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Jesus! Now with extra-bonus wisdom action

Posted on July 5, 2011 by megancastellan

I’m not dead, in case you were curious. Last week was the week between my two weeks at camp, and contained all the things that needed to get done between being away from regularly-scheduled work for nearly all of July. Meetings, meetings and more meetings. And an ordination (yay!) and More meetings.

So Sunday was nearly a relief. I was back again at the Friendly Local ELCA parish, where I forgot no major portion of the liturgy, and actually recognized the setting! (they have 10 in the new book. This seems excessive to me, especially since they aren’t really mix-and-match, like ours).
Here’s what I said.

July 3, 2011
Proper 9, Ordinary Time. Year A
Matthew 11: 16-19, 25-30

What is the wisest thing you’ve ever heard? Do you think of catchy needlepoint sampler sayings, or sentiments from greeting cards? Or quips from bumper stickers? Quotes from sermons, dare I hope?
Or do you remember the voice of your mother, your grandfather, your neighbor down the street, making some sage comment about life?
What is it that catches our ear, makes us stop and say, “that right there, that’s worth listening to. That’s wisdom.”?

For the people of Jesus’s day, wisdom meant something pretty specific. It wasn’t just something someone says that sounded halfway smart. Wisdom was an entire theological tradition within Israelite religion, wherein it was believed that by studying the world, nature, people, the sun, the moon, etc, you could learn to understand God, since God set all these things in motion in the first place. Wisdom wasn’t just being smart– it was coming close to God through understanding.
It’s this wisdom tradition within Judaism that gives us several books in the OT: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, and several in the Apocrypha. In these books, the idea of wisdom, this powerful understanding, is personified. Wisdom is depicted as a woman who beckons and encourages seekers to look for her, and find her, so that she might lead them to God. Check out Proverbs 8: wisdom personified says, “to you, oh people, I call, and my call is to all who live…the Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago.
30 then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
31 rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.
35 For whoever finds me finds life
and obtains favor from the Lord;
Some gorgeous stuff in the murky corners of the Old Testament, huh?

So this is wisdom. The joyous wisdom that delights in the creation of God, and the human race, and gleefully brings humanity closer to God.

I mention all this, because in the gospel for today, Jesus begins by disparaging the crowd for refusing to listen to either John the Baptist or himself, no matter what they do. And he uses the image of children playing games in the marketplace– first playing wedding, and then funeral. (this is common in lots of different parts of the world for kids to act out wedding ceremonies as a game, as well as act out funerals. People died a lot back then).
No matter what we did, he says, you wouldn’t play along. John was too strict, so he has a demon. Jesus is too lax, so he must be a glutton and drunkard, and all of you should be sure to remember this passage, because it sure comes in handy the next time you have to have a proof-txt battle with someone.
No matter what we did, he says, you couldn’t join the game.
But it’s ok, because wisdom is justified by her fruits.
There’s wisdom!

And throughout the prayer that follows, Jesus, the Son, becomes the one who can show best what the Father is up to. Jesus becomes that embodiment of joyful, freeing, knowledge. For the hearers, Jesus becomes that sought-after wisdom.

Which causes me to wonder: in our lives as Christians, is this the picture of Jesus that we present to the world? Is the Jesus that we tell the world about a Jesus of figure of joy, of comfort, someone who can talk freely about the games of children,
who, we can picture, rejoices in the inhabited world, and delights in the human race? Is our Jesus a figure of wisdom?

I came home the other day to find a tract on my front door from one of the local storefront churches. On it was a question: “if you died right now, can you be sure you’re going to heaven?”. Below that was the classic, dante’s inferno type picture of hell burning away, as if to suggest that the writers of this pamphlet did not share my confidence.
Inside was the usual– we’ve all sinned, which made God mad, so you should say the sinner’s prayer, and then you too can go to heaven. Oh, and please come to church on Sunday!

And it made me wonder, what sort of Jesus, what sort of God does this sort of thing show people?
We are in the business of the gospel, we are in the business of good news. And good news should sound….good. It should sound joyful. Good news should sound like Jesus does– come to me all who are heavy laden and I will refresh you.

But good news is hard to hear, if not impossible, when it comes with a threat. When it comes presented with anger and condemnation. When it comes stripped of comfort and joy and wisdom at all. We in the church so frequently forget that our news is good. That Jesus is joyful. And delights in humanity, And comes to give us comfort. Anything that detracts from that central truth of who Christ is needs to take a back seat.

From somewhere, maybe, we got the impression that more people would listen if we just scared them out of their wits. But this isn’t working, and what’s worse, it clouds the good news. It’s hard to believe that Jesus wants to comfort and console if he’s depicted as a scary bouncer at the gates of heaven.

We’ve spent years selling ourselves short. We’ve spent a long time telling ourselves and the rest of the world that Christianity is an extremely scary, and serious business, with little room for joy, and mirth and delight.

Whether the world admits it or not, it has a hunger for good news. Too long, it has only heard of a God of anger, wrath and fear. Our world longs for exactly what we already know, the good news we have to share.
The world needs to hear of the Jesus who calls us to sing and dance, and who calls to bring us comfort from our burdens, not to add to them.

So remember the good news you have to share. Remember that it is good news, not frightening, not angry, not hateful. This is the news the world so longs for.
So in everything you do, and say, and are, remember to do it in the name of the Jesus of comfort and love and wisdom, who came to share our burdens. Maybe you’ll get called names, get called a glutton, a drunkard, a weirdo. But someone needs to hear words of comfort and love and grace, and you’re just the one to speak them.
Amen.

This week: back at Chapel Rock, for an actual camp session with actual campers, opposed to training the counselors.
I do promise, though, another Rob Bell post before the week is over, however. I promise, I promise.

And one final note: one thing among many I learned this week: it is significantly harder to preach on Wisdom when you are speaking to a congregation that does not consider the Apocrypha to be canon. (imagine the NBC PSA music playing).

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Why Jerry Falwell has ruined it for the rest of us

Posted on June 22, 2011 by megancastellan

So a few different things this week!
For the first time since June of 2006, I did not have to preach on Trinity Sunday. While I consider this a milestone reached in my career, it also means that I don’t have a sermon to post here.
And also, since I am at camp this week, there will a short break in my review of “Love Wins”, since I left my book at home.

In the meantime, I am here at camp, helping to train counselors. Which has started me thinking (again) about something that I get asked pretty regularly, along with “Aren’t you too young to be a priest?” and “Is the Nielsen television rating system ridiculously antiquated for today’s increase in Internet video streaming technology?” (Answers: no and yes).
About once every two weeks, I get asked some question, beginning with the phrase “so you’re a young person…[insert question here]?”.
It’s hard to explain. Evidently, the population under 35 years of age, is like a foreign land, not unlike the past. But it is important to the church to try to understand these Young People, to speak their language, to know their customs and their ways, and I feel myself to be an Ambassador from this unknown land.

To that end, I present the first in an occasional series entitled Megan’s Helpful Hints for Preaching and Teaching with Millennials.
To be clear, these should not be taken as absolute gospel. (Part of what amuses me about being asked to give voice to an ENTIRE GENERATION is that I am a priest. I am not a ‘normal’ young person.)
Neither should these be restricted to only useful for young people. In my experience, as the church, and our American society as a whole, undergoes this massive change, the way we speak to and about each other has changed. For this reason, the language and rhetoric we use in church needs to change. Or no one will understand what we mean anymore.

Hint #1. Assume extreme mistrust.
This is not personal. This is not to say that you are not a perfectly lovely, friendly person who is delightful to know and associate with.
But you need to assume that anyone you meet, under the age of 40, and very many other people besides, be they churched or unchurched, be they cradle Episcopalian or a walk-in from the Baptist church down the street Does. Not. Trust. You.

This is for a few reasons (and lest I give you a complex, none of these are your fault, strictly speaking). First off, this young person has grown up in an world where Watergate and Vietnam have always been. The government has never, ever been seen as truthful or trustworthy. These things have not existed in her/his world. Institutions lie, and her/his whole existence has been shaped in part by a barrage of advertisements, trying to sell them things on a continual basis. Ads and shifty advertising language have been coming at them since the moment of birth, another fact of life. Most unfortunately, in their mind, the church is an institution, in there with the government and corporations.

Also, the only voice of Christianity in this person’s lifetime has been the televangelists through the media. Millennials are media-saturated. While you cannot assume that they can tell you the story of the good Samaritan, you can assume that they have heard the phrase ‘being saved’ or ‘personal relationship with Jesus’. Or ‘going to hell’. The infamous purple Teletubby incident? Pat Robertson saying 9/11 was the fault of the feminists and the ACLU? They heard about that. In their lifetime, Christianity has earned for itself a reputation as hypocritical and hateful, with little countering public voice.

It may sound abstract– it’s not. It takes a serious psychological toll to hear that an all powerful, all knowing God wants you (and probably most people you know) to burn in hell because you don’t believe the right thing/do the right thing/live the right way/say the right words. Great news! The smartest, best power in the universe sees you for what you are, and wants to destroy you, because you are so bad.

This is the ‘gospel’ that televangelists have managed to communicate for the last 35 years. Consistently. On the radio, on television, on the street corner, on billboards, in the media, and in politics.

Think of it as a generation that has been spiritually abused, subtly and continually.
Millennials see you, the religious authority, and all they expect to hear is more of the same.
Either outright condemnation and a guilt trip, or hypocrisy.

So, the ball is in your court, which is unfair, but there you go. While, yes, you personally didn’t create the phenomenon of 1970s-1980s televangelism, and the rise of the Religious Right in America, you are still going to have to work three times as hard to convince a terrified population that you really won’t hurt them. You don’t hate gays, you don’t believe Obama is secretly the Antichrist, and you don’t believe that rock and roll is the devil’s music. Evolution is quite nice, and no one is going to hell.

There is no magic cure, or easy fix, but a big help is realizing how damaged a huge portion of the population is. So maybe we’re being called to be not so much a social club for the pampered, but a refugee shelter. There’s a lot more care required.

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Love Wins!: In which we go to Hell

Posted on June 15, 2011 by megancastellan

Chapter Three of ‘Love Wins’ is entitled Hell. Possibly, there could have been some funnier, catchier title, but Rob Bell was like, “No! On with the theologizing and the weird e.e. cummings-like layout!”
And so here we are. The crux of why so many people are angry at the book.
Bell starts by going through the Bible, and offering to show us every place in there where the term ‘hell’ appears.
This is three pages into the chapter. And this, dear blog-reader, is where the wheels come off of the wagon.
Because here is where I began to talk back, in an audibly angry and frustrated voice, to my book, causing my Esteemed Lutheran Colleague to question my sanity.
The correct answer to Rob Bell’s experiment would have been ‘No Times! The term ‘hell’ literally appears not once in the pages of the Bible! Fun Fact!’
(For one, it’s English. So….there you are. Bible–written in Hebrew, Greek, and smattering of Aramaic. Not English.)
But, it turns out that Rob Bell is not so good at a number of things, one of them being the exegesis of the Hebrew Bible.
So he does a really good job of explaining about the term ‘Gehenna’ from the gospels, which is translated as ‘hell’ in many English translations, and yet was literally a garbage dump in Jerusalem, literally burning day and night and featuring unfriendly dogs eating the garbage in an un-kosher like manner, while gnashing their teeth. (Sound familiar?)
Also pretty solid on ‘Hades’, and ‘Tartarus’ which aren’t quite ‘hell’–more like ‘Realm of the Dead’, since it comes over straight from Greek mythology.

But. BUT. When he takes a whack at the Old Testament, the wheels come off, the top caves in, it’s just a complete mess.
Observe.
“There isn’t an exact word or concept in the Hebrew scriptures for hell other than a few words that refer to death and the grave. One of them is the Hebrew word ‘Sheol’, a dark, mysterious, murky place people go when they die”(pg 64, 65)
Dude. Sheol is not a word for hell. Sheol means death, in a capital D sort of way. It’s not even clear that people go to Sheol after death, and here is why, and let me begin a new line for clarity.
THERE WAS NOT A BELIEF IN THE AFTERLIFE IN ANCIENT ISRAEL. THEY DID NOT HAVE ONE.
There wasn’t. Saying someone ‘was in Sheol’ is like telling a kid you sent their dog to the farm upstate. It’s a nicer, more polite way to refer to the fact that they are now dead.
Know who did have a well-developed belief in an afterlife? Egypt! Babylon! Rome! Greece! Assyria! Persia!
Pick a civilization that tramped through and conquered poor little Ancient Israel (Known affectionately as the Belgium of its time) , and I guarantee, they had a well-developed dualistic system of thought, complete with Soul, and Life after Death. It became a point of pride with the ancient Israelites of Old Testament-fame to hold on to their wacky, idiosyncratic beliefs in defiance of all their ever-conquering neighbors. Heno/mono-theism, and the resurrection at the last day. NOT AN ETERNAL, AFTERLIFE-HAVING SOUL.

I am sorry, Rob Bell, but it just isn’t there, despite your well-meaning (I hope) efforts to locate it. So, saying things like: “God is identified as the God of ‘Abraham, Isaac and Jacob'” who “were dead by the time this story takes place. Where exactly Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were at that time isn’t mentioned, but Moses is told that God is still their God”(pg. 66) just becomes a problem.

Right. Because they were dead. Everyone knew exactly where they were. They had been buried, and their ‘bones gathered to their ancestors’ as was the custom. The expectation was that they would rise with the rest of the righteous on the last day, but, in the meantime…. they were dead. So no one is really concerned with them. This life is what’s important. (They get cited here because the writer wants this God to be the definitive Israelite God, rather than to be confused with an Egyptian god. So this God is the god of the Israelite patriarchs, this God curses people with really unclean things (which wouldn’t have bothered Egyptians much, etc.)

This would be less important (aside from being sort of insulting to people who take the Old Testament seriously in context) but it comes up again, and undercuts his ultimate argument.

Ok, so his argument ends up being that while hell, biblically, isn’t so much an otherworldly place of eternal torment,as it is tied up in humanity’s inclination to reject our God-given gifts of love, grace, and care for one another, and commit atrocities, both big and small. And that God lets us have the consequences of this. Fine. I might quibble with part of this, but I’ll see where he takes the next chapter.

But then, he expands to looking at verses that ‘talk about judgment without talking about hell’, and we’re back to doing crazy things with the Old Testament.
He’s talking about Sodom and Gomorrah (because, he’s right, this is a text that people have used to explain why God likes people to burn) and he cites Ezekiel 16, where God will “restore the fortunes of Sodom and her daughters” (pg 84).
He reads this as God wanting not so much eternal judgement or punishment for anyone.

Ok, I have absolutely no problem with that conclusion….but here’s the problem I do have.

It’s a metaphor. Ezekiel is using a metaphor.

He’s talking to a nation which is being destroyed, as he writes and speaks, by the Babylonians, and being hauled off into exile. They are suffering in the here and now. So, you know, they’d be feeling like the mythic torched city of Sodom (which, so we’re clear, was destroyed for being inhospitable and a lack of charity. Period.) Ezekiel re-interprets his people’s own religious stories (like a good prophet/pastor!) and uses it to console them at their lowest point. So God will rebuild Sodom, the epitome of the desolate, destroyed city, and God will rebuild and restore Israel now, Babylon or no Babylon. It’s pretty powerful in context. And Bell manages to strip it out.

This is just one example; Bell proceeds to do this to a grand total of 16 Old Testament passages.
And look, it’s not that I disagree necessarily with his conclusion–I don’t. I agree, for the most part.

My problem is that it’s disrespectful.
It’s blatantly disrespectful, in a way that I’m about 100% sure that Rob Bell doesn’t mean to be, both to the people who have found God for generations upon generations through the words of the Tanakah, (this would include Jesus) and to the text itself. Which, lest you forget, we Christians also call part of our scriptures.

Because, when you get right down to it, proof-texting, which is what he’s doing, cares only about matching up words. It’s a mentality that says “Oh! These words in this verse here match with what my thesis is. I shall use it like a geometry theorem! Who cares about what it means? The words are what’s important!” And in so doing, strips the text of the people who wrote it, the people who they wrote it for, the history around it, the commentary around it, the verses around it—its entire texture and meaning.

If such a thing were possible, I would posit that proof texting was a subconscious attempt to separate the scriptures from the Spirit who inspired their writing. Or, at least an attempt to quiet its voice, and the voices of the people whom the Spirit has spoken through around and in the text.

People before us wrote these texts, copied them, argued over them, preached and taught them, and loved them into holiness. We have a duty to these people to take these texts seriously enough to study them in their completeness, and not abuse the words for our own service.

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What kind of day has it been?

Posted on June 12, 2011 by megancastellan

So.
This week I was back at Lakeside. If you’ve been watching/reading/ listening to any national news, then you’ve heard about Lakeside this week. Lakeside is on the western edge of the Wallow wildfire that’s currently incinerating eastern Arizona, and now moving into New Mexico. Lakeside is where the evacuees, around 10,000 people, are being sheltered. Pretty terrifying. I’ve gotten used to snowstorms, and am learning to deal with WIND instead of spring, but ongoing forest fires are still scary.

Besides being an object lesson in Why You Never Leave Campfires Unattended (aka, You Idiot, Did You Want to Burn Down Half the Southwest?!?), they could probably make a pretty awesome GOE question out of this one.
“On Pentecost, you are called to supply for a small rural parish on the edge of the second-largest ongoing forest fire in the history of the state. What do you say to them?”
Here’s what I said.

June 12, 2011
Pentecost, Year A
Acts 2:1-21

In the criminally under appreciated sitcom Sports Night, by the end of the first season, the producer Dana Whitaker, played by Felicity Huffman, is having a hard time. Her sports news show is failing in the ratings, her competition at work is sneaking up on her, her mentor and boss had a massive stroke, and the network is showing an inclination to replace her. To add to her stress, there was a bomb threat in the studio the week previously, and her fiancé has broken up with her, after revealing his infidelity. Dana decides to deal with all this by buying a camera.
She buys a camera, and pours all her panic and stress into this one thing she can control. Picture taking! She will take a picture of the people where she works, all together, all looking perfect. And when someone asks where her engagement ring went, she says it’s at the ring cleaners, laughs it off. Problem solved.
Only not so much. Because just as she’s succeeded at getting everyone and everything perfect for the picture, everything lined up and fixed up just as it should be….
The film pops out from the back of the camera, as the flash misfires.
Which would be a fixable thing, if not for someone else asking at that same moment, where Dana’s ring had gone again?
And Dana just implodes.
The actress plays it brilliantly, because you can see that for her, it was the culmination of everything that had gone wrong up until that moment. And she just melts into tears of frustration , and starts yelling about this being the latest in a long line of humiliations, which she can take! And be fine with! With the exception of the camera! Because that’s just too much, and now something good needs to happen, just one good thing, before the day is over, and is that too much to ask?!?!?

In that moment her mentor, who’d suffered the stroke, and hadn’t been seen since, walks into the office. Calls her name. And asks her to please, as nicely as possible, get the show on the air. Great moment.***

We get so excited about Pentecost, sometimes, that we forget that on Pentecost? The disciples were petrified. They were scared, they were frustrated, they were confused.
They had given up several years of their lives, all they owned, left family, friends, neighbors, livelihoods, security, social respectability. All to follow a young rabbi whom, they believed, would bring the reign of God to earth. All those prophecies made true.

But then, Jesus is arrested by the authorities, put on trial and killed. This was a shock for a couple of reasons. First off, when Rome started crucifying political criminals, they never stopped with just the head of the organization– they liked to finish the job. So not only were the disciples contemplating some career choices that looked pretty shaky in hindsight; they also were convinced they were going to be killed.

Secondly, their friend was gone. By this point in the story, Jesus has been killed, risen, and has ascended to heaven. So while the disciples have seen the risen Lord….they also realize that he’s not sticking around. He might not be dead, but their problems aren’t solved. In fact, it creates another problem. Because, now, not only is the Roman army is still after them, they think. They still don’t have jobs. We can take a guess and figure that their families are none too pleased with them, if they were to return home at this point, tails between their legs, but now–
What to do about Jesus?

He ascended to heaven, leaving them in charge. He gave them a job to do. They are to tell the story of Jesus, of everything they have seen and experienced of God’s love for the world.

But right now, the thought of going out and doing something just seems like one more thing that can’t be done, in a long line of things that are going wrong. It’s one more obstacle to overcome, and it just looks too daunting.

It’s into this environment that the Holy Spirit sweeps, and the church is born, and the disciples are enlivened. (and accused of being drunk), amusingly. They were terrified, confused and ready to give up and go home, and now, they are overcome with passion for their callings. They are renewed.

But what’s striking is what the Spirit is not, as much as what the Spirit is.

As frightened and as confused as the disciples are, the Spirit does not come as a magic fix-all. Nothing is suddenly righted, or made all better. Peter isn’t suddenly a genius, and Thomas isn’t suddenly rich. The church isn’t made safe from Roman persecution. Their problems don’t disappear. Their problems don’t change; the people do.

The Spirit empowers the disciples to get up, and remember that Jesus called them for a reason. The Spirit empowers the disciples to use gifts they didn’t even know they had, in the service of each other, and people they had never even met before. People as different as could be suddenly hear the good news told to them in words they can understand, all by the power of the Spirit.

There are times in our lives when we are pretty sure that we have run out of things to go wrong. When we have hit the bottom of the barrel, and we look around at the state of things and think, “Surely, someone else has to come and fix this, because I just don’t have anything left to give. I have no idea where to start with this problem. Surely God will send someone else.”

When we are tired, when we are frightened, and confused, when the reality of the brokenness of the world overwhelms us, then it becomes all we can see. And we fixate on the brokeness, til it paralyzes us. “God, you can’t want me to do this, I’ve been told I’m too old. I’ve been told I’m too young. I’ve been told I’m not useful because I’m a woman, or I haven’t read the right books, or have the wrong opinions. Really, God, you need to send someone else.”

But it is precisely into the broken rooms of our panic that the Spirit sweeps. Not to give us the answers, or to give us magical solutions, though I’ve often wished that were the case. But to reassure us, that we are precisely the people God wants to serve the world in this particular situation. And whether we can see it clearly or not, we have precisely the gifts God requires for this moment to heal a fractured world.
And with the Spirit’s help, we are given the strength and courage to use them.

Amen

***The television show I reference here is ‘Sports Night’, written by Aaron Sorkin, genius behind “A Few Good Men”, and “The West Wing”. The episode is ‘What Kind of Day Has it Been?’, the first season finale. It’s on Netflix streaming now. Go. Watch it. Now. Trust me.

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Love Wins!: Questions at Heaven’s Door, Ch 1-2

Posted on June 9, 2011 by megancastellan

Because of how the first chapter is laid out, I’m combining the first and second chapters of “Love Wins”.  Basically, the first chapter, entitled, ‘What about the flat tire?’ poses a series of questions which the book, as a whole, will answer, or attempt to answer.  (Spoiler alert.)

They are good questions, they need to be asked, and, again, Rob Bell is doing a noble, martyr-like  job in bringing them up to his community.  (Have you seen his YouTube page’s comment section recently?  His community hasn’t been so friendly.)
That being said, the questions are predicated again on assumptions  that aren’t examined.  Nearly all the situations Bell brings up are based around the idea of how you properly believe. What’s the ‘age of accountability’?  How do you know when you’ve sincerely said the Jesus prayer, and how do you know it’s worked? How are you saved, “saved” meaning “going to heaven to be with God and Jesus after you die”?
All of these are specifically Protestant concerns– more than that, they are 20-21st century American evangelical Protestant concerns.  (Fun experiment– ask any Eastern Orthodox Christian about any of what I just wrote.  See?  To make up for the fact that you just ran an experiment on them, in a gesture of ecumenical friendliness, promise to never again say the Filioque clause.).
In Bell’s defense, he makes the point that all of these things are, in face, problematic.  Have to say a prayer to “be saved”?  Ok, but what if you say it wrong?  Or you didn’t understand it?  And he’s right.  His questions are good.
My problem with what he does is that he doesn’t really deconstruct the assumptions– he just pokes them a bit.  He never asks what ‘being saved’ might mean, or, hey, how it probably means something really different for us today in middle-upper class suburban churches than it did for persecuted minority Christians in the Roman Empire.  Or for a slave in the American South in 1860.
Which gets me into chapter 3: ‘Here is the New There”. Which is about specifically about heaven.
:: takes deep breath::  When I read this chapter through the first time, I read the whole thing, getting progressively more excited, got to the end, and got really annoyed and frustrated.  Here’s why.
In Ch. 1, Bell poses all these questions about how someone gets saved, based on biblical quotes, wherein he conflates phrases like ‘kingdom of heaven’, ‘forgiveness of sins’, ‘age to come’ and ‘salvation’.  Which all mean entirely different things in context.  ‘Kingdom of heaven’, for example, means about 20 different things in Matthew, and that’s being conservative.
In Ch.2,entitled “Here is the New There,” Bell actually addresses that.  (Hooray!)  He points out that for a large part of the 1st century community, saying ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ was another way of referring to God, and the reign of God on earth.  So there’s that.  (Hooray again.)
He also points out that it’s not like Jesus’s community had a clear concept of heaven-as-otherwordly-and-floaty-on-a-cloud.  Heaven, for them, was the complete manifestation of God’s will.  As he puts it.  Heaven, then, is achieved not so much by dying and getting transported somewhere else, but by doing God’s will on earth, and by participating in God’s recreation of the earth.
He follows this up by talking about how there are tons of different dimensions that we simultaneously participate in (via string theory), and heaven can be more real to us (sort of like being in love) than our present reality.
Ok.  It’s not that I disagree with Bell.  I don’t.  It’s just that I don’t think he goes quite far enough with some of the ideas he puts out there.  He’s pulling his punches.
If you are going to start to deconstruct the biblical passages that undergird ‘salvation theology’ then do it.  Tell me what exactly salvation means for Jesus. (Hint:  Jesus never says–Have a personal relationship with me.  We have jackets!)  Bell starts by pointing out that for Jesus’ community, it’s not otherworldly, but that also means it was material and physical.  It was in the here and now.
That is a huge statement to make, and it needs to be unpacked and explained, especially for an evangelical Protestant audience.  (Trust me.  I said that last night to a Lutheran college group reading this book and everyone stared at me.  Fun times!)  Bell never quite gets there.  He opens the door, but never goes through.
Also, an aspect that Bell never addresses is the communal aspect of heaven.  He brings up the story of the rich man and Jesus (Rich man asks Jesus how to enter heaven).  Salvation, being physical and not otherworldly-on-a-cloud-someplace, is also not just between me and Jesus.  When the rich man asks what he must do, Jesus responds by listing the commandments that have to do with our relationship to other people:  (don’t steal, don’t commit adultery, don’t lie, etc).  Salvation depends on others in a real way.  We are saved for each other, not from each other.

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