Backroads to Emmaus

Estrangement

2010-08-01T23:15:00.000-07:00

I have been a long time estranged from posting in this blog. And in parallel, I have a long time felt estranged in my relationship with my Father. That is to say, not only have I not been to church for several weeks, but I have not taken the time to pray, to read, to serve, to worship, to the point of relative estrangement.

I know that I have often said, because it is true, that you don't need to perform any purifying rites or jump through hoops or meet prerequisites to draw close to God. You don't need to become clean, pure, and good in order to approach Jesus because the point is Jesus's redemptive grace, not the worthiness of our offerings. So is it right that I feel estranged from God when I haven't been paid attention to Him in a while? It's not as if I have to wash myself in some river or sacrifice a spotless lamb or subsidize an orphanage in Darfur, and then I can go to church on a buzz of righteousness. In a very syllogistic sense, sin means separation from God, Jesus's death saves us from our sin, therefore our estrangement from God is stripped away wholly by Jesus's sacrifice. But in a relational sense, if you've wandered away from your lover for a while, there's a very personal process of reconciliation that needs to be worked through by both parties.

I'm reminded by the culmination of the story of the prodigal son in Luke 15. Surely, the son knew that his father was good and merciful. But after squandering his wealth in wild living and falling to the abject position of feeding pigs for a living, the son returned home with humility, yes, and meekness, yes, but also a sense of estrangement. The son said to himself, I will go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired men.

The son returns with no sense of entitlement. He knows who his father is. But does he see himself as a beloved heir because of his father's extravagant love? Or does he see himself as a son estranged from his father, beginning the road to restitution? Dramatic irony prevails; we know how the story ends. The prodigal son is embraced joyously by his father, who sets aside his judgment, wrath, and sorrow, and runs to welcome his lost child home. And in a certain sense, I guess it's less important to figure out whether the prodigal son was right or wrong to feel such abject undeserving because this story is a true and human story, and whether or not we should feel that way, when I have estranged myself from God, I do feel like the prodigal son and I do feel that God runs to me with welcoming and encircling arms.

I used to identify more with the older brother: the one who was patient and diligent for years and never got the recognition he deserved. I used to be troubled by that the idea that I was siding with the wrong perspective, and thought it would be a sign of wisdom and a realization of truth when I finally came around to identifying with the younger brother, the prodigal son.

I prefer suspended chords to tonal resolution in music, but I think I prefer reconciliations to estrangements in real life.

Hot Sun, Dry Sand, Empty Nalgenes

2010-05-26T12:58:00.000-07:00

I've liked deserts for a few years now. I originally liked mountains exclusively, and I still like mountains, but as someone once said, there's always gonna be another mountain. Deserts convey this wonderful sense of expanse and vastness, this sense that you're seeing all there is to see and at the same time, there's more beyond the horizon in every direction; and they test the adventurer's mettle in a different way than a mountain. Where a mountain will dictate how quickly or deliberately you climb, what vistas will unfold around the next switchback, or the level of your adrenaline as you navigate a particular sector, a desert makes the challenge simple and puts it directly in your control: how far are you willing to go?

Usually, when I venture into the desert, I bring a finite number of Nalgene bottles with me, and when I run out of water, I turn back. (I hate it when authors casually reference their experience like that, as if most authors have ever spent a lot of time climbing Mount McKinley or rebuilding a war-torn African village, but know that I have been in a lot of deserts.) This method pretty much tells me how far I can allow myself to go with a guaranteed assurance of survival.

Several thousand years ago, a group of liberated Hebrew slaves also set out in a jaunty exodus into the desert of Sinai, and they also carried a finite amount of water in urns or sheepskins or whatever sufficed before BPA-free polypropylene came into common usage. They probably refilled all their containers on the eastern side of the Red Sea, knowing it might be some time before they had another opportunity, and headed off following a giant pillar of cloud or fire, depending on outdoor lighting. And at a certain point, they ran out of water.

To this point, the Children of Israel and I share a relatively common experience. Faith is the point at which you shake your water bottles empty and continue into the desert based only on the promises of God's deliverance.

At a certain point when I was living in Charleston, I remember thinking it funny that I had recently purchased three used books, and all three of them had to do with the main characters crossing desert landscapes, and two of them were about them perishing in the wild. The defining characteristic of a desert is that there's no obvious water out there, so it's not the same as rolling the dice and committing yourself to fate. Once you've run out of the water you brought, your plan is pretty much no plan. So it took a lot of faith on the part of the Children to continue on to what most of us would call probable death. Especially since, as some pointed out, they could've just returned to Goshen. But the Children carried on into the wilderness for forty long years, relying on God alone, unable to use anything they had brought to ensure their survival. This allegory is true in terms of our ultimate condition of sin and our need to be saved by God, but physically, corporeally, I don't think I've ever been in such a place of trust, in a place where I so exclusively needed God's provision.

The Children did not always acquit themselves with grace and patient faith. They complained bitterly, rebelled, and doubted the Lord, wrongfully. But they were in a place in the desert, astoundingly dependent on God's provision, that few of us have seen. Few of us have the faith to shake our water bottles empty and continue our journey reliant on the providence of God.

To the Unknown God

2010-05-11T20:21:00.000-07:00

Back in college, when I was going through a stagnant period in my relationship with God, my college ministry advisor suggested that I re-read the stories of Biblical role models. Abraham, Moses, David, the Apostles. Jesus. I think oftentimes when we think of analyzing a role model, we start out with the blanket approach of finding application and "we should do as they do," so when we read that Stephen admonished the Pharisees, we instantly begin to think of modern-day Pharisees that we're supposed to be admonishing. And sometimes we skip that step of actually considering what these Biblical heroes did and appreciating in humility how greatly they acted for God.

Incidentally, South Park just put out an episode entitled "The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs" that cautions the viewer not to enter a reading of a text with too many preconceptions. Well, that was one of the lessons, among many, from that episode.

In my eyes, Acts 17 is one of those episodes for Paul that stands out as a high point in his ministry simply by the feat alone, not because it was Paul and we're supposed to be like Paul. The act is a speech Paul gives. The place is Areopagus. The audience is a group of Athenian philosophers who "spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas."

Paul begins his speech acknowledging that the Athenians are very religious. He mentions that he has carefully studied their objects of worship and found an altar labeled TO THE UNKNOWN GOD: a philosophical ideation of the unknownable. He then boldly posits that he is going to reveal this unknown god to them. Paul then describes in short the nature of our monotheistic creator God, emphasizing the difference between an omnipotent spiritual God and a human-formed idol and explaining the relationship we are meant to have with this God. He incorporates a quotation from a Greek poet and uses it as the basis for further thought. He ends his speech with the admonition that in the past, God overlooked idolatry, but those days are over and judgment is pending through a man that God demonstrably raised from the dead.

Let's look at what Paul did there, in just a few paragraphs. Sometimes we read too much into the written text of an oratory, forgetting that speeches are meant to be heard in the moment and not re-analyzed on a line by line basis, but the Athenians are erudite enough to indulge us on this one.

Paul demonstrates that he is familiar with the Athenian religious and philosophical beliefs. He has made a careful study of their temples and their idols, he knows of their religious devotion, and he even quotes one of their poets' writing to them. How many Christians out there take such a righteous pride in their oblivion to other cultures, including pop culture? I certainly haven't studied the holy texts or practices of other religions enough to engage them on their own terms. I couldn't quote you one passage from the Koran or the Bhagavad Gita. But Paul wouldn't have been effective here if he had just sailed in the breezeway of the temple and started selling his own wares without any appreciation for the mindset of the people he was supposed to be engaging.

Yet even as Paul acknowledges the Athenians' piety and philosophy, he is bold enough still to declare the truth of God in no uncertain terms. He says, "You say there is an unknown God. Here is the God you do not know." It is a remarkable segue, both unashamed and sensitive. Paul realizes that these men are searching for truth: it is a mark of wisdom to acknowledge that there are things we do not and cannot know. Instead of rebuking them for their polygamy and idolatry, he recognizes that they are searching and points the way to the truth. Paul also doesn't hold back on his authority on the truth. Sometimes, we get herded too far down the path of acknowledging the unknown. We might desire too much to find common ground, and when someone says, "Well, can we really know anything about God and Jesus?" we might hesitate to declare an absolute truth, and instead fall back to a subjective "Well, we can't know anything for certain sure, here's what has worked in my life." The truth is that we can't know everything; the truth is also that there are some things we do know, things that we have considered carefully and found to be true and corroborated by the Holy Spirit, and we should share those things unashamedly. And somehow, delicately and confidently, Paul threads the needle between sensitivity and audacity in this section of his speech. It's a trick we would do well to learn.

It's worth noting that Paul does not launch into an exposition on the life and sacrificial death of Jesus in this speech. If you're reading the passage for an instant apply-to-my-life, you might find this absence problematic because how are you supposed to present the gospel without the four-step methodology? But if you're reading the passage and appreciating that it's Paul talking to a group of intellectuals and doing so brilliantly, it's more than an example. It's upper level oratory. But it is an interesting question and maybe an inexplicable gap, considering that the Athenians began the exchange by asking Paul to explain his new teaching on Jesus and His resurrection. Paul only mentions those items at the conclusion of his speech, as demonstration of God's intent for man to repent. One has to wonder how much the Athenians have already heard about the gospel of Jesus.

The speech ends with the reception given it by the Athenians in the crowd. Some sneered, some said that they wanted to hear more thoughts on the matter, and some became disciples. Sometimes we can hear truth and only sometimes it will move us.

Romans vs James

2010-02-20T01:04:00.000-08:00

When posed with the query, "I really have intentions to start reading the Bible again. Where is a good book to start?" I would always point to Romans. Romans is a great summation of Christian theology, written in very organized and accessible language, and its chapters flow from one logical thesis to the next. The first chapter describes humanity's moral corruption and deviation from God, the second continues on to explain the law that delineates between holy and unholy and the condemnation under which we stand, and the rest of the book goes through the arguments of whether Jewishness is of spiritual import, the exemplification of godly faith by Abraham the patriarch, the explication of God's provision and our redemption through Jesus Christ, the exhortation to live transformed and righteous lives as new believers, our obligation and indebtedness to God's divine law, the explanation of the great hope we have in God's salvation, and the call to bring the gospel to the Jews and to the nations. In fact, most evangelical Christian literature follows a similar model: describe God's perfection and creationist relationship with man, demonstrate man's sin and corruption, show Jesus as the hope and assurance of salvation, and give counsel to lead transformed and missional lives in response to the gospel truth. Romans is overall an excellent read for establishing the basics about sin, the law, salvation, grace, and the relationship between God, Jesus, me, and you.

For the advanced subscriber to the gospel of Christ, I've recently decided to point to the book of James. Once upon a time, I was pretty dismissive of James because here was my understanding of the epistle:

Chapter 1, be persevering under trials, check.
Chapter 2, faith without works is dead, understood.
Chapter 3, no man can tame the tongue, simple concept.
Chapter 4, be nice and humble and peacemakers, okay.
Chapter 5, be patient for the Lord's coming and pray a lot, got it.

It's not that I oversimplified the text, although that certainly is true of most of my literary distillations. James is not a difficult or abstruse read. It lacks the bizarre prophecies, scriptural cross-references, or theological nuances that are more replete in a lot of other New Testament books. James is, to the casual reader, an easy book.

But the more I've progressed in my pursuit of Christ, the more I am convinced that this Christian life and our approach to scripture is not based in conceptual understanding. It is a benchmark of maturity for Christians that they progress from being able to read and interpret the Bible on an intellectual level to becoming the people that exemplify the better parts of God-inspired character. The first time you read James 1, you might read it like I read Proverbs: good wisdom, good advice for living so that we can all play nicely with each other. But the next time you read James 1, maybe you'll consider Jesus dying so that we could shrug off the shackles of sin, the dregs of our very nature, and become one with God and become like Him in righteousness, and you'll be humbled by the sort of person you are supposed to be: a person who welcomes trials and difficulties with joy in his heart, a person who takes pride in his humble circumstances knowing that he is where God wants him, a person who perseveres patiently through harsh circumstance spurred onward by an eternal perspective, a person who is quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger, a person who keeps a tight rein on his tongue, a person who looks out for widows and orphans and keeps himself pure. And that's only the first chapter, succeeded by the chapter that tells you that faith without substantiating works is in vain.

If you read that passage not with the goal of conceptual understanding, (check, I've got this passage down) but with perspective on the sort of person you are and the sort of Christ-like nature God expects of His servants, it is utterly humbling and transforming, and you come to an awestruck understanding that only through God's grace and the transforming work of the Holy Spirit will you become anything like that because it's not in our nature. You come to appreciate that Jesus modeled this righteousness to unfettered perfection. You draw closer to God's heart.

Romans is a good book for the head. James is a good book for the heart. As Peekay would say, first with the head, and then with the heart. Ecclesiastes is probably Level III.

Ghost of Christmas Recent

2010-02-09T19:00:00.000-08:00

23 December.

Here are my notes from the Christmas service I put together for interested crew members:

It’s easy to see, in a theological sense, why Good Friday and Easter are important commemorations for Christians. Jesus’s sacrificial death and subsequent supernatural resurrection are the cornerstone of our salvation and our restitution with God our Father. But why is Christmas, the supposed celebration of Christ’s birth, important to the believing Christian?
A possible and increasingly common answer is that it’s not. Many people would point to the season’s commercialist nature, the date December 25th’s origin in the pagan festival of Saturnalia, and the seeming insignificance of a birthday as a divine milestone to infer that the observance of Christmas is irrelevant to the Christian faith.
In response, I came up with two serious reasons that Christmas might be a worthwhile occasion to celebrate. The first stems from the precedent that it is appropriate to celebrate special days to commemorate special occurrences. In the book of Leviticus, God ordained the Feast of Passover for the Israelites to remember their deliverance, the Feast of Unleavened Bread to further remember His distinctions of holy and unholy provision, and the Feast of Tabernacles to remember their time of nomadic itinerance and utter dependence on God in the wilderness. Although not biblically mandated, it seems also appropriate to celebrate a special day commemorating Jesus’s arrival into the world: the miraculous beginning to a very special and remarkable 33 years, perhaps the greatest 33 years in the history of mankind. Even if it’s since been moved to the wrong day, it’s a day worth celebrating.
The second argument for Christmas is the significance of Jesus’s incarnation. It’s true that His death on the cross was what saved us from sin, overcame death, and captured eternal life for believers. But His life among us on earth gives an inexorable, indelible portrait of the sort of God we’re supposed to worship: it’s a historically true rendering of a God who really loves us. If you feel sorry for someone, you give them a handout. We observe this behavior in the way we give to the Salvation Army or the Vietnam Vet around Christmastime. We feel sorry for the disenfranchised and the destitute, we see that it is right to help, and we give. But if you love someone, you leave where you are and go to them. If your brother or sister had fallen into difficult times, you would buy a plane ticket and travel thousands of miles to be with them. And given our plight and sinful condition, our God responded not with some blanket, impersonal measure, but instead left where He was and came to us Himself.
I like to think, and I think it’s reasonable to think, that Jesus didn’t see His time on earth solely as an obligation towards the plan of salvation, but that He actually likes us and liked to spend time with us. He wept with Martha and Mary, ate with His disciples, took the time to coach and mentor them personally, played with little children. His coming to earth was a matter of love, not duty. And Christmas is a celebration of, yes, His coming to earth in human form.
It is an important truth that God loved us not only enough to die for us, a one-time event, but enough to live with us day in and day out and still love us. In light of that love so demonstrated, how then should I live?

2 February.

My most recent favorite passage: James 1:26-27:
“If anyone considers himself religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself and his religion is worthless. Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”

I'm On A Boat

2010-01-01T01:42:00.000-08:00

I remember in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, there was a great metaphor using a boat in the middle of an open ocean as a commentary on existentialist direction, or lack thereof. And in Searching for God Knows What, Don Miller explains how humans view and interact with each other in terms of a lifeboat metaphor. It's my turn to explain what the spiritual implications are of being on a boat.

I'll start with some observations on not-being-on-a-boat, since that's probably a common experience for most prospective readers. If you're not on a boat, and you're trying to live a gospel-centered life, you could easily find yourself with a lot of decisions to make. Whether to go to this church or that one. Whether to actually go to this church or that one. Whether to hang out with this set of Christian friends, or this set of non-Christian friends. Whether to spend time in the homeless ministry or mentoring the youth group. Whether to spend discipleship time reading a book, working in a soup kitchen, or just forgoing the practice altogether. Whether to tithe and how much. The simple and powerful decision to follow Christ can somehow manifest itself in a lot of pick-and-choose as to what features you want to upgrade your package of Christian lifestyle.

When you're on a boat, you're confined to a 300 foot cylinder several hundred feet underwater with 150 other guys in a complicated and demanding work environment. The paradigm of decision-making is distilled to one decision: every day, all you can decide, and all you have to decide, is whether to follow Jesus or not.

You have no privacy. Your life is utterly transparent because you live, eat, sleep, and work in the same 300 foot cylinder. This transparency precludes the duplicity of any sort of double lifestyle that self-conscious Christians sometimes find themselves in: party hard on Saturday night, then show up at church the next morning and smile at everybody; or be angry at your wife and children and then show up to the office with a genial temperament. If you're having a bad day, you can't decide to stay at home until you can make yourself presentable to the outside world. If you have a secret addiction to pornography, you can't shut the door so no one will know. You are who you are.

The sentiment of "you are who you are" is troubling for people who don't like who they are or who feel that they're not who they should be. But the truth is we should be very pleased with who we are because we are supposed to be redeemed by the salvation of Christ, made new in His image, transformed through the continual work of the Holy Spirit. We are to have been perfected. So this test of transparency, of being on a boat, is a test of whether you really believe that you stand where you say you do with Jesus. If you believe in the transforming grace of the gospel, then the fact that you are who you are is not a source of shame but a glorious testimony to the gospel of Christ.

Being on a boat also means that you have nonstop opportunities to live out the gospel because you can't defer the nonstop instances of interaction with other people. The questions of how to forgive, how to show mercy, how to turn the other cheek, and how to be a servant are much less academic because you are afforded those chances all day, every day. And you can't choose your church, and you can't choose whether you're surrounded by people you like or not: you've got what you're given. So it's not ever a question of whom you're going to love, but whether or not you're going to love. If you think about that condition, it's a truer sort of love.

Many people do not have the chance to be on a boat in the same way that I am on a boat. But I think it's still a good idea every once in a while to distill all decisions away from decisions regarding circumstance and focus on whether we want to follow Christ or not.

A Journey and a Hiatus

2009-11-07T09:19:00.001-08:00

I will be getting married today, and I will be deploying until sometime in the spring. I will not be making regular posts to this blog for some time.

You know those pregnant moments in life? Goodbyes at the airport where there's just a little too much time for uneasy silence and smalltalk before they call boarding on the flight. The mornings before afternoon weddings where you're excited for the event but not sure what to do with yourself. These meaningful moments where there is a heavy and palpable sense that something should be said or expressed, tears should be shed, memories relived, promises made in earnest, but we hesitate.

I have a sobering thought that maybe a lot people hesitate and don't say what they want to say when the moment is right, and the moment passes. That life begins to chronicle a series of uncomfortable silences where everyone there is thinking the same thing. That we're familiar with an expected script of what life should look like but sometimes don't actually know how to live. I don't want to live life that way, as a series of expectant, tentative moments. If you want to hug someone, kiss someone, love someone, tell someone something, you've got to do it.

I'll catch you all (I don't actually know who reads this thing) in six or so months.

Inerrancy and Bad Metaphors

2009-10-28T06:45:00.000-07:00

"Inerrancy" is a term I have been prone to throw around casually with regard to the Bible. Most people with a passing familiarity with Christian belief take it as standard doctrine that the Bible is inerrant, or at least infallible. Inerrant states that the Bible is free from all errors or contradictions and is true in every aspect, spiritual and historical, while infallible is a more limited understanding that the Bible is true in spiritual and practical matters with the possibility for minor contradictions as a historical account.

I'd always approached discussions with biblical inerrancy as one of those standard Christian assumptions. If you're a Christian, let's agree that we both assume the Bible is true and therefore use it as a benchmark for any other conclusions or inferences we reach. If you're not a believer, then for the sake of this conversation, we'll treat the Bible as a useful historical and cultural text and exclude biblical inerrancy from our list of givens.

The idea of biblical inerrancy has only recently come to the forefront of theological discussion. Before modernism and postmodernism pushed the reader to consider the source and author's perspective for a written text, most people wouldn't think to call the Bible inerrant because it was assumed to be so. But now we are trained to read between the lines, put things in context, research amplifying information, ask who the author is and what his motivation might have been.

So I was sitting in bible study one day and we were considering one of King David's psalms. And we were running into a wall with one of the psalm's phrases; I'm not sure which, but for "a man after God's own heart," King David says a lot of angsty, emo things. So I asked, do we have to take everything in the psalms to be true?

Some girl: What do you mean, Matt? Don't you believe the Bible is true?

Well, sure I do, I said. I take it as historically preserved and accurate, and I take it as moral and spiritual truth as well.

Then you have to take the psalms as truth too.

What I'm saying is, even if the Bible is historically accurate and spiritually true, there are things said in the Bible that we don't take as truth. "Am I my brother's keeper?" for example. So here, included in the Bible, is a collection of poetry and songs written by a King of Israel. Good stuff, to be sure, but infallible?

The girl didn't understand my question, which might be just as well for reasons I'll bring up in a few paragraphs.

I recounted this story with another friend, my friend who's studying to become a pastor, and he shared his perspective. He said he didn't like to say anything about the Bible that the Bible doesn't claim about itself. This practice seems wise, since Proverbs 30 (and Matthew 5) warns against adding to Scripture. And my friend said that the strongest statement the Bible makes about itself is that it is useful:

"But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work." -- 2 Timothy 3:16

(On a related note, it's clear from 2 Peter 3:15-16 that Peter at least considered Paul's epistles to be in the category of Scripture.)

The perceived danger with disavowing biblical inerrancy is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If the Bible is possibly flawed, then everything we thought was true tumbles into a whirling chaotic mess of doubt, and what do we base our faith on? Jesus Himself says (Uh oh! Did He actually say it?) that we are to follow His words as if we were building a house on a solid foundation.

My friend and I agreed that we generally believe in Biblical infallibility and probably inerrancy. The logic "God is perfect, the Bible is God's book, therefore the Bible is perfect" is not a watertight syllogism, but it's certainly tenable. Maybe there is no statement in the Bible that claims its own inerrancy, but there are still very good arguments based on archeological consistency, textual preservation, and the personal and historical work of the Holy Spirit that would give excellent bases to take the Bible as a book of truth, and moreover, truth that transcends any other source of truth out there in the canon of things-written-down. If people want to go on believing and telling each other that the Bible is inerrant and infallible, I don't take it as a bad thing because in all honesty, I'm still part of that camp, even if I might start to avoid saying it explicitly. And sometimes if you don't throw that card down on the table right away, you'll interact better with the other players at the poker table, and who knows, even learn a thing or two yourself.

While the poker metaphor is still hot, there's a definite wild card here, and that's the omnipresent Biblical phrase "w(W)ord of God." It's a definite player because it shows up everywhere in the Bible and there are so many significant things said about the "w(W)ord of God." John 1 ascribes that title to Jesus and His incarnation, but is that a universal application of the term? Consider as an example Psalm 30:4-5:

"Who has gone up to heaven and come down?
Who has gathered up the wind in the hollow of his hands?
Who has wrapped up the waters in his cloak?
Who has established all the ends of the earth?
What is his name, and the name of his son?
Tell me if you know!
Every word of God is flawless;
he is a shield to those who take refuge in him."

It would be speculative to delve into this discussion without more advanced etymological scholarship. I'm pretty sure I need to either find or become a Greek and Hebrew scholar before I can really say anything intelligent about the matter.

I've told you that my friend Peter thinks the first eleven chapters of Genesis are parabolic in nature. And my friend Orestes interprets the book of Job as fabular. Clearly, Scripture is not something to take with blanket literalism, not if we respect it, but a dynamic entity with which we as Christians will have to wrestle. You know the great thing about wrestling with something? You have to get up close and personal with it.

Psalm 102

2009-10-21T14:55:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I considered a psalm. For some time, I've felt pretty distant from God emotionally, so the "hide not thou thy face from me" aspect drew me to the 102nd psalm. Here begins the commentary.

1 Hear my prayer, O LORD;
let my cry for help come to you.

The most sound way to read the diction is that the second clause augments the first; that is, the psalmist pleads for the prayer to come through to the Lord's attention. Alternatively, I like to think it could also be him asking that his cries for help be directed to the Lord, as opposed to some other false earthly source of hope or aid. It's a common failing to look to false doctrines or flawed humans when we should be looking to God; therefore, his prayer is appropriate.

2 Do not hide your face from me
when I am in distress.
Turn your ear to me;
when I call, answer me quickly.

3 For my days vanish like smoke;
my bones burn like glowing embers.

More than a time of dire trouble, I've recently been concerned with the temporal nature of life. How multiple days seem to pass quickly, uneventfully, without clear meaning, irrevocably. It's a distressing thought, well expressed by the line "my days vanish like smoke." It's not only times of tribulation, but also times of stagnancy, where it is well to ask God to enter into our lives.

4 My heart is blighted and withered like grass;
I forget to eat my food.

5 Because of my loud groaning
I am reduced to skin and bones.

6 I am like a desert owl,
like an owl among the ruins.

7 I lie awake; I have become
like a bird alone on a roof.

Again, I'd posit that we wither and atrophy not only at the presence of suffering and persecution, but also in the absence of a vibrant and dynamic relationship with the God who is our only source of life and vitality. Food and sleep lose significance and life loses color.

8 All day long my enemies taunt me;
those who rail against me use my name as a curse.

9 For I eat ashes as my food
and mingle my drink with tears

10 because of your great wrath,
for you have taken me up and thrown me aside.

11 My days are like the evening shadow;
I wither away like grass.

Here we enter into the question of whether the psalmist's sentiment, that the Lord has wrathfully thrown him aside, is theologically viable or not. I once got into an argument in Bible Study where one girl couldn't understand what I was asking: just because we accept the Bible and the Psalms therein to be true books, does that necessarily make the psalms themselves infallible expressions of truth?

12 But you, O LORD, sit enthroned forever;
your renown endures through all generations.

13 You will arise and have compassion on Zion,
for it is time to show favor to her;
the appointed time has come.

14 For her stones are dear to your servants;
her very dust moves them to pity.

15 The nations will fear the name of the LORD,
all the kings of the earth will revere your glory.

Recently, I was reflecting on the whole emphasis on God's glory and fame, and how big of a deal His reputation seems to be. I think a lot of the questions we have about the matter stem from the more self-centered cause that we want to be ourselves recognized too. Doubters will ask, why is God so concerned with His own glory? If He were so great, wouldn't His reputation be pretty immaterial to Him? And the answer that I find reasonable is that in a hierarchical paradigm where God is all-that omnipotent and expansive and awesome, the natural response of subordinate creation would be awe and worship. It just makes sense. Therefore any less of a response, any more casual or less reverent, is inappropriate and out of place, reflective of something broken in the relationship.

16 For the LORD will rebuild Zion
and appear in his glory.

17 He will respond to the prayer of the destitute;
he will not despise their plea.

18 Let this be written for a future generation,
that a people not yet created may praise the LORD :

19 "The LORD looked down from his sanctuary on high,
from heaven he viewed the earth,

20 to hear the groans of the prisoners
and release those condemned to death."

21 So the name of the LORD will be declared in Zion
and his praise in Jerusalem

22 when the peoples and the kingdoms
assemble to worship the LORD.

It's a pretty powerful idea that future generations not yet created would praise the Lord because of what their predecessors wrote down about Him.

23 In the course of my life, he broke my strength;
he cut short my days.

24 So I said:
"Do not take me away, O my God, in the midst of my days;
your years go on through all generations.

The author seems to be reminding the Lord of his own mortality. Other question: if the author's life is so tiresome and ill-begotten, why does he ask for more years? A few possibilities come to mind: certain aspects of our God-given lives are more advantageous to live out and experience than the glories of heaven, or the author has some purpose or work he still wants to finish, or the author is fallible and is expressing a misguided desire to stay on earth and defer his reunion with eternity.

25 In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth,
and the heavens are the work of your hands.

26 They will perish, but you remain;
they will all wear out like a garment.
Like clothing you will change them
and they will be discarded.

People probably read verses like the ones above and think, oh, it means that God lasts forever and has an eternal nature, but I suspect few people have thought about the heavens, the stars and galaxies and nebulae billions of years old, being discarded and changed like used garments. We can't even fathom how crazy ancient certain celestial phenomena are in comparison to how long we've existed, much less the timelessness that the psalmist ascribes to God by comparison.

27 But you remain the same,
and your years will never end.

28 The children of your servants will live in your presence;
their descendants will be established before you."

Do we have that same communal and multi-generational attitude about faith? When I think of my faith with the Lord, do I think of myself and my ministry, or do I aspire to a long-lasting vision of thousands of descendants enjoying the fruits of a tree I labored to plant right now? God sees His work on a large scale, and we would understand Him better if we endeavored to adopt that mindset as well.

Hypocrisy

2009-10-10T05:55:00.000-07:00

is the one word that almost always comes to conversation when people mention why they disdain or rejected the church. The mention of the word implies that there was once a genuine interest in what the church was centered around: Christ, His mission of love, and our resultant mission of love; but when stark disparities arose between the "talk" and the "walk," people were turned off and walked.

My friend Joe mentioned this experience last night at dinner, remarking that he had always been expecting a church to be passionate and proactive about going out and doing something good, vice showing up once a week and checking off their good deed for the day. It's an almost archetypal commentary, albeit with many singular exceptions.

Hypocrisy is, at its most distilled definition, saying one thing and doing another. The fact that the church is errant, that its members are sinful, does not alone make it hypocritical: we espouse a doctrine that claims that man is depraved and sinful and that our sinful nature is everything absolutely wrong in the world. Our story is a story about Christ's love, not our own. In fact, it's a story of the redemption of our fallen nature through no action of our own. If we sin, we are simply being consistent.

But we also preach a doctrine of love and redemption, and if people see us as hypocritical, it's because they expect that love is transformational. That if we as Christians really encountered and believed in this amazing, divine love that we claim to experience, on a daily basis, we would be different people altogether.

The broad fact that so many outsiders see Christians as hypocritical means that there could be a universal expectation or understanding that true love transforms people into their better selves, and if you believe in good creation, into who they were meant to be. In this age of deconstruction and relativity, I think that a universal assumption like that is remarkable.

In this discourse, I sort of bastardized a lot of significant parts of our theology. The Bible does speak to Christians walking by the guidance of the Holy Spirit to lead transformed and perfected lives of righteousness and love. It does espouse a definite morality for the adherence of its followers. It doesn't say we can get away with murder because we are fallen, but that we are through Christ "a new creation." But the point still stands: people expect the love we talk about to be life-changing and epic. People are interested in the idea of life-changing love. Aren't we supposed to have the ultimate answer for that? If there's hypocrisy anywhere, there it is.

RAOK

2009-10-10T05:37:00.000-07:00

Since I graduated college and moved three times in the course of about a year, it's been challenging to find solid Christian fellowship and community. You find a church or a bible study or community group, and most of the regulars already have their preset social circles. They're not trying to be exclusive: it's just human nature.

Here in this particular phase of my career, I'm a hard guy to get to know because of I'm on 12 hour days, rotating shift-work. In other words, I basically cannot attend or commit to anything regularly because I might be starting my day at 4 am or 4pm, who knows. The mercurial schedule makes it so that I can attend church maybe once or twice a month and bible study with about the same frequency.

My friend Nathan happens to be my friend, not because it was easy or convenient for him, but because he makes it a priority and an intention to be my friend. When I first met up with him about five months ago, he said he really just likes hanging out with me and wanted to be my friend. Nathan is a newlywed, which means he has extra incentive to stay in the house, especially at odd hours of the night. But he's chosen to make room in his schedule for me, often last-minute or at unconventional times of day, purely because he values our relationship.

That's the thing that I'll remember most about Nathan. Not his earthy wisdom, not his Christ-centered ethos, not his sense of humor, not his insight, although all those things are certainly there, but his simple demonstration of kindness and love in going out of his way to do something good for me. He is a busy, busy man, and he made our friendship a priority.

It's a nice thing in itself, but it also gives some perspective. Do we love God because He is perfect and righteous and holy and just and magnificent? Or do we love Him because in an extreme act, He went out of His way to do something great for us? He is a busy, busy God, and He made our relationship a priority.

The Start of Something New

2009-10-01T23:06:00.000-07:00

So I'm getting married next month and it seems like time for some reflections on that elephant. To clarify, by elephant, I'm referring to the significant happy event, not the fiancee.

The format of my reflection shall be a dialogue between two fictional characters, Bebo and MattDunn. It shall remain a didactic exercise for the reader to determine whether one of these personae is allegorical for a real-life person of relevance and whether one is simply contrived for this blog post.

Bebo: Thanks for meeting me here in this quirky coffeeshop, MattDunn.

MattDunn: You're welcome, Bebo. I don't even like coffee, but I'm a bit of a junkie for human companionship, so I'm generally amenable to meeting with anybody, anytime, anywhere if it means good conversation.

Bebo: So is it true that you're getting married? Facebook tells me so, but you've also been twice previously married on Facebook, so I don't know whether to take you seriously.

MattDunn: Yup. It's true. It's happening.

Bebo: Wow, so tell me about your fiancee. What do you like about her? How and why did you come to decide that she was going to be the one for you?

MattDunn: I wanted to start my dynasty soon, and she's a woman of child-bearing age with all indications of fertility.

Bebo: True statement, but that describes all the dozens of women over the years who fallen madly in love with you that you've had to fight off with a stick.

MattDunn: Well, I'll tell you, when we first started dating, I found myself focusing on more of the differences between us than any valuable commonalities. And I'll tell you, most of us aren't born naturally able to love unconditionally and sacrificially, and to think of each other in the best possible light. I think by default, we tend to want to find carbon-copies of ourselves. So I was a little more critical of her then. I used to think: she doesn't sing as well as I do, she doesn't dance as well as I do, she doesn't cook as well as I do, she doesn't follow sports, and she doesn't watch a lot of movies, so what does she have going for her?

Bebo: Seems a little harsh.

MattDunn: I agree completely, and it's pretty immature, but when you think about it, everybody seems prone to that sort of self-centered thinking. Girls will grow up making lists of attributes for their ideal husband: he has to love animals, he has to be a musician, he has to be funny, he has to be taller than I am, he has to care about third world countries, or whatever; the point is that most people make lists of what they're looking for in their counterpart and expect a real, three-dimensional, breathing human being, flawed and fantastic at once, to match up with this fantasy wish list. It's trivial and superficial and unrealistic when you put it like that, but it's common, and I fell into that a little bit.

Bebo: So it wasn't her fault for not measuring up to your expectations.

MattDunn: It was my fault for projecting trivial expectations on her. You can't approach a relationship with the subconscious hope of the other person changing into someone else for you. That's not fair to them. Where do you get off asking them to change like that?

Bebo: So can't a person have standards for marriage?

MattDunn: Absolutely they can and they should. But they should realize that they're not on the market for finished products. People are meant to do a lot of their growing up through the experience of marriage; they're not supposed to be polished, completed works prior to it. I know a lot of girls in college who automatically ruled out a lot of earnest and good guys around them because they weren't able to see that the guys were works in progress, still learning to be real men.

Bebo: Yeah, you still haven't answered my question about why you picked your fiancee as the one for you.

MattDunn: Simply put, she has the biggest heart of anyone I know. I've never known anyone who loved me as completely and unconditionally and sincerely and unreservedly as she does. She is never too tired to talk about my day. She is never unwilling to put aside what she has in front of her to take care of something for me. She used to walk a mile and back to my apartment just to do my dishes or laundry when I lived off-campus. If there's anything she can do to better my day, she does it without question or hesitation. She never holds back affection or affirmation. She always, always smiles a megawatt smile when I come into the room. It's like I turn on her smile just by existing. She has a lovely smile. She is my biggest fan, and if one of our deepest needs is to be known and loved and liked for who we are, I will never find someone who could love me better. There's an excerpt from a book I was reading recently called Third Class Superhero by Charles Yu:

It's the truth like he has never heard the truth before. She doesn't mean it with sentiment or virtue, doesn't want credit in the big book of good deeds or bonus points towards Heaven. She doesn't regret it or begrudge him a single minute of her life. Her love for him is not something that can be changed -- it's physics, not emotion: It's the atomic weight of radium. It is vast and it is exact. It is tender and finite and inexhaustible. Her love for him is a fact. Her love for him is a brutal fact about the world.

That's what I think about it, Bebo, and I'd have to be a prize idiot to walk away from that kind of love. It's the best thing in the world.

Bebo: MattDunn, it sounds like your time dating Emily has really deepened your understanding of what love is.

MattDunn: It's definitely transformative. It's also nice to find a sweet Christian girl who will watch South Park and The Ultimate Fighter with you. And on days that I miss The Ultimate Fighter, she'll even send me a link so I don't have to search for the episode on Google and spoil the results of who wins the fight for myself.

Bebo: How does Jesus Christ fit into your perception of marriage?

MattDunn: I can think of three distinct ways that the personage of God is irrevocably intertwined with the concept and practice of love, and marriage, at its most ideal, is the culmination of love here on earth. The first way is that we humans are created in the image of a loving God. Bespotted and adulterated as we have made ourselves, 1 John 3 tells us to "behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God! [...] Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him." That same chapter tells us that our ability to love is a God-given gift: "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not love God, for God is love." So if we can act in love and live a life where we love others in a mode pure and complete, we are doing so because God made us as reflections of His nature and design.

Bebo: All right, fair enough. We were made by a loving God in His own image, so it stands to reason that our capacity to love would follow suit. What's your second connection to God?

MattDunn: Well, it's the fact that Jesus Christ demonstratively taught us to love. Everything He wants us to do, He did himself. In 1 John 3, we are told that we love "because He first loved us," and that "in this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His son to be the propitiation for our sins." Jesus didn't just sit outside the temporal realm and make broad declarations about love -- He came down and did it the hard way. So when Paul tells us men in Ephesians 5, "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her," it is a powerful command to love sacrificially.

Bebo: So how does that play out in your personal relationship with Emily?

MattDunn: One of the biggest lessons we have to learn to be decent human beings is learning how to forgive. And forgiveness is not a blanket nicety: it's a personal surrendering of your own rights to allow for the shortcomings of another person who has damaged you in some way. Sometimes when Emily did something stupid or wrong, I would kinda hold on to that anger or the fact that I was right and she was wrong, and even if I said I forgave her, I would remember it the next time she made the same mistake. There's no such thing as "forgiving and not forgetting." Forgiving means you have to give the other person a blank slate, every time, up to infinity, no matter what. But the lesson was really transcendent for me because it made me think of how my sins were personally grievous to God, to the point where He had to bleed and die for them to be forgiven: not just statistics on a sin-spreadsheet He could erase with the push of a button. And yet His mercies are still new every morning, so that's something that's expected of me.

Another more metaphorical example is debt. Emily has a pretty sizeable college tuition debt, and when we get married, I will assume and pay most of the debt. This situation had the potential to engender resentment and frustration, but a good friend pointed out to me that when Christ positioned Himself as the bridegroom to take the church as His bride, He had to pay off her debt with His life and in doing so made her perfected and spotless and new. He counted it as worthy to pay off her debt because it meant He had his perfect bride. There's certainly something there I can take away from His example as I go about paying Emily's financial debt.

Bebo: MattDunn, you are very wordy and long-winded, and I'm starting to suspect my only role in this dialogue is to break up the paragraphs into more accessible chunks.

MattDunn: By Jove, I think he's got it!

Bebo: That's what I thought. What about the third way that God connects to your up-and-coming marriage?

MattDunn: Just that imperfect people like me are unable to love completely without the daily and miraculous grace of God. It doesn't come easily or naturally to us, despite being made in the image of God. The call to love someone as your wife is an incredibly high and demanding task to be commissioned with, and I'm definitely not up to it on my own, so this marriage will be an exercise in faith and dependence on God for it to work.

Bebo: That's it?

MattDunn: What? What do you want from me?

Bebo: You've spent all this time talking about love, and you haven't even mentioned 1 Corinthians 13. Or the whole Genesis 2 description of Adam and Eve being created compatible for each other.

MattDunn: Oh, everyone talks about 1 Corinthians 13. It's expected.

Bebo: So what is marriage to you? Is it mutual cohabitation with benefits?

MattDunn: It's supposed to be the ultimate witness and testament to God's love. You're supposed to be able to point to a marriage and say, that's what love is, and that's the best glimpse in this lifetime of what God intended when He designed us to love, and the best gift that He has ever given us. I don't think that's true of most marriages, but it's supposed to be. And yes, I'm also looking forward to the benefits.

Bebo: Sex!

MattDunn: Uh, a mobile beer bottle dispensary, but sure, that too. My friend Patrick, who plays a lot of video games, once referred to women as "mobile spawn units." That's another good role for them.

Bebo: So talk to me about your take on the biblical roles of man and woman in marriage, and how instrumental communication is going to be, and whether you've been introduced to the 5 Love Languages or the Act of Marriage, and how will key aspects of your marital intimacy change as you grow older...

MattDunn: No, that stuff doesn't interest me so much. Look, we'll make it work. Marriage has been made to work with great success without a lot of taught methodologies. I love her and she loves me, it's a true statement on bad days as well as good, and God is on our side on this one. It'll all come out okay.

Bebo: What's the best piece of marital advice you ever heard?

MattDunn: From the movie Claudine: "Love is when a man brings the groceries instead of eating yours."

Bebo: So is there a possibility that you'll be getting married and then deployed the next day?

MattDunn: No way, that only happens in the movies.

Hey Stephen

2009-09-07T20:29:00.000-07:00

This Sunday, I had an amazing time at church because I was talking to my pastor's wife and she was discussing how she couldn't watch regular boxing anymore because she found the violence of mixed martial arts and the UFC much more appealing. Right on.

The pastor also preached a sermon on Acts 6-7, about the life and martyrdom of Stephen, and it was a great reminder of some simple truths for me. But as I opened my Bible to Acts 6, my eye caught the verses preceding the chapter:

"And when they had called for the apostles and beaten them, they commanded that they should not speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go. So they departed from the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for His name."

This verse reminded me that we don't have to rely on foreseeable consequences to come of our ministry, or of our sacrifices. In my last post, I lamented the idea that we would have to suffer through certain periods of our lives, that we would have to sacrifice some of our God-given time to something other than our happiness. And how often do we feel the need to substantiate or rationalize our suffering with a definite benefit or positive consequence that comes of it? But in this instance, the apostles don't see hundreds come to faith immediately afterward, nor do they receive the encouragement of the stubborn religious elders saying, "You're right, Jesus is the Messiah!", nor do angels descend from heaven and give them their notarized deed for a celestial mansion. They take a beating for the sake of their beloved Lord Jesus, and they are glad for the simple privilege to do it.

And Stephen! I hadn't read his story in a long time, so it was a powerful thing to recall the details. Stephen was a young man, still new to the Christian faith, but firm in his convictions and bold in his testimony. And as he delivers his reproach to the council of priests, himself full of the Holy Spirit, he seeds "the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God." To offer historical context, in the Judaic judicial system, physically standing was a way of affirming someone's testimony, a more demonstrative equivalent of our placing one's hand on the Bible and swearing. To see Jesus affirming his testimony: what an honor for Stephen, the fearless fledgling believer! And he didn't ask the same questions that you or I ask, what good will come of this action. In all candor, shortly after his martyrdom, "a great persecution arose against the church which was at Jerusalem; and they were all scattered," "and as for Saul, he made havoc of the church, entering every house, and dragging off men and women, committing them to prison." It's true that in the long run, the diaspora of believers helped spread the gospel across widespread Middle Eastern regions and sent Saul on his fateful way to Damascus, but there was no way anyone saw that coming at the time. There's no doubt from the way the story is presented, from the testimony Stephen gives, and from the way Jesus Himself stands behind it, that Stephen was doing a magnificent thing for His Lord, but if Stephen were asking the same skeptical questions that I often ask, he wouldn't have acted as he did.

Of course there's a place to think sensibly about using our time and energy well, and of course cost-benefit analysis has its applications in ministry. But for where I am, it's important for me to remember the value of suffering simply in faith for my Lord, to hope that I'm worthy of the same calling as the apostles, and to not make personal cost-benefit the basis of how I approach the gospel and the pursuit of Jesus Christ.

I hope that in time and by transforming grace, I would rejoice to be counted worthy to suffer shame for His name.

This Mortal Coil

2009-08-30T02:57:00.000-07:00

I woke up today and I thought, "I hate my job. At least, I hate this phase of my job. I wish I could just skip the next two months of my life and be done with it."

And then I was struck by the gravity and wrongness of my statement.

I guess recently I've realized that I'm concerned with my own finite mortality. I'm especially scared of growing old and dying. It's not that I'm worried, like Hamlet was, about "what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil." It's just that God gives us this one life, that we know of, to make count, and it's flying by day by day.

There are so many things I want to do, so many things I want to see, so many things I want to experience. This human existence that you're living in is the same one in which poets have penned sonnets, in which conquerors have taken Asia, in which architects have built skyscrapers, and in which lovers have built families. Life is too short to consider any of it expendable. I am 24: I am already 1/3 to 1/4 of the way through my expected term, and closer if unforeseen circumstances come to bear, and I feel like I'm just getting started. How can I afford to consider any period expendable? We do love to anticipate things to come, but I can't think of saying of any present period of time, "I wish it were over already" because it's part of a brief, finite lease on this earth. When we abide in the mentality that we wish now were over already, we don't consider the expendable time, and it's almost the same as if we had pressed our magical fast-forward button. --

-- I have to leave for work now. To be continued.

Continuation: there are a lot of things that could be said on the topic of finite mortality and carpe diem and all that, and most of them have been said to the point where there's nothing incredibly new on the subject I could post here. Suffice it to say that while there are things we suffer through patiently and deliberately, there is never a time where you should be wishing away a part of your God-given life. When that dilemma arises, either change your attitude or change your circumstances.

Samaritan

2009-08-12T23:03:00.000-07:00

So the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) has worked its way into popular reference, but today I was confronted with the fact that I might not really understand the story well enough to be a Good Samaritan.

I guess if I found someone lying bleeding and battered on the roadside, I'd probably stop and help that person out. That's what any decent person would do. The Good Samaritan is not a story about what any decent person would do because at least two decent people walked right on by the injured man. Priests, righteous men, and the like. I've heard the story once preached (here's the link, just click on the sermon from 6/15/08) in a way that fleshed out a lot of significant contextual details about the Good Samaritan story: that the road from Jericho to Jerusalem was a long, straight road, infamous for violence and robbery, and that a despised Samaritan would be the biggest target for getting his ass kicked on that road, much more so than an Aaronic priest, giving him great incentive just to hurry on his way, and that the naked victim was virtually unidentifiable, essentially an everyman whose only definite characteristics were that he was beaten half to death on the side of the road: that he was in need.

Today I was driving home from work at 12:30 am, and I passed an everyman with his thumb up under a streetlight along the winding country road to home. Faded baseball cap, orange reflective construction worker vest, blue jeans, cigarette. Everyman. As I watched him diminish in the rearview mirror, I saw him stare long and resignedly at the back of my car. Just another car passing by. And I thought to myself that I didn't know anything about this guy, except that he appeared to be in need of a ride, presumably to somewhere like home, but at least to a better place to spend the night than the side of the road in the middle of rural dark nowhere. I wondered why I was so willing to volunteer at homeless shelters in large, sponsored groups, but not to pick this hitchhiker up. A lot of excuses surfaced immediately because we're quick to excuse ourselves: I was tired, I had a long day behind me and another ahead, this man could be a dangerous psychokiller, no normal person would expect to give hitchhikers a ride, I owe it to my family and fiancee to live safely, and a million more. But I didn't really think the guy was a psychokiller. If someone doesn't own a car and wears a construction vest, that makes him underprivileged and therefore violent? I've always said that love means you give the other person the benefit of the doubt. And I realized that I had no good reason not to help him out. That's the thing about helping people: you can start anytime you decide it's what you want to do.

So after five miles of this mental back-and-forth between the little angel and little devil on either shoulder, I turned my car around and drove back to that intersection, to the streetlight, but he was already gone. I was a little relieved, but also ashamed. If Jesus tells a story illustrating how to love your neighbor, and in that story, the person with the most to lose chose to act in love at great personal risk, then a guy like me can definitely give a guy a simple car ride home without letting pre-judgment or inconvenience stand in the way.

Is "pre-judgment" a sort of etymological precursor to "prejudice"?

Addendum: Today (the day after) I saw him again and I gave him a ride home. It would have been a 10 mile midnight walk. His name was Luke, and he told me his life story, and he told me the key to a successful marriage is communication. He's worked at the same paper mill with the same partner for 15 years. I think he was pretty stoked about not having to walk 10 miles.

QNA

2009-08-10T21:15:00.000-07:00

I've often been told that my thought progression is typically non-linear. A week ago, I was trying to remember a phrase that I was going to write down that could serve as a simplification for how we meander through problem-solving life, and another question occurred to me: is life a question that begs an answer or an answer that begs a question? And of course, that was a much better thought than the one I was originally trying to recall.

Of course, you can substitute anything meaningful for "life" in that question: is truth an answer that begs a question or a question that begs an answer? What about God? I know people who have come to faith in Jesus Christ because He was the answer to a long series of philosophical and ontological questions: people who started by asking what sort of God might exist, and what sort of God would need to exist for the world to make sense, and what real love might look like in demonstrated form, and how a universal sense of justice and mercy might play out, and they ended up discovering the gospel as an ultimate answer to their sojourning and a completion to what they were missing. This sort of thinking is well found in C.S. Lewis nonfiction. Life was the question that begged an answer. But I also have known of people who have encountered Jesus Christ, in some form or another, and been pressed to something deeper, to ask questions and consider aspects of life they had never before considered or seen. Maybe Paul is a great example: in his encounter with Jesus, Jesus's glory and presence literally blinds him, and based on the reality and magnitude of his experience with Jesus, Paul goes on to ask (and address) questions about his eternal status, how Christians should live, how the church should act and govern itself, and where the young set of believers stood in their faith and their theology. As far as I can read from his writings, Paul did not initially approach life with questions: for him, God was the answer that begged the questions.

There are decidedly people in both camps, and I think nowadays, I sympathize more with the answer-begging-the-question camp. Having gone to a small, private high school, I was exposed to a lot of innovative teachers who were always trying new pedagogical methodologies. The first three days of a physics class might start with an open-ended discussion on the subject, "What is science?" One semester exam for a math class was simply the question: "Is mathematics created or discovered? Explain why." The starting point for learning, for the search for truth, was the big questions, and the value was in the experience of formulating frameworks and testing answers. But there were also the science teachers who were effective by simply making something explode in a beaker on the first day of class, demonstrating to us beyond a doubt that science existed and that it was something to be reckoned with. And based on watching a volatile exothermic reaction or nodes materialize out of nowhere in a vibrating transverse wave on a piece of string, we had to figure out relevant questions and probable answers. And it seems to me that a lot of the Old Testament is God taking that same show-me approach. Bam! Burning bush. Bam! The Red Sea parts. Bam! Pillar of fire. Here I am, I am God, you know beyond a doubt that I am out here, real and in your face. Now that you've seen me, I'm sure you have some questions because I am the Answer that begs the questions.

This demonstrative approach surely finds itself also in the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, to where the apostle John declares, "This is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and send His only Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins."

When I was growing up, I read almost all of the prominent child psychology books of the 1990's. It's weird, but it's true. My mom would borrow these parenting books from the library, and I'd read them to stay ahead of her so I could see what new parenting techniques or attitudes were forthcoming, so I ended up reading Reviving Ophelia, The War Against Boys, and numerous others, including Why Johnny Can't Tell Right From Wrong. That last book addressed trends and implications in moral education in American schools, and in particular, it advocated the old-school William Bennett approach of teaching virtues like honesty, courage, perseverance, and using stories to reinforce the points. The book contrasted this recommended approach with the more recent tendencies to present children with ethical scenarios and have them formulate a sense of morality based on their conclusions: if your family were starving, would it be morally permissible to steal bread to feed them, and so forth. Why Johnny Can't Tell Right From Wrong made the point that children are not naturally good -- they have to be taught morality -- and presenting them with complex ethical scenarios before their moral sensibilities are established is disorienting at best and damaging at worst. The book made a lot of ancillary points that were stupid and obsolete in its thinking, but it gave more credence to the notion that sometimes answers should precede questions.

I'm not saying that my proclivity towards the answer camp is more correct (that conclusion is left as an inference to the reader), but it's probable that this classification might serve as a helpful way to understand people better: whether they begin with questions or whether they begin with answers. I think conversations will make more sense. I think life, truth, God can work with either.

I'm a Smart-Ass

2009-07-24T00:02:00.000-07:00

Today, during pre-marital counseling, the male half of my mentor couple was asking about blogging, and how it's set up, and I explained to him about free online sites like blogger.com and how some blogs were just desultory expositions on what people did during the day ("Today I walked around the Rice village and ran into an old friend") and some are centralized around a specific theme ("Sarah's Southern Cooking Journey" or "Fred's Foray Through Med School" or "Paul's Political Profferings").

He asked, "So why would people read your blog?" (in a general sense) and I said, "Um, because it's awesome?"

Of course, an old friend once told me, "I always thought of you more as a wise ass than a smart ass."

MLIA.

Double Hockey Sticks

2009-07-14T01:34:00.000-07:00

In general, people are too quick to distill the Christian faith into a dichotomy of going to heaven or going to hell, and the point of believing in Jesus is to avoid burning for all eternity. That summary builds a religion motivated by fear and misses the central concept of falling in love and pursuing a personal relationship with a mysterious and wonderful God. There's a lot of imagery around heaven and hell that derives more from Dante and Jonathan Edwards than from any biblical text.

But as undesirable as that dichotomy feels, our notions of heaven and hell are very difficult to dismiss, especially in light of the scattered, but dramatic biblical passages about what happens after physical death. In Matthew 13, Jesus describes what He calls "the end of the age": "The Son of Man will send out His angels, and they will gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and those who practice lawlessness, and will cast them into the furnace of fire. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father."

There's so much scattered and arcane Scripture that makes reference to "the end times" that Christian eschatologists fill books compiling interpretations of the clues: what the 1299 days from the removal of "the daily sacrifice" to the establishment of "the abomination of desolation" might really mean, or what the number 666 really entails. And what comes of that is a fragmented, piecemeal, and usually terrifying perspective on the afterlife: the sort that spawns novels like the Left Behind series or sermons like "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."

In the book Searching For a God to Love, Chris Blake makes a compelling case that the whole "burning in hell" concept espoused by popular Christianity is "the worst lie ever told." He makes the point that a lot of our conception of hell comes from the ancient Jewish mythology of Sheol, the dark underworld, and that a Christian paradigm built on fear is irrational, since the most frequently given biblical command given by God to people is "do not fear" or "be not afraid." Also included is an illustrative story about a man who meets an angel walking down the road. The angel carries a bucket of water in one hand and a torch in the other and when asked, explains that the water is to put out the flames of hell and the torch is to burn down the castles of heaven -- "Then we'll see who really loves God."

There's an artificial contrast here set up between wanting to believe in a desirable God and wanting to believe in a real God, where real is defined by Scriptural inferences. The former mindset says, of course God is good and loving and merciful -- what kind of God would be cruel enough to send your parents or grandparents or best friend to eternal damnation? What kind of God would be impotent or uncaring to save them from a horrible fate? What kind of God do you believe in? And the latter mindset says, well, the Bible objectively mentions heaven and hell, so what kind of idealized, indulgent contrivance of a God are you hoping for, when the Scriptural evidence of judgment is before you? The artifice comes from the fact that our conceptions of heaven and hell are scattered notions at best; we know some things, but not all things, and we know what many Scriptures say, but not what they mean. I had a youth pastor who said he was once convinced that the Apocalypse was coming in the 80's because the winged demons that scoured the earth were clearly the UH-1 Huey helicopters in Vietnam. So to say that our popular paradigm of heaven and hell is objectively Scriptural is a narrowly focused perspective at best: it's like reading the parts of an automobile tech manual about the warning indicators and concluding that the car is inherently a death trap. And the truth that has to come to bear is that God is loving and God is incomprehensible to us: surely in those two truths, we can allow that there may be a truth that satisfies both the Scriptures we read and the God we want to follow.

I think about these things because my grandparents are not believers in Jesus Christ and because they're aging all-too rapidly. I wonder why this circumstance doesn't seem like a pressing issue for people, especially my parents. Why nobody worries about the prospect of old people, our loved ones, perishing eternally. Is it that we think that there are other ways to the Father besides Jesus? Because (with allowances for Romans 1) most of us think there aren't. Is it that we really don't believe in the reality of heaven and hell? Because most of us say that we do. Is it that we don't think we have an integral role to play in the advance of the gospel? Because most of us say we have. Is it that we don't care about our grandparents, our relatives, our friends who have not found salvation in the One we claim to be the only source of salvation?

I know it's bad salesmanship, and worse relationship for that matter, to be pushy about things, but you'd think more people would be showing more concern about their grandparents getting older or even their friends approaching death day by day. You'd think we would be like Paul, who so desired the salvation of the Jewish people that he claimed he would give up his own salvation if it would guarantee theirs. I don't see that most of us are like that. We have a lot of thinking to do to reconcile what we believe about heaven and hell and whether that adds up with any Scriptural basis and how we want to think God would treat our loved ones who are at once sinners in the hands of an angry God and beloved children of a kind Creator and people who mean the world to us. I know in my head that we are all sinners who deserve what we get and that the redemption of Jesus Christ and our promised eternal bliss is an unwarranted mercy, so it's missing the point to blame God; but I think in my heart that my grandparents are good people who shouldn't go to hell and that if they die unsaved, I'll probably be asking God why He didn't make a more foolproof system. Does hell, as we think of it, even exist? If Satan is to be eternally punished, would God really give him his own eternal sovereignty? Either we haven't given it enough thought, we've found resolution for our questions on the matter, or we're desperate and dying on the inside from the encroaching crisis.

And if we're wrapped up about the issue, I think that brings us back to what kind of God we believe in. And the reminder that God is loving and that God is incomprehensible helps me think nothing so specific as, maybe unrepentant sinners won't go to hell, but something more broad and true: that God is loving and God is incomprehensible to us. Surely in those two truths, we can allow that there may be a truth that satisfies both the Scriptures we read and the God we want to follow.

A Large Debt is a Great Opportunity to Put Your Money Where Your Money Used to Be.

2009-07-08T23:07:00.000-07:00

I think most of us want very much to love and follow Jesus faithfully. Especially when the matter comes to money and material possessions, we endeavor to say what He would want us to say because He Himself had a lot to say on the matter: Jesus lived a nomadic lifestyle, derided rich Pharisees and tax collectors, and ate with beggars and prostitutes. We admire that He was so willing to be poor because He was so aware of what true wealth is. Theologians debate back and forth about what it could mean that the Beatitudes in Matthew say "Blessed are the poor in spirit," and the equivalent verses in Luke read simply, "Blessed are the poor." Sermons tell and re-tell the story of the poor widow who, in giving her last mite to the church, gave a bigger contribution than the other more prosperous donors. And so on.

There are also many who tend to temper this profligate dismissal of the value of money with arguments for good stewardship and counterarguments on the side of material pursuits. These people are the people who would say, "Well, if you really believed that, then what's to stop you (or everyone) from donating all their money away and living a happily ascetic homeless existence?" They would continue with that thought, "See, you don't really believe that Christians shouldn't have money. It would be poor stewardship and horribly irresponsible if you didn't take care of your family and their future. Plus, you have to earn money to give it away. Also, the whole Bible talks about taking care of the poor and destitute among us. If having no money isn't a significant thing, why make such a huge deal about them being poor and us not being poor?" Some such arguments may be motivated by a desire to preserve a comfortable status quo, but a lot of it is well-intentioned and well-thought-out.

So if tomorrow, you suddenly and unexpectedly incurred a $100,000 dollar debt, how would you react? It would be a wonderfully pragmatic test to see what you really thought about the matter of money.

I suspect many Christians would interpret such circumstance as exactly that: a test. Either they need to pray and believe harder, or it's one of those karmic what-goes-around-comes-around phenomena, but if they wait it out in faith, then eventually God will bless them, and probably (although never voiced aloud) financially. Either that, or there's some lesson hidden in the circumstance that they have to figure out, some revelation about how they're living their life, and if they figure it out, God will restore normality. It's how our common interpretation of the book of Job and Chicken Soup for the Soul resolve: no one just dies poor and alone without the closure of either a belated reward or a valuable life lesson.

"The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed earnestly that it would not rain; and it did not rain for three years and six months. And he prayed again, and the earth produced its fruit." -- James 5:16-18

"And the Lord restored Job's losses when he prayed for his friends. Indeed, the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before." -- Job 42:10

The other extreme is also pretty conceivable. Many people simply divorce the issue of money from any sort of spiritual application. Money is one of those necessary tangibles, the currency of this temporal existence, and something that won't exist in heaven, so why bother placing all this spiritual value on who has it and who doesn't, and how you spend it?

"Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return there. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." -- Job 1:21

"Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moths nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." -- Matthew 6:19-21

"Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit,' whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.'" -- James 4:13-15

Those people are like the people who are quick to point out the Biblical distinction that the love of money, vice money itself, is the root of all evil. There's a lot of Scripture out there that would suggest that distinction is simply splitting hairs: that to seek or have lots of wealth is to keep a Pandora's Box on top of a gasoline tank next to a live, plugged-in arc welder. What I'm saying is, a lot of Scripture almost makes you uncomfortable to be on the side of the rich.

"Come now, you rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming upon you! Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver are corroded, and their corrosion will be a witness against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have heaped up treasure in the last days. Indeed, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the reapers have reached the ears of the Lord of the Sabbath." -- James 5:1-4

"Listen, my beloved brethren: Has God not chosen the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which He promised to those who love Him? But you have dishonored the poor man. Do not the rich oppress you and drag you into the courts? Do they not blaspheme that noble name by which you are called? If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself,' you do well; but if you show partiality, you commit sin, and are convicted by the law as transgressors." -- James 2:5-9

"Now godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and clothing, with these we shall be content. But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness and pierced themselves through with many sorrows. But you, O man of God, flee these things and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, and gentleness." -- 1 Timothy 6:6-11

The funny aspect of being $100,000 in debt is that there are a million Christian books and solutions for how to manage the money you have in a Christ-honoring way, but few satisfactory answers to the issues of having no money. And probably the best way to think about that one is to do what Paul said in his final letter to Timothy: remember Jesus Christ.

"Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head." -- Matthew 8:20

"You were not redeemed with corruptible things, like silver or gold [...] but with the precious blood of Christ." -- 1 Peter 1:18-19

"For you were bought at a price." -- 1 Corinthians 6:20

If you had suddenly and unexpectedly incurred a $100,000 debt, and you had to pick among a myriad of Christian perspectives, my hope would be that the circumstance would draw you closer to the mind of Christ, and that it would tangibly remind you that once you were in grave and inescapable debt, and that God paid it for you at great personal cost. And that oh, to grace how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be.

Job Satisfaction and Other Shorts

2009-07-08T22:54:00.000-07:00

Job Satisfaction IN THE NAVY!
(Binary Scale)

Find pleasure: 1
Search the world for treasure: 0
Learn science technology: 1
Begin to make my dreams all come true, on the land or on the sea: 0
Learn to fly: 0
Play in sports: 0
Skin dive: 0
Study oceanography: 1
Sign up for the big band: 0
Sit in the grandstand when your team and others meet: 0
Sail the seven seas: 0
Put my mind at ease: 0
Make a stand: 1
Protect the motherland: 0 (training commands to date)
Join your fellow man: 1

The perks of my job are apparently highly exaggerated.

This next generation of Americans will be one of selectively excellent spellers. Specifically, every female will be able to spell the words "bananas," "delicious," "tastey" (sic), "Fergie," and "glamorous." This phenomenon recalls an earlier generation that was able to spell the words "some," "pig," "terrific," "radiant," and "humble." If the wisdom of the ages were collated, the sentence "Some terrific, delicious, tastey, glamorous, radiant, bananas, humble pig Fergie" would be flawless except for want of a predicate.

Seriously, did no one think to spell out "laodicean" in a pop song? The Scripps spelling bee could've gone so much further.

Current Events

2009-06-27T17:10:00.000-07:00

So Farah Fawcett died this past week. Farah Fawcett goes to heaven and meets St. Peter, and St. Peter says, "Farah Fawcett, you seem like a good person who's led a good life, and I'm also secretly a big fan of Charlie's Angels, so I'll grant you one wish." Farah Fawcett shuts her eyes and thinks for a minute, then says, "I just wish there were something that could happen that would make all the children of the world safe."

Man Things

2009-06-22T18:19:00.000-07:00

I noticed a few days ago that the men's bathroom at work has a bank of four urinals. In accordance with man law, it's very bad form to take a urinal adjacent to someone already peeing: protocol dictates one empty stall as a buffer. So why then would you design a bathroom with an even number of urinals in a row? You're basically wasting a space because only two people can pee in a bank of four, whereas two people could still pee in a bank of three and maintain the necessary one stall separation.

Recently, I went to a social gathering with the men from my church in Saratoga. We ate wings and drank beer and for this particular Monday night, the men gave sound wisdom and supportive prayer for one of them who was about to get married. I generally like these guys, and I realized that I felt somehow that they were more real, genuine people because they were at ease with themselves and because they drank, smoked, and cussed about as often as I do, which is something you rarely find in a group of men who take their faith and their church seriously. The pastor was there and everything. Now, it's obviously true that these vices or habits have nothing to do with being either authentic or pretentious, or even good or bad. But it's interesting that I had to consciously recognize my thought as an errant misconception. Winston Churchill's quotation, "Never trust a man who has not a single redeeming vice," came to mind, and while you can debate its truth, I think the perception is a powerful one.

I know a lot of strong Baptists out there who would flip out at the presence of alcohol at a church gathering, and I tend to opine that you shouldn't add extraneous rules to biblical living: just because you don't like alcohol or you think social drinking is a bad idea doesn't mean you can make it a biblical principle not to partake. And the same with smoking or cussing or gambling. And I hate the idea that what separates us from the world is anything other than the redemptive grace and salvation of Jesus Christ, as opposed to the stereotyped behaviors of not-smoking, not-drinking, not-cussing. But at the same time, one has to pause upon reading Romans 14, which says that even the perception of sin can easily lead fallible people to real sin. And while it's not the case for me, could some people be motivated by the desire to be perceived as a "cool Christian" as opposed to a churchified square? Because doing anything solely for that reason would also be a bad thing.

Things to think about at tomorrow night's poker party, and by think about, I mean think about while I'm possibly smoking, drinking, and gambling.

Vive La Compagnie

2009-06-15T22:13:00.000-07:00

I am the one who encourages other believers to step outside of their comfort zones and to push past Christian convention. But here is something else that is true: it's always a palpable blessing to come home to a fellowship of believers.

My friend Mithun reminded me of that truth in his recent blog post:

"Much of it has to do with, I believe, the assumptions that pervade my environment. In law school, all of my reading, all of the class time I attend, and most of my conversations with friends have an implicit secular assumption. Behind each word lies the quiet whisper of 'there is no God, there is no God, there is no God….' Here, the opposite is true. The reading and lectures, as well as all the conversations with my 109 fellow Blackstone legal interns, have a common premise which is not at war with my deepest beliefs, but instead is in harmony. Every word has in its background the growing declaration of 'Christ is Lord, Christ is Lord, Christ is Lord….' I am beginning to re-view the law, society, and culture, from a Christian perspective."

There is great value in a questioning mindset, and there are definite problems with camping in a sheltered Christian comfort zone. But the follower of Jesus Christ is often best set up for success in the company and encouragement of other disciples. As Ephesians 4 explains,

"And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head -- Christ."

By default, I tend to push for the consideration of alien ideas, for re-thinking theology through different perspectives and paradigms, for syncretistic thinking. These approaches have their place and their benefit. But reflecting on Scripture, there are multitudinous key passages that warn the reader: build your house upon solid ground, vice shifting sand (Matthew 7). Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ (Colossians 2). Do not despise prophecies. Test all things: hold fast to what is good (1 Thessalonians 5). O Timothy! Guard what was committed to your trust, avoiding the profane and idle babblings and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge (1 Timothy 6).

Scripture is clear and consistent on the point that there are a lot of false ideas and philosophies out there that would ask you to believe in their veracity; Scripture is adamant that we hold fast to Jesus Christ and His gospel, and it commands us so because God knows we are easily distracted and confused, and that by leading us away from life, false ideas lead to destruction. Strong fellowship in community with other Christians is one of God's great safeguards for us.

My friend Bonnie asked my opinion about her possibly dating a friend with firm agnostic beliefs and remarkable six-pack abs. And what I told her was this: that you can't substitute a lifetime partner who will ground you in the truth of Jesus Christ and always remind you of your first, best love for a conversationalist, no matter how good a conversationalist this boy may be. It sounds judgmental, and it's not meant to be, but I'm convinced that in marriage relationships, the goal is to look out for and promulgate the other person's welfare, chiefly in the sense of his or her relationship with God. A brilliant conversationalist makes a good friend, but Eve was formed to be Adam's helper and conjugate.

I've had these thoughts for a while, but the watershed moment for me was a few weeks ago during church service. The church I attend in Saratoga Springs includes as part of its service a time for faith stories or sharing, in accordance with 1 Corinthians 14:26, which frankly is a great practice. And one of the ladies said three words with great authority and conviction: "Father, you reign."

I've posted a lot of words and thoughts on this blog, and I've spoken and listened to even more with other thinkers, but sometimes, when someone speaks the truth, all it takes are three simpler words conveying one simple concept, and you're left with nothing but awe and appreciation. Because to that point, it had been a long, long time since I'd stopped to admire God for who He is, to dwell in the truth of "Father, you reign."

We do love the notion of being called to remote places as lone emissaries of the gospel. We pray the prayer of Isaiah when he declares, "Here am I, Lord, send me." We use the words "stranger in a strange land" and "in but not of the world" with considerable frequency. Sometimes, God does call us to leave our comfortable place and go to Nineveh alone. And it's true that Jesus, in His final hours on earth, was very, very alone in His path.

But I like to think that Jesus's time on earth wasn't a lonely one. He was certainly relegated to a human body and away from His rightful place with His Father. But do you think He felt alone surrounded by lepers, prostitutes, and tax collectors? Or do you think He felt joy to live in communion and proximity with His beloved creation, whom He had foreknown and for whom He gave His life? I think Jesus took real joy in fellowship with His disciples in particular. It was certainly good motivation to bring the fish and the bread to Lunch Bunch.

Like a King, I may live in a palace so tall
With great riches to call my own.
But I don't know a thing in this whole wide world
That's worse than being alone.

All this to say, while God may sometimes call us to a wilderness time, I'm happy to have found a church in Saratoga Springs.

The Two Hour Interlude

2009-06-07T19:25:00.000-07:00

I spent most of today making a delicious meat stew, partially in hopes of bartering for some birthrights, but I got no takers, which is probably what I deserve for using beef in lieu of venison.

The other night at Bible study, I realized how much it matters to me that I approach Scripture in a way that I can really legitimately and usefully understand it. My current job involves a lot of technical instruction and training from written operational procedures and technical manuals, and a lot of them are incorporate a lot of glaring inconsistencies, shaky assumptions, shady explanations, or loose approximations that engender a lot of indignant protest from the exacting engineering major being trained. But for the sake of consistent training and operation, we have to go with the flow and accept what's written in the technical manuals: we have to hit the metaphorical "I Believe" button. Well, I realized I have a really hard time just letting things go with Bible study. When someone says, "Oh, I read this article online that said this is the answer, so there we have it" and considers the matter settled, I have a hard time not pushing the issue because I view the study of Scripture as an imperative pursuit of truth. I want to make as few blind or unfounded assumptions as I can. So the thought crossed my mind that we shouldn't have an "I Believe" with the Bible. A second later, I thought that sentence was hilarious, and so far, nobody else has found it remotely funny.

But on the topic of unpacking assumptions and textual understandings of the Bible, some of my friends from my old Messianic Jewish congregation sent me a link to a two hour sermon entitled The Hebrew Yeshua vs. the Greek Jesus. The title doesn't really apply until the last fifteen or so minutes of the 2 hour video -- a more descriptive title would have been "Rejecting the Exclusivity and Arbitrary Nature of Rabbinical Authority." If you have two hours free, absolutely watch the video. Watch it with a grain of salt (some of his facts and conclusions are a little dubious), but also watch it in the context of how you interpret truth from Scripture. It's a very compelling message.

I jotted down some notes, some observations to supplement the heavy-handed cases made in the sermon.

-- Gordon makes the case that the Pharisees, by expanding the Torah into a legalistic and hypocritical system, transformed the Law from something doable to something impossible to obey. But according to many passages in Romans that comprise a lot of the basis for how we generally understand the gospel, Jesus's sacrifice on the cross was necessitated by the truth that we as sinful humans could not uphold the holy and perfect Law of God. Even if the Pharisees added a lot of legalism and hoops to jump through, the Law that taught us what right and wrong are was never achievable for our flawed natures.

-- It makes sense that Gordon would omit the aspect of grace inherent in the gospel of Jesus. As a Karaite Jew, he would understand things in the more transactional paradigm of the Torah. For anyone to make it, either the Law has to be doable for a human being, or substitutive atonements have to be made. I guess that's still true in our understanding of the New Testament, but we more or less jump to the conclusion that we fall short of the Law and that Jesus was our ultimate and complete atonement.

-- In the same sense, Gordon concentrates solely on Jesus as a Rabbi, a teacher of the Torah. It's a reasonable distillation given Gordon's background, but again a narrow focus that needs to be recognized and taken into account.

-- The whole discussion of how the Pharisees decided that they had the exclusive right to interpret Scripture with a degree of infallibility decidedly recalls a lot of Catholic arguments for Papal authority in certain levels of magisterium.

-- It's true that legalism and the Pharisees' system of earning your righteousness is antithetical to the gospel of Jesus, but there's also a danger to be recognized in completely throwing out tradition, adaptation, and convention. The gospel is meant for the whole world and thus has to translate into different cultural manifestations: some good and beneficial practices will not find their bases explicitly in Scripture. Also, Scripture is sometimes very difficult to read and interpret. While Gordon mentioned that it was meant to be understood by the practice of reading the scrolls aloud to masses of Israelites, there are also a lot of passages about believers who have received the gift of teaching for the edification of others. It's at once very simple and at once very abstruse.

-- Gordon's final challenge to the audience is true, to some degree. Given a Hebrew Yeshua who corroborates the Torah and a Greek Jesus who updates the OS (or some variety of hybrid or halfsie), we Christians do have a choice to make about whom we're following.

And then again, at a certain point, you have to stop chasing rabbit holes and live your life, and it's at those times that you need an "I Believe" button.

The Forty Year Interlude

2009-05-28T18:58:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a lot of existential literature lately: Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard. One popular and concise definition of existentialist thought is the statement "existence precedes essence." In other words, we first fundamentally exist and from there determine our own sense of meaning, value, and truth: essence. Under this paradigm, there is no essence or reason that precedes the fact that we exist; existence is the solitary starting point. Of course, in a lot of existentialist literature, the point is not to look at things from a strictly existentialist perspective, but to waver back and forth between the apparent meaninglessness of a lack of pre-existing essence and the urge to find an underlying reason for the nature of things. Likewise, my thoughts here aren't about classical existentialism but more broadly about figuring out, in a given place and time, "Why am I here? What, if anything, am I supposed to be doing here?" In both of the aforementioned plays, the main characters spend a lot of frustrated dialogue conversing in circles, noting where they are and what they seem to be doing, and trying to figure out why they are there, whether it be for some pre-determined destiny or whether life is something you're supposed to make into your own magnum opus. It is true that the idea of "existence precedes essence" is pretty antithetical to our lives having been foreknown and designed by God before time began, but there are times when you ask, "What am I doing here? What, if anything, am I supposed to be doing here?"

What we know from Exodus 2 is that Moses, raised as Pharoah's daughter's son, killed an Egyptian in defense of a Hebrew, escaped the wrath of Pharoah, and fled Egypt in exile to the land of Midian for forty years before returning to lead the Hebrews from captivity. When you think about Moses in the wilderness for forty years, the question of what he was doing there almost proffers itself as an existentialist quandary:

Was he there because God had planned to cultivate him into a guide and leader for the Exodus of the Hebrew people by training him as a shepherd for four decades?

Was he there because he wasn't where he was supposed to be? Was he hiding from the role of emancipator that God had chosen for him, to the point that God had to appear as a burning bush to wake him out of his lethargy or latency?

Was he there simply as a logical consequence of his actions: killing an Egyptian and fleeing the country? After all, it's only in verse 24 that God "remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob." Was Moses simply in the right place at the right time for God to give him the part?

Was he there because God didn't really have a specific plan for him, other than to stay alive for forty years until the time was right to march back to challenge Pharoah?

See, we know that Moses was there in the wilderness for forty years, and the big question is why? The question is important to me because it seems to me that I've been living the last year in a sort of recurrent spiritual wilderness. I haven't been well connected to Christian community or teaching or discipleship; for the last year, it's mostly felt like God and me out there alone, where it can either be amazingly intimate or terrifyingly lonely. Is it for a reason? Is it a preparatory stage for greater things? Is it somehow punitive or correctional? Is it just because that's the way life is sometimes, coming and going in phases and seasons?

There's biblical precedent for all of the above rationalizations, so maybe the answer is yes. And it is true that trying to parallel my experience with Moses's is violating one of my cardinal rules of biblical teaching: you study the biblical text, you determine what truth is there about God, and then you apply that truth to your life, without skipping the middle step. But a lot of biblical teaching, most notably Jesus's teaching, is parabolic in nature. We are supposed to identify with the characters in the stories that we accept as stories of truth.

Let me know when you figure out why Moses was out there in the wilderness.

Skin Deep

2009-05-17T18:52:00.000-07:00

Today I had a thought, and my thought was about how we're wired to be attracted to physical beauty. People always make it out to seem like a bad thing, like if you're a Christian, and you notice and remark that a girl is hot, you need to check yourself because you're falling into an entrapment in a superficial and meaningless value system. You'll miss the deeper aspects of her character because you're too fixated on the outward appearances. "Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised." I have a friend who on occasion wears a t-shirt that reads "Modest is Hottest" and ironically, it's small print right across the breast area of the shirt. Should we then aim to be blind to physical beauty, concerned wholly with the inward?

I have this notion that maybe we're wired to be attracted to and desire physical beauty for the positive reason of learning to be attracted to and desire God. If you would grant: that one reason we were made to be physically hungry (and a reason we fast) is so we would know what it means to depend absolutely on God for sustenance and provision, to hunger and to be sated; that one reason we were made to need sleep is so we would know what it is to be refreshed, which also translates to the renewal that our relationship with God brings about. The physical experiences of our corporeal bodies help us better learn and understand spiritual realities about us, our world, and God. Could it not be the same way with our attraction to beauty? If we know what it is to be electrified at first sight of a beautiful woman, could we not better know what it is to react inexorably to true beauty? Otherwise, how would we understand what it means to call the Lord "Beautiful One"?

I realize there's a lot of room to misstep in taking this line of thought to an extreme, and we're both probably very familiar with those arguments. But you can also be gluttonous if you become too enraptured with physically eating, and you can also be lazy if you become too obsessed with the experience of sleep. We weren't meant to shut our eyes and feel bad about ourselves every time a hot girl walks by. That's not the freedom that Christ promised us.

The Snot Teapot Thought

2009-05-10T13:23:00.000-07:00

I mentioned the idea in an earlier post that sometimes it's hard to accept the gospel of Jesus as true because it's "too good to be true." The way His salvation and grace is so perfect and complete and meets all of our needs with no atoning works or righteousness necessary on our parts is just so, well, convenient. And we distrust immediate belief in things that are convenient because we don't want to be called naive, simply calling things true because we want them to be true.

From a certain aspect, the thesis that Jesus is too good to be true adds credibility to His message. Imagine if the Bible spent all of its time talking up the omnipotence and goodness of God and promoting Jesus as the only way to salvation, and imagine if somehow, that salvation was incomplete or defective. Not the triumphant spectacle and redemption we had hoped for and been led to anticipate. What would happen? We would wonder at the disappointing disconnect between what we thought God was capable of and what ended up happening. This perceived disparity is actually the prevalent doubt most amateur theologians wrestle with, manifested specifically as the Problem of Evil.

So if the gospel of Jesus seems too good to be true, then it becomes all the more compelling, since it touts itself as the only way to salvation, freedom, truth, life.

The Neti Pot has been the recent popular buzz item, a proven cure for sinuses and congestion. My fiancee has one, her sister has one, and my roommate has one. The procedure sounds disgusting: you brew up some warm solution in this teapot-looking-contraption, tilt your head sideways, and pour the liquid through one nostril, letting it seep through your nasal cavities and out the other nostril into the sink. It's the stupidest scam I've ever heard of, but 100 % of the users I've talked to swear by its effectiveness, which is remarkably convincing. By all accounts, its ridiculous design notwithstanding, the Neti Pot really is too good to be true, and that's the main reason that I'm becoming convinced it must actually cure sinuses and congestion. Gross.

No Time For Love, Dr. Jones.

2009-05-09T13:15:00.000-07:00

The reason that I haven't posted in a while is linked to the reason I haven't had much substantive spiritual insight in a while, and that's because I've had much less time. Since I moved and reported in to my current job, my schedule is basically waking up around 4:30 am, driving to work, working nonstop (maybe a 10 minute lunch break) until 7:30pm or so, then driving back home, making myself dinner and tomorrow's lunch, watching the Houston Rockets give away the second-round playoffs to the L.A. Lakers, and then going to bed to repeat the process tomorrow.

This practical example begs the question of whether God is there (of course He's there in an ontological sense, but is His presence really felt and is our relationship with Him real) when we don't make time for Him. The answer that we want to be true is that God's grace overcomes the banality of our scheduling. We want God to be big enough so that He presents Himself definitively in our thoughts and inexorably in our lives, to the point where it's not a question of our efforts or our abilities to prioritize Him, but a reminder that He is much bigger than us and able to overcome our obstacles for us. I think there are two primary reasons that you might want the above to be true about God and you. The first is a subscription to reformed theology, which rejects the idea that we in our total depravity achieve anything on our own efforts, but that everything is enabled and accomplished through the unfailing grace of God: if there is any reason that a relationship with God succeeds, it is because of God and not of ourselves. And the second reason is that we are lazy and don't want to make time for God, and it's easier to accept the idea that God can be there for us all week without our having to micromanage our relationship with quiet times, church meetings, bible studies, or planned prayer, than it is to make changes in our schedule and priorities.

The answer that I'm learning to this question is part experiential and part biblical. When I was involved in campus ministry, there was an annual predictable cycle in our ministry and in the spiritual lives of most of our Christian members. In August as the semester started, most Cru students would be very excited about the prospect of seeing old friends, meeting new freshmen, starting up bible study, and engaging in discipleship relationships, but as the semester progressed through the academic tribulations of October, November, and December, enthusiasm and passion would wane, and spiritual droughts and doldrums would start to become more frequent and prevalent. Yet every Christmas break from January 2-7 came the Dallas Winter Conference, and uncannily, the conference would always re-invigorate students' spiritual lives. My friends and I would, without fail, return from DWC refreshed, renewed in our commitment to follow hard after God, awed at what He was doing in our lives and on campus, and very much alive in His presence. What happened? Was there an artificial excitement and possibly even valuable spiritual growth imbued by the conference speakers, the worship band, the seminars, and the activities? Sure, to a small degree. People can always be hyped-up by a band or fun-tivities, but this week also brought real insight and transformation. My strong impression was that students who attended DWC would always be guaranteed a renewed and refreshed love for Christ because they put aside hours and hours each day to invest in their relationship with Him. Like any other relationship that was important to them. They studied His words, they read about His life, they talked earnestly with each other about Him, and they did their damnedest to point their hearts towards Jesus and let His promised transformation take place. Year after year, it was a guaranteed rebirth for a person's relationship with Christ because that person would personally invest the time and make it a priority. It's not a theological argument, but it's a truthful observation. You have to make time for things that are important.

I think the direction of this thought is biblically sound, and the reason that we often wonder dumbfoundedly where God is during the work week is that we've consistently ignored what He's told us to do from the beginning: take a break from the mundane every once in a while, and pay attention to the holy:

"Six years you shall sow your land and gather in its produce, but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow [...] Six days you shall do your work and on the seventh day you shall rest." -- Exodus 23:10-12

"Surely My Sabbaths you shall keep, for it is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I am the Lord who sanctifies you." -- Exodus 31:13

The specifics of keeping the Sabbath vary depending on whom you consult and what you read. In Old Testament tradition, the Sabbath was the "Queen of Days" that took precedence over all other days, including Yom Kippur and Passover; weddings could not take place on the Sabbath so as not to distract from the joy of the Sabbath. I don't want to discuss extents of legalism or doctrinal particulars on how to observe the Sabbath because the crux of what I'm learning is that the value is in taking time to "be still and know that I am God." Saturdays or Sundays notwithstanding: we can't complain about how we never feel like God's there or like we can't connect with Him if we don't set aside some time and invest our relationship with Him. Things are by definition made "holy" because they are "set apart" from other trivial things.

That's why when Jesus tells the Pharisees, "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath," He might be reproving them for their legalism and hypocritical rules about observing the Sabbath, but He also constructively reminds them of the point of even having the institution of the Sabbath: it's for us. It's a gift from God to us, and the intent is for "you to know that I am the Lord."

I have never been diligent or dutiful about observing the 4th of the 10 Commandments, and I have no trouble admitting that I don't have an answer for how you're supposed to do it, but I know that I very often haven't done anything, and that's surely part of the answer of why it's hard to relate to God when my schedule seems too busy for Him.

You have to make time for things that are important.

Pomophobia and the Emerging Church

2009-04-21T11:41:00.000-07:00

As a Christian, should you give according to your abilities? Consider Jesus's parable of the widow who gave her last two mites to the church and was considered a bigger contributor than all the rich men. Think of His words in Luke 12 that remind us, "To whom much is given, of him much is required." Remember all those parables about stewards who were entrusted with their masters' investments. It's reasonable to say that we would do well to give or contribute our finances, time, and efforts in accordance with our abilities.

As a Christian, should you take according your needs? Jesus spoke often about how a preoccupation with personal wealth and possessions could distract a person from enjoying the riches of a relationship with God. Paul set an example of working for his daily sustenance and living simply. Our central story is about the Son of God who forwent his rightful place in heaven for a lower-class existence on earth. It seems reasonable to say that with the eternal inheritances of heaven on our minds, we shouldn't be preoccupied with excesses here in this temporal life, but yes, should take according to our basic needs.

The above two conclusions seem pretty logical, but also neatly affirm the classical definition of communism: "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." And with the patriotic people I work with, the label of communism changes everything. Complaints and fears about the prospect of Obama's ever-expanding bailout, about taking everyone's hard-earned money and redistributing it to the poor, lazy, and undeserving. Re-affirmations of capitalism and self-reliance as bastions of American society, hallmarks of the American way. Apparently, there are things that we would agree with on principle about communism, but with the introduction of the label and in light of how the ideology has played out in practice, nobody wants to be a communist. Which is not unlike how I feel about the emerging church and whether I want to call myself a member.

I am usually behind the curve on the nuances and variations of Christian denominations and factions, so most people are probably more aware of the term "emerging church" than I am. A very simple definition would be the segment of Christians whose theology and vision of the church is more adapted to 20th and 21st century postmodern culture. The Wikipedia article for "emerging church" is helpful in outlining its main characteristics, but highlighted with multitudinous caveats about subsections prone to "weasel words," "biased or unverifiable information," and "clarification needed," which seems entirely appropriate for an ideology adapted to postmodernism. A lot of my friends hate the subjectivity of postmodernism, but I have never been a pomophobe, at least as far as literature and abstract ideas are concerned. Where does true meaning lie in a piece of media or text: in the intent of a usually-long-dead author, in the sensory perception and experience of the reader, or somewhere in between? It seems like an important question to ask about the nature of literature, and it seems like an important question to consider theologically. If there is a God trying to send an important message to me through a 2000-year-old book of historical chronicles, poetry, and epistles, how should I go about interpreting it? And clearly people have answered that question because they do choose to go about interpreting it in various ways that have manifested into a thousand different denominations, but few stop to think about the process by which they decide how to answer the question.

But to return to the other question of how to respond to the emerging church, it's intriguing to observe that some of its elements have caught on like wildfire, becoming as universal as the emerging church's best-known dare-I-say-manifesto Blue Like Jazz. During my time at Campus Crusade for Christ, a lot of brochures and ministry literature showed a lot of artistic and aesthetic emphasis: there were a lot of colorful, over-exposed images as backdrops and crazy trendy music videos inviting you to "encounter" God at the Fall Retreat. The new tool "Soularium" evangelism tool offered a few dozen over- or under-saturated photographs that were supposed to prompt an experiential discussion or dialogue about what truth, love, and God were all about. Words like "authentic," "organic," "not-prepackaged," and "holistic" began to replace the suddenly clunky, traditional "Christian-ese" in describing our faith. And these changes aren't simply cosmetic: a lot of the emphasis on social justice, third world concerns, sincere spiritual dialoguing in lieu of evangelistic presentations, and narrative theology has really burgeoned in the last decade or so, and these changes are great changes that have done a lot of great things to distill Christianity down from its hierarchical systems and legalisms to the central (yet decentralized) precepts of unconditional grace, love, and forgiveness. I love the concept of a decentralized, grassroots sort of Christianity because it seems more Jesus-like to me. I believe in all these things, and I believe that Jesus does too.

So in light of these significant positive aspects, why wouldn't I identify completely with the emerging church? The answer lies in my initial reaction to Blue Like Jazz. I hated it because I felt like it was a petulant response to conservative Christianity. As the Wikipedia article articulates, "Christian scholar, D. A. Carson, has characterized the emerging church movement as primarily a movement of protest in which participants are reacting against their more conservative heritage. Carson has pointed out that emergent books and blogs are more preoccupied with this protest than they are with any genuinely constructive agenda." In a certain sense, D. A. Carson has a point. There is sometimes a definite underlying push to set Jesus up as some sort of heroic everyman opponent of the religious establishment, which I don't think was the point of Jesus's time on earth. Also, a lot of newly "authentic" Christians seem like they're simply exchanging their hymnals for baseless, trendy pluralistic mysticism. Catechism for coffee shops, gospel tracts for grainy film clips. And one noticeable feature about reading literature in a postmodern way is that it emphasizes the reader's experience at the expense of devaluing the text itself. Sure, you can read Hamlet a thousand different ways and even turn it into The Lion King, but does the same hold true for Scripture, words that we have always taken to be divinely inspired by God? I wonder ambivalently about the limits of postmodern narrative interpretation because I like translations from King James to more culturally relevant language, but I don't like the idea of someone grasping the retelling of Old Testament from the NBC show Kings as reliable theology. Maybe it's possible that God preserved His meaning across the errata of different English translations, but it's a pretty extreme postmodern stretch to suppose He would grant the same legitimacy for our narrative re-imaginings. It seems to me that in a postmodern sense, we partially become the Authors of our faith, conform God to our image, and in that sense make ourselves gods.

To put it in other terms, here is another excerpt from the Wikipedia article:

"The movement appropriates set theory as a means of understanding a basic change in the way the Christian church thinks about itself as a group. Set theory is a concept in mathematics that allows an understanding of what numbers belong to a group, or set. A bounded set would describe a group with clear "in" and "out" definitions of membership. The Christian church has largely organized itself as a bounded set, those who share the same beliefs and values are in the set and those who disagree are outside. The centered set does not limit membership to pre-conceived boundaries. Instead a centered set is conditioned on a centered point. Membership is contingent on those who are moving toward that point. Elements moving toward a particular point are part of the set, but elements moving away from that point are not. As a centered-set Christian membership would be dependent on moving toward the central point of Jesus. A Christian is then defined by their focus and movement toward Christ rather than a limited set of shared beliefs and values."

The idea of Jesus as the singular epicenter of the paradigm is a true and compelling vision, but if Jesus is the center, unfettered by tradition and belief sets, how do we find and point to Jesus? Through experiential means or through Scripture? Does Scripture validate our experiences that lead us to Christ, or do our experiences validate the Scriptures that tell about Christ?

"O Timothy!" urges Paul at the end of his first letter to his beloved disciple, "Guard what was committed to your trust, avoiding the profane and idle babblings and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge -- by professing it, some have strayed concerning the faith." I identify with the sentiment: in the uncertainty of the world and mysteries of ontology, Scripture serves as the definitive lifeline and basis for truth. Of course, a significant contingent of the emerging church discredits the writings of Paul as errant third-party interpretations of the message Jesus really meant to present.

I think a short way to put it would be that I love some of the progressive aspects of the emerging church: the promotion of dialogue, the re-discovery of the poetic and aesthetic aspects of our Scripture, the emphases on social justice and applied grace, the decentralized grassroots style. And I love some of the harder questions raised by the postmodernist perspective. But I don't like the departure from solid Scriptural teaching coupled with a more syncretistic interpretation of the Christian faith: its effect does too much to make us the authors. I can't stand this indecision, married with a lack of vision: everybody wants to rule the world. I realize that Christmas and Easter are inherently syncretistic, but maybe we should question Christmas and Easter too. Sometimes when you mix too many colors, you don't get a jazz-like blue; you get a big, brown mess.

It's certainly worth appending, though, that I really liked Blue Like Jazz on the second read-through, and if there were one branch of Christianity I would identify myself with, it would decidedly be the emerging church.

Shorts, Part Two

2009-04-15T11:51:00.000-07:00

Most drivers check their blind spots and side mirrors to clear the lane or turn before they change lanes or turn, but sometimes they have a lapse and forget to do so. The large majority of collisions are decidedly preventable by the vigilance of the other drivers in the vicinity. Therefore, for drivers {x, y, z...} let {X, Y, Z} represent the probability of their respective situational awareness. Is the probability of collision therefore (1-X)(1-Y)(1-Z)...? The only variable that appears outstanding is the relative positioning of the vehicles. Let {xy, xz, yz...} therefore represent the coefficient of relative positioning that determines proximity to collision. The probability of collision would therefore be (xy)(xz)(yz)(1-X)(1-Y)(1-Z). Everyone should go home and determine their own probability of paying attention at any given moment on the road. We could then program the probabilities {X, Y, Z...} into transponders that would transmit to computerized radar detectors that could then output the probability of collision at any time during a drive based on the other drivers in the vicinity. Would that be more or less helpful than a CBDR output?

Second verse of "Amazing Grace": "Twas grace that taught my heart to fear." How, specifically, was this accomplished?

I have gained 30 lbs in the last 5 years. That averages to 6 lbs per year. Somehow I still look manorexic. If I live to be 80, I will rest with 489 lbs in my coffin. I can't imagine still looking manorexic at 489 lbs. I should look into finding more than the standard six pallbearers.

In the song "Single Ladies" by Beyonce, the main refrain is "If you liked it, then you shoulda put a ring on it." Let's focus on the pronoun and its possible antecedent. "If you liked [], then you shoulda put a ring on []." You'd expect to "put a ring on" [the lady's ring finger], but typically guys don't especially like [the lady's ring finger]. Take it from the other end: if you liked [the lady], then you're objectifying "it" to the point of not even granting "it" a "her" status. So for all the listeners who hail "Single Ladies" as the new female-empowering classic in the style of "Respect" and "I Will Survive" -- please, girlfriend.

Why would Miley Cyrus put Taylor Swift in her Hannah Montana movie? Taylor Swift is better looking and a better singer. That's like inviting Heidi Klum to be a bridesmaid at your wedding.

A lot of people do superficial things like check Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter excessively. A lot of people write superficial articles and columns about those aforementioned people doing superficial things. You are reading a superficial statement about those people writing superficial articles about people doing superficial things. It's almost as bad as getting RickRolled.

If the noun form of "artificial" is "artifice," the noun form of "superficial" should be obvious.

Strangers who normally wouldn't make eye contact suddenly walk across rooms to pat a woman's stomach once she becomes pregnant. Uncanny, but I wonder if there's some form of alternative energy to be harvested from the perpetual motion of fawning pregnant-stomach-patters.

If it weren't for great expectations, everyone could get married for under $10,000.

Most people, even if they haven't seen the movie, are familiar with the plot of Weekend at Bernie's: two young insurance executives discover that their boss Bernie has died in his sleep and over the weekend, to avoid trouble with the police and with certain hitmen, they have to convince everyone that Bernie is alive by dragging the corpse around, sitting it up, posing it, making its arms wave and head nod, and doing Bernie's voice from behind the corpse. Hey, I just thought of a way to make a sequel to The Dark Knight!

I think a good way to heckle someone named Mary would be to ask if she had Maryngitis, but unbelievably, I have never heard anyone use that.

It would make sense if Keats liked steak, especially since Keats had a turn for words.

Those Somali pirates could have definitely had much better PR if one of them had renamed himself Jack Sparrow.

Someone should write an algorithm that codifies the unspoken rules for selecting the optimal available urinal in the men's room. This algorithm could turn on a light over the correct urinal to use, based on which units are occupied and which are available. Not that the choice isn't typically intuitive and evident, but someone needs to teach boys to be men.

I recently went to England and visited three huge and beautiful edifices: St. Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, and Yorkminster. Each was awe-inspiring and engendered wonder and reverence for what would cause men to build such a structure of size and beauty and presence. In that way, giant cathedrals testify to the glory of God. Our hearts are also supposed to be temples for the Lord, but I wonder what specifically in my heart inspires that sort of awe and glorification of God.

I went to a beautiful wedding recently where the couple wrote their own vows. One of them said, "I will always give you the benefit of the doubt," which is a very loving thing to say. There are a lot of things about God that don't make sense to me, but if I love Him, I should always give Him the benefit of the doubt.

Broken For You

2009-04-12T16:49:00.000-07:00

"Just as many were astonished at you, so His visage was marred more than any man, and His form more than the sons of men; so shall He startle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths at Him; for what had not been told them, they shall see, and what they had not heard, they shall consider." -- Isaiah 52:14-15

I'm not alone in realizing that I'm pretty obsessed with my own body. I work out religiously, sometimes with more faithfulness and discipline than I apply to studying God's Word, and not for the purpose of helping to serve others or doing my job well, but to be good at sports and to appear impressive without a shirt. And sometimes I watch The Biggest Loser to marvel at the spectacle of the fat kids trying desperately to lose weight and regain a physical normality. I'm always impressed with the amount of effort and attention they put into their on-camera project, and no matter who wins, everyone seems elated and gratified at the end of the show and swears that come hell or high water, they will never let themselves regress to the throes of obesity. Would anything, any cause, compel them to sacrifice their new-found health, appearance, confidence, and approval? Because they seem pretty attached to their healthy bodies. Physical health is something most people prioritize and invest in significantly and constantly.

Consider the following hypothetical examples:

If given the choice, would you accept severe facial acne and a lazy eye for the rest of your life if it meant that your father would never face unemployment?
Would you stick your arm into a wood chipper if it meant that a child in Africa would never go hungry again?
Would you allow your eyes to be put out if it meant that you could have your pick of a mission field to be sent to?
Would you make all three physical sacrifices if it meant that all three resultant goods would come to pass?

Two observations stand extant from pondering those questions. One is that the questions are completely unreasonable because the sacrifice and the resultant good are seemingly unrelated: there is no foreseeable cause and effect. And the other is that they seem completely unreasonable because the resultant good might seem small or cheap compared to the thought of spending the rest of your life with facial acne, an amputated arm, and two detached eyes, both presumably made lazy through the process of removal. But if the resultant good of your sacrifice were high enough, worth enough, valuable enough, then the hesitation and regret about the physical sacrifice would pale in the face of the good consequences, and the questions would not seem so far-fetched.

I say these things because Jesus's face was "marred more than any man." Isaiah 53 predicted that in the midst of His crucifixion, He was the sort of man that people hid their faces from: either from shame and shock at the depth of His unmerited suffering or horror at His physical grotesqueness. It only takes a passing glance at the details of a Roman crucifixion or a viewing of The Passion of the Christ to imagine what Jesus gave up physically for us: a horrible, painful death so terrifying that He sweat blood in anticipation of the event in the Garden of Gethsemane. And He gave up so much more than His body: He gave up the rest of His human life and relationships that we treasure so highly. Time with His earthly family, His beloved disciples, His created and chosen people. Time spent with Mary and Martha and Lazarus. And before all that, He gave up His exalted status in heaven to dwell in abject humility as a homeless earthbound man.

My hypothetical scenarios were ridiculous and irrelevant because there was seemingly no connection between the sacrifice and the resultant good and because the resultant good may have seemed too petty for the accompanying sacrifice. And a lot of people might consider the story of Good Friday and Easter in the same way. What is the connection between a good man dying slowly and an eternal reconciliation with God? And what did He come to die for so horrifically: a chance to go to heaven for harp-playing and cloud-sitting tranquility?

The story of Jesus's death and resurrection becomes relevant and powerful when we address and dispel the two roadblocks. In today's Easter sermon in church, the pastor pointed to "substitution" as the ultimate distilled principle of Christianity: that if we understood nothing else, that if we never had the chance to absorb all the nuances and wisdom from the volumes of a Christian bookstore, we should definitely understand that Jesus Christ came to die in our place, that He substituted His fate for ours, and ours for His. It seems very simple, but with all the buzzwords and dogmas out there, I think a lot of people that we pass in life have only a vague notion of what specifically was accomplished by Jesus's death and resurrection.

The other half is thinking about what Jesus died to accomplish. It's decidedly silly to think about sacrifice your life, your hopes, your future for something small. It's silly to think that you would die if you could only see the Hannah Montana movie on opening night. It's more noble to think about sacrificing your life for the cause of your nation, but that's still an earthly cause, and governments are ultimately temporary. If you're going to give your life for something, let it be epic, let it be of ultimate importance. Let it be for the long-awaited restoration of a perfected, glorious relationship between a perfect Father and His beloved children, for the return of peace, love, and joy for all eternity, for the vanquishing of death and fear and loneliness, for a triumph that resounds throughout a vast created universe. And if that's what you're dying for, then even the ghastliness of a crucifixion seems like a worthwhile sacrifice, something not ridiculous, but perfectly obvious in its necessity.

"Let us not be deceived on this point nor misled by those who, when they announce Christ as the deliverer, think they have preached the gospel. If I throw a rope to a drowning man, I am a deliverer. But is Christ no more than that? If I cast myself into the sea and risk myself to save another, I am a deliverer. But is Christ no more? Did He risk His life? The very essence of Christ's deliverance is the substitution of himself for us--his life for ours! He did not come to risk his life; he came to die!" -- Horatius Bonar

These things to recall and rejoice in about the body of Christ, broken for you.

A Run in the Rain

2009-04-03T13:55:00.000-07:00

No resolution or structure or guidance to this post. Just going to let my fingers go. Sorry in advance if you get confused, weirded out, or put off. No one is making you read my writing.

I ran 6 miles today, a 3 mile there-and-back. The first 3 miles are unremarkable and mostly downhill, which implies the uphill incline of the last 3 miles. I run to my friends' house on Outlook Avenue, ask for a drink of water, chat for a while, then turn around to resume the run, to make my return trip. It starts raining and that's when I have a glorious excerpt, an epiphany, of life at the edge.

I duck out of the rain as it picks up, duck into a covered porch, walk inside the door, ask for a bathroom. I pee and look at myself in the mirror. I am sweaty and grizzled. I haven't shaved in a week, and I am covered in sweat and grime. A wild man is staring me down in the glass. I exit the bathroom and look around, realizing I am in a nursing home for the elderly. I wonder what they think of the wild man, wonder if they know I am a philosopher at heart and in mind. I find a rocking chair on the front porch and sit down to wait out the rain, which is now pouring heavily on the pavement of the parking lot in front of me. It is windy and about 40 degrees out, though the part of me that longs for symmetry wishes it were -40 degrees, so it would rest on the intersection of the Fahrenheit and Celsius spectra.

I think about the times I've been caught in the rain running, and I think I recall the feeling of being alive very poignantly. The rain is not letting up, and I have to eat sometime. Fuck it, I say to myself, and I get out of the chair and begin running uphill in the cold and the rain.

I run steadily uphill, my legs churning and pounding rhythmically and forcefully like the work-hardened pistons of a diesel engine. The rpm's have to increase to gain any traction, to achieve any progress on the uphill. The pace is slower, time slows down, the beauty of motion comes into higher resolution. The rain falls on my head, occludes the transparency of my glasses, and in my head, there is music, not one, but two songs dueling in an oddly functional syncopation: the "Training Montage" theme from Rocky and "A Little Fall of Rain" from Les Miserables. I am Rocky, willing himself up the hill, all heart barely caged in a bundle of muscle and bone and coursing blood, but I am also Marius and Eponine, oblivious to the falling rain, ignoring Cosette pining in the background.

As I power myself up the hill, pain begins to creep up my legs, starting with the burgeoning blisters in the arches of my soaked feet, stretching higher up my legs with each impact, like the mud splashing onto my calves, like the puck in the strong-man hammer game at the carnival, bouncing higher and higher until the puck hits the bell every time, ding, Ding, DING! The cold and the rain and the pain and the mud and the stab of the air into my lungs reminds me powerfully that I am very much alive, and I laugh scornfully at my friends who wouldn't be out here in the rain, who would've stayed indoors, who sit on the couch and watch their televisions and miss out on the carnal knowledge that they are gloriously alive. Cars and trucks scream by on the road, 60 mph, and as each careens by me, the warning sounds rising exponentially with Doppler waves until the closest point of approach, I hope desperately that their brakes don't lock up, that they don't break into a hurtling skid, fishtailing the car around at 60 mph to paste me into the passenger door like a bug. I'm running just off the paved shoulder of the road, mud splashing, each step a probabilistic mystery as to how far down my foot will sink into the next consecutive puddle.

Let the cars scream by me, let the drivers gawk from their warm, dry, steel-enclosed cabins at the grizzled crazy runner who has forgone such shelter. Let them wonder, what specimen is this -- man or beast -- who runs through the elements and forces of nature so recklessly? I am a Spartan, I am sprinting across the battlefield, I am a wolf bounding through the woods, hungry. As the uphill and the strenuous pace force the breath from my chest, I stop controlling my breathing and let my exhalations escape in ragged, noisy bursts. Eee-HUHHH, Eee-HUHHH. I sound like a woman giving birth, but to run yourself through the soaking cold rain and mud is to be reborn, a scene like Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption after he crawls through the drainage pipe and stands free, arms raised, in the thunderstorm.

As I cross under the final overpass and begin the final steep hill to my driveway, my body tells me, no, No, NO, but I am alive, God made me alive, and I need to live (what's the point in being alive if you're not going to use it?). And my legs protest, but my heart will go on. Cliches and quotations fly through my head, boring prose suddenly brought to life by my electric experience. Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war! Though my heart and my flesh fail me, God is my strength and my portion. And most prevalently, from Macbeth, his final words, my final words as I run headlong up the final hill, Damned be he who first cries, "Hold, enough!"

I arrive at my front porch. I shake my soaked shoes off of my blistered feet. I stumble into my garage, find a plot of concrete, and knock out 100 pushups and some abdominal exercises for good measure. I put away half a sandwich and a protein shake. I sit down at my keyboard, think for a second about whether people will want to read my self-centric ramblings, don't care, and begin to type. It occurs to me that I am writing while stark naked and high on endorphins. I let my fingers go.

John 14-16

2009-04-03T11:21:00.000-07:00

Here starteth the commentary.

14:2: "In My Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you."

An intriguing hypothetical: if there were no mansions in heaven, Jesus would have told us so. I wonder what that would've looked like. "Sorry, guys, you'll have to share this celestial duplex." And what does it mean that Jesus goes to prepare a place for us? Is He going to physically prepare the mansions? Is He referring to His ensuing death and resurrection that opens up a means for us to enter His Father's house?

14:5-7: After hearing about heaven, Doubting Thomas asks how to get there, and Jesus responds that He is the way, and not only the way, but the truth and the life. A lot of Christian theology centers around either Jesus being the nexus to God or Jesus Himself being the epicenter of the faith, and here Jesus equates the two with Himself.

14:18: In fact, when Jesus reassures the disciples, "I will not leave your orphans; I will come to you," He implies that He is their father, again equating Himself with the Father.

14:28: Jesus states, "My Father is greater than I." It's hard to say whether this sentence is a theological inequality or a statement of submission to and worship of the Father. We usually like to put Jesus and the Father on the same plane, if not merge them together as an Echad, but clearly there are separate roles that Jesus identifies.

14:11: If we don't believe that Jesus and the Father are one, then, Jesus says, at least "believe Me for the sake of the works themselves." This reasoning is reminiscent of the case where he healed the blind man, who commented afterward, "Whether He is a sinner or not, I do not know. One thing I know: that though I was blind, now I see." (John 9:25) What a powerful personal statement! Even if we don't grasp salvation in all its theological complexity and mystery, we can definitely grasp the understanding that once we were dead and blind, and now we've been granted life and vision.

14:19: "Because I live, you will live also." Foreshadowing of the truth of resurrection.

14:10, 11, 20, 30: Several times, Jesus uses the preposition "in" to describe relationships: "I am in the Father and the Father in Me." "At that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you." It sounds like a wacked-out game of Apples to Apples. Jesus explains the "in" relationship in more detail in the first half of John 15, describing Himself as the vine and His disciples as branches and reminding us of how the two collaborate to bear fruit.

15:14: "You are My friends if you do whatever I command you." Exactly how I feel about my own friendships. No one seems to appreciate the sentiment.

15:15: "No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father, I have made known to you." And then, 16:12: "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now." Confusing and seemingly contradictory statements. Probably shouldn't read too much into the antithetical; just take them for the sentiment that each conveys: the fact that Jesus calls us friend and confides in us, and the fact that He doesn't want to give us more than we can bear.

15:16: "You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you." Score one for the Reformed Christians.

15:19: "Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you." A good reminder that conflict and friction with the culture and society around us is not something gone awry, but a consequence expected with following Christ in a world that rejects Him. Not that we should seek conflict and suffering, but we shouldn't shy away from it.

15:22, 24: Jesus points out that if He had not spoken to the evildoers, "they would have no sin," but "now they have no excuse for their sin." The reflexive reaction of the reader is, well, why did You come into the world if we wouldn't have had sin otherwise? But the question misses the point: the point of Jesus coming into the world isn't that He revealed our sin, uncovering our disparity and distance from God, but rather the reconciliation and redemption and grace He came to offer.

16:3: "These things they will do to you because they have not known the Father nor Me." Rumored to have been Al Gore's quoted favorite Bible verse.

16:7-16: Jesus gives His disciples some explication as to what exactly the Holy Spirit (the Helper) will do and what His role is: to convict the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment; to guide us to all truth; to glorify both Jesus and the Father; and to take what is Jesus's and declare it to us. It seems that what we commonly term our "conscience" can be encompassed in the role of the Holy Spirit that is supposed to indwell in Christians.

16:25: Jesus notes that up to this point, He has spoken in figurative language, but the time is coming when He will speak plainly about the Father. Since the remaining chapters in John are about His crucifixion and resurrection, we can conclude that this time has not yet come. Jesus mentions that the disciples will not see Him for "a little while" because He will have gone to the Father, and when asked what "a little while" means, Jesus compares the timeline to a woman giving birth: first a period of anguish and pain and then a time of joy and exultation. The timing of Biblical events and prophesy is one of the most stupefying aspects of reading the Bible.

What a crazy set of chapters. The reader is constantly challenged to either look for consistency or look for Jesus.

Here endeth the commentary.

Daytona Article

2009-03-18T09:13:00.000-07:00

I don't usually post links, but here is an article about a Campus Crusade Spring Break Trip to Daytona Beach through the eyes of a skeptic who followed along.

I spent two spring breaks during college on similar evangelical trips to Panama City Beach, Florida, and had some comparable experiences and thoughts with the author. I've talked to some Christians who have read the article posted above, and they've without exception had one of two reactions: either they found the article unhelpful because it discouraged them from evangelism, or they found the article disturbingly accurate, discouraging them from evangelism.

The first mistake you could make in reading an account like the aforementioned is to make it interchangeable with evangelism in general, or even initiative evangelism (the type of evangelism that involves spiritual conversation with people you haven't yet met). There is no doubt that Christian evangelism has been what God has used to spread His gospel for centuries to great effect. The same holds true for initiative evangelism. In Acts 8, the Spirit of the Lord tells Philip point-blank to run up and approach an Ethiopian eunuch who was riding by on the road. So there's no use getting discouraged about evangelism or even initiative evangelism because of one singular report of failure in a specific instance; we already know that by God's grace and our obedience, evangelism works. Making this story representative of evangelical outreach at large makes as much sense as dismissing the Baptism of Christ from a bad experience at a Baptist church, and yet people do it all the time.

But the first gain you could take from this account are some pointed examples of what not to do. My experience is that a lot of Christians go to Big Break and other spring break outreaches because they believe sincerely in the cause of Christ's gospel and they want to be obedient to do something about it, and Big Break appears to be the only foreseeable way to reconcile the first two impetuses. So it makes sense that a lot of people would be pretty hesitant to dismiss anything that Big Break does on the rationale of "Well, what do you suggest we do instead?" But sometimes that's a restricting way of thinking. I understand that God is bigger and smarter than we are and that oftentimes we can't foresee the fruits of our labor, but a lot of times, it's better to do nothing than to do things that take backward steps and hope for the best.

And from what I saw, we did a lot that set back the gospel of Christ. The speaker at the conference preached 100% Success Evangelism, which meant that as long as you made an effort to communicate the gospel, God would bless that effort. There's some theological basis for that, but in practice, a lot of students translated 100% Success Evangelism into a really aggressive, pushy approach. I remember I was trying to connect with a guy on the beach and we were conversing about his experience with the church growing up when my evangelism partner sailed out of nowhere with the grace and delicacy of a battering ram. She physically pushed me aside and yelled in a loud voice, "Hey! I have two questions for you! If you were to die today, do you think you would go to heaven?" I tried to wriggle back into the discussion, but she physically blocked me and continued, "...And question two, on a scale of 1 to 10, how sure are you of your answer?"

A lot of people probably don't stop to think about the intellectual set-up necessary for that sort of question to mean anything. To ask whether I believed I would go to heaven would require that I believed in a lot of other fundamental ideas: that there is a God, that there is a heaven, that said heaven is accessible for me, that she is in fact asking about the Christian heaven, that whether I believe I am going to heaven actually reflects whether I am going there or not, and that I actually would want to go to heaven if I believed in such a place. When you think about it, it's pretty galling to assume blindly that a person is in such a place spiritually and intellectually, which makes that a pretty terrible one-two punch as far as introductions go.

For me, the most convicting excerpt of the article was this paragraph:

"The issue of post-salvation behavior is an interesting one. I thought, when Scott was teaching us to evangelize, that we'd be told to do some sort of follow-up with successful converts, if we had any -- guide them to a local church, maybe, or at least take their contact information. But there's no such procedure. If Jason had decided to get saved (he didn't), Martina would have led him through the Sinner's Prayer ("Jesus, I am a sinner, come into my heart and be my Lord and Savior" or some variant thereof), she would have let him know he was saved, perhaps given him some Bible verses to read, and they never would have seen each other again. Cold-turkey evangelism provides the shortest, most non-committal conversion offer of any Western religion -- which, I suspect, is part of the appeal."

In my two spring breaks there, I always did my best to establish contact information and be handy with follow-up advice or a listening ear. It's not easy for an experienced Christian to follow Christ on his or her own; how much harder for a fledgling believer in the middle of a drunken spring break event on a beach? What the author is pointing out is that something about the approach is short-termed, impersonal, and non-committal.

Two conclusions to walk away with from that paragraph. The first is that as negative as this feedback is, it's extremely helpful for us as Christian evangelists. I've always thought it would be a good idea to meet someone and say, "Hey, what were your thoughts on the way we've approached you with the message of the gospel? What were some things you found appealing and what did you find disingenuous? I want to know because the message of Jesus is important to me, and I really think it's the best news you'll ever hear, and I want to see if the way we communicate stands in the way of that, and fix it if I can." And in effect, the author and his article provided exactly that feedback. But the goal is not to be better salesmen with better tricks; the goal is to be better ambassadors of the true good news of Christ.

The second takeaway is that it's important to remember that Jesus is not a cookie-cutter, four-step process.

On we go.

One of the principal observations of the article was that Christians seemed to be in their own sheltered, naive world. And just as Paul became all things to all people, we should understand the importance of cultural relevance and context in connecting with others. But Christians are citizens of a different kingdom. We don't belong to the world; we belong to God. Our ways are not the same, our thoughts are not the same, our habits are not the same. To the author of the article, it was dubious whether all that effort and money was worth it for one more Christian, but to Jesus, it was worth everything to find that one lost lamb, and it was worth His life to give you and me a chance. So I think that in some sense, the frustration with the inability to relate with Daytona Beach Spring Break is finally a sign that they were doing something right. The closer students draw to God's holiness and righteousness, the more the prospect of drunken, concupiscent revelry should seem like something alien and terrible (of course, the same could be true if students were coming from an isolationist Christianized culture, rather than a true pursuit of godliness). And especially in some environment, it makes perfect sense that you'd find a lot of people who are completely uninterested in the gospel. Jesus gave His disciples the command to shake the dust off their feet and move on from such places. So to note that the entirety of Daytona Beach did not become a beacon of godliness overnight is not to say that the project was a failure. In one respect, it shows the need for Christ in more real way than most Christians are used to.

And Panama City Beach also saw a lot of success. Some student groups saw entire baseball teams give their hearts to Christ and every night, students gave testimonies in awe of what God had done that day through their witness. A cynical reflex is to say, "Well, how many of those were real salvation," but there's no answering that, so shut up. And there was something great in seeing the body of Christ, a small part of it, yes, and flawed, yes, but still laboring in the harvest of God's fields of humanity.

The Daytona Beach project has some undeniable flaws, it's true. But in my estimation, the spring break beach project is not fundamentally flawed. I have a lot of concrete ideas for how to make it a better, more genuine experience for both the Christian students and the kids who are just there to party.

For me, those two spring breaks were great learning experiences. I learned everything I just wrote down above, I learned a lot about what I think does and doesn't work in communicating the gospel, and I very vividly remember what a relief it was after a weary day in the world to return to God's people and worship together each night of the conference. To have spent the day wrestling with doubts from other people and doubts from yourself makes the return to God's realm so much sweeter.

It's been a year to the day since I started this blog, and apparently I'm just as long-winded as ever.

Eric's Song

2009-03-14T18:46:00.000-07:00

As someone who really liked Slumdog Millionaire, I've been keeping up with the news of what's been happening to the child actors who portrayed young Jamal, Salim, and Latika. A little research for yourself will show that the director and producers picked them up out of the slums of Mumbai, filmed them for the movie, and took them around Hollywood and Disneyland for the week of the Oscars. One week later, the kids are back in the corrugated tin shanties of Mumbai, going from the clean sheets of the Hilton to sleeping on the dirt floors again. There are some really sad details, like the fact that they stubbornly insist on wearing their Oscar night tuxedo and gown and that director Danny Boyle gave one of the boys a Nintendo DS that he won't be able to play after the batteries run out because he has no electricity.

It's an intriguing ethical scenario. (Should I feel bad for reducing their real-life dilemma to a case study?) The director and the producer compensated the kids for their work on the film, paid their tuition to a private school, and set up a large establishment fund to be released to them when they turn 18 and want to begin their adult careers. But the kids' paychecks for the film have already gone to pay for their parents' considerable medical expenses, and the interested public are aghast that these kids have been used to make millions for Slumdog Millionaire and subsequently returned to poverty. The director and producers are not trained social workers and have not become adoptive parents; they are specialists in the entertainment industry. How much responsibility have they accrued in hiring these kids? To their credit, they have also hired Indian social workers who have a better working knowledge and skill set to attend the case.

But I was struck by what the producer said about the situation. He said that the easiest thing for them would be to throw money at the problem, but that would not be the ethical approach.

I was driving up the Gold Star Highway a few days ago, and I passed a man standing in the esplanade, across from the Oh Boy! Diner, holding a sign that read, "Homeless, please help." I drove on, but it bothered me to pass him by, as it usually does to pass anyone like that by. It occurred to me that Jesus had the salvation of the world on His schedule and He took time for children and beggars. I had literally nothing to do that day. Was my time too important for this man?

I parked my car at Walmart and thought about it. I didn't want to just give him money: the expedient solution that would've annulled my guilt and let me go on with my day. What would be best for the man? Ask him. So I jogged across the highway and stuck out my hand and asked what his name was. And the man said Eric. I asked if he was hungry and if I could buy him lunch, and he said that he was, but if I was going to get him food, he asked that I bring it to him because his collecting money on the highway might literally be the difference between his having a roof over his head or not that night. Like I said, what else did I have to do that day that was more important? So I jogged over to Oh Boy! Diner, ordered a BLT and sweet potato fries to go, and brought it back to Eric.

I asked Eric where he was staying, and he replied that there was an elderly gentleman in Groton who was renting out his upstairs for $30 a night. Said that he had worked for over two decades at a machinery shop but came back after a weekend to find that the owners had closed the business and left for the Bahamas. Elaborated that every time he went to file for unemployment benefits, he was asked to show proof of prior employment and he couldn't manage to procure those documents. I asked Eric how much he made standing by the Gold Star Highway with a sign. It's a good question to ask because people always base their decision to give or not give on some impression that either homeless people don't get anything or they con hundreds of dollars a day off of hapless do-gooders. "It fluctuates wildly," Eric said. "Some days, I stand out here for four hours and end up with ten dollars, and some days, I stand out for two and end up with a hundred and fifty."

Eric only needed $4 more for the day, so I gave him the $3 I had in my wallet and wished him good luck. By the time I had jogged back over to the Walmart parking lot and pulled out to the turn, Eric had made his dollar and was gone. But another lady with another sign had already taken his place.

One of the lessons Jesus was really keen on was the relative unimportance of money. He preached against the hypocrisy and selfishness of the rich and lead a life of humility, simplicity, and service. It's true that He spent a lot of time helping the poor and disenfranchised, but if you step back, it's more true that He spent a lot of time helping the needy, rich or poor.

In a day-to-day sense, people like Eric need money to sustain themselves, but in an ultimate sense, they need to be known and loved. I am no Billy Dee Williams and Eric is no James Caan, but as best as I can write it, here is Eric's song.

John 8

2009-03-09T08:14:00.000-07:00

Commentary on John 8 in Sequential Order:

Verses 1-11

One conclusion the casual reader could draw from the story of the adulterous woman is that by letting the woman go, Jesus is abrogating the Law of Moses that condemns her to death for the sin of adultery. But it's important to note the context of her condemnation. God's Torah, as given to Moses, was for Israel to understand what is holy and what is not holy, what is of God and what is not, and in that very black and white context, adulterers were condemned to be stoned. And yet here, what we see is not the Pharisees upholding God's Law in holiness. There is no presence of "two or three witnesses" or judicial authority, just a mob with a lot of stones and a clear intent to test Jesus. So it's decidedly not a case of Jesus overturning the faithful execution of the Torah: it's a case of a bunch of mobsters challenging Jesus and awaiting His response.

Moreover, Jesus's response, "He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first," is a very specific reproach. The general interpretation could align with the true message that we shouldn't be judgmental of other people's sins in light of our own sinful natures, which is consistent with planks and specks in people's eyes from Matthew 7. But context again plays a role here: Jesus has called this culture an "evil and adulterous generation." (Matthew 12:39) I think the better reading of this story is that Jesus knew the hearts of the Pharisees and knew that they were largely a group of adulterers, and that He was dealing with a case of blatant hypocrisy: the secret adulterers gunning after the adulteress who was caught "in the very act."

Verses 12-20

Jesus addresses His authority in the context of the Law that God gave to Israel. Where the Law states that legitimate judicial authority is established "by the mouth of two or three," (Deut 17:6, 19:15) Jesus notes that His judgment is established by the dual witness of Himself and the Father. In this way, He puts Himself both in line with and above the Law.

It's interesting how the idea of two people's witness legitimizing a claim has manifested itself. In Albert Camus's The Fall, there is an excerpt that explores the idea that truth is founded in the witness of two people seeing a unicorn. If one person sees a unicorn, he won't believe it because it's crazy to have seen a unicorn and nobody else saw it. If two people see it, then it's true that the unicorn was there. If three or more people claim to have seen the uniform, then the idea of groupthink comes into play, where some might have influenced or persuaded others to think that they might've seen a unicorn.

Verses 21-59

In verses 21-24, Jesus notes that He is from above and that people are from beneath, putting it almost in geographic terms. He says that anyone who "does not believe will die in their sins," and it's almost implied that they remain in their sins down beneath. The up and down metaphor is very reminiscent of the illustrations that you'd find on tracts, with God up above and humanity down below with an uncrossable chasm in between, for which Jesus provides a bridge or ladder.

One apparent paradox is that in verse 30-31, the passage states that Jesus is speaking to the "many" who both "believed in Him" and "believed Him," which would indicate that He is speaking to seekers, believers, and followers. Yet as Jesus continues to speak, He calls them slaves of sin and children of the devil, and they in turn accuse Him of being a demon-possessed Samaritan, and then when Jesus pulls the big reveal and tells them, "Before Abraham was, I AM," they furiously try to stone Him. It's puzzling to discern who the audience really is in this passage.

It's also a very dramatic scene to visualize unfolding. The exchange begins when the Jews ask Jesus, "Who are you?" Jesus tells them, "Just as I have been saying to you from the beginning." And then the discussion heats as Jesus talks of His Father and Their relationship. Jesus calls Himself the offspring of God and calls them the offspring of the devil, the spawn of lies. The temperature in an already-scorching Israeli afternoon ratchets up several notches. And then they again demand, "Who are you?" and Jesus replies, "Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it and was glad," and the Jews again ask, "Who are you?" and Jesus declares in a thunderously outrageous statement, "Before Abraham was, I AM." That Name of God that was too sacred to even say, to the extent that Jews knew God as HaShem, "The Name," and only dared to spell out the four letters YHVH as an abbreviation on sacred scrolls. For Jesus to say that Name out loud in reference to Himself -- the impact doesn't come across in the New King James Version, where all the translator had to do was hit Caps Lock. I don't think we can fully understand; our culture doesn't hold anything with that sort of reverence these days.

And then Jesus disappears and walks through the crowd, which would be a really neat party trick and probably exactly what I would've done if they were about to throw rocks at me.

Sickness

2009-03-06T08:51:00.001-08:00

It's a bizarre thing, but when I get sick, I seem to lose completely the capacity for spiritual thought or exercise. It takes an extreme effort to focus on anything spiritual or divine. My head and my heart are nowhere near pursuing God, going to church, reading the Word, connecting with other people. All I want to do is shut down my life until my body recovers.

Why is that?

Desultory thoughts:

1. Our bodies were made in God's image. When God's creation fell to sin and imperfection, so did our bodies. You'll note that there's not supposed to be any sickness or death in the perfection of the coming eternity. (Revelation 21:4. On a side note, there's also no crying in heaven, just like there's no crying in baseball. What will girls do with their time?) I think that our bodies are meant to be a physical means of experiencing spiritual realities. That's not to say that when you're hungry, you're necessarily not being filled with the Spirit at that time, but it is to say that when you're hungry, you know what it's like not be filled and nourished. When your body is impassioned, you know what it is to yearn for communion with another person or being. These sensations you can translate to a spiritual plane pretty easily. Likewise, when you're sick, you know what it is to feel the opposite of alive -- a foreshadowing of death, the experience of being apart from God and eternal life.

2. In a certain sense, being sick doesn't make sense to me because if I'm in a bad place, shouldn't my first thought be a fervent plea for God to come and heal me, in the style of Jeremiah 17:14? The whole cycle of the Old Testament shows that when the Israelites got into trouble, their response was to repent and turn to the Lord and pray for healing and forgiveness, and then the Lord returned and made things right. Yet when I'm sick with the flu or somesuch, it takes considerable effort for me to even think of praying for healing or seeking the Lord, in favor of popping some Tylenol and going to sleep. Is there something wrong with me, or is there something counter-intuitive about this whole sickness process?

3. Which is easier to say to the paralytic? "Your sins are forgiven you," or "arise, take your bed and walk"? Physical healing can very well be a sign from God that He makes us well in all respects.

4. Maybe I'm grasping at straws, and there is no over-arching abstruse spiritual convention behind sickness, other than the fact that we have fallen bodies and it sucks to get sick.

But what a reminder of the dire mortality of our present existence. Do you know how much time I've spent at the gym in the past few months? We spend so much time on our bodies: working out, eating right, putting on suntan lotion, taking vitamins, bundling up in the winter, as if we were gods who could run forever on an infinite plane, and getting sick is a little slap-in-the-face from the reality of the temporary and transient nature of our present condition.

2 Corinthians 4:18: "Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day."

Desert Island Dinner Party Invites

2009-02-23T18:18:00.000-08:00

You remember these questions from college roommate surveys or ice-breakers.

1. If you could invite any three people to dinner, fictional or non-fictional, historic or contemporary, who would they be and why?

2. If you were stuck on a desert island and could only have one book, which book would it be and why?

If you're a follower of Jesus Christ, do you have to answer "Jesus" to Question 1 and do you have to answer "The Bible" to Question 2?

My first (reflexive) response is to say, no, being a Christian doesn't mean you have to give Christian answers to survey questions. David Crowder is not my favorite artist, John Piper is not my favorite author, and Facing the Giants is not my favorite movie. I always get annoyed when people have to put "Christian" answers to their preferences. Christ came to set us free, not entrap us in Christian cultural bases.

But my second response is that I'm supposed to be hinging my life, here and eternal, on the fact that Jesus is my first love, creator, best friend, and savior. And the Bible that sits on my shelf is supposed to be the living word of God, a "lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path," the ultimate source of day-to-day truth. If I'm at all serious about any of it, are my honest answers not obligated to be Jesus and the Bible respectively?

If I were given two free tickets to a Caribbean cruise, should I not take my fiancee? Sure, it's my choice in a technical sense, but if I chose anyone other than her, you'd be in the right to smack me and say, "What's the matter with you?"

Coming Up For Air

2009-02-17T09:26:00.000-08:00

Interactive experience and Wikipedia research clues me in to the enormous diversity and controversy of opinions surrounding the precedence for practice of baptism. (Fun fact: John 3 records that Jesus went around baptizing while John 4 said it was actually His followers. What a not-straightforward text.) I can't speak with great intelligence on the subject, but at church this Sunday, the pastor's sermon mentioned that one powerful idea associated with baptism is the symbolic act of being dead and buried (as you're immersed in the water) and then resurrected (as you rise back out of the water) as with Christ. Scriptures like Romans 6:3-5 and Colossians 2:11-12 seem to corroborate the theme.

If your imagination runs over this image, it's pretty arresting stuff. Imagine being forcibly held underwater, gasping for air, waves of shock and pain jarring through your nasal cavities, your torso arcing spasmodically. Death is no stasis, no absence of activity, but a terrifying, crushing, inexorable experience. And after the seconds-turned-eternity underwater, you suddenly rise, break over the surface, and gasp in a noisy, ragged breath that restores your lungs to capacity. It's a raw, powerful first breath that shakes you and punches you with the unmistakable miracle that you are now alive, gloriously alive, and free from the asphyxiating waters dripping off your face.

Maybe what I've described was not your baptism experience, but it might hold some bearing on what it means to be dead and then resurrected.

I keep a folded piece of paper in my Bible that reminds me of a figurative baptism I once had. During my freshman year of college, I was taking a computer science course in programming JAVA. Five months after I had taken my final exam, my friend Francis and I received a notice from the Rice University Honor Council that stated that we were being accused of colluding, specifically copying code, on said take-home exam. Never mind that I got an A+ and Francis failed the exam, that the evidence was incredibly circumstantial, and that we didn't cheat. We had a total of three or four successive hearings, spread out over a month-long period, each with the threat of suspension or expulsion with little to no means of appeal. Of course, for us, academic suspension would definitely mean the end of our Naval scholarships, which would mean we couldn't pay for school. During that month, Francis and I were as stressed as we'd ever been. We couldn't sleep at night, and every day was filled with continual worries of our college degrees, Naval careers, and lives swirling indefatigably down the toilet. No school would admit us after we were branded as cheaters. No employer would ever hire us. In a very melodramatic sense, we felt like we were on the verge of being separated from our lives, as good as dead. In a more practical sense, I lost ten pounds from stress and anxiety.

So after a month, we finally got a letter from the Honor Council that read as follows:

Matt Dunn, I am writing to inform you that the Honor Council has reached a decision regarding your case in COMP 201. The Honor Council has found you "Not In Violation" of the Honor Code in COMP 201.

I recall a very tangible, corporeal relief overwhelming me when I read those words of exoneration. Never mind that I was never actually guilty of the sin. In my mind, in some sense, I had considered myself dead and now I saw myself alive, and the best physical parallel was coming up for air after being held underwater.

It's a silly example, in retrospect, and I shouldn't have been so bent out of shape over something like being expelled from college. But the vivid sensation of being alive after my guilt was cleared was unforgettable. Like baptism, the letter physically reminds me of salvation. It has stayed in my Bible for over three years now.

Stranger than Fiction

2009-02-13T05:32:00.000-08:00

The reason I haven't posted in a while, and probably won't for some time, is that I've been recently engrossed in the series Battlestar Galactica. It's been an enormously thought-provoking show whose episodes and developments posit challenging ideas about issues of human nature, purpose, and faith. A large subplot of the series has been about humanity's pursuit of God and the relevance of religious faith to both society and individual decisions. It's been my least favorite subplot, the part where they talk about finding God and what comes of it, and I think I've realized why.

The first reason is that I'm always uncomfortable when I hear fictional representations about God interacting with people. The Left Behind book series. Fireproof. In His Steps. When critics label these books Christian propaganda, it's a little hard for me not to agree with them because I already think that it's treading on dangerous ground to suppose or assume how God would respond to a certain situation. Our Texas high school football team is losing games and quarreling with each other, but once we band together, hold hands, forgive each other, and learn to pray as a team, God rewards us and Joshua 1:9's us and gives us the state championship game? A lot of these stories become moralistic tales and compartmentalize God into some convenient, personified distributor of good karma.

The second reason, a related thought, is that these fictional representations of God are uncomfortable because we often find ourselves representing God in fictitious ways. The parental God who is deeply grieved every time high schoolers make out without having a Define-the-Relationship conversation. The cool God who, if you interacted with Him, would probably be pretty cool and relaxed and have a beer with you because He loves you. The conservative God who preserves the Republican party like it's the new chosen people.

Thirty-nine years ago, the movie Patton came out, where actor George C. Scott gave a legendary acting performance that he felt was true to the character of General Patton. It has since been an odd phenomenon that people at large associate the historical Patton with the movie characterization. Is the movie Patton far off from the historical Patton? Probably not. There's a lot of truth in George C. Scott's representation. But people don't think of the real Patton. And sometimes I'm afraid that could happen with God. It's not that the parental God, or the cool God, or the conservative God are each complete falsehoods, but they're all in some way fictional and a lot of people look to them to see God. Can we presume to represent God so well that our fictions can be considered biographical?

Interestingly enough, I've found myself arguing on the other side of the line too. During my sophomore year of college, a very post-modern pastor wrote the Rice Thresher with a letter to the editor, arguing that Jesus did not know He was God, but that His unintended death, a consequence of His bucking Roman authority, opened the way to salvation. She qualified her statements with the question, "How can I presume to know the mind of Christ? I can't." And I thought for a while about this statement, "How can I presume to know the mind of Christ," and on March 26, 2006, I replied,

You wrote that we can't presume to know the mind of Christ. I was reading through 1 Cor 2, and I agree that in our state, we probably won't be able to comprehend fully the "mystery / hidden wisdom which God ordained for the ages for our glory." But we do know that Christ was filled with the Holy Spirit, and also that "we have received...the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God." Would this not extend not only to spiritual gifts, but also to salvation through Jesus? The chapter also ends with the verse, "But we have the mind of Christ." I read that, through submission and filling of the Holy Spirit, God grants us more and more understanding of His nature, which is also that of Jesus, since "I and the Father are one." In that respect, the more we study Scripture under the revelation of the Holy Spirit, the more we can presume to know the mind of Christ.

My contention, at the time, was that we can't claim to know nothing about God or Jesus. God does show us a lot about Himself. To say otherwise in the name of open-mindedness belittles what He did, the time He spent here on earth, the way He's revealed Himself to us over centuries, and the way He interacts with us today. We do know that He said in 2 Chronicles 7:14, "If My people, who are called by My name, will humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land." We do know that in that verse, there is truth about God's compassion and mercy in the face of repentance. But do we know it well enough to proclaim that it will be true in the case of the high school football state championship? We must be careful to tell a true story when people say, "Tell me the story of Jesus."

I seldom know where I'm going with a train of thought, but once again, my post ended up talking about how it's important to avoid ugly extremes on both sides of an issue. Which is how Plato represented ethics and morality: a system of behavior whose ultimate goal is to achieve the golden mean between two wicked extremes. I should probably write about that sometime.

If I had to pick one fictional representation about God and what we know about Him, it would be from C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. Mr. Tumnus says something true: "He's not a tame lion, but He is a good lion."

To Be Honest

2009-01-31T06:52:00.000-08:00

My opening remarks on this blog were that I would not always be right, but I would always be honest. I think the word "honest" means different things to different people, and it's usually some variation on a theme of transparency.

The reason I usually don't like most blogs is because they are too "honest." I used to write blogs in high school that were like that; my friend Jimmy calls them "verbal masturbation," which is a gross but strikingly accurate summary. Every nasty thought about someone you ran across today or every insignificant thing that annoyed you or every temporary panic attack over misplacing your cell phone or keys.

People need to be straight with each other and we have to be willing to be vulnerable, but does that mean we need to be so utterly transparent?

Blue Like Jazz has this revolutionary idea where a bunch of Christians get together during an all-campus festival of debauchery and drunkenness and set up what they call a confession booth. The trick was that they were confessing to the students at Reed the sins and shortcomings of the church: the failure to be open and loving, the failure to feed the poor and comfort widows, and so on. And it wasn't a gimmick to trick the student body: it was a legitimate attempt to be candid, sincere, and transparent. Was it refreshingly honest or was it a misplaced endeavor?

I went to a campus ministry winter conference seminar where the speaker posed the question of what the consequences would be if all of our sins were broadcast on the campus radio every morning. I don't remember where the thought was going because I was stuck thinking about that idea. At the time, I thought it was the most incredible idea I'd ever heard. And really, when you talk about honesty in terms and scenarios like these, you have to consider the effects for two parties: yourself and the audience. For myself, I thought how humbling and convicting it would be to be held accountable not only by the people I chose to confide in, but by the attention of the campus at large. And how it would instantly negate my precarious hold on silly things like reputation and cool factor. And for the people who would hear it, well! They would hear and understand that I was also privy to sin and failure, but that I was also redeemed by the grace of my Lord Jesus Christ! Isn't that why God chose to use us broken people as His ambassadors? Clearly, the only thing holding back the body of Christ at large from using this transparent approach was utter cowardice!

I used to be a member of an evangelism team, constituted by a committee of five or six upperclassmen at Rice. The goal was to optimize how our students and resources were being used to reach the campus at large for Christ, and our meetings would have a lot of heated back-and-forth discussions about a number of fiery issues. At one point, I thought, wouldn't it be great if any given student could sit in on these private meetings? They could hold us accountable if we had an irrelevant idea or notion. They would see how much we cared about and labored towards their salvation and see our faith in a God who would make it so.

I'm no longer convinced that utter transparency is a good thing, for us or for the audience.

We were naked once upon a time, but in this fallen world, God ordained that we cover up our privates.

I think back to when I first learned the term honesty, around first grade or so, and the teacher or my mom said that to be honest is to tell the truth.

When you look at a blog rife with the messiness of petty details, unfounded conceptions, and desultory emotions, you may think of transparency, but you don't think of truth.

Jesus calls Himself the Truth. He speaks definitively of Light that shines and pierces through darkness. He declares that when men know the truth, the truth shall set them free.

Truth is more than you find in the average daily blog post, and it's a better thing than you would hear if my sins were broadcast daily over the radio. Because all you would hear then is a partial truth (that I'm a sinful person) and not the rest of it (the truth of Jesus's mysterious grace and salvation).

When Darth Vader tells Luke, "Search your feelings, you know it be true," it seems like Luke's confused, pained feelings are the worst place to search for truth.

And the truth is that when you ralph up a confession of your dirty laundry and innermost thoughts to most people, they're not going to respond well. They're going to say, why did you think it would be a good idea to tell me that nonsense?

The truth isn't what you're feeling at a particular point in time. The truth is unshakably Jesus. So we should add discernment and discretion to temper our notions of honesty and transparency. How many proverbs can you find where it tells you to keep your mouth shut?

I do think that most people should be more honest and more vulnerable. We do need to connect with people heart to heart, and we do need to reflect God's redemption in a meaningful, sincere way. We shouldn't pose or hide. We don't need to pretend that we don't have dirty laundry, but decidedly, we should be professors (we should profess) of Jesus's purifying love.

The Search for a Church

2009-01-25T19:23:00.000-08:00

Every new Christian, and especially those who come to faith after a certain mature age, comes to a point where they question why we worship communally if this Christian life is supposed to be about an individual's personal relationship with God. If in the end, this Christian walk is about me and God, then why the integral role of other people? What can I gain from going to church, when in this information age, I can access sermons and hymns and concordance references instantaneously from my own living room? We preach that God pursues our hearts, that He abhors legalism and that at the end of days, He won't be touting the statistics of our church attendance or whether we wore a tie on Sundays. And if we really believe that, shouldn't zero church attendance be a legitimate option?

We certainly can't spend life in a vacuum. Our growth will be stunted. We will not have the opportunity to love and be loved, and all that Scripture and its truth will remain an abstract and a nice set of ideas if we don't spend our lives around people, dealing with the messiness and vulnerability and beauty of life in Christ. That's why most of the commandments and guidance we get from the Bible is about how to deal with other people. Spending our lives studying Scripture by ourselves is about as safe, confining, and lonely as it sounds. So much for the living room Christian community of one.

By and large, I didn't go to church throughout my undergraduate years. My rationale was that I had everything a church could offer with my campus ministry. I was being fed spiritually, and I had a role where I was feeding others. I had strong fellowship with other believers, in a Christ-centered community of college students. I had a weekly opportunity to worship and pray corporately, and different ministry opportunities that more or less encompassed what I could've done at a church. I connected with my brothers and sisters in Christ: they encouraged me to grow in the Lord, and I did the same, and I think that's what church is all about.

People kept telling me I needed to join an actual church, but I never saw the reason why, and I still really don't see that I should have. But it might've made it easier for the hereafter.

I've been church-shopping for several months now without finding one that I've really liked. And it's made me stop and wonder whether I just haven't found it yet or whether I need to revise my search criteria. What church really is supposed to be.

I've never liked people who put a lot of meaningless criteria on what makes an acceptable church. "I can't go to a church that plays that contemporary Christian music." "Oh, I really don't like large churches. They're so impersonal and they don't care about you at all." "I don't like the way they elect their deacons." "Why don't they have a homeless ministry?" In the end, I like to think that what I'm looking for is a first: a good, strong, loving, encouraging community who is in love with Christ and who love other people well, and second: solid, challenging, relevant Biblical teaching. I like to think that I'm not picky or partial about the other trivialities of whether they make you wear a tie or whether they prefer King James to NIV.

It's hard to tell whether the places I've found have fallen short of those criteria or whether I've inadvertently appended other criteria to my list of two.

I haven't found a place where I've felt the teaching is intelligent, challenging, and solidly Biblically based. I suspect that the Baptist churches I've mostly been attending have strong roots in storytelling rhetoric in sermons, and a lot of their stories have made no sense or don't really follow from the passages at hand. I think I really just want a pastor whom I think is smarter than me. It might relate to why I skipped so many classes in college.

I haven't found a place where most of the congregants are under the age of sixty. Is this concern legitimate because I haven't found people I can really relate to or is it trivial because I'm concerned with the comfort zone of people in their 20's?

I haven't found a place where everyone didn't love the acting of Kirk Cameron, especially in Fireproof. I saw Left Behind. As much as I would love to root for evangelical film, it was excruciatingly bad. I know it's a picky little thing, but I really want to find people who agree with the obvious reality that he is not a good actor.

I'm sure in some respects, it's like a relationship, where after a certain point, you have to grow to love something for its beauty in spite of some misgivings and flaws. "The church is a whore, but she's my mother," right, Augustine?

In short, I haven't found a place I want to return to, and I'm wondering if I'm looking in the wrong places or if I'm looking wrongly at places.

I think back to the books in the New Testament, of the early days of church-founding, where former fishermen and tax collectors traveled itinerant from community to community founding congregations that were hungry for Jesus and struggling to come up with some sort of order and discipline for their corporate faith. I imagine that a believer back then would have had to settle for his local Christian community, made up of widows and orphans and beggars and scholars and masons and carpenters. I imagine that they rejoiced in the love of the Father and in each other.

And only in America today do I have this vast array of churches from which to choose. It wouldn't even be an issue in Zimbabwe or Myanmar. But I do live here and now. I do have a vast array of options before me, and that means I should take the decision seriously. The very phrase "church-shopping" makes the holy Bride of Christ sound like an automobile with various features I can choose by preference. I hate the caprice and irreverence of my approach. My search may change direction, and it continues.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

Pre-Marital Counseling

2009-01-21T18:01:00.000-08:00

Grace Bible Church's pre-marital counseling questionnaire form is 13 pages long, and that's just the questions. So it's been a long process filling out this incredibly long form with very introspective and profound questions. After a while, I started having fun and being myself again:

What brought you to the decision to want to be married? I want a male heir and she by all accounts is fertile and of child-bearing age.

Have you in the past or are you now living with your fiancée? She lives in my heart.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm too irreverent for my own good, but I never wonder about that very seriously.

Shalom Yerushalayim

2009-01-13T11:58:00.000-08:00

I think we're all losing the war in Israel.

900 Palestinians and 13 Israelis killed so far. Some of them civilians, some of them children.

In Iran, the Ayatollah has promised heavenly rewards to anyone killed fighting on the Palestinian side. They've also started burning effigies of Obama before he even takes office. Many Iranians blame the United States for not intervening. But if you're going to blame the cops for not protecting you, aren't you recognizing the moral and practical authority of the cops, and if you recognize that, shouldn't you stop burning pictures of them?

It's hard to form an informed opinion because it's hard to know what information and statistics to trust. Reports from Gaza? Whose reports? A Western journalist? An Israeli doctor? A local community leader?

Obama makes a good point: "If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I would do everything in my power to stop that."

It's also a significant point because both sides are launching missiles right now.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't be concerned with who is right and who is wrong, and who started it and who should end it. That's important. Most of my friends support Israel, both from patriotic and religious loyalties, and I agree that God has always loved Israel, ever since the faithfulness of Abraham. But supporting Israel doesn't mean that everything her government does is morally defensible or God's will. It doesn't mean that war isn't terrible. And the fact that Palestinian rockets have devastated Israeli homes doesn't mean we shouldn't weep for the death of Palestinian children any more than Israeli missile strikes preclude us from praying for the peace of Jerusalem.

My point is that even if we're called to stand by Israel, we don't have to give up the cause of humanity. Humanity is God's cause, His magnum opus, the apple of His eye. The attack on His people surely must anger God, and surely there is a cause of holiness and righteousness that accompanies a necessary war, but the result of our sin, the ensuing war, must surely grieve His heart with each death of a beloved creation.

I'm not a pacifist. I believe that sometimes you have to kill people and break their things. But it's still a terrible thing.

The problem isn't Palestinians, and it isn't Israelis. This conflict is just a local manifestation of the fact that in the bigger picture of creation and sin and consequences, the problem is us, you and I.

Zechariah

2009-01-06T09:39:00.000-08:00

Desultory thoughts on reading through Zechariah the second time. If you are reading this entry, be forewarned of my lack of organization here.

Lots of visions and prophecies that are difficult to place or interpret. One clear Messianic prophecy about a forthcoming Man whose name is BRANCH, who is to build the temple of the Lord and rule from His throne their as priest of the Lord.

It's interesting that we think of Jesus in the role as Savior so often and yet never consider what it means when the Old Testament calls Him a priest.

An interesting historical point is that the name "Jesus" is a Greek word that derives from the Hebrew "Yeshua," which both means "salvation" and is itself a derivation of "Yehoshua," which in the modern language translates to "Joshua." In other words, there's strong evidence that the names "Jesus" and "Joshua" were heavily related and possibly even interchangeable. What then do we make of Zechariah 3? In Zechariah 3, Joshua the high priest is shown standing before the Angel of the Lord. Already, the image is confusing theologically because both the Angel of the Lord and Joshua from the Old Testament are considered by many circles to be foreshadowing manifestations of Christ. Joshua the high priest is first clothed in filthy garments as he stands before the Angel, and the Lord commands that his filthy garments be stripped away and replaced with rich robes and a clean turban. And then the Lord promises Joshua the high priest that if he walks in His ways and keeps His commands, then he will judge the Lord's house and have charge of His courts.

Seems like Joshua here, who may not be linked to Joshua the son of Nun, is a pretty clear visual representation of a coming Messiah's restoration from filth to glory.

It's also relevant to note that in this text, the Angel of the Lord and the Lord are used interchangeably. I've always wondered about the capital letter Angel of the Lord, whether he is an angel with special authority or whether He is an incarnation of the Lord. Texts like Zechariah seem to indicate the latter, and a lot of people jump to the assumption that it's Jesus by another name, but what precludes the Angel of the Lord from being a fourth person of God, upgrading the paradigm from Trinity to Quaternity?

In chapter 7, verse 5, the Lord asks the people of Israel, "When you fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh months during those seventy years, did you really fast for Me -- for Me?" This verse is hilarious to me because of the immortal words of Ivan Drago in Rocky IV: "I fight for ME! For ME!"

Finally, a verse in chapter 8. For several years, I have tried to find ways to communicate how I think Israel plays into God's plan for the salvation of the nations. That instead of revealing Himself to the world at large, He chose Israel and gave her His laws and presence and favor so that the world would see and marvel and become jealous and want some of that awesome God thing that Israel had going for her. So it's a nice picture in Zechariah 8:23 that encapsulates that thought: "Thus says the Lord of hosts: 'In those days, ten men from every language of the nations shall grasp the sleeve of a Jewish man, saying, "Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you."'"

If you stand with Israel because you believe that God is still glorified in the way He preserves Israel, or if you believe that you are an ambassador for Christ, you should ready yourself for people tugging on your sleeves, wanting to come with you because in you they see the Lord.

On First Principles

2008-12-31T14:54:00.000-08:00

I wanted to present an additional idea to my previous discourse on First Principles and faith.

A First Principle is a philosophical term for a "basic, foundational proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption." An example would be the syllogism: Men are different from women. Kylie Minogue is a woman, and I am a man. Conclusion: I am not Kylie Minogue. The First Principle would be the starting point that we accept to be true, that men are different from women. Everything else logically follows from that stated truth.

I was having an extended discussion with my friend Willy about First Principles as applied to personal faith. At a certain point, he remarked, we all have a point where we decide to say, "Fuck it! I accept this as true." For a lot of people you run into, finding the First Principle might be as easy as the following hypothetical conversation:

Why do you call yourself a Christian? Because I believe in God. Why do you believe in God? Because the Bible says He's real and good. Why do you believe the Bible?
Because it's true. Why is it true? Because it's the Bible.

For that person, the assumed truth of the Bible is the philosophical starting place of faith. For a more curious or inquisitive type, it might go further:

Why do you believe the Bible is true? Because I've done a lot of research, and archeological investigation really corroborates a lot of the historical personages and events recorded in the Bible. Why do you take those as reliable? Well, these archeologists have described their methods and research, and they sound pretty legitimate, which I've decided is convincing enough for me.

The point being that everyone, after a series of "why" questions, has a point at which they base their faith on a First Principle. Does the fact that everyone, even Christians, might espouse a different First Principle for their faith or beliefs undermine the legitimacy of faith? On the contrary, that's the nature of faith. At a certain point, we decide to believe.

My friend Michael also made an incredibly insightful observation about the First Principle for Christians. He said that one day, he had begun, offhand, to question things by asking "why" in iterative succession. Why do I exist? To glorify and magnify God. Why is it necessary or right to do that? Because God is awesome and good and His glorification is the right thing to do, reflecting that magnitude of light and goodness. Why?

He found that at the very root of all these series of questionings lay the answer, as if from God: I Am.

He tried it several times, with a number of different starting points about life and the universe, and every time, after he asked why and why and why, Michael found himself at the basic First Principle that He Is.

Why is the sky blue? Because of the way the ozone and other chemicals emanate electromagnetic energy in specific wavelengths interpreted in bands by the cones in our eyes? Why do they do that? Because God designed them that way. What is the purpose and evidence behind that? Because He created all things for His glory. Why? Because He Did. Because, Michael, I Am.

Maybe if we ask why honestly, believer or nonbeliever, we'd find ourselves all in the same place. Maybe if we believe in Jesus, then all our First Principles are the same after all. Maybe God did more than tell us His name, and that's enough to anchor every question important enough to ask.

Obligatory Christmas Post

2008-12-23T16:29:00.001-08:00

The real bailout happened 2008 years ago.

Boy, do I wish I could meet the person who came up with that. I think I'd smack him in the face and shake his hand at the same time.

One Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church

2008-12-23T11:52:00.000-08:00

My experiences with the Catholic Church have not been that extensive, but in the past few years, I have had the great opportunity to be friends with a few devout Catholics and thus the chance to actually ask some questions instead of relying on mostly negative stereotypes that had previously formed my conception of Catholicism.

Long sentence.

Like many Protestants (I'm not sure I fit that label in its truest sense, but I'm not Catholic, right?), I had grown up thinking of Catholicism as a hyper traditionalist, dogmatic, and legalistic institution. They prayed blindly to dead saints. They worshiped the Virgin Mary. They had extra apocryphal books that they considered Scripture. They held services in Latin, for seemingly no apparent reason, since the Bible was written in Hebrew and Aramaic. At one point in history, they sold indulgences and forced the real Christians to break off in a Reformation, for 95 reasons. They were monolithic in their stance against divorce, abortion, and fun.

I asked my first Catholic friend to explain the reasoning behind a lot of their ideas, and she partially answered my queries. She clarified that she doesn't pray to the canonized saints, but rather prays that they would intercede for her, the way we might ask a priest or parent or righteous person to pray for us. She cited James 5:16 as a biblical basis, where it states that "the prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective."

It seemed to me like the whole practice of praying to St. Christopher as a patron saint for travel is a large extrapolation from the associated Scriptural text. We talked about some more of the larger practices in the Catholic Church -- that the papacy comes from Scriptures like Matthew 16:17-20, among others -- and it seemed to me that Catholics would have to make a lot of leaps of faith from specific isolated verses of Scripture to the way they insisted was the right way to practice and apply them. Can you really go from "on this rock, I will build my Church" to having a pope seated in the Vatican who occasionally is infallible in Magisterium? Catholicism was more legitimate than I had thought, but only if you were willing to make big stretches in faith.

Also, any time I attended a Catholic service, I automatically think of that final montage in The Godfather where Michael Corleone has everyone whacked during the ceremony for his godson. Can't help it.

I went on a month-long road trip with another friend who had converted from Protestant to Catholic during his freshman year of college. He is one of the smartest guys I know. He was patient and answered a lot of my questions. Don't a lot of people in the Catholic Church just blindly follow a lot of tradition and dogma? Yes, that's true, and it's a problem, but it's also a problem for every denomination out there. Isn't it a huge stretch to derive the whole institution of the papacy from isolated Scriptures here and there? The Protestant denominations also have practices that are stretches of faith: the idea that tithing is a modern obligation, for example. And so on.

The most intriguing and challenging aspect of his Catholic faith was the validation (or not) of church history. We could argue doctrinal points all day, and we did. But a lot of his reason for belief was that he saw that the Catholic Church had preserved the things of God from Christ's first coming to the present day. That in the same way that Israel had preserved the Torah and been witness to the nations of God's law, love, and character, so the Catholic Church has been God's instrument over the last 2000 years. That the Catholic priests and scribes had been the ones to maintain and consolidate the canon of Scripture and that they had been the ones to make important decisions for Christendom in councils and diets. And if God had used the Catholic Church as His true body for the last 2000 years, then that was pretty compelling reason to join Team Catholicism.

I don't share my friend's view of history, but it was more legitimate than the blind loyalty to the Catholic Church that I had previously imagined.

Whenever a person believes anything, he or she makes a decision, at some point, to believe, no matter what the evidence or lack thereof dictates. Philosophically, every set of beliefs comes from an immovable "first principle," where you basically say, "I'm going to accept this as true." Wikipedia's example is that for the syllogism "All men are mortal; Socrates was a man. Socrates was mortal," the first principle was "All men are mortal." You accept this statement as truth, and the rest follows from logic.

It makes sense to me that faith would also follow a first principle. Okay, we Protestants really like to believe that our faith is based on undeniable evidence and reason. But everyone has a different point at which they choose to believe something is the truth. For most people, you ask why they believe in God, and they say, the Bible says so, and you say, why do you accept the Bible is true? And they say, because it is, and you've reached the end of their paradigm. That the Bible is true is a first principle for them. For others, you would need to go further to find the first principle -- they have to put their trust in the fact that biblical archeology is true, or they would have to do further research to see whether the archeology was done legitimately, or they would have to do even further research to see whether the reports auditing the archeology were verifiable -- you get the idea. Everyone has a point where they say, "Screw it. I believe this much is true, and everything follows from this."

For the Protestant thinker, this identifying of first principles and taking small leaps of faith is a never-ending process. Every issue and every practice, I have to wrestle with why I believe it and how I should practice it and whether Scripture or doctrine really says what I think it says and whether it makes sense with the world around me, a recurrent process largely chronicled in this blog. And here is the main distinction I see with the Catholic faith. When they take it on faith that the Catholic Church is true, then they have made one astoundingly large conceptual leap of faith -- but everything else Catholic follows from that because they can then trust the Church's authority. Where I might have to question whether the Trinity is a real, necessary part of my belief, where I might have to question everything, the Catholic believer can trust the authority of the Church that he has chosen to subscribe to. The Protestant believer has to make many small leaps of faith and decisions to believe in whatever constitutes his day-to-day faith. The Catholic believer has to make one huge leap of faith.

For me, right now, that intellectual leap is too large, so I don't think I'm in any danger of becoming Catholic. I still don't agree with the history or a lot of their practices that seem to stray too far from their biblical bases. But here are two things I do like about the Catholic Church at large.

The first is their reverence in worship. I like the way they seem to take God seriously. I like the feel of Catholic services: it's hard to sit through all those prayers and liturgy and look at all the imagery around the churches and not ponder, with some sense of wonder, the God who is so much bigger than you. Sometimes Protestant services and gatherings have the atmosphere of having been thrown together at the last minute, like a barnyard shindig. I pray a lot in my boxers right after I get off the can, and I know I'm not supposed to be legalistic or self-righteous, but I feel like I do owe the King of the Universe and Lord of my life more reverence than I give Him most days.

The second is their strong emphasis on the importance of family.

I guess in the end, I'm happy where I am, and I'm happy I'm not a Catholic. But they're less ridiculous than I had thought they were originally.

Shorts, Part One

2008-12-03T13:47:00.000-08:00

Some days, I have original thoughts:

If you do a respectable ab workout, then it really hurts to do pullups, which must mean that pullups are an ab workout.

When people say, "Happy belated birthday," the sentiment they mean is a belated happy birthday. The phrase unintentionally shifts the blame from the negligent person who forgot your birthday to you for having a birthday belatedly. Good job, latecomer.

If you've ever wondered why they put Indian fennel seeds in Italian sausage, you've probably speculated that it's to make the sausage taste better. But it's probably because Indian fennel seeds are phytoestrogenic, so the effective way to be able to ingest Indian fennel seeds without turning into a woman would be to accompany them with a giant amalgamation of delicious pig meat.

The lack of hair continuity between chest hair and facial hair is probably because the body is designed for heat exchange around the carotid arteries in the neck.

"Wasabi" could almost be a dyslexic kid's exclamatory equivalent of "I saw a bee!"

The next six months, and frankly, the next four years will involve a lot of isolated, shift work in the Navy. I may not have regular opportunity to attend church or to plug into Christian fellowship. I think an earlier version of me would have considered a period of my life where I didn't have both an active ministry and explicit spiritual sources and outlets a wasted time period. Maybe, maybe not. Is that why God let Moses sit in the desert for 40 years before calling him to do something? Is that why He let Jesus be a carpenter for 30? Sometimes you're supposed to do "Christian things," but I don't think you're wrong if it doesn't look like two discipleship meetings and a small group every week. You just have to be ready to up and move when God decides to "use you again."

Did Jacob the Patriarch do anything worthwhile for God? He stole a birthright, wrestled an Angel, and demanded a blessing. It seems like his most noteworthy accomplishment was fathering a dozen or so male children, which probably makes more worthy the fact that he worked diligently for 14 years for the right wife. [Women: Insert snide comment about the ratio of men's to women's work in raising children.] And yet somehow he became the namesake of Israel. Jacob have I loved, indeed.

If someone tells you, oh, they've been to China, you should probably ask what Beijing and one section of the Great Wall were like.

If you went to Japan for a few weeks and didn't eat any sushi at all, you're probably my girlfriend.

The idea behind the Advent Conspiracy is a good one, but I think for my grandparents, giving nice gifts at Christmas and birthdays is one of the few and best ways they know how to love us. And I've thought about asking for nothing for Christmas, or a donation to some cause, but I think they would feel sad that they didn't get to buy a gift for me. The more loving thing to do here, for them, is to receive a gift graciously with a smile.

It'd be interesting to see what percentage of people who saw the new James Bond film knew what the words "quantum" and "solace" mean. Probably all the 11th graders.

If anyone makes a Christian pun on the term "Crossfit," I might die a little on the inside.

In the Roman era, warriors and soldiers wore red so that if they bled on the battlefield, their crimson wounds would be disguised. Nowadays, most of the world's military forces have uniform pants that are khaki brown. What are they hoping won't show in brown pants?

I wonder if most men in the world would be better men if they had ever been in one good fistfight.

Fhqwhgads

2008-11-30T11:58:00.000-08:00

We were talking about my friend [Fhqwhgads] at lunch, and someone asked how Fhqwhgads was doing, and someone else said, "Fhqwhgads is hanging on right now," and it was generally remarked upon that Fhqwhgads is the sort of person who always seems to be hanging on to life.

Fhqwhgads is very needy, emotionally and spiritually. A lot of the times, when you can classify your friends into people who invest and pour themselves into other people and people who need to be invested and poured into, Fhqwhgads falls squarely in the latter category. Fhqwhgads always ends up precariously balanced on razor-thin ice over a terrifying, rushing river of emotional and spiritual meltdown -- the world ends easily and often for Fhqwhgads. Fhqwhgads often seems unable to figure out the trick to living life. Fhqwhgads cries a lot.

According to Jesus, Fhqwhgads should be considered blessed because Fhqwhgads is poor in spirit and is one who mourns and therefore will have the Kingdom of Heaven and be comforted. Fhqwhgads should be considered like the Woman at the Well, whom Jesus meets directly and promises living water. Fhqwhgads should be considered like the tax collector who prayed with downcast eyes and went home justified instead of the righteous Pharisee. Fhqwhgads is the sort of broken that God can love the best.

If you don't know anyone like Fhqwhgads, then you don't know how hard it is to be Fhqwhgads's friend. It is a never-ending endeavor of forgiveness, humility, service, sacrifice, vulnerability, hardship, and love. It is difficult. Sometimes I fail and I think that Fhqwhgads is just a drain, not a giver or a source, someone who just needs and needs when all you do is give and give. God help us all when we think like that because it's hard not to sometimes. If I can't figure out why Fhqwhgads is blessed, and sometimes I really can't, then I'm no better off than Fhqwhgads.

The Great Commission

2008-11-23T08:52:00.000-08:00

The most recognizable rendition of the Great Commission comes from Matthew 28:

"Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, to the mountain which Jesus had appointed for them. When they saw Him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, 'All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.'"

In essence, Jesus says, "Hey guys, this one is from Me, and I have authority everywhere now. Go, Make disciples, Baptize, and Teach them."

If you look online, you'll find a lot of very strong statements on TGC, including "It's not the Great Suggestion," and "It goes without saying that ALL Christians have a responsibility to fulfill the Great Commission." It does go with saying that "The Great Commission" is not a term ascribed to this passage by the Bible, kind of like the term "Trinity." How can we determine whether this specific command from Jesus is to the eleven disciples He was directly addressing or to every Christian in every generation? I don't believe it goes without saying at all, so here are some thoughts:

1. Some would say that based on Mark 16:20 and Romans 16:25-26, the gospel has already been taken to "all nations." Which clearly, at this time period, wouldn't really mean all the nations of the world, but when The Great Commission uses the words "all nations," and those other two verses talk about the gospel having "been made known to all nations," it would seem like a fulfillment of a specific, finite command.

It reminds me of the case where Jesus cries out, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones the ones sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! See! Your house is left to you desolate, for I say to you, you shall see Me no more till you say, 'Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord!'" And after reading that, you have to balance whether salvation will return to the Jewish people only after they have turned from evil and sought His face (2 Chronicles 7:14), or whether that Scripture had more specific tie-ins to the fact that, in Matthew 21, the Jewish masses in Jerusalem had welcomed Jesus into the city shouting, "Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord!" The broader viewpoint is often more compelling and convicting, but the latter has enough Scriptural basis to make you wonder if this prophecy of Jesus is a more finite, specific case.

2. It's pretty clear that we are supposed to serve as the means of God's gospel going to the nations. Romans 10 makes the case, "How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless they are sent?" If believers are supposed to be the means of God's salvation reaching the world, then the Great Commission certainly supports that end.

3. The idea that Jesus uses the phrase "to the very end of the age" suggests that His command covers a larger time frame than the lifetimes of the eleven disciples. It's not immediately apparent what "the very end of the age" means, but it's probably longer than one generation.

4. If the eleven disciples were supposed to teach people to "observe all that Jesus commanded," then they should probably teach their disciples to observe this last command of Jesus to "go and make disciples." So the Great Commission, by including this "teach" command, is self-perpetuating, like a "Go To" function. That's just good, solid algorithmic logic.

5. The kicker for me is that my faith and probably yours is a direct result of Christians being obedient to the Great Commission. Even if it's not clear from Scripture that the Great Commission is intended for all Christians, the fact that you and I are believers in Christ is a testament to many Christians in many generations taking this command to heart and making disciples. That seems like pretty strong evidence that they were doing what they were supposed to be doing.

I think most people would agree with me that we are supposed to follow the Great Commission, that we are sent with a mission ("commission" -- "with a mission") by the highest Authority to Go, to Make disciples, to Baptize them in His name, and to Teach them everything Jesus said.

So we shouldn't be, but we probably will be, challenged by the following queries:

Is the directive "of all nations" for every single believer to take to heart, or a directive to the body of Christ at large? In other words, does every believer have an obligation to be nation-minded, or should the body of Christ as a whole be targeting to all nations?

How many disciples have you made? Who are they?

Where have you Gone? How are you Making disciples? How have you Baptized them? What have you Taught them?

Redeeming Love

2008-11-16T15:29:00.000-08:00

On recommendation from two girls at CSU, I read Francine Rivers's novel, Redeeming Love. The book basically re-tells the story of Hosea from the perspective of a godly farmer named Michael Hosea whom God commands to marry a prostitute, who then leaves him and hurts him over and over again, as they both learn and experience redeeming love.

If you're a Christian girl who is infatuated with Mr. Darcy, you will probably love this book.

What I appreciated about this book is that for the first time, I considered the perspective of Gomer, the prostitute Hosea is commanded to marry. It's pretty explicitly stated in the book of Hosea that God wants Hosea to experience and struggle with the infidelity of his wife, as an allegory for God's tempestuous relationship with Israel, a nation that has betrayed Him for other idols. And I always thought, man, it really speaks something amazing about God, that He chooses to love and forgive and pursue Israel (and us!) after they spurn and reject Him again and again. Seventy times seven, right? Here was a story where I identified a lot with Hosea, and the seemingly impossible challenge of forgiving and loving and giving people second chances and making yourself vulnerable again and again. I learned a lot from Hosea this way.

But I never thought of Gomer's experience. How she would feel born without purpose, trapped in her sin, obligated by her guilt, and unworthy of God's unconditional love. Accepting grace is no easy thing for a lot of people, especially if we keep screwing up over and over again. And the experience of redemption is an awesome one that we can't overestimate. So Redeeming Love was a good read for me because it helped me realize that perspective. A lot of people feel trapped by their past and their sin, and for a lot of people, accepting the depth of God's love and the completeness of His redemption and restoration for them is a long and rocky process.

What I didn't enjoy about the book: it reads like a trashy romance novel.

"His hand rested comfortingly on her thigh. Even that light touch made her melt inside. 'What do you feel now that I'm soft clay in your hands, Michael?' 'Joy,' he said. 'Pure joy.' He saw how the pulse raced in her throat and pressed a kiss to it. He heard her soft intake of breath and felt the answering warmth spread swiftly through him. He wanted her. He would always want her."

The whole book is like that. Seriously. I felt like I needed to eat some red meat and grunt and break some concrete with my forearms after reading 464 pages of that maudlin writing. And I think in a lot of ways, especially in the presentation of the character Michael Hosea, it is almost emotionally pornographic for women. I honestly consider that a serious concern in some social circles.

So if you are a man, and you want to understand better the heart of a woman and the story of Hosea, then you can read Redeeming Love. Just make sure you have your woman fetch you a beer and a steak after you're done to replenish your Y-chromosomes.

Right Now, You Like Me

2008-11-09T20:25:00.000-08:00

When Sally Field won the Oscar for Best Actress in 1985, she gushed out a heartfelt and earnest acceptance speech, where she spilled to the Academy, "...and I can't deny the fact that you like me! Right now, you like me!" People have made fun of that speech for decades, but when you look at her bubbling those words out in unbridled catharsis, what strikes you is how excited and energized she seems at the reality that right now, she is liked.

I've said before that my new perspective is that the worst thing in the world is to be alone. And I think that I've always believed that God loves me, but only recently have I considered that He likes me. In the recesses of my head, I guess I'd always accepted that Christ died for us sinners because He loved us, which meant because God is love and because it was the right thing to do. God loves me? Of course He does -- that's the awesome thing about God, He saved a wretch like me, He can love people who are as messed up as you and me! But the idea that God would enjoy my company, that He would look at me and see the best in me and think that what happened in my life was actually important? Big Idea, the type that shifts your paradigm with a clutch.

But it is definitely true that to love someone best, you have to learn to like them. It's been true in my relationship with my girlfriend, with my family, with my other friends -- I haven't begun to love them well until I begin to see the best about them. And it's not that I have to deny that they have flaws or undesirable attributes, but I think that if I love them, then I will focus on the most beautiful aspects about them. You can only love out of principle for so long, and even though it is sometimes difficult and sometimes a sacrifice, you can't wake up every day and think that you are going to love an ugly person because God said to. At a certain point, if you really love them, you will begin to consider them beautiful. You will find a way.

At the top of this post are two versions of a photograph of the swamp at Cypress Gardens in South Carolina. When I take photos these days, I edit them slightly using Microsoft Picture Manager, which is like the Microsoft Paint of photo-editing. The one on bottom is the one that my camera captured initially; the one on top is the one where I took the time to highlight what I considered its best attributes, particularly the contrast between the light and dark lines in the image. I helped create that photo by seeing a particularly striking image in my mind and capturing it. I saw something worthwhile and beautiful in that picture, and I took the time and effort to highlight its beauty, to make it as significant as I could. If that pattern sounds familiar, it's because you already know that God created us in His image, that He saw that we were good, and that the closer we come to God's perspective of love, the more we see the best and most beautiful attributes in the people around us. It's not that I'm distorting the images from their true form; I'm simply pointing out the best that they have to offer.

In Searching for God Knows What, Don Miller observes, "I kept wondering about the people who met Christ who were losers in the lifeboat, the crippled and the blind, the woman at the well, Mary Magdalene and Zacchaeus. Entire communities shunned them and told them they were no good, but God, the King of the universe, comes walking down the street and looks them in the eye, holds their hand, embraces them, eats at their tables, in their homes, for all the world to see. That must have been the greatest moment of their lives."

When God came and died for us, He did it because He so loved the world. We shouldn't take it to mean that we did anything to deserve it. But if we believe that God isn't an idiot, then we should really be struck with the devastating truth that God likes us enough to think that we're worth it.

Two Exercises

2008-10-31T13:38:00.001-07:00

Two good exercises for a small group, bible study, or discipleship meeting. Neither of them were originally my idea, but I've tweaked them substantially and found through experience that a lot of good can come out of going through them with people.

1. Three Lists

Take a whiteboard or a large piece of paper, and guide the audience to answering a question. The first question is, "What ideas or truths would a person have to believe in order to become saved or to be a Christian?" Keep their responses simple; don't let them get away with large, comprehensive statements like "You'd have to believe that Jesus Christ came down to sanctify us through the atonement He provided on the Cross." Your audience will or should probably come up with statements like "Jesus was a real, historical person." "Jesus was also fully God." "The Bible is a valid source of truth." "We can't make it to heaven through our own efforts." In summary, you're getting an understanding of what the gospel basis is in a short list of short statements.

Next, lead them through generating another list of ideas or truths. The second question is, "What are things that should be a part of every Christian's walk with God?" This list will probably include spiritual disciplines: prayer, quiet time, bible study, worship, fasting, accountability... and it might also include healthy practices like having a solid Christian community, evangelism, church, being filled with the Spirit, etc. The idea here is that you're having a discussion about those essential things about living the Christian life that, if any serious, earnest Christian were missing one, he or she would be missing out on God's best for them. Don't let people get by with blanket suggestions -- ask them why quiet times should really be on the list, and if a Christian doesn't get up every morning in a scheduled way, will he or she really be missing out on God's best? Is there a Scriptural basis for that? Is it essential or just helpful? Through answering this question, you'll be eliciting an image of what people think it means to follow God.

Then for the third and final list, ask people to clear their heads of the past two questions and discussions and to think intently on the third question: "How would a guy go about falling in love with a girl?" Be clear: you're not asking how you can get someone to fall in love with you, but how you would go about falling in love with someone. You might get a few answers: "You'd have to spend time with her." "You'd have to get to know her." But I think you'd come to the conclusion with your audience that although there are some solid, meaningful things you should do, it's not a watertight, comprehensive process.

Things you can take from this exercise: When I've done it with my disciple and with a small group, we chased it down all sorts of rabbit holes. One was that, in some ways, it's harder than people think to define exactly what a Christian is. People almost always come up with Romans 10:9, but don't usually feel that a Christian can just abide by those two statements and fundamentally understand the gospel. There's just so much divergence of doctrine. At some point, most people decide that Muslims are not Christians, and that Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses are somewhere on the periphery of Christianity, and that Baptists and Methodists are near the center, and it's based on some belief in a fundamental basis of truths, but what goes into that basis and why do we buy into it? The first question is an excellent launching pad for thinking that one out.

The second question I added because I thought it was a good thing to think about why we approach our relationship with God in particular ways, and whether those are good ways for us or good ways for everyone.

And I think the third question is a beautiful one because it reminds us that the center of following Jesus isn't so much what we believe, but a love relationship that can't be summed up on a list without losing some of its power and mystery. How would you go about falling in love with a girl? It'd probably be more than a list of disciplines and good ideas -- it would probably be a saga of mistakes and excitement and anticipation and understanding and communion and forgiveness and grace and intimacy and thrill. How much more so falling in love with Jesus!

So that was Three Lists.

2. The Starting Lineup

Pass out notecards to everyone in your group. Have them shut their Bibles and make them inaccessible. Ask them to take 5 minutes and write down on their notecard the top 5 or 10 go-to Scriptures they would use to explain the gospel to someone. Then discuss what people wrote and why.

The point here isn't that people won't always have Bibles on them or that they need to memorize every verse, although those are certainly ideas worth considering. The point here is to see how ready we are to take the gospel to the nations and to our friends. It was pretty telling that, the last time I did this exercise, several people wrote down "John 3:16" and then balked at coming up with other verses or passages.

In 2 Timothy, Paul charges his disciple to "preach the Word! Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching." I think we are all similarly commissioned, and I think we would be ill-prepared if we were to go out into our mission field, wherever it is, with just John 3:16 at our disposal.

Am I dogging the power and beauty of John 3:16? I am not. But I have the feeling that most of us aren't sharing the gospel with people to the extent or with the frequency that we would claim that followers of Christ should. There are only two reasons for our hesitancy: we don't know how, or we don't want to. The more equipped and awash and ready we are with the truth of Scripture, the more we can overcome both of those roadblocks.

And that was the Starting Lineup.

Stories of Grace

2008-10-29T19:53:00.000-07:00

Outside of the whole Jesus-dying-for-my-sins example, in recent times, I've had some awesome encounters with God's grace, and I want to write them down before I forget and cease to be thankful.

1. Through my last semester and a half at Rice University, my girlfriend's clinical depression was probably the hardest thing I'd had to deal with to date. One night in April, I was really wound up and emotionally exhausted, after several hours of trying frustratedly to talk her through some issues that had persisted for months. After my girlfriend left, I sat in my room, practically immobilized by emotional and physical exhaustion and a foreboding, heavy sense that I couldn't handle the difficulty and sacrifice of supporting my girlfriend through her struggles. I had never felt so alone or overrun by a situation. It came to the point where it was about 2:00 am, and I had punched walls and furniture until my knuckles were red and hurled things around the room, and then my friend Lauren dropped by our suite to visit a roommate and stopped in to say hello.

Lauren is also clinically depressed and has struggled for years with reconciling her emotions with reality and with how she interacted with her circumstances and the people around her. Lauren and I went for a walk and for the next hour and a half, she listened patiently as I rambled and vented, and she told me exactly what I needed to hear -- that I wasn't alone, that she knew from experience that being close to a depressed person is an incredibly hard thing, especially if you're one the only supports, and that this desperation and frustration and anger that I was experiencing was expected, and that I was doing a good job in an incredibly challenging role. She related it to her experience, and I really came to appreciate that Lauren is an incredibly good, patient, helpful friend, the kind who will walk with you at 2:00 am and listen to you vent and walk you through your catharsis. I felt like I was in 1000x better condition after talking to her than I had been in weeks. It's important to know that you're not a failure and that you're not alone, and it was a big revelation for me to understand that about myself when I had been trying for months to convey that to my girlfriend.

My girlfriend is doing 10x better these days. She is happy almost all the time, and things are a lot easier-going, at least for the time being. I love her to pieces. But what was Lauren doing stopping by my room at 2:00 am on a Tuesday night in April? Why would I have a visit from a person with extensive experience both being depressed and overcoming depression just as I reached a seemingly insurmountable impasse with the issue of depression?

Grace.

2. My disciple grew up in the Pentecostal Church, where they have a heavy emphasis on the significance of spiritual gifts: teaching, prophecy, speaking in tongues, etc. If you watch the documentary Jesus Camp, you can see a rather intense example of how the Pentecostal Church handles these gifts, as hundreds of kids shake and quiver and weep and speak in tongues, claiming that they have been swept up by the Holy Spirit. I've disagreed with Kyle on several counts, mainly on the basis that you can't replace the disciplines of studying the Word, of training disciples, of corporate worship, and of good planning and stewardship of God's resources with an unceasing reliance on the spontaneity of the Holy Spirit. For example, he had mentioned that an ideal weekly church service would be a group of people gathered together with no agenda or planning, and that they would just listen for the Holy Spirit to lead, and as a very last resort alternative, they might have a book of the Bible on standby to study. I completely disagree -- I think that the gifts of the Spirit have to be tempered for the edification of the church by the sense of judgment and reason that God gives us, not to mention His written word. If God left you in charge of a crop harvest (which He has), would you sit in your farmhouse and wait for things to grow, or would you be out there working in a disciplined way to plant and water and harvest in conjunction with relying on His miraculous work?

Kyle asked one day if we could talk specifically about spiritual gifts. He asked me what I thought about them. And just an hour beforehand, I had been going through passages in an arbitrary way (which sounds hypocritical in light of what I just typed, and probably was) and happened to read through 1 Corinthians 12-14, which talk explicitly about that very topic in a clear and elucidating way. And as a result of my being ready, having freshly gone through those passages, what followed was a really productive discussion on spiritual gifts and their role in the spiritual life of a believer and in the growth of the body of Christ.

Why would I have read 1 Corinthians 12-14, the most lucid exposition on spiritual gifts that the New Testament offers, an hour before Kyle asked me to discuss and share my thoughts on the topic with him? Why was I prepared (in the active sense, as in Someone preparing me) to engage with my disciple over an issue that was central to how he was raised spiritually?

Grace.

There are more, but it's getting late, and my point has been made.

What I really appreciate about instances of grace and the stories that come out of them is that they are all pointers to the ultimate story of grace between God and us. Every story of grace starts off when we find ourselves helpless to an insurmountable set of circumstances. Every story of grace includes an externally given, saving provision that we didn't affect and that we didn't deserve. Every story of grace ends on a note of transformation and restoration. In short, every story of grace is a beautiful retelling and reminder of the gospel story.

On Christian Manhood

2008-10-19T20:19:00.000-07:00

I never thought about Christian manhood until I came to college, but in a way that makes sense because the focus on the topic of Christian manhood didn't really evolve until recent decades. It's like parenting that way -- for centuries, parenting was something that people just did, and raising children was just a part of their lives, but if you asked, "Who are you? What is your identity?", nobody would say, "A father" or "a mother." They'd just tell you who they were, what they did, what they believed, what their passions were. It's only in recent decades that parenting and the art of child-rearing became the subject of countless books and curricula and methodologies, and there are two sides to this coin: a lot of good, sound wisdom has been shared and a lot of fluff has been generated over something that isn't as complicated or all-important as it's been made to seem. Parenting is important, but it shouldn't consume what you live for or who you are. I feel the same way about today's Christian idea of manhood.

There is a definite need for real men in the kingdom of God. There are a lot of boys out there who haven't yet begun to act like men. There is a lot of passivity and a lot of spectatorship -- we inherited it from Adam, the first man, who was passive enough to let Eve do the negotiating with the serpent, who was passive enough to let Eve take and eat the fruit, and who was passive enough to eat it himself when she gave it to him. There are men who passively let sin creep up on their doorstep and don't have the zeal or the courage to chase it away -- these are the men who know they have a problem with sexual purity and yet let themselves come to a place where they're alone in a room with the Internet and a closed door. There are men who blame other people for their shortcomings -- like Adam who tried to toss the blame to his wife Eve, or like a lot of angry men who credit their own absent fathers for their struggles to love their families. There are men who pursue the hearts of women until they are married, and then lack the passion and the initiative to pursue the hearts of their wives. There are men who sit at home while they should be out in the fields sowing, watering, reaping the harvest.

In God's image, men are meant to be leaders -- and leaders purport a vision -- and where there is no vision, the people perish (Proverbs 29:18). Without men to catch God's vision and follow hard after it to guide others towards it, the church stumbles, communities are directionless, families are broken.

So it's a good thing that there is a lot of good literature out there -- there's a definite margin for improvement. Some of it is better than others.

I'm not a big enthusiast about Wild at Heart because I think in a lot of ways, it effectively replaces solid biblical teaching with quotations from Braveheart. If doing the work of a man were as easy as getting fired up about heroic movies, I don't think any of us would have a problem getting the job done. There are even conferences for men these days where men spend a weekend watching movie clips and powerpoints and receive an all-included Scottish claymore sword at the end as a shiny reminder that they're the warrior protectors of their families. A little ridiculous. This weekend, however, Charleston Southern University did a men's retreat and went through two pretty solid curricula: one from The Quest for Authentic Manhood about Five Wounds men must face (1. The Absent Father Wound, 2. The Overly Bonded with Mother Wound, 3. The All Alone Wound, 4. The Lack of Manhood Vision Wound, and 5. The Heart Wound), and the other concerned the Four Pillars of a R.E.A.L. man (Rejecting passivity, Expecting God's greater reward, Accepting responsibility, Leading courageously).

My first reaction to lists and steps is pretty dismissive -- I usually don't really buy that there are Four Steps to anything authentic or Eight Keys to a powerful prayer life, but once you get over the numbers and acronyms game, there is some real wisdom to be found in some of the teaching. In a way, it's like the Scout Oath and Scout Law that I grew up with -- sure, they're not comprehensive, watertight paradigms of morality, but if you follow them consistently, you'll probably be headed in a good direction. Likewise, while it's probably not a complete list, a Christian guy who rejects passivity, expects God's best, accepts responsibility, and leads courageously will probably do great things in the kingdom of God. If it's arrogant of syllabus-writers to try to distill God's wisdom and direction into 8 convenient steps, it's also arrogant of me to dismiss blanketly what's been written because it's been formatted in a "pre-packaged" way.

But Don Miller also made a really good point about the whole tamale in his book about fatherhood and manhood, To Own a Dragon. In one of his chapters, he recounts speaking to a group of 900 high school boys, and telling them to take out a pen and write down that God's definition of a real man...is...someone...who has...a penis.

“God’s definition of a real man is a person with a penis!...And as much fun as I was having, I was also being serious. It had been a long journey for me, a journey filled with doubt and fear, and the only answer I could come up with is that all the commercials, all the sales tactics that said I wasn’t a real man unless I bought some book, or wore some aftershave, or slept with some cheerleader, were complete lies. If you have a penis, I told the group of guys, God has spoken… You are men. Some of you have never heard this before, but I want to tell you, you are men. You are not boys, you are not children, you are not women, you are men. God has spoken, and when God speaks, the majority has spoken. You are a man.”

Don has hit on a really good point here. The world has put so many false requirements on manhood -- that you need to have muscles, that you need to have a deep voice and grunt a lot, that you need to be good at sports -- and in some senses, Christianity sometimes does the same thing, creating hoops for Christian men to jump through to see if they are men, and at the same time, creating tests that can be failed, that can tell men that they are not men in God's eyes. But if you pee standing up, then that's all the validation you need. You've been given all the right equipment -- all that remains is that by His grace, you can act and live like the man that God made you to be.

Three Steps or Four Pillars to Authentic Manhood can do a lot, but it's all worthless if it's not rooted in our redeemed, restored identity of manhood, given to us by God through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

We keep calling for men to take a stand, and it should be refreshing to know that real men can do just that -- even while peeing.

Bethesda

2008-10-13T15:51:00.000-07:00

The first part of John 5 is a spectacular excerpt of Scripture. It tells the story of a pool of water with healing properties, called the Pool of Bethesda, and a man who waits 38 years with an infirmity by the poolside, only to be healed by Jesus. The story is spectacular for the following reasons:

- It is mystical. - I think it's easy for us to picture Jesus wandering from city to city, ministering to sinners, binding up the brokenhearted, teaching as no man taught, and making the Pharisees mad. But I think that we spend a lot of time trying to make Jesus very real and accessible to us and to historically validate Him, and thus it's challenging to picture Him in the context of a mysterious Pool with Five Porches outside the Jerusalem Sheep Gate, where an Angel used to go down at certain times, stir the water, and imbue said water with mysterious healing properties that were only good for one person at a time.

- It makes no sense. - So Jesus healed a guy who had been infirm for 38 years, and we get the sense that Jesus chose him because the healing bandwagon had passed him by. But what sets the guy apart? From what John tells us, there were a "great multitude of sick people, blind, lame, and paralyzed, waiting" for their turn at the poolside. It's not like they were healthy and spry, just hopping down the steps to enter the Pool -- they were in the same handicapped rowboat. Why did Jesus pass them by? Why did He walk away and leave them still sick and lame and desperate at the poolside, still trusting in the mysterious angelic healing properties of the Pool? The man Jesus healed didn't even really ask to be healed or even acknowledge Jesus as God until after the fact -- there was no incredible display of faith like there was for the Roman centurion, or woman who touched Jesus's cloak, or the blind man who appealed to Jesus above the scolding of His disciples.

- It makes perfect sense. - The man had been sick for 38 years. That's a long time. And I think God hates to see His children suffer, and it definitely matters to Him if you've been suffering for a long time. And the man had no friends to help him down into the water, and surely that condition of abject loneliness was also moving to the heart of God. And sure, the man didn't explicitly acknowledge Jesus as Lord at the time and didn't ask for His healing -- but I think this is a story about God's compassion, not the duty to repentance. And here's the thing -- the man was ready to be healed. Jesus asked him right off the bat, "Do you want to be made well?" And I think that's not really a cookie-cutter question to ask a sick person because if you stop and think, you probably have dozens of friends who don't want to "be made well," and you definitely have times when you don't want to "be made well." So for Jesus to ask that question and for that man to have responded to the affirmative is no small thing.

- It is relevant. - The man didn't even know it was Jesus who healed him. I think if you or I had planned this miracle, Jesus's name would be all over it, for the purpose of promulgating God's glory. Sometimes we think it is a waste of time to do good things for people without putting Jesus's name on it. During campus ministry meetings in college, we would often discuss how to reach the campus for the glory of God, and community service would always come up as an idea -- but always with a caveat, always with the condition that people would have to know that it was Christians who were doing God's work out of renewed hearts and Christ-centered love -- otherwise, there was no point, we'd just be like any other service organization. And people worry about the fact that Christians don't tip well during after-Sunday lunch, and if people see you're a Christian and see that you're not generous, then you're being a bad ambassador for Christ. But what happens when you go to a new restaurant and people don't know you're a Christian? Freed from the need to represent God, you can tip as little as you like. We marry the work for God's glory with how people perceive God in light of our actions, and it can become a bad thing if we stop acting out of love and compassion and forget that Jesus healed a man who, at the time, didn't even know His name.

At the end of his gospel, John reflects on the fact that there were so many things that Jesus did that the world itself could not contain the books that could've been written to describe it. The story of the Bethesda Pool is not a safe one, but I'm glad John elected to include it anyway.

Salt and Light

2008-10-08T21:00:00.000-07:00

Jesus once stood on a mountain and said,

You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men.

You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.

Salt and Light. What do these two metaphors mean?

The idea that we are to be salt is a little challenging to interpret, since the Bible and biblical cultures considered salt in a variety of ways. Salt was a preservative; salt was a seasoning; but salt was also a sign of brackishness and stagnation, and Jewish scholars have read a lot into comparing the living freshwater of the Jordan River and the salty stagnation of the Dead Sea. James 3:12 even mentions that a river cannot produce both fresh and salty water as a way of explaining the difficulties in taming the harmful ways we speak to each other. So obviously, there's some parsing to be done to put things in correct context.

Colossians 4:6 encourages us, "Let your speech always be with grace, seasoned with salt, that you may know how to answer each one." And Mark 9:50 says that "salt is good, but if salt loses its flavor, how will you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and have peace with one another." It seems to me that Paul and Jesus are talking about the way salt not season food, but also sustains its flavor and preserves it -- in other words, not only does salt bring food to life, but it also keeps it alive, and if you lose the salt, then what else do you have? (Pepper. Pepper Potts, if you're Ironman.) That saltiness, that vibrancy, that life, should emanate from the way we keep community with each other.

Here's the other thing. Salt doesn't lose its flavor. It's a stable ionic compound and doesn't tend to change chemically, so its flavor is part of its permanent inherent characteristics. So maybe we also can't lose our flavor, and that bringing of joy, life, vibrancy, hope, seasoning to the world is something that Christians fundamentally do, and if we "lose our flavor," we're simply forgetting who we are.

The idea of Christians being light to the world is a little more straightforward -- our lives and "good works" should shine before people such that they would wonder and glorify God. It's a little interesting that Jesus calls His followers the "light of the world" in Matthew 5:14, and yet Jesus is called the "light of the world," explicitly in John 8:12 and 9:1-5, and implied to be "light" in Matthew 4:16, John 3:19, 1 John 1:1-5, and many, many other verses.

The fact that both Jesus and His followers are called "light" isn't even an issue that the Bible really sidesteps. Isaiah 49:6 talks of Jesus when it says, "I will also give You as a light to the Gentiles, that You should be My salvation (Jesus, in Hebrew, Y'shua, means Salvation) to the ends of the earth." Yet when Paul quotes this verse in Acts 13:47, he expresses it as a commission for Christians: "For so the Lord has commanded us: 'I have set you as a light to the Gentiles, that you should be for salvation to the ends of the earth.'"

Jesus probably puts it best in John 12:35-36, when He tells people, "A little while longer the light is with you. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you; he who walks in darkness does not know where he is going. While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may becomes sons of light." To aspire to be a "son of light" sounds very mystical and hard to put a finger on doctrinally, but it's important to remember that a metaphor is often more valuable when you read it and allow the image to move you than to analyze the life out of it. Sometimes I have a hard time keeping from reading the Living Word of God as a history and literature textbook.

Finally, the Bible gives yet another usage of the word "light" that might be confusing to the novice reader, in Luke 12:48:

But the one who did not know and did what deserved a beating, will receive a light beating.

War and Peace

2008-09-30T19:13:00.000-07:00

In his Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, John Piper states that an "earnest prayer and challenge" of his for Christians is:

That you develop a wartime mentality and lifestyle; that you never forget that life is short, that billions of people hang in the balance of heaven and hell every day, that the love of money is spiritual suicide, that the goals of upward mobility are a poor and dangerous substitute for the goal of living for Christ with all your might and maximizing your joy in ministry to people's needs.

In Searching for God Knows What, Don Miller writes:

To be honest, I think most Christians [...] want to love people and obey God but feel they have to wage a culture war. But this isn't the case at all [...] in fact, even today, moralists who use war rhetoric will speak of right and wrong, and even some vague and angry God, but never Jesus [...] I can't say this clearly enough: If we are preaching a morality without Christ, and using war rhetoric to communicate a battle mentality, we are fighting on Satan's side.

I have juxtaposed these two excerpts slightly out of context, but I think it's really fascinating that the two Christian authors that my peers regard as their most influential take such opposite approaches to Christian ministry.

If we elect not to play the game of taking thoughts to unbalanced extremes, then I can see a lot of value in thinking both ways. We do serve a Lion and a Lamb.

Romans 6: Beauty Contests

2008-09-26T20:55:00.000-07:00

Most people can quote Romans 6:23, and as a consequence of being able to quote it, I think most people use it as a distilled truth: that if you sin, your punishment is death; otherwise, you can accept God's free gift of eternal life in Jesus. I don't think that's an untruth, or even really a partial truth -- it's a fair understanding of what the verse is saying -- but the context of Romans 6 really paints that truth in wider swaths.

Romans 6 is a chapter about slavery and freedom. The highlights are that "as many of us were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death." And "if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ having been raised from the dead, dies no more." The chapter talks about Sin and Death as personified masters, claiming that "Death no longer has dominion over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once and for all, but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Paul then explains his allegory, saying he is merely speaking "in human terms" because of "the weakness" of our human condition. He talks about slavery and freedom -- that we were all slaves of sin, and were free in regard to righteousness, and that the wages of that slavery to sin was death, and how in the other plantation, our slavery to God bears the fruit of holiness and everlasting life.

I think being a slave to sin is like being trapped in a beauty contest. There's a pivotal scene in that Little-Indie-That-Could, Little Miss Sunshine, where a disillusioned fifteen-year-old reflects for a while, then says, "Fuck beauty contests. Life is one fucking beauty contest after another." And sometimes I think we feel like we're in a sort of moderate place where we're neither trapped by sin nor convicted by God, but there are a lot of times when we're in beauty contests, trying desperately to please, and feeling more strongly like slaves than anything else.

I like beer, but sometimes at parties, I'm just in a beauty contest. I feel self-conscious and appraised, and I minimize that by having a red plastic cup in my hand, which has to contain beer, even if I don't really feel like drinking it. I have to laugh at people's jokes, or when they quote a Will Ferrell or Adam Sandler movie for the fifteenth time that night. I have to keep drinking at a minimum steady rate because otherwise it's like walking during a marathon when everyone else is running past you and giving you the dubious eye. And I have to stay until the party's critical mass begins to leave, and no earlier and no later, or else people will notice me as the odd one out. Isn't it weird that people (college freshmen) go to parties partially to establish a cool reputation in the eyes of their peers and cope by becoming as inconspicuous and indistinguishable from other party-goers as possible?

Sometimes being a Christian among Christians can become a beauty contest. When your peers in your bible study talk at length about some new Christian book you haven't read, or promise rings for their long awaited future spouse (especially if your own track record isn't the purest), or how they and twelve other popular Christian girls are called to a Season of Celibacy (but maybe you aren't?), I think that it could be frustrating for you if you spend a lot of time grappling with sin. You'd probably wonder why your friends don't have to wrestle with their habits or blunders or mistakes or doubts. You'd feel like you were losing the beauty contest of the Kingdom of God, and you'd probably feel trapped, forever relegated to Christian mediocrity, an only partially-freed slave to sin. What if you were a Bible study leader or a pastor and addicted to, say, pornography?

My friends have described addiction to pornography as binding, gripping, and inexorable. Any closeness with God seems shattered by the jarring "reality" of a desperate, recurrent need to close the door, turn down the speakers, and double-click Internet Explorer. I think it wouldn't be too hard to feel like a slave to sin if you were grappling with an addiction to pornography.

Sometimes it feels like smooth sailing, that sin is something that can throw off your groove but not really get you down, like a parking ticket or late fee. But I think sometimes, especially when we find ourselves in beauty contests, we really understand Paul's metaphor of slavery and understand what he means as he explains,

"For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin. For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice, but what I hate, I do." (Romans 7:14-15)

I've read over this passage several times, but I never really thought about the significance of verse 17:

"But now, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me."

And again, in verse 20: "Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me."

He finishes, "O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God - through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

We were slaves to sin, so when we used to sin, well, it was what we did as a function of our slavery to sin. But now we are slaves of God, and when we sin, it's not a function of who we really are as much as it is us forgetting who we really are in Jesus. Now, we have been remade in the likeness of Jesus. Being remade in perfection and grace means that there is no more beauty contest for us because Jesus has fundamentally and irrevocably removed any trace of ugliness from us. Being remade in the likeness of Jesus also means there is no beauty contest because Jesus Himself was probably physically unattractive (Isaiah 53:2-3) and never bothered to try to make Himself look good to anyone while He was here.

I'm convinced that there's no place for competition within the Kingdom of God. And if that's the case, there's certainly no place for beauty contests.

Excerpt from Speaker for the Dead

2008-09-21T19:15:00.000-07:00

I'd forgotten about this excerpt from Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead. Sorry, Orson, for the blatant copy-and-paste, but I figure you're the sort of writer who's more interested in sharing ideas. Not theologically watertight, but an interesting presentation nonetheless:

A great rabbi stands teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife’s adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. (There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine, a Speaker for the Dead, has told me of two other rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I’m going to tell you.) The rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears, and waits with the stones heavy in their hands, “Is there anyone here,” he says to them, “who has not desired another man’s wife, another woman’s husband?”

They murmur and say, “We all know the desire. But, Rabbi, none of us has acted on it.”

The rabbi says, “Then kneel down and give thanks that God made you strong.” He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, “Tell the lord magistrate who saved his mistress. Then he’ll know I am his loyal servant.”

So the woman lives, because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.

Another rabbi, another city, He goes to her and stops the mob, as in the other story, and says, “Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone.”

The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. Someday, they think, I may be like this woman, and I’ll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her the way I wish to be treated.

As they open their hands and let the stones fall to the ground, the rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman’s head, and throws it straight down with all his might. It crushes her skull and dashes her brains onto the cobblestones.

“Nor am I without sin,” he says to the people. “But if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead, and our city with it.”

So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.

The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis, and when they veer too far, they die. Only one rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So, of course, we killed him.

Into the Wild at Heart

2008-09-14T20:13:00.000-07:00

After some reflection, I think that going out into nature for a while is like God's version of Take Your Child to Work Day.

I took a road trip last summer that went through 33 days and 15 national parks, from Houston to Yosemite. I was expecting that with an experience like that, God probably had a whole curriculum of neat things He was going to teach me, and I was eager to let the epiphanies begin. Instead, I saw a bunch of mountains and deserts and forests and canyons. But what breathtaking, jagged mountains, and what immeasurable, bleak deserts, and what intricate, vibrant forests, and what dizzying, textured canyons. And through the whole summer, I think God was showing me two things: a) that when cooped up in a car with two other guys for over a month, I turn into a jerk, and I really needed to learn to compromise and loosen up, and b) to admire His workmanship. Which makes sense, right? We so often think of God as a teacher, or as a savior, or as something that fits our immediate, specific human needs that we forget that sometimes we are stepping into the studio of an Artist, who is pleased with His work, who "saw that it was good," and who wants us to be pleased with it too. And I was humbled that out of all this natural splendor and savage, untamed wilderness, man, in spite of all of our polluted sinfulness, is still God's favorite, the "apple of His eye." (Deut 32:10)

I think it's impossible to witness and experience God's creation and not commune on some fundamental level with God. Here's one reason to consider. I've recently come to the conclusion that for almost every person on Planet Earth, the worst thing in the world is to be alone. It's something that occurred to me moving to a new city with no friends or connections. No one wants to be alone. The common definition of spiritual death, the result of sin (Romans 6:23) is "eternal separation from God," and even though that phrase isn't directly biblical, Isaiah 59:2 posits that our sin makes us very alone, without God. Being alone, unloved, is the worst thing in the world.

I just finished the book Into the Wild, which is about a 23-year old guy who graduated from Emory and treks off into the wilderness by himself to find himself, the "dominant primordial beast," as Jack London articulates it. But people who trek off into the wilderness by themselves - and I think I know because I have a bit of this bug in me too - go off not to be alone but to struggle, to experience, to master and to be broken by the savage power of God's creation and His unbridled power and beauty, without the distraction of other people or cheap bangles. Any story of man versus nature is not a story of solitude, but at heart a story of man coming to terms with God's creation, majesty, and mystery.

If being alone is the worst thing in the world, and I think it often is, then being out in nature, standing tip-toe on a mountaintop, stretching to venture as close to the Creator as we dare risk, is the opposite of being alone. How can you say otherwise, when you've just come back from perusing the Artist's studio?

Also, Job 38.

Come and See

2008-09-05T12:16:00.000-07:00

Every time I re-read John 1, I come across something new.

Again, the next day, John stood with two of his disciples. And looking at Jesus as He walked, he said, "Behold the Lamb of God!" The two disciples heard him speak, and they followed Jesus. Then Jesus turned, and seeing them following, said to them, "What do you seek?" They said to Him, "Rabbi, where are You staying?" He said to them, "Come and see."

Philip found Nathaniel and said to him, "We have found him of whom Moses in the law, and also the prophets, wrote - Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph." And Nathaniel said to him, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" Philip said to him, "Come and see."

What a surprising and powerful response to the questions of the curious -- "Come and see." I've spent so much time puzzling over how a Christian is supposed to present the gospel of Jesus, and everything it entails, to someone who wants to hear. It's for this reason that we memorize handy formulas like the Four Laws, or keep fresh on Apologetics, or mull over ways to make conversations more natural. It's because we so often tend to think of the gospel as a fundamental set of ideas that, logically presented, have to be agreed with. When my friends have approached me and asked, "What is a Christian?" or "Why do you believe what you believe?" or "Who is Jesus?" I've always been clumsier, more tongue-tied, less ready with a compact summary of absolutely everything than I thought would've reflected someone who was supposed to be "ready in season and out" to "preach the Word." (2 Tim) I basically always feel like I've lost ground for the Kingdom of God if I don't provide a satisfactory answer on the spot.

But here someone asks a question to Jesus. And yes, it's a simple question of where He's spending the night. But Jesus could've said, I'm staying at My mom's, or an inn, or with John the Baptist. He could've simply answered the question. That's probably what I would've done. Instead, he gave an invitation. And I feel that if we're to truly understand what it is to share our faith, we need to be giving out more invitations and fewer answers.

What if Jesus had simply answered questions? What if He had never invited the disciples along for the ride and the chance to get to know Him? The gospels show, time and time again, instances where the disciples just didn't get it. Having spent years with Jesus, watching Him preach and minister and teach and heal and love, they still asked stupid questions like "Who will be the greatest among us?" If the disciples couldn't get it right after years of spending every moment with Jesus, how can we expect any of us to get it right with instant responses to singular questions? But walk a while with me. Let me show you a Christian community with individual lives redeemed by God, redeemed to God. Let me introduce you to worship and prayer and the joy we can take in fellowship with God. Let me tell you about my Friend and Savior and King. I don't think I can explain it sufficiently at all in five minutes, and I'm sorry to the people with whom I thought I could.

The catch is that we can't say "Come and see" if we don't believe that the power and grace of God have transformed our lives, if we don't believe that the Holy Spirit bears real fruit and real holiness, if we're too afraid to show our junk and our brokenness to others, or if we don't really buy that through Jesus, our sins are forgiven and ourselves reconciled with God. It's much safer for us to give an answer and not an invitation.

Where would Nathaniel have been if someone had not said, "Come and see"? Probably still under the fig tree, wondering what he missed.

The Difference

2008-08-30T19:55:00.000-07:00

What makes Christianity right and Islam wrong?

At some point, everyone questions the difference between Christianity and other religions. And to say that other religions don't have things about them that are admirable is simply untrue -- many of them do have a very advanced morality and have done a lot of good for a lot of people. And to say that Christianity, as a religion, gets everything right, is also untrue, and a good look at church history, the documentary Jesus Camp, or yourself will tell you that Christianity, as lived out by Christians, doesn't get everything right.

But a lot of Christians really struggle sometimes when asked, what exactly is the difference between what you believe in and what anyone else believes? What does Christianity have that other religions can't offer? Many Christians, myself included, have fallen into the valid, but squirrelly and sometimes unsatisfactory arguments about the age of the Bible, the scientific truth of creation, the hard-to-describe, unfilled "void" we feel in our lives, or the Dead Sea Scrolls. The pursuit of these issues is important, but if those issues are our first defenses of Christianity being set apart from other religions of the world, we are merely preparing to scrap against relativism and nothing more.

What does Christianity offer that other religions can't offer?
Here's the simple answer. The answer is Jesus.

And any Christian who doesn't understand why Jesus is the real, important difference between what Christians follow and what everyone else subscribes to needs to take a time-out and re-evaluate what they understand the gospel to mean and who they understand Jesus to be.

Support Groups

2008-08-27T18:37:00.000-07:00

Have you ever been to a support group? The idea is a little bit laughable to most of us. The show Dexter, the movie Fight Club, and even the musical RENT feature them prominently and comically. (Maybe not RENT, but I sure laughed during that scene.) And of course, there's that horrible group of divorced women from Jerry Maguire that sat around in a circle cackling and crying incessantly about nonsense every time they were onscreen until Jerry's awesome "You complete me" speech finally shut them up.

Some of the small group bible studies I've gone to have felt like support groups. Some of the small group bible studies I've led have felt that way too. I think it's a pretty common Christian experience. You sit in a circle. You share your name, your age, where you're from. And, leaning on that common trust and vulnerability that Christians are supposed to have, you share your secret sins and struggles. And everyone in the circle leans inwards, in an understood choreographed gesture of support, and hands are clasped and prayers are prayed. Or it could happen during accountability. Sometimes in a coffee shop. Sometimes tears are involved, especially if girls are involved.

I was leading a bible study last night, and as we introduced ourselves around the circle, one of the guys said, "Hi, my name is Chad, and I'm not an alcoholic." And it was a pretty funny thing to say, but I wasn't sure what to make of our mens' study resembling a support group.

In a way, it's a beautiful thing. I was reading Don Miller's Searching for God Knows What, and he makes the point that man isn't meant to be alone -- that we need something or someone outside of ourselves to tell us who we are and that we are valued, and if we don't find God to meet that need, we'll go desperately to other people and to society. And I think that's very true, and since men have a tendency to isolate themselves and tough things out, it's a good thing to come together to encourage each other and expose what's going on in our lives. We are broken people, and we have messed ourselves up, and to recognize the commonality and extremity of our predicament is a necessary and good thing.

But the drama of our condition shouldn't be the overarching focus, and I think that's the thing I don't like about Christian gatherings that feel like support groups. In Alcoholics Anonymous, or any other classic, the approach is to "overcome" or "move beyond" a certain condition or disorder, and the means is usually a multi-step method. But there is no 7-step method to overcoming sin, or 3-step method to a great prayer life, or a 13-step method to forgiving-my-divorced-parents. And the war against sin and pain isn't one that we undertake on our own will, accord, or strength -- so there's no reason a bible study or small group should sound like a locker room pep talk, as players and coaches work each other up into an animalistic frenzy and rush out to take the field like warrior-poets and mortify sin. Seriously, you haven't been to Christian gatherings that looked a little like that?

Someone once told me about an accountability group where the guys agreed upon a euphemism for sexual sin, or masturbating: "going to McDonald's." And they would meet weekly and sit uncomfortably in a circle for a while, and then someone would say, "Well, I went to McDonald's four times this week." "Oh, man, isn't it awful. I didn't want to, but I went to McDonald's five times this week." And they'd conclude that sin is really awful, but it's clearly a very serious and attractive thing, and hopefully God can help them out, and I wonder, what really came out of that? Everyone basically told each other that they went to McDonald's. If anything, just the conclusion that if I sin, I have Christian brothers out there who sin too, so I'm not alone in my guilt and shame. I wonder how many accountability relationships are like that.

When the priests approached Jesus and asked Him why His disciples and He weren't fasting, Jesus replied that the wedding guests couldn't fast while the Bridegroom was with them, but they would surely fast and mourn when He was taken away. And I know that Jesus isn't physically here on this earth at this moment, but He has resurrected and defeated sin and death, and He has foreshadowed a reunion with God through our having the Holy Spirit and its fruits, and shouldn't that be a cause for some joy?

I'm not saying that we should fake the funk and put on a happy face. But we should embrace the truth that we tell people we believe. If Jesus has really overcome the world and taken our punishment, then that should be bigger news than our sin and struggle. If Jesus has resurrected, then it shouldn't be simply a question of whether sin can be excised from our lifestyles, but whether our lives can be reconciled with a loving, dynamic relationship with God like they were meant to be from the beginning. If Jesus is our victory, then we have no reason to go through life hanging our heads in shame and defeat. And if we believe that experiencing God is bigger than the story of our sinful condition, then our times of encouragement and support with one another shouldn't conclude with, "Well, I went to McDonald's too this week. Sure does suck, doesn't it."

Happiness is Coming Home Again

2008-08-18T16:48:00.000-07:00

Matthew and Margaret are married. I think they'll be really happy together and I have great hopes for them. They've been an important couple for me for the simple reason that at first, I didn't think they were particularly compatible or complementary -- I think when they started dating, it was a shocker for a lot of us -- but the real truth is that they are two big-hearted, compassionate, earnest, selfless, and vulnerable people who love each other and love God very much, and that seems to have counted much more than anything eharmony or mattdunnthematchmaker could've produced. More than any other secondary traits, from what I've seen, their marriage is built on the fruits of the Spirit and their pursuit after God. That sort of perfect match, unpredicted by people like me, is literally ordained by God and His work in their hearts, and it was very cool to be there this past weekend and see that.

My favorite story with Margaret is from sophomore year when I had a ridiculous cold, and she gave me a hug and made me some tomato soup and some nice conversation, despite the fact that she was ridiculously busy. And I asked her in a head-achy, congested stupor when she was going to find a nice boy and settle down. I ask a lot of forward questions, but I got my answer to this one.

There is a musical called You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown that contains the line, "Happiness is coming home again," and that was incredibly true this weekend. I have never, ever been the type to get homesick, but if I were, I'm most homesick when I'm home on a brief visit and know I have to leave soon. There's a certain tragedy to coming back to a place and knowing that something, probably you, has changed. What ran through Moses's mind when he came back to Egypt after 40 years? Did he experience a heartbreaking divide in his soul between doing what God wanted him to and throwing down his stick and running back to the family he grew up with? What about Ruth -- was her break from Moab and the land of her family as clean and determined as she made it seem to Naomi, or was she acting out of deferent obedience to follow the people and ways of God? How did Jesus feel while He was here? He commented that he "had no place to lay His head," but also wept over Jerusalem, as if longing for a restoration over a dear relationship that had changed. Was Jesus longing for His return to the Father? Or was He at home on the earth, sharing good times and bad with His dear friends Mary and Martha and Lazarus?

The great comfort of believing in Christ and His game plan, at least as far as this topic is concerned, is that it's always "see you later" and never "goodbye" with dear friends in Christ. We rest assured to our reunion with God and with each other in heaven and eternal happiness, and for that reason, we endure with cheerfulness the mess and burden of our time on this earth. If God weren't real, if I didn't believe that, I don't think I'd be living responsibly -- I think I'd spend every waking moment with the people I love, doing the things I love. To go to work every day, to put in extra hours, to steal moments from friends and family and fulfillment in an unbearably finite existence is a severely depressing thought.

And when I think about the comfort and hope that God provides, I have a habit of falling into objectivist's guilt. Are my agnostic friends right? Was Pascale's Wager? Do I mainly believe because I like these prospects better than the hopelessness of the alternative ones? And I think a lot of Christians want to say, no, this hope that God provides is actually the verifiable truth, and not entirely feel-good, and as a result, sometimes guilt accompanies the receipt of God's comfort and goodness.

I do value apologetics, I do value critical thinking, and I do value the objective search for truth. But I think I also really, really want to believe. And if God were as good and as real as they say He is, then wouldn't that absolutely be my response to that incredible truth?

The Old Account

2008-08-13T21:53:00.000-07:00

There are some cases where you can hear the truth a thousand times and not really understand how to act in light of that truth. I think for me, money is one of those bugbears. I understand that Jesus said to store up treasures in heaven and that Paul McCartney said that money can't buy me love. But I think I'm not alone in being hesitant to invest my money into something that won't return directly to me. I check my bank account every month or so and if I've spent more than I made, then I get this tight uneasiness in my stomach.

Why worry? Harrison Ford made the observation, here paraphrased, that money is never an issue, unless you don't have it. And I've realized that to be true. Blessed to have a solid lower-middle class job in America (yes, I looked up "middle class" on Wikipedia), in my day-to-day living, money is absolutely an abstract. I don't spend anything ridiculous. I don't own any jetskis or horses. Yet I squirm about spending too much on a movie ticket or a new pair of shorts. I forget that, at least for the time being, all money really, truly is to me is a set of numbers on a computer screen that I try to make go up instead of down. I forget that I'm not in control of my life, that I could lose everything tomorrow and still have everything important.

Sometimes I think we think that it's a race to have balanced living a good life and having a pretty decent net positive balance at the end of the road, but you know what Scripture calls for us to have in our accounts at the end of life? No more than zero. So I should really embrace the idea that not every month has to end with a positive net balance -- God gives us money to use for His Kingdom work and to sustain us, not to hoard. There might have been a parable about that.

It's important to stay out of debt -- we do have an obligation to be good, faithful stewards of everything Christ has provided for us in our redeemed, purpose-driven lives, be that money or time or family or relationships. And we do have an obligation to model values like hard-work and self-control, as a witness and encouragement to others. And in 2 Thessalonians, Paul remarks on the importance of not burdening others: "For you yourselves know how you ought to follow us, for we were not disorderly among you; nor did we eat anyone's bread free of charge, but worked with labor and toil night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you, not because we do not have the authority, but to make ourselves an example of how you should follow us [...] For we hear that there are some who walk among you in a disorderly manner, not working at all, but are busybodies. Now those who are such, we command and exhort through our Lord Jesus Christ that they work in quietness and eat their own bread."

So yes, it's important to work and be faithful with the ledger. But I think I'm not the only Christian who really needs to let go of earthly treasures. I mean, it's come to the point where every time a ministry asks for money, they have to play some acoustic guitar music and a photo slideshow to guarantee donations. And I know that slideshows and acoustic guitar music are fine things, but I think ministries pretty much feel like they have to have those hooks to get Christians to donate. And there's a pretty well-known joke among waiters:

What's the difference between a Christian and a canoe? A canoe tips more.

Well, that's me, and it's a poor way of loving people who spend their days serving people like me. I think Christians should be big tippers. We should know how to take care of each other and how to show a little grace in practical ways.

I think people who read these thoughts will maybe think, that's a good thought, but it's not as if I should just shuffle off all my money to ease my guilty conscience. My problem is that I can't discern any good Kingdom investments or outlets for my money, so I'm saving it up. I don't think that's true at all -- I think every time you have an opportunity to give, whether it's to a homeless person, an international relief organization, a church, or your grandmother's birthday, your mind goes through two questions: should I give (yes or no) and do I want to give (yes or no)? And if our hearts say yes/no, then the cardial discrepancy depressurizes our stomach and gives us a tight, uneasy feeling. My biology might be a little off -- my point is that most of us probably experience no lack of opportunities for monetary investment in the Kingdom of God.

My other theory is that it's impossible to enjoy the reward of giving without doing it first. There are times where God grants us foresight of His blessing in something that we plan to do that makes us look forward to that particular endeavor -- marriage, children, joining a church, whatever. But it is so hard to want to give if we haven't started giving yet. Hence the camel and the eye of the needle. How can we see ourselves storing up treasures in heaven if we're sitting on a pile of earthly treasures? Isn't that the whole reason we haven't had our priorities straight to begin with?

Now I've done the easy part, which is write some words about something I should put into practice. I hope God grants me whatever it'll take for Step Two.

Watchmen

2008-08-06T20:19:00.000-07:00

There is a movie called Watchmen coming out, based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller, and it looks like a lot of fun.

In Isaiah 62, God declares, "I have set watchmen on your walls, O Jerusalem."

In Ezekiel 33, God appoints Ezekiel to be a watchman for the house of Israel.

Ezekiel 26-32 summarily drives home the point that you don't want to be on God's bad side, whether you're the prince of Tyre (earthly ruler serving Satan), the king of Tyre (Satan), or anyone in Egypt or Sidon or Assyria or Edom or the surrounding regions. "Their iniquities will be on their bones ecause of the terror of the mighty in the land of the living. Yes, you shall be broken in the midst of the uncircumcised and lie with those slain by the sword." (32:27-28) Probably a good time if any to get out of the country, maybe take that long forestalled trip to the Yellowstone, and generally not be in the Middle East when God utterly and furiously decimates the kingdoms of the earth.

Reading these chapters by yourself at night is a pretty frightening reminder that God's Word was never meant to be boring.

Here's what Chapter 33 says:

"When I bring the sword upon a land, and the people of the land take a man from their territory and make him their watchman, when he sees the sword coming upon the land, if he blows the trumpet and warns the people, then whoever hears the sound of the trumpet and does not take warning, if the sword comes and takes him away, his blood shall be on his own head. He heard the sound of the trumpet, but did not take warning. But he who takes warning shall save himself.

"But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, and the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood I will require at the watchman's hand. So you, son of man: I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel.

"When I say to the wicked, 'O wicked man, you shall surely die!' and you do not speak to warn the wicked from his way, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood I shall require at your hand. Nevertheless, if you warn the wicked to turn from his way, and he does not turn from his way, he shall die in his iniquity; but you have delivered your soul."

The chapter continues on to remark, in verses 17-20, that therein is God's justice: that the righteous-turned-wicked will die and the wicked-repented-righteous will live.

This passage offers a lot of insight towards a lot of questions we often ask about God's justice. What about those people who never hear about the gospel? If we don't take up the Great Commission, then won't God in His grace use someone else? If what the Bible says doesn't seem fair, does that mean we just have to believe that God's definition of fair supersedes our societal and otherwise derived notions of justice?

God's revelation to Ezekiel offers a few key points here. The first is that the wicked die in their own iniquity; in other words, nobody is unjustly or undeservedly punished. I think that idea is something we try to marginalize as Christians when we say that surely people need to hear the full four-law gospel before deciding to reject or accept salvation. Romans 1 makes the claim that "since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes are clearly seen [...] even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse because although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God." It's a big topic, but my point here is that this notion in Ezekiel 33 is certainly not without scriptural corroboration -- there is almost never such a thing as innocent, undeserving victims who are swept away by God's wrath. And I say "almost" because I'm not entirely sure what to do with Ezekiel's wife, from Chapter 24.

The second really cool thing about this passage is the role that watchmen play in the salvation (or at least possible salvation) of a people under siege. It's at least part of God's provision, part of His plan for grace, part of His justice. When people query, why doesn't God do something about those people who haven't heard of or been exposed to the goodness of His kingdom or the redemption of His gospel, they can forget in close-mindedness that watchmen are part of God's provision: watchmen who stand on the walls and warn people about the approach of destruction and help bring about the possibility of redemption and salvation.

I think it follows (as in, it's not a stretch) that Christians are called to be watchmen of sorts. Are we condemned (have we "failed to deliver our souls") if we tarry or fail in our appointment? Up until the point that "there is no condemnation in them who are in Christ Jesus." Over whom can we be called watchmen? Over those people who are facing destruction.

Whenever anyone makes a point, the immediate danger is that you can take it to an extreme. There's always the danger that someone will literally walk up to someone else and say, "O wicked man, you will surely die!" There's always the danger that we'll believe we are the only means God has for the salvation of a select number of people, and cut God out of the deal: how decisive our role is and exactly many degrees-of-freedom God gives things is also a big question and we'll never decidedly know during our earthly lifetimes. I'm not saying anything ridiculous here.

But I am saying something extreme, in that I am saying that Ezekiel 33 says something extreme: destruction is coming in a terrible way, and God has made you and I watchmen on the walls to warn people, and for this duty, we are accountable. How often we praise God that we are "saved" and forget that we are "saved" from a terrifying reality of destruction! How often we forget how many people are still without hope of salvation! And how much would God be glorified if His watchmen weren't so often asleep on the job.

Useful

2008-07-30T21:34:00.000-07:00

So I've seen Jenna's and Phil's photos from Africa, and I've seen people's photos from East Asia, and I guess I can't help but compare our experiences. Don't get me wrong -- I definitely believe in the value of the work I'm going into. And a lot of it is and will be dull, difficult, and repetitive, but that's the nature of a lot of meaningful endeavors. Every valuable experience will have its share of days without thrills or cheer.

There are just days when I want to feel like I'm making a difference.

Some days I want to go to Africa. Or the inner city. Some days I want to be Jerry Maguire. There's an exchange from the movie Platoon where one character mockingly calls another one a "crusader," and I think that sentiment often appeals to me.

Which is why I've thought about the Peace Corps and third world aid, I've thought about becoming a high school teacher, I've thought about joining the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ, I've thought about seminary, I've thought about a lot of things. The best times of my life have been volunteering to make a difference. The Boy Scouts was the most valuable experience I had growing up, and the reason I loved it was that I was having fun and doing something meaningful every time I did something with the Boy Scouts, be it teaching leadership or showing boys how to perform first aid, or organizing community service, or helping promote nature conservation. Church in the Park and ministry with Houston's homeless was one of the best experiences I had at Rice. I had a terrific time in El Salvador because we were really doing some good work for the small village of El Pital. I like being a tourist, but I've always loved doing things more than watching them.

I wonder sometimes how much of that is me needing to feel useful. Because that would be selfish. People in other countries and cultures didn't sign up to be an "experience" for me. Any profession offers the chance to do meaningful work. I don't want to be an engineer, but engineers do invaluable work to make our cars safer, our buildings sturdier, our water cleaner, our infrastructure more efficient, and our society better supported by improved technologies. That's certainly no less important than helping put together some concrete bricks in Central America, and if it were, I couldn't really be the judge of that.

After some thought, though, I don't think I really need to feel useful. I think I really just want to be useful, and I want to be sure that my life is being spent to good use. The distinction is subtle, but it's there.

Is it ironic to think about this issue so much while employed in a profession that most people by default associate with value and purpose? Yes, and no. That discussion probably won't go online, but you can ask me about it.

I think if you're like me, you've wanted to go to Africa before. But if you're going to be honest about it, even the people in Africa probably want to go to Africa at some point too.

ADDENDUM:
The Grace Bible Church sermon for this week, "The Glory of the Routine" actually helped a lot. God is faithful, and I'm glad He sometimes gives immediate answers when we feel like we need them.

Ezekiel 20

2008-07-27T17:04:00.000-07:00

First thing, recently I was challenged by the most serious spiritual discussion available online.

Ezekiel is a really trippy book to read as a whole. It's not like Ecclesiastes where it's tough because it seems to have a unilateral depressing message. It's tough because there's a lot of bizarre and seemingly contradictory stuff in here, and I think it's important to realize that it's perhaps not so much a delineated doctrinal exposition as a series of communiques from God to His people. Much of the book is written in repetitive verse, almost as if the verses were hymns or psalms, and in Chapter 19, the text explicitly says, "This is a lamentation and has become a lamentation." To me, that's important because it demonstrates the personage of God -- the fact that He has emotions and passions, and isn't the lifeless thing we always forget He isn't.

In Ezekiel 20, the following stood out to me:

The chapter opens with God telling Zeke in verse 4 to "make known to [the elders of Israel] the abominations of their fathers." Which is interesting because a good chunk of the previous book was about how people were going to be judged for their own sin or righteousness, rather than the inheritance of their predecessors. My inference is that God has a good sense of using family history as a close-to-home cautionary device.

Verses 3-4: "Son of man, speak to the elders of Israel, and say to them, 'Thus says the Lord God: "Have you come to inquire of Me? As I live," says the Lord God, "I will not be inquired of by you."'" And then in Verses 36-37: "'And I will bring you into the wilderness of the peoples, and there I will plead My case with you face to face. Just as I pleaded My case with your fathers in the land of Egypt, so I will plead My case to you,' says the Lord God."

I think that's crazy. The first description is God basically saying that He's above our questioning, and the second is Him saying that He pleads His case with us, as if to persuade us to come back to Him. Yet both are true: God is far beyond our comprehension, our righteousness, and our judgment, so who are we to say, as Israel's leaders did, "Where is God?" And at the same time, God's mercy pleads with us and humbles itself to come to us to bring us back home. If I wanted to, I could probably make up some statement to make the two thoughts more consistent, but why bother? It's awesome the way it is. I think we try too hard sometimes to make God more "consistent" so He'll make sense to us, but you always lose important details when you force linear models of nonlinear truths. (Thank you, Rice engineering.)

(By the way, in case you weren't completely aware, you got RICKROLLED!)

And here's something God says three times in Ezekiel 20: "Then I said, 'I will pour out my Fury on them and fulfill My anger against them in the wilderness.' But I acted for My name's sake, that it should not be profaned before the Gentiles, in whose sight I brought [the Israelite out of Egypt].

How would the Gentiles have seen God, based on the history of Israel? Certainly, they would've been pretty cued in to His power and strength as Israel was blessed to their miraculous exodus from Egypt and equally miraculous conquest of Canaan. What if God had destroyed Israel for her rebellion? Would some Gentiles have said, "That's what happens to those who disobey the wrath of a terrible and awesome God?" Were those the same Gentiles who might have seen God's mercy and said, "So apparently you can defy God and get away with little or no consequences?" And to the unbiased observer, that might be a reasonable thing to say, except that there were definitely consequences -- Israel was defeated by her enemies, her people led into captivity many times, and God never abandoned her.

But an important point here is that God says he acted for His name's sake. That His name would be glorified. For anyone who agrees with anything John Piper says, that's critical, since the chief end of man is supposed to be the glory of God. One thing I think God had in mind here was the salvation of the Gentiles -- that the nations around Israel would marvel at both God's power and His faithfulness and be inexorably drawn to Him. Sure, God wouldn't be any less powerful if He had said, "Earmuffs!" to the Gentiles and poured out His fury on Israel. He could've redeemed the Gentiles any other way He'd wanted to. But that's not the way He did it. In a sense, He acts for His glory, and in another sense, He acts compassionately for His people. How awesome that "God's glory" and His redemption of the nations go hand in hand!

I still wrestle with what it means to be zealous and passionate for God's glory, and it's an important issue since that's supposed to be the driving focus of our lives. Are we supposed to be like David, who couldn't stomach the Philistines mocking the name of God? How do you react when someone cracks a joke about the Christian faith? They go from obscene ("Why did Jesus get all the ladies? Because He was hung like this!") to the milder variety that pastors tell to start off Sunday sermons, but they all make light of the things of God. I've called people out on that sort of thing before. On the other hand, there's a point of self-righteousness where frowning on other people reflects a prideful, judgmental attitude more than a pure passion for God's glory. Maybe we're supposed to be more patient and loving and smile and forgive until God provides an opening on His timing, rather than hotheads that try to force the magic of the gospel on our own.

There's definitely danger in making it a selfish endeavor. Sometimes in conversation, I've told people not to make light of God, and I think they walk away thinking more about my Christian sensitivity, rather than their own thoughts about an eternal God. But sometimes, I've said nothing and let things go, and I think people sometimes conclude that we don't take our faith seriously if we're not ready to answer for it. Sometimes we can get to the point where we're think we're actually producing God's glory through our glory-filled actions, rather than realizing that everything we do should point to the cross of Jesus Christ.

Appropriately, Ezekiel 20 concludes with the response of Ezekiel: "Then I said, 'Ah, Lord God! They say of me, "Does he not speak in parables?"'"

Cheerful Givers

2008-07-15T19:54:00.000-07:00

I think we all run into a moral dilemma the first time we encounter a homeless man asking for change on the streets. We can live such sheltered lives, and then reality can smack us right outside our front door. Usually, people's thoughts are that you don't really know what the homeless-in-question is going to spend money on, be it drugs or worse, so while it's okay and even admirable to buy them some Whataburger (they don't have those here in South Carolina), they hesitate to give them any money.

It's not an easy dilemma. My default approach used to be to give them five or ten dollar bills from my wallet, and I think I had good moral reason to do so. I used to rationalize, "Well, if they spend the money unwisely, then that's on them, but if I don't give them what I can, then that's on me."

There's solid biblical precedent for that -- Ezekiel 18 stipulates that "the righteousness of the righteous shall be on himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be on himself." In other words, I can only be responsible for the decisions I make to give or not to give, not what someone does with my charity. Matthew 25 says that when Jesus returns, He will say, "Inasmuch as you did to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me." James 2 claims, "If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, 'Depart in peace, be warm and filled,' but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit?"

I based this approach partially on my experience with the homeless. My freshman year, at a Denny's in Dallas, my friends Jesse and Austin and I sat down with three homeless guys and paid for their meal in exchange for about an hour's worth of conversation: their names were Devil, Dave, and some other colorful name. They told me their life stories, and if I were to take them at face value, then they and I have shared the same circumstances. Devil said that he was born "with a silver spoon in his mouth" and described how his life had taken a downturn with a series of bad decisions. The other two were Army veterans, with Dave leaving the Army as recently as the Gulf War. They talked about the concrete morality of living on the street -- the territorialism, the camaraderie, the daily dependency on and hope for the provision of food or warmth that drove some to God and some away. It was an eye-opening evening because I realized we had a lot in common. I think we start to get into trouble any time we think we're above a bad decision -- we are not above any vice -- so the fact that they came from the same life I was living was a humbling testimony to God's grace and a cautionary admonition to live wisely.

The next year, my friend Austin and I ran into a homeless guy under a bridge in Dallas. We decided to bring him some fast food and talked with him for a while -- it turns out he knew Devil, the man we'd met last year. After we'd talked for some time, the man looked around, and then reached into some bushes and pulled out two boxes of food. He gave them to us. We were puzzled to receive food from a homeless man, but he explained that the boxes were full of pasta and rice and other dry starches, and since he didn't have a stove, they were no good to him, so we might as well re-distribute them. It's not every day you lift two boxes of food from a homeless guy.

One of the best things I got to experience at Rice was Church in the Park. I probably only went less than a dozen times, but each time was memorable. A group of five to ten Rice students would either cook up or collect a large amount of food in galvanized steel trays, then take them across Main Street to Hermann Park where a large group of homeless people would've already congregated. What followed was not an event of charity, but a collective meal and church service, usually led by one of the students. But I got to meet all sorts of people and see the reality of their needs, but more than that, the reality of who they were. Former Marine captains, electrical engineers, drug addicts, people from all over the country. Were there deserving poor? Probably, if there is such a thing, but there were undeserving poor too.

Nowadays when I see a homeless person on the street, I try to sit and talk to them and find out where they're coming from and where they're going, and see if I can help with a few kind words. I'm making myself out to sound really altruistic, and I don't mean to -- I've just realized that with all the needs and situations and perspectives of the people out there in the streets of the world, to simplify the question down to "do I give them money or not" is unsatisfactory, oversimplifying, and kind of patronizing. Jesus lived with these people -- He was effectively homeless while He was on this earth -- and He looked at them and He loved them.

Recently, I've been introduced to some compelling arguments for not opening the wallet whenever I see a homeless person. For one thing, I'm told, we do have limited resources. We have limited time and money, and if we invest it in one thing, then we won't be able to spend it elsewhere, so we do have to be good stewards and prioritize what we do with God's resources. It's true. I mean, it's true both ways. Jesus said not to cast pearls to swine. I probably shouldn't empty my bank account and give it to the next decrepit-looking person I see. In 2 Corinthians 11:9, Paul emphasizes that it was edifying for him not to burden the church at Corinth financially -- we don't want to run ourselves or our families into debt by mindlessly giving, or make it so we're unable to give anymore. At the same time, I think there's room for error in thinking, "I can't give any money away now -- I'm saving it to support missions next summer." Who knows where you or your money will be next summer? We can severely limit what God does with us if we don't allow room for Him to guide us. I guess in sum, I think we should be wise and shrewd, but we border on self-righteousness if we don't ever allow ourselves to give.

Here's another argument, and it's a better one. What's best for the homeless? I mean, what a question. Some may only need to accrue some cash to jump-start finding a job and a place to stay or to get back to their families. But for some, they do need to hit rock-bottom. Kurt told me about when he was working with a homeless ministry in another city, and the ministry had everything for the homeless -- free education and training, a sheltered place to stay, food provisions, job connections -- and all people had to do was to pledge to give up their vices of drugs, violence, and the other things that were killing themselves and hurting those around them. But many homeless refused -- they could get hundreds of dollars a day begging on the streets, and they openly stated that they'd rather live their own lives, since they could afford to get away with it. Kurt mentioned the time he saw one of them actually take out a fat wad of bills to help pay for a pizza. By giving these homeless money, well-meaning donors were inadvertently funding people's ability to live in sin, instead of letting them hit a rough patch that might have spurred them to repentance and redemption.

I've seen some of that too. Some people would rather live on their own terms than repent and be transformed -- they like their vices and they can get away with living their lives that way. Don't we all?

But I have to be careful. Whenever I can rationalize myself out of doing something legalistic, I swing the pendulum to the lazy side. When I came to the opinion that there was nothing particularly pertinent about 10% tithing, I said to myself, it's not necessarily important that I give exactly 10.0%, and within a matter of weeks, I wasn't giving anything. Lazy. It was the same for a while with encountering the homeless -- after talking to Kurt, I accidentally made an excuse for myself not to give money away, and as a result, I began to feel relieved when I didn't have money in my pockets because then I could guilt-free say, "Sorry, don't have any cash," instead of mumbling something ashamedly and incomprehensibly when I did have some cash on me. How messed up is that? It's the opposite of love.

I think I'm ready to start giving money again. I'm going to be smart about it, and I'm going to try to see the whole picture. Whether or not there are good shelters in the area to point people to. Whether or not this person has a family to take care of him, or whether he knows that he has a God who loves him. The money is only part of the picture of loving people. But the real truth is that the money is not mine, and my life is not mine -- it'll all have to start with surrendering them to God.

Further Bulletins as Events Warrant

2008-07-02T20:47:00.001-07:00

- I just ready Ezekiel 16 for the second time, and it might be my new favorite chapter of the Bible. Like many have said, there's both art and science in communication, and the way that book tells the story of God and His people is art that touches the soul.

- And that's about as corny as this blog will ever get.

- I was thinking of sending monthly updates to people back home. I thought, yeah, I'm just going to nuclear power school, not a mission or project or ministry or anything, but if I'm supposed to live a missional life, then I should have some stuff to write about, right? Well, my average day these days is, I wake up at 5:30am, go to work, study hard until 7:30pm or so, with short lunch break, then repeat. So I don't know if I can make updates to my life any more interesting without lying shamelessly.

- My next entry will probably be on the homeless.

- If anyone has any extra Don Miller books, I'd like to have them, so send them to me. Now that I've gotten over the fact that they're just good reads and honest thoughts, rather than actual solid doctrine, I've started to enjoy them without that chip on my shoulder that precluded previous enjoyment thereof. That's what this blog is, too -- honest thoughts, not doctrine by any means.

If there's anything I would say of my approach to ministry, at least while at Rice, it would be that I keep things real. I'm nothing special at many things -- I don't have Mithun's insight or Peter's boldness or Kurt's wisdom or Pat's initiative or James's diligence or David's kindness, but I do think one thing that I bring to the table is that I try not to front. I try not to say things I don't really mean, and I try not to make empty statements. I'm not cynical -- I think what's real is that God loves us and has a wonderful plan for our lives, so that's cause to be genuinely joyful. I call people out on things, including myself. I keep things real. Or at least, I like to think so.

Zion

2008-06-28T15:20:00.000-07:00

If we believe the Bible, then shouldn't we all be Zionist?

There are a lot of things I feel that mature Christians can disagree about -- for me, I think there are a number of issues that are certainly important, but it's probably okay if believers don't come to clear conclusions on them because the issues aren't necessarily clear themselves:

1. Predestination vs. Free Will
2. Creationism vs. Biblical Evolution.
3. Different Eschatologies
4. Other important issues.

But I do feel like all Christians who take the Bible seriously should be Zionist.

I bring it up because my roommate is anti-Israel. Not anti-Semitic, I'm pretty sure, just anti-Israel.

There's something of a progression for the Gentile believer, and I guess I'll lay out some of the thoughts that go into it. What do you make of verses like these?

I establish My covenant between Me and you and your descendants after you in their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and your descendants after you. Also I give to you and your descendants after you the land in which you are a stranger, all the land of Canaan, as an everlasting possession; and I will be their God. -- Genesis 17

How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill! If I do not remember you, let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth -- if I do not exalt Jerusalem above my chief joy. -- Psalm 137

For Zion's sake, I will not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem's sake, I will not rest, until her righteousness goes forth as brightness and her salvation as a lamp that burns. The Gentiles shall see your righteousness and all kings your glory. As a young man marries a virgin, so shall your sons marry you; and as a bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall God rejoice over you. -- Isaiah 62

I have set watchmen on your walls, O Jerusalem; They shall never hold their peace, day or night. You who make mention of the Lord, do not keep silent, and give Him no rest till He establishes and till He makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth. And they shall call them The Holy People, The Redeemed of the Lord; And you shall be called Sought Out, A City Not Forsaken. -- Isaiah 62

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! See! Your house is left to you desolate, for I say to you, you shall see Me no more, until you say, "Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!" -- Matthew 23

And of course, the entirety of Romans 11.

The Christian believer now runs into a few options, all of which have many subscribers:

a) Replacement Theology. The Church is effectively the new Israel.
b) Christian Semitism. We are called to love the Jewish people because of Jesus.
c) Christian Zionism. We are called to love the Jewish people and support the state of Israel because of Jesus.

Here's a link that'll give you a lot to think about.

Do some thinking and praying. This is important -- it is clear that the matter is important to God. As a Christian, are you called to feel or act a certain way towards Israel or the Jewish people? I'll update this one later, but what do you think?

Fight Club

2008-06-17T07:46:00.000-07:00

So I saw the movie Fight Club for the first time in its entirety, and I really, really liked it. I don't think it's a movie Christians are supposed to like. Not because of all the violence and sex and profanity, necessarily, but because its hero, Tyler Durden, is awesome and larger-than-life, and he's unapologetically nihilistic, disestablishmentarianist, uninhibited, destructive, hormonal, and everything Galatians 5 is not.

I spend a lot of time with movies like these thinking, "Fuck it! Why not?" and wondering whether I should feel guilty for that.

I suspect a lot of guys identify strongly with the movie. In a lot of ways, it was like Wild at Heart. Its message was primarily an anti-consumerist one, but to the males in the audience, it said, you've been emasculated by society, your idea of an adventure right now is to order something new and different from IKEA, and it's time to break through the constructed walls you've set up and do something awesome and feel pain and feel alive for the first time. I don't think that's inherently a bad message. It smacks of the attacks the New Testament brings against legalism and artifice. And it reminded me a lot of Wild at Heart. But the issue I had with Wild at Heart was that it glorified the means, and not the end. Jesus is more or less your safari guide to a life of adventure. Sure, it's great to be wild and adventurous and pursue things with, what was that overused phrase, "reckless abandon," but where do you go with it? What happens when you need some discipline to attain something great?

I know there are a lot of compelling reasonable reasons not to identify with Fight Club and not to admire Tyler Durden, but I'm a pretty impulsive person who can forget why I try to live how I try to live pretty easily because I identify easily with stories and characters. I have an active imagination that leads me to identify strongly with other perspectives more than to judge and distill their merit. I read Through Painted Deserts and I really want to take a spontaneous, unplanned road trip. I read Ender's Game and I feel like Ender, too smart and too capable and too destined for a normal life. I read The Sun Also Rises and I think I'm disillusioned and feel like sitting around somewhere like Spain idly, fishing and drinking because there's nothing better for me and my Lost Generation to do. So when I watch or read or think about an appealing character or story that brings along an un-biblical philosophy, it's hard for me to get off the bus and to re-center myself by remembering Christianity -- to me, it just feels like swapping one philosophy or paradigm or system for another.

Maybe that's why in 2 Timothy 2, Paul writes to Timothy to "remember Jesus Christ." It seems obvious in biblical context, usually because we've been reading the Bible or we're surrounded by Christians when we take a look at 2 Timothy. But maybe Timothy was like me, and maybe Timothy had times when he was hanging out with the gnostics, and they were talking about how God was transcendent beyond the confines of this physical world, which is just a construct anyway, and maybe Timothy knew that logically, metaphysically, it was crap, but found himself nodding along and agreeing anyway because it was compelling and answered some questions for him. But the person of Jesus, the way He walked and saw the world, and sees the world, and shares His perspective and His love and His character is incredibly gripping too, in a way that an ethical paradigm or a religious practice is not.

Maybe the best way to forget Tyler Durden is to think of Jesus. Maybe that's why Timothy and I both needed to hear what sounds so unnecessary to say -- "remember Jesus Christ."

The One

2008-06-12T08:12:00.000-07:00

"If I wasn't made for you, then why does my heart tell me that I am?"

I think a lot of young Christian guys and girls have to wrestle with the idea of The One: whether there is one specific pre-ordained, pre-destined girl out there that I'm supposed to find or be with, or whether any nice, godly girl has the potential to be my future wife, given enough time, care, love, and grace.

If there were only The One:

- That would coincide well with a lot of biblical precedent, such as Isaac and Rebekah.
- I could believe that the girl I marry is by definition The One, since God orchestrates His will in our lives.
- I could conversely believe that the girl I marry might not be The One, since we can sin and foul up God's plan for us, and I would probably wonder with every girl whether she's The One or not, especially when things got sticky or complicated or imperfect.
- I would be very upset and frustrated if I ended up alone or single past the age of forty or so. I'd try to take comfort in the fact that maybe God's timing is different than my expectations, but probably I'd just feel like I missed the boat when it passed by.

If The One is not a valid idea:

- Then I could conceivably make it with any godly, lovely girl, since love is an act of will and commitment and work and sacrifice, not just attraction and emotion.
- Then I wouldn't be tied to wondering constantly whether the girl is The One because I've in essence made her The One.
- That last conclusion might lead to a very works-centered approach to my relationship.
- Also, what prevents me from having multiple relationships with multiple women? Since there is no magical One, there can certainly be Two, right? Or is there just One, and she's not specific? Also, is there any drawback to just cutting my losses and moving on from a hard relationship, since I'm not forsaking any The One girl?

Whenever I've had this discussion with people, it always brings up a number of strangely familiar issues about how God's will plays into what happens, what doesn't happen, what might have happened, or what should happen in our lives. Do we have a say? Do we have an active role? Is that from us or from God? Is foreknowledge the same as control and responsibility?

Pat Hastings made the great point that this discussion boils down to predestination vs. free will for a good reason. One of the big points of finding a wife and the institution of marriage is to model Christ and His church. So it makes sense that we'd run into the same questions.

I was at my friend Russell's wedding in North Carolina this weekend, and I really think Russell found his The One woman in Katherine. But I think it also took him a lot of labor, love, grace, and sacrifice to get there.

1 Cor 3:5-9

2008-06-03T21:15:00.000-07:00

5 What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task. 6 I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. 7 So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. 8 The man who plants and the man who waters have one purpose, and each will be rewarded according to his own labor. 9 For we are God's fellow workers; you are God's field, God's building.

It's a very simple analogy: our ministry is like the farmer, planting and watering, and waiting on the Lord to deliver the miraculous increase. But I think this analogy helps us avoid a lot of traps, especially in evangelism. I used it in a brief study today.

- If we forget that God gives the increase, then we start to believe that evangelism is wholly our labor. This notion can lead to a few things. We begin to believe that we're directly responsible for the entire outcome of all our actions and conversations. We suddenly feel like we're under enormous pressure to share the gospel, in its entirety, to a person who might not be ready to hear everything. We can fall to spiritual pride, taking the credit for results that were entirely God's doing, and forgetting that we are, as Paul says, only servants. We also fall to doubt. When we see that an approach isn't the most promising, as initiative evangelism sometimes seems unworkable, then we can easily decide to give in to doubt and forgo trying, forgetting the surprising miraculousness of God and forgetting that it is often an act of faith, and that we haven't got God all figured out.

- If we forget that we have a role in the planting, sowing, and harvesting, then we also fall into a few traps. In attributing the growth of a harvest wholly to the mysterious workings of God, we can begin to believe very literally in "no fail evangelism," where any attempt is considered valuable because God can and does bless every attempt made in faith to spread His word. I've seen a lot of pushy evangelists that have really turned their listeners off to the gospel who say in earnest, "Mission accomplished: I did my part, and now it's up to them and God as to what they do with it." The other extreme can also follow if we forget our own role: we have no reason to follow the Great Commission, since God does all the work anyway. A farmer who recognizes that God gives him the crop harvest every year doesn't just not do any work planting or watering -- he recognizes that his labor is the way God has chosen to bring about the harvest.

- Sometimes we think, more sowing means more harvest, and we toss the seeds wildly, instead of carefully plowing and nurturing the plants. Sometimes we think too hard on nurturing one plant, forgetting the breadth of our fields and that we are to be efficient laborers and stewards for God.

There's a lot you can take from that particular analogy. Is it God who does the work in people's hearts? Yes. So do I really have an important role in the growth of God's kingdom? Romans 10 provides some insight:

14 How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? 15 And how can they preach unless they are sent?

God can make a crop grow from nothing. Don't believe He can't. But He chooses to use the hardworking farmer to bring it about by patience, sweat, faith, and diligence. I think that's some simple wisdom.

Out-Reach

2008-05-23T12:28:00.001-07:00

So I was sitting in the section of the Rice Memorial Center where all the GLBT magazines sit neatly in their racks, and the cover of OutSmart caught my eye. I ended up reading an article, a letter addressed to Joel Osteen, that I found really interesting -- here are some excerpts:

"Silence can say harsh things. Joel Osteen's refusal to speak an opinion on God and homosexuality has ruffled either side of the issue -- those who say it's a sin and those who believe it's not. A man who reaches more than 40,000 people at Lakewood each week and another 200 million television viewers worldwide should take a stand on one of today's most pressing societal issues."

"Mr. Osteen...expect a group of at least two dozen gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenders, along with their families and supportive church leaders, to visit Lakewood on Mother's Day. Lakewood is the first of six megachurches that The American Family Outing will attend through Father's Day hoping to address family, faith, and sexual orientation in friendly sit-down conversations with members of those congregations."

The article went on to discuss the AFO's initiative to start dialogues with large Christian communities to reconcile the belief and cultural differences between the two groups.

----------

This irony in this article is staggering. Who is supposed to be reaching out to whom?

It is humbling to realize that the gay community, or some organizations within it, are reaching out in love and reconciliation to the very body of Christ that is supposed to have lovingly and sacrificially brought that gospel to them. It's about as paradoxical as Gentiles reaching out to the Jews through whom God revealed Himself and His word and His Son. God has a funny way of flipping peoples' roles.

Here are my basic thoughts on the issue:

-- Pursuing homosexuality is a sin. It's no worse a sin than any other, and no better.

-- Homosexuality is made more controversial than other sins for three reasons: one, it's often seen as a natural, inherent part of a person's identity, and two, people are often very proud, defensive, and indignant about homosexuality in a way you wouldn't see with other sins, and three, it doesn't have the immediate apparent destructive consequences of some other sins, for example, murder or stealing.

-- It's not the best argument to say that homosexuality must be controllable, or must be a sinful choice, because God says it's wrong in the Bible. People are born with a sin nature, a natural inclination to sin. People who are born with bad tempers are naturally predisposed to wrath; people who are horny are predisposed to sexual sin and lust. By this reasoning, I do think people can be born with homosexual temperaments.

I often forget that our relationship with God is always grace first. I think gays often get the message that they have to change themselves before they can enter God's house and worship Him with His family. It's really the other way around. God's grace enables and necessitates transformation, not for gays, but for everyone. I think liberal Christianity often plays down the fact that sin, including homosexual sin, brings death. The grace of Jesus Christ is the only means for that -- we need to tell each other that! Doesn't that provide a great answer to the question of whether to be zealous for God's standards or whether to be loving and accepting? I think when people get stuck hard on the question of love versus justice, they are forgetting in part the magnitude and transformative nature of God's grace.

We are very hypocritical. I found myself glancing around the RMC every few minutes to see if anyone I knew were walking by watching me read OutSmart. I wondered if people would think I was gay, and then I wondered why in the world that should bother me, when we all profess to be redeemed sinners. I think many of my friends suffer from the same self-consciousness.

It looks like in this case, the AFO has their priorities in order, and it is humbling. People making themselves right isn't God's game, for defiant homosexuals or for self-righteous Christians. God's Kingdom is about encouraging each other to pursue God, and letting everything else follow from His grace and redemption. And after we remove the plank from our own eyes, God still wants us to help others get their splinters out.

Sunday Morning Sharkfest

2008-05-18T08:55:00.000-07:00

Short version: This morning, my friend, my little brother, and I were going to go to church, but we didn't. The End.

Longer version: My little brother is always really slow to mobilize. He has to be roused at least three times to get out of bed to go to school in the morning, so it's not uncommon for whoever's driving to burst a blood vessel trying to get the little fartknocker out of bed.
So we needed to leave for church by 9:45 this morning to get to the 10:30 service. Where is Geoff? On the toilet. Males in the Dunn household, except me, have been known to sit on the can for up to half an hour just moseying and taking their time, so my friend and I take turns shouting at him to hurry up. He mumbles from behind the closed bathroom door that he has a stomachache. We wait while he sits on the can for 20+ minutes.

Three options formed in my head, in this order: (1) hurry his malingering ass out of the bathroom and get him to the car so we can speed down the freeway to stumble in late and flustered to church, (2) leave him on the can (he's 17, he can handle himself), and go to church -- I mean, if he's not going to get anything out of it, I might as well get some spiritual mileage out of the day, right? (3) Not go to church, sit around and fume all day, and unintentionally-but-sort-of-intentionally guilt-trip the little fartknocker.

It seems obvious when I list them out that those three options are incredibly unloving. But those were the first things that occurred to me to do. And if you stop and think, that sort of scene probably plays itself out around the American South Bible Belt on Sunday mornings. Foxtrot cartoons always have the parents screaming and hollering in order to get their lackadaisical kids into their pews on time. It's almost become a cultural joke to think about two congregants engaging in apoplectic road rage and then finding themselves next to each other in church. I remember a lot of Sabbath mornings that felt extremely stressful because everyone was running into the congregation on edge -- I remember wondering where the love, joy, peace, patience, and all that jazz had gone.

Two scriptures came to mind: the Mark 2:27 part where Jesus points out that "the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath," and the 1 John 4:20 part where "if anyone says, I love God, but hates his brother, he is a liar." How could I abide in God's love, how could I celebrate God's love on His Sabbath, and still lack the patience, the love, the concern for my brother -- who actually did turn out to have a pretty bad case of stomach pains for the next few hours. God gave me my brother that I should have the opportunity to love him, and my first few thoughts today definitely failed that.

God doesn't want us to wallow in our guilt, but if we're doing something wrong, then we need to know it. Think about those two churchgoers who scream at each other on the road and then end up in adjacent pews feeling guilty. They have a right to feel humbled: as Jesus put it in Matthew 5, "If you bring your gift to the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift."

God looks at our hearts, not our church attendance, in the end.

Fortunately, God's grace gave me those thoughts before I did anything rash, and what we ended up doing was staying home, while I wrote this entry and gave my brother some soda and crackers. Which I know, sounds pretty basic.

Kingdom Work

2008-05-11T13:25:00.000-07:00

In the last few weeks, I graduated and commissioned in the United States Navy, but for the most part, after I finished final exams and projects, I went to a lot of receptions and ate a lot of food and spent a lot of time with friends and family.

I always tend to feel like I'm wasting time when I'm not "doing something worthwhile." Am I not supposed to be advancing the Kingdom of God, caring for his people, promoting the gospel, or something?

Ecclesiastes 2 warns that spending a lot of time worrying about strivings and labor is vanity. It states, "There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and that his soul should enjoy the good of his labor. This also, I saw, was from the hand of God."

It's hard to read a lot of Ecclesiastes, but I think it's wisdom that God gives us a lot of gifts so that we can enjoy them. So often we're overachievers, and we want to be great stewards and do excellent things with what God provides, but I think there's something to be said for learning to be a great recipient of a gift. How could we really be great proponents of the gospel of grace if we didn't first allow ourselves to be awed by what it means for us? How can we be planters of trees to shade others, if we don't know what it means to sit and enjoy the shade?

The book Through Painted Deserts by Don Miller recounts Don going on a road trip from Houston to Oregon and being overwhelmed by the fact that God made the stars and the mountains to amaze us. I had some similar experiences last summer, road-tripping through national parks from Houston to San Francisco. If you stand on top of Half-Dome on Yosemite, or look out over the depths and widths of the Grand Canyon, or stare around at the vast and terrible stillness of Death Valley, it gives you a sense of what God had in mind at the very beginning, before we fouled things up -- the world as an amazing garden for us to enjoy in His company. And the biggest lesson God taught me during that road trip was to learn let go, to relax, and to enjoy things as they came.

Sometimes the Bible isn't just a set of instructions, and sometimes the world isn't just a battlefield for Christians to conquer for Christ. Sometimes life is a love letter, authored by God, for us to enjoy. I think that's why Job was exceedingly blessed after his trials -- it wasn't a reward for any good behavior, it was a gift from a loving Father. I think it's why Jesus took a nap on the fishing boat on the Sea of Galilee. I think that's why I've had some time to breathe, relax, and enjoy my friends and family and the beautiful weather and this amazing university experience.

Jacob and Esau

2008-05-04T13:36:00.001-07:00

Question of the week:

I've run into people who have understood the gospel and what it means on an intellectual level. But one person in particular has said to me, "Yes, I understand that Jesus came to take away my sins, which I can't do myself, and to reconcile me with God. But I don't want to be in debt to anyone or owe anyone anything. I didn't ask to be obligated to His grace, and I'd rather deal with consequences on my own terms, even if that means going to hell." What do you say to that?

My first thought is, this person probably doesn't have the best understanding of how bad sin and death really are, but then again, sometimes I don't either. My second thought is that as Christians, we all have to really learn by experience or revelation what grace is and to accept it. It is a turning point in every Christian's faith when they realize, "Hey, grace isn't just like a reset button -- it is hard work and sacrificial love on God's part, something I deserve the opposite of, and it's what I'm called to base my life and my faith upon." So that thought that we don't want to be obligated to anyone and we want to make it on our own terms (or if we know we can't, at least go down trying) is a reflection of the non-Christian mindset.

From the moment we're born, we're indebted to the grace of others, either our family or "the kindness of strangers," but that's a little different. Accepting Christ is a decision, a willful acceptance of our indebtedness to Christ's work and our inability to stand on our own feet.

Still, in some ways, it feels like a valid question. Jesus did suffer and die for us, but we weren't there and we never asked Him to, so what obligates us to accept except a certain realism that we can't do it alone? I'd like to know what anyone would say to that statement, "I don't want to be indebted to anyone."

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Genesis 27 is a chapter about people who mess things up, and a lot of my insight is based on this morning's sermon at Grace Bible Church.

In verses 1-4, Isaac blindly tells Esau to go hunt some meat and cook him a savory stew so that he can receive his father's blessing. In verses 5-29, Jacob and Rebekah come up with a conniving, deceitful scheme to pass Jacob off as Esau and steal the blessing of Isaac. The remainder of the chapter is Esau getting really pissed off, getting an ersatz blessing from Isaac, and then Jacob having to flee Isaac's household so Esau won't kill him.

How do we read this story? I've heard so many approaches and interpretations. Isaac was going to bless Esau, but as predicted by God in Genesis 25:23 when the twins were born, Jacob ends up on top, which we can take to mean that God has excellent foresight. Esau gave up the right to a birthright in Genesis 25 when he ate Jacob's stew, so what happened was really what Esau deserved. Sure, Jacob and Rebekah were deceitful and corrupt in the way they went about it, but they were passionate after God's blessing, so in the end, that was in accordance with God's will -- sort of the argument that the person who really wants the championship is the person who will use any means to get there. And nothing really happens to Jacob -- he gets the blessing, doesn't he -- so it must've been okay for him to do what he did.

Here are some important things I've realized about this story:

- By choosing Esau to bless, Isaac is trying to circumvent God's will. I'd always read God's words in Genesis 25:23 as prophecy, not a command, but God definitely told Rebekah (who almost certainly would've told Isaac) that the blessing was to go to Jacob. So it's not as if the blessing was ever up for grabs, and Jacob just came away with it in the end. Jacob was intended to have God's blessing from the beginning.

- Jacob was supposed to have the blessing because God wanted him to, and that's all we'll ever really know about it. Malachi 1:2-3 and all of that. It's a reality of how God works, and it's not a function of merit or deserving. Jacob was a conniving little snot, and Esau married a Hittite and gave his parents grief, so it's not like either were golden boys.

- It is absolutely ridiculous that Isaac tried to circumvent God's will and give the blessing to Esau over his affinity for Esau's venison stew, but we forgo God's plan for ridiculous things too. A Bible scholar named Alexander Whyte noted, "What envy was to Cain, and what wine was to Noah, and what lewdness was to Ham, and what wealth was to Lot, and what pride and impatience were to Sarah -- all that, venison and savoury meat were to Isaac." Great men of God sacrifice so much of their marital happiness and godly purity for the momentary pleasures of Internet pornography. It is important that I realize that I am not above any sin, ever.

- Are Jacob and Rebekah working to achieve the stated will of God? Yes. Are they sinning in the way they go about it? Absolutely they are. But they get the blessing -- does that mean it's okay? No way. It is one thing to work toward the stated will of God and another to do it by worldly means. First, it's clear that they're sinning. Jacob's chief concern is getting caught by Isaac, not doing wrong. And they're lying and deceiving and stealing. Second, if they do things wrong and don't reap the consequences they deserve -- well, that's the definition of mercy, right? Doesn't mean they weren't sinning. Third, Jacob and Rebekah do have to deal with pretty dire consequences that I hadn't thought about before today. Jacob has to leave his father's house for hard labor in Laban's fields. He never gets to see his mother again, and accordingly, Rebekah never sees her favorite son again. Jacob and Esau, two twin brothers, are also estranged in a hateful relationship for decades. And their descendents are continually at war, up until King Herod (an Edomite) encounters Jesus (an Israelite). So the fact that Jacob did end up with the blessing doesn't mean he got away with anything so much as it reflects how God is going to make His will come to pass.

I had a lot of misconceptions about Jacob and Esau, but I think today's sermon and reflection have helped a lot. These were men like us, they screwed up like us, and they are redeemed like us. And I've certainly exchanged God's blessing for things stupider than venison.

Romans 9:3

2008-04-20T09:49:00.000-07:00

In Romans 9, Paul writes, "For I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my countrymen according to the flesh."

What a powerful statement that is. When I first read it, I thought Paul was actually saying that he would sacrifice his relationship with Christ if it meant assuring the salvation of Israel. What a testament to Paul's devotion to Israel, but what a statement on Paul's part about what he was willing to forsake. Would anyone in their right mind forsake their salvation in Jesus Christ for someone else? That salvation, the hope of mankind, the hope for every sinner, the redemption from eternal punishment and separation from God? We barely inconvenience ourselves for the people around us. Would you go to hell for someone else?

Jesus did, for us, for three days. Jesus, in fact, gave up His place with God for our salvation, in the same way Paul would have wished for the salvation of Israel at the cost of his place with God. That was different though. Jesus has a certain return to glory. The thought for Paul to be "accursed from Christ" probably meant no hope for resurrection from that separation from God.

What a thought to give up your place with God for the sake of someone else! Yet, we see a few examples in the Bible. After the episode with the golden calf in Exodus 32, Moses pleads with God, "Oh, these people have committed a great sin, and have made for themselves a god of gold! Yet now, if You will forgive their sin -- but if not, I pray, blot me out of Your book, which You have written."

I don't think that Paul actually dared to wish that he could exchange his salvation for that of Israel's. He knew it wasn't possible for his sacrifice to cover an entire nation's, and he knew that his sacrifice would be no assurance of anyone's salvation. His words are "I could wish" express a strong desire, rather than a literal meaning, in the same sense that "I could kill him, I'm so angry" doesn't really mean that I want to or intend to kill anyone. Paul's words simply communicate a strong passionate wish for the salvation of Israel and a personal commitment and investment.

The story that really helps me visualize this sort of sacrificial love is in Mark 2. It's not clear why four men are carrying the paralytic to see Jesus; it's not clear if they're friends, or the four men found the paralytic on the periphery of the crowd, or if the paralytic made the request, or if the four men were simply proactive in love. But I think it's reasonable to think that those four guys could've pushed through the crowd to see Jesus for themselves, and left that guy outside. "Sorry, but seeing Jesus is really important to me, and I'm not willing to give that chance up. I'm really sorry, but I'm going to have to leave you outside." How often do we say that our individual pursuit of Jesus is the most important thing in our lives? But here we see four men risking their chance to see Jesus to help the chances of the paralytic.

It helps to know that Jesus loves and blesses and rewards that kind of sacrifice. It helps to know that it isn't really possible to lose our salvation in pursuing the salvation of others. But that strong love and desire for others to see God will take sacrifice, and it's verses like Romans 9:3 that make you stop and think about what you'd be willing to give up for the sake of other people.

Things I Learned in College

2008-04-18T11:35:00.000-07:00

I came to Rice University four years ago, and I'm not really any smarter now, but I am wiser for the experiences I have here. I thought it'd be valuable to write down some of the things I've learned since I've been here. It's not a comprehensive list, but it's something.

1. Family is important.

You know, if you're like me, you grow up with your family and you spend a lot of that time wanting to get away from them. You can pick your friends because you have something in common with them, they're likeable, they're fun, or whatever quality you could predetermine, but your family is a random group of people that you're just stuck with: why wouldn't you prefer to be with your friends?

I grew up with a strained relationship with my dad, or at least I felt like I did, and to a fifteen or sixteen year old, that's all that matters: you feel like life's dealt you a lousy hand. Why don't my parents love me? I wondered. Of course they loved me, but teenagers have a really poor sense of perspective. At any rate, it was a huge turning point when I realized that I had not been asking the real question about love: how can I love my family?

I realized I'd been having the wrong approach to family: that it's not just a random assortment of people that are supposed to love you no matter what -- it's a random assortment of people that you get to love, no matter what. And what an opportunity to see and experience love as it really is. You don't love your sister or your brother because they're super-nice or for any other merit. You love them because they're your family and that's who God's given you to love. That's how God loves us. That's how we're supposed to love. It's hard work and it's so much more worth it because it's not easy.

I came to college wanting to get away from those annoying people that constituted my family. Now I realize that family is a God-given opportunity for us to learn about love.

2. Second Chances are Important.

I used to read the story about Jesus telling His followers to forgive their neighbors not seven times, but seventy times seven times. And of course, the point of the story is that we're supposed to embrace forgiveness without keeping a count of how many times we've been wronged. Obvious, right?

Since I started my first dating relationship a little over fifteen months ago, I've realized that I'm not naturally very good at forgiving. My girlfriend really seems to be. She's just about the most forgiving person in the world, and it puts me to shame. But I found that especially as she kept making the same mistakes over and over, I found it harder and harder to let it go. Why would you do this again? Didn't you do it yesterday, and realize how much it angers me? I know I'm supposed to forgive and everything, but how many times are you going to screw this up?
It is a lot of work to forgive. It is a lot of work to say, "It's okay, honey, I still love you, and I don't hold it against you" and really mean it every time.

It helped to read 1 Corinthians 13, where it says that love "bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." The NIV says, "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs."

It is humbling to realize that as much as I struggle with forgiving little things from day to day and giving someone a second chance every chance, God does the same for you, and He does it perfectly. It is no easier for Him; someone doing something wrong or hurtful to you is a universal downer. He is just that good.

3. Thinkers are common, talkers are common. Doers are rare.

4. God is bigger than I thought.

I more or less had God figured out when I came to college. Now I feel like I know very little about what there is to know about Him. I'll give an example: for a young believer, when they ask, "Does everyone who believes in Jesus get saved and go to heaven?" It's a pretty safe and true answer to say, "Yes." The answer to the real question at hand is, "Yes, if you give your life and yourself to Jesus, He's promised His salvation for you." But a more mature believer might ask, "Well, what about the Scriptures like James 2:19 where it talks about demons believing and trembling? What about Matthew 7:21-23? What about the whole doctrine of faith versus works?" And it would be good sense to reason that maybe not "everyone" who "believes" in Jesus would be saved, depending on how you define those terms. What about non-Christians? Do all of them go to hell? Romans 1:18-21 would suggest that people who don't even hear the gospel have a chance to realize and accept God or reject Him. Where do we even get our conception of hell? What does the Bible say about hell? Not a whole lot in very clear description.

As I've studied Scripture and pursued God through my time at Rice, I've come to realize that a lot of the things I used to think were simple black and white, are not as obvious or defined as I thought they were. Of course there are truths to live by, and some of my contemplation is foolishness. But God is much, much bigger and beyond my understanding than that feeble religious system I had Him pegged in when I came to Rice four years ago.

5. Experience counts.

In Bible study and in ministry, I'm starting to give more value to experience than I used to.

These things seem obvious, but they're not until you really learn them.

Mere Sunday Christianity

2008-04-13T16:35:00.000-07:00

The term "Sunday Christian" is one tier above the class of people who go to church exclusively on Christmas or Easter. So technically, for most of college years, I've been one step below a Sunday Christian -- I hadn't been going to church because campus ministry has been pretty amazing at meeting my needs for discipleship, mentorship, bible study, community, etc., and also a great outlet for personal ministry, so this past Easter was the first time in months that I'd really gone to church. (Okay, I went to Kurt's church once, but it had a food court.) I like this one, so far; I think I've been for four Sundays in a row, so I can now augment from being a "submarine Christian" that only surfaces twice a year.

All these derisive labels are rather tellingly explained on Wikipedia.

This past week, though, I really was a Sunday Christian. I led leaders' bible study on Monday about Ecclesiastes, and that went well, but from Monday until today, I really didn't give God a second thought. I had conflicts with both discipleship and Martel bible study, so I didn't participate in either of those, which makes me realize how dependent I sometimes am on structured events to begin seeking God. I think, without really thinking about it, I reassured myself with the thought that it was okay because on Sunday, I'd get right with God and start the week over again. There was no urgency to the now.

It was really easy to slip into being a Sunday Christian for a week.

I've had enough dry times to know that your faith isn't necessarily broken if you've spent some time away with God and you don't feel horrible as a result. That's a new believer's dilemma: "How can it be that I haven't spent any time with the Lord in the past few days and I still feel okay, I don't feel empty or miserable or anything without Him?" Well, hey, it's called grace, and God is sometimes super-nice to us, and no, you don't deserve to feel okay, but that's the whole point. And I don't think there's any problem with really seeking God in organized, disciplined routines -- discipline through regular churchgoing and bible study and discipleship at set points throughout the week are really amazing venues through which God can work in your heart. God even set incredibly regular, prescribed remembrance feasts for His people in Leviticus 23, which I think we can take to mean that not all our "authentic" spiritual experience has to be spontaneous or "organic." The sticky part about taking a disciplined approach to faith is that you have to have some discipline. I can say, I'll probably grow a lot in the Lord if I set aside these times to pursue Him in these ways, but I have to actually follow through, and often times I don't because I'm lazy.

And yet God has blessed my faith, unquestionably, unstintingly, in the last four years.

We fail at pursuing God through disciplined means, and we fail at pursuing God when we disavow "pre-packaged religion" and try to make it on our own terms. Here is the real meaning of 1 John 4:10: "This is love, not that we love God, but that He loved us." If I am growing in my faith and relationship with God and only putting in the paltry work of a Sunday Christian, then God's grace for me is far more than I deserve. Even in my failures, God is faithful to reveal Himself.

If there were ever anything to persuade me to the doctrine of predestination, it would be my own failure and God's overwhelming compassion towards me when I don't deserve a thing. The same could also be said about the gospel of Jesus Christ.