shadowing god

telos materials

2012-01-31T08:40:00.006-05:00

we've started a new class at the winds on wednesday nights. "telos" is a sequel to our 'intro to christian spirituality' class (called "doxa") and focuses on the goal of the christian life. in a word, that goal is "glory."

the word telos is the greek word for 'goal' or 'point' or 'objective', sometimes also parsed to mean 'perfect,' (as in, 'be ye perfect, for your heavenly father is perfect...' and yes, i just said 'ye.')

anyway - here are some of the visual aids i'll be using this week to try and summarize what we've talked about so far:

Second Story Man: prologue

2012-01-26T01:09:00.001-05:00

Prologue

The dream always starts the same way.

Nyeli comes to the door in a ripped shift. Her little eyes are watery, her bottom lip quivers, but she is brave. Sidon answers the door like he always does, gatekeeper and watchman. His broad shoulders could almost be wider than the girl is tall. Nyeli has the high features of the Shishalh, accented by her long eyes. She's such a soft thing, looking every bit the orphan. Sidon does too, in his own way, that of the mean streets and hard knocks. Eli is in his room, knowing why she's come and waiting for the dog to come and kiss him on the hands, summoning.

"It's in the woods," she says, and Eli knows she means the wendigo.

Sidon looks at his master, his stand-in father and mentor and sage. "Will you go?" he asks, and Eli nods. Cherub, the Bernese Mountain Dog, opens her mouth in a grin. The little girl loves the dog instantly, the way children do.

"Stay put," Eli says to Sidon. The younger man nods and closes the door behind the much, much older. Eli's white beard blows in the midnight wind, sand on a bleached shore. Nyeli reaches up to clutch at the beard and Eli smiles. It's a hard thing to smile when you go monster-hunting, but the wonder of a child is a magic all its own. Eli gently pulls Nyeli's hand away from the wool on his face and holds it. "Will you take me to the wendigo?" he asks. Nyeli nods, pushing her blue-black hair behind her ears with the other hand.

They go into the woods, the dark part, where the bad things live.

Despite all the stories, Eli knows what they go to see is not the wendigo. The wendigo is an old yarn from the First Nations, rare in the Pacific Northwest but more common as you move east. It has other names—Sasquatch, Yeti, Bigfoot, Abominable Snowman, New Jersey Devil—but they are all just made up folklore and fairy tales. Maybe the origin of the stories comes from the extravagance of movie stars like John Wayne, who once purchased an island in the San Juans and stocked it with African game so he and his friends could hunt. Maybe a gorilla got loose, or an orangutan. Or maybe there was just a guy who lived in the mountains that happened to be seen at the wrong time, in the right light, and looked like something else.

But there's no such thing as a wendigo, and no one knows this better than Eli, for he has lived in the mountains longer than any and has walked trails even medicine men have neglected. Even here, in the dream he's having for the hundredth time, he knows the wendigo isn't real.

But Nyeli doesn't know, and the dark part of the woods incites the dark part of her imagination. These three—little girl, old man, massive dog—traipse through the underbrush making no effort to conceal themselves. "Make noise, sweet," Eli says, "it keeps away the wolves." Nyeli grips the old man's hand that much tighter. Her fingernails would likely have penetrated his nut-brown skin if not for his faded flannel cuff hanging unbuttoned on his wrist. Eli is simply dressed, just jeans and boots, backpack and unbuttoned shirt, plain old clothes for a plain old man. He thinks of a story to tell, then decides against it. That's a rare thing, he says to himself and smirks. Cherub woofs and looks up at him. "You believe it, girl?" he asks the dog, though both girls look at him for clarification. "Here I am, a storyteller with no tale, a raconteur with nothing to recount."

Cherub races a few paces ahead, sniffing the ground excitedly. "What you got?" asks Eli. "Eh? What is it?" Eli skips a step or two to get closer, careful not to drag Nyeli behind him but willing to rush her more than she'd like. When they get close, they see that the dog has found a skeleton.

"What is it please, Mr. Eli?" asks Nyeli.

"Don't waste your 'mister-y' on me, sweet. I'm old, but I'm just Eli." Nyeli takes her hand away from the old man to hesitantly wipe her tears. The moon can barely penetrate the tall evergreen canopy, and the brush presses in close underneath it.

"What is it, please?"

"Kodiak," he says, and in the dream he remembers finding this giant bear. The skeleton was nearly as white as his beard, having been there a long time past when the maggots and flies found use of it. It had been picked, plucked, puckered, and left in perfect shape.

"Was it the wendigo?" Nyeli asks, and Eli almost laughs in response because the wendigo isn't real. He doesn’t laugh, though, because the thing that is out there, the thing Eli and Sidon and Cherub know is worse than a wendigo, could have killed ten kodiaks. Maybe not at once. Maybe.

"Not the wendigo, sugar," he replies. "Best keep moving."

The old man of the mountain goes deeper into the dark part than he has dared in a long time. He does not want to, but for the girl's sake he knows it is right. The timing is right to end an old evil, older than almost any remaining. How it came from Persia no longer seems to matter. After all, in the age of cell phones and Skype, transatlantic aircraft and Venusian landings, it hardly boggles the mind. Mostly Eli just feels foolish for not tending to this earlier. Sidon had shamed him once, and he'd been looking for this chance to make it right.

Eli had been looking to make things right for a long time.

Lycanthropes, as a rule, don't come near the First Nations peoples. "Maybe they're afraid of the wendigo," Eli says out loud but without any humor.

"Pardon, sir?" asks the girl. Eli grunts in return.

In truth, only a handful of the creatures had ever existed. They were always the offspring of sorcery, always the refuse of hate. Eli knew of only three for sure, though his friends at the Inn at the Edge of the World said there had been more. Thank God he hadn't had to deal with the rest. Three was enough.

Let’s hope four’s not too many.

"I have a story to tell, now, sweet. If you'd hear it." Eli's voice is loud in the woods, whose sounds have diminished without either he or the girl noticing.

"No thank you," she says.

"It's a story that will frighten the wendigo, and it may even frighten you, but I think it’s best."

"No thank you," Nyeli repeats, her voice sounding far away from Eli and from the woods. It is like a dream within this dream, that voice and plea. Cherub lets loose a low growl and pounces through the woods, chasing a rabbit perhaps. "Come back!" Nyeli shouts. "Won't he come back?" she asks.

Eli ignores this. His story was important. "The prophet Daniel told of a great king, Nebuchadnezzar, who became proud and spurned God," he begins. Nyeli reaches for his hand once more, and in the darkest part of the woods where there is no moon, Eli continues, penetrating the shroud of silence. "God was angry and sent the king into the woods to learn humility."

"Please sir, what is humility?"

Eli smiles. "To know I AM."

"What are you?" she asks.

"Less," Eli replies. I’m just an old man, he thinks. Nothing special, really. Not an angel or a wizard. Just old. He stops walking then, kneeling down in front of the girl and taking both her hands into one of his. There in the dark, his knuckles could pass for roots and his face for bark. He is part of the forest and that is good. "I'm going to hide you away in this tree and then I'm going to walk a few steps there." Eli points to a small clearing around which a ring of trees loom like a canopy of rakes. "I'm going to keep telling you this story, but you'll hear it up high." The old man, surprisingly strong for his twig arms and thin trunk, plucks the girl from the ground and sets her in a branch eight feet from the forest floor. Eli turns and wipes his hands on his denim pants and shakes the leaves from his steel-toed boots. He gets out a red kerchief and dabs his brow before stuffing it into the front pocket of his jeans. Then he thinks differently, and with a bitter mirth he pulls it out again and waves it in the clearing crying, "Toro, Toro, Nebuchadnezzar! Come skewer your man and choke."

The part of the dream when the red kerchief falls is the beginning of the end, the worst part, and the truest.

Eli shuffles his feet and moves in a circle, like the shamans used to do, and he claps his hands together and slaps them against his chest to make a sound like the beating of a broom on a haystack. His words come out in rhythms and his voice rises in a chant, a moan, a call. "His pride sent him to the wood, to eat as an animal and grow fangs like a wolf," he begins. Nyeli watches him from the tree, and in the dream Eli can still see her liquid eyes shining in the dark. "His back was feathered and his brow blunt," he hollers now, furious. "All men were his enemies. In time, God removed the curse but some men like the taste of blood. Some would rather stay accursed, or even seek a curse again, than accept the peace of grace." Eli stops his dance, bends over panting, then he stands up straight and yells, "Accursed, come now and be done!"

The trees bend to the side as the thing bursts upon the old man. Eli dives away to the right and rolls, miraculously, to his feet as Nyeli screams, "WENDIGO!" The beast is seven, eight feet tall, and one could call it either a feathered ape or a wolfish-bird, so great is the disparity between its many parts. Snout. Wings. Claws. Gambrels. The-thing-that-is-not-a-wendigo paws at the ground, shooting clods of dirt into the woods and baring great teeth at the millenigenarian. It crouches, ready to pounce, when in a second explosion from the forest Cherub tears through the woods and grabs the beast by its throat.

The two animals claw and scratch and writhe and shake and bite and snarl and ravage one another as Eli bolts away through the wood. "Stay in the tree!" he calls out to Nyeli.

"Eli!" she calls, her voice curdling and haunted. "Don't leave me!" But Eli runs through the darkened paths back to the kodiak. He doesn't like to do what he has now to do, but there it is. Lying on the bones, he intones a prayer. Some might call it a spell, but that would be a blasphemy. The bones begin to shake and to rumble, and the old man whispers one final injunction, "Take him to hell."

Then Eli is off, racing through the wood and following the sound of Nyeli's screams, which grow louder until the old man bursts through the bush like both the dog and the not-wendigo before him. He hadn't considered that Cherub could lose this fight, not really, not even when he had measured the lycanthrope and all its soiled soul, but Cherub is on the ground with a badly bleeding paw all the same. The lycanthrope is bleeding too, but Eli has never seen Cherub's blood. And there had been occasion for such a sight more than once.

"Get away!" Eli screams and the not-wendigo turns toward him once again, the dog forgotten. But there is no crouching this time, no preparation for a leaping attack, since close behind Eli is his conjuration and from the woods comes the skeletal-bear. Twelve feet tall, pneumatikos animata, it roars and the leaves blow from the branches. Nyeli screams again as the skeletal bear and the not-wendigo slam into each other, two titans of the supernatural, like rams. But the not-wendigo is overmatched and out-smarted, for Eli has not envisioned the bear as a contestant but as a cage. The skeletal-bear's chest opens to receive the lycanthrope and closes to encapsulate it. A humming noise comes from within the skeletal-bear as the lycanthrope changes back into a man. Middle-aged, tired, middle-eastern, confused.

"Don't send me there," he begs Eli.

"I have waited longer than I should to do what I must," says Eli, and then the old man bows his head and whispers once more. The humming noise increases, filling the clearing with the sound of a thousand, thousand bees in a swarm, ending in an eruption of light. Eli covers his eyes, as does Nyeli, and when they are again able to look, both the skeleton-bear and its prisoner are gone.

It is daytime and the dream ends.

Eli woke in his low-bed, sweating and crying and clutching the hairs of his best friend beside him. Cherub hardly stirred. The dream always bothered him. But never as much as when it happened that night in the wood.

working on a new one...

2012-01-22T21:02:00.002-05:00

in the jewish mystical tradition, there are literally thousands of tales concerning the prophet elijah coming back to earth and performing weird miracles, telling tall tales, and generally screwing up bad guys while helping good ones. after all the fun i had with the undwelllable city, and all the positive feedback, i thought that my next project for the winds would be a kind of hybrid teaching atlas//novel.

"second story man" is a compilation of over a hundred different legends, fables, folktales and myths from christian history and tradition, all woven together in a larger framing story concerning the prophet elijah. we'll teach through some of it in the cue, beginning mid-february, and the book will be available exclusively through the westwinds bookstore.

thanks again everybody, for all your well-wishes, constructive criticism, and support!

the periodic table of the bible

2011-10-30T22:16:00.001-04:00

The Undwellable City (30 second promo)

2011-10-14T10:23:00.001-04:00

nice comments from my editor

2011-10-14T10:18:00.002-04:00

Julie Little is my editor. She's done contract work for Westwinds for the last couple of years, editing several atlases for myself, Ben, and Jvo. She's very skilled and a pleasure to work with.

Julie's first love is fiction; so, when I decided to write The Undwellable City she was the logical person to call and ask for help. And she has been fantastically helpful. She sees holes in the plot, inconsistencies in the characters, and makes useful suggestions about conflict, tension, and pacing.

Plus she fixes all my spelling mistakes :)

At the end of editing part four Julie wrote me the following note. I don't normally like to post stuff like this, but I was genuinely touched by her kind words. I'm reprinting them here so I never lose them:

And the thriller continues! You are going to have people beating down your door to get to Part 5. Way to go; this is awesome stuff! I loved reading this. A true page-turner. You seem to know just where to twist the plot and leave the readers hanging, and you also draw on some very thought-provoking themes without beating us over the head with them. This character is so realistic, flawed, and human. I’m amazed at the world you have created and its spiritual parallels. You have a knack for novels, I think; maybe this is a new genre for you!

Pretty cool, huh?

Julie - whatever we're paying you, it's not enough

The Undwellable City: short film #1

2011-09-30T13:01:00.000-04:00

The UnDwellable City

2011-09-30T12:40:00.003-04:00

I've always been amazed by people's willingness to talk about movies, books, and television. Even bad movies, books, and television. Buckaroo Bonzai generated a lot of conversation. The new Conan remake got a lot of people talking. Twlight, The Shack, and The Five People You Meet in Heaven were all watercooler fodder for a long time.

I've written 1.6million words of pop-theology in my 6 years at Westwinds. 36 Teaching Atlases. 19 White Papers. Granted, I'm no John Donne or Thomas Aquinas...but the sheer volume ought to count for something.

It occurs to me that, had I written 1.6million words of FICTION instead of non-fiction, I might have had far more success in fostering conversation. And that's really what I want. I began writing Atlases so people could take what they experienced at Westwinds, digest it on their own time (and at a deeper level), and then live enriched by their new understanding.

But William Paul Young has been far more successful in getting people to do that with The Shack than I have with even my best stuff--Bleached, Sin Monkey, Monsters, Shadowing God.

So I've written a story, my first attempt at a novel. It's about a widower who takes the gospel to Atlantis and it's titled "The Undwellable City."

I originally began referring to the genre as "speculative theology" (a play on "speculative fiction," often referred to as SCI-FI or FANTASY). But speculative theology makes it sound like I'm going to pretend Jesus was an astronaut and Mary was his buxom barmaid. Instead, Jvo suggested I call it "anecdotal theology." I like that, a lot.

But the truth is that The Undwellable City is narrative theology in the strictest sense. I've taken God's story, and woven it together with the lives of real people in a fictional story. It's His narrative + our narrative; which, after all, is the basis for all good theology.

Jacob, my 7 year old son, provided the source material. Knowing I have a tendency toward abstract concepts and heady-ideas, I asked Jake what his 5 favorite things were to read about, play with, and pretend to be. As a result, The Undwellable City takes a "speculative theologian" and exposes him to Atlantis, sports, war, science, and zombies.

The Undwellable City will be released in 5 parts, beginning this Sunday, at Westwinds. Each part has been lovingly illustrated by my friend Heidi Rhodes and beautifully laid out by our mutual friend Carrie Joers. Davey Buchanan, my long-time mentor and coach in the world of new media, has spent hours developing a short-film//fictional documentary series about David Mann (the principal character), and we'll be showing these films around the winds as well.

WESTWINDS AND THE MULTI-SITE REVOLUTION: A Second Campus Rationale

2011-09-22T14:05:00.000-04:00

During WWII 300,000 British troops were trapped at Dunkirk by the Germans with the sea as their only escape route. There is no boat big enough to hold 300,000 people; but those men were evacuated safely because the British Navy supplied many little ones.

One church cannot effectively change all of Jackson County, let alone all of southern Michigan or the Midwest. It will take many churches. Some of the churches that will make a difference will be unlike Westwinds; but other churches will need to be tailored, like Westwinds, to the world of Google, Facebook, and the iPhone. We need more churches reaching the spiritually curious, those disenfranchised with organized religion, the intellectuals, and the creatives.

The best way to reach new people is through new churches. For example, did you know that, on average, the older a church the less effective it is in introducing people to Christ? So, if a church is 50 years old they introduce 1 new person to Christ, on average, for every 90 members. That’s a growth rate of only 1.1%/yr. A church of 10 years averages 1 new Christ-follower for every 7 members (14%/yr), and a church of 3 years averages 1 new Christ-follower for every 3 members (33%/yr).

In our contemporary context, 80% of people come to faith in Jesus Christ through churches less than 2 years old. If we believe in the mission of God to heal the world, and we believe that the local church is the way God plans to see it done, then we’ve got to do a better job of planting churches.

There are many ways to start new churches, but – contrary to popular opinion – finding some lone church planter to go off by themselves into a new city is the least effective. Conversely, the most effective (and least risky) kind of church plant is to create a franchise.

This is the same idea we see so often in business. For example, after a frustrating vacation stuck in too many dirty, sour motels, a Tennessee businessman came up with a novel idea: a network of family-friendly hotels across the country, all with the same name. We know this network as the Holiday Inn, and people loved it right from the start – a place where you could always count on experiencing the same quality and find a core of common features, such as an on-premises restaurant and a child-friendly environment.

That’s what we want to do with Westwinds – we want to create franchises so people can go to a variety of locations and experience Team Jesus, Westwinds style. In the church world, we refer to that as becoming a ‘multi-site’ congregation, and there are currently over 2,000 multi-site churches in the USA alone. In contrast to beginning a new church from scratch, a multi-site expansion keeps the overhead costs low (the same staff can be utilized, the same resources and materials) and quickly overcomes the hurdles against which most new churches struggle (such as mission, vision, core values, and strategic alignment). A multi-site church benefits from the wisdom and experience of existing elder and finance teams, policy and procedures, as well as having a strong, built-in missional DNA.

With a multi-site church you get the excitement of a new church start, with the stability and excellence that comes from existing church success.

MULTI-SITE BENEFITS:

low risk, low cost

brand new church, with a trusted brand

new church vibe plus big church quality

sharing resources (atlases, satellites, staff, budget, elders/finance) shared DNA/core pre-established network for problem solving increases total number of seats available during optimal worship times enables untapped talent – new opportunities for ministry and involvement

After reviewing these simple facts, I can’t help but wonder: If this is the most effective means of introducing new people into the kingdom in America, and if we can do it cheaply, locally, and without much risk, why wouldn’t we? We’ve got free space on the second-largest traffic route for 20miles (1825 Spring Arbor road, where we’re renovating our youth center). We’ve got top level staff and professional grade resources. If anyone can think of a good way to do a new thing it’s us.

Nothing is stopping us.

Think of it this way: Jackson has a great pizza parlor, Klavon’s, where everyone likes to eat Chicago-style pizza. But Klavon’s is just one spot, and it’s way out in Rives Junction. If Klavon’s wants to find 1,000 new customers they’re going to have to be in more than one location. A new location, even one fairly close, gives Klavon’s the opportunity to gather 1,000 new pizza lovers.

That’s what we want to do. We can’t make a bigger Westwinds, but if start another one we get our bests opportunity at introducing 1,000 new people to Team Jesus, Westwinds’ style.

One final thought: becoming a multi-site congregation is a cool idea with some neat potential, but it’s not an end-unto-itself. It’s not even a strategy for growth, but a way for our church to keep on growing. What truly stimulates growth is our commitment to shadow God and heal the world. That’s what fuels and funds transformation in the lives of real people, and that’s what will fuel and fund the transformation of our church in the future.

The new Westwinds campus!

2011-09-22T13:49:00.002-04:00

it feels like i haven't blogged in a LONG time. sorry about that.

part of the reason concerns the changing landscape at westwinds. we've been working hard since january to prepare for the opening of our new campus: 1825 spring arbor road (at the hub). services will be held there every sunday morning at 10am, in between our regular 9 am & 11 am services on robinson road.

because so many of you have asked, i'll do my best to field a couple of common questions about the new campus:

1. who will be speaking there?

- myself and ben. simply put, there are 12 opportunities to speak in a typical (4-week) month. i will be speaking 9 of those times and ben will do the other three. on most sundays i will speak at robinson at 9, drive to spring arbor to speak at 10, then back to robinson at 11. some days, however, i'll just do one campus or the other, as will ben.

2. who will be doing music?

- jvo and chad. jvo will be overseeing the music at both campuses, but chad will be leading at the hub 3 out of every 4 weeks. on the odd week of the month chad and jvo will rotate.

3. will the hub be very different from robinson road?

- yes and no. what we do at robinson, we will do at the hub. it will still be westwinds - complete with weirdness and wonder - but, by virtue of the fact that the room is different and the location is different, we anticipate that the new campus will take on a life (and to some extent a personality) all its own.

4. will there be childcare/kids' journey at the hub?

- yes, but only up until kindergarten. if your children are age 6 or older, then robinson road will likely serve your family better.

5. i'm new to westwinds. which campus should i go to?

- go to the hub. new campuses are the best place for new people to get plugged in and involved in hands-on ministry. you're far more likely to make friends and get connected at the hub than at robinson.

hope that helps!

A Jewish Legend

2011-09-11T07:40:00.002-04:00

whenever i come across old stories like this one i try and jot them down (in contemporary language) as quickly as i can. i discovered this little gem while researching the parable of the good samaritan:

In the old stories, whenever someone died they contaminated the land. Consequently, as people neared death, their families often fought about which land they would contaminate.

Two priests were arguing about this issue, specifically about the boundary between the Temple and the City. They argued about which of these places would become unclean, if someone died on the border between them. The Temple priest claimed that the House of God could never be contaminated. The City priest claimed that God would spare His people from contamination.

To settle the debate, the City priest grabbed a young man from the market and plunged a knife into his chest while straddling the border. As the young man lay dying, the Temple priest stood before the people and posed the question: what has now been defiled?

But the young man's father was there. He ran to his son, screaming that he was not dead. The father held his son and forced the people would bear witness. He cursed the priests. He told them: my son will not die, and his wound will never stop bleeding, until you recognize that loving religion is no substitute for loving another human being.

Because the priests failed to perceive the father's wisdom, just as they failed to perceive their own sin, the City and the Temple both drowned in the blood of the son.

funny you should ask: concerning the invisible world

2011-08-04T11:15:00.000-04:00

Concerning The Invisible World from Brandon McCarrell on Vimeo.

my friend, eric jones

2011-07-24T08:11:00.002-04:00

my friend eric died this week. it was too soon. he'd been fighting cancer for a long time. he lost that fight, but he won many others.

he fought to demonstrate courage to his children. he won that fight.

he fought to show his wife he loved her with every breath.

he won that one, too. he fought to keep his faith, his hope, and his dignity alive. he won that triple crown, uncontested.

he fought to prove that, though cancer may have claimed his health, it has no defeated his spirit.

he fought to prove that life is worth living, that the people around us matter, and that the way we conduct ourselves while suffering counts for a great deal.

i'm going to miss you, hell-fighter. but i know you're in better place. "to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord" paul says in 2 corinthians 5, and i know you're there and even now your being transformed from this fragile form into something far superior. again, paul says that our perishable bodies will be transformed into heavenly bodies that will never die' (1 Corinthians 15).

death has come and done its worst, but you endure.

we'll see you soon.

the problem of evil (teaser for this week's installment of "funny you should ask")

2011-07-22T13:17:00.002-04:00

The Problem of Evil from Brandon McCarrell on Vimeo.

feeling much like my old self again...thanks for asking

2011-07-22T13:15:00.003-04:00

wow. i'm a little surprised that so many of you read this. i'm doubly surprised at all the texts and phone calls and emails making sure i'm alright.

i'm alright. i promise. no craziness detected :)

after a couple more days at home, some late nights, some minor work urgency, and some time devoted to a passion project, i feel much more myself again.

albeit, myself at 100 degrees.

Funny You Should Ask: the authority of the bible

2011-07-19T16:37:00.001-04:00

Can The Bible Be Trusted? from Brandon McCarrell on Vimeo.

feeling a little weird...

2011-07-18T00:03:00.002-04:00

i've been feeling a little off my game since leaving for vacation. i didn't quite feel right the whole time i was away, and that feeling has intensified since returning home.

sorry if any of you have been casualties of that.

i'm doing what i always try and do when i feel a little off kilter: shut up and not do anything stupid. it's good advice. i often give it to others. i mostly give it to myself.

in the midst of feeling like a C- version of dave mcdonald, i still want to exercise A+ discipline. even if i don't feel amazing, i want to protect those around me from any moodiness, melancholy, or malaise.

i'm writing all this (which is information i typically consider "too private" for places like blogger and twitter and facebook) because of a comment someone made to me today at church. they were talking about how *perfect* i am (their words, not mine!) and about how i must never struggle with anything in life - especially not anything emotional.

we all struggle. sometimes we lose. but we should never stop fightingt.

this too shall pass. it always does. don't sweat it in the meantime.

pentecost sunday (today's sermon transcript)

2011-06-12T17:57:00.000-04:00

When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

Acts 2.1-4

Pentecost was the name of an ancient Jewish feast associated with the Exodus. Fifty days after the first Passover Moses ascended Mount Sinai and received the Torah (the Jewish law). This occurred just as the grain was being harvested; so the Hebrew people took the first sheaf of grain, known as the “first fruits,” and offered it to God.

From the beginning Pentecost was about the law and the harvest. The law was associated with fruitfulness because of what it produced in the lives of the righteous. Yet it was also compared to fire because of its tendency to burn away unrighteousness.

After the Ascension 120 disciples gathered together for prayer on the Day of Pentecost, during which time the Holy Spirit descended upon them in a new way. Everyone would have been aware of the connection between the law and the harvest. They would have known - independent of fire and wind and tongues - that a new law and a new kind of harvest were breaking into their reality.

When Moses ascended Sinai he received the law, which he then brought down to the people. Christ also Ascended, but into heaven rather than a mountaintop, and he has sent his Spirit to replace the law of Moses.

The coming of the Spirit at Pentecost was like a new Sinai.

But Sinai wasn’t the only episode from the First Testament to rhyme with Pentecost. In Genesis 11, for example, all of the world’s population gathered together and attempted to build a tower leading straight to heaven. It’s not that they wanted to invade heaven, so much as they want to prove their equality with God. In judgment, God dissembled their language from one common tongue to many disparate ones. As a result, the people could no longer understand each other.

In Genesis 11 God supernaturally diversified language, but in Acts 2 God supernaturally unified language. Not wholly, but representatively. Now, instead of human beings reaching up to identify with God, God has come down personally to identify with us. He has sent His Spirit to provide us a comforter, an interpreter, a guide, a healer, and a counselor.

We also see the Holy Spirit in the First Testament coming on particular people at specific times for unique tasks. For example, the Spirit filled Bezelel with skill, ability, and knowledge to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver, and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, and to engage in all kinds of craftsmanship (see Exodus 31). Likewise, the Spirit empowered cowardly Gideon – the least among all men in his tribe –to become a mighty leader and judge (see Judges 6-8). Samson, too, is a baffling tale in which an ordinary man is given superhuman strength when the Spirit comes upon him (see Judges 13-16). Isaiah proclaimed good news to the poor in the Spirit’s power, and prophesied Christ’s coming (see Isaiah 61, 40, 53).

The coming of the Spirit at Pentecost was also the fulfillment of an ancient promise. Both Jeremiah and Ezekiel prophesied that God would one day replace the law ‘written on tablets of stone’ with a new law ‘written on the hearts of men.’

I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.

Jeremiah 31.33

The Spirit was seen as the means to experience abundant life now more than ever before. This is the fulfillment of another ancient promise, made through Joel:

I will pour out my Spirit on all people.

Your sons and daughters will prophesy,

your old men will dream dreams,

your young men will see visions.

Joel 2.28

The Day of Pentecost was a special event, but not entirely unique. Both prior to and following Pentecost people were filled with the Spirit and empowered as witnesses for Christ and his kingdom. In fact, Luke describes nine different instances of people being filled with the Spirit in his writing (Luke 1.15; 1.41; 1.67; Acts 2.4; 4.8; 4.31; 9.17; 13.9; 13.52). This demonstrates that Pentecost was a continuation of God’s long-term mission to heal the world. The only difference was the distribution method.

Pentecost is about the transfer of the Spirit from Christ to the disciples. During his earthly ministry Jesus was the sole-possessor of God’s Spirit, but at Pentecost he re-distributed God’s power to his followers. When Christ told his disciples he must leave but they should not be afraid, he was referring to the fact that he would Ascend to the Father and send the Spirit in his place. Christ told them they would be clothed with power from on high. This promise is consistent with his commissioning of the Twelve earlier, when Christ gave them authority to heal diseases, cast our demons, and exercise power (see Luke 9.1-6). They became partners with Christ colonizing the Kingdom of God on earth. Through this transfer the disciples become the heirs and successors to the ministry of Jesus. Because Christ poured out the Spirit on them, the disciples can continue God’s mission to heal the world with the same resources as Christ himself.

I like how Brian McLaren, in his book The Secret Message of Jesus, has conceptualized this:

If you get a glimpse of soldiers in camouflage sneaking through the forest, if you notice planes from an enemy country flying high above us, if key political leaders in your country disappear or are mysteriously assassinated, then you might suspect that an invasion is coming. If bullets start flying and bomb sirens start going off, your suspicions will be fulfilled. Another nation, let’s call it a kingdom, is preparing to invade and conquer your kingdom.

But what if the kingdom that is invading is a kingdom of a very different sort? What if the invasion is one of kindness and compassion rather than force or aggression? What if sick people start getting well suddenly and inexplicably? What if rumors spread of storms being calmed and insane people becoming sane again, hungry people being fed and dead people rising alive from the grave? Couldn’t this be the sign of a very different kind of invasion … the coming of a different kind of kingdom?

This is how I’ve come to understand the signs and wonders of Jesus Christ. They are dramatic enactments of his message – the message of the kingdom spread in a media beyond words that combine to signify that the impossible is about to become possible, the kingdom of God with its peace, healing, sanity, empowerment and freedom is available to all here and now. Signs and wonders unbolt the mechanisms that tell us what is mathematically and practically possible and impossible. They make way for faith that is something new, unprecedented and previously impossible is now on the move. They tell us that we are being invaded by a force of hope, of group of undercover agents clouding goodness.

Being filled with the Spirit always had a prophetic dimension to it. That’s not to say that everyone is supposed to be a prophet, simply that Luke makes a connection between the ministries of the First Testament prophets with that of the church.

Prophetic ministry is eschatological, concerned with how things end up; supernatural, concerned with things that cannot be seen or measured; and universal, meaning it is no longer available to only particular people at particular times for particular tasks. It is for everybody. Our job is to keep our focus on the future (eschatology), while mindful of people’s hidden motivations and machinations (supernatural), telling everyone (universal) the good news of the gospel of God.

Many of us try to so this on our own, but that is always doomed to fail. We don’t have sufficient strength or will to change. We need God’s help to become godly. That’s why God sent His Spirit. The Spirit empowers us, providing us with a pervading sense of God’s presence. The Spirit works by changing the way we think. This doesn’t happen overnight.

In N. T. Wright’s book Simply Christian, he writes:

Once we glimpse this vision of the Holy Spirit coming to live within human beings, making them temples of the living God which ought to make us shiver in our shoes, we are able to grasp the point of the Spirit’s work in several other ways as well. To begin with, building on the startling call to holiness that we just noticed, we see right across the early Christian writings the notion that those who follow Jesus are called to fulfill the Law.

The word used to describe the Holy Spirit in Biblical Greek is the word paraclete, which means advocate - one who pleads a client’s case before a court. The Spirit is our supernatural Counselor. When we become Christians the Spirit of God comes to live in us. When he does, he begins to communicate with us so we learn to understand the “voice” of God. Typically that voice is understood as a sense of direction or a strong conviction that we ought to act in this way or not this way. It’s not so much a question of the Spirit saying: do this, or do that. It’s much more a recognition that our whole lives need to change in such-and-such a way. We test those feelings, those impulses, and those compulsions against wise counsel and against Scripture.

When we know his will and act accordingly, the Spirit’s action in our lives produces positive results known as the Fruit of the Spirit (see Galatians 5.22-23). The Bible defines the fruit of the spirit as love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, and self-control. Because Jesus said “you will know a tree by its fruit” then we can test ourselves, based on our behaviors, to determine whether or not we’re growing in godliness. We must learn to adjudicate our behavior based, striving for lives of virtue and good character in response to God’s movement within us.

Most of the time God speaks to me through nudges, or promptings. They’re little ideas that pop into my head about something I might say or do, a gentle push to step outside my comfort zone. I have learned to understand the prompting of the Spirit, typically, as a sense of direction or a strong conviction that I ought to act in this way or not that way.

In our backyard we have an electric fence dug into the ground for our Bernese Mountain Dog. It’s attached to a device on the collar he wears, and if he ever crosses the threshold of the fence, the device vibrates on his neck. The closer the dog gets to the boundaries of the fence, the more the device begins to beep a warning. When the dog is warned, he backs away from the boundary marker because he doesn’t like what happens when he crosses that line.

In many ways the conviction of the Holy Spirit is like the warning beep on that device – the Spirit speaks to us, reminding us of who we are and what we’re supposed to do in this world to shadow God. If we disregard the Spirit, we inevitably end up with results we don’t like. He doesn’t zap us or shock us or hurt us, but the consequences of crossing God’s boundary lines are always unpleasant and include things like broken relationships, broken dreams, and broken hearts.

In reality, the Spirit is working in us to change who we are completely. That usually begins with small changes that grow into larger ones. You will discover all kinds of nuances, too, the more attentive you are to the Spirit. You will make discoveries and observations about the world that are God’s unique gift to only you. Pay attention to them. They are God’s gift to you and you’re meant to share them as your gift to others.

Of course, the primary purpose for the Spirit’s coming was to empower us to witness. The Spirit hasn’t only been given so we have power to change, but was also given so we have power to change the world. We’re meant to testify to those around us that God has something better in store for them than the life they’re already living. And, just as the ministry of Jesus had been inaugurated in the power of the Spirit, so was the ministry of the church.

You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

Acts 1.8

The Spirit of God gives us both the desire and the ability to tell other people about Christ. This doesn’t mean you have to force feed them your religious beliefs. On the contrary, the most compelling thing you could ever do is tell someone about your own spiritual experiences. Tell them how you felt, tell them the parts you still don’t entirely understand, and be honest about how strongly you feel now. This is called witnessing – when you tell other people what God had done for you. Evangelism, on the other hand, is when you tell other people what God can do for them. The Bible tells us there are people with the gift of evangelism (see Ephesians 4; 1 Corinthians 12), but all believers are required to witness (see Matthew 28; Acts 1). So you aren’t required to tell people what God can do for them, only about your personal experiences. In fact, if you don’t have the gift of evangelism and you feel like you’re supposed to “evangelize,” you probably run the danger of coming off as confrontational. However, if we are obedient to the Second Testament text and share our story with words like – “this is what Jesus Christ has done for me,” or “this is how I experience the power of the Holy Spirit,” or “this is how I know God,” then we can be sure of two things: first, nobody can argue with you or doubt the validity of your experiences; second, no one feels threatened or boxed in by your religious rhetoric.

In all our discussion about Pentecost we’ve skated around one of the most significant facets of this story. It concerns glossolalia, or “speaking in other tongues.” Luke tells us the disciples were supernaturally gifted with the ability to communicate in languages they had never learned. Tom Wright makes a fantastic point concerning the gift of tongues in his commentary on Acts.

It is precisely part of being a genuine human being, made and renewed in God’s image, that people should do that most characteristic thing, using words and language, in quite a new way. We are called to be people of God’s word, and God’s word can never be controlled by rationalistic schemes, or contained within the tight little frameworks that we invent to keep everything tidy and under control.

Because this issue has often been divisive within Christianity, I want to take a few moments and address its contemporary use.

What exactly is speaking in tongues?

Speaking in tongues is a kind of prayer, one of many different forms listed in the Second Testament. Sometimes these tongues turn out to be actual human languages (see Acts 2), like a Russian who spontaneously begins to speak Chinese without ever learning it. Sometimes these tongues sound inhuman, almost like gibberish (see 1 Corinthians 13). Sometimes the person who speaks in tongues knows what they are saying and can interpret it, but not always.

This kind of prayer was, and is, powerful. It evokes the presence of Jesus, celebrates the energy of the Spirit, edifies individuals, and guides Christians concerning how they should pray.

If you think of face to face being the highest form of interpersonal conversation, and of friends who are joined at the hop, and lovers whose hearts are joined together, than I think it’s entirely appropriate to conceptualize tongues as a Spirit-to-spirit connection between God and us. It’s that moment when, instead of getting tripped up by words I think might be inadequate or fear that I might say something inappropriate, tongues allows me to simply open my heart to God and pour everything out before Him.

Tongues is a sign that God’s Spirit has been poured out on humanity, and particularly on those who were least expected to be included in God’s kingdom. Gentiles, for instance, were baptized in the Spirit before the Council of Jerusalem even officially welcomed them into the church (see Acts 10.44-48).

How does tongues help?

We are all limited by language. The average American knows about 4500 English words. Some people, of course, know considerably more. Englishmen are famous for boasting about Winston Churchill’s 15000-word vocabulary, but whether you know 4500 or 45000 there’s still a limitation to what you’re able to articulate. We all know this. We know what it’s like to be at a loss for words, to have nothing to say, or to find ourselves speechless.

It’s precisely those instances for which praying in tongues is most useful.

In worship we often find ourselves calling out to God, extolling His many virtues. But there comes a point in which I, for one, begin to feel a bit silly. Once I’ve told God He’s awesome about a hundred times I find myself reaching for other words. Somehow, Lord You’re the Grooviest doesn’t quite seem to convey what I truly feel. Tongues is a very useful tool for expressing my feelings to God in these moments.

Other scenarios for which I find tongues useful include those times when I’m afraid, or stressed out, or feeling confused, or even apathetic. In moments when I don’t know what to say or what’s wrong, I pray in tongues. I pray in tongues everyday, usually in my jeep or sometimes while walking up and down the halls at work. I’m careful to do this privately because of Paul’s instructions in 1 Corinthians 14, but also out of respect for others whose experience with God differs from my own.

Finally, I often employ tongues when I’m praying on behalf of someone else. Sometimes I’m driven to pray for someone whom I know barely at all. Sometimes I pray a long time for people who need healing. Sometimes I pray for someone I know very well but that God brings into my mind for no readily identifiable reason. Rather than guessing what they might need prayer for, or even repeating my desires over and over again to God, I pray in tongues. That way, I can pray for a long time and experience a sense of God’s presence and awareness concerning both the people in question and my own heart in submission to Him.

What about Paul’s teaching on tongues? Doesn’t he limit that gift?

Paul is very clear about the silliness of excessive tongues in church services (see 1 Corinthians 14). He makes it very clear that a bunch of people all speaking in tongues in a public meeting will be of little benefit to one another unless there’s someone to interpret (vs. 27). However, Paul also makes it clear that tongues shouldn’t be prohibited (vs. 39), since he himself speaks in tongues more than all his peers (vs. 18) and strongly desires everyone to exercise and utilize this gift as well (vs. 5).

How do we receive the gift of tongues?

Tongues isn’t for everybody. Those who are gifted with the ability to pray in other tongues shouldn’t feel special, or more holy, or more privileged that other Christians. However, I have noticed that certain people greatly desire the gift of tongues. They have an inborn sense that tongues is for them, as if it’s the perfect tool for their spirituality.

If that’s you, here’s how I suggest you pray to receive the gift of tongues.

First, ask God to give it to you. Tell Him why you want to pray in tongues, and spend time each day asking for God to fill you with His Spirit in this new way.

Second, get around other people who pray in tongues and ask them to pray for you. This might be a little scary at first, and they might even give you strange-sounding advice, but that’s okay. Keep your focus on Christ while they pray for you and continue asking God for the gift.

Finally, take opportunities during worship services to begin verbally thanking and praising God in your own words, rather than just the words from the music. In my experience this is often where people first begin to pray in tongues, almost as an afterthought. They get so caught up in the presence of God that they forget their desire for the gift. That’s entirely appropriate. Remember that the gift is meant to help us know God.

God is the point, not tongues; so keep your focus on Him, not on it.

One last thing...

Luke uses exciting imagery to describe this supernatural encounter - gale force winds, moaning noises, flickering dashes of flame - but we shouldn’t get too caught up in the details. His point isn’t pyrotechnics, but spiritual transformation. They’re not the event, just the effect. The real event is the coming of the Spirit in this new way. The wind and the fire are unpredictable, wild forces; but based on other accounts in Scripture we know that God equally appears in serene, gentle manifestations as well (see 1 Kings 19 for the story of God coming in a whisper, not a whirlwind).

I do find one of these details of some consequence, however, and that is the nature of tongues of flame. The image that Luke has in mind is something like fiery teardrops placed over the head of every person present. The purpose for the image is to show that one single fire has sparked many different flames. The flames rest on individuals, but they all come from the same place.

It occurs to me that many different denominations, tribes, and church cultures have different views on the Day of Pentecost. Some give it greater weight than others, some provisionally ignore it, and some elevate its importance to that of the cross. Some emulate it as precisely as possible in their worship gatherings, and some disregard it altogether for fear of excess, while still others try and continue ministry in that same spirit without worrying too much about all the particulars.

These differing practices are like the tongues of fire falling in the upper room. Provided no one quenches the Spirit (see 1 Thessalonians 5.19), or fails to test the Spirit (see 1 John 4.1), or refuses to control themselves while experiencing the Spirit (see 1 Corinthians 14), we’re best to understand that our differences of opinion and theology concerning the precise nature and practice of Pentecost should be considered second or third-tier Christianity.

I pray in tongues. You may not. So what?

You pray in tongues and find it to be the single most important part of your prayer life. My friend John does not. So what?

Be humble and gentle, patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

Ephesians 4.2-5

God is at work. He is filling up the empty space inside of us and transforming us into faithful emissaries and dignitaries of His kingdom and His mission to heal the world. We need the Spirit to equip us and guide us and change us so we can better cooperate with the Father.

We must always be asking the Spirit for insights as to the behaviors, judgments, and postures that cause us to eclipse Christ instead of shadow him. When we do clear away the stuff, however, we uncover our “new humanity,” as Paul calls it. That new humanity speaks to the very heart of this issue of spiritual transformation, because, as the saying goes, once out with the old, back in with the new.

That’s the purpose of Pentecost: power to change, and power to change the world.

churchopoly: Now there's a fun way to feel self-righteous without leaving the comfort of your own home!

2011-06-11T17:22:00.000-04:00

this is a funny little video from my friends dan and erin

Churchopoly - watch more funny videos

fan fic

2011-06-11T15:05:00.002-04:00

fan fiction is a term used to describe amateur writing set in the world of an existing fantasy. for example, star wars was created by george lucas, but there are plenty of amateur writers who create star wars novels. these are not part of the star wars cannon. they're just made up. they're fun little stories that people write in order to share with others who also love star wars.

there's all kinds of fan fic out there: batman, superman, ironman; lost, pirates of the carribean, star trek.

there's even gilmore girls fan fiction.

wow. do i even need to comment on that?

anyway - i've been reflecting a lot on all the writing i've done over the last several years. it's a lot. 37 teaching atlases, each at approximately 45,000 words. some are much longer, some a little shorter. all told, it's just under 1.7 million words in the dave mcdonald literary collection including short stories, parables, theology, reflection, commentary, arguments and rebuttals, exegesis, travelogue, confessionals, film scripts and poetry.

when i peruse this giant body of work, it occurs to me that the best label for all that i've done is fan fic. christ rules the cosmos, and i write about it. i love the world he's created. i love the characters. i love the rules. i love the plotlines.

i'm a fan.

and like any good fan, nothing seems sweeter to me than taking a little of my own time and talent and putting my own spin on his story.

i've got a big project about to be released this summer. it's the compendium of all my work on the liturgical calendar. i've spent about twenty hours compiling all my work and condensing it. i'm paring it down to about 800 pages. it's quite an accomplishment, and i've been really happy with how much my work has helped people, but at the end of the day it's not cannon.

it's just the work of jesus christ's #1 fan.

christology

2011-05-27T19:16:00.003-04:00

found these juicy gems today...where were they in grad school when i was trying to figure all this crap out!

click on the image for an enlargement in another window

enjoy :)

re-writing the great commission (a paraphrase and an exegesis)

2011-05-15T08:14:00.003-04:00

I am the rightful ruler of everyone and everything everywhere.

Lord over the cosmos, over the planet, over the environment, culture and economy.

Lord over every living and non-living thing on earth, and over all the people who live - or have lived or ever will live - here.

Lord over angels and demons, over thrones and powers and principalities, over structures and governments and natural laws.

Lord over every person and place in the invisible worlds.

So go tell everybody. Help them understand who's at the top of the food chain. Get them learning my Ways and following me.

Baptize them in the name of the Father - who sent me, and from whom I've received my authority - and the Son and the Holy Spirit - who empowered me to claim and to demonstrate this authority and who will also help you to enforce it.

All of you should live like me, with my Spirit inside you to help.

And, as you do , you can be sure of one thing: you'll never be alone. I will always be with you through the power and the presence of my Spirit, until this season of conflict and corruption ends, and all the darkness of sin and Satan has been obliterated, and things are once more the way they were originally intended to be in the beginning.

Boom.

review: the seraph seal

2011-05-12T13:12:00.000-04:00

I LOVED this book.

Over the years end-of-the-world scenarios have become cliche. We all got a good scare out of Damien, and everyone enjoys munching on a little popcorn during the summer disaster movies, but it's been a long, long time since anyone put on their thinking cap and wondered 'what if none of those cliches held?'

Seraph Seal follows a basic formula, but in a new way. The protagonist is a pedestrian academic - think Dan Brown, here - but he gathers a crew of would-be world-savers to assist him in avoiding Armageddon. Working together, this collection of well-drawn, interesting characters is more reminiscent of a caper film (Ocean's 11, the Rat Pack) than super-hero team; but the action never stops and you find yourself caught up in a myriad of plots and sub-plots, intrigue and nuance.

For those who like religious-themed fiction (end times, book-of-Revelation, stuff) there's plenty of that here. In fact, Sweet's work is far more biblically credible and theologically consistent than any of that 'Left Behind' babble. The book could be a master's level study in symbolism and hidden meaning, and the careful reader will be rewarded over and over again with gems subtly woven into each chapter (actually, onto almost every page).

So, if you like great characters, a well-constructed plot with multiple-layers, and want to imagine a new way in which the world could end (or not!), this is the book for you. The Omen, meets the Da Vinci Code, meets The Italian Job.

prayer for america

2011-05-05T13:03:00.002-04:00

this is hilarious. i was asked to pray for my country today at the national day of prayer. i'm not usually comfortable in those scenarios, so i took some time and prepared. through a few hours of prayer and reflection i was able to pen something i truly feel and deeply believe.

only en route to the event did i discover my error. i had been asked to pray for my county, not my country.

i fessed up to the audience, telling them that perhaps god's providence could work through my stupidity.

who knows?

here is my prayer for america, the one i wrote by mistake:

Father - you are good. there is none higher, none better, no one who compares.

Yours is the name above every name.

You are the King of kings,

the Lord of lords,

and True God above all gods.

You tell us if we ‘remain in you, and your words in us, then we may ask for anything and it will be granted.’

Well...I’m asking.

I’m asking for an America I can be increasingly proud of

because I see us acting, collectively, to heal the world.

I’m asking to turn on the television and feel blessed every time I see our flag or hear our song.

I’m asking for opportunity for those who try,

who believe,

who dare,

who suffer,

who endure,

and who refuse to wallow

or wane

or be wasted in this life.

I’m asking for a place that feels like home to the world.

Safe.

Energetic.

Full of promise and hope

for those victims of despair and deceit,

hopelessness and broken promises.

I’m asking for my President to continually grow as a man of peace.

I’m asking for my government to be dominated by competent idealists

and self-sacrificing men and women

who roll up their sleeves,

put on their own pants,

and stay until things are put right.

There is no heaven for America - we are a country, not a soul - but I want to believe America can be heaven-on-earth for those who are tired of living in hell.

I want to believe there’s something worth fighting for:

Hospitality. Integrity. Virtue.

Justice. Hope. Peace.

And I want to believe we are, in fact, fighting for those things

and not for power, position, or profit.

Lord - I believe. Help me with my unbelief, as I co-operate with those who have sacrificed to make this the land of the free and home to the brave.

Amen.

forgot to mention...

2011-04-30T07:53:00.001-04:00

you can visit michael blewett's blog here:

http://www.michaelblewett.com/Under_Gods_Fingernails/Welcome.html

my friend, michael blewett: dead went noodling...

2011-04-30T07:42:00.003-04:00

my friend michael is an episcopal priest, a master carpenter, and brilliant pastor. in fact, len sweet tells me he reads michael's blog as part of his daily devotional routine. that's tough to beat, being as thousands of others are reading len for theirs.

i've come to enjoy michael's company, his insights, and his work. i think you will too. here is his piece concerning good friday. it's very easy to understand, but that may be what makes him so valuable: plain profundity.

DEATH WENT NOODLING

Cletus, Ricky and Elrod were lifelong friends. Born and raised in rural Oklahoma, not one of them had ever even ventured outside the county let alone the state. When they weren’t at work, they spent nearly every waking minute together, usually camped out on Ricky’s porch. Though they (probably) weren’t related, they were closer than brothers, and they fought like it, too. Once their daily case of beer was about three-quarters kicked, they’d start to argue. And the question they argued about was always the same: which of them was the best at ‘noodling.’

For the uninitiated, noodling is “hand fishing,” usually for very large and ornery catfish. It’s as basic and raw as fly fishing is subtle and complex. You strip down to your shorts, jump in the river, and shove your arm into whatever underwater crevasse you come across. If there’s a catfish inside, especially an angry one guarding eggs, it’ll bite down on your hand, or even half way up your arm. Then you just haul it in…if it does drown you first.⁠1

Noodling can be dangerous at times, because there’s lots of things that inhabit underwater holes besides catfish, like big snapping turtles, water moccasins, razor-toothed beavers and even alligators. More than a few folks have given fingers, hands or even half and arm for the love of the sport.

Cletus, Ricky and Elrod were evenly matched. Although Ricky held the record for the largest fish, Elrod was always the one who’d discover the small caves that no one else had ever found; he’d even lost the pinky on his right hand two years ago to something that lurked in the river. One Friday afternoon, those three knocked off work early and knocked back a few. True to form, they started arguing about noodling. After a while it got out of hand and they nearly came to blows. So they piled, half-drunk, into Cletus’ truck and sped toward the river.

Throwing off their shoes and shirts, each of them swore they’d prove, once and for all, which of them was the best. It wasn’t long before Ricky hauled up a nice thity-pounder. Only fifteen minutes later, Cletus caught hold of a 50-lb monster than darned-near drowned him. Just then, Elrod, true to his talent, reached his arm into a new hole that he’d never found before. And with a splash and a gurgle, Elrod was gone. It happened in a heartbeat; something had consumed Elrod. Cletus and Ricky locked arms, and Cletus reached into the mysterious darkness. Ricky’s arm was almost pulled out of its socket as Cletus, too, disappeared into the murky deep.

With a drunken cry of rage, Ricky hurled himself toward the hole and instantaneously felt his entire body engulfed in the maw of something huge, unknown and immensely powerful. The great fish swirled and rolled Ricky around in his mouth, stripping him naked and scraping his flesh. Inexplicably, Ricky felt himself being vomited out, and landed face down on the muddy bank.

Blinking away the mud, Ricky’s eyes locked on the eyes of the great fish, a fish unlike anything he had ever seen. With just a glance, Ricky knew the fish had spared him on purpose. It had stripped Ricky of absolutely everything, right down to the suit God gave him; he felt utterly powerless. As the fish swam up the great river, it glanced back at Ricky with a look that said, unmistakably, “I will come back.”

At three o’clock on Friday, Jesus breathed his last. Drunk with their victory, Sin, Death and the Devil decided to knock off early. They’d certainly earned a little recreation time. But, seeing as though they hadn’t actually done anything fun in, like, forever, they couldn’t figure out what to do. So they went to hang out on the Devil’s porch.

Now, even though these three hung out a lot, they didn’t really like each other very much. In fact, Death had really been having a rough time dealing with Sin and the Devil. Ever since this guy named Lazarus had busted out of Death’s prison, Sin and the Devil had teased him mercilessly. Quite frankly, Death was feeling pretty bad about himself. And since nothing made Death feel as good as working, he decided to make his rounds at the graveyard. Sin and the Devil, thoroughly bored by now, tagged along.

They had never really watched Death go about his business; he was good. Really good, really quick. He had mastered this technique of reaching his hands into the tombs and, without even looking, would deftly snatch what was his. Sin thought it looked kind of fun, so he asked if he could give it a whirl. Death pointed to a tomb, “Try that one. It’s brand new.”

But as soon as Sin reached his gnarled hand inside, he vanished. One second he was there, then…gone. The Devil looked alarmed, but Death reassured him, “Don’t worry. He might have latched on to a prophet or something. They can really put up a fight sometimes. But just in case, lock arms with me so I’ve got some more leverage.”

Death reached inside and felt himself engulfed…consumed….swallowed up. He felt like…nothing. The Devil, too, was encased in an unbearable, blazing light. It pummeled him, stripped him, rolled him around then spit him outside the tomb, naked, beaten and very afraid.

1600 years ago, the brilliant and eloquent St. John Chrysostom preached in his Easter sermon,

“[Hell] is in an uproar, for it is now made captive.

Hell took a body, and discovered God.”⁠2

Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death and giving life to those in the tomb.

And he will come back.

1 The world record for noodling catfish is 123 lbs. 9 oz,caught in 1998 in Independence, Kansas. http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/young_naturalists/monsters/index.html

2 http://orthodoxinfo.com/death/resurrection_icon.aspx

easter sunday, from thecommontruth.org

2011-04-30T07:41:00.001-04:00

Easter Sunday from Taylor Keating on Vimeo.

holy saturday, from thecommontruth.org

2011-04-30T07:40:00.000-04:00

Holy Saturday from Taylor Keating on Vimeo.

good friday, from thecommontruth.org

2011-04-30T07:39:00.000-04:00

Good Friday from Taylor Keating on Vimeo.

maundy thursday, from the commontruth.org

2011-04-30T07:38:00.001-04:00

Maundy Thursday from Taylor Keating on Vimeo.

spy wednesday, from thecommontruth.org

2011-04-20T10:10:00.000-04:00

Spy Wednesday from Taylor Keating on Vimeo.

holy week timeline

2011-04-20T10:09:00.000-04:00

great tuesday, thecommontruth.org

2011-04-19T08:19:00.000-04:00

fig monday, thecommontruth.org

2011-04-18T10:24:00.000-04:00

Fig Monday from Taylor Keating on Vimeo.

palm sunday, from thecommontruth.org

2011-04-18T10:22:00.001-04:00

Palm Sunday from Taylor Keating on Vimeo.

"Of" but not "In"

2011-04-17T06:46:00.001-04:00

One of the most oft-quoted scriptures is "be in the world, but not of the world."

In our best understanding that means something like 'live normally, among normal people; but don't be corrupted by the values of secular society."

in other words, do the stuff everyone does but do it differently. let something other than materialism or fame or lust or whatever animate you as you live.

i think, however, that many christian people have gotten this exactly backwards. we often try to live OUT of the world, but find ourselves still living ACCORDING to the values of the world.

for instance...

on a recent trip to florida i saw a large bilboard that said "christian actors and singers and musicians wanted...this is what everyone in hollywood is after."

if i'm honest, i really really really hope that this bilboard means
"hollywood is presently open to the gospel in a new way"

but i'm quite certain it doesn't.

i've noticed a saddening trend among christian people - not only in the performing arts, but especially there - to emphasize their christian identity while chasing after the dreams of sex, money, and power. the christian music industry seems to be among the worst offenders, with pop princesses and boy bands galore, each trying to find a way to cross-over into the secular marketplace.

to be clear - i don't think it's bad to want success, or even want to be an artist with a large audience. i just think we ought to acknowledge that when we [a] isolate and segregate ourselves from the rest of the population by signing with 'christian' labels to do 'christian' things we're no longer being obedient to be IN the world; likewise, when we [b] use our 'christian' stuff to try and be famous, get rich, search after outside validation, etc then we must acknowledge we are now OF the world.

i have lots of grace for people who fall into this trap, but i would like to point out that this is, in fact, a trap. and that, by falling into it, we're disobedient in at least 2 directions.

we've got to think critically about who we are and what we're doing, and we've got to recognize that jesus' instructions about "in" but not "of" aren't meant to only be a warning, but also a mandate.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

my favorite books come alive on hbo...

2011-04-04T15:05:00.000-04:00

Game of Thrones Exclusive Preview

book i read on my trip: part two

2011-03-27T07:06:00.001-04:00

here is the rest of the books i pounded out on my trip...

the naked gospel, by andrew farley
if you grew up hyper-conservative, then this is a good book to burst your bubble. i didn't think it was anything special, but then i'm probably not the target audience. cool cover tho :)

the contrarian's guide to knowing god, by larry osborne
this was GREAT. larry usually writes stuff for church leaders, but this book is for normal people. it's about how to know god better, without buying all the lies and half-truths usually expounded upon by 'experts.' i loved it and would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone.

the compound effect, by darren hardy
this is kind of a standard 'here's how i do it' business book. hardy really pushes hard for people to be industrious and single-minded, which is good, but he doesn't sound like a particularly healthy human being. i'd hate to be his son.

the parables of dr. seuss, by robert short
i like dr. seuss, so i thought this would be cool. it was moderately cool, but mostly a bit obvious and a bit 'stretchy.'

incarnation and resurrection, by paul molnar
this book was a summary of several famed theologians' beliefs about the subject. it was super dull. i'm guessing it was the author's phd these turned into a book. it probably shouldn't have been.

a failure of nerve, by edwin friedman
i'm going to go back and re-read this boo because i loved it so much. SO MUCH. most business books i find to be more of the 'same-old, same-old' but this one was different, providing substantiated research + intelligent insight into the reason why most 'leaders' don't have the guts to do what needs to be done.

alright...back to writing :)

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

book i read on my trip: part one

2011-03-26T15:20:00.002-04:00

i always look forward to going on trips so i can get some reading done...here's a few of the gems i polished off on this trip

the seraph seal, by len sweet
this is len's first novel and i LOVED it. please go and pre-order it on amazon. it's like a cross between the da vinci code and the left behind series. smarter than dan brown, better than tim lahaye. it also has a little bit of 'the omen' mixed in with some fun, end-of-the-world-in-2012 bits mixed in. woot.

love wins, by rob bell
i used to really like rob bell, but this book is forcing me to reevaluate. rob's clever, but i think too clever in this book. he departs from orthodox christianity pretty heavily and i'm not a fan. i think we'll have a night at the winds to discuss his book for anyone who's interested. since rob's church isn't too far from ours, i think it's probably appropriate for us to get some of this out in the open.

space, time, and resurrection, by thomas torrance
this is a brainy book on the resurrection and the asension. i loved it!

he ascended into heaven, by tim perry and aaron perry
this is a very accessible book on the ascension, but it was only so-so.

the garden of god, by alejandro Garcia-rivera
i LOVED this book which explores creation-centered spirituality. i think it's one of my top 5 this year.

thy kingdom connected, by dwight friesen
honestly dwight is one of the smartest people alive, but i don't find this book helpful. if you've never understood how people can justify saying that 'everything is connected' then this book is for you. if that statement doesn't really trouble you, then the book will likely not be useful.

alright...more later

The Thomist Church (a legend)

2011-03-26T14:25:00.000-04:00

The Jewish poet Bardesan wrote a famous book about 175 years after Thomas died, chronicling Thomas’ exploits in India. For various reasons – many of them theological – this book is not recommended reading (Bardesan, apparently, confused Jesus Christ with a kind of Kung Fu Cosmic Wizard…which, while exciting, is pretty bogus). The Acts of Thomas do, however, tell us a historically accurate recounting of Thomas missionary journey into India and what is now Afghanistan.

Legend has it that after the Ascension, the disciples divided the world so they could each spread the message of Jesus across the globe. Thomas was chosen to minister in India, but didn't want to go ashamedly because he was something of a racist. Jesus appeared to Thomas in a vision, however, and instructed him to go anyway but Thomas stubbornly refused, saying: I will go wherever you send me, so long as there are no Indians.

Around that time, there was a wealthy merchant from India visiting Jerusalem. He had been send by King Gundaphorus to secure skilled carpenters who could work on the King’s new palace. Thomas was such a carpenter, but refused to go with Abbanes (the merchant). Jesus, however, approached Abbanes in the marketplace and told him Thomas was his slave. He sold Thomas to Abbanes, who then proceeded to find Thomas in the market and confront him.

Abbanes cornered Thomas and asked him if Christ was his master. Thomas told him that indeed he was, and then Abbanes informed the disciple that he had been sold and would now travel back to India to work on King Gundaphorus’ palace.

Thomas said nothing in reply, but did travel to India and led the project on the King’s home. The King gave him vast amounts of money and conscripted hundreds of workmen to help him, but Thomas gave all the money to the poor. He told the King the palace was coming along nicely, but Gundaphorus began to get suspicious. In the end the King sent for Thomas and asked him: have you finished my palace? To which Thomas replied: Yes I have. You may go and see it. Not now, of course, but when you have departed this life you will see the mansion I have built for you in heaven.

At first the King was furious, but his anger subsided and he was won over to the cause of Christ.

This is how Christian spirituality first came to India, and how the Thomist Christian Church was formed.

hell...sheesh

2011-03-25T20:39:00.002-04:00

with rob bell's new book "love wins" available now, i've gone back through some of my old posts and added a new label ("concerning hell"). i don't really want to talk about hell, or get any further embroiled in the rob b/hell controversy, but i am getting asked about it a lot and i thought that re-labeling some of my stuff would make things a little more expedient.

one final thing: i never really like to talk about hell without offering the much sweeter, much more beautiful vision of heaven. so, here's my favorite piece of the bible to balance out all this hell-stuff:

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, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell 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.”

He said to me: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life. Those who are victorious will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my children.

Revelation 21.1-7

beneath still earth

2011-03-25T20:33:00.002-04:00

a few years ago i wrote a short story concerning hell and the 'hell on earth.' it's pretty graphic, so i'd advise you to stay clear of it unless your really, really curious and really, really aware of the fact that this about the most awful stuff i can imagine.

let's give it an R rating.

anyway, the point of the book was to try and reconcile the diverse biblical teaching on hell with the many examples of hell-on-earth we see played around us every day. rob bell's book "love wins" alludes to this hellishness, but i have some reservations about his claim that there really isn't a hell that people can go to after this life is over.

anyway...if you're up for an R-rated storyline about a priest who wakes up in hell and is totally confused about how he got there, then you can download this beauty by clicking through the link in the embed code. the link actually takes you to a place where you can buy a full-color, hardcover copy...but it's super expensive.

anyway, please don't show this to your children :)

CONCERNING HELL AND FINAL JUDGMENT V

2011-03-25T20:29:00.001-04:00

Common Questions about Hell

What about Purgatory?

Purgatory is an “in-between” state in Catholic theology meant to delineate the space between when we die and when we go to heaven. It is a condition in which the souls of Christians are made ready for heaven.

Evangelical Christians find the doctrine of purgatory suspicious for three reasons: [1] because it’s not found in the canon of the Scriptures, only in the apocrypha (specifically 2 Maccabees 12.41-16); [2] because the doctrine didn’t appear for almost 1100 years after Jesus left the earth; and [3] because purgatory depends upon special “revelation” given to the Catholic church during the Middle Ages. By appealing to the authority of the church at a time when it was selling indulgences to release souls from torment, this doctrine has no credible basis for belief among Protestants.

What about people who have never heard about Jesus—do they go to Hell?

Jesus said “no one comes to the Father except through me,” meaning that there is only one way to escape Hell and enter Heaven: a relationship with Jesus.

However, just as Jesus is the only way to Heaven, we must understand that there are many ways to find Jesus. Some find Jesus through intellectual belief, some through dreams (like Pharoah), some through visions (like Balaam), or prophesies or strange experiences.

We cannot overlook the creativity of God to get the gospel out. God wants people to be saved and is capable of revealing Himself to all in order for every single person to be given a justifiable opportunity to embrace their Creator.

What about babies? Do they go to Hell?

This is a disturbing question that’s asked a lot, especially among people who grew up in very religious homes where there is a lot of anger and hellfire and brimstone kind of talk. If they lose a child, they get terrified that the baby is going to end up in hell.

Consider this, however: “Shall not the Judge of all the Earth do what is Just?” (Genesis 18.25).

Since we know God is good, and He is the Judge of all, we can be confident that God will not unfairly damn any soul – especially innocents or invalids – to eternal torment.

In 2 Samuel 12, we read about King David’s son dying as an infant. It is a sad story, but in the midst of that sadness we read about David’s assurance that he will see his child in the next life. David has this unshakeable confidence that he will be with his dead child in the presence of God.

Finally, we know that Jesus had a special concern for children. Jesus gathers the children to himself and said: “Suffer not the little children to come unto me” (Matthew 19.14).

If you know someone who has lost a child and they’re worried about this (God forbid that you would ever be in that situation or that they would), you can give them all manner of comfort.

Is there a last chance for redemption at the time of our death?

No. There is a spectacular responsibility on the way you live right now. Live now the way you want to live for eternity. If what you want ultimately is to be with God then, then you must begin to be with God now.

Is there anything wrong with “Last Rites?”

Not necessarily. In fact, I think the idea of giving your life to God and committing your soul into His care with your dying breaths is a beautiful and sincere notion. Some people, however, use the Last Rites as a cop out. They plan to live like fools, rejecting God in this life, and then quickly beg for forgiveness at the end to sneak their way into God’s good graces. In a case like this, which – sadly – is surprisingly common, we must ask ourselves how sincere our “last-minute” repentance truly is—if it is insincere, we risk Hell. Are you willing to risk an eternity in torment on a gamble like that?

Do you believe eternal positions are fixed at death forever more? Why or why not?

The people who go to Hell are there because they don’t want to be with God. The Scriptures really seem to indicate that once you are there in Hell, there is no way out.

I love God, but have made mistakes and still prospered. Am I going to Hell?

That’s such a sad, sad question. I, too, love God and I have made mistakes and still prospered. I make mistakes all the time. I get mad at my kids. I lose my cool. Ben jokingly said that it’s never safe to take me to a conference of church leaders because it’s like taking a Pit Bull to a playground…you’re just waiting for an “incident” to occur.

I am riddled with sin and God has still prospered me. I feel so gracious, so grateful and thankful to God for the life I have. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier. I don’t think my family has ever been better. That’s what we call grace—God’s grace for me, loving me in spite of my sin that while I was still a sinner, Christ died for me. He died just because he loved me in all my crap and all my garbage. He would die again tomorrow for me, for the person I am now. Whatever good things in this life I enjoy, I enjoy because of his grace, his common grace poured out to all humanity.

The last question I would separate from the previous statement.

“Am I going to Hell?”

I don’t know. I don’t even know who you are. Even if I knew you, I wouldn’t know if you’re going to Hell. The question is: Are you right with Jesus? If you make mistakes, do you repent? Do you thank God for his grace? Is your life oriented towards Jesus, to make him Lord, to confess that he is Lord? Do your actions belie your belief that he is, in fact, raised from the dead and God is, in fact, at work in you?

What does it mean that Christ descended into Hell?

Jesus proved his love for us by descending into Hell – a theological bit of pizzazz rarely talked about, though ultimately very significant.

Here it is in a nutshell:

We believe that Jesus died and descended into the depths of Hades (Ephesians 4.8-10). He did not suffer, for his suffering was completed on the cross (John 19.30). He preached to those tormented because of their sin (1 Peter 3.18, 20; 4.4), spreading the fragrance of himself even into Hell (2 Corinthians 2.14-16). He departed (Acts 2.27, 31), bearing the keys of Hades (Revelation 1.18) and destroying Death itself (Hebrews 2.14).

The doctrine of the descent into Hell is first and foremost a doctrine about love, God’s love for us, and the power of that love to go to all lengths, to descend to all depths and to go through virtually every barrier in order to redeem a wounded, huddled, frightened, paranoid, alienated, and unfree humanity.

Did God create Hell? If so, why did He create something from which we need saving?

The most accurate theological answer is that Hell is not necessarily a place that God created. It’s a place from which God has withdrawn. It’s the place where he is not, rather than the place where everything is as he wants it to be.

So, why did he need something from which we need saving? The question is maybe misplaced. The question is: Will you live with him? That’s the real question.

If you’re a Christian and you continually sin, is there ever a point where you can cross the line, where you sin too much and are condemned to Hell?

No, you can’t sin too much for the grace of God to make up the difference. There is always grace for you (cf 2 Corinthians 12.9). Think about when Jesus told his disciples to forgive not only seven times seven, but seventy times seven (cf Matthew 18.22).

When I worked for Campus Crusade, we used to say that question is misplaced. Imagine that in order for you to get to heaven, figuratively speaking, you would have to live on the moon and the only way you could get to the moon was to jump high enough to arrive there under your own power. In other words, you had to be good enough or athletic enough or whatever super power enough to jump from here to the moon. Some of you might be able to jump only 6 inches and some of you might be able to jump four feet, but nobody can ever jump all the way to the moon.

So, in effect, the question of our relative sinfulness is moot, because nobody is sinless enough or not quite so sinful as to ever make up the difference. God’s grace covers for everybody, no matter how crappy you are, which I’m particularly happy about.

The question as to whether there is ever a point where you can cross the line or sin too much—the question refers to that scripture about the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. There’s a blasphemy of Holy Spirit—one sin which can never be forgiven (Mark 3.29). Basically, if you do this one sin, you blaspheme the Holy Spirit and automatically go to hell. The whole idea of the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is the ultimate rejection of God.

The only way you can blaspheme the Holy Spirit is to reject God, reject God, reject God, reject God, and then die. Even if you were still alive and rejecting God and rejecting God and rejecting God, there’s still grace. There’s still grace for everybody. There’s still space for everybody, because Jesus, again, is standing there saying, “Come, come to the banquet. There’s room for everyone.”

So, if you’re a Christian and continually sin, is there ever a point where you can cross the line or sin too much? No, not if you keep fighting and trying to live as God intends you to live, not if you keep repenting, not if you keep inviting the Spirit to change you. Just don’t give up.

CONCERNING HELL AND FINAL JUDGMENT IV

2011-03-25T20:28:00.000-04:00

How could god send anyone to Hell?

If God is good and loving and values his creation, how can he justify sending anyone there?

I suppose we want to just beg the question a little bit, because God doesn’t really send anyone to Hell. People choose Hell. In fact, in 2 Peter 3:9 we’re told God doesn’t want anyone to go to Hell. His desire is for everyone to experience the free gift of his love, his grace.

Romans 5 tells us that Jesus did everything possible to keep people out of Hell including dying on the cross in our place, becoming sin for us so we would never have to suffer punishment for all the stupid stuff we’ve done.

So, does God send anyone to Hell? No. Emphatically, no. But there is still a Hell and people still end up there. What are we supposed to with that?

It’s all about choice

C. S. Lewis, the philosopher and writer, wrote a fantastic book on this topic called The Great Divorce. In the book Lewis paints a picture that the only people who are ever in Hell are the people who choose to go there. It’s a very biblically consistent picture.

God comes to each of us in the person of Jesus Christ, through the power and presence of His Holy Spirit, and says, “I want you to have the best life imaginable. I created you, I love you, I want you to have:

Love,

Harmony,

Fulfillment,

Satisfaction,

Pleasure,

Untold wonder,

Joy,

Exuberance,

and Expectation

in this life and in the life to come.”

This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.

Deuteronomy 30.19

For as the Father raises the dead and gives life to them, even so the Son gives life to whom He will.

John 5.21

God offers life, but there’s a condition attached: it only comes through Jesus, by the Spirit, submitting to the will of the Father. God says, “You get life by virtue of being connected to me. So choose life, choose me.”

There’s another choice…the choice of saying, “All that sounds cool, but I don’t like the part where I have to get God in order to get all that other stuff. Because I don’t want God, I’m willing to risk having or not having that abundant life on my own.” There are really only two choices. By virtue of not choosing God we choose something else.

So, we might say that Hell is for those who persistently choose not-God, which is the same as persistently choosing other gods or choosing to be your own god.

It’s actually quite difficult to get into Hell if we take the teaching of the Bible seriously. That doesn’t mean that all kinds of people get into heaven by accident. It does mean you have to really choose to walk way from God. As Jesus said, “Whoever is not against us is for us” (Mark 9.40). You really have to pick not-him. You have to say “No” to God.

Hell, in many ways, is simply a matter of God giving His creatures what they want. If you don’t want to live with God now, why you would want to live with God for all eternity? Biblically speaking, that’s really what heaven is— it is the place where God is. Hell, in many ways, is the extrapolation of our selfishness, our desire to rule ourselves. It’s that selfishness and that “No” to God extrapolated through all eternity.

God doesn’t just get mad at a bunch of people and send down the holy sledge hammer to squish them and then scrape them off into the fireplace. In fact, Jesus tells this fantastic story about a master giving a banquet. This master puts on a fantastic feast and invites all the special people in the community to come. “Come,” he says, “the feast is ready, prepared especially for you. Time to eat!” Nobody invited to the feast goes—they just don’t show up. That’s the picture Jesus gives about who gets into heaven and who doesn’t.

The Kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused to come.

Then he sent some more servants and said, 'Tell those who have been invited that I have prepared my dinner: My oxen and fattened cattle have been butchered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding banquet.'

But they paid no attention and went off—one to his field, another to his business. The rest seized his servants, mistreated them and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned their city.

Then he said to his servants, 'The wedding banquet is ready, but those I invited did not deserve to come. Go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find.' So the servants went out into the streets and gathered all the people they could find, both good and bad, and the wedding hall was filled with guests.

But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing wedding clothes. 'Friend,' he asked, 'how did you get in here without wedding clothes?' The man was speechless.

Then the king told the attendants, 'Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.'

For many are invited, but few are chosen.

Matthew 22.2-14

God doesn’t send anyone to Hell. C. S. Lewis also said, “In this life people do not choose God and in the next life they cannot any longer choose God.” They choose something other than God. We find here the spiritual truth that we irreversibly become the decisions that we make. The decisions we make over time add up to something. We get stuck not only in a fate that seems undesirable to us later, but even in this life we get stuck living a life we don’t want because we consistently and persistently choose not-God. We choose Option B. We choose something other than him.

This is what Paul is referring to in Romans 1:18 where he talks about the wrath of God being poured out over all humanity. That sounds a little harsh until we realize that God’s “wrath” is simply God giving people what they want:

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness…therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another…because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts…furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done…although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

Romans 1.18,24,26,28,32

So, if you’re selfish, then the wrath of God for you looks like God letting you be as selfish a jerk as possible and suffering the full consequences of your selfishness.

If you’re an adulterer, the wrath of God for you looks like God letting you sleep with whoever you want and suffer the full consequences of the children and the relationships involved.

If you’ve got a little problem with gambling, then the wrath of God for you looks like God letting you lose everything or be corrupted by everything you win.

So, when we talk about the wrath of God and mistakenly think God is out to punish everybody or get everybody, it is actually God no longer protecting everyone from the full measure of their actions. Hell, then, is the place where God no longer offers you protection. He takes his hands off and you suffer the full measure of consequences for your selfishness, your greed, your isolation, your horror, whatever.

Hell on earth

Let me give you an example of what this looks like in real life. We had this old gal a few years ago, she was in her late eighties or nineties, who had been jilted as a young lady by her fiancée. To hear this old lady describe herself in her youth, she was the belle of the ball. She was engaged to this handsome young man and they were all set to be married, but in the process of their courtship her fiancée fell in love with her sister. He decided to break off the engagement to marry the sister instead.

Sixty-five years later this old lady is living alone in a musty old apartment with a bunch of cats. There are pictures of herself in her beauty days all over the place. She’s bitter and angry because she refuses to forgive her sister. She says, “For six decades they’ve been calling and asking for forgiveness and I won’t give it to them. I won’t even pick up the phone. I won’t see them at Christmas. I won’t see them at New Year’s. I’m going to make them suffer for what they did to me.”

Who do you think is really suffering in that instance?

The people who ended up together, who admittedly maybe didn’t get off to the best start, but who have had children and a life and Christmas and Thanksgiving and feast days and presents and memories and home movies and Polaroid’s together . . .are they suffering? Or was the old lady with her cats, surrounded by pictures of how beautiful she used to be, refusing to let go of her hatred and her bitterness?

That old lady is in Hell.

We’ve seen how the First Testament of the Bible used the word Sheol to describe Hell. It literally means “the grave” and the way you ended your life is the way you would spend eternity. So, if you ended your life on a trajectory of bitterness and misery and unforgiveness, then Hell for you was an eternity of bitterness and misery and unforgiveness.

In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis talks famously about the example of Napoleon Bonaparte being in the furthest, most remote region of Hell where no one can bother him. He doesn’t have to see anyone else because the furthest most remote region of Hell is where Napoleon is unquestionably the emperor of everything. Everyone around him, which is to say no one, does exactly what he says. That’s Hell—this phantom-like, spectral, empty existence where you get what you want for eternity. How very different is that to the picture Jesus gives in the Gospel of Matthew of a feast and a banquet where everybody is ready, where everyone is excited, where everyone is welcome, where everyone gets to eat their fill and be in the presence of God, in the presence of life.

Deuteronomy talks about choosing life, Jesus talks about the opportunity to have life and to have life more abundantly, God extends to us the promise of once again being unified with our creator and join the fullness of life. What a huge contrast to the other alternative, which is getting what we want so long as we don’t have to be with God.

But Hell is not merely a place of rejecting God, and this is where Lewis gets it wrong. This is where I’m ashamed to say for most of my life I’ve been getting it wrong. Hell will hurt. There are two kinds of pain in Hell. There is the pain of loss, meaning at some point you’re going to wake up to the fact that you’ve made a bad choice, or maybe a hundred and fifty thousand bad choices. There’s the pain of sense, meaning everyone gets resurrected (John 5), both the just and the unjust, both the righteous and the wicked. There will be physical pain in Hell because the “resurrected unjust” will have physical bodies that will not be renewed but – instead – deteriorate over the eons of torment and disregard.

The pain of loss

The pain of loss is like when you do something that hurts someone and you can’t take it back. I had this girlfriend in eighth grade and, like most eighth grade boys, I was insensitive. I made a joke about her weight and when I saw her after we graduated high school, she reminded me about that comment and how it stayed with her. She had wrestled for years with low self-esteem and battled bulimia because of her inability to cope with the pressures that I (and others) had placed on her to be thin and pretty. It was then that I realized the things we say actually hurt people for a long time and there’s no way to make it right.

In the movie Crash there’s this terrifying situation in which an angry elderly gentleman goes to shoot a Hispanic deliveryman. He’s mad at this guy because he thinks he broke into his store and stole a bunch of stuff. He didn’t, but the elderly shopkeeper thinks he did. He drives up to this Hispanic deliveryman’s house, takes out a pistol, and pulls the trigger just as the deliveryman’s beautiful little daughter jumps into her daddy’s arms and holds onto his neck to protect him. Thankfully, the shopkeeper didn’t know the gun was full of blanks.

That feeling of finally getting revenge on the person who screwed you over, doing everything to spray his brains all over the lawn only to realize you just shot a kid—that’s going to be Hell.

When you realize that when you told her she was fat, when you told him he was a bad father, when you said, “I’m not your son anymore,” and you realize how much damage you did—that’s Hell. That’s the pain of loss.

The pain of sense

The pain of sense, on the other hand, is physical pain. Hell in the Bible is described as being:

Fire (Mt 13.42)

Darkness (Mt 25.30)

Punishment (Rev 14.10-11)

Exclusion from God’s presence (Mt 7.23)

Restlessness (Rev 14.11)

Second death (Rev 2.1)

Weeping and gnashing of teeth (Mt 13.42)

All of those things, by the way, are just metaphors and they’re acknowledged as such, but because they’re metaphors that doesn’t mean they’re not describing something horrible. People don’t use metaphors when they could use just use plain language to describe something. The fact is we don’t have language for how bad Hell is.

Somebody once said to me, “Yes, but God wouldn’t just create a big torture chamber in Hell and torture people.” I said, “No, I don’t think he would. It seems like he’s strongly opposed to violence. It seems very strange to me that God would set up a torture chamber and be after everybody.” If it’s true we all get resurrected, some to everlasting life and some to everlasting judgment, what do you think happens when all the bad people who have been resurrected live together? What kind of neighborhood will it be where Stalin, Hitler, and Napoleon get to play cards together after work?

Let’s look at Matthew 25:31-46. This is Jesus describing the final judgment about who gets in and who gets out to heaven. The recognition of loss, the anguish and torment I’ve been talking about is best represented in this Scripture:

When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then He will sit on the throne of His glory. All the nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. And He will set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on His right hand, ‘Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.’

Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink? When did we see You a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe You? Or when did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?’ And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.’

Then He will also say to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels: for I was hungry and you gave Me no food; I was thirsty and you gave Me no drink; I was a stranger and you did not take Me in, naked and you did not clothe Me, sick and in prison and you did not visit Me.’

Then they also will answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to You?’ Then He will answer them, saying, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’

And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.

Matthew 25.31-46

I want to stop there for just a moment. Notice, in contrast to what many of us loosely believe, that at the final judgment we are judged on our works, on the way we live, and by what we actually do. Remember that the outcome of our judgment according the Book of Romans and to Jesus’ teaching later on in the Gospels, particularly in Luke 12, is based on God’s grace and whether or not we are associated with Jesus. It’s Jesus’ grace that “gets us in” to heaven. But when the time comes for judgment, we are judged by what we do.

The purpose of that judgment is for us to show what it looks to be filled with the Spirit of Jesus. The way you treat your husband, the way you are at work, the way you treat your friends, the way you treat your children, is all going to matter and most of the time most of us don’t think our little mistakes really add up to much.

So then, the question about whether or not God sends people to Hell is answered.

No, he doesn’t send them to Hell. We choose Hell. And once we choose Hell, we quickly realize that it is a place of “everlasting punishment.”

I’m saying this again here because nearly everyone’s impression of how people end up in Hell is all wrong and I want to drive this point home. We choose Hell by choosing our selves over God. We choose Hell by choosing false gods over the True One. We choose Hell by choosing not to be with God. Hell is the extrapolation of our selfishness, our sin, our pride, our violence, and that extrapolation of who we really are is bad, causing incredible emotional and physical suffering.

Remember, we are holistic beings comprised of spirit, mind, and body. These are all interconnected. Mental and emotional anguish – the realization of loss and the resulting weeping of gnashing – takes its toll in the here and now; there’s no reason to think that this same mental and emotional anguish will not take its toll later on. Even though we will receive new bodies, if those new bodies are resurrected into judgment (cf. John 5) we have to understand that they will be subject to the same “toll-taking” as the bodies we have now. Hell’s physical pain may largely result from the torment we suffer mentally and spiritually and be experienced as being bathed in fire.

Judgment of sin

Some might say, “This all sounds a little impish or vindictive on God’s part, like he’s bloodthirsty and just itching for us to finally get what we deserve. Is this God’s bloody judgment on humanity?” No, it’s his bloody judgment on sin. God, in his justice and in his holiness and his righteousness, cannot abide sin at all.

We have the same sense of justice inside of us. If somebody told you a serial rapist was about to go free and move next door to your house, how would you feel? You would be infuriated because of your sense of justice. But because of the Fall and our own sin, our sense of justice is cracked up a bit; it’s not quite as properly put together as with Him.

God cannot abide our sin so he has to judge it. In order for the world to be the way God wants it be, in order for you to have the best life possible, to have life and life more abundantly, God has to get rid of sin. He has to judge it.

The only time we suffer God’s judgment of sin is when we refuse to let go of our sin. If we let go of our sin and take hold of the life God offers us in Christ Jesus through his Spirit, then we have nothing to be afraid of.

Recall that Jesus paints the picture of Hell as being like a burning garbage dump and his intends for sin to get tossed out and burned up with the trash. People worry: “Will I be burned up in judgment?” Only if you refuse to let go of your sin.

The fire of God’s judgment is a refining fire. It is a fire of purification – like the fire used to refine gold (cf. Malachi 3.2). We will all walk through fire. Some of us will be refined by it, some of us will be destroyed by it. If we let go of our sin, God will destroy it. If we cling to our sin, we will be destroyed along with it. All of us that is not the gold of Jesus will get burned up in the fire of judgment.

The Way

Just so you have something to hold onto, something to pull out of all of this, what I really want you to know about is not Hell, but life. I want you to believe that Jesus did not design you for Hell. He did not design you to be burned up, to be tormented, to be tortured now nor later. He designed you for life. He designed you for goodness. He designed you for relationship. He designed you for peace. He designed you for harmony. All the crap you go through right now in this life—the Hell on earth, the way you feel like Hell, when everything’s shot to Hell—all of that is going to be fixed.

According to Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:15 and Romans 8, according to Isaiah 65 and 66, all the stuff that is wrong is going to be set right in the new creation, what we commonly refer to as heaven. I want you to know that there’s something better in store. So, please:

Trust in Jesus.

Hold onto Jesus.

Pick the team of Jesus.

Accept the way of life Jesus taught us.

Study the Bible.

Listen to teachings.

Fill yourself full of the teachings of the way of Jesus.

Even though it’s going to be mean sacrifices, even though it’s going to hard, even though it’s going to be counter-cultural in ways, you’re never going to have to worry about Hell. Just live the way Jesus tells you to live.

Lastly, and most importantly, accept the help of Jesus, the guidance of Spirit of Jesus, and submit to the will of the Father. That’s maybe a bunch of gobbledygook, and I don’t have time to explain it here, but it just means that in every moment of every day say, “Lord, I want your will to be done in me now, so my will doesn’t screw it up and I have to suffer consequences later.”

CONCERNING HELL AND FINAL JUDGMENT III

2011-03-25T20:27:00.001-04:00

Three common errors about Hell

In a church like ours, there are three common errors about Hell.

1. People like us tend to think there is no Hell.

2. People like us tend to think if there is a Hell,

nobody goes there (universalism).

3. People like us tend to think if there is a Hell and some people go there,

it’s probably not that bad (annihilationism).

I’d like to deal with each of these three issues in turn, examining the biblical teaching on Hell.

The first error

First, let’s talk about the fact that Hell does, in fact, exist according not only to our Scriptures (in general), but to the teachings of Jesus (specifically). This, by the way, blew my mind. I didn’t know that Jesus talked about Hell more than anybody else. Half of Jesus’ parables have to do with Hell. Thirteen percent of Jesus’ teachings are specifically about Hell. With the exception of money, Jesus talks more about Hell than any other topic.

Let’s begin in Matthew 13:41-43 with Jesus’ teachings concerning the final judgment and Hell:

The Son of Man will send out His angels, and they will gather out of His Kingdom all things that offend, and those who practice lawlessness, and will cast them into the furnace of fire. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine forth as the sun in the Kingdom of their Father. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!

This makes it pretty clear: we cannot deny that the Bible refers to a Hell. We cannot deny the fact that Jesus preached about the final judgment and that there would be those who to Hell.

So much for error number one.

The second error

The second major error for people like us is we think nobody goes there. We think eventually everybody ends up singing ”kum ba ya” in heaven, BYO harp and halo.

But, Jesus speaks of a coming judgment, a dividing time that will precede the full manifestation of his Kingdom.

That means:

Before God recreates the world,

Before things are here as God wants them,

Before God’s presence saturates us,

Before we ever get to be with him in the realm called heaven,

there will be a judgment,

a dividing, an adjudication.

At this judgment people will be separated into two groups

sons of the Kingdom and sons of the evil one (Mt 13.38)

wise and foolish (Mt 7.24-27)

sheep and goats (Mt 25.31-46)

those who enter life and those thrown in Hell (Mk 9.42-48)

The judgment will be based on works (Mt 7.21-23, 12.36-37, 25.31-46), but the outcome will be based on relationship (Lk 12.8-9). Everyone will be judged (Heb 4.13, 13.17, 1Peter 4.5-6). Christians are not exempt from the final judgment precisely because its purpose is to show, by the evidence of people's deeds, whether or not they are in relationship to Christ (cf Gal 5.19-21, 1 Cor 6.9-10, Eph 5.5). For those without Christ, their works - however insufficient - will be the criterion upon which they are judged and condemned.

Those who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind

Hosea 8.7

Sometimes people will say, “Yes, we’re all sinners but God throws our sins into the Sea of Forgetfulness.” Actually, that’s not in the Bible. That’s a lyric from a hymn—a good lyric, a nice bit of imagination, but not biblical theology. In the Bible, it’s clear that we are appraised by the way we live.

But the outcome, again, is based on grace. It’s based on our relationship with Jesus. As I’m fond of saying, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” You pick Team Jesus, you give your life to Jesus, you do everything you can to make Jesus proud, and you’re good. But you’d better give your life to Jesus, do everything you can to make him proud and make sure the way you live lines up with what you say you believe, because there’s going to be that awful moment in TiVo heaven.

The sad truth, my friends, is that there is a Hell and not everybody escapes it. The only way to escape it is not by being moral. Behavior is only the evidence that you are connected to the author of life, Jesus Christ.

The third error

The third common error that people like us make is that we think if there is a Hell and somebody goes there, it’s probably not that bad.

I wish that were true. However, I’ve been wide-eyed over the last month while studying Hell because of how specific the Scriptures are about how bad Hell is.

Those in Hell will suffer intense and excruciating pain:

i. This will be both emotional and spiritual (John 5.28-29)

ii. Hell is a fate far worse than being thrown into the sea (Mark 9.42)

iii. Worse than being maimed (Mt 5.29-30)

iv. This suffering never ends (Mt 25.31)

v. Those in Hell will be thrown into a lake of fire (Mt 3.12)

vi. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth (Mt 8.12, 13.42)

vii. The suffering is proportional to the wickedness of someone's deeds while alive (Romans 5.2-8)

While it’s popular to acknowledge that the way the Bible talks about Hell is often by employing metaphors, that doesn’t mean it’s not going be bad. The very fact that the biblical writers talk about it as a place of:

Fire,

Judgment,

Destruction,

Darkness

Isolation,

Being cut off,

Where you’re being eaten by worms for eternity,

doesn’t make it less bad just because those are metaphors. The fact they use so many metaphors and they are so explicit and terrifying ought to make us say, “These people don’t have good language for how bad Hell really is.”

Let’s read from Luke 16:19-31. This is really a peculiar piece of the Bible where Jesus tells a story about a man in Hell:

There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man's table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.

The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham's side. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hell, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, 'Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’

But Abraham replied, 'Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.'

He answered, 'Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father's house, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.'

Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.'

'No, father Abraham,' he said, 'but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.'

He said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.'

I’m reading this puzzling piece of Scripture primarily just to show that the rich guy doesn’t want to be where he is. He’s tormented, he’s in agony. He’s not only in physical agony, he’s in emotional agony for two reasons. The first is personal. He says, “Look at what I did with the rest of my life. Look at how I treated Lazarus. Look at the mistakes I’ve made. Look at all the different things I could have done with my wealth, with my life, with my influence.” He’s in emotional torment as the full realization of the way he lived—the fraudulence, corruption, and selfishness—comes crashing down on him.

But the second reason for his emotional agony is about his loved ones. He says, “I’ve got five brothers and you’ve got to go tell them.”

What does Abraham say?

“No.”

He says, “Why not.”

“They’ve got everything they need.”

“Hey, but they’re not paying attention to it.”

“Well, they’re not going to listen to me or Lazarus or Jesus. They’re just not going to listen.”

Are you hearing this? People like us think there is no Hell, and if there is, no one goes there, or if they go there, it’s not so bad.

The truth is there is a Hell, some folks are going to end up there, and it’s bad.

The point?

Make sure you don’t go there.

We have to come to terms with the fact that our few years on this earth are not all the years there will be. This life isn’t the only thing that matters. Something endures.

At the same time, we must keep from falling in love with death and judgment, as some other Christians have done. We’ve got to keep ourselves from fantasizing about who goes to Hell and whether or not we get to be part of sending them there.

What I’m really hoping for in my own Spirit and for our church is that we go home, fall on our knees, and say, “Oh, Jesus, forgive me for not taking you seriously enough, for not taking my life seriously enough, for not thanking you enough for your gracious and atoning sacrifice. You don’t want me to go to Hell so much you were willing to die to keep me out of it. You threw yourself in front of the bus for me. Please forgive me for not acknowledging that.”

We’ve got to keep ourselves from falling in love with the sadism of final judgment. Instead, while not dismissing it, we need to focus our efforts and our spirits on thanking God for the grace he has extended to us.

One final thing, and I want to make this real clear: We need to remember that God doesn’t want anybody to go to Hell. According to 2 Peter 3:9, “He’s not willing that any should perish.” Again, Jesus gave up his own life to keep people from experiencing death, the second death, judgment, isolation, and fire. God is not the punisher—he revealed himself to us, instead, as the self-sacrificing hero Jesus Christ so we should have an appropriate sense of gratitude to him for saving us from that.

So, what does this mean in real life? There are a couple of Scriptures that are often quoted at this point. They’re good Scriptures, justifiable Scriptures:

For God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him would not perish but have eternal life. For I did not come into the world to condemn it or to judge, but to save it.

John 3:16-17

What does this mean for you? Again, as I mentioned earlier, the way you get away from Hell—and not only the Hell that comes later on, but the all the Hell and the garbage and the crap that assails us and sticks to us in this life—is by embracing Jesus, by holding fast to him, by knowing and loving him, by holding the precious sacred heart of Jesus in your mind and in your will and in your spirit.

There’s a very famous Scripture in Romans 10:9 that coincides with and further develops John 3:16:

If you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart

that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

What does that mean? “Confess with your mouth” means you need to speak about the fact that Jesus is Lord, not in some vague way, but that he’s Lord of your life.

Have you ever stopped to consider how often we say the word Jesus around Westwinds, instead of God or Lord? We’re specific about using the word Jesus. We’re specific about using the Father. We’re specific about using the Spirit. It’s because we want everyone to know specifically who is in charge. It’s King Jesus; Jesus: the Senior Pastor; Jesus: the Leader; Jesus: the President; it’s Jesus.

When you talk about religion or spiritual things, the afterlife or the invisible world, you’ve got to be sure you’re confessing that Jesus is in control of you. When you make decisions with your spouse about how you’re going to spend your money, you need to confess that Jesus has a place in the conversation. In fact, he has first place in that conversation. When you’re talking with your children about why you do the things you do and about why the things you do are important, you’d better confess that the reason they’re important is Jesus. It’s Jesus. It’s not like some little prayer you say. It’s like a river just coming out of you. That’s the confession that Jesus is Lord. He’s Lord over everything.

Why are we preaching about Hell today? It’s Jesus. He talked about it. He chastises us for neglecting it. It’s Jesus.

Isn’t that hilarious? Not just believe in your heart that he’s real, not just believe in your heart that there is a God, not just believe in your heart that Jesus is important somehow or even that Jesus is Lord, but believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, that the supernatural power of God Almighty, the Being above Whom there is no other, conquered death.

Jesus—more terrifying, more powerful, more astronomically magnificent than Hell or death. What do you believe? Believe the Author of life is alive and at work in you like He was alive and at work raising Jesus from the dead.

Confess and believe and you will be saved. What is the promise of salvation? Is it that you won’t go to Hell? Yes, that’s part of it. Is it that you get to go to heaven? Yes, that’s part of it too. But, let’s be crystal clear about what heaven is. The New Testament is explicit that heaven is not some blissful, wispy, ghostlike, spectral existence, but it’s the promise of God:

Healing the world,

Restoring everything that’s been broken,

Healing Jackson County,

Healing Michigan,

Putting our city back together again,

Putting you back together again.

Not just the promise of heaven, but the promise of the new heaven and the new earth and new bodies. In heaven everything wrong gets made right and things are then as God wants them to be, because he is completely in charge, completely present.

Salvation is the promise of heaven, the new heaven, which is this world remade and your body restored. Salvation isn’t just some future thing. We know from the Scriptures and from Christian history that that word salvation is better translated “wholeness” or “healing.”

You will be whole not just then, but now.

When you confess that Jesus is Lord to your children, something happens in your relationships and your family. When you confess that Jesus is Lord over home, something happens in your household, something happens in your job, something happens in your marriage, something happens in your heart: you are being saved, you are being healed.

When you believe God raised Jesus from the dead, you’re not just saved for later, you’re saved now because you know that no matter what problem you’re facing, no matter what difficulty you’re facing, you know that God is greater than whatever you’re facing. Salvation is a promise for later, but it’s also being realized now, right now, right this very moment.

To get to that point is the real value of talking about Hell. God offers you life and life more abundant. Take it now; take it right now.

Confess. Believe.

CONCERNING HELL AND FINAL JUDGMENT II

2011-03-25T20:25:00.000-04:00

What does the Bible say about Hell?

Five or six weeks ago I started feeling this nudge that maybe Hell was a topic we should investigate further at the Winds. At the time I recognized this as a prompting from the Spirit because I’m not personally all that keen on the doctrine of Hell, nor do I particularly enjoy thinking about how to introduce the topic of Hell to people that I love. However, once I began my study on the topic I was convicted and embarrassed by precisely how much there is in the Bible on Hell. Since I am deeply concerned with being a faithful student and teacher of the biblical text, I feel compelled to – perhaps for this one time only – spend a little time teaching on Hell and why it is an issue of some significance for us today.

A church like ours tends toward either indifference or oblivion when it comes to Hell. We don’t really think about it, and because we don’t really think about it we tend not to really care that much about it either. Yet, if we’re going to be faithful followers of Jesus and students of the Scriptures, we ought to know what the Bible actually says about our final judgment and the alternative to eternal life with Christ in new creation.

This is my real problem with Christians: They say they believe in Hell, but they never talk about it. You’ve got to really hate someone to believe in Hell and never tell them it’s there or how to avoid it. I think Christians hate me, because they’ve never warned me about Hell.

Penn Jillete, magician

There are four words in the Bible used to describe Hell— one Hebrew word (Sheol), three Greek words (Hades, Gehenna, Tartarus). At first, these four terms might seem contradictory, but – in reality – they are easily harmonized. Part of this harmonization process is the realization that Hell is a very complicated issue. We should be mindful of this whenever we are tempted to trivialize the ultimate fate of humanity or the judgment of God.

First, in the Old Testament the only word that’s used to describe Hell is the Hebrew word Sheol, which also means “the grave.” For example, in Deuteronomy 30.19, Sheol is used synonymously with death:

Brought low, you will speak from the ground; your speech will mumble out of the dust. Your voice will come ghostlike from the earth; out of the dust your speech will whisper.

From this passage, and many others, we come to understand that Sheol didn’t just mean “death” or “the grave” or even “Hell” exclusively, but a kind of deathlessness, emptiness, and misery.

Sheol is not just a place, it’s a state of being that you can enter now as well as once you’ve died if your relationship with God isn’t right or if you’ve been unfaithful to the people around you.

Listen to what I’m saying. Our first understanding of Hell isn’t so much about torment and brimstone, but about misery and sadness. It’s about living like a specter, a ghost, without hope or substance, flitting here and there about the world. That’s what the afterlife will be like if you died and your relationship with God and others is out of whack. That’s life now before you die if your relationships are out of whack.

Think about it this way: If you die miserably, Sheol is the extrapolation of that misery for all eternity—sadness, heartache, emptiness, and isolation.

In our contemporary context, we use images like Sheol to describe misery in this life. Think about some of our more common colloquialisms:

…you look like death warmed over

…you smell like you’ve got one foot in the grave

…you are so dead when she finds out what you’ve done

The ways in which we use these colloquialisms are similar to the ways our spiritual ancestors used Sheol and, later, Hades – which is the second word in Scripture used to define Hell. In the New Testament, Hades is the place where the wicked go after they’ve died but before they’re judged.

Jesus references Hades several times, most notably in Matthew 16:18:

I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it.

Hades is the Greek version of Sheol, but only as it concerns the afterlife. Whereas Sheol is something you could experience now and after your death (i.e. both a state of being and a place of deathlessness), Hades is only a place in the afterlife (or perhaps more accurately, in the afterdeath).

The third, and arguably most important, word used to describe Hell is Gehenna. Jesus, by the way, teaches about Hell more than anybody else. In fact, most of our understanding of Hell comes almost exclusively from the teachings of Jesus, and Jesus’ preferred understanding of Hell is defined by his use of Gehenna.

The word had some significance, because Gehenna was the local garbage dump outside of Jerusalem. Gehenna was a stinky, filthy, reeking, rotting place known as the Valley of Ben-Hinnom.

The Valley of Ben-Hinnom had a very dark history. In 2 Kings 23, for example, we read that this was where child sacrifices were offered to the pagan god Molech. Other human sacrifices were offered there. This place was anathema, to be avoided at all costs, fit only for refuse. It was a place of condemnation.

In our contemporary context, the best (and still woefully inadequate) comparison would be like saying Hell is Auschwitz, or – more locally and inadequately – 8 Mile.

Jesus says that to be separated from God, to willfully choose to reject Him, to disavow yourself of the life God wants you to have, is to choose to live in the garbage, in Auschwitz, in Gehenna. What goes there is the garbage of our sin, and if we choose not to let go of our sin, we will perish with it.

It is important to recognize that Gehenna is the exact opposite of the Garden of Eden. Remember, God’s original intent for His creation was a world of beauty and goodness, with harmony between the created order and the creator. Over time, we have taken that beautiful and good creation and destroyed it through violence and selfishness.

God made Eden, we have made Gehenna.

God wants to restore Eden in the New Creation that Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 15 (and Isaiah talks about in Isaiah 65 and 66), but if we refuse to cooperate with God in His project of New Creation, we will find ourselves in the eternal refuse of Gehenna.

He is bringing heaven to earth. We are resisting heaven-on-earth and so we will spend eternity in Hell unless we repent.

Jesus sets up these polar opposites to let us understand the things we do now, the choices we make now, the actions we take now, are always taking us one step closer to new life and new creation or to Hell, the stinking, festering, garbage dump of eternity.

Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in Hell.

Matthew 10.28

The last image we get of Hell comes from the Book of Peter and it’s the “place of torment,” known as Tartarus in Greco-Roman mythology. In 2 Peter 2:4, Peter says:

For God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into Hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment.

There are people who sometimes make the mistake of thinking that Hell is just separation from God. In their minds, this isn’t really such a bad thing; after all, we all experience a little separation in the here and now, so what’s a little separation for eternity?

The difference, of course, is that the separation we experience now is limited in degree and duration. We don’t now experience full separation from God – for, even if we are separated from Him, others are not and we get a kind of spill-over benefit from their intimacy with God. And we still have now the potential for reconciliation – meaning, it doesn’t have to last for eternity since we could choose to embrace God and allow that separation to evaporate.

But ultimate, eschatological separation from God would be much worse than what we now experience because we would have no protection whatsoever –no spillover effect – and this final separation would have no possibility of ceasing.

Given all of this, there are three things I want you to remember:

1. The clear emphasis of the Scriptures is not on Hell or death. It’s on new life and that life more abundantly. When you read the Bible cover to cover, when you study the Scriptures, you realize the emphasis of the Bible is on how to live well and how to enjoy living in the presence of God.

I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.

John 10.10

Even though we’re touching on Hell, please don’t anybody get excited about it. The Bible spends far more time on, and is far more specific about, what good life looks like rather than bad life. It’s far more explicit about what heaven, the new heaven, and the new earth are like than about what Hell is like. So our emphasis should be on living and living well.

2. But that doesn’t mean we can completely ignore what the Bible says about death and judgment. Death and judgment are a pretty significant theme, not the main theme, not the dominant theme, but a significant theme in the Scriptures and we need to take them seriously.

Let me give you one Scripture from John 5:25-29 that will bring this home. These are pretty harsh words from Jesus himself and they ought to disturb us just a little bit. Jesus says:

Very truly I tell you, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so He has granted the Son also to have life in himself. And He has given him authority to judge because he is the Son of Man. Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out—those who have done what is good will rise to live, and those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned.

Some translations say, “Those who have done what is good will rise to everlasting life and those who have done what is evil will rise to everlasting torment.”

One of the things about Hell we often forget is that Hell is physical. Just as people who love and embrace Jesus Christ, who choose to be with him, are given new bodies at the resurrection, so too are those who hate Jesus and reject God are given new bodies at the resurrection. However, those who choose the side of life, who choose to embrace God biblically, are said to inherit life – the blessings of the Kingdom, peace with God, harmony in this world and in the next; whereas those who reject life, reject God, are in store for all kinds of bad things, to which this text synonymously refers as judgment, condemnation, torment, and punishment.

3. Because Scripture teaches on both life and judgment, we must find ways to avoid “death” in the here and now. We have to find a way to embrace the life of Jesus now, so that when we are in fact appraised for all of the things we’ve done in this life, and we are evaluated on our allegiance, we will have taken whatever steps necessary to avoid what the Book of Revelation calls “second death.”

We need to be very, very careful about the way we live now so we don’t embrace or encourage any kind of spiritual death. Have you ever heard anybody use the colloquialism “I just feel dead spiritually” or “I feel dead inside” or “I feel like I’m dying?” Those words speak to the reality of Sheol, they speak to the reality of Hell on earth and they intimate the reality of Hell to come. We’ve got to do whatever we can to avoid being spiritual dead. We’ve got to avoid the death of our eternal selves.

Spiritual death has four key qualities in the Bible.

I. To be spiritually dead is to stop trying. You know somebody’s marriage is doomed when one of them just checks out and stops trying to control their tongue, to control their behavior, to control their sexuality. Their marriage is over. To be spiritually dead is to stop trying.

People say, “I have such a hard time praying and reading the Bible and understanding it.” Who said it was going to be easy? What spam filter are you using that you didn’t get the memo saying you’re going to fight through some stuff? The Bible is not a coloring book. It’s going to be hard to understand at some point, but if you want to be spiritually alive, you’re going to keep trying even though you don’t feel like it, even though it’s hard. If you want to stay married, you’re going to keep trying even though it’s hard.

II. To be spiritually dead is stop feeling. We don’t have as much control over our feelings, so they are like a litmus test. When we ask ourselves, “Am I spiritually vibrant?”, we can usually tell by our feelings. Am I in love with my wife still? You can usually tell by your feelings. If you even have to ask yourself that question, it might be a little moment of concern for you.

III. To be spiritually dead is to stop thinking. If you’re not wrestling and engaging with your faith, you’re dying spiritually. My dad used to tell me when I was a kid, “Son, everyday God is asking us to make a decision.” I never understood what that meant. I thought I already made the decision. I prayed the prayer, I signed up for Team Jesus and I’m good. I thought there was only one decision I had to make. My dad in his wisdom understood that, yes, that’s the big decision you have to make, but every day. In fact, God is asking you every moment to make other decisions:

To choose him,

To choose life and not choose death,

To choose Eden and not choose Gehenna,

To choose to live in a blessed existence now,

To welcome the Kingdom now,

instead of being stuck in Sheol or some kind of Hell on earth, some miserable existence, some dying marriage, some thoughtless work.

To be spiritually dead is to turn your mind off and believe that whatever you don’t know doesn’t really matter. Whether you’ve been following Jesus ten minutes or ten thousand years there is more.

IV. To be spiritually dead is to stop repenting. We are so rightfully afraid of sin. We should understand sin is bad because it is a violation against God’s holiness. But because we recognize sin is bad, we often lie about whether or not we sin. We justify it by saying, “That wasn’t really a sin though.” “I told my wife I hate her, but that’s really not that bad; God understands.” No, that’s a sin. “I cheat on my income tax; that’s not really a sin.” Yes, it is. I get why you did it, but it’s still a sin.

We have to find recognize there’s a lot of sin in our lives and that it’s all really bad. We need to repent of all of it and turn away from the way we would otherwise live apart from the Spirit of God and turn toward the way Christ wants us to live.

What have you done that you have not repented of? What have you thought that you have not repented of? There’s something about coming to terms with your own sin that’s liberating, that’s life-giving. As you get rid of that garbage, as you confess it to the Spirit, he breathes new life into you and you become spiritually more alive.

The bottom line is that what you do right now really matters, because:

God gives us the opportunity to choose life,

Jesus wants us to choose life,

We’re asked to make a decision about life,

We need a posture of repentance in order to experience abundant life.

The alternative to life is not just one death, but:

A second death,

A punishing death,

An empty death,

An extrapolated death,

A burning death.

We’ve got to understand the way we live now has either eternal consequence or eternal significance.

Everything you do matters.

What we need to do in the face of these huge and weighty issues is take some very simple advice from Jesus. In Mark 1:15 Jesus begins to preach the Kingdom of God with two very simple words—repent and believe.

Repent — Jesus says change the way you live. Turn away from the death life and turn towards the God life. Turn away from Gehenna and turn toward Eden. Turn away from death and judgment and turn toward more abundant life. Change the way you live from living for yourself to living for the King of the Universe.

Believe — you’ve heard the expression that someone’s actions belie their intent. That’s really what belief is. The way you live gives evidence to what you think way down in your heart. So, if you’re really proud of one of your children, they’re going to know it, because there will be evidence to support what you believe about your son or your daughter.

If you’re proud of them, you’re going to:

Have pictures of them,

Spend time with them,

Tell them,

Love them,

Hug them,

Edify them,

Encourage them.

Your actions will belie your beliefs.

When we talk about what it means to believe in Jesus, we talk about the fact that our lives give evidence. People look at you and recognize you are living not for yourself, but you are living with the very sincere belief that there is a clear choice in every moment between the way of life and the way of death, between the way of living for God and the way of living for yourself.

I hate to boil a very large and complicated issue down to something very, very simple, but I’m going to take my nods and tips from King Jesus here. We can get lost for at least another four hours of teaching on Hell. But, the real issue is not figuring out what the furniture or the temperature is going to be in Hell. The real issue is figuring out what to do with the life God has made available to us. Life—made available through repentance and belief.

ON HELL AND FINAL JUDGMENT I

2011-03-25T20:24:00.000-04:00

ON HELL AND FINAL JUDGMENT

Dr. David McDonald

INTRO

This paper is comprised of three sermons given on one Sunday at Westwinds Community Church during the Cue. They are about Hell. Given that our overarching emphasis at Westwinds is on grace, we felt like it was appropriate – given the significant amount of biblical teaching on judgment and the afterlife – to spend at least one Sunday unpacking the other side of the equation.

Up until this point we’ve been all carrot and no stick, so to speak.

We have no plans to completely change our orientation, but out of devotion to Christ and the clear teachings of Scripture we do want to make sure we teach both sides of the story.

This paper, then, is a summary of the biblical doctrine of Hell and Final Judgment. Please don’t pass it around. Don’t give it to others in hopes of scaring them into becoming Christians. Don’t use this as leverage to get others to feel guilty or do what you want them to do. Instead, read and study this for yourself. Pray and invite the Spirit to change you. Open your heart to God more fully and more sincerely.

Stay right with Christ, and stay out of Hell.

It’s bad there.

failure

2011-03-13T19:39:00.000-04:00

a small issue of repentance

2011-03-10T15:41:00.001-05:00

in prep for this sunday's lenten launch, i've been re-reading "lent: giving up guilt for 40 days"

i'm really happy with the book. it was fun to write (probably even the least stressful of all the atlases we've done), and i'm proud of how i grew and was shaped by the process.

but something's bugging me about the first few pages. it's the tone. i don't like the way i sound in the introduction. it's chippy, and a bit snarky, and i don't want to be that way.

to be fair, i was feeling chippy and snarky when i wrote the intro. i'd been studying lent for a couple of months (having previously learned nothing about it), and kept expecting this big revelation concerning christ, and season-oriented spirituality, or maybe even something specific concerning repentance, etc.

but my reading was largely fruitless. it was so frustrating to read SO MUCH and glean so little.

and on the tail end of that quest for new meaning, i wrote the intro to "lent" and gave voice to my disappointment.

i wish i hadn't. not because i feel like it's super sinful or anything, but mostly because i don't want to hurt somebody's feelings. many people, after all, find catholic spirituality (and many of the spiritual readings that disappointed yours truly) to be very meaningful, and i don't want to take that away from them. i never want to be the voice that says: the thing you love, i think is dumb. i want people to find help and meaning wherever they can, without worrying about my frustration, or my disappointment.

maybe i'm making too much of my own opinion. i mean, really, it's not like my opinion counts for all that much. i'm just writing this as a kind of apology, i guess, both to you (whoever you are) and to the version of myself i'm trying to become.

c'est la.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Sexagesima (sermon manuscript)

2011-02-27T09:53:00.001-05:00

‘Sexagesima’ comes from the Latin word for Sixtieth, and signifies the sixty remaining days (excluding Sundays and holidays) prior to Easter. In the Christian liturgical tradition, it is common to focus and to study the parable of the Sower and the Seed, contained in Luke 8.1-18, on this Sunday morning.

After this, Jesus traveled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. The Twelve were with him, and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out; Joanna the wife of Chuza, the manager of Herod’s household; Susanna; and many others. These women were helping to support them out of their own means.

While a large crowd was gathering and people were coming to Jesus from town after town, he told this parable: A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path; it was trampled on, and the birds ate it up. Some fell on rocky ground, and when it came up, the plants withered because they had no moisture. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up with it and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up and yielded a crop, a hundred times more than was sown.

When he said this, he called out: Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.

His disciples asked him what this parable meant. He said, The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak in parables, so that,

‘though seeing, they may not see;
though hearing, they may not understand.’

This is the meaning of the parable: The seed is the word of God. Those along the path are the ones who hear, and then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. Those on the rocky ground are the ones who receive the word with joy when they hear it, but they have no root. They believe for a while, but in the time of testing they fall away. The seed that fell among thorns stands for those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by life’s worries, riches and pleasures, and they do not mature. But the seed on good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop.

No one lights a lamp and hides it in a clay jar or puts it under a bed. Instead, they put it on a stand, so that those who come in can see the light. For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open. Therefore consider carefully how you listen. Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what they think they have will be taken from them.
Luke 8.1-18

I used to write all kinds of songs and play in a bunch of bands. That can be a very vulnerable experience. To be successful, you need to really put yourself out there and be prepared to play and sing the most intimate and personal bits of your life in front of strangers…and have them respond honestly. It’s fascinating, but true, that the way in which people will receive your music largely depends on their context.

For example, I once wrote a worship song that was very personally meaningful. I played it for a friend of mine in the church basement late one night, and he really loved it. But, the following day, when I played it again for he and one other person it didn’t go over nearly as well. The other person was distracted – sending an email on their laptop while only half-listening – and my friend began to feel embarrassed that he had liked the song, and now this newer person obviously didn’t care. So my friend did what most of us would have done in that moment, he interrupted the song, changed the topic, and said the reason he probably liked it in the first place was because it was late and he was tired.

My point is that the context for the performance really matters. That song, which was soft and tender, would have been booed and called off stage were it done during half-time at a football game, but lauded and loved around a campfire. Why? Because it’s all about the audience and their context.

Or, as Jesus said here, it’s about the soil.

The parable of the Sower and the Seed is the parable of parables – the most famousest of all, the prototype upon which all others are based. Parables were much more common in the ancient world that they are today, and serve as something like Aesop’s fables in Judeo-Christian thought. They were famous linguistic tools of the First Testament prophets, and even endured after the closing of the canon in certain rabbinical schools.

Take this Jewish parable, for example, about the different kinds of disciples:

One is like a sponge, one is like a funnel, one is like a strainer, and the last like a sieve. Which is best? The sponge soaks up everything. The funnel lets it in one end and out the other. The strainer lets the fine wine pass through it, but remains stuck with the lees. The sieve lets out the bran but retains the fine flour. The worst kind of disciple, then, is the funnel because information flows in one ear and out the other; whereas the best is the sieve, which retains only the most worthy information.

This parable does what all parables are meant to do: it helps people better understand spiritual truths. If that seems confusing at first, don't worry, modern-day preachers do this all the time. I frequently tell stories about my children or write little fictional episodes to illustrate biblical theology because those stories are far more accessible to most people than big words and scary phrases like propitiation, transubstantiation, and penal substitutionary atonement. Not everyone can understand Jesus’ prosaic teaching on the already-not-yet nature of his Kingdom and its catholicity (see, even those words are confusing), but everyone can understand the basic meaning of the parable of the Sower and the Seed. Both accurately tell it like it is, but the former way is intimidating while the latter is pretty basic and achieves much the same thing.

The Sower and the Seed is a parable about people responding to Christ’s Kingdom. Jesus often spoke about the fact that the kingdom was everywhere and for all people, and here describes four different types of people who hear his message their responses to him.

Most of his audience were expecting their Messiah to do something huge – like replace Herod, or topple the Romans, or reform the Temple – but Jesus, through this parable, was trying to open their eyes to the fact that his Kingdom wasn’t made out of stones and swords and animal sacrifices. His Kingdom was a kingdom of thoughts and deeds and motivations and behaviors. His Kingdom was a Kingdom of the Word.

Now, had Jesus’ audience known the parable was about ‘the word’ they would have thought this story was about Torah (the Jewish law). Parables of this sort, after all, usually were primarily concerned with Torah observance, and Jesus’ parable could easily have fit within this framework. Perhaps his audience would even have had famous Scriptures like Isaiah 55.11 lurking in the backs of their minds: my word shall not return empty, but it shall accomplish my purpose.

But the Word in the Sower is not Torah, but Christ himself – God made flesh. This, incidentally, was what really infuriated that scribes and Pharisees – not that Jesus rejected their transactional understanding of spirituality, but that he claimed to the true Word in place of Torah and Temple.

The Sower, then, is not Jesus (as is often assumed) but God the Father. Jesus is the seed sown into the soil. In terms of this parable, the seed has been sown everywhere – the kingdom is in every place, and available to every person – but the critical issue remains how each person will respond to it.

Jesus’ teachings were making the kingdom a reality, insofar as what he said caused people to change what they believed and how they lived. His kingdom was at work then – right away! – and continues to work now, as more people respond with belief and begin to live the way God desires for all His creation.

This parable suggests that the Word, even if you see it, doesn’t look like very much (seeds are disproportionally small compared with what they eventually produce). It is not a thunderclap or an explosion, but a seed – something small that, once planted, disappears because it’s covered by the soil and then – as far as it’s own identity is concerned – dies and disappear, transforming into something else entirely.

Christ the Word, comes to his own people and they reject him. He is not welcomed or lauded by the powers-that-be, but instead he is received by the humble and the lowly, the poor and the abject. To top it all off, he is betrayed, murdered, and buried. His entire earthly life was like that of a seed; but – like a seed – once he was placed within the ground, he became something much more.

Forgive me if it feels like I’m getting ahead of myself here; but I felt like we needed to understand the players and the program before we could accurately understand the play. Let us turn our attention now to the actual details of the parable. First, notice that the seed falls into four kinds of ground.

The common ground in Palestine was split into long narrow strips; between the strips there were paths for walking and working. When the seed fell on these paths (which were beaten as hard as the road), they had no chance of getting into the ground and so birds came down and ate them.

The rocky ground refers to ground that looks good, but is really only a thin layer of soil over a shelf of limestone. In such ground there was no water or nourishment and the seed would quickly die.

The ground full of thorns likely looked clean on the surface, probably because it had been turned over, but the weeds and thistles were still alive underneath and began to grow along with the seed, choking it.

The good ground was that ground which was deep and clean and well-prepared.

The climax of the story is the unusually high harvest. Though not an impossible yield, it would have been a once-in-a-lifetime dream come true for the farmers listening to Christ to have received 100 times their harvest.

After Jesus tells everyone the parable, his disciples pull him aside and ask him for clarification. At first, it seems like Jesus is reluctant to give it. He says:

The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak in parables, so that,

‘though seeing, they may not see;
though hearing, they may not understand.’

In order for us to properly understand his meaning, however, we may need a little lesson on the background of the ancient world. ‘The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom’ is a construct that refers to ancient mystery religions. These ‘mysteries’ weren’t things unknown, but things that God (or the gods, in the pagan scenario) had already revealed to His people. To say the mystery of the kingdom of God has been given to you didn’t mean that you’d been given a puzzle you now had to solve, but to remind you that Christ has already shown you the answer. Though seeing, they may not see; though hearing, they may not understand was Jesus’ way of expressing his frustration with the obtuseness all around him. He was quoting from Isaiah, who himself was impossibly furious with people’s refusal to understand the severity of their sins against God. For Jesus to quote Isaiah was like he was watching his audience thinking to himself: Isaiah had it right, and then began to recite those verses out loud.

Jesus isn’t using the parable as a way to make plain truth confusing; he’s using the parable to make an unpleasant truth (“you need to be receptive to the Word and stop hardening, flagging, and ignoring me”) accessible to everyone. His quotation of Isaiah, then, wasn’t to justify being confusing, but to express frustration that – no matter how simply he said what needed to be said – the people just didn’t seem ready to listen.

Now, having expressed his frustration and reminded his disciples that they should already know what the parable is about, Jesus indulges his friends with an explanation. The parable emphasizes both receptivity and bearing fruit. Farmers sow seed in order for them to bear fruit; without the result, the plants are good for nothing. The only variable determining failure or success is the soil onto which the seed falls.

The hard path is like a shut mind, refusing to consider Christ.

The shallow ground is like the person who never thinks things through, and fails to realize the consequence of not doing so until it is too late.

The thorns represent those things in life that force God out because our lives get too busy and too crowded.

The good ground represents a good heart belonging to the person who listens attentively, thinks things over, and translates those thoughts into transformational behaviors.

Notice that two of the three “failed” sowings describe people who respond positively to the message. They even hear the message with joy, but their hearing is still superficial. Receiving the kingdom with joy is not enough – there must be fruit, there must be transformation that changes hearts and aligns behavior.

The Hebrew word for ‘hearing’ (sama), we might do well to remember, is most often translated into English as ‘obey.’ Real hearing is hearing that leads to obedience. The disciples can understand the mystery because of their decision to obey. But, for everyone else, it’s hard to understand because it just seems like Jesus was making up folk tales. To really understand God’s Kingdom, you’ve got to live in it for a while. You’ve got to experience it. It has to live in you as well.

Galatians 5.16-26, concerning the Fruits of the Spirit, reinforces the parable of the Sower and the Seed. In his letter to the church of Galatia, Paul distinguishes between the works of the flesh and the fruits of the Spirit. The works are a list of disastrous character traits that Paul says result from trying to achieve the abundant life God desires for all creation without God. These works aren’t merely obvious sins like greed and lust (the phrase ‘according to the flesh’ doesn’t refer to our bodies so much as it refers to our self-centered efforts), but are instead mental, physical, emotional, and even (aberrantly) spiritual sins that seek to circumvent the Spirit and get what He promises without His involvement. These sins are things like envy, strife, and witchcraft – which we might best understand as an un-God-ly form of spirituality that promises reward without morality. The fruits of the Spirit, however, result not from our efforts but from our cooperation with God. They grow simply by being unimpeded by our ambition and our impatience. This is why they are described as fruits – fruit simply grows in the right conditions, without much interference – as opposed to the works – which, obvious, indicate the striving and the earnest efforts of the self-satisfied person.

Having now explained the parable, Jesus concludes his teaching with a confusing set of seemingly random remarks. Yet, upon further reflection, we begin to see that his words are designed again to provoke a response from those who though they have eyes, do not see.

The first remark (no one lights a lamp and hides it under a bed) sounds roughly like: What am I supposed to do? Hide the truth because people don’t like it? While the second (there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed) has to have been offensive to those who believed God had already disclosed everything to them. The final remark (whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what they think they have will be taken from them) sounds to me like Jesus is saying: if you grasp the fact that the kingdom works in a mystery, then that very grip will give you more and more understanding. But if you don’t grasp that, then everything that happens will make it look as if you’re plausibility-loving understanding is being deliberately taken from you.

I think this parable likely had a secondary benefit for the disciples as a warning against despair. Think of the situation. Jesus had been banished from the synagogues. The scribes and the Pharisees were up against him. Inevitably, the disciples would be disheartened. When Jesus tells them this story it’s like he is reassuring them that despite these setbacks the harvest is assured. Every farmer knows not every seed will grow, yet he still plants.

Jesus’ parable was both a warning and an invitation to his audience. The warning concerned receptivity and fruitfulness; or, as he proclaimed it elsewhere, the call to repent and believe. Believe in the Word, and change the way you live in accordance with your beliefs. The invitation concerned all who heard – the message of the gospel was for everyone; which, I think, is one of the reasons the first few verses prior to the parable are so important.

In Luke 8.1-3 we read about a collection of women that accompany Jesus and his disciples. Luke lists them, interestingly, as patrons and benefactors of the ministry. These married women followed Christ around and covered his expenses, and we should never neglect the fact that this would have been seriously scandalous behavior in that world at that time. Today people might make jokes about these women being sugar mammas or cougars, inferring somehow that they were keeping Jesus and his friends like favored pets to show off to their society friends; but notice that Jesus simply accept their good will and charity with a mind to the fact that they too are welcomed into the kingdom. The kingdom message is for the poor, but it is also for the Real Housewives of Orange County. It is for everybody.

That is the Christ’s message in this parable:

come one, come all;
repent and believe.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

i'd rather be sniffly than crazed

2011-02-27T07:50:00.001-05:00

from about monday night until mid-day thursday i was a hot mess. i was emotional. depressed. gloomy. i was wrestling with very dark thoughts and several times was almost completely overtaken with anxiety. that's not like me. from time to time (usually in the 'let-down' time after completing an atlas) i go through little bouts of melancholy, but this was different.

i was scared of what i was thinking, scared of what i was feeling, and couldn't understand either where it came from or why. all i could do in that time was think 'please god help me protect my family from my mood, from my tongue, and from any actions that communicate neglect or disinterest or lack of love.'

i am so thankful for god and his grace to me and to my beautiful wife and children. carmel was such a rock star this week, and my awesome kids never even wized up to their dad's nuttiness. i am also thankful to god for the work he has done in me over the last few years. i don't think i could have made it through this week as safely (or caused as little damage to others) even six months ago. god's persistent grace has been at work in my spirit, re-forming me into a better version of myself. he is so good!

anyway - i just wanted to give a little testimony about how god rescued me this week and about how good he's been to me in the preceding years. these last few years have been really formative. i'm so happy and grateful and thankful to god for what he's done in my life. i'm blessed beyond words with the life he's given me. no one could ever ask for more than i have.

and the depression? turns out i was caught in a chemical crossfire. i had a very bad head cold and it was interfering with my ability to preach and lead the winds. i was taking nyquil at night and sudafed in the morning, and the tail end of the nyquil was hanging on through most of the day (hence the energy-less depression) just as the sudafed was kicking everything into high gear (hence the anxiety and panic attacks). thursday morning i kind of woke up thinking: maybe this is the drugs? and immediately stopped taking everything. i was back to my old self within about 4 hours.

thank god.

i still have the sniffles, but i'll take 'em. after all, it's better to be sick than crazy. and this week has given me something to celebrate: through the dark time, i was able to exercise discipline and keep something personally unpleasant from becoming something that wrecked my job, my family, and my relationships. some people doubt whether or not there is a god; but i can tell you there is. it's only through his spirit that i was able to get through this week like that. i don't have enough character to control myself like i did. he had to give me his.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

loved this! imported from detroit

2011-02-06T22:51:00.001-05:00

sadly, i'm sure someone has already tried this...

2011-02-05T17:37:00.000-05:00

writing on lent

2011-02-01T11:53:00.002-05:00

this week is writing week. like rumplestiltskin i will descend into my basement and weave hair (or coffee + sour kids) into gold (or a book on lent).

i'm trying a couple new things this week. first, i took sunday evening and monday off (which i don't normally do on writing weeks...usually i come home from preaching sunday am, have a short nap, and then immediately begin writing). i'm hoping this will help me stave off the inevitable despair that accompanies so much time spent underground writing. i'm hoping my spirits will stay buoyant, and that that lightness will come through in my writing.

i'm also really avoiding heavy theology (which i love) and scriptural argumentation (which i think is important) in favor of a more 'pastoral' tone. i'm writing as if someone is in my office, asking for advice. i'm writing more from the heart than from the head, this time around. of course, that sounds like a really good thing, but it's not as it i normally ignore my heart :) normally, i try and mine some new truth or try and bring light to some old truth in some new way. i love doing that. atlases like monsters, or bleached, or sin monkey are among my favorites. this is more like 'sweet dreams' or the final 1/3 of shadowing god. i feel like i have a lot to offer in this lenten season, based on my experience as a pastor. you can't always trade on that while writing, though, so i imagine that the next time around i'll revert back to form...but here, i'm enjoying writing like this.

i'm also continuing a few things...the liturgical calender (of course), and all the previously employed artwork and layout designs (which really reduces the work load, btw). and i'm continuing with my habit of a 'companion read', something totally un-spiritual to jar me out of my monkness, and in this case i'm reading joe abercombie's 'best served cold.' it's a gooder, and i'm re-reading it in prep for his most recent book 'heroes.'

ok - that's me - hope your life is good, better even than its ever been

back to writing!

whiplash

2011-01-25T14:20:00.001-05:00

that's what i think i'm gonna have after january 2011...a great big bewilderment, wondering 'where did that month go?'

everything has been full steam ahead, pedal stomped to the floor for about 6 weeks. youth center. permits. money. fundraising. 2010 fiscal year. 2011 budget. bill's jag. 4 doctoral students. carmel's new job. common time. lent. shane's hire. xp search. new after-school schedule. staff/elder retreat. paranoia. hypertension. mad pastor's disease.

thankfully, i find myself in a tiny little window of reprieve. i have this week to sort-of catch my breath, and then launch 200% into next week. next week i write the atlas on lent (which, btw, is the most horrifically boring topic imaginable...i've read almost 40 books on lent and not one, single sentence/paragraph/thought has expressed anything other than malaise and depression..."bright sadness" ha! says who? how about super-depressing-emo-weirdness-with-a-twist-of-catholic-guilt-and-sprinkled-by-antideluvian-liturgics?)

after i finish up with lent (hopefully offering something of marginally higher value than the drivel i've been reading), i'll be focusing on choosing our xp (down to just a couple of candidates now), and then ramping up the ww second campus which will eventually launch over at the youth center.

to clear up any confusion, the youth center is - and always will be - primarily a youth center. even once we start holding adult worship services there (which has always been part of the plan) that building will be primarily for teens. think of it as space we're renting...from ourselves...for free. we won't be un-youth-ing it, neither will we be limiting the youth-usage of it. but in the off-time for youth ministry, when it would otherwise remain empty (which is to say before noon) we will loan it to ourselves for church.

anyway, i'll get going on that soon enough. i really do need to chillax a little this week, though. i tore someone's head off this sunday in the lobby. it was ugly. they said "you guys don't care at all about jesus, all you care about is entertainment" then later "why do you need a youth center, the disciples didn't need $250 K to do ministry." i think at any other time, which is to say when i'm not feeling a little stretched thin, i would have responded graciously and calmly explained our rationale for why we're doing what we're doing and how. instead, i screamed at this poor idiot in the lobby.

bad form, davey...bad form.

so, yeah, i need to do a better job this week of recharging my batteries and managing my spirit; which, for me, ironically doesn't mean praying more or reading more scripture (i do that A LOT), but instead means wrestling with my kids, eating with my wife, playing mass effect 2, reading 'last argument of kings' in prep for 'heroes' and dreaming about 'game of thrones' on hbo.

alright - that's me, and that's all

for now

d.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

wrong religion (excerpt from "common time: living the life of christ until it becomes our own"

2011-01-12T14:19:00.001-05:00

"It is a mistake to think that God is chiefly interested in religion."
- William Temple, 20th Century Archbishop of Canterbury

One of the first and truest clichés that any Christ-follower learns is that Christianity is not a religion, but a relationship.

Sadly, the potency of that statement is diminished by the frequency of its appearance, especially on bumper stickers, bracelets, and t-shirts. (Nothing holy should go on a bumper, by the way. If you’re not ready to live it, you’re certainly not ready to weave it through traffic. If you are already living it, you recognize that brandishing it like a slogan sort of undermines it in the first place.)

We have difficulty living with God. That’s why religion is such a comfort. Religion compartmentalizes God, gives us clear rules for how not to tick Him off. It segments and augments the things we should be doing instinctively, turning our behavior into merits and demerits for glory or gore.

Though it has been pointed out before, our relationship with God can be understood as any other relationship. My relationship with my wife, for example, has “rules” of a sort: don’t cheat, don’t lie, don’t mistreat, don’t neglect. But if I did nothing but follow those rules, our marriage would sorely lack romance. We wouldn’t be fostering love, we’d be cohabiting a contract.

Forgive us for wanting something more.

The sports world also provides an adequate parallel. Did you know you can successfully play a full soccer match without breaking any rules simply by standing at midfield and never moving? Technically, you’d be keeping all of the rules; you’d be on-side, you’d never tackle from behind, you’d never touch the ball with your hands. But in reality you wouldn’t be fit for the national team of Liliput.

There must be more to relationship than rules. There must be more to God than religion.

But we often fail to see it, and further fail to experience the thrill of living it. Jesus tried to demonstrate this with his numerous confrontations in the Temple, on the Sabbath, and against the religious powers of his day. He wanted them to know they were completely missing the point. They kept the rules, but they were playing midfield statue soccer. They obeyed everything they were supposed to, but there was no romance in their divine marriage.

For them, everything was legislation, a spiritual bureaucracy, an adventure in missing the forest for the trees.

In this section we will look at four episodes of Jesus’ life that placed him into direct conflict with the religious establishment of his day. These episodes demonstrate clearly that Christ understood the relationship between God and His people to be broken and in need of reconciliation. We need to be reconciled to God for our sins, but we also need a further reconciliation--a deeper and more holistic healing, if you will--of our basic understanding of how this relationship with God is supposed to work.

The first episode I’d like to examine is the famous Temple Tantrum, found here in John 2.13-22:

When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market! His disciples remembered that it is written: Zeal for your house will consume me.

The Jews then responded to him, What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?

Jesus answered them, Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days. They replied, It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?

But the temple he had spoken of was his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.

Let’s be clear: what Jesus did here was like attacking the Bank of America. He went right into the heart of the culture and economy of his own people and blasted them for exploiting and living unjustly.

Jesus’ action gave a clear warning, not only to his original audience, but to future audiences as well. He made it clear there is no place for those whose minds are filled with religion-for-hire or who seek to prostitute the gospel for the sake of position, favor, or authority.

Nehemiah, a 5th Century BCE Jewish governor, did much the same thing when confronted with Temple fraud. In his case, he learned that the high priest had been renting out rooms in the temple and skimming from the rations of the temple workers in order to curry favor with foreign dignitaries. In his anger, Nehemiah broke into the temple storerooms and cleaned them out, fired everyone responsible, and tore out the hair of the high priest.

Jesus followed in Nehemiah’s footsteps, modeling that same kind of single-minded devotion to God for us.

Jesus’ clearing of the temple took place in one corner of the large building. Though the story makes it seem like his temple cleansing was the main event, in reality, Jesus probably only interrupted a very small portion of the temple business that day. However, the aftershocks of his activity went far and wide. The area in question was the Court of the Gentiles, measuring roughly the size of ten football fields, contained within the temple complex which was about three times larger – and the likely commotion would have been equivalent to a cheerleader kicking a linesman in the shin at halftime. That’s not to say it wasn’t significant. Many people would have seen and been startled, and news would have spread fast. But it wasn’t on the scale of WWE Smackdown or the Main Event at Caesar’s Palace.

Jesus was specifically confronting the wanton slaughter and selling of animals for huge profits to the priests and their black market thugs. The doves mentioned in the story were the only sacrifices that the poor could afford, while the cattle were the more extravagant offerings available to the upper class. Since the Court of the Gentiles was meant to be the place where anyone could come and offer sacrifices in appropriate ways (and without inappropriate fees or interference), and since many of the people who came to offer those sacrifices traveled a great distance and would have arrived totally burned out and exhausted, it is easy to understand why Jesus was so intolerant of this criminal behavior.

Furthermore, notice that the first thing Jesus did was to scatter the animals and set them free (v. 15). Prior to Jesus’ Temple Tantrum, the road to redemption was paved with the blood of animal sacrifice and priestly intercession, but Jesus changed all of that for good. His compassion for the outcast spilled over into his passion for the animal inhabitants of the world. There is no biblical record that Jesus ever participated in animal sacrifice, nor did he advocate that his followers do so. Clearly, Jesus had in mind that the old system of killing animals would be replaced by a new system predicated on a sacrifice of a very different kind.

The blood of animals was replaced by the blood of Christ himself.

Jesus replaced one kind of sacrifice with another, also replacing the old temple with the new temple of his body (see verse 21). Now, instead of sacrificing animals and offering them to God, Christ has sacrificed and offered himself to God on our behalf, and it is in communion that we recognize the sacrifice of his broken body and shed blood.

"The meal where Jesus becomes bread for our bodies is the divine substitute for animal sacrifice."
- Len Sweet, 21st Century American futurist and theologian

The church is now the community in which the sacrifice of Jesus is embodied. We carry his sacrifice with us wherever we go (see 2 Corinthians 4.10), and in so doing keep a constant reminder that it is not our forms and functionality that make us holy, but our relationship with the God of the Universe who descended into the world to die for the world.

At this point it may be very easy to become smug, to look back at those temple servants and wonder how they could have ever missed the boat to such a degree. But I caution you against doing that, because the same sins that plague them--and that plagued the temple servants in Nehemiah’s time--plague us now.

We still commodify religion. We still prostitute the gospel. We commercialize religion and advance our own agendas over and against the mission of God to heal the world.

There are obvious examples of this to excess: TV preachers, political Protestants, denominational lackeys. But it is the less-obvious examples that deserve a little space and criticism here.

For my own church, I think we’re pretty careful not to co-opt the gospel for political or financial purposes; however, I do think we oft en run the risk of expropriating the gospel for social causes and anti-establishment rants and raves. Ours are the left -wing sins that mirror the sins of the right-wing infatuation with the military industrial and entertainment complex, but are themselves no less sinful.

We join churches because they stand up for what we already believe in: that people matter, that human rights matter, that human dignity matters, that ecology matters…and they do! But then we get impatient with the pace of the gospel mission and seek to short-circuit the plans and purposes of God.

Simply put, God’s mission sometimes takes longer than we would like. Our agendas are not oft en patient enough to wait for God’s mission to bear fruit. As a result, when we don’t see our churches doing enough social justice, or when they seem to be spending too much on frivolities like building maintenance, or wasting too much paper, or not speaking out loudly enough against whatever the current foreign military occupation has designed, we become nasty and mean-spirited. We treat others with contempt, and we ignore the movement of the Spirit in our own lives, thwarting the transformation that God wants to see in us in favor of the transformation that we hoped to see in the world through us. We justify our hate with geopiety. We comfort our intolerance with a shift less grace that allows us to feel safe from God’s judgment so long as we’re judging those who haven’t figured out what we already claim to know.

But we’ve really just traded one set of sins for another, haven’t we? We’ve polarized our unrighteousness and called it holy because it doesn’t look like the unrighteousness of those we feel privileged to have rebelled against.

The Democrat only sees the sins of the Republican, and vice versa.

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?
Matthew 7.3

This is why Westwinds has adopted a three-fold mission statement. We want to focus not only on the transformation of ourselves as image-bearers of God, not only on the beautiful community of God’s people in which His will reigns supreme, but also on the ultimate reconciliation of the world back into a perfectly ordered and harmonious planet.

That’s why we tell our people we’re here to shadow God, build the church, and heal the world.

Shadowing God reminds us that we must stay in step with God’s plan for us as individuals. We are never fully formed; we are always works-in- progress. That work progresses only by staying in step with the Spirit and being constantly malleable to and edited by God.

Building the church means we recognize Christian spirituality is not an individual sport. Church is plural, and God’s purposes for reconciliation involve us sorting out our relationships with the people around us.

Healing the world connotes the fact that our salvation is neither merely privatized nor communized, but expressed most faithfully in mission. We invite the Spirit to change us and to create a holy community of similarly simultaneously changing people, so that together we can effect change in the world.

Shadowing God protects us from either just being content to remain crappy people but have lots of church-y friends, or just being involved in some kind of social agenda with no real ethic of personal transformation.

Building the church protects us from either just focusing on our own spiritual experience to the exclusion of those around us, or just diving into random projects as a means of escaping human interaction, laughter, learning, or solidarity with those in pain.

Healing the world protects us from either being really great moral examples who are so ‘heavenly minded as to be no earthly good,’ or creating little ecclesial communes who focus only on those with club-member elite status, content to let the pagans, or their forests or their ozone, burn.

There’s a trifecta at work in the ministry of the church, a three-legged stool that simply cannot function well while balancing on only two (or, God-forbid, one) leg. What God really wants from us, His people individually and corporately as the church, is that we come to Him in open relationship, embody the sacrifice of Jesus, and work to reconcile ourselves and others to Him and His mission to heal and to save.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

westwinds youth center

2011-01-10T09:56:00.002-05:00

yesterday we announced that we will launch out ww youth center in march of this year. it's going to be a significant push forward for our church, but a crucial one. we believe in the power of the gospel to change people's lives, and this feels like the right next step to do that at scale.

looking for some html that incorporates audio into blogger

2011-01-10T09:52:00.003-05:00

i often use a dictaphone (an iphone app) to process my thoughts. it records your voice, like an answering machine message to yourself, and allows you to review and store your ideas.

i use mine 5-8 times a day.

i wish there was a way to upload those audio (.caf) files to blogger, so i could 'audio blog.' there must be. tumblr has a widget for that, and i've made use of it in the past (http://guerillahost.tumblr.com), but i wish blogger had easy access to one.

any help out there?

Common Time (a preview)

2011-01-04T21:53:00.001-05:00

I can probably think of six exceptionally spiritual moments in my whole life:

Johnny Markin praying for me at an altar in a Surrey gymnasium. I was so overcome by emotion that my nose turned into a faucet and my mom had to bootleg Kleenex to me at the front of the church.

A youth retreat in Whistler. I got my first glimpse into the invisible world…and learned about girls.

Meeting Rocky Tannehill and staying up all night at his place talking about God. When I got home, I collapsed in my front hall, crushed by the guilt of my rebellion.

Holding my children, newly born and still covered in gloop. I realized I knew nothing about God at all because I knew nothing about fatherhood.

Dancing in worship with my friends, Barry and Erika Crocker, from Australia, soaking my Fender Jaguar guitar in olive oil, laughing and singing.

Grieving with Jvo over the staff cutbacks at the Winds, my first massive failing as a pastor, followed quickly by the death of our friend Randy.

That’s it. Six exceptional moments. Thing is, I count myself lucky. Not everyone gets moments like those, let alone a half-dozen. And, I don’t mean to suggest those were the only times of spiritual consequence in my life – far from it! It’s just that those were exceptional experiences that marked and shaped me forever. They were times when I felt the veil between heaven and earth thin out and I was alive in glory.

But those moments are rare.

I might not even have another six before I bite the biscuit, pay the piper, or wake up dead for the long goodbye. But herein lies an incomparable spiritual truth:

Our spirituality is not forged in the exceptional,

but in the average.

It’s not founded on the extraordinary,

but the ordinary.

The infinite truths of God

are most often expressed in the everyday.

Yet somehow, spiritual people often forget that the biblical model for transcendence is more holiness-as-usual than rapture, climax, and abandon. Thankfully, our Christian heritage has established sound rituals for reminding us that ordinary time matters.

In the liturgical calendar, Ordinary Time is the season during which there are no feasts or festivals. It is the Time between Times during which we refuse to be overwhelmed by the distraction of celebration and lamentation, pomp and poignancy. Life, after all, is more ordinary than not, more business-as-usual than ecstasy, orgasm, and peril. Ordinary Time is for us to live like we normally ought, governed by the driving truths of the faith – therein lies enough spirituality for a lifetime.

Strictly speaking there are two seasons of Ordinary Time:

the first, Common Time, occurs between Epiphany and Lent;

the second, Kingdom Tide, occurs after Trinity and before Advent.

They are both lengthy seasons, and they both concern the foundations of the church.

Kingdom Tide is about the birth of the Church. Common Time is about the episodes during the life of Christ that influence who the people of God will later become.

Christ came to reconcile and to heal. He provides the source material for what it means to be the church.

Allow me to explain:

The church is an agency of healing. By that I really mean something like a place for healing – but not a place like a park or, even, a hospital. I mean something more like a headquarters, a place with a mandate or a mission – more CIA than Hollywood Boulevard. When I think of the church as an agency of healing I think of it (as I’m convinced the Bible does also) as a collection of people committed to one allegiance with one mission: to heal the world. I define this healing rather holistically as, again, I’m convinced the Bible does. It is spiritual healing, emotional healing, psychological healing, social healing, physical healing, relational healing, counteracting the effects of the all-encompassing corruption brought on by sin.

The church is an agency of healing, a people called to fix what’s broken.

The church, also, is an agency of healing doing the ministry of reconciliation. Meaning, the primary ways in which the church heals are relational (i.e. reconciling two parties back together again). That ‘ministry of reconciliation’ (which Paul speaks about in 2 Corinthians 5) can be traced back to the initial relationships that God ordered in Genesis 1 and 2 – our relationship with God, our relationship with others, our relationship with our true selves as image-bearers of God, and our relationship to Creation. Though Paul explicitly refers to only the relationship between ourselves and God in 2 Corinthians, he speaks explicitly about the reconciliatory nature of the other three relationships in many other places throughout his letters (more on that later). The church is an agency of healing that is working to reconcile us to God, to other people, to our true selves (how to live the way God intended for us to live), and to Creation (everything that has been made by God).

The church is in the business of healing and reconciliation. We fix, and are fixed ourselves.

Based on the life of Christ between Baptism and Transfiguration (the traditional scope of Common Time), we gain insight into who we are as the people of God and what we’re collectively supposed to do as the church.

If Kingdom Tide is about the birth of the church, then Common Time is a sonogram showing us the church in the Gospel womb.

In his life, Jesus showed us what we must later do ourselves. Imagine him explaining football to an eager group of athletes as they sit together in a diner. Jesus can take out a napkin, and draw all the positions on the field and explain all the rules of play. He might even get rambunctious and jump up from the table, kicking an orange around the restaurant, jovially showing his young friends how it all works. Later, those athletes will go out and play the game for themselves, on a full-sized pitch with teammates and uniforms.

But for now they watch Christ and learn what they are expected to do.

That’s what Common Time is.

In this book about Common Time, we will look at 6 episodes from the life of Christ to figure out [1] what he did and why he did it and [2] what we’re supposed to do as a result. During Common Time we live the life of Christ until it finally becomes our own. Together, we must become an agency of healing in the ministry of reconciliation just as he worked to reconcile and to heal.

The transformation from Christian to Church is explored through episodes of baptism, Sabbath, blindness, storms, outsiders, and transfiguration. By examining these lodestones of Christian spirituality, we will come to a clearer understanding of Christ’s life and mission, and his mandate for the life and mission of the Church.

Christianity Under Siege in the Muslim World

2011-01-04T21:52:00.000-05:00

Christianity Under Siege in the Muslim World