Okay, so you're able to keep and control your clothing, paying someone who has a laundry hustle. 

Once you have your clothing, how can you make a fashion statement?

Again, whatever you do it has to be a subtle alteration, and it most definitely can't affect the color. So what can you do?

Mainly two things.

First, you can have your clothing starched, pressed and bleached. To accomplish this, you'll still be working with someone doing a laundry hustle. Again, this is something you might not notice if you're not looking for it, but the men who have to use the community clothing have limp, dingy white pants and shirts. Other inmates, the ones who can afford it, have crisp, stiff, brilliant white clothing. Whenever you encounter an inmate whose clothing is limp and dingy, that inmate is poor and lower in the prison hierarchy. Starched, bleached white clothing is a status symbol.

The second way you can make a fashion statement is having your shirt and pants double-stitched. Clothing in the community clothing circulation is single-stitched. But if you send your clothing to someone working a garment factory hustle, where the clothing is made, inmates with access to the sewing machines can double stitch your shirt and pants. Again, it's a subtle thing, but walking around with double-stitched clothing is another fashion and status symbol. When I meet new inmates I'll often look for double-stitching to get a quick estimate about where they stand in the prison hierarchy.

"Evil is not simply a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured."

--Flannery O'Connor

One of the joys of praying with the Daily Office (the Catholic version of The Book of Common Prayer), is how every day you pray the three canticles from Luke's infancy narrative.

There are three canticles (songs) from the gospel of Luke associated with the birth of Jesus.

The first is the Benedictus (the Song of Zechariah) from Luke 1.68-79, Zechariah's praise to God for the birth of John the Baptist.

The second canticle is the Magnificat (Mary's Song), sung by Mary in Luke 1.46-55 to praise God for the birth of Jesus.

And the third canticle is Nunc dimittis (the Song of Simeon) from Luke 2.29-32, the song Simeon sings thanking God for the birth of Jesus.

Most of us only sing and read these songs during the Advent and Christmas seasons. But the Daily Office has you pray these canticles every single day.

For morning prayer you pray the Benedictus. For evening prayer you pray the Magnificat. And for Night prayer you pray the Nuc dimittis.

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

--Beannacht / Blessing by John O’Donohue

Recently I wrote a post about how (transgressive) beauty will save the world.

The point I made in that post, reacting to the work of Brian Zahnd's How Beauty Will Save the World, is that, yes, in hindsight we find Jesus' actions in the gospels to be beautiful.

But Jesus' contemporaries found his actions ugly and transgressive. This is the key insight that guides Unclean.

My point is that we continue to find Jesus transgressive and ugly. We don't, for example, rush toward the homeless, addicted and incarcerated. We don't rush to embrace our enemies.

How many conservative Christians are rushing to embrace the LGBT community? How many progressive Christians are rushing to embrace Donald Trump supporters?

Exactly.

Jesus' beauty is a hard, difficult, and terrible beauty. It's not easy, attractive or alluring.

So the issue becomes, what sort of spiritual formation must we undergo to find Jesus beautiful?

Fashion reigns out at the prison.

It's a testimony to the human spirit how, even in the midst of enforced uniformity and drabness, we crave style and individuality. My wife sees this every week with the way her students play on the edges of the school dress code and uniform. And it's the same out at the prison.

But it's a little harder in a prison. The men are given a smock-like top and pants with an elastic waistband. The material is all white, a thick cotton fabric, like denim. The uniform is pictured here.

So how do you create fashion out of that blandness?

The first thing you have to do is control you clothing.

Generally, you're supposed to exchange your dirty clothing each week for clothing laundered in laundry. It's all handed out by size, so you never keep the same shirt or pants. So the first thing you have to do to control your clothing is not hand it over during laundry collection.

So you keep your shirt and pants. You now control them, but you'll need to have them laundered and given back to you. This is where someone with a laundry hustle comes in.

To get your clothing laundered you pay a guy working in the laundry. You give him your clothing. He puts your clothing on when he goes to work. At work he washes your clothing, puts it back on, returns to the block, and gives it back to you. All clean.

The point of all this is to keep and control your shirt and pants. If you can't do this, any changes you make to the shirt and pants are lost in the laundry collection, turned in and handed out to someone else.

But if you can control your clothing you can start thinking about fashion.

I'll get to that next week.

I'm starting to get into a groove being an expert on the devil.

Life's funny. Four years ago I never would have predicted I would get calls to talk about the devil. I'm not really an expert, but compared to most people I guess I am. After the publication of Reviving Old Scratch I'm increasingly called upon to lecture about the devil, demons and spiritual warfare.

My favorite gig is at my son's high school. The senior English class has a unit on C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters. So for the last two years I've been invited at the start of the unit to give a lecture to the class about the devil.

I spend the talk lecturing through four names for Old Scratch: Satan, the Devil, Lucifer and Beelzebub. I use each name to highlight an aspect of the devil that tends to get missed in most conversations these teenagers have had about the devil. The names of Old Scratch allow me to talk about love, oppression, idolatry and grace. Like I do in Reviving Old Scratch, I use the devil as figure/ground illusion to paint a positive picture of what the kingdom of God is supposed to look like.

This summer I've turned that "Four Names of the Devil" lecture into a sermon, preaching it in Dallas once and twice in the UK. I use the War in Heaven text from Revelation 12. Most churches have never heard a whole sermon exclusively about the devil. And while the devil doesn't sound like a very edifying topic for a sermon, I think audiences have been pleasantly surprised by the sermon's challenge and message.

Seek then the highest wisdom, not by arguments in words but by the perfection of your life...If you search by means of discussions for the God who cannot be defined in words, He will depart further from you than he was before.

--Saint Columban

In the past
prayer was able
to bring down punishment,
rout armies,
withhold the blessing of rain.
Now, however,
the prayer of the just
turns aside the whole anger of God,
keeps vigil for its enemies,
pleads for persecutors.
Is it any wonder
that it can call down water from heaven
when it could obtain fire from heaven as well?

Prayer is the one thing that can conquer God.

But Christ has willed
that it should work no evil,
and has given it all power over good.
Its only art
is to call back the souls of the dead
from the very journey into death,
to give strength to the weak,
to heal the sick,
to exorcise the possessed,
to open prison cells,
to free the innocent from their chains.
Prayer cleanses from sin,
drives away temptations,
stamps out persecutions,
comforts the fainthearted,
gives new strength to the courageous,
brings travelers safely home,
calms the waves,
confounds robbers,
feeds the poor,
overrules the rich,
lifts up the fallen,
supports those who are falling,
sustains those who stand firm.

All the angels pray.
Every creature prays.
Cattle and wild beasts pray
and bend the knee.
As they come from their barns and caves
they look out to heaven and call out,
lifting up their spirit in their own fashion.
The birds too rise
and lift themselves up to heaven:
they open out their wings,
instead of hands,
in the form of a cross,
and give voice to what seems to be a prayer.

What more need be said on the duty of prayer?

Even the Lord himself prayed.


--from the treatise On Prayer by Tertullian

Jay Stephens, a singer in Abilene, is the son of our dear friend Mike Stephens. Jay's got a voice that sounds so much like Johnny Cash. Recently, Mike asked Jay to do a version of U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" if Johnny Cash had covered it. So Jay sat on his porch and recorded the song for his Dad.

Below is Jay's "Johnny Cash interpretation" of the song. I think it's haunting and beautiful. And it sounds like the ghost of Johnny came back to sing us a song...



Update: Jay has posted a better audio quality version of the song on Bandlab.

Money isn’t the only part of prison economy, the other key player is “the hustle.”

In prison parlance “the hustle” is any sort of access or ability the prisoner can use to create income or use in a barter.

I have not made an inventory of all the prison hustles. Again, a doctoral dissertation could be written about the subject. But here are four common hustles.

More about this in a later post, but fashion continues to rule in the prison. Yes, all the inmates are given a pullover, smock-like shirt and some pants with an elastic waistband. All white. (Which is why we call them the “Men in White.”) But despite, or perhaps because of, the bland uniformity of prison dress, fashion reigns in the prison. Consequently, the inmates who work in the garment factory--where prison attire is made, repaired and cleaned--have the ability to create a fashion hustle. The hustle involves taking an order to clean or make changes to the clothing to met fashion standards, changes hard for most people to detect unless you know what you’re looking for.

All that to say, if you work in the garment factory you can get a good hustle going, taking clothing orders for stamps or “real money.”

Another hustle is cleaning, mainly because of movement. An inmate with cleaning responsibilities will move from block to block doing their work. This allows the inmate to create a courier hustle, transporting messages or items from cell block to cell block. Cleaning jobs create mailman hustles.

Kitchen workers, obviously, have access to food. Food pilfered from the kitchen creates food hustles.

Finally, specialized skills can create hustles, from cooking to repair to electronics. Your special talent in making or repairing something can create your hustle.

All that to say, in the prison economy the hustle, if you can get one, is a key and vital part of your livelihood and position within the prison.

Jana and I love comparing language differences when we visit the UK.

In America we stand in a "line," in the UK it's a "queue." In America we "sleep in," in the UK you "lie in." American cars have a "trunk," UK cars have a "boot."

In the UK when things are "all set," "all done," or "all good" you say "sorted."

In the UK instead of "awesome," "great" or "wonderful," you mostly say "brilliant."

We've been "faffing about" and have needed to take a "jumper" along because it might be chilly. We ask directions about where the "loo" is. I requested "builder's tea" when I didn't want any fuss about the drink. We asked for "rubbing alcohol" and got blank stares until we asked for "surgical spirits."

And don't get me started on what "pants" mean in the UK.

All this is great fun, but at the HOST conference I was reminded about the power of language by Tim Nash's presentation and a comment made during a Q&A by Mark Sampson.

In Tim's presentation about language and Otherness he made two points. First, using Chinese versus English as his illustration, Tim made the point that language is a way of knowing, a gateway of perception. Second, only about 6% of the world's population speaks English.

Those two observations lead a profound point: English speakers don't know how most of the world thinks or sees the world.

Related to the relationship between language and perception, Mark's comment about language at HOST had to do with economics and reality.

Economists like to trump conversations by saying that the language of economics is simply describing "the real world," the world "as it is." This gives the language of economics epistemological power, as "reality" is the ultimate trump card. The person who describes "reality" is the one who is telling the truth

But Mark's comment was this: "Economic language isn't descriptive, it's performative. It doesn't describe the world, it creates the world."

This notion that language is performative won't be new to many readers, but I don't think many church going folk think about language in this way, that language creates as much as it describes reality. At least our perceptual reality.

All that to simply say this: Language can trap us.

Tim pointed out how language blocks us English-speakers from knowing and understanding how 94% of our fellow human beings see and think about the world.

And Mark's comment points how the language of late-modern capitalism blocks us from imagining a new, different and better world.

I was also honored to present with Eve Poole at HOST during a lunch gathering of the Jersey business community. Eve and I talked about spiritual formation in the corporate workplace.

Eve presented material from her new book Leadersmithing: Revealing the Trade Secrets of Leadership. You can also check out Eve’s TEDx talk on leadersmithing.

For those familiar with the work of James Smith (Desiring the Kingdom and You Are What You Love), you’ll note similarities with Eve’s concept of leadersmithing. Specifically, Eve argues that forming leaders must focus upon up our emotions—especially during times of stress—through intentional virtue-forming practices.

The example Eve used, and it’s also the example in her TEDx talk, was how she overcame her fear response when faced with aggressive, belligerent males in business settings. To confront, habituate, and acquire calmness in the face of male hostility Eve began to adopt a practice she called “picking fights with chaps,” intentionally disagreeing with and arguing with males in the workplace. Not in any hostile and mean way, but simply as a practice that allowed her to habituate to conflict and disagreement. Eve practiced her way into a different set of emotional responses in the face of severe disagreement and personal attack, and this formed her into being a better leader.

I followed up by connecting Eve’s work to spiritual formation and the acquisition of Christian virtue, the Fruit of the Spirit in particular.

Forming a Christ-like character (virtues), like forming a good leader, comes down to intentionality and practice aimed primarily at our rapid, often unconscious, emotional reactions to situations.

At the HOST conference it was my pleasure to get to meet Brian Zahnd for the first time. Brian’s HOST presentation was on “How Beauty Will Save the World,” a quote from Dostoevsky that is also the title of Brian’s book How Beauty Will Save the World.

Brain’s main point is that Christian apologetics works best when we use an aesthetical approach, an appeal to beauty. And when the standard of beauty is Jesus, well, what can be more beautiful than that?

I’m totally with Brain on this point. I’ve been writing about beauty as an apologetics for many years. I’ve found the approach particularly helpful with my doubting college students. When belief is hard, beauty is often a gateway into faith. I think artists are our most effective evangelists.

That said, during the Q&A with Brain after his talk I raised the issue of transgressive art.

Regular readers of this blog and my books (i.e., the “Piss Christ” chapter in Unclean, and the chapter about “The Thomas Kinkade Effect” in The Authenticity of Faith) know I’ve been thinking about art, ugliness and theology for quite sometime.

Specifically, if Jesus is “beautiful” his “beauty” was first experienced in the gospels as ugly, transgressive and monstrous. Yes, we thrill to the beauty of Jesus embracing the unclean. But the visceral disgust and shock experienced by those watching Jesus would never have led them to call his actions “beautiful.”

And this I why, as I argued in Brian's Q&A, so few Christians actually behave like Jesus today. We actually don’t find Jesus very beautiful.

Just like in the gospels, we’re still scandalized by the trangressive nature of what cruciform beauty looks like.

Beauty will save the world, but it often will be experienced as a transgressive beauty.

I had another wonderful experience last week with Business Connect who curates the HOST gathering on Jersey island. HOST is an amazing conversation between theologians, activists, artists, pastors, teachers, and business leaders.

A highlight of HOST for me was participating in an evening of art and theological reflection with musician and theologian David Benjamin Blower, who also co-hosts the NOMAD podcast with Tim Nash.

During the evening David performed his album The Book of Jonah, a musical about the book of Jonah. (Between songs on the album N.T. Wright narrates the story and Alastair McIntosh is the voice of Jonah.)

The Book of Jonah is amazing—by turns funny and profound—and it has a companion book written by David. Sympathy for Jonah: Reflections on Humiliation, Terror and the Politics of Enemy Love is a challenging reappraisal of the book of Jonah, seeing the story as a scandalous meditation on the call to enemy-love. A taste of the book:

The grace of God is awful to us because the proper response to evil is to fear it and desire its destruction, not to love it and desire its redemption…

While the book of Jonah makes a brilliant children’s story, it is not a children’s story, nor is it a story about a whale, but about an empire. It is a tract about radical enemy love and radical non-violence. The word radical is not used lightly, since in all history no enemy has seemed less human and more evil than the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The call to loving compassion for such monsters would be distasteful to the extreme, and I repeat, it is miraculous that the book survived at all let alone was canonized as holy writ by anyone.

If you're interested in the fusion of art and theology, stream/purchase the Book of Jonah and buy the book Sympathy for Jonah.

Like I've said, I'm fascinated by the prison economy.

Many men have money deposited by friends and family into their commissary account, which allows them to buy food and other items, from shoes to fans.

Without actual money, a make-shift economy emerges in the prison and main currency of this economy are stamps.

Forever stamps cost 49¢, and I've inquired about their actual purchasing power in the prison. Are stamps affected by inflation or deflation? Do they purchase 49¢ of goods from the commissary, or less? I feel there's a doctoral dissertation out there waiting to be written about prison stamp currency.  

But here's the interesting thing about the prison economy. While stamps are the currency, when the inmates talk about "real money" they aren't talking about dollar bills or stamps.

"Real money" in the prison is food.

Food is "real money," the most valuable thing you can trade in the prison economy.

In the Psalms there are three dramatis personae--the psalmist, God and the enemy.

You can't read the Psalms without reading about the enemy over and over. Enemies taunt, kill, jeer, rob, betray and oppress all through the Psalms.

So it's not surprising that a thread of vengeance is woven through the Psalms. And sometimes this thirst for vengeance can look for all the world like a call for jihad. 

Psalm 149.6-9
May the praise of God be in their mouths
and a double-edged sword in their hands,

to inflict vengeance on the nations
and punishment on the peoples,

to bind their kings with fetters,
their nobles with shackles of iron,

to carry out the sentence written against them—
this is the glory of all his faithful people.

May the praise of God be in their mouths and a double-edged sword be in their hands to inflict vengeance upon the nations. This is glory of God's faithful people.

This psalm governed the imagination of the zealots. And when we speak of the Jews during Jesus' day expecting a military Messiah we know where this expectation comes from, it comes from places like Psalm 149.

So how did Jesus read psalms like Psalm 149?

Again, as I argue in Reviving Old Scratch, Jesus used what we can call a Christus Victor hermeneutic to read the Psalms.

Yes, there is an Enemy to be defeated, an Enemy that is ruling the nations. That Enemy is Satan.

I think one of the problems liberal and progressive Christians have with psalms like Psalm 149 is that, because they tend not to believe in the devil, they struggle to locate "the enemy" in the psalms. Liberal and progressive Christians lack Jesus' imagination.

Without Satan as the enemy the only enemy left are human beings, the wicked oppressors, which tempts liberal and progressive Christians into the imagination of the zealots.

You can have read the Bible your whole life and still you get surprised by something, surprised by something staring at you right in the face but something you've never seen before.

For example, think of all the theodicy questions we ask about Hitler and genocide. Why does God allow things like murder, rape, abuse, slavery, torture, exploitation and sex trafficking?

The answer you tend to hear is free will. But that's not the answer the Bible gives. The theodicy the Bible gives is Noah:

Genesis 6.5-8; 8.18-21; 9.12-17
The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.

So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord...

So Noah came out, together with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives. All the animals and all the creatures that move along the ground and all the birds—everything that moves on land—came out of the ark, one kind after another.

Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done..."

And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”

So God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth.”

Isn't Noah a theodicy?

I've never read Noah as a theodicy, never before see this obvious thing staring me in the face. The Noah story is all about why God allows evil in the world. God allows evil because God made a promise not to punish human evil with violence.

That doesn't mean God ignores evil. The story continues with God's call to Abraham.

To be clear, I'm not saying that God's pledge to Noah is a satisfactory theodicy. What I'm saying is that in all the theodicy conversations I've ever had I've never once heard anyone mention Noah.

Question: Why does God allow evil?

Answer: The rainbow.

I've never heard anyone answer like that.

Yesterday I wrote about visiting St. Albans Abbey here in the UK. Today I'd like to comment on something else I enjoyed at the abbey, the martyr nave screen.

The nave screen in St. Albans Abbey displays seven martyrs of the church. From the Abbey website, the seven are:

Amphibalus is the priest whom Alban sheltered and helped to escape, but who was later martyred at Redbourn, and his relics brought to St Albans. His shrine, currently in the North Ambulatory, will be restored as part of the Alban, Britain’s First Saint project. It was his influence that brought Alban to Christ. He encourages us to share our faith with those around us, both by our words and by our deeds, even when it may bring us into trouble.

George Tankerfield is a Protestant martyr who was burned under Queen Mary on Romeland, opposite the Cathedral’s west front. He is another example of a man who stood up for his beliefs whatever the cost – and his story reminds us that as well as being the oppressed, religious people have just as often been the oppressors.

Alban Roe is a Catholic priest and martyr, arrested under the Commonwealth and imprisoned in the Abbey gatehouse until his execution in London. Together with George Tankerfield he reminds us that the Reformation disputes inspired both great heroism and great cruelty. They are an example and warning to us to seek reconciliation in our own time between all faiths and denominations, and never to let our differences descend into hatred and violence.

St Elisabeth Romanova was a member of the Russian Royal Family and granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who in her widowhood became a nun and Abbess. She was murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918, because they feared that the people, who admired her holiness and acts of charity, might try to re-establish the monarchy through her. She is an example of a saint who was willing to give up wealth and power to serve Christ in the poor.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was imprisoned in a concentration camp for his opposition to the Nazis and executed in 1945. He had had the chance to escape to America, but chose to stay in Germany to fight the Nazis and stand up for genuine Christianity, at a time when the majority of the Church there had chosen to follow Hitler. He is a reminder that sometimes we are called to fight directly against evil, and to be rejected by our own community for the sake of the truth.

Oscar Romero, Archbishop of El Salvador, was assassinated in 1980 while celebrating Mass at the chapel of the hospital where he lived, because of his outspoken defence of the poor and his condemnation of the totalitarian regime in his country. Though by instinct a quiet, scholarly and conservative man, he was driven by conscience to speak out against injustice, and he challenges us to do the same. 

You're surrounded by martyrs when you tour through old churches in the UK, but the inclusion of modern martyrs at St Albans--like Oscar Romero and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, two heroes of mine--really brought home to me a point I've raised before on this blog. From my 2014 post entitled "Blood Trumps Everything":

Human life is the most sacred thing. Blood trumps everything.

To be sure, many would rush to say that God is the most sacred thing. That God trumps everything.

But in point of fact, that's not true. Empirically speaking, we behave as if--as well we should--that human life is the most sacred thing.

And this is what makes patriotism and the flag the most sacred thing. This is why the nation is the most sacred thing. Because human life was sacrificed--blood was spilt--for these things. The blood of the solider consecrates and baptizes the flag and the nation. And because blood trumps everything, because there is no holier and more sacred thing than human life, the flag and the nation is the most sacred thing in the world.

I experience this viscerally whenever I'm asked to stand at an athletic event for the national anthem. All around me there are grey haired men, many wearing ball caps telling about their military service. Veterans. Theologically, I chaff at displays of national allegiance. And yet, I feel awkward standing around these grey haired gentlemen during "The Star-Spangled Banner." I don't want my theological beliefs to be interpreted as a sign of disrespect. These men gave their blood, their lives for that flag. That they survived doesn't diminish this. For in their memories, as they sing the national anthem, they see the faces of friends who made, as we say, the ultimate sacrifice.

And again, blood trumps everything.

My point in all this is that debates about things like nationalism or pacifism aren't simply abstract theological discussions. These debates need to, but often fail to, take into consideration the sacred element of human blood. These debates need to reckon with the fact that blood is the most sacred thing we know, more sacred, even, than God. Emotionally, where this argument will be won or lost, blood will trump theology. Always.

And this is why the church needs her martyrs.

Phrased another way, an issue like pacifism cannot be adjudicated theologically. It can only be adjudicated ecclesiologically. Pacifism isn't about ideas. It's about blood. And without blood the academic defense of pacifism will never prevail in the pews. Because blood trumps everything. Which is why the church needs her martyrs.

Is it any surprise that the Protestant tradition most associated with pacifism and anti-nationalism--the Anabaptists--is the Protestant tradition with the most robust commemoration of her martyrs?

In short, if blood is the most sacred thing we know the church needs to have some blood in the game if she is to stand as a counter-cultural witness to the blood-soaked flag of a nation.

Because that flag, given how much blood it represents, is very, very sacred.

And blood trumps everything.

Last week, Jana and I were in St. Albans in the UK with our dear friends, Hannah, David and Gil Bywaters. I was there speaking at Ashley Church, a beautiful, Christ-filled community.

While in St. Albans we got to visit St. Alban's Abbey, dedicated to the memory of Saint Alban.

St. Alban is venerated as Britain's first Christian martyr. For centuries, the shrine of St. Alban in the abbey has been a destination for pilgrimages, and remains so today.

Alban was martyred in the 3rd or 4th century. At the time, St. Albans was the Roman city Verulamium.

According to the story found in Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, it was a time of persecution of Christians, and Alban was a Roman solider stationed in Verulamium. One day, a priest fleeing persecution sought shelter at Alban's house. Alban took the priest in. During the priest's stay Alban became so impressed with the priest's courage and devotion that the Roman solider converted to Christianity.

Eventually, the priest's location was discovered. To save the priest, Alban placed his Roman cloak upon the holy man and dressed himself in the priest's garb. When the Roman soldiers arrived they arrested Alban and allowed the priest, disguised as a Roman solider, to escape.

The leaders of the persecution were outraged at Alban's subterfuge, demanding an answer as to why he had allowed the priest to escape. Alban confessed that he had converted to Christianity. To test his conversion, Alban was told he would endure all the punishments that were to be inflicted upon the priest unless he renounced his faith and participated in Roman pagan worship.

Alban refused and declared, "I worship and adore the true and living God who created all things."

Upon hearing this, Alban was sentenced to beheading.

And to this day, Alban's prayer is used in St Alban's Abbey.

"I worship and adore the true and living God who created all things."

What's the biggest challenge of prison ministry?

In my experience, the biggest challenge is shifting from the revivalistic to the ethical.

The theology and spirituality of my prison is revivalistic. By that I mean there's a lot of discussion about grace and forgiveness--Jesus died for your sins--and a lot of testimonies about God's provision or the Spirit moving. And by and large, I'm fine with this emphasis. Given the weight of guilt the men carry, a message heavy on grace is a good thing. And testimonies about God's faithfulness and the Spirit's presence lessen feelings of alienation and abandonment.

But my classes, exhortations, and preaching struggle when I move off of these revivalistic themes to the ethical. Talking about violence is a good example. Or asking the men to view their Christian brotherhood as deeper and more foundational than the gangs (largely defined by race and ethnicity) they run with.

Basically, my biggest struggle is the same struggle most churches have with spiritual formation, how to shift the focus away from justification to sanctification. By and large, prison ministry is focused on revival and evangelism. It struggles to do anything with spiritual formation.

In yesterday's post I pointed how N.T. Wright in his book The Day the Revolution Began makes the argument that the gospels do present us with an atonement theology.

Specifically, the death of Jesus is associated with Passover in the gospels, rather than the Day of Atonement. According to the gospels, then, the death of Jesus is a liberating and emancipating event. This is Christus Victor imagery. According to the gospels, Jesus' death liberates us from dark, enslaving forces in the same way the Passover saved Israel from bondage, Pharaoh and the Angel of Death.

And yet, Day of Atonement imagery also runs through the gospels, most notably with the repeated references to "the forgiveness of sins." Jesus goes about performing exorcisms, good Christus Victor stuff, but he also goes about forgiving sins, Day of Atonement imagery.

Wright's book is helpful in showing how these two festivals--Passover (Christus Victor) and the Day of Atonement (forgiveness of sins)--go together in the gospels.

This is important because in our modern atonement debates Passover (Christus Victor) and the Day of Atonement (forgiveness of sins) often get pitted against each other, forcing you to choose between the two. But in the gospels they work together.

According to Wright, here's how these two festivals get fused.

In the gospels the Jews felt themselves to be in a time of exile, in bondage of foreign powers. Despite the return to Jerusalem and the rebuilding the temple as recounted in Ezra and Nehemiah, this exile was an extension of the Babylonian exile. This season of exile was felt to be similar to the captivity in Egypt. So the Jews were looking for a Messiah who would lead a Second Exodus, a Messiah who would be the awaited Second Moses.

This parallel between the Babylonian exile and the captivity in Egypt sets up the Passover imagery in the gospels. But there's a crucial difference between the two. As Wright points out, the captivity in Egypt was a result of historical circumstance. By contrast, the Babylonian exile was punishment for Israel's sins.

This twist linked Passover expectations with the Day of Atonement. Because the exile was associated with the punishment of sin, the forgiveness of sins would be the sign that Israel's exile was coming to an end, that the long awaited Passover event was at hand.

In short, when Jesus is going about forgiving sins he's proclaiming the end of Israel's exile. Jesus is fulling Israel's hope that with the forgiveness of her sins her liberation and emancipation--her Passover--could now commence:

Isaiah 40.1-5
Comfort, comfort my people,
says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and proclaim to her
that her hard service has been completed,
that her sin has been paid for,
that she has received from the Lord’s hand
double for all her sins.

A voice of one calling:
“In the wilderness prepare
the way for the Lord;
make straight in the desert
a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be raised up,
every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,
the rugged places a plain.

And the glory of the Lord will be revealed,
and all people will see it together.
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

In short, there's no need to pit Christus Victor against the forgiveness of sins. In the life of Israel, these were a part of the same story.

And Jesus' death accomplishes both.