because, man, what that younger brother did suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked.

@Dad tries to get second Boy to join the party in spite of his indignation.  Story ends.

Some stories are telescopes, they make you imagine what things might be at a great distance.  Some stories are windows, they help you understand what’s just beyond.  The best stories are different.  They’re mirrors.  They make you look at yourself.  Even if you want them to be windows they won’t be.  You’ll look hard and imagine that you see something through it, but you’re really not.  It’s really your visage staring back at you.  I think the reason we’ve become saturated with this story is because it is a mirror.

I find it very difficult to approach this story without identifying with one or more of the characters.  I have been the son who has literally scripted a speech to his parents regarding an enormous series of mistakes.  I have hoped for tolerance and received incredible graciousness.  

I have been the father.  Violated and under appreciated.  I have been the older brother, convinced that my right-ness or righteousness or proficiency has been ignored over and against the histrionics of someone more flamboyant.  

So imagine Jesus’ telling that story, that mirror of a story and all the types of persons forced to see themselves.  Trying to decide if they would be in the party or not.

And the party is really the key.  This is the third of three stories in which Jesus has used a party as a concluding device.  Jesus is basically letting his listeners binge a whole season of his stories but they all have the same ending.  A party.  

I hear about a party and think “oh, well I guess that’s nice.”  

*Actually because I’m an introvert I think “OH SHIT WHAT WOULD I SAY//WHAT WOULD I DO WITH MY HANDS//WHAT IF PEOPLE SAW THAT I WAS SWEATY”

People in first century Palestine would have had a hard time trying not to smile when Jesus brought up a party though.  Parties were rarities.  Most people lived at or below sustenance level—which means they had enough food to eat…and that was it.  Parties were reserved for weddings and religious festivals mostly.  They were symbols for what might be someday.  They were a way of pretending that someday was actually today.  Countless religious groups used parties as a means by which they could pretend as though they were escaping reality.  Jesus’ religious compatriots, Jewish folks, thought of parties as a way to express hope in a reality that they believed would invade.  

People who get paid to wear tweed jackets call this hope-for-what-could/will-be “eschatology”.  In fact there is an entire section of study dedicated to parties which embody this hope.  They’re called eschatological banquets.  The political activist and artist Isaiah writes about his hope that one day people from all over the world would come to Jerusalem and “eat on God’s holy mountain”—that’s an eschatological banquet.  In some Jewish literature there is an idea that someday the perfect embodiment of God’s qualities, the Messiah, would somehow pull this giant fish/monster/thing called the Leviathan from the sea and feed everyone on its flesh (so think of Jesus feeding 5000+ people by the sea…and then they wanted to make him king by force…ahh…AHH)—that’s an eschatological banquet.  Naturally Jesus would have developed his own ideas about eschatological banquets during his traveling miracles and mayhem roadshow.  He offered a view of that ideology in the party at the conclusion of the prodigal son story.  

****

“Blessed is he who eats at the feast of the Kingdom of God.”

A dude said that.  At a dinner party.  And then presumably everyone looked around awkwardly because that’s like those moments when your uncle says “Let’s talk about 9/11”.  No one really wants to go there.

But this dude says this thing at a dinner party that Jesus’ attended.  It was a party thrown by a guy who knew religion.  He had perfected it.  Don’t read that with cynicism.  You know who was really good at their religion?  Mother Theresa.  Probably one of your relatives who’s always been really kind to you.  Of course, your racist classmate might be good at religion too.  Or that hypocritical co-worker you have.  Whatever the nature of this person’s heart, he invited Jesus to dinner.  And when Jesus is at dinner you don’t talk about shortening the shot clock or how silly it is to pay for cable these days.  No, you talk about God-stuff. So this guy, bless his heart, says this thing, probably with a glass of wine in his hand expecting everyone to shout “L’chaim!” and chug.

But Jesus doesn’t.  

Jesus swigs the booze and then tells a story.  He tells the men around the table about a party a gentleman throws that no one attends.  Some people refuse to attend because they bought some land and want to go look at it.  Lame.  Others just bought some oxen because apparently they’re going on the Oregon trail.  Screw those guys, they’re just going to die of dysentery anyway.  Finally a young couple refuses because they’re about to go on their honeymoon—okay they get a pass.  The party coordinator (because it’s fancy) tells the guy throwing the party that there’s too much room on the dance floor or it’s all dudes or something else that makes a party suck.  So the host tells the party coordinator to start grabbing people who are just outside and bring them in.  Done.  Still too much room.  The coordinator does it again, bringing in disabled people and homeless people and people who live in the trailer park that you know could get a job if they weren’t so damn lazy.  Jesus says that’s what the “…feast of the Kingdom of God” is like.  Red carpet meets meth house.  

Now it’s Jesus’ who’s said the awkward thing at dinner.  

But here’s the thing—I think that’s Jesus idea of an eschatological banquet.  I think that’s his hope for humanity.  And I think the party he describes at that dinner is actually the party the older brother refuses to go into in the prodigal son story.  I think it’s a party that Jesus has attended.

****

In another Jesus-biography called Matthew Jesus invites a tax collector named…well…Matthew to be his formal student and bro-friend.  I could go on a long diatribe about first century tax collectors and Roman taxation and oppression through economic and psychological control; but instead I’ll just ask this, do you like paying taxes?  So, Jesus wants to be friend with a tax collector.  Matthew would presumably love to be Jesus’ friend but Matthew is perpetually “unclean” because of his regular contact with Roman money and Roman soldiers and his willingness to bleed his countrymen dry for a profit.  However, as is often the case in Jesus stories, Matthew meets Jesus and everything changes.  And because Matthew has a little extra money (he’s been, you know, engaging in state-sponsored theft for a while now) he throws a party.  He invites Jesus.  Jesus had been to a wedding party before this point, but he seemed a bit annoyed the whole time before making hundreds of gallons of wine (Jesus is just the bee’s knees).  This seems more his speed.  He’s partying with Matthew and Matthew’s “sinner” friends.  And while he’s enjoying the company there are all these people who are convinced their right-ness or righteousness is being ignored.  These people are milling around outside the party.

Outside.  They could come in.  They’d rather be outside and hang on to just how “right” they are.  Because their great hope is that they will be right enough for the big party to come. In fact Jesus’ formal students and bro-friends caught somewhere in between.  When you’re told your whole life that you need to make sure your invitation is guarded and your right-ness will get you past the velvet rope what do you do when your mentor is swapping jokes with prostitutes?  

Jesus sees the people outside, he even talks to them.  

I think this moment is burned into Jesus’ brain.

I think the experience and memory of this party cuts new pathways for electronic impulses to travel in Jesus brain.  I think Jesus believes this is an eschatological banquet.  This is what it would look like if God moved into the neighborhood and throw a mixer.  

God doesn’t want you at the party if you have to be the most right to get in.  

God doesn’t want you to feel as though you need to beg your way through the door or watch it to make sure the wrong people come in behind you.

God wants the busted up and the horribly inconsistent.  

God wants those that have no accomplishments or qualities to hide behind any longer.

God isn’t a father who waits for you to come home so he can throw a party for his knucklehead son or daughter.  

God yells your name into the night.  He drives the neighborhoods.  He buys a pirated police scanner and listens, hoping and not hoping all at once.  God starts a gofundme to finance his search for you.  And once he finds you, in the midst of your speech and promises and apologies and tears and snot and anguish and disintegration he finally sends the invitations he’s had pressed and ready for..days? months? years? He blows more money than you stole to make you feel home.

****

So she must have been 8 or 9, standing in front of her home, all alone inviting people to a party.  Now what kind of story is that?  Well of course it’s just the beginning, but it sounds familiar doesn’t it?  

[christownley]

• shooting the sun • #instagramaz #igersphx #hikingaz #teamtownley #sunrise #piestewapeak (at Piestewa Peak)

[christownley]

• family photo • #teamtownley #instagramaz #hikingaz #rufflife #westclearcreek (at West Clear Creek Wilderness)

[christownley]

• wade right in • #instagramaz #maiadog #not115degrees #lakelife #teamtownley (at Willow Springs Lake)

[christownley]

• dog head in the "cone of style" • #kuladog #rufflife #deeogee

[christownley]

• some farm, somewhere • #montanamoment #livingbozeman #sunrise #farmlife (at Gallatin Gateway, Montana)

[christownley]

• eh • #sunsetstalking #livingbozeman #montanamoment #bozeman #sunset #bigskycountry

[christownley]

• Spanish Peaks, MT • #makemoments #montanamoment #livingbozeman #momenttele

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• kate's best friend • #maiadog #rufflife #deeogee

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• the shack • #livingbozeman #sunsetstalking #makemoments #momentwide #shack #nexttothebigyellowbarn #bridwellwinn

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• farm living is the life for me • #notreally #livingbozeman #makemoments #momentwide #farmlife #montanamoment

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• the sounds of Wiebe • #bigyellowbarn #bridwellwinn #livingbozeman #makemoments #momentwide

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• fetch in Fairy Lake • #makemoments #livingbozeman #kuladog #momentwide

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• view from Sac Peak • #makemoments #livingbozeman #bridgers #momentwide

[christownley]

• Maia in the mirror • #rufflife #deeogee #maiadog #mirrorselfie