E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten
Kibbe Life in a Lifeless World
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-5140-1027-3
Verlag: IVP Academic
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Encountering Jesus in the Book of Hebrews
E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-5140-1027-3
Verlag: IVP Academic
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Michael Kibbe is associate professor of Bible and academic dean at Great Northern University in Spokane, WA. He received his PhD in New Testament from Wheaton College, and taught previously at Wheaton College and Moody Bible Institute. His other books include From Topic to Thesis, From Research to Teaching, and Godly Fear or Ungodly Failure: Hebrews 12 and the Sinai Theophanies. He and his wife, Annie, live in Spokane with their three children.
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Introduction
Starbucks, downtown Spokane, waiting for an appointment at the nearby Apple Store. Is there anything more generically twenty-first-century suburban American than that? I wish it hadn’t happened there, but it did. I was getting ready to teach a portion of my systematic theology course at Great Northern University. My first year of teaching that course, my first year of working at that university. John Webster, in his book Holy Scripture, is taking me to school. A word jumps off the page, a word he did not intend to have the effect on me that it did. Ectopic. It comes from a Greek word that means “out of [ek] place [topos].” The church, says Webster, is “ectopic” because it exists in an environment from which it cannot receive its life.1
Webster is talking about the church, but in that moment I’m not thinking about the church. I’m thinking about the first time I heard the term ectopic, and it wasn’t in a theology textbook. It was spoken by an OB-GYN as she rushed my wife and me out the door, into our van, and toward the hospital. Annie had been experiencing some miscarriage symptoms, and the pregnancy tests couldn’t make up their mind—were we expecting our second child or not? We showed up at the doctor’s office at 1:00 p.m., we arrived back home at our apartment at 7:30 p.m., and in between were the most surreal six and a half hours of our lives.
An ectopic pregnancy typically occurs when the fertilized egg implants itself in a fallopian tube rather than in the uterus (thus the alternate name tubal pregnancy). It’s “out of place.” That’s a problem, because it can’t survive—fallopian tubes are not equipped for nine-month residency. Sometimes the mother’s body recognizes the problem and miscarries. Sometimes it doesn’t, and the baby manages to grow a little bit from the sparsely available nutrients. And that growth is deadly, because sooner or later, the fallopian tube will rupture, and the mother will bleed out internally. Apart from advanced medical technology, such as ultrasounds and surgery centers, it’s a death sentence for the mom and for the baby.
“You need to go to the hospital.” “Can we stop by our apartment and—?” “No. Go to the hospital now.” Two hours later I’m sitting in the hospital waiting room, surrounded by friends, trying to keep it together until the digital screen on the wall switches from “Kibbe–In Operating Room” to “Kibbe–In Recovery.” By dinnertime I am helping Annie walk gingerly up the stairs to our apartment, where Sean, our one-year old, is sitting on the floor with some good friends, eating Cheerios and having not a clue in the world.
We barely had time that day to take a breath. But when we did, we had questions. Some logistical—how do we care for a toddler whom Mommy can’t pick up for six weeks? Some personal—will we ever get pregnant again? And, of course, the big one: What exactly just happened? Three of us entered that hospital, and only two came out. The surgeon saved Annie’s life by removing what he afterward called “ectopic tissue.” Tissue. That’s our child you’re talking about. We’re not angry at him—did I mention he saved Annie’s life and that he did so in the only way known to humanity at this stage of medical development? We’re hardly second-guessing the decision, but we still have questions.
We figured out the logistics, as so many families have in such circumstances. We did get pregnant again—our daughter’s name is Eliana, which means “my God answers.” We grieved and processed, with each other and with our community, the best we knew how. And we moved on together—until seeing the word ectopic in Webster’s book years later brought it all back.
It could have been a news headline, or a friend recounting their own story, or some other random experience. Any spark might have lit this flame. But God chose to use a technical book by a British theologian who wasn’t talking about pregnancy at all, and God did that, I think, because he wanted to lead me into another phase of this journey, starting with the recognition that Webster was on to something. The church is ectopic. It is out of place. It cannot receive its life from its location. But what does that mean, exactly? And if our life does not come from our immediate environment, from where does it come? How? And why? And who cares?
What no surgeon could do for our baby, God does for us. God sustains our life, collectively and individually, within an environment that is incapable of doing so by itself. This book is about how he does this, and why, and what difference it ought to make to my misplaced existence (quite a lot, as it turns out). And I don’t mind telling you that there might be some surprises along the way. The first surprise is where we go for answers to these questions. There is in the New Testament a book we call Hebrews. Hebrews was written to God’s people in their struggle to remain alive despite existing in an environment that could not provide that life—like a fetus in a fallopian tube, they needed sustenance from without. And Hebrews showed them—and shows us—how God provides that life, sustains that life, and invites us to put that life on display.
The second surprise comes in how, according to Hebrews, God has accomplished all this. If you’ve read Hebrews, or even if you haven’t, you might guess that the answer has something to do with Jesus. So try this on for size: Jesus, by virtue of his resurrected human life and priestly position at the right hand of the Father in heaven, sustains the lives of his brothers and sisters on earth until the day that he brings them into his universal inheritance and kingship over all of God’s creation. And in the meantime he invites us to live that life through faith, hospitality, sexual fidelity, generosity, and suffering.
You might also be surprised, as I was years ago, at how common ectopic pregnancies are. The medical literature estimates, based on reported diagnosed cases in US hospitals, that 1-2 percent of pregnancies in this country are ectopic.2 Given that between 3.5 and 4 million babies are born in the United States each year, that’s an astounding number of ectopic pregnancies in this country alone.3 But ectopicness comes in different forms. Being out of place and failing to find life in one’s current situation—that’s not a 1-2 percent occurrence. More like 100 percent. Who hasn’t experienced that? The teenager who went home in March 2020 for Covid lockdown and emerged two years later with nothing to show for it but gaming expertise and profound loneliness. I interact with people online all the time—why do I feel like no one really knows me? The middle-aged couple wondering whether they’ll bother staying together as empty nesters. I just don’t know if we’re headed the same direction. The millennial waking up to the feeling that they’ve been sold a bill of goods on the American dream. I thought I was going to change the world. The young single coming to the city for a first career opportunity, along with the widow slowly fading away in a rundown apartment. How can I be known when everyone who knows me is somewhere else? The young mom whose personhood has disappeared beneath a pile of diaper bags and Pack ‘n Plays. Is this all that there is to me? The midcareer professional sitting at a Starbucks waiting for his Genius Bar appointment—the irony of being confronted with my own ectopicness in that particular space is quite something. The best and brightest of modern American marketing told me this was precisely the kind of person I wanted to be.
We’re all ectopic. We’re all living in a place that can’t sustain us. So the real question is, What are we going to do about it? Option A is to believe the hype, believe the lies, about substances or behaviors or relationships or possessions or positions or experiences that are presented as sources of meaning, fulfillment, sustenance, life. And to pursue life where it may not be found is to pursue death—every ounce of energy and every drop of sweat given to pulling that bucket out of the empty well is simply taking us closer to our inevitable demise. Is it really surprising, given how quick we are to follow these paths to nowhere, that addictions are skyrocketing and mental health is in free fall?
Option B is to seek life where it may be found. That, ultimately, is what this book is all about. But notice, right here at the beginning of our journey together, that option B is not to leave the place we are in. God has led us to the wilderness. God has called us to live ectopically, not to escape ectopicness. So this book isn’t about leaving the world. “This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through”—nope. Wrong. This world is our home, but at the moment, this world can’t sustain us. The question isn’t how to get out of the world but how to continue to be in the world and yet receive life from beyond it and be a conduit of life to it until that day when God renews the world and it becomes a place of life for us once again.
I don’t mind telling you that there’s some heavy lifting on the interpreting-the-Bible front in this book—Hebrews is dense; there’s just no way around that. So I’m going to do my best to lead you through some deep waters without either of us drowning. We’ll start with a little warmup on what Hebrews is, where it came from, and what sorts of questions might be the right ones to keep us on track. And on occasion, throughout...
