Questionable Answers

new blog

2009-06-03T16:23:00.000-07:00

I will no longer be using this blog. My new blog, with the same title, is now hosted at Wordpress.com

I hope that you enjoy the new look, and hopefully the new content.

Peace
KC

Of Course

2009-05-20T12:05:00.000-07:00

Look, perhaps I was being an asshole when I responded to the original report that Obama had decided to close Gitmo with skepticism. In fact, I remember specifically saying something incredibly cynical about how on the same day he decided to bomb Afghanistan.

BUT MY SKEPTICISM HAS BEEN PROVED WORTHY!!!

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/05/20/white_house_closing_gitmo_a_hasty_decision_96593.html

"White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was a 'hasty decision,' in his daily press briefing with reporters."

WHAT? Hasty? You mean, you made that decision to differentiate yourself from your predecessor, but looking back you now realize that you can't possibly pretend to be that different? Or was it hasty because you actually don't care about 'universal human rights'? Or perhaps there is political and economic pressure to continue torturing and imprisoning people? Something you couldn't have foreseen?

I, for one, will continue to call bullshit on American politics and political figures.

Truly Radical Christianity?

2009-05-08T14:28:00.000-07:00

From Craig Carter's blog:

"I have come to believe that the only truly radical (getting to the roots) way of being a Christian in late modernity is to embrace a pre-modern conservatism that challenges all forms of liberalism (left liberalism & neo-conservativism alike) by challenging the fundamental, bedrock assumption of modernity common to all strands of modernity and postmodernity, which is the priority of the autonomous self. True conservativism hearkens back to a time before the priority of the autonomous self, a time when family was fundamental, civil society was robust, tradition was sacred and the state was limited. It does not want to go back to that time (which is impossible), but it does want to mine that tradition for resources that can help us rebuild a church that has been decimated by modernity.

What resources does it offer? It offers such treasures as a metaphysics of a universe in motion moved by the love of God (C. S. Lewis, John Milbank), virtue ethics (A. MacIntyre, S. Pinckears), proper confidence in reason's ability to know truth (St. Thomas Aquinas, Benedict XVI) and a way of reading Scripture for its spiritual meaning (H. de Lubac). These are just the examples that come to mind first."

Apparently Carter was a "Yoderian" (see his book Rethinking Christ and Culture: A Post-Christendom Perspective) before undergoing a conversion to "pre-modern conservatism." Seeing the names he associates his position with, it makes me wonder how much this position has in common with the people at Front Porch Republic, especially this post: Letter from a Traditional Conservative. In this article, a similar argument is made regarding modern (enlightenment) presuppositions about the atomistic individual:

Contemporary American-style conservatism and liberalism are merely two faces of that intelligible beast, (Eighteenth Century) Classical Liberalism. Its vision says the substantive unit or entity in politics is strictly the individual, and the freedom of the individual is the primary good after which society and government seek. Since, therefore, the term “society” indicates nothing more than a numerical aggregate of the individuals in a given area, then the only purpose of government must be to defend the potentially infinite number of “private” interests of these loosely gathered individual freedom-maximizers...

They are both simply expressions of the basic tenets of bourgeois classical liberalism. Generally, when someone says, “I’m conservative on some issues and liberal on others,” what he really means is that he is just a more consistent classical liberal than American-style conservatives and liberals, i.e. he has traced out more fully the consequences of the individual as the sole entity in politics and the individual’s protected freedom as its end.

I have often felt like I don't fit into either of the classic "liberal" or "conservative" camps, and have been reluctant to identify myself with any group. Increasingly, however, I find that my positions tend to be much more firmly rooted in a protest against enlightenment individualism - which can often seem to be closer to the classic "conservative" side. But this new category, whether it is called "Traditional" or "Pre-modern" conservatism, is MUCH closer to what I would consider my own position and (rightly) avoids the mistakes of enlightenment individualism.

I think this position is often labeld as "agrarianism" or "communitarianism," on such people as Stanley Hauerwas and Wendell Berry (and others like them). I have had a hard time (and I recognize the error in even attempting this) figuring out whether people like Berry and Hauerwas are "liberal" or "conservative." I read one thing and am convinced one way, only to turn the page and be baffled at the apparent juxtaposition of contrary opinions scattered throught their writings. But the difficulty in identifying where they stand on the liberal/conservative spectrum is difficulty precisely because they reject the very categories being used.

I think I will do the same.

Rust and blue

2009-03-28T17:15:00.001-07:00

Rust and blue
Originally uploaded by elisaj10

lisa is a good photographer!

Signs of Spring

2009-03-18T16:42:00.001-07:00

Signs of Spring
Originally uploaded by flynnkc

Bookshelves

2009-03-06T08:45:00.001-08:00

Bookshelves
Originally uploaded by flynnkc

I've been using Flickr quite a bit lately. Come have a lookt!

Stanford Financial.jpg

2009-02-17T10:12:00.001-08:00

Stanford Financial.jpg
Originally uploaded by Roddick Remixed

Democracy in (North) America

2008-10-30T23:08:00.000-07:00

“I think there is no country in the civilized world where they are less occupied with philosophy than the United States.

The Americans have no philosophic school of their own, and they worry very little about all those that divide Europe; they hardly know their names.

It is easy to see, nevertheless, that almost all the inhabitants of the United States direct their minds in the same manner and conduct them by the same rules; that is to say, they possess a certain philosophic method, whose rules they have never taken the trouble to define, that is common to all of them.

To escape from the spirit of system, from the yoke of habits, from family maxims, from class opinions, and, up to a certain point, from national prejudices; to take tradition only as information, and current facts only as a useful study for doing otherwise and better; to seek the reason for things by themselves and in themselves alone, to strive for a result without letting themselves be chained to the means, and to see through the form to the foundation, these are the principal features that characterize what I shall call the philosophic method of the Americans.

If I go still further and seek among these diverse features the principal one that can sum up almost all the others, I discover that in most of the operations of the mind, each American calls only on the individual effort of his reason.

America is therefore the one country in the world where the precepts of Descartes are least studied and best followed. That should not be surprising.

Americans do not read Descartes’ works because their social state turns them away from speculative studies, and they follow his maxims because this same social state naturally disposes their minds to adopt them.

Amidst the continual movement that reigns in the heart of a democratic society, the bond that unites generations is relaxed or broken; each man easily loses track of the ideas of his ancestors or scarcely worries about them.

Men who live in such a society can no longer draw their beliefs from the opinions of the class to which they belong, for there are, so to speak, no longer any classes, and those that still exist are composed of elements that move so much that the body can never exert a genuine power over it members.

As for the action that the intellect of one man can have on another, it necessarily very restricted in a country where citizens, having become nearly the same, all see each other from very close, and, not perceiving in anyone among themselves incontestable signs of greatness and superiority, are constantly led back toward their own reason as the most visible and closest, source of truth. Then not only is trust in such and such a man destroyed but the taste for believing any man whomsoever at his word.

Each therefore withdraws narrowly into himself and claims to judge the world from there.

The American way of taking the rule of their judgment only from themselves leads to other habits of mind.

As they see that they manage to resolve unaided all the little difficulties that practical life presents, they easily conclude that everything in the world is explicable and that nothing exceeds the bounds of intelligence.

Thus they willingly deny what they cannot comprehend.”

Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840.

The Political Importance of Wednesday

2008-10-26T23:54:00.001-07:00

This was published in etcetera on Oct. 28, 2008.

The Political Importance of Wednesday

How can we distinguish between true and false modes of Christian political action? This is the same question that began my article from Sept. 30, and I want to begin again with it today. In that article I was hoping to challenge our assumption that voting is the best or only way to bear faithful witness to Christ during the elections in the United States in 2008. I came to the conclusion that it is neither, and offered the action of non-voting as a better alternative. Today, however, I don’t want to talk about voting - which Ben Amundgaard calls “one of the only opportunities a citizen has to directly alter the position of the government under which he or she must live” – rather, I want to talk about the public and political nature of the church.

We don’t normally talk about the church as being ‘public’ or ‘political’. The reason for this is because those words have been co-opted by the state in order to put the church in its proper place. Unfortunately, that place is no place. “Political action” is voting, running for office, and starting political action committees. The closest the church can get to being “public” is by talking about being “visible”, which usually ends up being nothing more than a discussion about church building funds. “Public” is specifically used in contrast to “private”, which is the only thing the church can be: a place for the private affairs of a dwindling number of nostalgic, self-deluded believers.

I want to reject these distinctions and the implications they lead to. I want to argue that it is the church – the ekklesia – that is the most political entity in God’s creation and, consequently, the most public. However, these words (political and public) must be used on the church’s terms rather than those dictated to us by the state. In his book Political Worship, Bernd Wannenwetsch states: “It should be borne in mind that the church has its own ‘politics’ (and economics), its specific way of dealing with the differences in social life... This means that it enters into a struggle which is certainly not directly ‘political’ (since it does not follow the prevailing political rules) but is primarily a struggle about politics, a struggle for the true form of political existence.” Wannenwetsch goes on, “…the Church has to bring its own form of political praxis into the game, by playing along, but with other rules.”

What are those rules? How many of us have ever considered that most of the rules we live by are actually given to us by the state, not the Gospel of Jesus Christ? The freedom of the gospel allows us to think outside the rules of empire. Why was the term ekklesia used by the early church for self-identification when other concepts were available? Ekklesia, as argued by William Cavanaugh and others, is a particularly political term. To be political was to be involved in the affairs of the polis – the state. They could have self-identified as a guild or an association (koinon or collegium) but opted for a word that denotes a specific stance towards the public life. The choice of ekklesia was a conscience choice to self-identify as the people of the public God who is the Lord of all of life – even the empire. We must recapture this understanding of ekklesia if we will ever be able to engage the state with true political and public worship.

What does it mean to be political? How can we distinguish between true and false modes of Christian political action? I have few answers to these questions but I refuse to begin with the answers of empire. As long as the illusion is perpetuated that says we can divvy up our life into public, private, sacred and secular, it is crucial that the church resists the disintegrating force of the modern political machine driven by propaganda and technique. We must disengage from the dominance of the state – to use the words of Walter Brueggemann – only then to re-engage as Christians to unmask the principalities and powers. The action of disengagement begins with gathering as the ekklesia. After prayer, gathering around the crucified and resurrected Lord is the most significant form of political (public) action we have available to us. And if we don’t engage in these two things with patience, hope, and imagination, we will not be faithful to our call to be the church that resists the world by living the Word. If we can’t understand how praying and gathering are both political and public, then perhaps we should start with that question before simply accepting the imperatives of the state.

Christians in The United States will have the opportunity to engage in some “political” action by voting next Tuesday, but what will we do on Wednesday? If the church is not political on Wednesday then it is not political at all – and there are no elections on Wednesday.

KC Flynn, Oct. 28, 2008

The Sacred Right To Not Vote

2008-10-26T23:50:00.000-07:00

This was published in the Sept. 30th edition of etcetera, the weekly newspaper of Regent College.

The art of saying ‘No’ sets us free to follow Jesus.
– Eugene Peterson

How can we distinguish between true and false modes of Christian political action? Is voting compatible with a faithful Christian witness? These questions have been on my mind of late and will likely remain on my mind for the next few months. I assume that most readers are fairly comfortable with their “sacred right to vote.” Further, I assume that my own decision not to vote will immediately cause many of you to disregard anything I have to say – especially about voting. But I must do my part, as we all must, of bearing witness to what I have come to believe is the truth of the matter.

Romans 13 clearly demands subordination to the government. True, but what kind of government did Paul have in mind? Does this count for the writers of the Declaration of Independence, or just for us? What about the underground church in China or Nazi Germany? Is the fact that I am being submissive to the former rebellious colonies of the British Empire problematic, or can I just ignore it because, well, that was a long time ago? I raise this issue to show that submission to governing authorities is far from simplistic. Any argument made on the grounds that I am to be a “good citizen” by voting will not work. Our relationship to the governing authorities must be predicated on a more sturdy foundation, and it is that foundation which I will turn to now.

Paul says that “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” This is the foundation on which I want to build my case for non-voting. You may think, “Yes, but this is exactly why we should vote! We are free and should not waste our freedom!” Perhaps. But how free are we when we participate in American democracy?

Jacques Ellul, French sociologist and lay theologian, comments on democracy’s necessity of propaganda: “The moment a democratic regime establishes itself, propaganda establishes itself alongside it under various forms. This is inevitable, as democracy depends on public opinion and competition between political parties. In order to come to power, parties make propaganda to gain voters.” Last election, there was $1 billion spent to persuade people to vote either Republican or Democrat. I would like to believe that this money was donated in goodwill to be used freely at the discretion of the political party in the service of the supreme good of humanity. But I suspect that money had certain promises tied to it, which means that it is not freely used and we are hardly the recipients of that advertising as “free” men and women. The only way we can be free of it is if we choose to ignore it, or better yet, choose to test it rigorously against what we know to be true of the reality of the world.

Jesus tells us about this reality. In Matthew’s gospel Jesus taught his disciples about how to become great: by becoming a slave. The paradox that seems to make the disciples “indignant” is that power comes through weakness and transformation is affected by serving. Unfortunately, political advertising—indeed the whole game of American politics—would have us believe that the President of the United States is the most important person in the world because he or she can bring about “change.” The best you and I can do to affect this change is vote.
So, is voting compatible with a faithful Christian witness? In the current political climate in North America, a climate in which powerful political parties try to convince the masses that it is only through allegiance to them that the future hope of the world is secured, I must say that it is not. The freedom granted to us as Christians is more than just the ability to participate in someone else’s game: as the Church, we participate in the reality of the world by gathering together around the risen Christ. That is reality, no matter what any prime-time political advertisement says.

It is clear to me that the heart of this issue is idolatry. The political climate in North America is one littered with the worship of false gods. We listen to the gods of media to tell us how to see the world, we listen to the gods of politics to tell us how to fix the world, and we listen to the gods of money who tell us how to be fully human (and happy!) in the world. All the while ignoring the one true God who speaks to us in Jesus Christ, showing us the way to live, move, and have our being in the world.

To conclude, I want to argue that the Christian witness of non-voting is a valid option because we have been seduced by the power to change the world through something other than the resurrected Christ. How are we to faithfully bear witness to Christ in this situation? Voting for McCain or Obama will not cut it. In a world telling me that voting is the best way to participate in reality, non-voting is one real way to legitimately say that our hope lies not in man but in the God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ, the crucified and resurrected Lord of all. One way (and not the only way, to be sure) to do this is by saying “No!” to worshiping at the altar of the voting booth in November.

KC Flynn, Sept. 30, 2008

Annoyed

2008-07-18T14:25:00.000-07:00

http://www.ecpa.org/christianbookawards/winners2008.php

the 2008 ECPA book of the year is an audiobook. that is ridiculous.

The Possibility of Offense

2008-07-02T17:55:00.000-07:00

When Christianity came into the world, it did not need to call attention (even though it did so) to the fact that it was contrary to human nature and human understanding, for the world discovered that easily enough. But now that we are on intimate terms with Christianity, we must awaken the collision.

The possibility of offense must be again preached to life. Only the possibility of offense (the antidote to the apologists’ sleeping potion) is able to waken those who have fallen asleep, is able to break the spell so that Christianity is itself again.

Woe to him therefore, who preaches Christianity without the possibility of offense. Woe to the person who smoothly, flirtatiously, commendingly, convincingly preaches some soft, sweet something which is supposed to be Christianity!

Woe to the person who makes miracles reasonable. Woe to the person who betrays and and breaks the mystery of faith, distorts it into public wisdom, because he takes away the possibility of offense! Woe to the person who speaks of the mystery of the Atonement without detecting in it anything of the possibility of offense.

Woe again to him who thinks God and Christianity are something for study and discussion. Woe to every unfaithful steward who sits down and writes false proofs, winning friends for themselves and for Christianity by writing off the possibility of offense. Oh, the learning and acumen tragically wasted. Oh the enormous time wasted in the enormous work of making Christianity so reasonable, and in trying to make it so relevant!…The more skillful, the more articulate, the more excellent the defense, however, the more Christianity is disfigured, abolished, exhausted like an emasculated man

…Therefore, take away from Christianity the possibility of offense or take away from the forgiveness of sin the battle of an anguished conscience. Then lock the churches, the sooner the better, or turn them into places of amusement which stand open all day long!

Kierkegaard, Works of Love: Some Christian Reflections in the Form of Discourses, pp. 199-200

Good Quote

2008-06-17T12:49:00.000-07:00

"The leaders of the rich nations are elected on the basis of a collective lie in which they collude with their corporate funders, advertisers and the media; that they will make the lives of voters better, and their communities fairer as well as more prosperous, by allowing economic corporations to continue to rip through the ecosystems of the earth and the social fabric of human communities in North and South as they accumulate monetary wealth at others' expense. Politicians will not tell the truth about climate change and ecological collapse, which is that addressing these long-run problems will actually require reductions in economic growth, a reigning-in of corporate greed and the re-regulation of the money supply. This is because the truth runs counter to the core assumption of neoliberalism that unrestrained economic growth, deregulated trade in goods and deregulated money markets are redemptive devices that make the world a better place."

Michael Northcott, A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming, pg. 35.

All of My Days

2008-06-16T11:59:00.001-07:00

"all of my days" by alexi murdoch

Well I have been searching all of my days
All of my days
Many a road, you know
I’ve been walking on
All of my days
And I’ve been trying to find
What’s been in my mind
As the days keep turning into night

Well I have been quietly standing in the shade
All of my days
Watch the sky breaking on the promise that we made
All of this rain
And I’ve been trying to find
What’s been in my mind
As the days keep turning into night

Well many a night I found myself with no friends standing near
All of my days
I cried aloud
I shook my hands
What am I doing here
All of these days
For I look around me
And my eyes confound me
And it’s just too bright
As the days keep turning into night

Now I see clearly
It’s you I’m looking for
All of my days
Soon I’ll smile
I know I’ll feel this loneliness no more
All of my days
For I look around me
And it seems He found me
And it’s coming into sight
As the days keep turning into night
As the days keep turning into night
And even breathing feels all right
Yes, even breathing feels all right
Now even breathing feels all right
It’s even breathing
Feels all right

The Thought

2008-04-15T23:59:00.000-07:00

"The Thought"
by KC Flynn

Silence whispers to me,
Be still.
Movement moves its way
towards death
and I am alone.

Still, the stillness speaks,
You are loved.
The thought
alone
bears the weight
of my imagination
and I
cannot bear it.

Stay

2007-12-08T20:53:00.000-08:00

I need this one right now...

Stay
by Robbie Seay Band

Hope is the call
That is ringing in my soul
But I can’t pretend that I see
Much light in front of me

I wait to find you here
Hope is thrown away
I can’t give up
I’ll wait to see You here
I have gone astray
But You will always stay beside me
And Your rescue comes to find me
And You always stay

Love is the seed
That is buried underneath
the soil of the pain and grief
But it grows into the tree
That I’ll climb to see You here
Hope is thrown away

I can’t give up
I’ll wait to see You here
I have gone astray
But You will always stay beside me
And Your path is straight before me
You will always stay
You will always stay

Pride is the friend
Who betrays me in the end
Stealing joy, as it goes
Leaves me longing for a home

I’ll wait to find you here
Though I’m thrown away
I can’t give up
I’ll wait to see You here
I have gone astray
And I believe I’ll sing until You’re here
Though I’m lost and afraid
I can’t give up
I wait to find you here
I have gone astray

You will always stay beside me
And Your sun will rise above me
And Your light will shine upon me
And Your skies are clear above me
And You will always stay
You will always stay

What is going on?

2007-09-30T23:39:00.000-07:00

I am an admittedly bad blogger. When I used to work for the man and he used to keep me down I had so many thoughts all day long that blogging became a way for me to 'discuss' them in a corporate world void of meaningful talk. But now that I'm in grad school studying something I love with other people who love it, all I do all day is talk about the stuff I would have blogged back in the day. So I get home and I don't have the energy to write out my rants or ideas because I've already bounced them off my friends here who think relatively similar to me. So the blog has become something else, but I'm not sure what. I am not a journaler and I never have been. I hate that I feel like a bad Christian for not journaling. But I just never had it in me. I'm an extremely introspective person - for better or worse - but I find that writing my thoughts out doesn't really help much. I prefer writing poetry or painting, neither of which I'm very good at. But you can't blog that stuff.

So what should I do? Maybe I could try to be more disciplined and write about what I'm studying. Or perhaps I could talk about the books that I read or see in the library and want to read. I realize that I'm a novice at theology. I just don't know what I'm doing. So when I read blogs like America's Young Theologian, Faith & Theology, or Chrisendom I just feel like an idiot. Trying to blog like those guys would be like trying out for the Astros - I would just look like a fool.

So what is my role in the blogosphere? I guess that question will slowly become more clear as I get closer to figuring out my role in the world. Oh well...

The Gathered Community

2007-08-30T18:51:00.000-07:00

My vision of the gathered church that had come to me after I became the janitor had been replaced by a vision of the gathered community. What I saw now was the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection. There had maybe never been anybody who had not been loved by somebody, who had been loved by somebody else, and so on and on…It was a community always disappointed in itself, disappointing its members, always trying to contain its divisions and gentle its meanness, always failing and yet always preserving a sort of will toward goodwill. I knew that, in the midst of all the ignorance and error, this was a membership; it was the membership of Port William and of no other place on earth. My vision gathered the community as it never has been and never will be gathered in this world of time, for the community must always be marred by members who are indifferent to it or against it, who are nonetheless its members and maybe nonetheless essential to it. And yet I saw then all as some how perfected, beyond time, by one another’s love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace.

Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry, pg. 205

I'm writing a paper on Wendell Berry's vision of the gathered community. My argument is that it is a challenge to the church's embodiment of the Gospel, but also that it is insufficient in and of itself. Berry needs the Church in order to have a people capable of performing this vision.

"Without a church capable of demythologizing false idealism that possess our imaginations, there is no possibility..." that a community can exist capable of loving its neighbors or its enemies to the extent Berry envisions. Essentially, it is an argument that sides with Hauerwas and stands against those who think Hauerwas and Berry are 'idealists'.

Rethinking Christ and Culture

2007-03-25T01:21:00.000-07:00

Liberal Protestantism has accommodated itself to culture at the point of the sexual revolution. The fruites of the sexual revolution are easy divorce, shallow interpersonal relationships and promiscuity, sexually transmitted disease and sterility, homosexual activity, routine abortion, contraceptvies and antibiotics as substitutes for sexual responsibility, increased poverty among women and children, and children growing up without secure relationships with both parents. All this is tragic--yet liberal Protestantism does little to stand against it.

On the other hand, conservative Protestantism has accommodated itself to culture by blessing the commercialization of all of life and the exploitation of the poor through global capitalism. The fruits of the worship of the market are the commercialization of nearly all public space, the constant preaching of materialism through advertising, the destruction of the environment, the mad scramble for money, and the trampling of the poor by faceless corporations that view people as nothing but units of labor and consumers. All this is tragic too--yet conserviative Protestantism does little to stand against it.

Ironically, having set out to transform culture, both liberal and conservative forms of Christianity in North America today find themselves greatly transformed by late-capitalist, liberal-individualist culture during the last century. It is little more that empty rhetoric, then, for liberals and conservatives to claim to be transforming culture and to accuse those who reject the Christ transformting culture model (of Niebuhr's Christ and Culture) as irresponsible and irrelevant. What could be more irrelevant than Christian leaders who beg the government to pass laws to coerce their own church members into caring for the poor or refusing the abortion temptation, when those Christian leaders cannot convince their own flocks to do these things on the basis of the Bible? There is a glaring parallel between liberal Christians lobbying the government to tax the capitalists in their own flocks and redistribute the money to the poor, on the one hand, and conservative Christians lobbying the government to outlaw abortion, so members of their own flock will not have it as an option. No wonder politicians often have so little respect for religious lobbyists.

--Craig Carter, Rethinking Christ and Culture (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006) 20-21.

Eyes wide open...

2007-03-06T21:20:00.000-08:00

In prayer we wake up to the world as it is spread out before God in all its heights and depths. We perceive the sighing of creation, and hear the cries of the created victims that have fallen dumb. We also hear the song of praise of the blossoming spring, and feel the divine love for everything that lives. The person who prays, lives more attentively. Pray wakefully – that is only possible if we don’t pray mystically with closed eyes, but messianically, with eyes wide open for God’s future in the world. - Jurgen Moltmann

life...

2007-03-05T22:20:00.000-08:00

The older you get, the more you need those who knew you when you were young.

Math Atheism

2007-02-26T23:22:00.000-08:00

4 things

2007-02-12T23:19:00.000-08:00

1) As long as we think that 'success' is the same as 'popularity', we will fail.
2) As soon as we forget the cross and what it means, we will make Jesus (and Christianity, for that matter) a means to our own ends.
3) We will think that 'being in positions of influence' will be the only way for real change when we forget who Jesus was.
4) Most of us read the Bible thinly and without a proper understanding of the context from which Jesus comes from and into which Jesus speaks. Therefore we fail to see the counter-cultural (read: subversive) nature of the Gospel, of Jesus, and of Paul (and the whole Bible, really). If this is the case, we will always be 'chaplains to power' and affirm the status quo.

To be an artist in world of dirt...

2007-01-30T00:04:00.000-08:00

Thanks to AYT for this post:

Gandhi, Graffiti, and Christian Ethics

Rugged Individualism

2006-12-27T19:43:00.000-08:00

"Every man for himself" is a doctrine for a feeding frenzy or for a panic in a burning nightclub, appropriate for sharks or hogs or perhaps a cascade of lemmings. A society wishing to endure must speak the language of caretaking, faith-keeping, kindness, neighborliness, and peace. That language is another precious resource that cannot be "privatized."

A quote from "Rugged Individualism," in The Way of Ignorance, by Wendell Berry.

John Yates & The Falls Church in the NY Times

2006-12-17T13:26:00.000-08:00

Episcopalians Reach Point of Revolt
by Laurie Goodstein

"For about 30 years, the Episcopal Church has been one big unhappy family. Under one roof there were female bishops and male bishops who would not ordain women. There were parishes that celebrated gay weddings and parishes that denounced them; theologians sure that Jesus was the only route to salvation, and theologians who disagreed.

Now, after years of threats, the family is breaking up.

As many as eight conservative Episcopal churches in Virginia are expected to announce today that their parishioners have voted to cut their ties with the Episcopal Church. Two are large, historic congregations that minister to the Washington elite and occupy real estate worth a combined $27 million, which could result in a legal battle over who keeps the property.

In a twist, these wealthy American congregations are essentially putting themselves up for adoption by Anglican archbishops in poorer dioceses in Africa, Asia and Latin America who share conservative theological views about homosexuality and the interpretation of Scripture with the breakaway Americans."

Read the rest of the article here.

2 in a row!

2006-12-09T19:05:00.000-08:00

What are the chances...

You scored as Moltmannian Eschatology. Jürgen Moltmann is one of the key eschatological thinkers of the 20th Century. Eschatology is not only about heaven and hell, but God's plan to make all things new. This should spur us on to political and social action in the present.

What's your eschatology?
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Which Theologian Are You?

2006-12-08T22:34:00.000-08:00

Ironically, I started reading Moltmann about 2 weeks ago for some unknown reason. I don't know much about him at all.

You scored as Jürgen Moltmann. The problem of evil is central to your thought, and only a crucified God can show that God is not indifferent to human suffering. Christian discipleship means identifying with suffering but also anticipating the new creation of all things that God will bring about.

Jürgen Moltmann

73%

John Calvin

53%

Karl Barth

47%

Martin Luther

40%

Friedrich Schleiermacher

40%

Paul Tillich

40%

Charles Finney

33%

Anselm

33%

Augustine

27%

Jonathan Edwards

Which theologian are you?
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Does Hope Cheat Man of the Happiness of the Present?

2006-11-24T23:18:00.000-08:00

We do not rest satisfied with the present. We anticipate the future as too slow in coming, as if in order to hasten its course; or we recall the past, to stop its too rapid flight. So imprudent are we that we wander in times which are not ours, and do not think of the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more, and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists....We scarcely ever think of the present; and if we think of it, it is only to take light from it to arrange the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end. So we never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so.

--Blaise Pascal, Pensées, No. 172 as quoted in Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope

New Member of the Family!

2006-11-20T16:00:00.000-08:00

Welcome the newest member of the Flynn family: Ellie. That is one cute dog.

Donny--were you listening to the Dude's story?

2006-11-13T18:41:00.003-08:00

Me (with chocolate syrup spilled on my shirt), Donny, Meghan, and Zach.

Donny was a good bowler, and a good man. He was one of us. He was a man who loved the outdoors... and bowling, and as a surfer he explored the beaches of Southern California, from La Jolla to Leo Carrillo and... up to... Pismo. He resigned, like so many young men of his generation, he resigned before his time. In your wisdom, Lord, you took him, as you took so many bright flowering young men at Khe Sanh, at Langdok, at Hill 364. These young men gave their lives. And so would Donny. Donny, who loved bowling. And so, Donald Rumsfeld, in accordance with what we think your retiring wishes might well have been, we commit your final mortal remains to the bosom of the Pacific Ocean, which you loved so well. Good night, sweet prince.

Resident Blogger

2006-10-27T23:12:00.000-07:00

William H. Willimon, Methodist Bishop and co-author of Resident Aliens (and other books that I haven't read), is now blogging. I found out from Jordon Cooper. I am going to go ahead and suggest checking it out regularly.

A Peculiar Prophet

Marriage and 'The End of the World'

2006-10-17T01:54:00.000-07:00

I was in Raleigh, NC, this weekend for the wedding of my good friends Ryan and Anna. It was probably the nicest wedding I've ever been to. It was over-the-top fancy and I haven't eaten better hors d'oeuvres in my life. It was also my first non-groomsman involvement in a wedding. I was a 'reader'. I warmed up the crowd with Revelation 21:1-5 before Doctor Steven Scott Garber (as the program very nicely spelled out) took it home with an amazing homily.

I love homilies that include readings from Wendell Berry and no one can read Berry aloud like Garber (I think it was a selection from Hannah Coulter but I'll have to check on that). The homily had a simple but profound point: In your marriage-to-be what is your telos, and what praxis is sufficient to get you there?

Perhaps it was appropriate that I read from Revelation before Garber got up to speak. All joking aside, I did warm up the crowd with those 5 verses:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away."

He who was seated on the throne said, "I am making everything new!" Then he said, "Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true."

That is our telos. Left Behind? I think not.

But what is our praxis?

Amen!

2006-10-06T20:21:00.000-07:00

This man has been alive for four of my lifetimes.

104-Year-Old Named America's Oldest Worker

POSTED: 7:55 am EDT October 5, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Thinking about retiring? Waldo McBurney of Quinter, Kan., isn't. In fact, the 104-year-old has just been honored as America's oldest worker by Experience Works, a group that provides training and employment services for seniors. A 1927 graduate of Kansas State Agricultural College, which is now Kansas State University, McBurney had a nearly 25-year career in agriculture. He now works as a beekeeper. In the last few years he's maintained as many as 100 colonies. But that's just part of his story. McBurney began long-distance running at 65, and running competitively at 75. At age 80, he set a Kansas state record for the 10-mile run for runners his age and went on to set records in running, long jump, discus and shot-put into his 90s and 100s at the Senior Olympics.

Retirement? McBurney said, "I can't find it in my Bible."

Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press.

America's Young Theologian

2006-10-03T23:28:00.000-07:00

I wanted to point everyone to a great post about a guy named Walton. As you'll see it's not really about Walton, but it has everything to do with Walton. You can read it at America's Young Theologian.

"People with disabilities don't suffer from being disabled...they suffer from us." - Stanley Hauerwas

New Website

2006-10-02T23:05:00.001-07:00

Hey everyone. I hope you're doing well.

My friend Matt, along with myself and a few other close friends (although Matt did all the work), has started a new blog devoted to the idea of doing business as Christians. It can be found at http://churchinbusiness.blogspot.com . I'm excited to be a 'contributor' to this forum even though my experience in the business world is short and a few years old now. There should be some good ideas generated and hopefully some lively discussion. Check it out.

Great T.S. Eliot Quote

2006-09-05T22:15:00.000-07:00

[Radio] is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.

-T.S. Eliot

I think the same could be said about TV. Thanks to Sean for showing me that one.

Free Derek Webb!

2006-08-27T21:57:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Sarah for pointing me to this....

Colorado Pictures

2006-08-03T11:20:00.000-07:00

Here are a few pictures (with my new camera!) that I took this last week in Colorado. The trip was great and along with the end of the trip comes the end of my 'summer' job at Memorial Drive United Methodist Church.

I may or may not post again before I leave for my road trip to Canada (which has been named 'Canada or Bust, eh?' because my good friend Dany is getting married tomorrow night and I have a lot of packing to do. Regent College, here I come!

Lack of Blogging

2006-07-23T23:25:00.000-07:00

It has been a while since my last blog. Over a month, actually. Its funny because sometimes I actually believe people read this and are wondering what I'm doing. Then I realize that most people who would ever read this probably know me and don't really care what I'm doing instead of blogging. Unless you're my mom. Hi Mom. :)

Let's see...what has been going on?

Well, the summer is slowly coming to a close. I'm going to recap what exactly I have been doing, using the trips I've taken as my main bullet points.

1. Galveston Staff Trip. Galveston, Texas. This was sort of a staff orientation trip. My official title is 'Senior Staff' but I feel my role is much different. Jennifer is the female Senior Staff and she actually fulfills that role much better than me. I tend to gravitate towards big-picture issues instead of dealing with the staff from a ministry perpective. Sure, its still ministry, but not the kind that I was probably hired to do. There are some reasons that I won't go into, but I think that it has been OK. This trip I layed out the foundation for what I wanted to work with the College Staff on: Christian identity.

2. High School Workcamp. Boerne, Texas. This is THE trip of the summer. 175 high school youth (all from one church!), 15 College Staff, 15 college volunteers, 30-something parent volunteers, and about 8-9 permanent youth staff. Its a big mission trip that would be a logistical nightmare if we didn't have a Youth Pastor like Steve Cragg. The theme of the week was 'Journey'. I had a small group on this trip made up of 6 high school guys that went great. We really struggled through some issues and worked on moving them towards a comitted Christian life. Mark and I did a little 'skit' (is that the right word?) where we put on robes and played Roman cross builders. We actually constructed a cross on stage and had some dialogue about who Jesus was and his message. Great trip, as usual, and really gets my mind thinking when it comes to doing ministry because of all the issues that come up during the trip. Oh, and in the big Workcamp skit titled 'SpellQuest', a mockumentary about spelling bees, I played 'Ned Reierson' (groundhog day anyone?) the Founder and Chairman of W.U.R.D.S.--The Worldwide United Regulatory Department of Spelling. Good stuff....

3. Middle School Workcamp. Houston, Texas. This is a smaller, 'cliffs notes' version of high school workcamp. About 80 middle school kids, less volunteers, same staff. My last post came on the last night of this trip. Many questions still remain.

4. Rafting Trip. San Marcos, Texas. This trip is a non-mission trip that is pretty much just a fun trip. Not much Jesus talk, just community.

5. Colorado 2K6. Pagosa Springs, Colorado. This is the best trip. This trip involves only the graduated seniors and college types. I have been working on a reading packet for this trip that I hope gets some of these kids some resources for thinking about the Christian life before they go off to college. Its a critical time for some because they need a bit of a reminder of what life is all about before they let the colleges they attend tell them another story. We leave this Tuesday.

So that's what I've been doing. I've been trying to read some Hauerwas, Berry, Brueggemann and Wright before I go off to school.

Oh yeah, I'm going to school soon. Regent College in Vancouver. I'm so ready. I leave August 6th for an 8-day road trip on the west coast. Once I get to Vancouver I need to find a place to live. Once that is done and as long as it doesn't take too long, hopefully I'll be making a trek to Alaska. That's an extra bonus, so we'll see.

So many questions this summer. Am I fit to be a 'minister'? If not, what do I need to develop about myself? What do I need to allow God to really have his way with? What are my strengths? Weaknesses? What is the point of youth ministry? How do you do any ministry involving both evangelism and discipleship well? How much do you compromise in order to be 'relevant'? How do you train leaders well? If I end up not being a pastor, what other things am I fit to do? There are so many more, including some more theological questions and less introspective.

That's all. Maybe you stopped reading a while ago.

I'm going to bed now. Goodnight.

'Meaningful' Youth Ministry

2006-06-20T22:26:00.000-07:00

How do you do 'meaningful' youth ministry?

After a long day of work in the Houston humidity and heat the nearly 100 middle school youth gather together back at the church. As I sat in the back of the room tonight I thought on this as I watched minute after minute of programmed time go by. First it was the video, then the skit, then more video, then a slide-show, then small group time. Coffee break for me. Now we're back together...testimonies (if you can even call them that), then a short talk--which tonight was actually just the reading of a devotional book (i'm pretty confused about that one)--then communion time. Now the kids are dancing and will be for a little while longer. They will sleep a bit tonight and then get on a bus and head for Dallas to spend the day at Six Flags Over Texas.

So is this youth ministry? I don't know what these kids leave with. I'm sure a lot of them leave with that warm, fuzzy feeling that we call 'God'. Granted, this is a Methodist church and who knows what anyone believes here anyway, but I still get this pessimistic feeling about the whole thing.

I have the day off tomorrow so maybe I'll try to write some more about this. I have to go play babysitter for a few more hours...

peace

I'm back...but tired

2006-06-13T11:23:00.000-07:00

I'm back from the mission trip. Good trip. 170 High School students. lots of fun...

I'm too tired to think or write, but hopefully i will soon.

This is all I have now, the last paragraph of Simply Christian, by NT Wright:

Made for Spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world. It is time, in the power of the Spirit, to take up our proper role, our fully human role, as agents, heralds, and stewards of the new day that is dawning. That, quite simply, is what it means to be Christian: to follow Jesus Christ into the new world, God's new world, which he has thrown open before us.

Another Good Reading List

2006-05-31T10:13:00.000-07:00

Common Grounds Online 2006 Non-fiction Reading List

http://commongroundsonline.typepad.com/common_grounds_online/2006/05/summer_reading_.html#more

There is definitely some good stuff in here. Charlie Peacock, NT Wright, Wolterstorff...

Happy reading!

Resist

2006-05-30T21:28:00.000-07:00

Whoever can reconcile this, 'Resist not evil', with 'Resist violence by force', again, 'Give also thy other cheek', with 'Strike again'; also, 'Love thine enemies', with 'Spoil them, make a prey of them, pursue them with fire and the sword', or, 'Pray for those that persecute you, and those that calumniate you', with 'Persecute them by fines, imprisonments and death itself', whoever, I say, can find a means to reconcile these things may be supposed also to have found a way to reconcile God with the Devil, Christ with Antichrist, Light with Darkness, and good with evil. But if this be impossible, as indeed it is impossible, so will also the other be impossible, and men do but deceive both themselves and others, while they boldly adventure to establish such absurd and impossible things.

Robert Barclay, 1678

Ever since I spent time at L'Abri I have been thinking about what it means to be a pacifist. I have always said that I was a pacifist only because I never liked fighting. Maybe its because I'm not very strong so I would just say that I was a pacifist so I would have a reason to not back up my friends in a bar fight. Luckily I have well behaving friends and I never had to show my stripes in that situation.

One might think there would be a lot of pacifists at L'Abri. Surprisingly, there were only a few. I was one of the only people who really spoke up about it. Maybe I should define this better than I am. Pacifism is a tricky word because it denotes (at least to me) an extremely passive, almost non-caring attitude towards violence. I would say that Christian pacifism is more of an active non-violence. I didn't make that up, I think I stole it from Ron Sider's old book Christ & Violence. This is the same book that introduced me to the idea of systematic injustice. It was also the only book in the L'Abri library about nonviolence (in a positive light).

I guess I have always been a Christian pacifist for two reasons (more now, but from the beginning just two.) First, I could never reconcile violence (especially war) with Jesus' words to love our enemies and 'do not resist evil'. This was never well thought out but more of a gut-feeling about how we need to take those things seriously even if it messes up what we want to think about our enemies or violence done to us. Second, I never liked the idea that nonviolence needed to be defended. Violence was always the initial reaction and then we should present a case for nonviolence. It seemed that nonviolence should be the standard and one should try to be convinced of why violence should be allowed. More gut than anything else, but I could never get around those two things.

The other thing about nonviolence and pacifism is that I think it should be carried to its logical conclusion. Just like the idea of 'pro-life' should enlarged to include not only human birth but the environment, marriage, the death penalty, and all forms of life-giving and life-taking, I think that nonviolence should be extended too. Nonviolence in its fullest form should include nonviolence to the earth and its resources, nonviolence to enemies, nonviolence to our bodies, nonviolent words and actions towards our family, nonviolent speech in general. Its kind of like the difference between peace-loving and peace-making. Not just people who want peace, but people who make peace.

I wrote most of that last night. I don't know where I was going...so I'll stop there.

What Remains

2006-05-28T08:34:00.000-07:00

I haven't had any good thoughts lately. I've been busy with my new job. It's actually nice to not have to sit in one place all day and just think about stuff. I'm much happier.

This will be another plug for a blog I read. This one should be a keeper. I was reading Matthew's stuff a few years ago (during the same time as Real Live Preacher stuff) and reading his thoughts on his own struggle to go to seminary vs. keeping a comfortable job helped me immensly. He stopped blogging for a while but he is back and I would love it if you guys went over and checked him out regularly. He writes and thinks beautifully about the stuff that matters.

What Remains

Someday, your children’s children’s children will drive by what remains of a Barnes and Noble hulking next door to the blasted remains of a Bed, Bath and Beyond. Across the potholed highway will be their fallen mirror images: the debris of a Borders; a leaning and derelict Linens ‘n’ Things.

No one gives any thought to how these things will look a thousand years from now, or even fifty. When Arnolfo di Cambia designed the duomo in Florence–over seven hundred years ago–he knew he was building something that would last. We don’t build things to last, or even to remain for very long. Everything will be abandoned, rebranded, moved along, or quietly disappeared....Read more here

Matthew Sturges' Blog

Enjoy! Maybe one of these days I'll actually write something.

Language and the Limits of Imagination

2006-05-26T07:22:00.000-07:00

My friend Sarah goes to Duke Divinity School. She is cool. Like, really cool. And really smart. And awesome. Like, really awesome.

Anyway, she blogs over at Xanga (what does that even mean?) and writes some really cool stuff. Today's post is great. She and I have similar interests in theology (not to mention music, too!) but she writes beautifully. This post is about what it is like to learn theology. I highly recommend it.

Langauge and the Limits of Imagination

so I had a thought today while walking away from my car, which I left in the parking lot with strict instructions to get steaming hot while I was in Hebrew class> I was thinking about how to describe the task of teaching/learning theology. It's about learning a language, eh? Picking up a new vocabulary, getting a feel for its own web of connections and realities, looking along its sightlines until you can move around inside the space it carves out with both freedom and faithfulness....read more here

Sarah's Blog

Enjoy!

Your Guide Toward Meaningful Work

2006-05-24T09:23:00.000-07:00

This was in today's Sojomail.

Your guide toward meaningful work

by David Batstone

The pursuit for meaningful work must be at the top of many people's minds these days. All of a sudden I am receiving a slew of invitations to speak on the subject of vocation and meaning at university campuses and professional forums.

Individuals yearn to pour their talents and deepest interests into work that matters. They are tired of being one person at work, another with their family, and possibly yet another in their community or political activity. Sustaining these multiple personalities quickly becomes exhausting and makes us feel spiritually fragmented.

Of course, many people in the world do not have the privilege of choosing work that means something beyond a daily wage. But for the majority of SojoMail readers, that is not the case. Education and economic conditions offer choices.

It's exciting to watch traditional boundaries on work blur. In many cases, the decision whether to join, or launch, a nonprofit organization rather than a for-profit enterprise comes down to personal strategy and circumstance. In other words, your skills alone do not determine your career path. In that respect, I know some very talented managers and business minds who find their niche confronting the problem of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa or designing low-cost housing in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco. In like manner, I met some remarkably creative and values-led people at Dell Computer Corporation where I spent last week delivering workshops on ethics and sustainability in a global economy.

Following the publication of my last book, Saving the Corporate Soul, I went on the road for two years visiting all kinds of organizations about significance and purpose at work. I discovered that when individuals explain what motivates them they keep coming back to three basic drivers: purpose, passion, and profit. So I designed a short inventory to identify how individuals take a primary orientation from one of these drivers. I call the tool the Triple P Quiz: Purpose, Passion and Profit- and it's available online.

I like to use the word orientation because we truly operate with a mix of motivations. Nonetheless, I discovered that nearly everyone I interview points to a primary driver that shapes their experience at work.

In designing the tool, I aim not only to help workers learn more about themselves, I want to offer the workplace a language for job engagement and the range of motivations that inspire team members.

It may be helpful to offer here a thumb-nail sketch of each p. Passion-led individuals value inspiring and creative work. No matter how much an organization touts the higher purpose of a job, if they do not feel passionate about the activities the position involves, they are not likely to find the job enticing. In other words, passion-led people shiver at the thought of waking up to a month of Mondays and face a set of tasks that are uninspiring.

I meet purpose-led people most often in the nonprofit and civic sector. Don't get me wrong, these individuals are not disappointed to take on creative tasks. But what inspires them is the larger mission of the enterprise of which they are a part. Purpose people do not fit into a one-size-fits-all box, however. While one person may want to find a cure for cancer, another purpose person finds motivation for designing a new software. You want purpose people to help drive the mission and core values of your organization. They keep the enterprise on course.

Profit-led people are the most rare in the non-profit world. Profit does not solely refer to bottom-line financials. More broadly, profit-led people find meaning in achieving a set of determined deliverables. They are the ones who provide discipline and structure to the organization. If you have ever started your own enterprise, you know the valuable role that profit-led people play, especially once your operation began to scale.

The deeper I engage with organizations, the more I appreciate the range of motivations required to make an organization healthy and successful. Individuals are not all wired the same; they find meaning in very different ways. Unfortunately, we do not always value the differences.

Last week I received a cynical note from an individual who took the Triple P Quiz and proclaimed that passion people are self-indulgent. In short, here's his message: It is well and good to seek inspiration, but get over it, because the world is full of suffering people. This purpose-led individual doubts the sincerity of other people who do not share his own motivation. In my experience, it is always a temptation for purpose-led people to feel that any other motivation for meaning is inferior, if not selling out.

His position reminds me of a dilemma that a CEO presented to me recently. The company was a victim of its own success; it was experiencing wild economic growth. When the company launched over a decade ago, the very passionate founder attracted a first wave of employees who also believed fervently in the products of the company. Once the company passed the $100 million mark in sales, the management team saw the need to bring in profit-led people who could better discipline its operations. The early-generation workers, of course, viewed the intrusion of the profit-led people as a threat to their passion-led corporate culture. The profit-led people felt less than welcomed. For their part, they wondered how such a chaotic, undisciplined crew could have gotten so far in business.

My challenge is to help every member of an organization recognize the value of an orchestra with many instruments. No organization can sustain itself without a strong mission (purpose), a creative and inspired dynamism (passion), and clear set of achievements and deliverables (profit). When any one of these values dominates in such a degree that it squeezes out the comfortable space the others offer, the organization will falter. Those enterprises that value the uniqueness of their personnel, on the other hand, design work environments where productivity thrives.

-------------------

So, are you Passion-driven, Profit-driven, Purpose-driven? Take the test here.

I took the test and I am 81% Passion, 69% Purpose, 50% profit.*

*My first test was taken in a busy room without much thought. I retook the test about 12 hours later and my new results were: 94% Passion, 63% Purpose, and 44% Profit.

A New Law

2006-05-21T10:15:00.000-07:00

I know I'm a little slow, but I just got Derek Webb's new(est) album Mockingbird and I have to say it might be his best yet. I've been listening to Derek for over 10 years now. When I was in high school Caedmon's Call used to play at Metro Bible Study (Houston) before they hit it big. If you are familiar with any of Caedmon's music, you will know that Derek has always stood out from the rest of the band in more ways than just his musical ability. His songs, of course, have always been deeper and more honest--much less praise music and more self/god discovery. On stage he only wears white T-shirts (sometimes accompanied by a jacket). My kind of guy.

OK, the CD. It's called Mockingbird. Apparently--and I have no actual evidence of this besides the music itself--Derek was reading a lot of Stanley Hauerwas (among others) during the writing of these songs. I'm sure that I will love it. Here is what Hauerwas himself says about the CD:

In general, I hate Christian rock music. But now I have heard the songs of Derek Webb. Webbs songs are free of the pietistic sentimentality that usually characterizes popular Christian music. His music, like the Gospel, is at once hard, edgy, and beautiful.

I'm still getting to know the songs, but I wanted to post the lyrics to one of my favorites and include a link to a video.

A New Law

dont teach me about politics and government
just tell me who to vote for

dont teach me about truth and beauty
just label my music

dont teach me how to live like a free man
just give me a new law

i dont wanna know if the answers arent easy
so just bring it down from the mountain to me

i want a new law
i want a new law
gimme that new law

dont teach me about moderation and liberty
i prefer a shot of grape juice

dont teach me about loving my enemies

dont teach me how to listen to the Spirit
just give me a new law

i dont wanna know if the answers arent easy
so just bring it down from the mountain to me

i want a new law
i want a new law
gimme that new law

whats the use in trading a law you can never keep
for one you can that cannot get you anything
do not be afraid
do not be afraid
do not be afraid

Link to video: http://www.workofthepeople.com/index.php5?ct=store.details&pid=V00044

Enjoy.

The Work of the People is defined by its name. We are a community of artists, storytellers, filmmakers, poets and theologians. Our work is to tell the story we share and to ask poignant questions through film, literature, art and music. We utilize our gifts to create tools for the Church to engage universal spiritual issues through progressive media. We confess that we are created in the image of God and fulfill our calling by creating and recreating to the glory of God

America Part 1

2006-05-19T11:35:00.000-07:00

it’s the dawn of the 21st century
America is still on top
there’s political confusion, social illusion
but its no worse than most folks have got

we read in the papers about the dealers and the rapers
and the wars that are being fought
we see those who are needy
give thanks to the banks that are not

workin’ the 9 to 5
so we can afford our pretty white homes
and if we run out of money buying stuff we don’t need
we can always just apply for a loan

we live in the suburbs with our aunts and our mothers
and our pagers and our cellular phones
and our email, world wide web
so we’re never alone

we give and we give to ourselves
but still we need more
we drink and we drink to our health
pass out on the floor
there is something very wrong with this nation
that we all gladly ignore
rather be ignorant and complacent
than pack our bags and walk out the door

each Sunday the choir fills the churches with such beautiful sounds
then the music trails off
and its back to the noise
of traffic and the smell of downtown

we pass by the whores, the gays, the drunks in the doorways
and we try to keep our eyes on the ground
we snicker at the lost and think,
“man, I’m so glad that I’m found”

we give and we give to ourselves
but still we need more
we drink, yeah, we drink to our health
pass out on the floor
there is something very wrong with this nation
that we all just gladly ignore
rather be ignorant and complacent
than pack our bags and walk out the door

sometimes I find myself asking
“have we come this far?”
if only we could be the country we were
instead of the country we are
except the country we were was built
on the backs of the blacks and the blood of the red
America the beautiful
home for the rich and the graves of the dead

Seth Woods, America Part 1

What's not to like?

2006-05-17T07:13:00.000-07:00

The Ongoing Holy War Against Evil, a poem by Wendell Berry

Stop the killing, or
I'll kill you, you
God-damned murderer!

I wonder why more people don't like poetry sometimes.

Life Together

2006-05-15T12:20:00.000-07:00

It is true, of course, that what is an unspeakable gift of God for the lonely individual is easily disregarded and trodden under foot by those who have the gift every day. It is easily forgotten that the fellowship of Christian brethren is a gift of grace, a gift of the Kingdom of God that any day may be taken from us, that the time that still separates us from utter loneliness may be brief indeed. Therefore, let him who until now has had the privilege of living a common Christian life with other Christians praise God's grace from the bottom of his heart. Let him thank God on his knees and declare: It is grace, nothing but grace, that we are allowed to live in community with Christian brethren.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

I'm reminded of The Fellows Program and L'Abri. I hope I never forget that fellowship is a gift.

Beginnings

2006-05-15T10:04:00.000-07:00

I'm not at work(corporate accounting job) because I quit. Call me a quitter if you will, I don't mind.

I will be spending the next 3-4 months working with about 15 college students at a local church.

After that, Regent College.

We'll see how my 75 year plan works out...

Bono Pics

2006-05-14T15:39:00.000-07:00

Thanks to my new friend Edgar for sending me these great pics. Edgar is a true U2/Bono fan. He's the kind of guy who would fly to Hawaii to see them...or Mexico City. I know that because he did. Although Edgar took the shots, I was next to him so I had pretty much the same view...enjoy!

I gave a copy of :the choice campaign: prospectus to the tall man in the back of this picture. He's Bono's personal security guard and said, "I'll see what I can do" when I asked him if he could get it to Bono.

Edgar was rewarded with a signed copy of Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas

Engage!

2006-05-11T14:05:00.000-07:00

From a blog about Stanley Hauerwas speaking at Theology Live at Yale:

"he didn't like what we were doing because he thought it was 'public theology' or some such thing, which he considers a sort of tired grab for power on the part of the church. as if we ought to be trying to say better things on economics than economists or on medicine than doctors, etc. he said he had no idea how to do that well, and didn't want to anyway. but when he found out that our aim is to help christians to be stronger, deeper, more thoughtful christians not only at church, but more importantly (because of its neglect) in the rest of life, he got excited. that's all i've been trying to do, he said. quoting loosely, he said "people accuse me of trying to withdraw. hell, I want people to engage, but i just want them to engage as christians! if that's what you want to do, great. we need more of that."

- Stanley Hauerwas

Amen, brother!

The System

2006-05-11T07:22:00.000-07:00

From Patrick Ness in the most recent SojoMail, on our generation:

We are encouraged to care, but not question. We are told that individual acts of charity are to be commended, but that systems will never change. The "common good" only applies to those whose accents, skin, neighborhood, and paycheck look like our own. Don't get me wrong - we're not complacent. We simply haven't learned the power of collective action toward lasting social transformation.

I'm reading Walter Wink, The Powers That Be, and in the book he talks about the nature of systems, how they have personalities, and discusses what the New Testament means when it talks about "principalities and powers." It is an interesting idea. I was reading John 10 the other day and in it is the passage about Jesus offering us life to the full:

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. - John 10:8-10

Before even reading the book I had the thought that perhaps "the thief" isn't only an evil, demonic being (which I'm not sure about yet) but perhaps systems and structures that destroy. If Jesus' offer isn't one of isolated, personal salvation, but is actually a message of the formation of a new community of God's people (and more than that, too, but not less) then it would be easy to see that the enemy--thief--could be a system that comes only to kill and destroy.

Just a thought. If the system can be directly opposed to the life that God has planned for us, then as Christians we should recognize the problems and make choices in line with that. It is too easy to say that we will just go into the working world and 'be Christians'.

I am not saying that we should arrange our lives to live out Fight Club or V for Vendetta. Those are stories that perpetuate the myth of redemptive violence. Violence and destruction will not fix anything. But the creation of an alternative community--a community that breaths life to a dead world...that seems to be option I continually come back to. I don't know if that means we shouldn't participate in the 'corporate' world, but as Wendell Berry says:

I don't mean to say, of course, that all corporate executives and stockholders are bad people. I am only saying that all of them are very seriously implicated in a bad economy.

We've go to start there. Not only corporate executives and stockholders, but consumers as well. We need to see just how deeply we are implicated in a system that could potentially be destructive to the earth, communities, and life as was intended by God. Collective action towards lasting social transformation begins when we realize that we can do something! I'm not just talking about boycotting certain consumer products, TV stations, movies, or Wal-Mart--which are all good and noble things to do--but the arrangement of a different way of life where we don't have to boycott Wal-Mart because we don't need anything from them.

As far as the corporate world goes its not that I'm against capitalism or anything, but I just don't think we have to always work for huge, international companies. I say go local. I would love to see lots of people caring about their communities, providing services for the community, consuming things that are from their community, banks that serve the community, etc. This is a place we must use our imaginations because it would look very different than our society looks in the cities today. No more Chili's and Bank of America. What a world it would be....

Collective action towards lasting social transformation begins and ends with the Gospel. Jesus is Lord. That should be enough to change everything if we would just allow it...

Mary Oliver

2006-05-10T09:18:00.000-07:00

I've found a new poet that I think I want to start reading more of. Well actually, she's really not new, but only new to me. I love that feeling when you find a writer that you connect with almost immediately...like you have known the person for a long time and only now are beginning to talk about the things that matter. And when they speak (or when I read) my heart jumps because they say the things that I think in ways that I can't say or think. For me that has been Wendell Berry, Walter Brueggemann, Stanley Hauerwas, N.T. Wright, Annie Dillard, Madeline L'Engle...

and now, Mary Oliver...

Why I Wake Early

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who make the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety--

best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light--
good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

Work, Sometimes

I was sad all day, and why not. There i was, books piled
on both sides of the table, paper stacked up, words
falling off my tongue.

The robins had been a long time singing, and now it
was beginning to rain.

What are we sure of? Happiness isn't a town on a map,
or and early arrival, or a job well done, but good work
ongoing. Which is not likely to be trifling around
with a poem.

Then it began raining hard, and the flowers in the yard
were full of lively fragrance.

You have had days like this, no doubt. And wasn't it
wonderful, finally, to leave the room? Ah, what a
moment!

As for myself, I swung the door open. And there was
the wordless, singing world. And I ran for my life.

Psalm 23 v. 2.0

2006-05-09T12:42:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Common Grounds Online and fellow Houstonians Ben Young and Glen Lucke for posting this.

From Ben Young's book Out of Control:

Technology is my shepherd; I shall not want.
It makes me lie down in front of the high-definition screen.
It leads me with incessant noise.
It makes me feel significant.
Though I walk through the valley of no cell-phone coverage,
(Can you hear me now?) you are with me.
My Blackberry, my laptop, they comfort me.
You set wireless access before me in the presence of my family.
You anoint my head with Blue Tooth; my e-mail overflows.
Surely Microsoft and Verizon will follow me all the days of my life
And I will dwell in the database forever…

Ben goes on to ask the questions, "Has more and more technology really made our lives easier, as it promises to do? Sure, there are many wonderful ways technology has enhanced the quality of life in the Western world, but what have we sacrificed for it?"

Good questions that I don't think we can ignore. So what do you think? What have we sacrificed for our 'enhanced quality of life'?

The Good Work of Praise

2006-05-09T08:52:00.000-07:00

The Good Work of Praise

Strange Lord, who would rule your creation with the crucified Son of a carpenter, make us workers in your kingdom. We want to work, but so often our work turns out to be nothing but busyness. We think that if we are busy we must be doing something that you can use. At least being busy hides our boredom. Yet we know you would not have us busy, having given us the good work of prayer. Help us, in our busyness, learn to pray—so that all our work, all that is our lives, may glorify you. In a world that for so many seems devoid of purpose, we praise you for giving us the good work of praise. Hallelujah and Amen.

From Prayers Plainly Spoken, by Stanley Hauerwas

Bono Speaks...The Dude Listens

2006-05-07T19:55:00.000-07:00

So, I'm back from Dallas and the big Bono event. I must say, I love Bono. But who doesn't? He's funny, smart, prophetic, cool...just a nice guy. On and off the stage. I didn't get to meet him although my friend Todd did. He said he was just a regular guy, like us. The closest I got was when he showed up in his Suburban and got out to greet a few of us fans who were waiting around. This was my first experience with groupies and I can't say that I recommend it. Lots of girls screaming, yelling, pushing and grabbing. Angry, single girls, who were in love with Bono.

Ok, so after my friend Todd's dad introduced Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, she spoke for about 7 minutes about Bono. Pretty boring, senatorial bullshit. It was easy to see that she had probably never talked to him for more than 2 minutes. But it went by fast and the crowd was ready for Bono.

He got up to the podium waited while the crowd gave him a 5 minute standing ovation. He was wearing a black jacket, black shirt, gold tie, trademark sunglasses.

"I don't wear ties for politicians, but i wear them for the people of texas."

For the most part much of his speech was an echo of his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast. He addressed the problems in Africa: The spread of Aids, the astonishing number of orphans, malaria, malnutrition, ridiculous amounts of debt, the systematic genocide happening in Darfur. It was a plea by one of the richest, most famous people in the world on behalf of some of the most insignifcant, poor people in the world.

There were also traces of U2:

Where you live should not decide whether you live or whether you die.

Would you deny for others what you demand for yourself?

He said history will remember our generation according to what we do or don't do about Africa. I think he's right.

He also said he's not a rock star fighting for a 'cause'. Africa is not a 'cause'--it's an emergency. Good to remember. This isn't just something we should consider getting on board with, I would say that it is an imperative for Christians to get involved in whatever way we can--maybe also in ways we don't think we can, but actually can. (you know what i'm saying?)

-Every day in Africa, 6,600 people die and another 8,500 contract the HIV virus - 1,400 of whom are newborn babies infected during childbirth or by their mothers' milk. Africa is home to 25 million people with HIV - 64% of global infections.
-Over 120,000 people die every month, the same as the tsunami in southeast Asia...EVERY MONTH.
-More than 300 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa—nearly half the population—live on less than $1 a day
-The developing world now spends $13 on debt repayment for every $1 it receives in grants.

I really admire what Bono is doing. Check out www.one.org or www.data.org to get involved in what is going on. It's not about money, it's about a voice for the voiceless.

I would recommend reading Bono's speech from the National Prayer Breakfast if you are really interested in what he said in Dallas. Besides a few 'y'alls' it is pretty much the same.

Bono in Dallas

2006-05-04T14:12:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is an exciting day for me.

1) I will get to take a day off from work*

2) I will be seeing some of my best friends in the world, Jeff & Julie and Matthew & Erica (and maybe more that I don't know about!)

3) I will be sitting in Section SS, Row O, Seat 3 to hear Bono speak at the Dallas World Affairs Council!!!

If Bono's speech is anything like the one he gave at the National Prayer Breakfast, then we are in for a treat. Hopefully I'll write more when I get back....

Tomorrow may be an important day for The Choice Campaign. Never heard of it? You're not alone. Last year for our Fellows project, Meghan--a fellow fellow--and I developed an advertising campaign with the purpose of looking at the daily consumer choices in the west and contrasting them with statistics about the state of the 2/3rds world. Inspired by Bono's ONE Campaign, our aim is to increase awareness of global injustice and help people get involved on whatever level they can. Ideally, the ONE Campaign will want to use our ads for their purposes, which are our purposes.

Tomorrow, if things happen and my connections come through, Bono may have a copy of The Choice Campaign in his hands. That is the very best we can hope for. If you are the praying type, I ask that you would pray for a miracle.

*Its actually not that big of a deal for me to get a day off from work since my official last day is a week from tomorrow and ever since I submitted my resignation I haven't really done much.

peace!

What are you working on today?

2006-05-03T08:55:00.000-07:00

Good work finds the way between pride and despair.
It graces with health. It heals with grace.
It preserves the given so that it remains a gift
By it, we lose loneliness:
we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other's arms,
and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.

--Wendell Berry

Three Thoughts on the Bible

2006-05-01T08:23:00.000-07:00

In the last 2 days, I have had three converging ideas from three different sources. The big-picture point is about the bible, I think. On their own, they stem off from one big stream, or perhaps, they merge from three different streams. Either way, there is much to think about.

First, the sources:

1) Unleashing the Scripture: Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America - Stanley Hauerwas

2) Passion and Perspective: Two Dimensions of Education in the Bible - Walter Brueggemann

3) Dear RLP - Real Live Preacher

From Hauerwas' Unleashing the Scripture, Part I: The Politics of the Bible: Sola Scriptura as Heresy?, Chapter 1: Taking the Bible Away from North American Christians. (What great titles!)

"Most North American Christians assume that they have a right, if not an obligation, to read the Bible. I challenge that assumption. No task is more important than for the Church to take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians in North America. Let us no longer give the Bible to all children when they enter the third grade or whenever their assumed rise to Christian Maturity is marked, such as eighth-grade commencements. Let us rather tell them and their parents that they are possessed by habits far too corrupt for them to be encouraged to read the Bible on their own.

North American Christians are trained to believe that they are capable of reading the Bible without spiritual and moral transformation. They read the Bible not as Christians, not as a people set apart, but as democratic citizens who think their "common sense" is sufficient for "understanding" the Scripture. They feel no need to stand under the authority of a truthful community to be told how to read. Instead they assume that they have all the "religious experience" necessary to know what the Bible is about. As a result the Bible inherently becomes the ideology for a politics quite different from the politics of the Church."

Now number 2, from a Brueggemann article:

"Perhaps the primary issue in education, in relation to the Bible, is to break the grip on church education which tends to be privatistic, idealist, and spiritual. The crucial question before us is whether, for the difficult decades to come, we shall have men and women in public life who have a passion for justice and a perspective of mystery, awe, and amazement.

IN 1918, Max Weber made the following statement: "Politics is a strong slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth-that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible." There are clues here for understanding important dimensions of education, biblically understood.

Education in ancient Israel is education in a quite concrete passion. Education consists in the older generation communicating its concrete passions to the younger generation and, hopefully, having that younger generation appropriate them with zeal and imagination.

The texts that mark the beginning point of our discussion (Ex. 12:26, 13:8, 13:14; Deut. 6:20-21; Josh. 4:6, 21) are those that show the parents inculcating the young into what is foundational for the community. In one form or another, all of these texts anticipate a time to come when there will be learning readiness and the child will ask the questions of the community: What does it mean to be Israel? Why do we live the way we live and do what we do? The answer, in various castings, is to tell the story of this community, the long deep memory which started with nobodies who were surprised by transformation and became a community through the historical process (cf. Deut. 10:22). This community has a distinct identity that is in considerable tension with the values and the presuppositions of the dominant community. That distinct identity is the primary subject matter of education in passion.

Education in passion, in the Bible, is nurture into a distinct community that knows itself to be at odds with dominant assumptions. Torah education is an insistence on being fully covenanted Israel who has been chosen, summoned, commanded, and promised. This nurture in passion is concrete and specific, as indeed passion must always be. While Torah acknowledges that "others" are there and struggles with how Israel is to relate to and be understood in the midst of the others (cf. Gen. 12:1-3; Deut. 7:6-11, 23:3-8), it is nurture in particularity that is the main focus, a nurture that produces adults who know so well who they are and what is commanded that they value and celebrate their oddity in the face of every seductive and powerful imperial alternative."

OK, and now number 3 from Real Live Preacher:

Dear RLP,

I have been really confused lately, so I wanted to see if you can help me out at all. This may be a really big question, but why is the Bible important? I am a Christian, and I have heard other Christians say that the Bible is God's word, but I don't know how they are so sure of this. Other Christians say that the Bible is inerrant, which I can't accept just based on my own reading of it.

So here is the problem. How can anyone know that the Bible is divinely inspired? And if it's not, then why does it have any authority? I'm really confused about this.

Andrew

Excerpts of RLP's response:

"If I understand you correctly, you'd like to know why Christians think the Bible is inspired by God and therefore authoritative for Christian life. You would like to know how people came to believe that the teachings in the Bible have a connection to the will and desire of God....

As for me, I know that an ancient tradition and many testimonies of human experience stand behind the New Testament. These are the writings that have nurtured our mothers and fathers in faith across the ages. For that reason alone, I have deep respect for the Bible. My own careful study of the gospels over the years leaves me continually astounded by their depth and by the way they continue to speak powerfully to people of all cultures, all ages, and all levels of education. So I join myself with the larger Christian community in affirming these writings as scripture and using them to guide my life. The New Testament provides me with a baseline or measurement that keeps my own spiritual journey connected to the original teachings of Jesus and his friends.

My trust in the New Testament is an act of faith on my part. It is my own offering to a movement that stretches back to Jesus himself. I faithfully offer my life and belief with a full knowledge of what I am doing and why I am doing it."

OK, sorry for the long quotes...

How do we reconcile these three things? I posted a while back about my thoughts on 'inerrancy', and you can read those here. That was in response to several conversations I had overheard (read: eavesdropping) and was getting pretty frustrated with both the tone of the questions and the responses. Now the Bible is back and I think these guys raise some really interesting questions ands points.

What is the Bible for us--the church--and how on earth do we 'use' it? How are we supposed to read it?

I think the answer to that is we must be taught how to read it; we must be shown how to 'use' it.

Maybe that isn't always the answer, but in this culture, with the mindset that we tend to have, I think it is essential. I don't think I'm ready to be interpreting scripture, but there are some key ideas that have helped me see what is going on in the Bible. Themes such as Kingdom, creation, fall, redemption, community, covenant, etc.--which were all taught to me--have helped shape my worldview and given me a new lens in which to read the Bible.

Its absurd to think that we can open the Bible, read it and understand what is going on apart from the community that the Bible has shaped. To think that we can begin to understand God apart from the People whom God has trusted his identity to doesn't make much sense to me. What we get, as many before have noted, the Bible becomes a tool for us to justify our current lives. It becomes an authority for the status quo which, I believe, it was meant to constantly destroy.

Brueggemann makes an interesting point here about education in ancient Israel: Education consists in the older generation communicating its concrete passions to the younger generation and, hopefully, having that younger generation appropriate them with zeal and imagination. My friends and I talk about the lack of this truth in our Churches today. There is such a division between the older members and the young. And there tend to be no 18-35 year olds in churches with active youth and rich adults. You find the 18-35 year olds at emerging churches or mega churches where they can join a singles group, or a young married couples group, or a young parents group--whatever group happens to meet their description at the time.

This seems to cause a division in the church. The old are no longer involved in the lives of the young. The adults who have struggled with meaning and purpose, love and hate, worked through hard relationships, seen war, been in war...they have no connection to the young people who are struggling to come to terms with their identity, what is meaningful, what does it mean to love, etc. The college kids have no connection to the high school kids. The 20-somethings have no connection to the college kids. Wisdom becomes exclusive to whatever group you happen to be in.

How then does the older generation teach the younger generation? I'm not really sure. I think that it probably involves the creation of a community that doesn't look the rest of the world, to start. And then maybe something like this could be said: This book that we order our lives around, the Bible, it is not like other books. It is the story of the people of God, people like us, through history. This book is not easy to understand and although most people seem to think otherwise, you are not ready to read it on your own yet. But we will teach you to read it. We will give you the tools to be able to understand it and the world around you so that you can continue the stories in your own lives as we have in ours.

Lastly, there are so many people who have questions about the authority of Scripture, or the inerrancy of the Bible...I wonder if those exist because there is a community, namely the church, that does not have any authority in people's lives (for many reasons, probably) and then that community goes around saying things like this about the Bible. Why should anyone care and why should it make sense? It can't make sense apart from a community that actually believes it and lives it out.

This blog is too long, so I'll end it here. I should have let the texts speak for themselves...oh well. A few questions that I'm left to wrestle with:

1) How does the church equip its members to read the Bible?
2) How does the church exercise authority over the lives of the members?
3) What does 'authority' look like, subversively speaking, in this power-suspicious culture?
4) How do we help create new, good habits for Christians in the chespeciallycially in terms of reading the Bible and interpreting it?
5) How do we create a community in which the older generation is teaching the younger? How might this change youth ministry?

Perhaps the primary issue in education, in relation to the Bible, is to break the grip on church education which tends to be privatistic, idealistic, and spiritual. The crucial question before us is whether, for the difficult decades to come, we shall have men and women in public life who have a passion for justice and a perspective of mystery, awe, and amazement. Without such passion and perspective, we are left with the worst forms of pragmatism, technical reason, and utilitarianism which uncritically practice self-interest of a brutal kind. Israel's alternative education insists that life in this world requires glad obedience to the coming Kingdom in which the blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news preached to them (Luke 7:22). Without this education in passionate impossibility, the blind, lame, lepers, dead, and poor go unnoticed, and all the others are fated then to live in anxiety and despair until we destroy each other. Without this education in a perspective on the possible, there will be no concrete context for the impossible. (Brueggemann)

Christians in the City

2006-04-30T08:56:00.000-07:00

Once in cities, Christians should be a dynamic counterculture. It is not enough for Christians to simply live as individuals in the city. They must live as a particular kind of community. Jesus told his disciples that they were "a city on a hill" that showed God's glory to the world (Matt. 5:14-16). Christians are called to be an alternative city within every earthly city, and alternate human culture within every human culture, to show how sex, money, and power can be used in nondestructive ways.

Tim Keller, Christianity Today

Writing, III

2006-04-29T10:19:00.000-07:00

Making Our Lives Available to Others

One of the arguments we often use for not writing is this: "I have nothing original to say. Whatever I might say, someone else has already said it, and better than I will ever be able to." This, however, is not a good argument for not writing. Each human person is unique and original, and nobody has lived what we have lived. Furthermore, what we have lived, we have lived not just for ourselves but for others as well. Writing can be a very creative and invigorating way to make our lives available to ourselves and to others.

We have to trust that our stories deserve to be told. We may discover that the better we tell our stories the better we will want to live them.

www.nouwen.net

I have the terrible problem of always saying, "Whatever I might say, someone else has already said it, and better than I will ever be able to." Extend that to everything I have hopes of doing in my life and you have my thought process in a nutshell.

I want to expand Nouwen's wisdom a bit: We have to trust that our stories deserve to be lived.

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

2006-04-28T18:42:00.000-07:00

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion--put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Wil this distrub the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

a poem by Wendell Berry

Writing, II

2006-04-28T16:03:00.000-07:00

I guess the Nouwen Daily Meditations have a theme of writing this week. Its helpful to read.

Writing, Opening a Deep Well

Writing is not just jotting down ideas. Often we say: "I don't know what to write. I have no thoughts worth writing down." But much good writing emerges from the process of writing itself. As we simply sit down in front of a sheet of paper and start to express in words what is on our minds or in our hearts, new ideas emerge, ideas that can surprise us and lead us to inner places we hardly knew were there.

One of the most satisfying aspects of writing is that it can open in us deep wells of hidden treasures that are beautiful for us as well as for others to see.

www.nouwen.net

Roswell, NM

2006-04-28T07:54:00.000-07:00

I'm in the middle of reading Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon. In this excerpt from Chapter 2, they are discussing the types of churches as outlined by John Howard Yoder; the activist church, the conversionist church, and the confessing church. I find it helpful for thinking about the church's role and how we should go about thinking about ourselves. I highly recommend the book.

---------------

The activist church is more concerned with the building of a better society than with the reformation of the church. Through the humanization of social structures, the activist church glorifies God. It calls on its members to see God at work behind the movements for social change so that Christians will join in movements for justice where they find them. It hopes to be on the right side of history, believing it has the key for reading the direction of history or underwriting the progressive forces of history. The difficulty, as we noted earlier, is that the activist church appears to lack the theological insight to judge history for itself. Its politics becomes a sort of religiously glorified liberalism.

On the other hand we have the conversionist church. This church argues that no amount of tinkering with the structures of society will counter the effects of human sin. The promises of secular optimism are therefore false because they attempt to bypass the biblical call to admit personal guilt and to experience reconciliation to God and neighbor. The sphere of political action is shifted by the conversionist church from without to within, from society to the individual soul. Because this church works only for inward change, it has no alternative social ethic or social structure of its own to offer the world. Alas, the political claims of Jesus are sacrificed for politics that inevitably seem to degenerate into a religiously glorified conservatism.

The confessing church is not a synthesis of the other two approaches, a helpful middle ground. Rather, it is a radical alternative. Rejecting both the individualism of the conversionists and the secularism of the activists and their common equation of what works with what is faithful, the confessing church finds its main political task to lie, not in the personal transformation of individual hearts or the modification of society, but rather in the congregation's determination to worship Christ in all things.

We might be tempted to say that faithfulness rather than effectiveness is the goal of a confessing church. Yet we believe this is a false alternative. Few of us would admit to holding an ecclesiology that believes in either faithfulness regardless of cost or results, or effectiveness that is purely pragmatic. The person who says, "The church must give up some of its principles in order to have a more significant impact on society," is still claiming that the goal of influencing society is a worthy principle. "Effectiveness" usually means that I have selected one principle as being more important than others. For the confessing church to be determined to worship God alone "though the heavens fall" implies that, if these heavens fall, this church has a principle based on the belief that God is not stumped by such dire situations. For the church to set the principle of being the church above other principles is not to thumb our noses at results. It is trusting God to give us the rules, which are based on what God is doing in the world to bring about God's good results.

The confessing church, like the conversionist church, also calls people to conversion, but it depicts that conversion as a long process of being baptismally engrafted into a new people, an alternative polis, a countercultural social structure called church. It seeks to influence the world by being the church, that is, by being something that the world is not and can never be, lacking the gift of faith and vision, which is ours in Christ. The confesing church seeks the visible church, a place, clearly visible to the world, in which people are faithful to their promises, love their enemies, tell the truth, honor the poor, suffer for righteousness, and thereby testify to the amazing community-creating power of God. The confessing church has not interest in withdrawing from the world, but it is not surprised when its witness evokes hostility from the world. The confessing church moves from the activist church's acceptance of the culture with a few qualifications, to rejection of the culture with a few exceptions. The confessing church can participate in secular movements against war, against hunger, and against other forms of inhumanity, but it sees this as part of its necessary proclamatory action. This church knows that its most credible form of witness (and the most 'effective' thing it can do for the world) is the actual creation of a living, breathing, visible community of faith.

Writing to Save the Day

2006-04-27T06:38:00.000-07:00

From today's Daily Meditation from Henri Nouwen:

Writing to Save the Day

Writing can be a true spiritual discipline. Writing can help us to concentrate, to get in touch with the deeper stirrings of our hearts, to clarify our minds, to process confusing emotions, to reflect on our experiences, to give artistic expression to what we are living, and to store significant events in our memories. Writing can also be good for others who might read what we write.

Quite often a difficult, painful, or frustrating day can be "redeemed" by writing about it. By writing we can claim what we have lived and thus integrate it more fully into our journeys. Then writing can become lifesaving for us and sometimes for others too.

www.nouwen.net

One or the Other

2006-04-26T09:29:00.001-07:00

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” – Henry David Thoreau

I think this is true.

That's All

2006-04-25T11:25:00.000-07:00

The Preacher was good to us today. I hope we are good to each other as well.

Open Communion

Pascal's Wager

2006-04-20T06:57:00.000-07:00

Do you know Pascal's Wager?

Either God exists, or God doesn't exist. Either you choose to believe in God, or choose not to believe in God. Those are the 4 pieces of the wager. You could make a square that looked like this:

...........GOD EXISTS....................GOD DOES NOT EXIST.............
-
-
Belief
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
-
Non-Belief
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(it's harder to make a square on Blogger than I thought)

Now, within this matrix there are 4 options:

1)Belief / God exists
2)Belief / God does not exist
3)non-belief / God exists
4)non-belief / God does not exist

Here is a brief description of each one:

1) You choose to believe in God and he does in fact exist. Pascal would say that the reward is 'heaven' but also, tangible benefits here and now.

2) You choose to beileve in God but he doesn't actually exist. Pascal would say nothing is lost. If there is no God, there is no afterlife, and your belief in God is a null set.

3) You choose not to believe in God and He does exist. Pascal would say that your 'punishment' would be 'hell' for non-belief.

4) You choose not to believe in God and He does not exist. Again, null set. Makes no difference.

The point of the wager is that your 'best bet' is to believe in God.

.....................GOD EXISTS....................GOD DOES NOT EXIST.............
-
-
Belief.........You Win - Heaven..........Null Set....makes no difference
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
-
Non-Belief...You lose - Hell.................null set...Makes no difference
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

OK, that is our brief philosophy lesson for today. I'm not going to get into the whole heaven and hell issue right now.

Now take Pascal's Wager and change it from belief in God, to belief that you can live an extraordinary life. Or perhaps that you can live a simple life, or a godly life, or a subversive life, or a life like Martin Luther King, Jr., or Mother Teresa, or Stephan Bauman, or Steve Garber.

Here are the results (Fill in Steve Garber with your own personal choice):

1) You believe that you can live a life like Steve Garber and in fact, you can't. Embarrassment might come, perhaps a feeling of failure, but you wil be dead so it doesn't particularly matter to you.

2) You believe that you can't live a life like Steve Garber and in you are right. Nothing happens, you continue your job in your cubicle, you have a nice house in the suburbs, and die very comfortable and bored.

3) You believe that you can't live a life like Steve Garber and you are wrong. You missed your chance and see other people following their passions and fulfilling their calling in God's Kingdom. You experience sadness and regret, knowing that you never had the guts to do anything risky.

4) You believe that you can live a life like Steve Garber, and you're right! You live a life of purpose, fueled by your God-given gifts and passions and not only you, but countless numbers of others are better for it.

So, your best bet is to believe that it is possible to live an extraordinary life. (And of course I mean extraordinary in terms of God's kingdom, where there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.)

Why Love is Not the Answer

2006-04-19T07:43:00.001-07:00

The following is from a talk that Stanley Hauerwas gave to the Duke Youth Academy in 2005. Having worked in youth ministry for a pretty long time I think it is important to see what Hauerwas is saying here. There is so much more to Jesus than we are teaching our youth about. The talk in its entirety can be found here:

http://www.valpo.edu/cresset/2006_Lent_Hauerwas.pdf

Why Love is Not the Answer

One of the difficulties for anyone trying to figure out what it might mean to be a Christian in America is that our very familiarity with Christianity has made it difficult to hear what is read to us Sunday after Sunday from the Bible. For example, many of you, when you are talking with friends about life, might say that what makes you a Christian is a “personal relationship with Jesus.” Such a relation, you might suggest, is about trying to be a loving person. You might even suggest that Christians are to love one another because our sins have been forgiven.

There is no question that love between the persons of the Trinity is at the very heart of the Christian faith. But I think nothing is more destructive to the Christian faith than the current identification of Christianity with love. If God wants us to be more loving, why do you need Jesus to tell us that? If Christianity is about the forgiveness of our sins, then why did Jesus have to die? If God is all about love, why go through the trouble of being this man, Jesus? Why didn’t God simply tell us through an appropriate spokesman (it could have been Jesus) that God wants us to love one another? God, in such a faith, becomes that great OK who tells us we are OK and, therefore, we are taught we should tell one another we are OK. But if Jesus is the proclamation of the great “OK” why would anyone have bothered putting him to death? There must have been some terrible failure in communication.

One of the problems with identifying Christianity with love is how such a view turns out to be anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic. The Jews and Catholics become identified with law and dogma, in contrast to Protestant Christians who are about love. Such a view assumes that any form of faith that creates divisions must be retrograde because such a faith is not about loving. Of course, when love becomes what Christianity is all about, we can make no sense of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

For example, consider how the temptation narrative of Jesus in the fourth chapter of Luke must be read if Jesus is all about love. It is as if we think Jesus went out to find himself. We are told that he “was driven out” by the devil no less, but we know such language is “mythical.” Such language was used to help us understand the spiritual struggle Jesus must have been going through, that is, he was confronting the existential nothingness of existence which was necessary for his ability to make an authentic choice about how he would live his life.

Returning from this desert, the disciples note that he looks as if he has been through a very rough time. “Man, you look like you have been to hell and back,” they might say. (No doubt they must have said something like this, for otherwise how do we explain the language of being tempted by the devil.) In response, Jesus can be imagined to say, “You are right, I have had a rough forty days, but I have come to recognize what God wants from us. So I feel compelled to lay this big insight on you. I have come to realize that God, or whatever we call that which we cannot explain, wants us to love one another. There, I have said it, and I am glad I did.”

Ask yourself: If that is what Jesus is all about—getting us to love one another—why did everyone reject him? They did so, I think, because when Jesus was told by the devil he would be given the power to turn stones to bread, he refused; when Jesus was offered authority over all the kingdoms of this world, he refused; when he was offered the possibility he would not die, he refused. Note that Jesus was offered the means to feed the hungry, the authority to end war between peoples, and even the defeat of death itself. But he refused these goods. He did so because Jesus knows God’s kingdom cannot be forced into existence with the devil’s means.

But note that Jesus’ refusal to play the devil’s game does not mean the kingdom he proclaims is not political. Jesus’work is political, but the kingdom politics he represents is one that comes through the transformation of the world’s understanding of how to achieve good results. Jesus refuses to use the
violence of the world to achieve “peace.” But that does not mean he is any less political or that he is not about the securing of peace. It is, therefore, not accidental that after the temptation narrative we see Jesus in a synagogue on the Sabbath reading from the scroll of Isaiah. The passage he reads says,

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (Luke 4:18–19).

After reading this Jesus sat down and said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

The offense is not that Jesus wanted his followers to be loving; the offense is Jesus. Jesus is the politics of the new age. He is about the establishment of a kingdom. He is the one who has created a new time that gives us time not only to care for the poor but to be poor. Jesus is the one who makes it possible to be nonviolent in a violent world. We should not be surprised that Jesus is the embodiment of such politics. After all, Mary’s song promised that the proud would have their imaginations “scattered,” the powerful would be brought down from their thrones, the rich would be sent away empty, the lowly would be lifted up, and the hungry would be filled with good things. Is it any wonder that the world was not prepared to welcome this savior?

Regent or Northpark?

2006-04-17T06:46:00.000-07:00

I went to Chicago this weekend to look at Northpark Seminary. I liked it. Chicago is great.
I went to Vancouver last July to look at Regent College. I liked it. Vancouver is great.

Northpark is a pretty unique school.
Regent is a pretty unique school.

I think I would be challenged and encouraged to think in new ways at Northpark.
I think I would be challenged and encouraged to think in new ways at Regent.

Northpark

-Has justice issues at the core of the program.
-Centered in and focused on the city
-Because of the denomination it is affiliated with (Covenant) it is an interesting place for theological discussion
-Professors are extremely accessible
-Good and growing reputation in the academic community
-May not be a great place to prepare for Ph.D. programs, although certainly possible

Regent

-Has interdisciplinary studies/engaging culture at the core of the program
-Located on the campus of a major, secular university
-Because it is transdenominational it is an interesting place for theological discussion
-Professors are highly respected
-Good reputation in the academic community
-Probably a good place to prepare for Ph.D. programs

I think that Regent and Northpark stand out among all the Seminary/Graduate schools I have looked at. Most schools that I have looked at are looking to churning out pastors and not looking at the important issues (That’s probably not completely true but it is what I perceive). Northpark and Regent are different in that they want to prepare Pastors (or non-pastors) who think critically about issues that are emerging in our society.

From Regent’s website: Regent College is an international graduate school of Christian studies that educates, nurtures, and equips women and men to live, work and minister in their varied vocations, in ways honouring to God.

Regent isn’t concerned with producing professional ministers. If that is your vocation/calling, then they are concerned with equipping you to live out that vocation fully, but it seems to me that it is more of a secondary issue to them. That is unique. (Plus, they used the English spelling of ‘honouring’ with the extra ‘u’. That is always cool and reminds me of L’Abri.)

From Northpark’s website: We hope to be a bridge between the seminary, the church and the public arena. Challenging all to "Bridge the Gap" of injustice by their choices, their thinking, their work, and their life of Faith in Christ.

No other evangelical seminary address issues of social justice and seeks to integrate it to the life of the church like Northpark.

I do have an idea of which one is the right fit for me but it is a hard choice to make. Thankfully, I feel that I have some freedom from God in the choice. I tend to think very black-and-white about these things but I am learning that it is hardly ever that simple. In this case, both are good choices and I am not sure I can make a ‘wrong’ decision. The hope I have is that no matter what decision I end up making, for better or for worse, God has been guiding me all along whether I am aware of it or not.

Os Guinness once told me, “KC, be an entrepreneur with your life.” There is both freedom and responsibility in our choices. I have the freedom to do anything in the world, but I have the responsibility to use my gifts wisely and with the Kingdom on my mind. I suspect this choice is no different.

I guess we’ll see…

Easter

2006-04-15T22:30:00.000-07:00

"Easter is God's most radical, most extreme, most decisive answer to prayer. The resurrection of Jesus is the most determined maneuver God makes to intervene among those who seek help in their need and desperation."

--Walter Brueggemann

“[The resurrection] is the ultimate act of prophetic energizing in which a new history is initiated. It is a new history open to all but peculiarly received by the marginal victims of the old order.”

--Walter Brueggemann

"The resurrection of Jesus is the ultimate sign that our salvation comes only when we cease trying to interpret Jesus' story in the light of our history, and instead we interpret ourselves in the light of his."

--Stanley Hauerwas

But we are here today, on Sunday, the resurrection day, to celebrate and proclaim to the world the fact that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. We live by this truth and we shall die by this truth. We comfort each other by this truth and we are stirred to love and devotion and service by this truth. Let us therefore settle it in our minds and hearts that we will allow the truth of the resurrection to propel us to be true revolutionaries. Not the cheap and easy kind of revolutionary, those who want to use violence to overthrow the present order and simply turn it upside down and replace it with one of their own. No, we’ve had plenty of those and it doesn’t work. No, we are like Jesus and, in his love and power to be double revolutionaries, celebrating his victory over death and sin, and finding through prayer and politics and Bible study and campaigning and love and fellowship and celebration and truth — finding the way to bring that victory to birth, both in the dark corners of our own private and personal lives and in the dark corners of God’s suffering world.

May God give you grace and joy in his service and in believing and living the gospel of the resurrection and to his name be the praise and the glory. Amen.

--N.T. Wright, from a sermon given at The Falls Church

For the Love of God! (or mammon)

2006-04-12T13:13:00.000-07:00

Google is smart. If you use Google to search, you will notice small ads that pop up on the right side of the screen that are based on your search. For instance, I do a search for "Astros" and on the side of the screen are these links (they may differ each time): www.mlb.com and, "Houston Baseball Tickets" www.cheappricedtickets.com . They are customized advertising links. That is how Google makes its money, advertising.

Gmail is also smart. Gmail is similarly set up so that these ads are related to keywords from the email that is being read. Gmail also has a special feature that scrolls news items across the top of your page. These are more general news items, but some are "sponsored links" that are related to key words from your emails. Since many of my emails are discussing Christian ideas with people, sending quotes and whatnot, many of the links are Christian in nature. Here is one below that made me laugh:

www.collect7keveryday.com

What's funny is that the word 'Christian' is nowhere to be found on the site except for the title, "Learn from Christian Millionaires." Maybe the "Make $7,000 dollars over and over again," is supposed to conjur up memories of the sacred number 7 from our Jewish roots. But I doubt it.

I'm going somewhere with this, I promise.

On the actual link on Gmail includes the following tagline: It's OK to be Rich...So Says The Bible. Learn To Make Millions And Spread The Wealth.

Here is a story that I got from The Drudge Report today: Oprah Winfrey: Wealth Is 'A Good Thing'. This article is ridiculous to me.

I just read an article yesterday in First Things by Alan Jacobs of Wheaton in which he quotes Kierkegaard:

“Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. . . . We would be sunk if it were not for Christian scholarship! Praise be to everyone who works to consolidate the reputation of Christian scholarship, which helps to restrain the New Testament, this confounded book which would, one, two, three, run us all down if it got loose.”

How did we get to the place where the Bible no longer speaks to us prophetically about wealth. We have somehow allowed the love of money to seep into our interpretation of scripture that allows us to read it without any consequences. I'm not saying wealth is necessarily bad, but should we assume that it is necessarily good? I think that is dangerous place to be.

Why are there Christain get-rich-quick schemes? Because there are Christians who will buy into that crap, literally. We listen to Oprah instead of Amos, I suspect.

http://www.reallivepreacher.com/node/723

Maybe it's unrelated, but The Preacher has just written a beautiful RLPDV (Real Live Preacher Dramatized Version) story of the Rich Man from Mark's Gospel. I think it is related.

The Cross

2006-04-12T12:56:00.000-07:00

"The very idea that we might know God abstracted from how God makes himself known was the result of the loss of Christian politics called church. . . .Christians betray themselves as well as their non-Christian brothers and sisters when in the interest of apologetics we say and act as if the cross of Christ is incidental to God's being. In fact, the God we worship and world God created cannot be truthfully known without the cross, which is why the knowledge of God and ecclesiology--or the politics called church--are interdependent."

-Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church's Witness and Natural Theology (Brazos, 2001), 16-17.

This week, we should reflect on the cross. The cross is the lens in which we can see and know God as he truly is.

The cross was once a sign of Roman power--Don't mess with Rome or you'll end up on a cross. It is now the most widely embraced Christian symbol. That is redemption. That is the power of Easter.

God is Always Calling

2006-04-09T12:34:00.000-07:00

Here is a great article about calling and vocation from the Washington Institute. This has Garber written all over it. Here is a bit about the author:
Andi Ashworth is the author of Real Love for Real Life: The Art and Work of Caring . Andi partners with her husband Charlie Peacock-Ashworth in the work of the Art House, a 90-year-old, renovated country church that serves as the Ashworths’ home, as well as their place of business and ministry.

Charlie Peacock is the one of the men behind Jars of Clay, Switchfoot, and Blood:Water Mission. Steve Garber is one of the men behind Charlie Peacock.

This post is dedicated to Laura.

From the article:

One thing I know for sure as I approach my 50th year: Understanding one’s calling is an ongoing process of discovery, and calling doesn’t have to be limited to one area. I continue to find new aspects of calling announcing themselves in different chapters of our lives, and I don’t suppose the revelation is over yet.

Young people of college age feel such pressure to decide what field of study to engage in, what kind of work to pursue. The age-old question, “what will you be when you grow up?” is haunting. I remember my daughter’s anxiety as the need to declare a major loomed in her second year of college. Since my husband and I had grappled with the meaning of vocation for ourselves, we urged her to study what she loved, to move toward her true interests rather than worrying about the exact nature of her post-college life. We trusted that God would bring her to the work, people, and places that would fit the way He’d created her.

A few years after giving our daughter this advice, our pastor, Scotty Smith, gave Chuck and me similar counsel. We were living temporarily in St. Louis to attend Covenant Theological Seminary, and the Master of Divinity path my husband was on quickly showed itself to be the wrong one for him. During a break we came home and sought counsel from Scotty. He set us free from worrying about degree programs and told us to frame our choice of classes toward calling instead of degree. His advice reminded us of something important that had been lost.

That is good advice. Frame your choice of classes toward calling instead of degree. Frame all of your choices towards calling instead of the thing that the world seems to think is right. Remember, we can live within a different system.

Think, dammit!

2006-04-07T13:17:00.000-07:00

I would like to thank Mike for this quote:

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
--Soren Kierkegaard

Freedom of thought must be one of the greatest benefits of being a Christian. I'm not about being a Christian for the benefits, in fact, I usually hate it when people say stuff like that. But when I think about it honestly it's not really a benefit, it's more of a responsibility. We are free to think and so we should! We should imagine, we should dream, we should create. We must do these things if we are to live in now-but-not-yet Kingdom of God. We must engage our entire selves (minds included!) in the work of the Kingdom and not sit back and uncritically live in the world as if we are waiting to be raptured. I'm sorry everyone, that's just not going to happen. (Side note: check out www.notraptured.com for a few laughs)

But here is my point: this whole thing is about transformation. Paul said to be transformed by the renewing of your mind. It starts there. Only then we can think of new ways of doing things. We don't have to be stuck in the system that only allows little leeway on how things are done. We can be in God's system in which all things are possible, all doors can be opened, all wounds can be healed, all debts can be cancelled, and all people can be reconciled.

Full Circle

2006-04-03T13:11:00.000-07:00

Washington, DC, April 3, 2006:

Caller: "Is he in?"
Sean: "Let me see, one moment. Can I tell him who's calling?"
Caller: "Uh, yeah... Clarence Thomas."

It was just after the Presidential election in 2000. Thousands of people were gathered in front of the Supreme Court in both protest and support of whatever it was people were supporting and protesting. And in the middle of it all was this man:

That's Sean P. Flynn, in the middle of serious left and right-wing crazies, holding the sign that says: ABOLISH THE DESIGNATED HITTER (Rule 6.10)

That was the last time they met...but everytime Sean sees the President or Clarence Thomas watches an American League game, they both stop and think about what that day meant for all of us...

What are we doing?

2006-04-03T06:56:00.000-07:00

The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. -- Genesis 2:15

The vocation of every man and woman is to serve other people. -- Tolstoy

It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe. -- Thomas Carlyle

Each man has his own vocation; his talent is his call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence. -- Balzac

Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone's task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it. -- Victor Frankl

Well, it's certainly very appropriate for any Christian to ask, to struggle with a calling, a vocation. I do it. Every Christian does. -- Jim Wallis

It is not more vacation we need - it is more vocation. -- Eleanor Roosevelt

Vocation is the spine of life. -- Nietzsche

There is no easy formula for determining right and wrong livelihood, but it is essential to keep the question alive. To return the sense of dignity and honor to manhood, we have to stop pretending that we can make a living at something that is trivial or destructive and still have sense of legitimate self-worth. A society in which vocation and job are separated for most people gradually creates an economy that is often devoid of spirit, one that frequently fills our pocketbooks at the cost of emptying our souls. -- Sam Keen

Where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your vocation. -- Aristotle

A total economy is one in which everything - "life forms," for instance, or the "right to pollute" - is "private property" and has a price and is for sale. In a total economy significant and sometimes critical choices that once belonged to individuals or communities become the property of corporations. A total economy, operating internationally, necessarily shrinks the powers of state and national governments, not only because those governments have signed over significant powers to an international bureaucracy or because political leaders become the paid hacks of the corporations but also because political processes - and especially democratic processes - are too slow to react to unrestrained economic and technological development on a global scale. And when state and national governments begin to act in effect as agents of the global economy, selling their people for low wages and their people's products for low prices, then the rights and liberties of citizenship must necessarily shrink. A total economy is an unrestrained taking of profits from the disintegration of nations, communities, households, landscapes, and ecosystems. It licenses symbolic or artificial wealth to "grow" by means of the destruction of the real wealth of all the world.

Among the many costs of the total economy, the loss of the principle of vocation is probably the most symptomatic and, from a cultural standpoint, the most critical. It is by the replacement of vocation with economic determinism that the exterior workings of a total economy destroy the character and culture also from the inside. -- Wendell Berry

Study: Prayer Doesn't Affect Heart Patients

2006-03-30T11:49:00.000-08:00

http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/03/30/prayer.study.ap/index.html

Thank you Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard. I can stop wasting all that time on prayer because, thanks to your research, I now know for sure that it's useless.

Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School and other scientists tested the effect of having three Christian groups pray for particular patients, starting the night before surgery and continuing for two weeks. The volunteers prayed for "a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications" for specific patients, for whom they were given the first name and first initial of the last name.

My question is, who are these 'Christian groups' that actually signed up for this bullshit? The problem begins there, I think. I don't care if people want to study or do research on it. In fact, I'm all for it. But when Christians are willing participants in studies like this it just deepens the problem. We should be the ones saying, "Well, Dr. Benson, I appreciate the offer to participate in your study. I'm so honored and humbled. But, actually, that is not what prayer is about. I will pray for these people because they are hurting and in need of comfort, but I will not do it to satisfy your research. God does not work like that. I'm sorry we can't help. But there is a Baptist church down the street that might be interested...."

(low blow)

Prayer is not magic. You can't expect things to happen just because you pray for it. (Sorry Bruce Wilkinson) Prayer is much more than that. Prayer is wrestling; prayer is hard work; prayer is unpredictable.

Dr. Harold G. Koenig, director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at the Duke University Medical Center, who did not take part in the study, said the results did not surprise him.

"There are no scientific grounds to expect a result and there are no real theological grounds to expect a result either," he said.

Science, he said, "is not designed to study the supernatural."

Even those guys at Duke get it.

The Preacher...

2006-03-28T14:51:00.000-08:00

I don't think I've really mentioned him before but I wanted to introduce you to The Preacher.
The Preacher (aka 'Real Live Preacher') was a big influence in my life a few years ago. During my struggle in the corporate world I read his blog at least a dozen times a day. No joke. I would check it religiously to see if he had made any posts. If not, I would dig through his archive to find the ones that made my heart warm a little, or perhaps the ones that helped me to imagine again. The Preacher helped me out of my tiny, southern, bible-belt Christianity and showed me that there were in fact thoughtful people who were serious about the Kingdom in Texas.

The Preacher is subversive. He is imagniative. He understands the role of the Church community. I'm working on an essay right now that ties those three together, but if you want to see it in action, The Preacher is your man.

I like this one - John the Baptist

This one makes me cry - The Smallest Person in the World

The Dude abides - Thank you for "The Big Lebowski"

Anyway, I wanted to send my regards to the preacher by sending him traffic. All 3 of you who visit this site should check out his. You won't be disappointed, and I won't be disappointed if you don't come back here because you have to catch up on his archived stories. I owe him my blog traffic, at the very least...

Thank you Preacher.

www.reallivepreacher.com

Subversion

2006-03-24T11:03:00.000-08:00

My thesis is that preaching is a sub-version. You will recognize the play that I intend. Preaching is never dominant version, never has been. It is always a sub-version, always a version, a rendering of reality that lives under the dominant version. We may adopt a strategy of making our “under-version” sound closely like the dominant version, or an alternative strategy of showing our “under-version” to be in deep tension with the dominant version.

The dominant version of reality each of us would mark differently, but we likely would not disagree much on its nature. Perhaps the logo of the dominant version is swoosh, Nike, “life is for winners” of a private, individualized kind who can make it in the market or in the sports arena, who live well, are self-indulgent but who never get involved with in anything outside their own success. The Nike version of reality, deeply rooted in Western Enlightenment consumerism and in US democratic capitalism, has an old history. In the Old Testament it appears as coercive Babylonian imperial expectations looking back to Egyptian brick quotas. In the New Testament it is the endless requirements of Jewish punctiliousness or the demand of Roman emperor worship; it is Luther’s “works”, and in our day perhaps it is “the end of welfare as we know it,” the pressure to get kids into the right preschools for the sake of someday working for Intel. It is an act of dominant imagination that screens out all “neighbors”, neighbors who can be screened out if the God of all Neighborliness can be refashioned into a God who celebrates the virtues of private achievement. It is dominant, so dominant, that it is taken as a given, so dominant that it sustains both liberal and conservative ideology, so dominant that even we who critique are deeply committed to it, so dominant it is not worth criticizing—too costly.

And then we preachers are summoned to get up and utter a sub-version of reality, an alternative version of reality that says another way of life in the world is not only possible but is peculiarly mandated and peculiarly valid. It is a sub-version because we must fly low, stay under the radar, and hope not to be detected too soon, a sub-version, because it does indeed intend to sub-vert the dominant version and to empower a community of sub-versives who are determined to practice their lives according to a different way of imagining.

Walter Brueggemann - Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope: Contested Truth in a Post-Christian World

A few thoughts on inerrancy...

2006-03-23T09:31:00.000-08:00

Recently I have overheard a few conversations about biblical inerrancy. I want to jump into the middle of the conversation and mix things up a bit because I hear the same things over and over and I don't think much of it has any substance.

First of all, inerrancy is a relatively new concept. Even Paul, when he is writing to Timothy, doesn't use the concept of inerrancy to describe the Scriptures:

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. (1 Timothy 3:16-17)

Useful? That word is scary because it isn't as water-tight as 'inerrant'. Useful might mean that I might actualy have to use my mind. Useful might mean that I might need to rely on wisdom for help.

I believe that scripture is absolutely trustworthy in revealing to us who God is, who we are, and the reality of the world. If I used inerrancy from here on out, that is what I mean by it.

Here is what I want to say to these very common objections:

"I don't believe that God whispered in someone's ear and they wrote it all down."

Good for you and you'll be glad to know that most people don't either--especially those who take biblical inerrancy seriously. No one supposes that the Holy Spirit dictated the words we now read in the Bible. The idea is that the biblical writers were inspired by the Holy Spirit to write what they did. The Spirit revealed the truth to them and they were moved to write what they had been revealed. But it was very much written by men, inspired by the Spirit. You might even say guided by the Spirit, but then again we don't want to go thinking that God actually is moving and working in this world [sarcasm]....Brueggemann's Prophetic Imagination is important for understanding this idea.

"I think that a lot of it is metaphorical."

Again, good job. Here is the problem though: You are drawing a line in the sand between 'truth' and 'not-truth' which is a good start. But under the 'truth' side you write 'fact' and under the 'not-truth' side you write 'fiction' and under 'fiction' you write 'metaphor'. You need to fix your premise. Something can be True (with a capital T) and not be a fact. Do you think that Jesus' parables were factual? Do you think he actually intended people to think he was telling them a 'true' story? Of course not. But he absolutely intended to tell them a True story about who God was and is. So even Jesus would say that much of what is True is metaphorical.

Along with this, the intention of the writers is important. Much of the writers never wanted anyone to think what they were writing was factually true. They actually didn't really care. That is a modern, post-enlightenment mindset. They were writing this in pre-modern, pre-enlightenment times and weren't concerned with facts the way we are today. But they were probably more concerned with Truth than we are today--and what they wrote is True.

"I think that other things besides the bible, like the writings of saints, are just as valid as the bible."

Remember where the saints get their inspiration. From the writings of the Saints that I've read, they actually point to holy scripture more than anything else (St. Augustine, St. Francis de Sales, Mother Teresa, Thomas a Kempis). The point here is that what the Saints wrote needs to be judged somehow. In fact, what Donald Miller writes needs to be tested somehow. The way we are to judge whether something someone writes is true or not (remember our categories here) is to test it with Scripture.

"There are so many contradictions in the Bible."

Really? Where? You mean how the Gospels don't exactly match? Well, since the beginning of the era when people titled these stories, they have always been named "The Gospel According to..." They are the collective stories of Jesus' ministry as told by a certain person with a message for a certain group of people (Think of why Matthew is so concerned with the fulfillment of prophecy, or why John focuses his stories around speech-acts). Think of how when you tell stories with your friends around and someone always chimes in with a different perspective or a detail that you didn't notice. Together they paint a pretty good picture of Jesus which is why we need all of them. If you're worried about factual truth, one difference could shake up your whole foundation. But if you can let go and try to see something bigger happening, a difference in the order of a story or a few words here and there don't seem to matter as much, and actually add to the value of the story.

That's all I got, and who knows if it holds any weight...

Good reading:

How Can Scripture Be Authoritative? (Article) - NT Wright

The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture (Book) - NT Wright

Struggling With Scripture - Walter Brueggemann

Empire Remixed

2006-03-21T11:50:00.000-08:00

One voice says that we live in the shadow of empire. Another voice points out that we live in the shadow of no towers.

Where are we really, and what are we to do?

One might claim that we need to tear the walls down. Another might claim that we have no business acting on such a grand scale. And yet, in the midst of this all, in the midst of our culture, we hear a new song. A new sound.

And as we listen, a question: Will the walls of this empire come creaking, crashing, tumbling down – or will they come back, remixed, with a completely different sound?

These are the thoughts that moved us one Tuesday morning in November when this lamp illuminated our office, fresh cups of coffee in-hand. Fair-trade coffee, a small worshiping community, and an idea.

You see, we find ourselves living in the midst of empire, and yet desire something more. Something different. Something worthy of hope.

What might the empire look like remixed?

And then, one simple thought. One simple word. Basilea. The word used to describe the empire of old, seen with different eyes, heard with different ears, is also the word for the Kingdom of God. Two competing definitions. Two competing visions.

Even in the midst of the most dire circumstances, even in the shadow of a dominating, domineering culture, Jesus called his disciples, called all people to bear in their own life God's gift of peace for the life of the world. Here we must not only proclaim the kingdom but bear in our own lives the kingdom's presence.

Thought becomes dream becomes reality.

This is where we find ourselves today – living the dream, living the story, even here, today, in Toronto. Here, today, in Toronto, we'd like to know: what might our city, what might our culture, what might our nation look like with God's kingdom come?

These are the questions we choose to ask. Perhaps the answers won't come easily, but we propose to struggle with them all the same.

In The Beginning...

2006-03-21T10:45:00.000-08:00

Interesting article from BBC about the Archbishop of Cantebury speaking about teaching Creationism in schools.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4828238.stm

From the article:

Dr Williams [Archbishop] said: "I think creationism is, in a sense, a kind of category mistake, as if the Bible were a theory like other theories.

"Whatever the biblical account of creation is, it's not a theory alongside theories. It's not as if the writer of Genesis or whatever sat down and said: 'Well, how am I going to explain all this... I know: in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth'.

"So if creationism is presented as a stark alternative theory alongside other theories I think there's just been a jarring of categories. It's not what it's about."

Asked if it should be taught, he said: "I don't think it should, actually. No, no. And that's different from saying - different from discussing, teaching what creation means.

"For that matter, it's not even the same as saying that Darwinism is - is the only thing that ought to be taught. My worry is creationism can end up reducing the doctrine of creation rather than enhancing it."

Interesting thought. I happen to agree with him that Creationism, or Intelligent Design, shouldn't be taught in schools and I think his reasoning is spot on here. Would it reduce the doctrine of creation? I think it might. Because as the Archbishop carefully notes, it is "different from discussing, teaching what creation means." Its not just that it happened in a specific way, but that it happened as the very specific will of a very specific person. Not to discount the way it happened, which may be important, but I also tend to agree that this would be a category mistake. The writer of Genesis is making a different point here.

My favorite books on Genesis:

In The Beginning: The Opening Chapters of Genesis - Henri Blocher

The Five Books of Moses - Robert Alter

Genesis: Interpretation - Walter Brueggemann

My Friend Stephan

2006-03-21T06:52:00.000-08:00

My friend Stephan and his family (wife Belinda, sons Joshua and Caleb) are currently living in Rwanda where he is the National Director for World Relief. Stephan used to be the Director of International Programs for World Hope International where I worked during my Falls Church Fellows year. I got to know Stephan pretty well that year as we loved to kick back and talk theology, music, life, love, and dream of the perfect church together.

Every once in a while, they send out an update of their work in Rwanda. They are short, but always full of joy and hope. Here is a link to a few blogs that Stephan keeps up (when he can) but I hope that they point you to the work that people are doing with God around the world.

baumans.blogspot.com
underthemango.blogspot.com

I'm glad there are people like Stephan and Belinda working for reconciliation in Rwanda.

This is a keeper...

2006-03-18T12:02:00.000-08:00

This quote was sent by a friend. I promise I'm not reading books about marriage...but this quote is a good one to think on...

"God never sends just one sign: He keeps on confirming His course for
us with one vision after another. But the reading of His signs is
essentially a task for faith, a task for people who are willing to
persist in seeking out the correspondence between the external and
visible realities of their lives, and the interior weather of their
souls, striving always to bring the two into line in order that the
kingdom of God might come."
- Mike Mason, "The Mystery of Marriage"

Thanks Meghan :)

Simply Wonderful

2006-03-18T10:36:00.000-08:00

Ok, I've read the first chapter of Simply Christian and I have to report what I read...It was amazing. Much like Mere Christianity, the book begins by appealing to our desires. Part one is entitled Echoes of a Voice, and the first of the four chapters is entitled Putting the World to Rights. In this chapter, again like Lewis, Wright points to our innate desire for justice, to children on a playground yelling, "That's not fair!", to a sense of there being something wrong with the world. This of course doesn't immediately point to the Christian God but Wright is setting the groundwork for how Christianity actually answers these desires and in fact, in a way, is the cause of them.

Here are some excerpts that I enjoyed:

"We dream the dream of justice. We glimpse, for a moment, a world at one, a world put to rights, a world where things work out, where socieities function fairly and efficiently, where we not only know what we ought to do but actually do it. And then we wake up and come back to reality. But what are we hearing when we're dreaming the dream?" pg. 3

"There are three basic ways of explaining this sense of the echo of a voice, this call to justice, this dream of a world (and all of us within it) put to rights....We can say that it is indeed only a dream...Down the road we find Machiavelli and Nietzsche, the world of naked power and grabbing what you can get, the world where the only sin is to be caught....
Or we can say that the dream is of a different world altogether, a world where we really belong, where everything is indeed put to rights, a world into which we can escape one day for good--but a world which has little purchase on the present world except that people who live in this one sometimes find themselves dreaming of that one. That approach leaves the unscrupulous bullies running this world, but it consoles us with the thought that things will be better somewhere, sometime, even if there's not much we can do about it here and now....
Or we can say that the reason we have these dreams, the reason we have a sense of a memory of the echo of a voice, is that there is someone speaking to us, whispering in our ear--someone who cares very much about this present world and our present selves, and who has made us and the world for a purpose which will indeed involve justice, things being put to rights, ourselves being put to rights, the world being rescued at last." Pg. 9

"It's about justice because Christians not only inherit the Jewish passion for justice but claim that Jesus embodied that passion, and that what he did, and what happened to him, set in motion the Creator's plan to rescue the world and put it back to rights." Pg. 10

The book is full of other quotable sentences and paragraphs, but just to make sure I'm not in violation of copyright laws I better leave it there.

Simply Christian

2006-03-15T06:42:00.000-08:00

Grab your to-do lists and a pencil and under your last item "stop making to-do lists", write "buy new NT Wright book". This book was just released yesterday and if you are so out of touch with pop culture that you actually follow the Christian book publishing dates, then you probably already know about this. But for the rest of you get excited...

This little book is NT Wright's latest contribution to trying to increase the amount of good, recommendable books in the Christian section of the bookstore. To compare it to another Oxford/Cambridge giant who also uses initials, one of the blurbs describes it as, "a Mere Christianity for a new generation from a leading Christian scholar and Anglican bishop". I'm not sure that really is enough to do justice to what this book could be, and who NT Wright is. So, I will try to fill in the gaps for anyone who cares...

Here is what the back cover offers to casual readers in the bookstore:

Why is justice fair? Why are so many people pursuing spirituality? Why do we crave relationship? And why is beauty so beautiful? N. T. Wright argues that each of these questions takes us into the mystery of who God is and what he wants from us. For two thousand years Christianity has claimed to answer these mysteries, and this renowned biblical scholar and Anglican bishop shows that it still does today. Like C. S. Lewis did in his classic Mere Christianity, Wright makes the case for Christian faith from the ground up, assuming that the reader is starting from ground zero with no predisposition to and perhaps even some negativity toward religion in general and Christianity in particular. His goal is to describe Christianity in as simple and accessible, yet hopefully attractive and exciting, a way as possible, both to say to outsiders “You might want to look at this further,” and to say to insiders “You may not have quite understood this bit clearly yet.”

Wright has done more for my intellectual and spiritual life than any other Christian thinker out there. I have learned more about the faith I claim as my own from him than I have from almost every other writer I've read. And here is the 'about the author' blurb:

N.T. Wright is Bishop of Durham and was formerly Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey and dean of Lichfield Cathedral. He taught New Testament studies for twenty years at Cambridge, McGill, and Oxford Universities. Wright's full-scale work, Jesus and the Victory of God, is widely regarded as one of the most significant studies in the contemporary Third Quest of the historical Jesus. It follows The New Testament and the People of God as the second volume in his projected six-volume series entitled Christian Origins and the Question of God. Among his many published works are: The Challenge of Jesus, The Meaning of Jesus (coauthored with Marcus Borg), and What Saint Paul Really Said.

OK, so now that that is unpacked a little, let me try to do my best to persuade you to read this book and/or offer it to people you know to read. Mere Christianity was probably one of the 5 most important things that ever happened to me. I don't remember where I got it and I don't remember ever wanting to read it, but for some reason I found myself for a week straight in my room, alone, reading through it. I was a junior in college and my life wasn't really what I wanted it to be. I would say that I was depressed but I don't think it was that serious, just a tendency I have to be a little melancholy. At the time I wasn't a reader, in fact it may have been the first book I ever read outside of school. That book changed me. I looked at the world in a new way after putting that book down. The last paragraph is what put the last nail in the coffin for the old Dude:

"But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away blindly so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. it will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambition and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in." -CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

So that was it for me. I was never really the same person. A long series of events has brought me to where I was today, but Mere Christianity was the beginning.

I would like to think that this book could be a new Mere Christianity for a generation that needs to hear a fresh presentation of the Gospel. Like Lewis, Wright deals with philosophical questions in beautifully simple style but he goes one step further that Lewis was able to do in his context. Wright has long been a voice for social justice and the Christian vocation of being called to be where the world is in pain, at the place where the world is suffering and in a state of shame and sorrow. He also, for me at least, articulates God's new creation better than anyone else and the hope of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, not some far-off-floatinig-soul diembodied Heaven we tent to speak of.

I think that this book will speak to a generation that sees the pain in the world like never before. It will speak to those who think the Church has nothing to say to global injustice. It will speak to those who read Mere Christianity. It will speak to those who have never heard the gospel of Jesus and the Kingdom. With Wright's brilliant mind and beautiful prose, there are sure to be people for generations citing this book as the beginning of something new in their lives. At least, that is what I would like to think...

Go read this book and give it away to someone that needs it. You won't be dissappointed and neither will they.

***The Dude just got a copy yesterday and has only read the first chapter. Any and all predictions are completely speculation, although The Dude believes very strongly that it will be an important book for years to come. Plus, the cover is badass.

I could definitely live here....

2006-03-11T18:22:00.000-08:00

Vancouver, BC

Regent College

Sure beats Waco

I think this picture was taken on July 13th

I don't know when this one is from...

Good Genes

2006-03-10T08:11:00.000-08:00

My brother recently discovered my blog. Well it turns out that blogging doesn't set me apart in the Flynn family. A few years ago my brother was involved in little project called Catholic Hoops. Here is the biography that is included at the bottom of the blog:

Sean Flynn: The driving force behind Catholic Hoops, he is neither Catholic nor a basketball player. Born to an Irish Protestant father and a Jewish mother, he was baptized Christian but remains Jewish under Jewish law. Bridging these cultures while growing up in Houston, Flynn grew an uncommon fondness for East Coast basketball. He oversaw the John Thompson retirement while completing his studies at Georgetown University.

I admire my brother for a lot of things not least of which is his ability to write. I always wished I could write as well as he could but I'm not sure I'll ever get there. It's not that fair of a race though...he does have 18 months on me, an education from a prestigious school, plus he's smarter, and he was reading the sports page at age 3...so he's got that going for him. Anyway, here is my favorite article my brother wrote while he was in college, I think you'll find it entertaining:

School's Out Forever

The picture above, which is from that article, is of Sean (Son of Cary Flynn) on the Left, David Noll (Son of Mark Noll) center, and the cool guy on the right is yours truly.

Sean's articles can be found here: The Washington Post.

Sure, I was a student....but I wasn't a student

2006-03-09T15:22:00.000-08:00

So I was doing a wikipedia search on the word Iconoclast. Read below and see if you think its as funny as I do.

An iconoclast originally referred to a person who destroyed icons, that is, sacred paintings or sculpture. An example is Byzantine emperor Leo III, who ordered the destruction of all icons of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the Saints in his empire. For more discussion of historical iconoclasts, see iconoclasm.

The more common meaning in current usage is that an iconoclast is a person who carries out symbolic or quixotic acts of protest against authority figures, the connotation being that the iconoclast opposes the imposition of authority itself rather than any particular policy or action.

The term may also refer to a person who reacts against popular culture or ideals.

Iconoclast was also a Southern Californian anarcho-punk band from the 1980s. It is also the name of a Sundance Channel show where ground-breaking celebrities are interviewed. In the 1890's Iconoclast was the name of a major Texas newspaper known for being critical of powerful institutions and figures. The newspaper ceased to exist when the editor was shot in the back for exposing scandelous activities at Baylor University.

Everyting is coming together now. It starts out with good intentions and ends with a shooting at Baylor University.

Sabbath

2006-03-07T06:48:00.000-08:00

What is the Sabbath?

In the Christian West we mark Sunday as being the Sabbath. For the Jews the Sabbath is Saturday. Did the Sabbath change? The way I understand it is that the Sabbath is represented by the last day of the week (Saturday) to reflect Yahweh resting on the seventh day of Creation. Christians moved the holy day to Sunday to mark the celebration of Christ's resurrection, but I'm not sure they actually moved the Sabbath. Correct me if I'm wrong here.

Yesterday morning in Bible study we looked at John 5. There is the story of Jesus healing the invalid at the pool on the Sabbath and then a long exposition by Jesus about who he is, testimonies, and how they need to believe God, who sent Jesus, which the scriptures clearly point to.

Here is what caught my attention this morning:

So, because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath (healing the invalid), the Jews (the word used here specifies that the 'Jews' are Judeans) persecuted him. Jesus said to them, "My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working." For this reason the Jews tried all the harder to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.

My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working.

I think Jesus is challenging the Jews idea of the Sabbath here and hopefully our ideas of the Sabbath as well. We typically think of Sabbath as the day of rest. Which is not incorrect; it is the day of rest for Jews, Christians, and Muslims (although all 3 practice on different days, in different ways). But what does it mean to rest? I think the first place we would normally look would be Genesis 2 or perhaps the 10 commandments . It does clearly say there in both Exodus and Deuteronomy that the Jews were to do no work. God did all his work during the first 6 days and then rested, and so shall they. A (perhaps major) difference between the two texts is that in Deuteronomy, Moses adds this: Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the LORD your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the LORD your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.

So we can see the Sabbath as a day set aside to reflect on the story of the people of God. We are not to work, we are to rest in creation as God rests and remember what God did at the Exodus. But I'm not so sure that works when we play the Jesus card.

Jesus didn't have to heal the man on the Sabbath. He had been sick for 38 years and one more day wouldn't have hurt him. But it looks like Jesus deliberately chooses this day(or at least the day chose him). And Jesus doesn't even do any work he simply tells the man to pick up his mat (which is considered work). After this, Jesus' statement about the father working is meant to set a new standard for people to go by. The Sabbath is most certainly not outdated, or useless anymore, but needs a tune-up. It needs to be recreated itself.

First, there are a few other sayings of Jesus that are important here:

-It is lawful to do good on the Sabbath (Matthew 12:12)
-The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27)
-Now if a child can be circumcised on the Sabbath so that the law of Moses may not be broken, why are you angry with me for healing the whole man on the Sabbath? (John 7:23)
-The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath (Mark 2:28 and parallels)

I'm sure there are more and I definitely don't want to take any of these out of context, but I think they are important to understand the 'new' Sabbath.

If we keep in mind the big picture story of Creation, Fall, and Redemption, maybe we can make sense of the Sabbath. In the beginning, God created the world. The world he created 'fell', and Sin is now alive and well. Soon after that God begins his work of redeeming the world and restoring the world to its original glory. Jesus is the climax of the restoration, the victory of God over evil, and the beginning of the new creation.

It's this last point that I want to focus on: new creation. God is making all things new! That sounds like work to me but a very specific kind of work. We see it revealed in Jesus: 'My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working' is a redefinition of work and sabbath, i think. God is working on restoring the creation and redeeming it. We are in a different part of the story from when the Sabbath was given but not a new story, as Tom Wright would say. So what does that do to Sabbath rest? Again, I think it redefines it.

"The heart of it seems to be Jesus' belief that Israel's god was then and there in the process of launching the new creation. And somehow this new creation was superseding the old one. Its timescale was taking precedence. God was healing the sorry, sick old world, and though there might come a time for rest (when Jesus' own work was finished, maybe: see John 19.28-30), at the moment it was time for the work of new creation to go forward." - Tom Wright

So, just like these ramblings, there is work to be done. Not work so we can earn our way into heaven, but work because if we believe in the one who was sent from God (or Paul for that matter) we know that we can be participants (in fact we are invited!) in the new creation. Jesus' ministry opens with a reading from Isaiah:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

Let us make this our mission statement as Jesus made it his. There is work to be done. There are poor yet to be preached the good news, there are prisoners yet to be set free, there are blind people whose sight is yet to be recovered, there are people yet to be released from oppression. If we want sabbath rest, let us rest in the fact that God is working on making all things new. Let us work with him and rest in the new creation and not settle for anything less.

For God's Sake

2006-03-01T11:39:00.000-08:00

From a wonderful article by Philip Yancey in Christianity Today:

I've become more convinced than ever that God finds ways to communicate with those who truly seek him, especially when we lower the volume of the surrounding static. I remember reading the account of a spiritual seeker who interrupted a busy life to spend a few days in a monastery. "I hope your stay is a blessed one," said the monk who showed the visitor to his cell. "If you need anything, let us know, and we'll teach you how to live without it."

A Look at Redeeming the Routines

2006-02-26T15:17:00.000-08:00

This isn't really a book review, more of a book thought. I'm in the middle of a pretty good book by Robert Banks called Redeeming the Routines: Bringing Theology to Life. Its a book about lay theology, or what he prefers to call "Theology of Everyday Life". It's a very L'Abri-esque book, one that tries to bridge the gap between what we believe and how we live out our lives with an emphasis on the 'routine' side of life where we spend most of our time. I hopefully will do a full book review one of these days but for now I wanted to share what he's talked about so far and maybe start some thoughts along these lines. In chapter 2, The Credibility Gap, he formulates ten theses that have their basis in the experiences of a wide range of people who have corroborated or extended his own conclusions about the relationship between belief and the routines of everyday life.

1. Few of us apply or know how to apply our belief to our work, or lack of work
2. We make only minimal connections between our faith and our spare time activities
3. We have little sense of a Christian approach to regular activities
4. Our everyday attitudes are partly shaped by the dominant values of our society
5. Many of our spiritual difficulties stem from the daily pressures we experience
6. Our everyday concerns receive little attention in the church
7. Only occasionally do professional theologians address routine activities
8. When addressed, everyday issues tend to be approached too theoretically
9. Only a minority of Christians read religious books or attend theological courses
10. Most churchgoers reject the idea of a gap between their belief and their ways of life

That's a pretty good list. He goes into pages of detail for each point which I won't discuss here but I thought it was a good overview of the problem and a good articulation of the state of Western Christianity. I think number 10 is the kicker here. After reflecting on 1-9, I came to the realization that most people would either give you the blank i-don't-have-a-clue-what-you're-talking-about-i-just-want-to-enjoy-my-sermon stare, or deny that this was a problem all together and falling into their dualistic-American private religion worldview that has been nestled into their minds. But thankfully Banks addresses this problem and I look forward to reading how he might deal with it. Maybe I'll post a follow-up.

I feel a deep resonance with the problems addressed in this list. The ideas represented here have fueled a lot of my passion and desire for teaching or being in some type of a vocational/equipping ministry. When I became a Reflective Christian sometime near the end of college, what sparked a flame in me was the disconnect I saw between the story of the people of God in the scriptures and the lives of the Christians all around me (granted, I may have had a skewed perception). There just didn't seem to be much difference in the daily lives of the people who claimed to be 'saved' and those who the 'saved' claimed were 'lost' (The Dude has issues with even using these words). I thought to myself, along the lines of what CS Lewis once wrote, If this whole thing is true then it should make a difference to every aspect of my life, not just some 'religious' part...and if it's not true, it doesn't make a hell of a difference. That has been the essence of my questioning for the last few years; thinking about and exploring why those differences are there, how can they be connected, and how the issues can be raised and dealt with among nominal Christians and devoted Christians alike.

Ranald Macaulay says that spirituality is the restoration of humanity to the image of God. When we are truly spiritual, we are truly human. The movement away from super-spirituality where praying, singing, and bible reading have precedent over the rest of life begins with an understanding that with the exception of sin, all of life is sacred. Of course praying, singing, and bible reading is spiritual, but no more or less than appreciating music, washing dishes, or listening to a friend. This book should make us aware of how small a part of our lives are actually being engaged in this movement towards restoration.

Along these lines, there is a great story about Madeline L'Engle. She was listening to a young friend explain that he felt like he had no time to pray during the day. He was so busy and tired that praying just didn't fit in his schedule. She asked him if he ever considered praying while on the toilet. He answered quickly, "I don't really think thats an appropriate place to do that." She snapped back, "That's not very incarnational of you!"

This book is a good place to start if you want to think that joke is funny(kind of), and a better place to start if you want to bridge the gap between belief and behavior.

By the way, Dennis Haack of Ransom Fellowship did a very short review of this book here.

L'Abri

2006-02-25T22:49:00.000-08:00

I miss L'Abri...

Sucker

2006-02-24T09:11:00.000-08:00

I'm a sucker for websites like this: Badcorp.org. With a tagline like "Stop funding your own oppression" how can I not immediately fall in love? How else will I relieve my middle class guilt if not through bashing the corporations I can't live without? Seriously, this stuff can excite me.

Websites like this along with magazines like Adbusters (by the way, The Dude is a fan of Adbusters campaigns like "buy nothing day" and "slow down week"--check them out.)seem to bring out the cynic in me as well. If you know me, he's in there and he can be found driving The Dude at least a few hours a day. You've probably seen some of his blogs. This is the part of me that hates the Man, the part of me that wants to buy a hybrid, the part of me that found this website.

Many times my initial reaction to the corruption and oppression in the world is along the lines of Fight Club and I think "if what we have created so far is destroying us, then destroying what we have created may be the most meaningful(and useful) act of creation we can participate in." (this is The Dude's personal interpretation of Fight Club). But does that really free us from oppression and corruption? I don't think so.

There must be constructive deconstruction. I think that we must recognize the brokenness in the world, see the systematic injustice we are currently participating in and grieve over it--even become angry over it. But we mustn't stop there, we must begin to look for new ways of doing things--while always realizing that change won't be immediate and until the Kingdom comes we will be a perpetually broken people living in a perpetually broken world. But redemption has to fit in here somewhere. We can't just scrap what we have created and try again--that's not the way God does things at least. That's where I begin to see the flaws with Adbusters and BadCorp--there is no redemption.

So, here is what I am going to do: go to www.badcorp.org and read the corporate shit-list; try to understand what these guys are saying and do my best to discern what is true and false; see how and in what ways am I contributing to systematic injustice in the world; grieve; be angry; embrace the hope that Jesus brings with Kingdom of God; begin to work on the injustices I am causing against those nearest to me; begin to work on the injustices I am causing against those farthest from me; never settle for the way things are; continue to look for new ways of doing things in alignment with the teachings of Jesus and the will of God.

Of course none of this is possible without holding on to grace and hope. Optimism and pessimism will always leave us wanting. So www.badcorp.org, if you're reading this, go read the bible and gain an understanding of redemption. See what Jesus is talking about when he talks about "making all things new." Destruction is not the answer, redemption is.

Just Enough

2006-02-22T14:07:00.000-08:00

Found this here, got there from here, and ironically saw it here, too.

1) Living with just enough is an act of discipleship - Jesus soundly condemned the wealth-seeking of his own day. He called his disciples to seek first the Kingdom and not to worry about what they would eat, drink and wear. He called the poor blessed and uttered "woes" against the rich, telling stories to illustrate his point. He declared that mammon (love of wealth) prevented people from serving God. He warned against "laying up treasures on earth" and told people to give away their possessions. A commitment to Jesus led members of the early church to share their goods with one another. Those who claim to be Christ's faithful followers must grapple with his clear call to live simply.

2) Living with just enough encourages generosity - Jesus honoured the poor widow who placed two copper coins, her entire living, into the synagogue treasury. He recognized that, oftentimes, it is the poor who demonstrate the greatest spirit of generosity. The more stuff we humans acquire, it seems, the less we are willing to part with it. A commitment to living with just enough encourages us to be more generous. When we are less attached to "our" money and "our" possessions, we are freed to share them with others. And when we give more freely and generously, we in turn find ourselves less concerned to acquire more things.

3) Living with just enough demonstrates resistance - Our economy is driven by a culture of consumerism. Marketers and advertisers continually make us feel ashamed if our clothes are out of style, our car is old or we don't have the latest electronic gadgets. Living with just enough is a way of resisting this insanity. It is a way of being conscientious objectors to a society and an economy that depends on people being kept in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction. Someone has written that "conformity to a sick society is to be sick." A tradition of nonconformity has historically been an important piece of the Anabaptist-Mennonite heritage. That tradition, especially as it applies to the culture of consumerism, is worth rediscovering.

4) Living with just enough fosters sustainability - It preserves God's creation. Extravagant and wasteful lifestyles contribute to environmental depletion. Indeed, scientists with the ecological footprint movement indicate that if everyone consumed in the way that most North Americans do, we would need 2 to 3 additional planets to provide the resources and process the waste. The earth cannot sustain such a level of consumption. A commitment to live with just enough is a necessary part of valuing and helping to preserve God's creation.

5) Living with just enough invites discernment - Sometimes the pressures of time and busy schedules force us to act in unsustainable ways. We opt for fast or processed food rather than a simple nutritious meal. We drive to the corner store rather than walk or bike, or simply do without. A commitment to live with just enough makes us consciously confront the stresses and pressures in our lives. It pushes us to make intentional choices about those things which are truly life-giving, perhaps even limiting involvements that are good and worthy. It helps us to be discerning about our lives.

6) Living with just enough is an act of witness - A friend chooses to take a bus rather than an airplane, not because the bus is cheaper, but because it uses less fuel and therefore is less harmful to the environment. A family with teenagers chooses to live without a car. Yet another family chooses to shop at a downtown independent grocer than at the big superstore in the suburbs, therefore paying considerably more for their groceries; they say they can better support local producers this way. All of these people are witnesses to a more just world. You can be a witness too.

7) Living with just enough invites celebration - Much of the impulse for the simple living movement has been middle class guilt. But guilt has little staying power. Moreover, guilt-motivated living will likely find expression in legalism and rigidity. We will find ourselves judging those who buy a certain house or take a certain vacation. Spirit-filled simple living, on the other hand, is characterized by joy, freedom and peace. It is grounded in God's promise of abundant living and enough for all people. It is the outward expression of a life focused on seeking first God's Kingdom.

I love the Mennonites. I've only known one Mennonite in my life, when I lived in Washington. They seem like they are a community of people who take this stuff seriously. I used to think I was becoming Catholic because of Nouwen, Merton and Mother Teresa, but now I feel like the Mennonites are in the running. The simlilarities are obvious: a spiritual awareness of the world and an understanding of the radical nature of true Christian living.

Found in Translation

2006-02-22T10:01:00.000-08:00

What a great title. Unfortunately I didn't make it up and ironically I didn't steal it from Brimas' Blog. I posted this last summer on that same blog and although I don't really think it's a good post, I was referring to the Kingdom of God language and how I was beginning to see it pop up in mainstream Christianity. I discussed the Willow Creek Leadership Summit and some of the statements made there by Rick Warren. (by the way--The views and opinions of Willow Creek are probably not shared by The Dude) I also mentioned Brian McLaren's blog and his new book The Secret Message of Jesus (Due out April 4).

So fast forward to today to the latest Sojourners email and the article titled Found in Translation, by Brian Mclaren. In it he discusses language of the Kingdom of God and how that language may need to be adapted to the culture to make sense in our world today.

When Jesus spoke of the kingdom of God, his language was charged with urgent political, religious, and cultural electricity. But if we speak of the kingdom of God today, the original electricity is largely gone, and in its place we often find a kind of tired familiarity that inspires not hope and excitement, but anxiety or boredom.

Why is kingdom language not as dynamic today? First, in our world, kingdoms have given way to republics, democracies, and democratic republics. Where kings exist, they are by and large anachronisms, playing a limited ceremonial role in relation to parliaments and prime ministers, evoking nothing of the power and authority they did in Jesus’ day.

Another ironic point (for me) is that this same topic came up in my 6:30 am bible study yesterday. I was ranting about the problem with the American church while we were discussing the idea of being born again from John chapter 3. I was complaining about the same thing that McLaren seems to hit on in the first sentence: the language we use today in the American Church (with exceptions of course--I know I'm generalizing) isn't the exciting, political, revolutionary language meant by the Kingdom of God. We talk about 'Heaven' and 'Salvation' as far off realities separated from this life that really don't have much to do with how I live my life here and now as long as I have 'accepted Jesus in my heart' and live out some form of conservative American morality (forgive the polemic). I think the message of the Kingdom should shatter any ideas we have about 'going to heaven when I die' (thanks NT Wright) and should challenge us to see our role as the people of God in a new light.

Sorry for the rambling...now to my point...

Here is a list of the six metaphors McLaren says 'have special promise' for translating the message of the Kingdom to our own culture:

1) The Dream of God - This language suggests a more personal, less mechanistic relationship between God and our world. It would resonate, for example, with a mother who has great dreams for her child, or an artist who has great dreams for a novel or symphony he is creating.

2) The Revolution of God - For people like Martin Luther King Jr., attuned to fighting injustice, corruption, oppression, racism, and other forms of social evil, the “revolution” or “revolutionary movement” of God naturally flows from the metaphor of the dream of God for creation....perhaps we need a modifier in front of revolution to show how the goals and tactics of this regime are radically different: the peace revolution of God, the spiritual revolution of God, the love revolution of God, the reconciling revolution of God, the justice revolution of God. In these ways, we get much closer to the dynamic hidden in Jesus’ original language of kingdom of God.

3) The Mission of God - The Latin term missio dei has long been used to describe God’s work in the world. Its etymology (the root miss means “send”) reminds us that God sends us into the world to be agents of change: We have a task to do for God. True, there is more to the kingdom than mission; being in relationship is essential to life in the kingdom, so kingdom life is not just doing work. But this metaphor still has great value, as long as we complement it with more relational language.

4) The Party of God - Jesus often compared the kingdom to parties, feasts, and banquets. Today we could say that God is inviting people to leave their gang fights, workaholism, loneliness, and isolation and join the party, to leave their exclusive parties (political ones, for example, which win elections by dividing electorates) and join one inclusive party of a different sort, to stop fighting, complaining, hating, or competing and instead start partying and celebrating the goodness and love of God.

5) The Network of God - A promising new metaphor works with the idea of a network or system. God is inviting people into a life-giving network. First, God wants people to be connected, plugged in, in communication with God, so God can transfer to them what they need—not just information but also virus-debugging software, along with love, hope, empowerment, purpose, and wisdom. As well, each person who is connected to God must become integrally connected to all others in the network. In this way, the network of God breaks down the walls of smaller, exclusive networks (like networks of racism, nationalism, and the like) and invites them into the only truly worldwide web of love. The network becomes a resource for people outside the network as well, and of course, people are always invited to enter the connectivity themselves.

6) The Dance of God - In the early church, one of the most powerful images used for the Trinity was the image of a dance of mutual indwelling. The Father, Son, and Spirit live in an eternal, joyful, vibrant dance of love and honor, rhythm and harmony, grace and beauty, giving and receiving. The universe was created to be an expression and extension of the dance of God—so all creatures share in the dynamic joy of movement, love, vitality, harmony, and celebration. But we humans broke with the dance. We stamped on the toes of other dancers, ignored the rhythm, rejected the grace, and generally made a mess of things. But God sent Jesus into the world to model for us a way of living in the rhythm of God’s music of love, and ever since, people have been attracted to the beauty of his steps and have begun rejoining the dance.

Despite what you or I may think of these 'new' metaphors, I think that McLaren is doing the important work of imagination in order to see God's Kingdom become a fuller reality. What metaphors can we come up with in our own communities to convey the idea of reconciliation, peace, love and justice to the culture? Brian has the last word here:

There are many other metaphors we could explore. In a sense, Jesus’ creative use of parables sets an example for us to follow. It inspires us to ongoing creative communication—seeking to convey the kingdom through the symbolism of words as he did in the short fictional form of parable, and also in poetry, short story, novel, or essay. But it doesn’t stop with the symbolism of words. People have been inspired to express the kingdom through the symbols of space and form, color, and texture—in architecture and interior design. They have used the symbolism of movement and gesture in dance and drama. They’ve used the visual languages of painting, sculpture, collage, flower arranging, or gardening. Even the symbolic language of taste can express the kingdom in cooking. Come to think of it, we might say that the kingdom of God is like an arts colony.