Last evening we discussed “texts”—messages and meanings from the “world” as well as those from Scripture.  One of the characteristics of emerging church is intertextuality—using texts from church and world to interpret each other, rather than privileging one set of texts completely over the other (for us that latter phrase would mean scripture always interprets world and never vice versa).  Frambach offers this thought.  “Emerging church communities take cultural texts as seriously as they take sacred texts, though cultural texts do not norm their belief and proclamation the way Judeo-Christian Scriptures do” (page 64).

Thanks go to Ben for sharing the song (text) with us recording by the “Wailing Jennies.”  Holding this song beside the words of 1 Corinthians 12 led to a fruitful discussion of how to use and benefit from intertexting.

Now to build on that.  The next item on Frambach’s descriptive list is “The Understanding of Suffering” (page 65).  “In emerging church communities,” he writes, “suffering simply is, and it is personal, social and environmental.”  The contrast is made with church as we typically know it—a place where suffering is suppressed, not discussed and usually glossed over.  Thus suffering people are often made, subtly, to feel unwelcome and are often instructed, once again subtly, to keep quiet about their struggles.  May it not be so among us.

Using intertextuality, we can perhaps hold cultural texts on suffering alongside our scriptural and theological texts.  I think of the recent movie, Million Dollar Baby.  It is a profound meditation on the necessity of suffering in a relationship rooted in love.  I wonder how that cultural text stands alongside a Christian text—for example, Romans 5:1-11.  I suggest this as a possibility for reflection this week.

Frambach offers a few more lines to guide this meditation.

--“Suffering is viewed as something to be joined, even befriended, rather than conquered or fixed” (at least in emerging churches).

--“To use a Lutheran theological category, sharing in the suffering of others is living the theology of the cross in community” (page 65, last lines).

Emerging Church is weary of the fraudulent triumphalism of western Christianity and seeks for the real substance of a cross-shaped church (Hennigs).