The following is an excerpt from VELVET ELVIS by ROB BELL of MARS HILL BIBLE CHURCH in Grand Rapids. I like the implications of this passage for the modern church, the reminder that these words are to us pastor types to invest in disciples, to let someone follow behind us closely enough to get dusty. I haven’t read the book yet, only pieces like this one. Have you? If so, what’d you think?
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One of the earliest sages of the Mishnah, Yose ben Yoezer, said, “Cover yourself with the dust of their feet.”
This idea of being covered in the dust of your rabbi came from something everybody had seen. A rabbi comes to town and right behind him would be this group of students doing their best to keep up with rabbi as he went about teaching from one place to another. By the end of a day of walking in the dirt directly behind your rabbi, you would have the dust from his feet all over you.
And that was a good thing.
So at the age of thirty, when a rabbi generally began his public teaching and training of disciples, we find Jesus walking along the Sea of Galilee. “He saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen.”
They are fishermen because they weren’t good enough. They didn’t make the cut.
Jesus calls the not-good-enoughs and, as the story continues, “at once they left their nets and followed him.”
This is strange, isn’t it? Why do they just drop their nets? And those Christian movies don’t help. Jesus is usually wearing a white bath robe with a light blue beauty pageant sash and he has blow dried hair.
And he’s Swedish.
But given the first-century context, it’s clear what’s going on here. Can you imagine what this must have been like-to have a rabbi say, “Come, follow me”?
To have a rabbi say: “YOU can be like ME.”
Of course you would drop your nets.
House Church Pastor and Evangelist Arrested in Henan
October 4, 2005
From China Aid Association
Midland, Texas (CAA, 10-4-2005)—Mr. Ma Shulei, a full time house church evangelist, was arrested in Mianchi County, Sanmenxia City, Henan Province, along with his 58-year-old father, Mr. Ma Yinzhou, who is a house church pastor.
On September 26, 2005, Mr. Ma Shulei returned home from Yunnan Province to visit his father. Someone immediately reported this information to the police. When the police arrived, Mr. Ma Shulei was not at home. Therefore, the police arrested his father Pastor Ma Yinzhou, and forced him to reveal his son’s whereabouts. To save his father, Mr. Ma Shulei turned himself in October 2. However, his father was not released and both are now in police custody.
In 2002, Mr. Ma Shulei and his father were detained in Beijing for more than 40 days after a church leader’s meeting was raided by the police. Later they were put on probation and ordered to report to the police every five days. Instead of following the probation order, Mr. Ma Shulei went into Yunnan Province as a house church missionary. Mr. Ma Shulei graduated from a Chinese seminary in Myanmar in 2002.
“To hold the father in order to arrest the son is certainly a very harsh tactic to use against two innocent individuals.” said Bob Fu, “We urge the Chinese government to immediately release Pastor Ma and his son.”
Voice Of The Martyrs would like you to write a polite letter of protest on the behalf of Mr. Ma Shulei and Mr. Ma Yinzhou. Send to:
Embassy of the People’s Republic of China
Zhou Wenzhong, Ambassador
2300 Connecticut Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20008
Phone: (202) 328-2500
Fax: (202) 588-0032
Her front yard looks like the Grim Reaper’s carnival set up shop. Tomb stones litter the flower beds. Gargoyles bask in black lighting. A ten foot spider crouches guarding against sidewalk riff raff. An undead woman in rotted wedding regalia laughs maniacally at the front door while fog machines seethe a low haze of dread across the lawn.
She’s scary. She’s my neighbor - a woman in her late thirties who looks like any other mother of boys driving a mini van to the elementary school twice daily and dropping by Kroger for ten items or less every few days. But this mom looks forward to Halloween. It’s her Christmas, she exaplins. After the first week of October, as soon as her yard begins crawling with plastic ghouls of all manifestations, people start to wonder “Who ARE these people living among us?”
She’s an accomplished author, that’s who. She’s written book adaptations of some very frightening films, examples of which I won’t list here for fear of blowing her cover and drawing fans to our otherwise sleepy neighborhood. Her biggest claim to fame is, however, a series of original books about a vampire slayer - a very sexually rambunctious vampire slayer. In the one chapter I was brave enough to peak at (I scare easily) a woman woke up in a dungeon chained to a bulging hunk of a man, wondering if she’d had too much to drink the night before or if something more sinister had taken place since her last memory of consciousness. In less than a page the sleeping stranger she’s tethered too awakes, is of course gorgeous, and predictably amorous. He crawls on top of her and paragraphs of odd dialogue about vampires, werewolves and assassins ensue, made uncomfortable by constant internally monologued sexual fantasies from both characters. Of course the two characters consummate their new “friendship” and embark on an unholy sinister adventure and I’m left wondering A) Why am I still reading this? and B) Who ARE these people living among us? Again, she’s scary.
I’m living next door to the Danielle Steele of the Dungeons and Dragons crowd. I imagine her fans to be a certain group of guys I knew in high school. I imagine them believing vampires were real back then. They probably worshipped the devil, wearing black as a kind of warning shot, to ward off the rest of us. They put curses on the homes of strict teachers and sacrificed farm animals and such. They probably talked to Satan, heard him talk back and hated all things beautiful and innocent - I imagine. And this imagination of mine kept me from getting closer to my neighbor than a wave from the mailbox and a smile. She’s scary - feeding demonic sex crazed wackos page after page of encouragement every day like she does.
But then my kids asked if they could cross the street and stroll through her tomb stones and corpses and how could I refuse? That’s when she came outside and we actually met, laughed, talked a long time - her in a “I’m Evil” t-shirt (black of course) and me in a “Relevant Magazine” shirt (white of course). We talked long enough that the hazer in her bushes ran out of juice and then the fog began to clear.
She’s known apparently for quite some time about what I do too. “I live across the street from a guy who sings songs about God for Christians,” she may have blogged in the past. “I knew people in high school who listened to that crap. They’d skip our dances and look mortified when I’d cuss or walk around campus with my hand in my boyfriend’s back pocket. I imagined them talking about angels and what Jesus would major in at College or what the new Queen record says if you play it backward. They had slumber parties at which the souls of damned class mates were “lifted up”, and G-rated movies were consumed while wearing footy pajamas before turning in no later than 9.”
Now that we’re friends though I’ve learned she need not use her imagination to picture one of my fans. She doesn’t have to lean on foggy high school memories of Christians. Her sister is one - an angel seeing, doily decorating, ceramic figurine collecting, George Bush voting, speaking in tongues, slain in the spirit, charting the end times, boycott Disney and Ellen and the Teletubbies, “don’t say geez”, church twice a week, Jesus fished, until-you-stop-writing-those-kinds-of-books-don’t-come-to-our-house-for-Christmas Christian...who loves my music and hates her.
Now that’s scary. Or, sadly, that’s what the scary are sometimes made of.
FROM THE BOOK ABOUT THE BEATITUDES (THE CHAPTER ON MEEKNESS)…
I went to youth camp a few times when I was fifteen or sixteen. It was a week of swimming and hiking and daily gatherings in an outdoor ampitheatre to hear songs and sermons about God. The sermons usually came from a traveling preacher, a professional speaker, who passionately delivered to us the same words every year. With the same results. The gist of his message was how much God loved us and how we should not sleep around or do drugs. The connection between the two – sex and drugs and God’s love – was hard for me to make out.
At some point in his sermon though, there was a compelling brutal retelling of Jesus’ dramatic death on the cross for my sins. It was riveting. The preacher would cry when he told it. We’d cry too. And then one by one we’d trickle out of our seats, as the piano was lightly tinkered, weave our arms around each other and form a massive sweaty pile of remorse at the front of the stage.
One girl in the crowd prayed to “receive Jesus Christ as her personal Lord and Savior.” Then the other hundred of us in the weeping huddle would “rededicate” our lives to Jesus. We filled out cards, white cards, with tiny pencils, making our formal commitment by checking the “rededication” box.
The cheerleader swore she’d eat lunch with those below her social status at school this year - members of the chess team or trombone players - and she’d stop putting out to the quarterback and the linebacker and the point guard and the captain of the swim team. The computer geek promised to stop masturbating to downloaded pictures of Vanna White and stop lusting after the cheerleader and hating the quarterback and the linebacker and the point guard and the captain of the swim team. All of us in the sobbing huddle said these kinds of things. “I’ll be better,” we promised ourselves, God and whoever read those cards.
And we meant it. Just like we did last Summer.
I got the big V on Friday. Today I’m strung out on Percocet, bag of frozen peas where no frozen peas have gone before, lap top next to me and I’m making final outlines and plans for tomorrow’s big trip. I’m going on a sabbatical - me, my drugs, my peas and two suitcases of books.
I taught the beatitudes to the folks at IKON a year and a half ago and became obsessed with these eight diminutive hand grenade blessings Jesus lobbed into the souls of curiosity seekers and followers gathered on a hillside two thousand years. “Blessed are the poor in Spirit, those who mourn, the meek...” Deceptively simple. Counterintuitive and peculiar. Only God could write such blasphemy. “Blessed are those who make peace, who are persecuted...”
I was so undone and inspired that I wrote eleven songs and recorded one more for WHITE FLAG, an album reflecting on these axioms from the Sermon on the Mount. Teaching and singing them didn’t shake the obsession for understanding and communicating them though. I’ve continued to read and wrestle and now have screens of notes and a head full of stories and observations too large for verses and chorus or thirty minute discourses.
So I’m heading to a cabin in the woods for a week to download all that I’ve learned about the beatitudes into book form. The hope is that this material will be enjoyable and challenging to read, as comforting and controversial as the day they were spoken. I hope this book is used to provoke more study and conversation by those who read it and that disciples are forged from mere believers.
But that seems a bit lofty for me right now. Right now, waddling about the house like a half-retarded penguin, with pillow hair and scraggly beard, bad breath and melting produce between my legs, I feel incredibly ordinary - or even less. And while that once discouraged me from picking up a guitar or singing for strangers, I’ve now learned that the ordinary - the less than ordinary even - when infused with Divine direction and passion and power, can accomplish the lofty: the limping can leap. And so I have this tingle in me tonight that is either a side effect of heavy medication or anticipation of and confidence in what God can and might just say through me this week. This is the final full brain dump of hours of study, prayer, inspiration and questioning surrounding the beatitudes.
No matter how good or not good this book ends up being, it just feels good to tingle again like I did years ago sitting scared on my garage floor working out the chorus of Should I Tell Them. It feels good to feel too small for the occasion - to feel the weight of the opportunity before me, to be fearful, to try anyway, to be alone pondering and carefully joyfully painting God with a new kind of brush.
See you when I return in about a week - hopefully with a finished book and a thawed...you know.
The following is an excerpt from VELVET ELVIS by ROB BELL of MARS HILL BIBLE CHURCH in Grand Rapids. I like the implications of this passage for the modern church, the reminder that these words are to us pastor types to invest in disciples, to let someone follow behind us closely enough to get dusty. I haven’t read the book yet, only pieces like this one. Have you? If so, what’d you think?
