a whole nother blog

"all my tubes and wires and careful notes"

2010-12-01T11:23:00.000-08:00

so we are eating some delicious food at a place that specializes in providing that during the luncheon hour, and my friend leans back in his chair and posits something that has obviously been growing within him for awhile.

"i think science is crowding out God." he says

then he proceeds to make a case for it. the things that have been traditionally attributed to God are being explained, one by one, by science. examples flow like sweet wine as he paints a picture of this God person being effectively relegated to superintending little bits of almost completely irrelevant void.

it's funny how two people can draw entirely different conclusions from the same observational data... factor faith and theology into things and the polarity increases.

in this case, as in most, i think science is used best to somehow reinforce what we already suspect to be true. so whereas, my friend embraces the void and is quite comfortable with the incredible shrinking god, i embrace the presence and am quite comfortable with the increasingly revealed God. scientifically speaking, in the end it's all theory and one theory is as good as the next, right? we can't prove God any more than we can disprove God... especially if we have room in our theology for ongoing revelation.

what i mean is this: in my view, God doesn't cease to be involved in things simply because we come to understand a bit more about how they fit into the large 3D jigsaw puzzle called 'physical reality.' the fact that we can see a connection between this and that event only threatens the theology of the man who expects God and God's actions to be completely mysterious, completely invisible, completely unexplainable... but where is that written down?

if one holds to the idea that God is involved, whether actively manipulating objects or simply setting wheels in motion, then the explanation of the movements of those objects or the rate and rotation of the wheels and how they fit with others in a giant clocklike construction of mindblowingly intricate cogs is really cause to marvel and exult.

the psalmist speaks of ascribing to God all glory and honour due his name. through even unpardonably sloppy science, my own humble words of praise are simply a bit more informed.

and i like that.
selah

chance- get out of jail free card

2010-10-18T08:34:00.001-07:00

on another blog i keep, a good conversation on justice developed from a post about a TV show. in my view, it's well worth reading.

a question was raised at the end that caught me by surprise, however. it challenged me to examine the chasm that exists between the man i am and the one i seek to become.

"Question is, is there such a thing as being too merciful/gracious?" (sVs)

hmm.

i don't know about this...

my old sense of crime and punishment says 'yes'

my growing sense of embraceable ideal says 'no.'

what to do?

i think that i have been raised in an environment so prone to pronouncements that it is an ongoing struggle to default beyond this. in most cases, it's fairly common to see a black hat on one guy and a white hat on the other. as a matter of fact, i have even noticed, upon looking deeply into my own relational world, that if i can identify one 'villain' in the group i am more ready to extend grace to everybody else in the room.

i believe the word for this is 'scapegoating'

not good.

it bugs me that it is so easy to focus all my negative energy, presumption, cold officiousness, harsh scrutiny, suspicion and even expectation upon one person, while granting everyone else in the game the 'chance- get out of jail free' card. it's a twisted redemption game where the lamb to be sacrificed is not the most perfect, but the one with the greatest observable flaws.

marilyn manson, mass-media manipulator extraordinaire, reflected upon this once: People tend to associate anyone who looks and behaves differently with illegal or immoral activity.

there has got to be a better way.

you'd think that, with all the preaching about unconditional love and the unmerited favour of God that i do, the best of it would either come from a deeper place or, through my preparation process, sink in a little deeper and ultimately become the new default setting. working on that.

whatever the case, here's a thought that is emerging:

if it is possible that one's capacity for mercy plays a key role in increasing the readiness to extend grace- what then?

what i mean is this: if one can be taught to see the other indescriminately- to remove the hats, both black and white- and see people's apparent inability to live to realization the best things about themselves as lamentable rather than indictable, then perhaps one can find the grace needed to extend to them, even against the pain that they seem to be inflicting upon others. there might be hope there.

oh, to be more merciful, more gracious,
more ready to give the other a chance.

see, somehow God affords the breaker of natural law opportunity to be redeemed. neither the most nor the least unrighteous of us is struck down where he stands because God has just had it with him. the yet-to-be-realized good in a person may be the only thing that God sees in his infinite mercy and patience. the ability to see in our limited capacity for the same is what's needed for the rest of us who aren't God, for this is integral in bearing his image, recognizing and responding to it in others.

for chris and richard

2010-09-09T14:16:00.001-07:00

dogma

2010-06-24T17:15:00.000-07:00

recently on another blog, my friend hineini left a question in the comment box that got me going:

what would our theologies gain/lose
if we were to jettison the idea of original sin?
***

now, i LOVE the idea of jettisoning original sin. really i do. the problem is that i and all the 'good' people i know have this capacity to do 'bad' things.

bad: self destructive. disunitive. exploitive, self-absorbed and self-serving at the expense of others, ... all that.

somehow we have to deal with this because we are called to something existentially higher than the 'survival of the fittest/ fight or flight' defaults of the animal kingdom. seems that the stakes are higher for us.

what i mean is that, in being exalted above an instinct-driven state of being, we are afforded both the luxury and the responsibility of not only contemplating morality, faith, and a spiritual realm, but engaging in the expression or at least the exploration of these things. in being raised up to this higher level of awareness, we are pressed to do something useful with it.

but all that botching up... all that hurting and being hurt. all that violence. without the doctrine of original sin, these things become even more confounding than they already are with it.

the question is a pretty intriguing one though:

what would our THEOLOGIES gain/lose if we were to jettison the idea of original sin?

if theology is the science/knowledge of God and so much of our picture of things turns around our picture of the creator of these things, then the change we're talking about here is something fairly all-encompassing: our picture of God would change drastically if we were to do away with this idea, even just in speculation. i mean, all that business of grace and hope and redemption would be moot. i think we'd lose a great deal in our picture of God if we decided that somehow we should be able to just raise ourselves above the current state of 'fallenness' simply because there would be aspects of God that are inherently positive and comely which would disappear from our perspective. we would have no reason or context through which to encounter them... could it be that, with the fall of man came an exaltation of God, as certain things about God's nature became apparent for the first time?

(NOTE- tangent: ...much like the way radio waves are invisible to our eyes. radio waves are 'real' within our physical realm, yet are imperceptible to us because we have no natural way to engage with them. the best we can do is develop a theory, then develop a technology to try to meaningfully bridge the gap between our theory and our experience. turns out we know radio waves are real because in small measure they can be used to communicate information relatively cleanly and efficiently- provided we have a network of transmitters and receivers in place. we know that they are real because, in large measure they can be used to either fuel our greatest exploits or kill one another... yet whether we're dealing with a little or a lot, to our senses radio waves remain undetectable. in a quirky, but mildly interesting curio called Radio KAOS, roger waters, conceptual mastermind of the band pink floyd, explores some of these ideas... found a vid on youtube circa 1987: mullets and mall hair abound!)

so anyway, our knowledge of God is very heavily affected by the ways that we are permitted to encounter, explore and interact with him- the ways God chooses to reveal himself to those created in his image. all this kinda makes me wonder what other aspects of God are also true but have not found expression within our reality.

what aspects of the image of God are yet unrealized amongst those who bear it?

and what aspects of God are interfered with or otherwise distorted because of the doctrines we've constructed in our attempts to arrive at some kind of reasonable agreement with one another about some of the most troublesome aspects of our own existence? somehow our knowledge of God seems to be contingent upon our knowledge of self in community with others, and vice versa.

perhaps, without all this business of fallenness and original sin we'd also be able to embrace at face value the invitation of God to participate in the ongoing celebration of life and love within the cosmos. perhaps our relationship with God would also be freed of all that self-interested, soul-saving stuff and, in being freed of it, be released to one of loving God for God's sake, rather than our own?

like LSD in the 60's which promised to unlock the real potential of human consciousness but instead just left, in its wake, a generation of seekers whose minds had been so opened that they struggled to discern the difference between the real and the surreal, is our doctrine of original sin a version of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that we have become addicted to because no one has passed a law against it yet?

hmm...

but what to do with all that other negative stuff that we carry within and express so easily? pretend it's not there?

hmm... hmm...
and again i say hmm...

playing bongos at the opera house (a rant)

2010-05-25T09:31:00.000-07:00

It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different plants, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil- which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama (Richard Feynman)

this heterodoxious quote flew from the face of feynman as part of a television interview in 1959, six years before the 'distinguished young theoretical physicist' (as he was introduced on the early-morning eisenhower-era broadcast) would win the nobel prize "for (his) fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles."

it is picked up by herman wouk and placed, with no initial explanation, as the forward of wouk's book on science and religion The Language God Talks (the title of which is also taken from a feynman soundbyte.) that's where i read it.

what i find exciting is how one person can speak a thought into being, and that thought can be preserved and shared back and forth for decades, centuries and even millenia, continuing to challenge people to discover the truths contained within it that have yet to be revealed. it is not just scripture or other epic pieces of literature that engage and exalt us in this way.

in this case, a brilliant scientist makes a mildly scandalous cosmological remark on a 'good morning, pleasantville' tv show that is faithfully transcribed and later discovered by one of the scientist's contemporaries to life-changing effect and to be explored in a book written by this contemporary a half century later and sold at superstore to a preacher who is wandering around looking for things to do while he waits for his son to get off work... but who also happens to be planning to speak to the little flock assembled the following sunday about how the Holy Spirit of God draws people into ongoing dialogue with himself and each other in ways that are sometimes 'unconventional.'

in any event, feynman was probably intending to communicate something very different in the articulation of his thought than the meaning that i took from it.

what can you do, though?

as i used to tell my students ad nausium:

"the moment you release an aesthetic piece into the physical realm, you forfeit all rights to its real meaning. It will mean whatever the person engaging with the art decides it means, which is perfect because what we really want to accomplish here is the engagement of other people in what we're doing together..."

yeah, those poor kids had to endure more preaching than the sunday morning crowd because they had me once a day, every day for an entire term or more...

anyway, feynman's words lead me not away from God,

but towards God.

words of doubt always lead me there- not in a glib, faith beyond reason, hard right-wing-push-back-attempt-at-maintaining-defaults-in-order-to-resist-change-and-ultimately-growth kinda way, but simply by inviting me to consider possibilities about God rather than impossibilities about 'the Old One.' (wouk's term of endearment)

i agree that the stage is far too massive to support this relatively small and self-contained little show about good and evil. that's because in any opera (derived from latin opus meaning 'work', but decidedly more... a 'large, multifaceted, composite work') of significance, every aspect of the production is part of the intended purpose: set, properties, costuming, lighting, visual and sonic effects, stage management, direction, blocking, choreo, harmony, score and orchestra all move together with the story and the songs, but do not come to complete realization until the show closes and the audience, cast and crew disperse, having been collectively moved and individually touched by the experience, afforded stories to tell in reflection.

in God's universe- comprised of all of those rich dynamics: the sound and silence, the beauty and horror, the darkness and light- the scripturally stated purpose is God's glory and this purpose is only completely realized when the show closes.

so in my view, a large part of our roles in this piece of cosmic performance art is to explore our beingness, not be preoccupied with explaining it. if our place in the big show is to be, say, the bongo-player, then let's get on with playing the bongos rather than go on and on about whether these bongos and the ability to play them is ordained by God or not.

epifony [sic]

2010-04-30T21:54:00.000-07:00

we had been talking about epiphanies and i found myself seated reflectively in one of those ridiculous plastic chairs at tim horton's caught up in a moment of internal conflict over what to make of that fairly deep and pointed online discussion, and what to do with what i was making...

syd barrett's tortured voice from 1968 broke through my own inner din:

and what exactly is a dream?

and what exactly is a joke?

luckily, i had a pencil.

epiphanies are very personal things.

one will say that

too many can be painful

another will counter that

too few can leave us feeling rather alone in it all.

the thing about one person's moment of discovery or clarity is that

it's one person's moment

and in so being is limited by this person's perspective...

perspective: the gestalt of his/her experiences to date synthesized with all learnings heretofore gathered;

perspective: the summative who what where when and how the person is today;

perspective: the id and superego engaged in their seductive dancing, each beckoning the other to cross the great divide of the ego

and is, therefore

subjective observation at best,

high treason of the heart at worst.

so with all this illogical clutter

unsubstantiated allegation and

crazy emotion-driven inkling, what makes it an epiphany at all?

simply the preceding search for one?

search on, man

2010-04-27T21:53:00.000-07:00

Look to the LORD and his strength; seek his face always. (psalm 105.4)

to search for truth, strength, direction, redemption, hope... and to keep on searching is a challenge that is put forth by the psalmist. it is his MO, his raison d'etre...

and isn't it that way for us all?

the ancient creed says that

the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever

well, if this is true then the means to this end is the search. it takes us there, qualifying our glorification and enjoyment with context- taking it out of the abstract and into the concrete.

There's a belief by the

Children of Man which states

all will be well

Search on man, calm savior

Veteran of wars incalculable

greed. Search on man, calm savior

God-speed & forgive you

morning-star, fragrant

meadow person girl

(Jim Morrison)

deconstructing the skeptical fridge magnet

2010-04-27T14:05:00.000-07:00

so what do you say to something like this?

i mean, sure, the tone is a bit off, but this executive summary of the basic articles of religion has a lot that is found in scripture, the apostles creed and church dogma.

(and if you don't feel like reading a lengthy rant today, scroll down to the bottom for the whole point.)

BELIEF:

Christ praised thomas the twin for his belief when presented with visual evidence. however, he had even higher praise and blessing for those having faith, believing even in that which they have not seen.

COSMIC JEWISH ZOMBIE and LIVING FOREVER:

Jesus Christ was of jewish ethnicity, raised by jewish parents in a jewish household of a respected line (Jesus' stepfather was of the royal line of david, which was kind of a big deal) in ancient disciplines that would equip him for a rabbinical role in the leadership structures of his traditional belief system.

the holy writings of this tradition spoke of an enlightened deliverer who would lift israel and the world out of the disparity, desperation, disease and death that had become the feeling of life... and when considered in a certain light, appeared to be pointing right at Jesus with such focal clarity that

his birth triggered a tragic infanticide
his life (or at least the last three years of it) was considered a model of perfect living even though it seems oxymoronic, being simultaneously gracious, loving and kind on the one hand and outrageously sacrilegious, impatient, outspoken, rebellious and rude on the other
his death became the scandalous stuff of debate for millennia to follow, claiming exclusive rights to the redemption solution for all humankind in the face of the tradition from which he had risen.

and the zombie idea? well that's just kind of a fun way to try to get our brains around something as beyond our scope as resurrection and eternal life.

we are arguably the only species on earth that deals with its mortality from a very young age. part of our early childhood development has to do with coming to grips with what it means to 'be' while also sorting out what it means to 'not be anymore.' mortality is a huge pill to swallow, and tends to scrape a bit going down, leaving scar tissue that is tender and prone to discomfort when similar objects are swallowed at future meals.

(ha ha- for some further rambling on the zombie Jesus idea, go here )

SYMBOLICALLY EAT HIS FLESH:

speaking of meals, this one was a bit dodgy in the first century as the symbolic part was missed and people thought that this new cult had, as the centerpoint of its ritual, embraced cannibalism as a means of grace. in truth, symbolic enactments play meaningful roles in nearly every religious tradition (the fact that the Lord's Supper is derived from the jewish passover Seder that Jesus and the boys were celebrating that thursday night is, perhaps, good evidence of this) because of the common spiritual aspect of these traditions: religions turn upon the possibility that there is an order to things which is broader in scope than those immersed in these things can grasp completely.

its a problem of perspective, like the awareness of a missing sense. within humankind there is both this existential self-knowledge that we are mortal and this desire for meaning and legacy in larger than immediate physical terms. we recognize the comfort in being reminded that our impact on humanity is as difficult to gather and gauge as seeds carried by the wind are traceable, yet this comfort is cold. religion and its ritual help us address this need for a place in the cosmos, while also addressing the 'God-shaped void' (pascal) within.

all that being said, however, there is a common dogmatic misconception that has led to many an infant baptism and probably even more final communions as a way to somehow secure resurrection reservations in advance. the enactment of the Lord's Supper (with all that eating of flesh and the drinking of blood) carries deep significance, but does not accomplish this eternal life thing any more than the sacrament of baptism saves us from being 'consigned to flames of woe'. both of these are celebrations in the physical realm and on physical terms, of something that has taken place in the spiritual realm. they are participatory spiritual metaphors. they are symbolic.

TELEPATHICALLY ACCEPTING MASTERSHIP:

well, the telepathic bit (prayer) has to do with trying to establish relationship with an invisible being. quite frankly, i'm surprised that the problem of the invisible God hasn't made the list of things that are hard to embrace.

let's face it- if God was more apparent it would be a lot easier to relate. instead, we have to sort out just what we conclude from God's invisibility: is God gone? is God here, but hiding? is God present but uninvolved? is God present and involved in deterministic ways that impede upon our freedom to make choices? all these lead us to the big two:

if God IS involved, then why do awful things happen?
if God ISN'T involved, then why not?

so what to do with these? well, there are a couple defaults that can be set in order to not go crazy thinking about it all but these are issues that are greater than can even be encapsulated in this humble blogspace, much less solved here.

it could be that the face of God is perceptible only by that 'missing sense' mentioned above, and that apart from this we need to rely on revelations- small glimpses of glory- in order to hold that this God person even exists.

revelations of God come in many sizes and shapes, but are usually contingent upon our will for their recognition and interpretation. one person will look at a tree with blossoms in spring and see a miracle of God and a metaphor for resurrection there, while another will look at the same tree and see life and hope and the promise of fruit. both are encouraged at the evidence of the passing of winter, but take different meanings- one more natural, the other more supernatural- from this glimpse of glory. both could be considered correct. both have depth. both have to do with the person's perspective and what that person is seeking. however, another thing to consider is that neither contradicts the other and neither ceases to be a possible interpretation simply because it is not being considered.

possibilities simply exist. they are static.

one might even say they are a form of objective truth.

conclusions, however, are arrived at as part of our journey through observing, speculating, synthesizing, and in all other ways interacting with both nature and supernature.

it could be that this is our whole problem with God: we treat God as a subjective creation rather than an objective creator. if we simply embrace God as a possibility rather than a conclusion, then all this need for data which proves or disproves is done away with. furthermore, if we are able to bend our minds away from the empirical (which is a fairly closed system of thought) in order to be more theoretical (more openly ready to embrace possibilities) we might find that master, that Lord, who invites engagement through the most subtle of revelations, to be a rather welcome friend in a suddenly much larger universe.

EVIL FORCE, TALKING SNAKE and MAGICAL TREE:

okay, so evil is all around, in and through us. please tell me we don't need to argue this one too much. it is an inescapable reality. whether the story of the tree and the snake is an allegory for self-awareness (which, by the way, includes both the awareness of our imminent demise and the desire for immortality and purpose built into it) or a literal play by play chronicle of humankind's fall from grace is one of those things that we can intellectually and theologically arm-wrestle over in perpetuity to no avail. the problem is not whether there is evil or how it came to be so easy for us to express- the problem is what are we gonna do about it?

PERFECT SENSE?

this is where those who wanted to skip all the drivel should rejoin the dialogue, for herein lies my actual point:

who said it was all supposed to make sense?

i don't think God said this...

i think we did.

fully completely?

2010-02-10T20:30:00.000-08:00

You who truly and earnestly repent of your sins, who live in love and peace with your neighbours, and who intend to lead a new life, following the commandments of God and walking in his holy ways, draw near with faith, and take this holy sacrament for your comfort; and humbly bowing, make your honest confession to Almighty God.

(Invitation to the Free Methodist Communion Liturgy)

***

so my friend and i came to a surprise disagreement over the little piece of holy poetry cited above:

I ask myself how can we say we have an open communion when our liturgy narrows who’s invited? Our current liturgy is personally troublesome in that the invitation, in my opinion, excludes honest, seeking people – honest in that they confess they are truly seeking God but cannot in good conscience say they yet have “truly and earnestly” repented of their sins and/or are reconciled and at peace with their neighbours, much less intend to lead a new life, following the commandments of God and walking in his holy ways.

Sometimes I wonder if I, by this invitation, am even invited to the Lord’s Table.

concerning the invitation, i believe that the qualifying 'truly and earnestly' is valuable. gotta say that right off the top. the way we frame in faith experiences does make a difference to the one who is engaging, and attaching strong language like 'truly and earnestly' places the onus on the one who is interested in pressing into something deeply personal, to do so with an appropriate degree of intention and ownership. i've learned, after all, that people don't value things that come too easily, and so the problem poses itself: how do you invite everyone to participate at their level in a spiritually meaningful practice without cheapening, bastardizing or even desecrating the practice for others?

oh, tradition is a messy thing, but i didn't expect a kind of spanish inquisition...

(JARRING CHORD - The door flies open and Cardinal Ximinez of Spain enters, flanked by two junior cardinals. Cardinal Biggles has goggles pushed over his forehead. Cardinal Fang is just Cardinal Fang)

Ximinez: NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is suprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again. (Exit and exeunt)

Man: I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition.

(JARRING CHORD - The cardinals burst in)

Ximinez: NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as: fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms - Oh damn! (To Cardinal Biggles) I can't say it - you'll have to say it.

Biggles: What?

Ximinez: You'll have to say the bit about 'Our chief weapons are ...'

Biggles: (rather horrified) I couldn't do that...

(Ximinez bundles the cardinals outside again)

Man: I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition.

(JARRING CHORD - The cardinals enter)

Biggles: Er.... Nobody...um....

Ximinez: Expects...

Biggles: Expects... Nobody expects the...um...the Spanish...um...

Ximinez: Inquisition.

Biggles: I know, I know! Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. In fact, those who do expect -

Ximinez: Our chief weapons are...

Biggles: Our chief weapons are...um...er...

Ximinez: Surprise...

Biggles: Surprise and --

Ximinez: Okay, stop. Stop. Stop there - stop there. Stop. Phew! Ah! ...our chief weapons are surprise...blah blah blah. Cardinal, read the charges.

Fang: You are hereby charged that you did on diverse dates commit heresy against the Holy Church...

(courtesy of the silly people at pythonet )

the messiness of tradition is only one possible explanation for the fact that more people aren't interested in receiving communion bread and wine- symbols of the redeeming sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ- in a local church, whether that church practices 'open communion' (as we do) or not. the fact that so many purpogators of this particular grace-based faith are exceptionally graceless themselves most of the time definitely weighs in.

the basic tenet in a grace-based faith, is that relationship with the Divine is 'free'

but the question of tradition and religiosity seems to circle back here: who decides whether something is too free or not free enough? is one's theology too open or too closed to describe the God of the universe? how about the practices used by this one to approach this God? are these practices and perameters transferrable, or are they strictly as individualistic as the relationship that this God seeks to engage in with these humble created personal beings?

see, it gets a little slippery, in my view, with the holy pendulum swinging back and forth causing this great gospel thing that is supposedly free and available to all to have all these hidden costs showing up which are impossible to calculate because everyone you talk to draws up the 'salvation bill' differently. what began as a movement of freedom and hope for the lost and emotionally, socially and spiritually disconnected becomes something decidely less free, less hopeful.

like when we discovered that, although napster was back online as a digital music service, the utopic 'what's mine is yours' P2P shine had been replaced with butt-covering licensing fees and such. (yeah, that was a tangent)

well, whether it's digital music or God that we are seeking to access, it appears as though it is up to us to sort it all out in order to attain that to which we are driven. God himself seems to be okay with open-sourcing his gospel and the life-changing truth that is at its centre. in fact, that seems to be how he's preferred to operate for a very long time. God has left a fair bit of room in the bible for maneuvering.

i mean, questions similar to those above of my friend concerning open communion could be posed regarding the claim that God has unconditional love, yet only those who 'believeth in him will not perish but have everlasting life...' (john3.16)

i must confess that this conditional grace doesn't go down easy for me most days, as i work hard to discern between the questions that i wrestle with in my own understanding of how this all comes together and the words i am to speak to a crowd.

see, i've heard people speak of 'cheap grace' and how it is incorrect to consider that God may just say on that day of days:

"you know, you were lied to by the prince of the air your whole life about who you are and who i am and i agreed to abide by your will, as ill-informed as it was... but i'm God and this is my day now- the day of the Lord- and i, the Lord say to one and all 'behold now, the kingdom. enter into my rest.' ''

i'm not so sure. it sounds like that kind of grace, although perhaps 'cheap' for the recipient of it, is pretty damn expensive for God. this would make it grace- unmerited favour- for real. yet i mustn't preach those thoughts lest i be branded a heretic or at least a bleeding-hearts liberal. in my heart of hearts, the question is perpetually posed for consideration.

we have liturgies that have been prayerfully drawn up to give us a structure for our worship, and i believe that their orthodoxy protects us all if these more liberal versions of God's grace, although they may feel right to me, are a little off. by including these thoughts in the invitation, those who have been entrusted with leadership are equipping people for meaningful decision-making with righteous intention: we say everyone is invited and we include, in the invitation, words of preparation. (1 corinthians 11.27-29).

as to the degree to which a person understands (or misunderstands) those words of invitation, it's probably between that person and God. God knows what any of us really mean and how fully completely given to him our hearts are, yet he invites us to step forward in faith and assures us that these steps are not in vain...

yep, more grace, courtesy of God.

maybe the poet

2010-01-25T10:12:00.000-08:00

i'm sure the psalmist was bipolar.

reading the psalms can sometimes feel like trying to make sense of the journaled ramblings of a paranoid schizophrenic. in one moment there are words of hope, victory, assurance, confidence and vision, while in the next there are the muffled sounds of someone tearfully whimpering from under a rock somewhere, whispering curses and justifications or frank, shame-filled confessions. often these drastic swings are found in the same post.

and yet, as i look at the rollercoaster ride of my own emotions, which seem to regularly take me into the funhouse to gaze at the distorted image of myself reflected there, inviting acceptance, i cannot help drawing some comfort from the fact that the psalmist does not seem to be able to get it all together for very long before he has to step outside of himself and regroup yet again.

perhaps we're all crazy and this, in and of itself, is the key reason why the psalms have survived in some written form these three thousand years- to give us someone to talk to while we wait in the dark for the coming dawn that always arrives.

***
in addition to spending time dialoguing with the psalms, i've been thinking about an old song by bruce cockburn over the last couple days...

Maybe the poet is gay but he'll be heard anyway
Maybe the poet is drugged but he won't stay under the rug
Maybe the voice of the spirit in which case you'd better hear it
Maybe he's a woman who can touch you where you're human

Male female slave or free
Peaceful or disorderly
Maybe you and he will not agree
But you need him to show you new ways to see
Don't let the system fool you
All it wants to do is rule you
Pay attention to the poet
You need him and you know it

Put him up against the wall, shoot him up with pentothal
Shoot him up with lead you won't call back what's been said
Put him in the ground but one day you'll look around
There'll be a face you don't know voicing thoughts you've heard before
(Toronto January 1982)

luck?

2010-01-13T08:56:00.000-08:00

it just wasn't meant to be

recently, someone i love made this observation and i had to just shut up and let it go by without a comment. some things are more useful blogging than they are in polite familial conversation over the holidays.

but

how can we say this with any rational basis at all? there's this silly entitlement thinking that seeps into our reason and our faith, prompting these ridiculous cosmic harmony notions that are uniquely western world in their perspective... as though the only things that are meant to be (ie: God's will) are graced with only circumstancial compliments.

all this talk of thorns and the 'sweat of your brow' in genesis 3.17-19 are summarized in a word that is often used to speak of the damned: curse. phrases like 'painful toil' are used by God to describe the way things are to be following humankind's first person embracing of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. however, if this 'curse' were not somehow the will of the sovereign, almighty God, then it would be lifted. i mean, one could easily argue that if God is truly omnipotent then nothing that exists or takes place can really do so outside of God's wanting or, at very least, tolerance.

so to default to the thought that, because something doesn't simply fall together in easy consonance and effortless balance, 'it must not be meant to be' is to have theological and situational expectations that are neither realistic, nor biblical.

perhaps there is room in my theology for luck after all...

lift

2009-12-17T11:09:00.000-08:00

torchie sent me an email recently
I’m sitting here, enjoying some good conversation with my youngest son, some internet reading on incarnation, and a glass of Captain Morgan. I had a good day at work and I know that God and my wife still love me.

How can life get any better?

So, I began thinking, “Would we be celebrating Christmas, or, would Jesus have come even if me and humankind would not have sinned?”

Don’t feel obligated to respond, or, if you do to respond at great length, but whattaya’ think?

***

i suppose we're safe in that this has a built-in shock absorber in there:
the question is simply 'whattaya think?'

think? whew- pressure's off.

so many things seem to be separated in the curse of genesis 3. it causes me to wonder whether the word 'curse' simply means separation when used in scripture.

it reads in genesis 3.14-19 as the antithesis of blessing.

here's the thing, though.
there is something sanctificatory about both:
with either blessing or curse, something or someone is set apart.

i would even argue that a case could be made (and has been by a few speakers and writers under whose teaching i've sat) that this setting apart- whether circumstantially delightful or tragic- is in accordance with God's greater purposes for his universal creation; part of God's exaltation of it.

3.14: the serpent is separate from all livestock and animals of the wild. 'above all' it reads. typically when we use a phrase like 'above all', we are not talking about something or someone that we see as the lowest of the low. perhaps this a simple reinforcement of the idea that our perspective is pretty limited and pretty linear.

3.15: there is higher level separation (enmity) between the woman/ the offspring of the woman and the crafty antagonist. the context is set for the messianic promise to be announced for the first time.

3.16: there is greater understanding of this human experience, for we have this whole paradox and sexual conflict that seems to open up for the woman: desire for the man and yet 'increased pain' in childbirth. whatever the case, this life experience just went from black and white to colour for the woman.

3.17-19: for the man, there is work and toil and sweat and ultimately death. however, these things have become the essence of our cultural identity. whether it is in our fallenness or simply as the result of a life steeped in it as we continue to strive here, just east of eden, most conversations with strangers move into the realm of chosen occupation relatively early on. i know that i typically remember this about a person quite easily, but his or her name takes a bit more work. there is something functional here that fits into our understanding of the way things work quite naturally, affording us a relatively uncomplicated, safe causeway to further relationship.

(interesting- i believe in some recent comments on an earlier blogpost here we delved briefly into the whole trouble with equating 'being' with 'doing', yet it seems to be ingrained as part of our perspective.)

one writer observes that
'Meeting the needs of a self in a world of other selves is an anxious enterprise. Even short of death, there is much to be anxious about in life.'
(robert gerzon, in his book Finding Serenity in the Age of Anxiety )

gerzon contends that humankind chose natural anxiety over existential anxiety (he calls it 'sacred anxiety' in his book) because reporting solely to God was a burden too great for mortals to bear. in any event, life seems to take on new meaning and significance now that there is something precious to be lost. it is no longer a given and so an exaltation of sorts- a lifting up 'above all' similar to 3.14- takes place.

so if curse means separation and separation means curse, then is God somehow cursed by the changes that go down in the garden? have we, in our disobedience, cursed God as well as ourselves?

well, there does seem to be a separation of the personalities of God that takes place here- is required as a result of all of this action in the garden. it appears that free will and technicolour living will require even God to undergo a radical change in how the trinity interacts within itself as well as within the world created. somehow the son needs to be torn from that place of perfect relational balance and compliment in order to address the great challenges imposed by God's decision to abide by the free will of everyday people who have no clue who they are or what they're doing most of the time. happens again when the Holy Spirit is given at pentecost. it appears that somehow the triune God is affected by the gift of free will as described in genesis 3.

so would Jesus have had to come?
no. not in my view.

i can't see any need for God the son to have been separated from God the father and God the spirit apart from the need that is ushered in as a direct result of humankind's swiping of the freewill card for the first time.

the question that eats away at me is
would we even be able to notice?
living in the cozy, pre-fall balance, would we value the stasis-
in God or in ourselves?

what if our ultimate failure as the God's very-goods in a world of goods was simply a rite of passage into the coloured and contrasted existence that God actually desired for us? what if this fall of man was actually a lifting up by God to a deeper experience of life and relationship, with each other as well as with God? what might this suggest about God's love for his crowned of creation?

as messy as all of this is most days, i think i love God more when i think of God's activation and honouring of my free will like this- especially considering the cost to God.

POV: frankenstein?

2009-11-21T13:08:00.000-08:00

(the journal page above by austin kleon appears on a whole nother blog by kind permission of the artist, and can be found in its original context here. dig around and see if you can find it! hint- it's from 2007)

"Perspective is everything" (SVS)

isn't it, though?
i think that the previous brief piece had everything to do with perspectives- two of 'em in particular:

1) that of the one person seeing the other as a monster of some sort.

2) that of the monster, dealing emotionally with the perceptions of others.

i remember reading a thing that marilyn manson had posted on his website years ago. it was so rich and insightful that i used it as part of my arts education program for many years as part of the work i did within the public school system. the most exciting thing about that was not giving the notes to the students and inviting them to guess who the writer was, it was presenting this same material to the parents on 'meet the creature night' (school open-house, typically taking place in early to mid-september) and gauging their responses once they learned who the quote had come from.

(note: a picture of the actual typewritten note, and some baloney i wrote in response to it is found in the blogpost artists and the things they say.)

and yet, when my own son began reading 'the long dark road out of hell' (manson's autobiography) i was suddenly uncomfortable and this bothered me.

was i being the hypocrite? was i allowing fear of monsters to keep me looking into the darkness for things that weren't even there? was i, in my turn, wearing the same face that i had seen on other parents? was it okay for me to value someone like brian warner's place in the larger scheme of things, but as soon as my own son began to explore it did i default to the religious-right's knee-jerk response to this media-seducing frankenstein that had come to be known as 'marilyn manson?'

well, whatever the motivation and resultant attitude, i found my perspective challenged. although i agree that, in some cases we have some control over how monstrous we become, there are other cases when others' defaults place us squarely in a box that we don't really want to inhabit, with a label we don't appreciate.

take the word 'pastor' for example.

depending on one's experience, this label can be incredibly negative or incredibly positive- and both reads on it are difficult for the one wearing the namebadge. on the one hand the positive label is flattering but is LOADED with expectations and pedastelization that cannot possibly be lived up to; on the other, more negative, hand the label is LOADED with mistrust projected from heartbreaking past experiences and relationships onto a real person who was not present or involved in any of it.

then there's the problem of basic poor self-concept or self-loathing which can somehow spike someone into defaulting to the ludicrous notion that the voices in their own head are actually the words of the pastor or are in some way being reiterated by this big 'spiritual authority figure' in the most innocent of remarks or actions.

i know this last, because in the previous week it's happened to me (or, more correctly, ABOUT me) at least twice that i know of, arriving back on my doorstep like a flaming bag of dog crap left there while those who rang the doorbell find a place to hide in the darkness. the door opens and the stamp stamp stamp of a foot breaks the silence of night.

yes, perspective is everything, for now i need to figure out what to do with the perspectives of others as they impose themselves upon my own motives and actions, shaping for them what i REALLY meant. God, i'm glad i'm not famous or this would be even more distracting to me than it already is. i wonder how people like brian can sleep at night.

i don't know- perhaps 'stereoscopic vision' has to do with being able to see reality from both sides- yours and mine, his and hers, ours and theirs- simultaneously?

Q

2009-11-17T20:32:00.000-08:00

so after a hiatus of well over a year, i finally have something to write...

it's a basic question that, due to its simplicity in one respect and its poignance in others, has probably been asked millions upon millions of times already with as many different responses as there have been responders- all of them equally truthful because of the skeleton key phrase 'you think'

that something like this is enough to call one out of exile to post in this forum yet again is part of its established value.

here it is:
what kind of monster do you think i am?

could it be
that being prone to being
scandalously misunderstood
is part of being
created in the image of God?

amazing...

2008-08-27T21:45:00.000-07:00

...how little gets published
once the quest for a new
thought begins...

deja vu and something about the naked God

2008-05-20T21:12:00.000-07:00

well, in classic form, the comment left by hineini prompted a whole new post...

These seem to me to be more demanding questions that take both out experiences and our desires for who we are and who God is seriously, without trapping us in the "things we'll never know" wasteland where we end up taking "the leader's" word for how things are. (hineini)

we all seem to play the same scripts again and again don't we?
the more we try to grow, the more we stay the same.

except that, for my part, it demonstrates a fair bit of growth to become a question-asker rather than an answer-giver... something like "i also think that the most important aspect of one's faith is the question-asking part... even if the answers we are able to arrive at are, at best, inconclusive" may very well be a familiar type of statement on this blog over the last year. however, in this case, it is a fair distance from the land of this writer's origins.

(for laughs we can always go looking for evidence of this by reading really early posts on this particular blog, replete with declarative statements and high-sounding direction.)

but to assert that the asking of this or that particular type of question is a bit old hat feels rather one dimensional in and of itself somehow. i mean, the challenge has been there for awhile now to consider possibilities that, for me, can only be articulated in the form of the scandalous question... to explore with trembling hands the face of the maybe God that has been obscured into a formless blur for us due to our years of staring directly into its own light of revelation to the point of relative blindness.

so the challenge is ever to try to take each new experience, each new conversation, each new relationship, and consider that aspects of this God person which are inconsistent between two or more scenarios have to go- to have my own personal picture of God shaped by comparison so that, like the approach to sculpture adopted by michelangelo, large pieces of the slab of theological and doctrinal marble that keep God the person encased in human construction would drop away, revealing the naked God within.

i was talking with a friend the other day about this- in particular about the robes that we place upon God... robes which celebrate (and even exaggerate) certain aspects of God's character while almost completely obscuring others. we like this God to be loving and just, but where love and justice seem to conflict, we default to grace in order to escape wrath or damnation. we like this God to be merciful and miraculous, but where neither mercy nor miracle seems present, we default to existentialist free will doctrines which allow God to escape the bang and blame game.

my friend and i agreed that it seems to be very comfortable for us to clothe God with our own presumptions and prejudices about and against God- to array God in some things rather than ascribe to God all things. it feels somehow safer to selectively highlight the things that we either like or dislike about God, depending upon our orientation towards the divine, rather than to openly admit that the things we feel either unsure or uncomfortable suspecting to be true about God are also divine possibilities...

and in so doing, we dress God up like something God is not.

like a little child who dresses the family dog up in a frilly dress and a silly hat in order to serve the dog some make believe tea, we dress the God up in order to somehow relate to rather than revere the creator of all.

but have you ever looked at the face of that dog? there's this look of weary tolerance, as if the dog knows it looks foolish (almost as if it even feel as foolish as it looks) bound up in something like that. all far-fetched anthropomorphisms aside, in my view, we bind God up in the garments of praise/ robes of expectation rather than subject ourselves to the prospect of the naked God- and God puts up with it.

eventually, i hope that my understanding of God will be free of all of these cultural coats and expectations that i in my myopia have loved to dress God up in.

but back to hineini's post above.
i couldn't help but notice something interesting in there considering familiarity and restlessness.

the questions asked in the bit prior to the above statement that opens this post also have a familiarity to them. we've been down that road before as well- unsatisfactorily or otherwise- in earlier dialogues, and have come back to the same queries.

one might call this consistency.
another might conclude that an impass has been reached... you know, that place in a conversation where everything is on the table and the arguments become circular and rhythmic. that's usually where one or the other loses interest! ha ha.

what i find most intriguing, though, is the idea of the things we'll never know wasteland and how open endedness is a trap that causes people's free minds to run crazily and pointlessly on the wheel in the cage until such time as some leader releases them with an easy answer, telling them emphatically how things are. it seems as though the dissatisfaction with the inconclusive answer to the tiresome question is based on exactly this: wanting some leader to state emphatically how things are.

okay, here's my take on it all:

inconclusive and unexplained,
but being progressively revealed...
God's strip tease.

nope, nothing new there...

but, after all, the last post was called 'ferris' and did bear the illustration of the space station from the film 2001 a space odyssey with human beings doing laps on a large revolving wheel set in the stars. metaphors come and metaphors go, but this is more of a visual rhyme.
***
Despite all my rage I'm still just a rat in a cage
Then someone will say what is lost can never be saved
Despite all my rage Im still just a rat in a cage
And I still believe that I cannot be saved
(billy corgan, 1994)

ferris

2008-05-12T10:00:00.000-07:00

my friend in malaysia recently posed a line of questions in an email.
Did God create everything?
If so then did He create SIN?
If not then can Satan create things?
Or did God just make the possibility of sin?
Is the possibility of something too big a question for the human mind to understand?"

there are some challenges whenever we default to the notion that "God created everything, therefore..."

it's probably just bad logic on my part.

i like to hold to the idea that God created materials and situations, got wheels turning, and BOOM, there we have the earth and all that is within.

i like the idea that the 'big bang' was the voice of God shattering the silence and the darkness simultaneously with the words 'let there be light!'

i like the idea that evolutionary theories do not prove or disprove anything, especially the existence or non-existence of God, and that they do not necessarily contradict our Christian cosmology.

but...

if i am comfortable with this 'wheels turning' thing, then i should also be good with the idea that God indirectly put to death the friends and families of my dear friends in sri lanka with the tsunami. i should be fine with the idea that God 'did' the recent cyclone in burma which took the lives of 100 thousand and has us wondering whatever happened to at least 200 thousand more. wheels are turning and the outcome is attributable to God, right?

well... yes, but... no... but...

hate that. somehow there are things that seem inconsistent with our (my) picture of who God is and what God is about, no matter which position in a logical argument like this i side with. drives me crazy sometimes.

there is comfort for me, however, in remembering that all we know about God has been revealed to us- revealed to us in ways that are recognizable to us even though we are, in our fallenness, only a reasonable hand-drawn facsimile of what created and deemed 'very good.' the things that we do not know we do not know because God has chosen to remain a mystery through them for reasons that are God's- perhaps because the answers to some of our questions may be too big for our minds to embrace. we mustn't ever let logic bind God. this promptly ushers out the possibility of miracle.

a miracle, after all, is a break in the cause/effect nature of our physical world- an intervention- and when God chooses to break these little physical rules that keep our feet on the ground and keep the fires burning and the air circulating on this planet, God does so for good reasons- God's.

and how might we understand the mind of God apart from revelation? we can't. i'm kinda glad that we can't though.

being prone to bad logic, foolish conclusions and abhorable behaviour, for us to be able to completely comprehend the divine at this level would make divinity considerable less divine. in my view, part of God's divinity is God's mystery. in my rather wimpy understanding of things, the possibility of sin is our free will, which is also our greatest endowment from God- free will represents God's greatest trust, greatest risk, greatest hope.

i also think that the most important aspect of one's faith is the question-asking part... even if the answers we are able to arrive at are, at best, inconclusive.

the needing God

2008-03-19T08:28:00.000-07:00

sometimes relationships and dialogue serve as a catalyst for these great lengthy rants.
other times, they spawn these little platitudes that would probably make great fridge magnets.

synthesizing a few different streams, i was prompted to type this in an email to a friend:

the need that is to be attended to in ministry is what God needs you to do, not simply what you and others are in need of... if we all think this way, the world need not go hungry.

it's a bit quirky to speak of God needing.

(tangent: i sometimes get all caught up in these silly kinds of things and the result of the catching is that i overthink my way out of expressing the idea. i remember a friend once spoke of the danger inherent in editing, as one can unwittingly edit brilliance down to mediocrity. although i recognize the value of choosing words carefully, i sometimes am so careful that i end up saying nothing at all. i have heard people pray this way, flipping and flopping around with verbal shock absorbers and 'not my will but thy will' phrases to the point where you gotta wonder if God isn't just finding those infinite reserves of divine patience and longsuffering being depleted. God sits there, forcing a smile, saying was there something you wanted to talk to me about?)

i wonder if the idea of a God with a need isn't such a bad thing.
what if the idea of need further completes our picture of God, further augment the perfection and the holiness that we ascribe to God?

can one with need be complete? be God?

for me to embrace this notion, i must let go of the projections that i am tempted to slap onto God which are actually human conditions- human conditions that drive me mildly crazy. you know the ones: those aspects of the phrase 'needy' that suck our own reserves dry.

a needing God is not the same as a needy God.

God needs regular people to show love to each other
God needs regular people to share what they have with each other (you get the idea...)

see, God has created us to engage in meaningful life and experience with one another, and seeks to work miracles of faith and provision through these engagements. i'm fond of saying that

every good thing is of God and
every bad thing is something good that's been compromised

i believe this, but if what i believe is true, then part of God's glory must needs be realized through me. i have a responsibility in this bigger picture- this grand mosaic that presents the face of God to humankind through the faces of each other- to be part of what's going on, lest my lack of stewardship in the area entrusted to me become compromised and no longer bearing the truth of God's invitation.

i am needed to actively share the aspects of God's face that are part of God's revelation through me... failing to meet this need, part of God's expression of love to this world is stifled, suppressed.

in my view, these things don't change who God is. i'm not tossing some home-brewed version of pantheism onto the table and claiming to have discovered something new. creator is still separate from the created.

thing is, aspects of creator go unexpressed in direct relation to the responsiveness, or lack thereof, of the created to divine opportunities for revelation.

God needs people to express things as creator which can only be truly expressed through the created of God. whereas, some aspects of God's character are plainly evident in this world of somethings, the relational aspects must be expressed through the someones.

take, for instance, a song that i was given back in 1999. it was the last song i wrote in the 20th century, written on new year's eve.

(i say 'given' because there are many different processes for or approaches to creating art, whether this art is visual, dramatic, musical or linguistic. modes of inspiration? probably a whole nother blog that someone else has posted already and articulated better)

the way this song was written was unusual for me. it was almost like automatic writing of sorts, in that there were ideas that seemed to synthesize themselves, arriving on the written page already finished and requiring virtually no editing at all. the ideas flowed in an order contrary to the way i usually think, exploring the passion of the Christ, forgoing any discussion of resurrection and moving backwards in time from the burial to the passover meal.

break this thieving heart and place it in the ground
turn and walk away as darkness falls all around
pick up all the pieces of your life
as if we'd never met
and maybe then i'd know how to love

crucify this thieving heart-bind it with thorns
strike it with your fists, subject it to scorn
pledge undying faithfulness
and then betray it with a kiss
and maybe then i'd know how to love

take this thieving heart and do with it what you must
feast upon the flesh, forsake its every trust
drink deeply from the cup
it laboured so earnestly to fill
and maybe then
just maybe then
and maybe then i'd know how to love

i find this all very humbling, because when something like this takes place you are left with a sense of divine visitation of sorts. this is what i mean by revelation.

now whether the revelation of God through a person is as dramatic as this example seems to be for me, or simply a moment when the need of another presented itself and a person responded in love and grace, i must conclude that God needs us in order to express these aspects of God's character that fall silent in our absence. the need of God, then, seems to be both contextual and infinite- well, as infinite as the possibilities and opportunities that exist mathematically if we assign a number to every person who has lived, does live and ever will live, and then multiply those numbers by themselves to the Nth power... that's infinite enough for me to represent a pretty huge divine need.

that you and i are part of the meeting of this need causes me to feel incredibly small, yet somehow integral to the 'self actualization of God.'

blaise pascal spoke of the God-shaped void within every human being. could it be that in the heart of God there is a human-shaped void for each of us?

the maybe God

2008-02-18T08:04:00.000-08:00

"Maybe God does get upset with us for offering all sorts of prayers. Maybe God gets upset some days and not others. Maybe we think God capable of that and maybe not but I guess the point is that if we equate a certain way of thinking with "the accuser" or "Satan" or "the evil one" I'm just not sure how we can avoid calling anyone (at least implicitly) who thinks this way evil." (hineini)

you, know, i am so incredibly comfortable with a 'maybe God' idea that i wonder if it represents some kind of faith shortcoming in my theology or something. what i mean is that a God of possibility makes more sense to my heart than a God of impossibility... this is challenging for me to embrace in light of my sunday school upbringing, but there is a natural invitation to my heart there that i cannot deny.

recently i read a deep, meaningful and frank email from a friend who is fed up with his job- particularly his boss. none of his prayers seem to be answered right now and it is making him crazy. unfortunately, i'm not sure my words were much comfort because i had been asking questions of my own.

but what? God is only interested in our growth when we are theologically orthodox and well-behaved? where is that written down?

perhaps we go through famine in order to discover aspects of the spiritual walk that elude us all these years of plenty. perhaps pain and calamity are necessary parts of our invitation into dialogue with the maybe God. perhaps we cannot grasp the concept of the maybe God in times of affluence and charm.

the God of faith and UNcertainty- can we deal with a God like this?
all over the world, others do.

it's like we have been using theological hand sanitizer for so long that the smallest doubt bug will wipe us out as an entire people because we have no faculty for dealing with the God who doesn't get right back to us on this one

the God of the wait
the God of the silence
the God of the apparent absense... the maybe God.

maybe God is focusing on global injustice and disparity
maybe God is wanting me to sort this one out myself
maybe God is more like the sovereign king that the weeping lover
maybe God is angry
maybe God is hardline
maybe God punishes
maybe God isn't interested in the win-win
maybe God isn't going to ever give me a sign

not even the slightest movement of the curtain as i throw rocks at the window in the sky (rev david whitticomb, 2001)

what do we do with the maybe God, who can therefore be the undoing of everything we always thought about God?
the things that we found so endearing about God?
the things we've based our entire faith upon?

what if the maybe God is a truer picture of God than the one we've held onto our entire life? what then?

Jesus said

"Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."

i think that Jesus was talking about the maybe God.

what if my issues with my boss are actually my issues with my God?
is there enough faith left to still hold on? if not, what do i need to do in order to get a better grip on this God-person?

i mean, letting go is not an option- but what if the most important learnings of our lives take place in the time of punishment? what if the most important work we do for God is still before us and is contingent upon our embracing of these new revelations of God- these divine possibilities?

these are the questions that i ask the silence

to be systematic and carve very rigid lines between who God is and who God isn't presumes a lot, i think. there is no awe for me in an understandable diety. this doesn't mean that i like the glib, nonspecific, acknowledgement of a someone or something that is beyond or at best removed and therefore irrelevent- i just find comfort in the knowledge that the more i discover within the character of God as revealed in scripture and demonstrated in people, the more aware i am of how much more there probably is to discover.

geometrically, a ray is a line that extends from a starting point on to forever, whereas a segment is the portion of a line that connects one point to another. i think that it might be more comfortable for many to see theology as a segment and their own personal growth as a ray. for me, however, there is great joy in considering both my personal growth and my theology to find their beginning at a point on a pre-existing line and travelling on that line to eternity at the same speed.

i don't think that the pre-existing line is God or 'the pathway of God' or anything... it's probably just a linear model of time. however, the idea that life and love can move along this together at the same speed appeals to me, in that it is my desire to be somehow growing and deepening in my capacity to love with each passing day.

to increase one's capacity to love and express this love is, in my view, the point of a personal theology.

and this is for the questions that don't have any answers
(kid rock)

prayer and the lying bastard

2008-02-12T22:41:00.000-08:00

i was just digging back through some old emails when i stumbled upon this note that someone sent me once:

"Given my neurotic tendencies, my natural proclivity is to think God is upset with me for offering up such prayers."

i wonder if God, in divine grace, could ever actually be upset with us for praying. no matter how egocentric, experiencially narrow and theologically "off" our prayers might be, to what degree does God judge them versus simply considering their source?

i think that the accusor would have us subjected daily to the judgements of a harsh and perfectionistic divine parent, the approval of whom we fail to receive ad infinitum.

if i was a lying bastard, that's who I'D say God is...

100th episode

2008-02-09T10:20:00.000-08:00

okay, so here we are with the 100th post on this blog.

amazing.

after all these months, to reopen this all but abandoned webspace. why?

i don't know.

perhaps there are still conversations to be had. more idea-pong to be played.

i thought that i'd start this 100th post where we left off. i was in the middle of writing something and then just abruptly stopped. it was, for some reason, important enough to me to start and yet not important enough to finish. how many things about my life and yours are that way?

well, whatever the case,
welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends...

***

faith often unwittingly discounts reason as being ungodly and calculating… which essentially imprisons the reasonable, relegating them to mere subjects rather than citizens of the kingdom of God. this exclusionary thinking is responsible for literally chasing people whose hard-wired sacred pathway is their intellect from our fellowship as believers. It’s Spiritual Bullying.

***

that's it. that's as far as i got. but at least we're back at the table.

pride, possession, and something about karma

2007-05-22T13:55:00.000-07:00

bigbro and i were speaking long ago about his bearing of the burdens of a rather wealthy other, and the stress connected with being instrumental in attending to this person's freedom from the darkness that had dogged his every step...

I've learned that a man can shed his demons and there is a really good feeling of freedom that comes with that shedding, but there is also a loneliness, because those demons were all the guy had for company for a long time......bigbro aka fred call

taking on the demons of another? some heavy sledding there.
two things:

1) the demons don't want to leave, and

2) their hosts are usually terrified of the hole that will be left. a friend of mine was telling me about how he quit music altogether after going through rehab because he was terrified of what would happen if he stepped onstage straight and tried to do what he does better than anything in the world without the usual buffers. it's been four years now...

anyway, it's true; prosperity and loneliness seem to be together a lot.
the story of king midas comes to mind...

and so bigbro continued:
As for Z: He had money. He had demons. Then he realized he couldn't buy his demons off with money. He really didn't want to live. I think he wanted to beat his bad karma before he died, so he didn't have to take it with him. My instincts say he had a better chance of taking his money with him than he had of taking better karma with him. In the final analysis, it was his decision how to go. That he's gone, I think he's happier. I just hope he managed to shed the bad assed karma that gave him cancer in the first place. Otherwise, he's got to go through chemo again in the next go round.

could the whole deathwish thing be inherent in our preoccupation with ourselves? navel-gazing spiritual beings finding themselves relegated by their behaviour and the attitudes or perspectives that give life to that behaviour into something less than was originally intended? even though we fear death and the uncertainty that it holds for anyone in search of hard facts, we still feel more comfortable with despair than with hope because this allows us to essentially remain the same, being ever victimized by things beyond our apparent control in the process..

as i read about bigbro's wealthy friend, i was reminded of something i had read just the day before... i love those nexus moments where things just appear to randomly connect and to inform each other... what we do with those connections is another affair, but i think if we can at least recognize them when they come together there has to be some benefit.

"God, in his power, drags away the rich. They may rise high, but they have no assurance in life. They may be allowed to live in security, but God is always watching them. And though they are great now, in a moment they will be gone like all others, withered like heads of grain. "Can anyone claim otherwise? Who can prove me wrong?" (job 24.22-24, NLT)

i remember being told once -probably back in bible school- that job is arguably the oldest book (or at least the oldest story) in the bible apart from the creation narratives themselves and the stuff about the adams family ('adam' meaning 'son of dirt' or 'first man') ... all this to say that, in my view, apparently the whole notion of wealth and the basic disparity of the human race has been with us for awhile.

and so in what ring of dante's hell was the rich man standing when he begged michael to send lazarus down with a drop of water for his tongue? and why in the hell did he think that it was the poor man's job to serve him beverages?

in sri lanka, august of 2005, clues as to an answer for this second query came in through the back door.

traditionally the sri lankans are a hospitality culture, offering preferential treatment to anyone who arrives at their door having journeyed long- they are still that way, even while in the throes of a twenty-five year old civil war. one day we arrived at this guy's place, having traveled for about 6 hours or so in a van with no air-conditioning. he greeted us warmly (although he was surprisingly more aware of the fact that, due to spot checks and road conditions, we were arriving two hours late than we had expected him to be) and proceeded to draw a bucket of water from the family well (only about 3 feet of water in it at the time) for us to wash our hands before he then washed our feet with the remainder of the water. he would not allow us to share a bucket- a new one had to be drawn for each guest.

now in my western oh-no-not-me-i'm-so-unimportant vanity, this would have been awkward and there would have been this graceless non-receiving of a kindness offered that probably would have led to pain, as this man would be left pondering a cultural question:
'what have i or my family done, that you would not accept this humble kindness from us?'

however, having been there nearly two weeks already and therefore used to hospitality by then, i just said thank you.

see, whether it's having this sick entitlement thing that presumes some form of dominion over another, or having this nauseating false humility thing that refuses to allow another the freedom to give selflessly, it seems to me that the main problem- the swelling that makes the camel far too large for the needle's eye- is humankind's inability to get over itself.

i think that that's probably the bad-assed karma of which bigbro spoke. like edgar alan poe's imp of the perverse, it drives us to to self destruction through the destruction of others. as a species, we're really good at putting ourselves first and attributing our selfishness to natural selection or something. it's how we got here and it's how we'll ultimately leave.

the apostle paul said that 'the wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ.'

okay, now i'm not being one of job's buddies here, providing some pretty hollow words of explanation as to why bad things happen to good people. (in truth, i think that the problem is that there aren't actually any good people... now there's an encouraging topic for a whole nother blog) i'm simply suggesting that if we want some answers as to the pain that assails us all- not the physically or emotionally detailed, circumstancial, case-sensitive pain of an individual, but that pain which systematically dismantles us while defining us as one people, one race, one species- we probably don't have to look very far.

unfortunately, as long as we continue to preoccupy ourselves with ourselves, i think that we're stuck with it for awhile longer.

ideally?

2007-05-22T07:11:00.000-07:00

torchie and i were talking about ideas and actions when he made an interesting statement:

knowing something philosophically and experientially are distinct from each other but not mutually exclusive for both are necessary to knowing something fully. (torchie)

hmm... the fullness of knowledge.

does this soundbyte speak of a difference between intellectual ascent and actually living the dream? i love that they cannot be separated from each other and still be true- excluding one while embracing the other is simply hypocrisy is it not?

okay, here's the kick: is all hypocrisy bad, or is hypocrisy sometimes simply indicative of one's faithlessness? i mean, until someone points it out in me, is the log in my eye a bad thing for which i must take responsibility, or is it just blindness... the presence of which being possibly the responsibility of others to identify in me? this is how people discover that they are colour blind, right? the awareness of this 'blindness' is impossible within a relational vacuum because basically perspective gone unchallenged is personal truth. we have no reason to question something from our own point of view because it's our own point of view and we hold to its accuracy... perhaps this is yet another reason establishing the importance of graciously receiving the investments that others make in us as we labour together.

example? the other day i was meeting for breakfast with this 'bob the builder' guy that i haven't hooked up with in a long time. as we spoke of about many things, i started to notice that he had a particular verbal habit. no workaday vocalized pauses like 'um' or 'er' or 'd'Oh!' in fact, he kept inserting the word ideally into the beginning of sentences. after two or three of these i called him on it...

can an ideal ever be attainable?
or is its unattainability that which makes it an ideal?

in other words, is 'ideally' a verbal shock absorber that allows you to say how you wish things could be, but have no faith in the possibility of the realization of this dream?

see, in bob's case, i think that his use of 'ideally' connoted the 'settling for' something less than the best. it was philosophically there, but experiencially non-existant even in his imagination... he had already signed off on the dream, settling instead for something commonplace and ultimately unsatisfying.

so when we speak of spiritual walks and healing journeys and possible differences between what we are envisioning and what we are experiencing, i say hold on and receive these things as they are offered... remembering that the vision of healing is fuel enough to see the realization of this vision. circumstancial and relational realities cannot withstand the restorative vision that God places in one's heart as hope for the future.

it's not ideal- it is simply yet to come.

should i stay or should i go

2007-04-26T22:59:00.000-07:00

this one got going on 'northVUs' and it seemed like there might be more to say so i transplanted it here...

"How bout those who reject Jesus, or the church, or faith? It seems to me that as soon as you define the role of something, specifically an institution, then you are necessarily excluding." (hineini)

i agree that those who reject the centre of a faith community- in this case Jesus- will find themselves outside of that faith community... but that is what rejection means, isn't it? the turning from rather than towards something or someone?

does this mean that these individuals fall outside of the love of that community or the love of the God of that community? no, it shouldn't imply this at all. as a matter of fact, it is pretty scriptural that the love of God and his faith community, the Church, is offered inclusively with no expiry date and no umpire keeping track of strikes. if Jesus would implore peter and the boys to forgive seventy-times-seven then i think it would be rather inconsistent for God the Father to say

"well, yeah, that's a rule i made for you. however, with me it's down to your basic three strikes and you're out."

however, some of hineini's comment seems to reflect this understanding or characterization of God. in my view, that god is a construct, created in the image of certain members of fallen humanity who would seek to somehow justify thoughts of condemnation of the people beside them... much like the parable Jesus told in luke 18.9-14 . the reality of who God is is not limited by our sloppy theology. the only thing that is limited by our sloppy theology is our ability to experience a deep relationship with this God person... oh, and the ability to invite others into relationship with God as well, for a relationship based on misconception is going to have some pretty arbitrary limits and some therefore pretty limited appeal.

but back to rejection... it is my belief that when individuals reject that which is being offered (and continues to be offered regardless of their decision to accept or reject it) then they have no place entertaining feelings of embitterment or alienation based on their own decision to reject. they've chosen exclusion of their own design.

remember, i am not talking about somehow barring the doors or shutting the lights out and pretending no one is home when an 'other' (in the biblical sense) comes by. i am simply acknowledging that the burden of one's own redemption lands right back where the burden of damnation began- free will.

escape

2007-04-26T07:16:00.000-07:00

"I am curious though why we work so hard to avoid guilt. I am aware its an unpleasent feeling but... the risks are too great, the costs too high to start to justify our actions to ourselves, excusing ourselves from our infinite debt to the other."(hineini)

realization

2007-04-13T21:54:00.000-07:00

"The problem seems to be not the mere thought of 'lust' - but the cultivation of that idea until we 'act' in ways that compromise 'do not commit adultery' (societyVS)

hmmm. i'm not sure about this. i guess it's the whole cultivation thing that has me doing a double take. where is the line in the sand that separates the doing from the done?

i mean, Jesus' words point out that, in the eyes of God, there is no real difference between what we do mentally and what we do physically. in other words, although we think of ourselves as these fragmented, compartmentalized beings, God does not. as hineini has shared from his ongoing study of the teachings of philosopher emmanuel levinas, to put someone into a box of our own design is to murder the person's identity and therefore rob that person of freedom and life... regardless of whether we treat that person the way we think of them or not. similarly, our hindu friends assert that all of life is in the mind, and go on to suggest that if we were actually able to think certain things, those things would be realized.

the word realize in and of itself is used more often with reference to an idea than to a physical situation. we speak of 'suddenly realizing' something, meaning that an idea which has been elusive up until now becames an accepted truth for us. for us it has been made real: it has been realized.

a friend of mine was recently sorting out some life stuff and it was getting messy. the challenge was that he was trying to apply the wise teachings of another to his life, but was having trouble doing so because he was basically stubborn. he wanted to but he didn't want to, you know? classic divided heart stuff that we all encounter from time to time.

in a different context, i was recently speaking on the biblical character of samson. to summarize the biblical narrative, his story is the story of the slow demise of a super hero…

this is a guy who seems to be best known for his arrogance and impulsiveness, his belligerence and unteachability, and his tendency to push hard against the limits to see if they will hold. yet while still in the womb, it is established that he is to be set apart to live a life of radical holiness and dedication to God in order to bear radical fruit. he is to be a nazirite.

it is your basic three-part vow (as detailed in the sixth chapter of the fourth book of the bible):

*no contact with fruit of the vine- inner purity, self control and self discipline
*no contact with any already dead thing- inner purity, alignment with life not death
*no haircuts- common among holy men around the world, outwardly signifying this ‘vow of separation’

but samson’s fall is a gradual descent from radical consecration to regular compromise… samson systematically dismantles his own 'super powers'…

first he goes wandering off from the rest of his group, getting into a scrap with a lion down by a certain vineyard and then keeping it secret. later, he wanders off again, returning to the scene of his secret crime, and enjoying strange and exotic delicacies from the insides of this carcass, hinting coyly at it with riddles. now whether we look at this narrative figuratively, or literally, it appears that, with two down and one to go, this revocation of vows just needs an outward signature to authenticate the inner abandonment. it is no surprise when the hair finally comes off- what is a surprise is that it takes twenty years and a personal midlife crisis for the divided heart of this guy to finally be outwardly realized.

in my view, it is of even greater import that we give attention to the inner struggle of submission and yieldedness, as the growth in this underlying area will serve our journey in the decisions and actions of many overlying ones. i almost said 'superficial' here but then realized that our outer life is in no way superficial... if it were, i think that Jesus would have focused entirely upon mystical teachings, rather than calling people again and again to an awareness of how their hearts and their bones need to be in sync.

after all, the actions of the outer man betray or celebrate the state of the inner person. they are the realization in our outer, physical realm of the angel or devil inside.
***

gordon macdonald has a rather successful book called rebuilding your private world and i imagine much of this thinking is better-articulated there. the book asserts, event within its title, that we live in (at least) two worlds, an inner one and an outer one, and that their prudent management, order and reorder are both possible and necessary.

UFC, dragons and the image of God

2007-03-14T08:31:00.001-07:00

"When we place value (the only value) in the overcoming, or transcending, or triumph over these things, (struggles, difficulties, sufferings etc.) we empty them of their positive content and value. When it comes to people then, the victim is valued when they overcome their victimization, the addict is valued when they have triumph over their addiction or when they clean up and the "criminal" has value when they are delivered from their "deviance" and rehabilitated." (hineini)

i think i hear what you are saying, hineini.

last summer, i was in a meeting where somebody made a statement that all they had had to do was pray and they were healed... that their faith had made them whole.

now, i have no problem with feeling this- i mean, it's even biblical.

however, feeling and articulating are two very different things. one must needs be careful with this kind of testimonial because of the message of hopelessness and failure that this kind of announcement indirectly puts out there for someone who is still struggling with and being overcome by something that is completely out of their control. to put it another way, the victim of an infirmity feels devalued as a person because of his or her inability to somehow slay this dragon and bring back a victory report to the crowd.

a friend of mine, an old 'saint' and one of the most faithful followers of Christ i know, had been struggling with major kidney failure and had been doing and receiving from others a heckuvalot of prayer- but was losing the battle. to make this glib 'mind over matter' kind of statement in his presence was to suggest that his faith was somehow not strong enough to overcome this physical ailment. what was intended to be a shout of victory for the encouragement of the masses within their own circumstance probably just rang out as hollow hopelessness for my friend. try to tell someone who has been praying against something for years to no resolution that 'God has no favorite children' and then listen to their side. there is this pervasive 'well why not ME then?' question begging for an answer- although my friend would never say this, i believe i might if i were in his place.

even beyond this, contrast western prosperity theology and all this 'child of the king' talk with war, hunger, starvation, disease, homelessness and natural disaster in any of the three or four worlds and see how well the rhetoric holds up to real life. i remember being rather stuck for an answer when a new friend of mine in sri lanka asked me point blank the first time we met:

"what do i tell the people of my village who have lost everything- family, friends, home, livelihood- to Tsunami? who is this God that i am to share with them?"
(rev david gunasari)

d'uh... good question.

journeys down 'alleyways of strife' have and always will be things of beauty... but not the comfortable, renaissance, dayglo psychadelic or off-in-a-field-somewhere-with-the-archbishop-of-canterbury kind of beauty... the kind of wild, action-painter beauty of jackson pollock paintings, bearing upon them the scars of the creative battle itself; the beauty of jacob's walk after his all-night UFC bout with an angel of God; the beauty of my friend rev david's angry resolve to hold tightly to his faith in an invisible God- the only thing in his life that wasn't destroyed by the disaster that destroyed his village and killed many of his family and friends.

there are very few things as inspiring to me as seeing the faith of one who is fighting an ongoing battle with something and refuses to relent on either the battle or the faith that brings greater strength to contend.

i find great inspiration in the white-knuckling of faith in the face of all manner of opposition. job's refusal to accept the advice of his wife to just 'curse God and die' makes him already victorious- but not in the manner of the 'colonial triumphalism' described above, which seems to be a 'fought the good fight, ran the good race' kinda thing.

in my view, job's 'victory' is an ongoing one of day to day conviction and plain perseverence- not in naivete but in hard-nosed faithfulness. rather than being the opiate of the people, faith for people like job and my friend is adrenaline, enabling them the supernatural strength to somehow do things that they really shouldn't be able to do.

but i don't think that any of this is what hineini is saying.
what i take from hineini's comment above is a challenge...

i am being challenged to find inspiration in the life lived in desperation, struggle and strain; the life lived to ultimate 'failure' in these Victory in Jesus terms; the life lived to bear testimony to the love and lifebreath of God simply because it is a human life, and being such bears the truth, the dignity and the opportunity to enlighten that is the very image of God.

TGWU (baggage handlers' union)

2007-03-08T12:38:00.001-08:00

some good questions:
1)why is unencumbered good again? (hineini)

wow- well posed. i think that hineini's question above is really strongly related to societyVS' one below:

2) Outlive a painful experience, interesting. Like as in 'forget about it' or 'deal with it'? (societyVS)

both of these questions have been going round and round in my head the last couple days for reasons that have nothing to do with blogging, and the more i think about them, the more i wonder if, in fact, unencumbered is necessarily a good thing. i mean, it probably depends on what we mean by unencumbered.

here's what set me off. last night a mom showed up at our small wednesday night prayer group and shared some desperate pain with everyone there (it was a small meeting compared to some- only about 10 people) concerning her angry young daughter's journey into extreme sports self destructive decision making.

at this gathering was a guy who had been absent from our fellowship for about 8 months. having been admitted to the hospital for day surgery back in july, he had contracted an infection which had brought about excruciating pain that had to be treated eventually with morphine which triggered his cocaine addiction and caused him to basically fall off the edge of the world, spiralling downward for literally months. he was completely unreachable and, at times, even untraceable until the disease finally remitted and he came to at one of the local rescue missions where he now lives, having sold everything he owned for drugs.

so he didn't know this mom or her daughter at all, having been seriously 'out of the loop' per se. he sat quietly listening, drinking in the whole story. when he spoke, however, it wasn't to recount his own experiences or personal regrets, providing glib testimonial to the fact that hope was not completely out of reach because any one can change blah blah blah. he instead shared his duaghter's story which, for all intents and purposes, was very similar to the story just shared.

suddenly the conversation was between two people who knew what they were talking about. the rest of the group bore witness to it all, but listened in silence. the true healing that took place there (obviously in small measure, considering the tragic tales being exchanged) was in the basic sharing of common pain.

unencumbered? hmm. i'm not sure that one completely unencumbered would have been much use at that meeting. it was an enactment of God's mercy and grace that, on this particular evening and in spite of the bad weather and the multiple bus transfers that were needed to be worked through in order for my friend to come to the prayer group, he was there as the one completely empathically understanding set of ears in the room. reminds me a lot of the kind of environment that societyVS describes in some of his earlier comments. the writer of acts concurs, as does the apostle paul in what he extols the baby church to become in 2 cor 1.1-11 (which had been my chosen devotional text for the evening, having no idea what was about to happen.)

so if living unencumbered means somehow glibly denying that this or that abuse happened again and again and no one seemed to be listening, or winking at the moral failure of one in a position of authority, or otherwise just running from reality because it hurts then what's the point? but if, when we speak of living unencumbered, we mean somehow outliving (surviving) truths that would enslave or negatively redefine us- and using the freedom that follows to inform our journey as we walk alongside of others in community and support, then i'm in.

That there- thats not me
I go where I please
I walk through walls
I float down the liffey
Im not here
This isnt happening
Im not here
Im not here

In a little while Ill be gone
The moments already passed
Yeah its gone
And Im not here
This isnt happening
Im not here
Im not here

Strobe lights and blown speakers
Fireworks and hurricanes
Im not here
This isnt happening
Im not here
Im not here

(thom yorke, circa 2000)

uninformed and unaffected

2007-03-05T07:02:00.000-08:00

"I can say for a fact 'the truth sets me free' - in the sense that I see clearly my faults and human weaknesses - and I go through the valley of death/pain - just to get to the point where I accept that truth and then deal with it honestly and sincerely" (societyVS)

so here's the thing. i'm out for breakfast with this guy and he's talking to me about this bible study that he is beginning to attend. the group is studying the book of romans and he is just really loving the time that is being spent in the scriptures and how much he's learning from it all.

after listening for a bit, i ask

'what part of romans do you like the most?'

i know, i know... dumb question. it's a totally heavy book which doesn't really fit into 'like/dislike' thinking. it's full of really strong counsel on how to live life as a follower of Christ.

anyway, he begins to quote romans 12 really really fast...

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you.

what makes this all rather tough for me is that there are many aspects of the life being lived that directly contradict this memorized and recited moral soundbyte. we have spoken of so many things, but all i can think of is that once again these scriptural words are being quoted from one whose life continues to exist uninformed and even unaffected by them.

honesty and truth must go together. it's not the loving of truth that bears the fruit of freedom, it's the living of it.

free

2007-03-01T07:53:00.000-08:00

"Nothing wrong with the truth
when the truth can set us free"
(societyVS)

hmmm. what if that truth doesn't set us free? what if that truth actually imprisons us in a causality cage where we are sentenced to live in a box with the consequences of our actions/decisions?

how's that truth feel? is that freedom?

a friend of mine is living there now... and yet would argue that he is experiencing the first actual freedom he's had in years. there's something amazingly liberating about no longer having to check over your shoulder; no longer having to run from the facts that may yet overtake you; no longer having to remember the lies you've told to cover up the lies you've told.

mark twain had something to say about the virtue inherent in that of kind of truth.

i don't think that it is truth that is hard to work with in the classic adage (taken from a larger passage on cause, effect, integrity and identity in john 8.31-40 that is a crucial read) alluded to by societyVS...

it's this whole elusive notion of freedom.
***
words from the cell- YOU decide what freedom means:

I have not felt this "alive" for a very long time.
If my wife and closest friends were asked how I am doing
(and by the way, theyre reading this)
I would bet the farm that theyd say
"Torchie has really changed for the better. He went MIA but he has now been found. We have him back again!"
I am enjoying the freedom Jesus meant for me to have over [addictions, indiscretions] and the damning accusations that are associated with these. My freedom is a by-product of the rich satisfaction that comes from knowing and loving God. My knowledge of and love for God has been significantly influenced by a daily diet of Scripture and prayer as well as the encouragement and counsel of my wife and trusted friends.
Listen Everyone:

I DONT EVER WANT TO GO BACK TO WHERE I HAVE COME FROM.
(torchie)
***

i rose above these sterile sheets
a cold sweat left behind
a departure from a living death
delivered just in time
the plot had thickened to the point
where there was little hope to see
the antagonist had raised his fist
no option was open to me

but for a deus ex machina
a god in the machine
an unexpected reversal comes about
like awakening from a bad dream
with the swing of the playwright's pen
life returns to me again
now the show can have a happy ending
by faith, for freedom's haste, the seasons change

it's never too late to whirl around
move the other way
i have seen mornings robbed of light
nights as bright as day
the future is changeable- the past is set
finally i understand
hardest to grasp is that circumstance
is successfully countermand

by deus ex machina
God in the machine
an unexpected reversal comes about
like awakening from a bad dream
with the swing of the playwright's pen
life returns to me again
now the show can have a happy ending
by faith, for freedom's haste, the seasons change

by faith, for freedom's haste, the seasons change

big-talking golden rulers

2007-01-23T09:44:00.000-08:00

brotherken said:
"Now I know a lot of this doesn't jive with the way many ministries are run today.In most cases we (the church) have given the impression that you must convert, or at least listen to our preaching, to benefit from our charity."

to which hineini responded with a whole nother blog:
I think this is a really interesting idea and one I'd like to speak with you all about a little more. Much has been made in previous posts about how easy it is to criticize the church, maybe more so in terms of its service to those "outside". I have been curious why this is so for quite some time. What I was thinking of offering here was maybe a form of question as to why this is. The simplistic version of the question is "Why doesn't the church do what it says" (as a nod to jollybeggar I will concede that this question already assumes the church guilty as charged) but I want to encourage anyone to pose that question anyway they'd like and offer any thoughts they have.

On my own behalf, I'd like to speak briefly about a distinction that I think offers very hopeful possibilities for a turn around for the church, or, the church's repentance if you will. I want to start by returning to the quote above, specifically the second sentence;

"In most cases we (the church) have given the impression that you must convert, or at least listen to our preaching, to benefit from our charity" (brotherken)

The problem I see here, and of course this problem offers a hopeful possibility, is the concept of charity. Now it may look like I'm playing semantics here, and to be fair I may have asked brotherken to clarify what he means (and I hope he will) but I think many of the difficulties the church faces currently in regards to "the least" is the church's inabilty to transcend charity, to move beyond charity to charity's better, solidarity.

Let me explain. As mentioned above in the conversation regarding the "golden rule" I mentioned that although the golden rule offers a helpful tool for generally peacable and charitable conduct towards those who surround me, it still uses my desires, how I would like to be treated, as a rule in determining how I should treat others. I must first decide what I want before I act and in acting, I in a sense, impose myself on the other, assuming they will want what I want. With charity the giver is never at risk, their position, their beliefs, their life are held in reserve from the other. They are giver, and the other is receiver. A one-way transaction, that in this world's economy cannot but create a debt in the receiver.

In order that this doesn't drag out I will get to what I see as the hopeful possibility. The step beyond charity (which is actually a step back for the "I") is solidarity. Now what do I mean by solidarity. Well, solidarity is the radical humilty of the self that seeks to empty itself (kenosis) of itself and instead privilage the other. The self keeps no interior fortress of unassailable beliefs or doctrines but seeks to move beyond the distinction between I and they. As an important side note, this rejection of the "us" and "them" distinction is not a collaspe into a collective "we" instead its a privilaging of the other. It is the embrace and pursuit of St Paul's words to "count others better than yourself".

Obviously there is much more to say but I'd like to hear what others have to say. (hineini)

...by the way, jollybeggar says 'thanks for the nod!'

the mask of oz

2007-01-18T06:50:00.000-08:00

remembering how at bible school, one prof was notorious for tearing apart the presuppositions that these prairie kids fresh out of youth group and high school ISCF groups brought with them to their study of the scriptures...

by the end of the first term, there were always fewer Christians on campus! ha ha.

although at the time i found this incredibly challenging, i came to understand, over the years that followed, what this guy was doing... he was trying to coax us out of our warm, cozy caccoons where the inside walls were lovingly papered with old sunday-school papers from the 70's and pages from the comic-book version of the bible published by david c. cook in 1973. outside of that happy place was the real world. a place where real people had real questions arising from troubling everyday experiences- a place where a theological bumper-sticker bandaid just wouldn't stop the bleeding.

however, the thing that i still wrestle with today, just like then, is balance. on the one hand, i subscribe to a faith that, because all of the facts are not yet in, does not need to completely reason and qualify all ideas in order to exist; yet on the other hand, i cannot let myself become so accomodating that pretty much anything goes. steve taylor, a singer in the 80's described it well when he said 'you're so open-minded that your brain leaked out.'

i know that i'm not qualified to speak of higher criticism except as an observer. i work hard to qualify the things i teach, sure, but i recognize that this is simply my responsibility as a preacher... it has not been my life'swork. On any theologian's bookshelf there are whole books written by people who can read the ancient languages, who are well-versed in the ancient traditions, and have sat under the teaching of people who have entire wings in seminaries named after them. me? i have books written by people who have read books written by people who attended those seminaries. i understand this.

however, from my acknowledged place as an interactive observer, i have also seen how higher criticism has done much to strip the Bible of its authority among common people and scholars alike... it bothers me that we are so good at talking ourselves out of belief; so ready to be cynical; so eager to take the side of the sceptic rather than the mystic.

why is that? i have an opinion- but it's probably wrong because it oversimplifies things. here goes: i think that most of us are just not interested enough to actively pursue God's truth. it takes too much time and effort. too much reading. too much listening. too much praying. pick any spiritual discipline and you will probably find that it requires too much of us who are kinda comfortable where we are.

so 'when the weight of this world crashes down on you' (mark heard, circa '82) we are ill-equipped to face the barrage- defaulting instead to the sceptic's view, sitting with our face in our drink concluding 'there is no truth.'

actually, there is. the problem is that we are so unfamiliar with his revelation due to our lack of discipline that it is easier to speak of the mask of oz than to seek the face of God.
***

i realize that this post is incomplete-
but that is, after all, the freedom of a whole nother blog...

rabbinical yoke?

2007-01-12T07:31:00.000-08:00

recently in another conversation, a friend of mine figuratively mentioned "following the advice of a rabbi..."

which reminded me of an msn convo i had awhile back with societyVS about the people to whose teaching we subscribe and are most likely to readily cite. i know that, apart from musicians and poets who package human interpersonal and intrapersonal insights into soundbites that i can subliminally feed upon while driving in my car, there are a couple of writers whom i regularly go to for a word of truth. i'm sure many of us have these: it is probably telling to simply click on one's online profile for further details there...

anyway, something i read recently in velvet elvis by rob bell...

(discussed briefly and cross-linked in one of my favourite websites:
www.churchmarketingsucks.com/archives/2005/06/churches_are_li.html)

... about the traditional role of the rabbi seems to be relevant:

Now the ancient rabbis understood that the Bible is open-ended and has to be interpreted. And they understood that their role in the community was to study and mediate and discuss and pray and then make those decisions. Rabbis are like interpreters, helping people understand what God is saying to them through the text and what it means to live out the text...

Different rabbis had different sets of rules, which were really different lists of what they forbade and what they permitted. A rabbi's set of rules and lists, which was really that rabbi's interpretation of how to live the Torah, was called that rabbi's yoke. When you followed a certain rabbi, you were following him because you believed that rabbi's set of interpretations were the closest to what God intended through the Scriptures. And when you followed that rabbi, you were taking up that rabbi's yoke.

One rabbi even said his yoke was easy.

The intent then of a rabbi having a yoke wasn't just to interpret the words correctly; it was to live them out. In the jewish context, action was always the goal. It still is.

Rabbis would spend hours discussing with their students what it meant to live out a certain text. If a student made a suggestion about what a certain text meant and the rabbi thought that the student had totally missed the point, the rabbi would say, "You have abolished the Torah," which meant that in the rabbi's opinion, the student wasn't anywhere near what God wanted. But if the student got it right, if the rabbi thought the student had grasped God's intention in the text, the rabbi would say, "You have fulfilled the Torah."

Notice what Jesus says in one of his first messages: "I have not come to abolish [the Torah] but to fulfill [it]. He was essentially saying, "I didn't come to do away with the words of God; I came to show people what it looks like when the Torah is lived out perfectly, right down to the smallest punctuation marks."

"I'm here to put flesh and blood on the words."

Most rabbis taught the yoke of a well respected rabbi who had come before them. So if you visited a synogogue and the local rabbi (Torah teacher) was going to teach, you might hear that this rabbi teaches in the name of Rabbi So-and-So. If you were familiar with the yoke of Rabbi So-and-So, then you would know what to expect from this rabbi.

Every once in a while, a rabbi would come along who was teaching a new yoke, a new way of interpreting the Torah. This was rare and extraordinary.

Bell goes on to point out that, contained in all the talk about binding and loosing and keys to the kingdom, the yoke of Christ is to give his followers permission and the authority to debate and interpret scripture responsibly...

And not only is he giving them authority, but he is saying that when they do debate and discuss and pray and wrestle and then make decisions about the Bible, somehow God in heaven will be involved...
(rob bell, velvet elvis, exerpted pp 46-48, 2005)

crime and punishment?

2007-01-10T09:52:00.000-08:00

"we must allow the worldly court system to do punish as it sees fit." (brotherken)

Why? This was the whole point of the post, to question this assumption. Can you give at least some reasons to support this? If you'll read above, I ask whether Jesus' words don't offer a way to seperate justice from punishment (and especially violence) and with the immensity of violence surrounding us today I am looking for every possible hope offered. (hineini)

is 'justice' an objective concept... or is it cultural, circumstancial, situational, and personal?

another question might be how lady justice can wield a sword faithfully while blindfolded?

sanctimony baloney

2007-01-09T16:24:00.000-08:00

JOLLYBEGGAR DISCLAIMER:

okay, i've been thinking about this for awhile...
especially since we hit the 40-somethingth comment on the 'cruel God' post...
this dialogue is just too rich to shut down.

although i was trying to close off this blog, the conversation kept moving forward. it didn't even surrender to redundency and circle logic... it just kept progressing.

what kind of an idiot would pull the plug on that?
not this kind, anyway.

the challenge has been to either come up with something new to post or change the whole blog. the e-pistles idea was certainly dialogue based, but originally it was a place to put long-winded explorations of things that had sprung from other emails, comment boxes etc. after awhile, the phrase 'but that's a whole nother blog' started to appear whenever it felt like a tangent was developing. the idea of starting a blog that entertained only the tangents started around then...

a blog that allowed ideas to flow like sweet wine.
an oasis that might have five or six posts all going simultaneously in different directions... something for those of us with attention deficits... those of us who are currently reading four or five books at a time and seem to never be finishing any of them in chronological order.

lately, this has been that blog in a way. it's been a great place to talk, and has been, in the comment boxes of the last two official 'posts' changed direction and focus numerous times. it's been awesome in that it has both challenged and affirmed.

so here's what we can do...

every (or most) time(s) a comment takes us in a different direction, i will just copy and paste it as a new post so that we can continue the one thread while recognizing and embracing the new 'tangents' along the way too. this way the blog will grow naturally out of ongoing dialogue like the many tributaries of a morris louis painting, except that instead of convergent streams of paint these are divergent streams of ideas.

that's why the new name and that's why the new look. the same idea stream with a key difference: the topical flow is less restricted and less reliant upon whether yours truly has anything on his mind these days.

what follows is what prompted the last post, and probably the reason why this blog has stalled for so long. see it as a confessional.

***

i remember a conversation that i had with a friend of mine long ago. we were going through a rather 'rocky' period in our relationship, and one day he asked me why we were always fighting. i didn't even have to think... it just came out:

"because we both know we're right."

okay, so i think i'm still figuring some things out.

a few weeks back, on the same listserve that brought us that controversial piece of wisdom from charles spurgeon (don't think i've ever heard spurgeon refered to as controversial! ha ha) about what debates to enter into, there was a post by someone else who holds a very critical and exclusive (dareisay exclusionary?) perspective on postmodernity and the emerging church.

the good thing about a list like this is that it is run essentially by the people who read it (as opposed to being an 'official' company line on anything.) the bad thing is that it features mainly the cerebral meanderings of many people who should probably just start their own blogs and send the address out to the crowd one time. you can hardly even read the 'del' on my delete key anymore.

now at the risk of sounding disunitive (and amidst a fair bit of sanctimony baloney of my own) i have found the sanctimonious nature of the posts by this one writer on this one email list a bit annoying. at my darkest, i read them so that i can be annoyed, but at my brightest, i choose to not read them because they annoy me... not much of a gap there. not much grace.

so much for being mr free-exchange-of-ideas.

anyway, in his post, this guy was extolling the virtues of a certain book that, in his view, all postmoderns and all emergent pastors should read. in the same post, he shared a few tidbits as anticipatory teasers to ready the soil for the seeds of wisdom that he would be sharing in a forthcoming synopsis and review of the book.

reading the teasers caused me to wonder by whom and for whom such a book is written.

it is the same thing. no big deal, the writer just believes he's right. he's found intellectual acquiesence among many, like the fellow posting the review, who subscribe to the same views. i am reminded of the episode of the simpsons where bart gets kicked out of school and, before finally settling on home-schooling, he is briefly enroled by marge in a school that proudly but falsely promises to put "the fun in fundamentalist dogma."

you see, from within rich personal tradition and its ugly twin, ethnocentricity, people who write often write at everyone else who, in this view, is obviously wrong and misguided... not to them.

from this place, a person often thinks that he/she is helping when he/she presumes to advise others... but in trying to acknowledge societal, philosophical, theological or doctrinal change from an unchanging (although not immutable- simply subjected to and strengthened in its resolve by opposing worldviews and new traditions) vantage point, one risks mispresumption on a number of levels. i wonder how often i wear that hat? i'm pretty sure i'm wearing it now, but i'm going to stand in front of the mirror for a few minutes and just see what i look and feel like with it on.

yep- i look and feel like an ass. call me not-so-jolly-beggar- jollybeggar's ugly twin.

rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty

2006-11-22T15:32:00.000-08:00

when does one cross the line that apparently separates valuable discourse from foolishness? like that fine line that exists between the person at the party who is really interesting and funny after a couple of beers and that same person just one beer too many...

so speaking of wry smiles-
i smile wryly when i read pilate's words in john 18:
"What is truth?" (John 18.38)
nietzsche couldn't have said it better!

and the part in colossians 2 about pointless logic and theosophying...
"See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ." (Colossians 2.8)

a couple of days ago, this little devotional by chucky spurgeon on titus 3.9 went out over the free methodist church in canada's listserve... i read it and decided to just copy and paste it, rather than trying to decide if someone else was feeling that things can get pretty maudlin on blogs and listserves, and had posted it as a reminder to keep our feet on the ground.
***

“Avoid foolish questions.” Titus 3:9

Our days are few, and are far better spent in doing good, than in disputing over matters which are, at best, of minor importance.

The old schoolmen did a world of mischief by their incessant discussion of subjects of no practical importance; and our Churches suffer much from petty wars over abstruse points and unimportant questions. After everything has been said that can be said, neither party is any the wiser, and therefore the discussion no more promotes knowledge than love, and it is foolish to sow in so barren a field.

Questions upon points wherein Scripture is silent; upon mysteries which belong to God alone; upon prophecies of doubtful interpretation; and upon mere modes of observing human ceremonials, are all foolish, and wise men avoid them. Our business is neither to ask nor answer foolish questions, but to avoid them altogether; and if we observe the apostle’s precept (Titus 3:8) to be careful to maintain good works, we shall find ourselves far too much occupied with profitable business to take much interest in unworthy, contentious, and needless strivings.

There are, however, some questions which are the reverse of foolish, which we must not avoid, but fairly and honestly meet, such as these: Do I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ? Am I renewed in the spirit of my mind? Am I walking not after the flesh, but after the Spirit? Am I growing in grace? Does my conversation adorn the doctrine of God my Saviour? Am I looking for the coming of the Lord, and watching as a servant should do who expects his master? What more can I do for Jesus?

Such enquiries as these urgently demand our attention; and if we have been at all given to cavilling, let us now turn our critical abilities to a service so much more profitable. Let us be peace-makers, and endeavour to lead others both by our precept and example, to “avoid foolish questions.”
(Charles Spurgeon)

***
honestly, i think that i'm just kinda tired of blogging. i'm glad that so many are keeping the fires burning around here because lately i haven't been interested in typing anything... there's just too much going on around me that i am taking part in which requires the time that it takes for me to write anything even mildly useful. at best, i get thinking in silly circles like dougie adams' majikthise and vroomfondel, knowing full well that there is work to be done that i'm not attending to in the meantime.

so that's it for me for awhile. i'll check back in from time to time to see who's left the porchlight on for some late-night java...

keep the faith
-jollybeggar

***

"O Deep Thought Computer," he said, "the task we have designed you to perform is this. We want you to tell us ..." he paused, "... the Answer!"

"The answer?" said Deep Thought. "The answer to what?"

"Life!" urged Fook.

"The Universe!" said Lunkwill.

"Everything!" they said in chorus.

Deep Thought paused for a moment's reflection.

"Tricky," he said finally.

"But can you do it?"

Again, a significant pause.

"Yes," said Deep Thought, "I can do it."

"There is an answer?" said Fook with breathless excitement."

"A simple answer?" added Lunkwill.

"Yes," said Deep Thought. "Life, the Universe, and Everything. There is an answer. But," he added, "I'll have to think about it."

A sudden commotion destroyed the moment: the door flew open and two angry men wearing the coarse faded-blue robes and belts of the Cruxwan University burst into the room, thrusting aside the ineffectual flunkies who tried to bar their way.

"We demand admission!" shouted the younger of the two men elbowing a pretty young secretary in the throat.

"Come on," shouted the older one, "you can't keep us out!" He pushed a junior programmer back through the door.

"We demand that you can't keep us out!" bawled the younger one, though he was now firmly inside the room and no further attempts were being made to stop him.

"Who are you?" said Lunkwill, rising angrily from his seat. "What do you want?"

"I am Majikthise!" announced the older one.

"And I demand that I am Vroomfondel!" shouted the younger one.

Majikthise turned on Vroomfondel. "It's alright," he explained angrily, "you don't need to demand that."

"Alright!" bawled Vroomfondel banging on an nearby desk. "I am Vroomfondel, and that is not a demand, that is a solid fact! What we demand is solid facts!"

"No we don't!" exclaimed Majikthise in irritation. "That is precisely what we don't demand!"

Scarcely pausing for breath, Vroomfondel shouted, "We don't demand solid facts! What we demand is a total absence of solid facts. I demand that I may or may not be Vroomfondel!"

"But who the devil are you?" exclaimed an outraged Fook.

"We," said Majikthise, "are Philosophers."

"Though we may not be," said Vroomfondel waving a warning finger at the programmers.

"Yes we are," insisted Majikthise. "We are quite definitely here as representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons, and we want this machine off, and we want it off now!"

"What's the problem?" said Lunkwill.

"I'll tell you what the problem is mate," said Majikthise, "demarcation, that's the problem!"

"We demand," yelled Vroomfondel, "that demarcation may or may not be the problem!"

"You just let the machines get on with the adding up," warned Majikthise, "and we'll take care of the eternal verities thank you very much. You want to check your legal position you do mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job aren't we? I mean what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?"

"That's right!" shouted Vroomfondel,
"we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"

(Douglas Adams- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy;
cited at http://flag.blackened.net/dinsdale/dna/book1.html)

a cruel God

2006-10-31T23:06:00.000-08:00

(disclaimer: warning, some theological BASE jumping here...)

nope, you're right

i definately have a tough time with the 'big cruel God' thing... however, as i started typing the drivel below my brain started to do some backflips which may or may not make sense... let me try to put the ideas together.

in my understanding of it (bereft of any supplemental consultation with our friends at either biblegateway.com or dictionary.com LOL) the whole notion of cruelty turns around not only one person's propensity to act in his or her own self-interest at the expense of all others, but to draw great satisfaction from the pain inflicted upon others in the process. ability, opportunity and motive are all part of the deal.

it is for this reason that i really push back against the whole 'cruel God' idea because most of the time it is embraced by those who are seeking someone to blame for the things that they hate or cannot explain. might as well project responsibility upon someone invisible- provides a bit of counterfeit comfort.

okay, here's a question: are cruelty and responsibility the same?

(i know i'm already in trouble here because H subscribes to much of emmanuel levinas' ideas on responsibility, but i'll let him tell everyone more about that)

i mean, we leap to the conclusion that one who is capable of preventing them but permits awful happenings must do so because that one draws some sick pleasure from the pain of others. you know what? in my view, no God would be better than a God like that... if that's who God is then i'll take my chances and not give him my love or my devotion...maybe there's someone else up there i can talk to.

but then we get all this stuff about bad things happening to good people going on, and the age old questions don't really go away when we default to 'who can say?'...

we need someone to blame.

blame God- it's easy... he's invisible and doesn't contest our blasphemies with miracles, signs or wonders- he just lets us choose to believe what we want- even about his very character.

the heart of God must be a ragged mess.

i know that my own skimpy picture of right and wrong bristles when i hear people attribute stupid, humanly preventable tragedies to God's 'plan.' as i've mentioned in this blog before, we saw through the loss of two of my wife's brothers in three months to automobile accidents. one sunny morning in july of 2003, my brother in law went face to face with a semi as he drove to work... no one has ever been able to explain what happened there. then, three months later to the day, another brother in law and his wife and her young daughter collided with a drunk driver in the middle of the night, claiming not only the lives of my brother-in-law and his soul mate, but that of the driver of the other vehicle as well... there was no one we could even hate over it. both of these tragedies just happened.

as angry and confused as i was about it at the time (and still am- the three-year anniversary of losing my dear friend and brother-in-law terry was october 11) i just couldn't blame 'God's plan' for the night when this one drunken bastard left a wedding in his car and was able to drive an hour and a half in the dark with his lights off before running head-on into the front of my brother-in-law's van as he and his wife of only six-months and her daughter were travelling back home after a dance competition.

what the heck would be the point of blaming God? wouldn't bring anybody back. three people died in that crash and the young dancer had to work obsessively at her physiotherapy once all the skin and bone-grafting had healed just to walk again, much less dance (which she did, by the way... she danced at the same event a year later.)

but is God cruel because he doesn't prevent these local tragedies, much less things like the holocaust? is there something that we, in our temporal subjectivity might be missing?

well what if God IS the cruel one? if you twist it around just so, you just might be able to make a case for it and still remain mildly orthodox...

here's what i'm thinking: God can prevent all bad things. however, he doesn't- he has made a deal to permit all of humankind with freedom of will and he's not backing out now. would it be fair to say that God draws satisfaction from permitting us to make up our own minds about things that we believe or don't believe, things we do or don't do etc? well, he's either satisfied or putting up with it for some reason because this appears to be our causal cage whether we like it or not.

is satisfaction pleasure?
could be.

and if it is, then can God be seen as drawing pleasure from allowing us to make the decisions we make even though he can see they are going to bring about pain and consequence for ourselves and others, as well as himself? if so then here lies the cruelty of God...

to agree to abide by our stupid decisions because he derives more pleasure from our freedom to choose life or love or pride or pain than he derives from happiness- ours and his own.

who is really to blame here?

Getting Tough?

2006-10-23T16:27:00.000-07:00

hey gang
i'm gonna go out on a limb here and post a note that hineini sent me recently.
it prompted some pretty cool discussion on legalism and what the role of law actually was/is/is to be for the nation of israel- the pharisees in particular- which i might post sometime...

(jump in anytime h to clarify)
***

The Gospel of John 8:1-11 recounts a story most of us are very familiar with. A crowd brings a woman to Jesus telling him “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery”. The story tells how the teachers of the law remind Jesus of the harsh punishment that the law given to Moses demands in the situation. I can hear the fear in the crowd that approaches Jesus, these are life and death things. Not only is the woman’s life at stake but so is the well being of the community and its members. The law given to Moses is what held the community together for centuries. The story says the people who brought the woman to Jesus were using the situation as a trap for Jesus. Probably, many of them saw Jesus as a threat to how things were, the health and safety of their communities and their faith. Maybe some of them hoped that Jesus wasn’t as radical as they had heard, that he really didn’t want to change things too much and maybe they were offering Jesus an opportunity to ease their fears, an olive branch if you will.

Well, we know how the story ends. Jesus, without denying the importance of the law, instead urges leniency, revealing to everyone there that they were all law breakers; they were all in a position deserving of punishment. In a truly wonderful gesture, Jesus, instead of demanding punishment for all, watches those who would condemn face their own faults until there is no condemnation for anyone, simply forgiveness. “Has no one condemned you?” Jesus asks her and when she replies “No one” he says “Then neither do I condemn you.”.

It was this story that passed through my mind when I received the last mailing from my local Member of Parliament (MP). The mailing entitled “Cracking Down On Crime” described the parties eagerness to “get tough” on “criminals“. I’m not sure why but the image of that woman, cowering at Jesus’ feet, probably pretty certain she was going to die, stayed with me as I read through the mailing. I could hear the crowd demanded Jesus “get tough” with the “criminal” as I read how new laws were being readied that seek to punish people even further. In the end though, as I finished reading the party’s ideas it’s Jesus, and his soft, kind and forgiving words to that very vulnerable woman that gets me thinking that “getting tough” on “criminals” might not be what I’m called to support.

dysconnected

2006-10-12T12:37:00.000-07:00

So this is my prayer: that your love will flourish and that you will not only love much but well. Learn to love appropriately. You need to use your head and test your feelings so that your love is sincere and intelligent, not sentimental gush. Live a lover's life, circumspect and exemplary, a life Jesus will be proud of: bountiful in fruits from the soul, making Jesus Christ attractive to all, getting everyone involved in the glory and praise of God.
(philippians 1.9-11- The Message)

i was thinking a lot about the whole phil1 thing the other night before our church board meeting. however, i didn’t want to preach a whole ‘sermon’ on it (a sermon and a board meeting? too much, even for these amazing saints that sit on our board…) so there were some things that i wanted to say but didn’t. it's tough when you know that you only have room for a devotional and yet the message burning within you is bigger than that.

you see, my mentor had asked me a really good question a week earlier and it was still alive in me when i read this passage. the question was a simple one: who are we attracting to this church?

later on that week, with such a question richocheting around in the cavernous hallways of my brain, i was able to separately meet with members of four different households that have just recently begun to call this place and the people who worship here 'home.' what was really neat was how, although completely unsolicited by me, they all volunteered some pieces of the answer to the big question of the day...

in each case these relative newcomers reflected upon how this little church was (my words now) both receiving and accepting; in each case there was a person who had been hurt by the religious establishment and had been prompted by God through another believer to give this whole fellowship road another go...

apparently my answer was right in front of me...
my answer even had faces.
those who are hurting and in need of healing within a loving and accepting environment.

so reading phil1 with all of this life going on was affirming:
love is both our message and our method
love is both our raison d'etre and our modus operendi.
love is the point.

but here's the thing that i didn't have time to share: the love that we share, which originates from the Spirit of the Living God, seems to be best detected by newcomers. they feel, as i mentioned that night, received and accepted. where it can break down in this community, as in any one i imagine, is that once someone is assimilated they are presumed to be connected. this presumption can be dangerous, as people seem to fall through the cracks all the time. i spent a fair bit of energy building into a group of young adults last spring, but over the summer they all drifted elsewhere… we lost their fellowship. God didn’t, but we did.

sometimes in a relational vacuum, people just leave. other times, connectional counterfeits can grow to meet the basic need for connection illegitimately. you know the kind- religious circles are infamous for them: negativity groups, specializing in the establishment and maintenance of malcontent. driving wedges between church people and then continuing to hammer them down over self oriented (as opposed to others oriented) shallow-water issues, these perspective collectives often preach a gospel of criticism and social dissonance... but do so out of basic hurt and disappointment. see, they really sensed that people cared for them once, but hadn't felt it for quite awhile.

back then, everyone had them over for lunch. everyone learned the names and ages of their children. everyone offered them the fellowship that they so desperately longed for. it hooked them because they hadn't expected this- they had heard that churches were clique-y and judgemental. this experience was none of that. but that was for a relatively short time a very long time ago- back when they were 'newcomers.'

i think that there is something important to note here: as we continue to grow and impact the lives of those new to to our fellowships, there is a very real need to be attended to in the basic loving of our regular attenders, lest they become ensnared in the type of negative mindset that becomes ballast for greater and greater works that are trying to get off the ground.

everyone needs to continue to experience the love that initially attracted them. otherwise, embitterment sets in.

embitterment has a distinctive spiritual smell. it is the smell of rotting fruit. it is the smell of good things going to waste simply because no one is doing anything with them. to fail to disciple those who no longer qualify as 'newcomers' is to leave carefully gathered baskets of fruit in the orchard to spoil while racing around to fill more.

paul continues later on in phil3.12-16 with some humble words that i am trying to live. if the mission and the method is love, then i think i need to make every effort to keep it at the front and centre of everything i personally do and say... and, well, some days are better than others:

I'm not saying that I have this all together, that I have it made. But I am well on my way, reaching out for Christ, who has so wondrously reached out for me. Friends, don't get me wrong: By no means do I count myself an expert in all of this, but I've got my eye on the goal, where God is beckoning us onward—to Jesus. I'm off and running, and I'm not turning back.

So let's keep focused on that goal, those of us who want everything God has for us. If any of you have something else in mind, something less than total commitment, God will clear your blurred vision—you'll see it yet! Now that we're on the right track, let's stay on it.

upside-down

2006-10-02T21:12:00.000-07:00

a friend was telling me recently of his journey through the book of Job. in this guy's view, Job was self-righteous- not in the 'naughty naughty you spiritual snob' way, but in that he was applying the method and effectively doing so to the point where he and anyone paying attention could draw the conclusion that there was some pretty sweet causality engaged here. until the time of testing, his view was no different than the views of his three friends or his wife.

this shines a light of plausibility upon the words of satan in the beginning of the book...

"look, this guy's sussed it- he's figured out the system, that's all. if you change all the rules and his sure-things become obviously much less sure, he will abandon this righteousness of which you, his creator, are so proud... you don't believe me? prove me wrong..."

here was, after all, the whole problem- he hadn't dropped the ball at all. things were just not the way they were supposed to be. the apple was not falling to the ground, it was just hanging in the air 'precisely the way bricks don't' (douglas adams)... somebody had reordered everything and the dramatic irony of it all was that the most righteous man alive was the only one who knew it (agonizingly so because of all of the pontification he had to endure from this wife and these friends that were supposedly there to bring encouragement and strength).

centuries later, Jesus would turn everything upside down in the same way- breaking the implicit order of things just when people were starting to get the hang of how to play the system. the old methods of establishing credibility and worth were no longer valid- the old causalities no longer held true... like a law in science that is suddenly overturned by some rogue coincidence leaving everyone wondering what else is out of sync that they just haven't discovered yet.

perhaps this is the spiritual bankruptcy of which paul speaks.

off the record

2006-09-24T23:50:00.000-07:00

okay, so here we go again.
it seems if you really want to see the phone lines light up, just bring up either worship music or homosexuality among a group of evangelical pastors... this time the catalyst was a decision to by wal-mart to become corporate members of the Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce.
(http://news.yahoo.com/s/usnw/20060821/pl_usnw/national_gay___lesbian_chamber_of_commerce_announces_wal_mart_stores_inc__membership109_xml)
one person made this honest and open statement at the end of an email on a list which invited opinions from many different angles:

"The homosexual community is so suspicious of the Christian community that I am concerned that a boycott would only convince them of our lack of love toward them. But I'd love to hear what other people think about it! These questions always challenge me to rethink my interaction as a Christian with the larger world."

amidst a barrage of, in some cases insightful and in other cases unsightly, comments and opinions on whether or not to boycott wal-mart and the like over their willingness to join said organization, one voice resonnated with the grace of experience, so i wrote the guy to talk more. what i've tried to do is pull some of that ongoing dialogue together here so that it reads a bit like an interview... meet william gardner.

WG: Hi Jolly. Sorry my response took so long. I just got back from a missions trip where we work amongst our own samaritans (ie: acts 1.8) every summer. Then I did a quick family getaway to cottage land. Just got back from that.

JB: hey man. thanks for writing back. i remember hearing of your work from a mutual friend and how it was so obviously Holy Spirit-inspired. love it when God takes on the logistics that would typically hold us back... the same kind of stuff has happened with regard to our missions to sri lanka.

anyway, thank you for your words and, more importantly, i think, the tone of your words. there is so much unlove around- particularly among clergy- that the heart behind a few simple lines here was a cool breeze amidst so much hot air.

WG: Thanks for the kind words. Appreciated!

JB: i have a question, however. context: a guy that had started going to our church asked me to go for lunch about six months ago, so we hooked up at this great little thai place downtown. amidst a whole bunch of other questions and curios, he slipped in a question about my position on gay relationships. didn't think much of it at the time, as the whole lunch felt a bit like an interview- sort of a reverse membership process.

WG: Very cool that you had lunch with him! To me that is the way we are supposed to be. I am going out for a drink with a lesbian who has checked us out on the web and wants to know if she would be welcome at our church.... As she is? Supposed to be going this week. Have another good friend who is a practicing lesbian...errr, actually she is legally married to her partner. She has come a few times to our church and loves the love she feels here.

JB: yeah, well, last sunday he came up at archived me back to our conversation... in particular, the relationship part. then he told me that he is currently in a gay relationship.

WG: Funny how people do that.

JB: right. so, okay, now my rhetoric is being tested. i've blogged a couple times in this direction:

http://e-pistles.blogspot.com/2005/07/others.html
http://northvus.blogspot.com/2006/05/song-for-drella.html

what i am trying to sort out is whether my position held is something that i can maintain publicly amidst possible pressure from those in our church who are spectating... believing in God's grace for themselves without receiving it to overflowing- that others' thirst for it would be quenched through a cup of it given by them in the name of the Lord, ya know?

WG: Yeah, I find people are so low on the giving grace to others scale. Showed in the recent hurly burly online. My goodness- that one guy was attacked by some really stupid comments. I wanted to jump in and call the other guy an asshole. But I have learned... the knives of right wing fundamentalists are very sharp.

JB: i always hold that we are introducing people to Jesus, and that the real work is being done by the Holy Spirit- but what if my friend missed what i was saying when i spoke of sexual purity and how intimate friendships between people of either gender are part of how we share God's love and strength with each other, but that these are not to move to sexual relations... hearing only that "love is love and the pastor said it's okay?"

WG: I think you should not worry about that. That is how we start to want to play the role of something we are not. We are not the Holy Sprit. God is. We are what we are....stumbling, fumbling, bumbling people who ache to dance with God. Indeed we do dance with God. Or rather, God dances with us and lets us stand on His feet as it were. He carries us in this crazy dance. It looks comical, like a little kid standing on his dad's feet does. But what a picture. It makes you smile. It makes you feel warm. Not sappy crap warm. But real warmth. God warmth. That draws people.

Relationship takes time. Trust. In that time and trust, lives are changed. Gently, lovingly, grace-filled-ly.

JB: i remember hearing someone refer to the neighbourhood inwhich your church is situated as being an area with a high gay/lesbian population within its demographic.

WG: Um, we probably have the same percentage that your own neighborhood has. Just some places are a bit safer for people to be honest about who they are.

One of the safest and most honest places I have ever been was a narcotics anonymous meeting with one of my people ( a recovering heroin addict). She wanted me to see her "other church"...her words. She also wanted her other church to see her pastor. They asked me to speak that night, impromptu.

It was awkward as I got up and said: "I am not worthy to speak here because I have listened to all of you speak so stripped down honestly about all kinds of stuff and I feel as though I could slip into some kind of inauthentic bullshit. I do not want to do that in this place. I just want to thank you for letting me be present here tonight. With you. Your stories are precious. Thank you."

That NA meeting was more 'church like' than most churches I have been in over the last 20 years. I was convicted by the reality there. By the presence of God there.

I share that tid bit because, I think a lot of church folks think they are bringing God into a place or situation. That is completely wrong headed. I do not bring God anywhere, He is there ahead of me and asks me to join the wild dance He is already doing in that place.

God is already amongst the Gay people. He just is looking for a few of us to go and be His skin in the situation where He already is.

JB: great story. a nice one to have lived, not simply heard somewhere... i am reminded of one of my favourite bible bits, 1 corinthians 14.24-25, where paul speaks of strangers just showing up 'impromptu' and being so moved by the apparent presence of God at a meeting that they are convicted of the sin in their own life- like what happened for you at the NA gig.

it is important for people to not only feel but actually be loved when they enter God's house- i don't really care who they are because it doesn't seem as though God does.

no- strike that.

i think it is more that God cares deeply about who they are while the people of God often get sidetracked by the sin problems that are so much more evident to the naked eye than the soul being strangled by them is. we fail to see Jesus' blood upon others, finding ourselves ever fixating upon that which our knowledge of good and evil recognizes in others (even if our knowledge of good and evil is skewed by far too much human tradition and history to be objective anyway)... this whole world view being the one thing from which God tried to save us back in the garden anyway.

WG: Yeah. Hey, sorry for blabbering on and on. Thanks for engaging me. I hope you don't mind my being fairly open and honest with you. There are a lot of people in the church world that I would not talk as honestly and real as I just did above. After reading your Warhol blog though, I felt I could be myself with you. Thanks for that.

Blessings and joy be yours!
William.
***

blabbering on and on? no worries from my end... it's what i do best.

but now for some questions with no answers: when, if ever, do we address the whole area of sexuality and fidelity and the like with our gay friends, and how do we do so without coming off all sanctimonious and, as was said above, ready to perform surgery to their current sexual identity with a very sharp right-wing fundamentalist knife?

i keep saying 'they' and 'their' because, within my own sphere i know very few people who are 'out.' there are some natural degrees of social separation that i'm trying to somehow attend to for my part. however, i have had a few frustrating discussions (with one individual in particular) which have brought to articulation some pretty comfortable little prejudiced defaults of others towards clergy. because i am a pastor, i am sometimes relegated by others to as few distinguishable characteristics as your everyday homophobe might for a lesbian... in this view, i am autocratic and judgemental and presumptuously ethnocentric- holding to my own bigotted view of what the scriptures say rather than considering other more open-minded possibilities. i have conceded that this may be true of many in my vocation (thinking of the online skirmish that prompted the conversation with william, for instance) but that one has to be careful not to reverse discriminate...

however, in roll the personal doubts. these brow-beatings have me continually reassessing my own world view, wondering if these relational presumptions are in fact true of me and all that. i don't want them to be. i want to lead everyone who becomes part of our church family in the paths of righteousness, and am eager to discern by God's light, where these paths truly lead and through what terrain.

whatever- tangent. nevermind.

point is, our church is starting to become a place that is investigated every now and then by an openly gay person looking for God... i see this as a blessing because i think it means that God is trusting us with some really spiritually fragile people who have received a lot of heavy disaffirmation in their lives and have somehow heard that our church on the corner is safe.

i want it to continue grow into the identity of a safe place- even for 'others.'
i want the one investigating to sense that this is an environment where we are going after deepening relationships with God and each other and that the Holy Spirit is the one who is doing the convicting.

i guess that i am aware of the 'us and them' scenarios both on and off the record, and am eager to proceed on to the 'we.'

robert johnson

2006-09-20T09:45:00.000-07:00

back in june i put together a powerpoint presentation for my son's 'grade 8 farewell' (lest we call it 'grad'!) and i got thinking about poetry and nicknames. see, my kid's nickname is dozzy- easy to say, means nothing... it's perfect. (be cooler to call him d'Ozzy or something, but that's a whole nother blog). my father's nickname was similar- his friends called him duzzy.

my nickname? i'd rather not talk about it.

the kids called me dogslop.

now i understand that nicknames are typically kids' earliest application of poetic devices into some sort of social context (e.g. as per the recent 'happy madison' movie Benchwarmers: Gerry Fairy, Gus Bus… etc) but something in me still bristles when i remember signing things using my nickname.

dogslop.

if it was some sort of big scriptural reference to my basic propensity to sin (proverbs 26.11) then it might allow me to build some form of outlaw persona out of it. however, all of my friends knew me as the squeeky-clean sunday-school kid who didn't smoke, drink, swear or go to parties. i was the proverbial whitesheep of the family, the designated driver of the band and the conveniently christian friend from school to introduce to one's parents if they ever got suspicious. nope, this nickname was simply a ridiculous rhyme for my last name (at least no one called me coleslaw which was probably a closer fit, but not at all interesting.)

but it's humbling to remember not only answering to this name, but signing it. i signed the name because it was given to me by my friends and, in choosing to see it as social credentials, i had entered into agreement with it.

well, as for names given to you, it is important to remember that, whether a name is thoughtfully or thoughtlessly imposed, it is not prophecy. it is simply a doorway into relationship: people have to call you something other than 'bud' or 'dude' or whatever, and a name allows others to somehow identify you in some way when refering to you. you give meaning to your name- it doesn't give meaning to you.

i am reminded of the story in mark's gospel of Jesus' encounter with the madman of the tombs. Jesus asks him 'what is your name?' and the guy replies 'legion, for we are many...'

hmm.

scripture does not record his given name, only the taken one. the name that possessed him. the identity that imprisoned him spiritually and marginalized him socially. the name by which he was known by everyone in the community- and who didn't seem to really be interested in his personal redemption or restoration.

think about it. everyone knew him as the wild man of the tombs- the demoniac- there may have even been some that called him 'legion.' imagine how strange it must have been to have arrived on the scene to find the guy that had been so easy to dismiss sitting quietly at the feet of Christ. suddenly there was something wrong with this picture: the world had just changed- nothing was as it seemed anymore.

Jesus had that kind of power- the kind that healed the sick and raised the dead, the kind that set the captives free and brought into public hearing the things people only dared think about their worldly spiritual leaders, the kind that redeemed original identities.

in his book "Abba's Child",
(http://www.ebookmall.com/ebook/98265-ebook.htm)
brennan manning explores the notion of shadow selves. to paraphrase, shadow selves are created identities based on relationships which are circumstancial and ever-changing… they are highly unstable operating systems…

there are similar notions contained in john eldredge's "Wild At Heart"
(http://www.amazon.com/Wild-Heart-Discovering-Secret-Mans/dp/0785268839)
and the fact that they seem to agree so deeply with this story found in mark 5 leads me to ask many questions on any given day... but most notably:

do we live bound in agreement with what hell wants us to believe about ourselves… rather than being what Jesus saw in us that was worth dying for?

letting shadow selves live in our place is like making a pact with the devil… we shake hands and go on living a life that is, at best, spiritually inconsequential. rather than meeting at the crossroads to ensure greatness (in the tradition of faust and/or the legends of bluesman robert johnson) our deal is more scriptural, ensuring the utter hopelessness of mediocrity and marginalization.

what is the alternative to living out the life of a shadow self?
living in the light of God's truth would be a logical answer. 1 john 1.5-7 informs this one.

and so i ask myself and anyone who will listen

who are you really?
how many shadow selves are you?
how many addictions do you do battle with?
how often do you renew your pact with the devil?
what would it take for you to stop going along with it and fight back by accepting the name God has for you?

this past summer i travelled to my hometown on holidays. as is my usual drill, i went running in the mornings. what i did not expect (amidst a predictably high nostalgia factor) was a return to the crossroads...

on one particular morning, i ran down a street that i had walked as a little kid and i found myself remembering a couple of incidents (one in particular) that had been the birthplace of a particularly important shadow self. this spot wasn't the scene of an abuse at the hands of another or a redefining encounter or anything like that- just the beginning of some perspective that was part of me from then on. although as a young person, i had done a bunch of praying about this one later, my identity had remained in question and i could never really figure out why.

reason? probably that i had never simply spent the time putting that shadow self to death.

but on this one sunny holiday morning, i had nothing but time. renouncing the hold that events some thirty-five years earlier had had upon me, my relationships, my behaviours etc was the first step to a new journey, informed and enwisened by the old one.

with a head full of spiritual steam, i then proceeded to a second place where i needed to continue the cleansing dialogue, systematically putting to death an even more spiritually emasculating self that had long since passed its reasonable expiry date.

and at the end of my run, i sat calmly at the feet of my Lord...
a new man built upon the ruins of the old one.

"As Jesus was getting into the boat, the man who had been demon-possessed begged to go with him. Jesus did not let him, but said, "Go home to your family and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you..." (mark 5.18-19)

riding the wrecking ball

2006-08-30T07:54:00.000-07:00

Why are young adults not finding their faith in their parents church?
Brian McLaren asks the question in a recent post.

These families share something in common: their young adult kids are not easily finding their places in the church of their parents. The problem is widespread. I have been in two groups of pastors lately where someone asked how many of our post-high-school kids were actively involved in the church. No pastor in either group had a majority of his kids involved in the church; most had no kids actively involved.

Mike Sares replies that it is the drive for “excellence” is driving young adults from the church

Today’s young adults see a generation of baby-boomer Christians that has striven for "excellence" in every part of church life. Boomers proclaimed in the 1980s that image is everything, and their churches have reflected that cultural trend. The nurseries have got to be sparkling clean, the church buildings are marvelously functional as opposed to artistic, the music is as close to FM radio quality as possible (even if they must hire a band), the Sunday services are seamless with perfect transitions (just like television), the preaching is entertaining and informative (but not so deep as to offend visitors), and the plants on stage are beautiful (but artificial).

As a result, according to Dieter Zander, the next generation has concluded that "everything is image," and therefore nothing can be trusted. Church is too slick, too good, too polished to be real. And the twenty-something hunger for raw authenticity just doesn’t fit in.
(posted aug 27 http://www.jordoncooper.com/)
***

on a 'day off' while on mission in sri lanka, i was talking with a twenty-something (whatever that means) friend of mine about this phenomenon.

in the late 80's and on into the 90's, the quest for quality became the new (or not so new) idolatry... at the expense of relationships. as part of this battle for a culturally relevant environment in reaction to the christian counterculture that had risen up with its own radio and television stations, its own celebrities, colloquialisms and inside jokes, the family of God became institutional with a capital I. although there was a real drive to, by means of a quality production, reach those who had yet to hear and respond to the gospel, the whole relational element of evangelism and discipleship became almost secondary to the correcting of the mistakes of the church's forefathers and, with boomers at the helm, the assembled church became this thing that was the anithesis of everything the they had restlessly sat through growing up.

and so now the next generation of pastors and worshipers slowly (or not so slowly) moves into position to take hold of the wheel and turn this thing off of the superhighway and into the bush where their adventure is.

great. boomers, step back.

here's the thing, though. within every new reactionary method, there is wisdom and there is folly. just as the pursuit of 'quality' was great for reminding us that our best was important to give to God, it also belched out a bi-product of mass spectatorship. people started inviting their friends to church because of the programming, the music, the yada yada yada and stopped inviting them to Jesus. it was possible in this environment for one to be in active ministry, having perfect church service attendance for a decade or more without ever actually connecting with God one-on-one.

with gatherings so well-produced and facilities so shiny-looking, it was easy for many to slide back into consumer-mode simply because they felt somehow unworthy to serve in the upfront stuff and were mildly unaware of (or, let's face it, disinterested in) the behind the scenes stuff. social marginalization took place in the church and one of the key groups that felt marginalized, as cited above in the observations of brian d. mclaren and dieter zander, was the group of younger people that would grow up to eventually inherit this monstrosity.

it wasn't, in our church's case anyway, that the youth and younger adults were excluded from invitations to serve. it was simply that the time commitment implied by involvement in many of the ministries, what with some pretty intense type-A leadership styles and over-achieving work ethics, left little room for a life. it became quite common for everyone to be about reaching a hypothetical crowd with the gospel, since very few of us actually had any time left in our lives to develop relationships with those who weren't doing the same ministries, much less with those who didn't know Jesus.

so many of the prodigal heirs left home without their inheritance.

they were not abandoning their faith as such... they were simply checking out of the infrastructure before they got stuck trying to maintain something that they didn't believe in- something that had air so conditioned that they were left feeling a bit chilly, daydreaming of the beach.

house-churches and alternative services now rise up to attend to all the failings of the I-Me-Mine church. fair enough. in the tradition of their fathers, a new generation of church leaders moves into position to have a go at seeing the great commission realized.

i only hope that new approaches to authenticity in faith and fellowship result in a deeper walk for all generations, not just in producing environments where the children growing up in these emerging churches 'fix it all' again when they come of age by returning to the hard wooden pews, hellfire and brimstone homilies and eloquent hymnals of their grandparents' worship experience and tradition. otherwise we're just riding a generational wrecking ball back and forth as it destroys worship environments to the left and to the right in a forty-year arch.

powerless

2006-08-29T14:32:00.000-07:00

i hadn't heard that voice in years.

that tomblike sound that is the cavernous resonance of my friend's empty heart. i heard it again in a telephone conversation one morning in july when i was too far away to be of any use. i was at an educators' conference three provinces and several days' journey away.

i came and sat down in the morning's keynote session and began to unpack my cluttered heart on paper...
***

it is a powerless feeling to be separated by geography in a friend's time of need... especially when the one in need has so often been there for me when the roles have been reversed. what good is my strength now in bizarro world? and of what use is my fellowship from such a distance?

satan is a bastard, assailing so many of my friends while i am here, holidaying gaily under the thin veneer of conference attendance. is guilt my affliction? even in that i am spared, for i do not really feel guilt right now- more the obligation to feel guilt.

yet i will not thumb my nose at this season of health and freedom, for to do this is to be ungrateful- embezzling thanksgiving and worship from Almighty God who has been the author of my on-going journey towards his beautiful face.

it is good to sing in the silence;
good to dance in life's heaviness;
good to be heat in chill, light in oppression, energy in malaise.
this is to bear witness to the wonder working power of Jesus' blood in my day of reason amidst weeks of confusion and lostness- the loneliness of sin

but are my prayers of intercession enough? i mean, i'm trying to figure out what my role is in the ongoing restoration of my friend. pray? sure, but i find my prayers becoming increasingly cluttered with my own desires for his life.

i'm not sure, but i think that this type of prayer may be bordering on offensive (or at the very least, annoying) to God in the same way that the prayer of the smug pharisee, as cited by Jesus in luke 18.9-14, was.

To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable:

"Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: 'God, I thank you that I am not like other men—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.'

"But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner.'

"I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."

nope. the truth is, we are not to be each others' salvation or benchmark... Jesus is, and he will accomplish his will in all things- even actively in people where invited to do so. as my friend invites a closer walk with Jesus in this time of spiritual emptiness, i join him in this invitation from my time and place of strength with all the passion i can muster.

rings and loops

2006-08-03T12:06:00.000-07:00

c.s. lewis, one of my heroes, wrote an amazing article long ago entitled 'the inner ring.' in it, he says this:

of all passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is the most skillful at making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things...

as long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. you are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. until you conquer your fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain...

the quest for the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. but if you break it, a surprising result will follow. if, in your working hours, you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. you will be one of the sound craftsmen , and other sound craftsmen will know it. this group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. it will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the professional as a whole against the public, nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. but it will do those things which the profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which the profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain. and if, in your spare time, you consort only with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside, that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. but the difference is that its secrecy is accidental, its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric, for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do the things that they like. this is friendship. aristotle placed it among the virtues. it causes perhaps half of the happiness in the world and no Inner Ringer can ever have it.

(c.s.lewis; exerpted from 'the inner ring', taken from 'the weight of glory', circa 1962)
***

if we make loving others our profession, what are the implications of lewis' words here?

i think the implications of this are a feedback loop the builds upon itself with each cycle to a deafening celebration of everything good.

could this, perhaps, be the voice of God himself?

*note: jollybeggar is off to sri lanka until the end of august on a mission. for descriptions and details of what this kind of mission can entail, feel free to read his journals from last year, posted at www.acts1v8.blogspot.com (hyperlinked to your right under the heading 'jollybeggar abroad')

shalom, my friends.

urochrome filter

2006-07-24T12:33:00.000-07:00

(this) is a controversial photograph by American photographer Andres Serrano. It depicts a small plastic crucifix supporting the body of Jesus Christ submerged in a glass of the artist's urine. Some have suggested that the glass may also contain the artist's blood. The piece was a winner of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art's "Awards in the Visual Arts" competition, which is sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, a United States Government agency that offers support and funding for artistic projects.

The piece caused a scandal when it was exhibited in 1989, with detractors accusing Serrano of blasphemy and others raising this as a major issue of artistic freedom. On the floor of the United States Senate, Senators Al D'Amato and Jesse Helms expressed outrage that the piece was supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, since it is a federal taxpayer-financed institution.

Surprisingly, the art critic and Catholic Nun Sister Wendy Beckett voiced her approval of (it) whose public exhibition offended all conservative, most moderate and even some liberal Catholics.

Serrano produced other similar works to much less controversy; Madonna and Child II (1989), for example, in which the subject is similarly submerged in urine, is not nearly as well known...

(it) is often used as a test-case for the idea of freedom of speech, and was described in the journal Arts & Opinion as "a clash between the interests of artists in freedom of expression on the one hand, and the hurt such works may cause to a section of the community on the other."

It is referred to in many popular publications including Bill Maher's book When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden. (as per www.wikipedia.com)
***

fredcall sends me the strangest stuff. i've been on holidays from my computer for awhile, and was glad that this didn't 'expire' the way things in my hotmail junkbox regularly do when i don't attend to them.

so... this photograph. hmmmm. really bad title. kinda funny, the things that set us off. for me, i just hated the title so i substituted all of the (it)'s because the tone just brought everything down somehow. sorry- my blog, i can censor as i see fit, but let's just refer to this photograph as PC, okay? you can look it up in the wikipedia under the name of the artist if my little title problem is really bothering you.

anyway, there are two things that come to mind when i think of this photograph and the controversy that surrounds it- one has to do with literal interpretations, the other with figurative ones:

A) literal:
i've gotta give a big 'whatever' on this one.
i mean, yes, there is real urine- but let's also not forget that there is also a plastic figurine.

this isn't Jesus, it's just a little plastic thingie that bears some resemblance to him according to popular arts expressions from the euro renaissance. we should all try to remember that there is nothing inherently more holy about this figurine than about the figurine of 'earthworm jim' that is on the file cabinet behind me as i type. as a matter of fact, i believe both of them represent humankind's propensity for idol-making and fancy.

as for the urine? well, it's the very healthy product of a well-functioning urinary system which was designed by God to flush out the effluent in both animals and mammals. an entry in the wikipedia asserts that "Healthy urine is a clear aqueous solution, varying in colour from dark yellow to colourless, depending on the dilution. The main constituent besides water is urea; urochrome is the pigment that gives urine its color. Urea is one of the three nitrogenous waste products. The other two are creatinine and uric acid. Urine also contains various inorganic ions, including sodium and chloride. Lighter urine indicates higher water consumption."

so basically, plastic is plastic and piss is piss.

B) figurative:
having said that plastic is plastic and piss is piss, we probably need to look at what these things have come to represent to us. plastic first- artificiality. something easily fashioned and easily refashioned with the help of a little heat. plastic often means counterfeit or fake to us. if we want to be all uptight about the significance of things, then we should probably reconsider whether renderings of Jesus should be permitted at all. i mean, how often do people bow down before or talk to a picture or figurine of Christ as if it were the actual God? pagan idols were also representations of characters from an unseen pantheon that were prayed to as if they were the real thing, yet this was called idolatry by both God and man... oh, but it's all different when it's Jesus? i don't think so.

if one wanted to be really strict and legalistic, then the words of j.i. packer in his classic book 'Knowing God' probably bear some repitition (note: i have done a bit of clipping in order to summarize what i believe are his key relevent points of discussion- totally good book from start to finish if you're into that kinda thing)

1) images dishonor God for they obscure his glory...the pathos of the crucifix obscures the glory of Christ, for it hides the fact of his deity, his victory on the cross, and his present kingdom. it displays his human weakness, but it conceals his divine strength; it depicts the reality of his pain, but keeps out of our sight the reality of his joy and his power... the symbol is unworthy most of all because of what it fails to display. and so are all other visible representations of deity
2)images mislead us. they convey false ideas about God... the very inadequecy with which they represent him perverts our thoughts of him and plants in our minds errors of all sorts about his character and will... the use of the crucifix as an aid to prayer has encouraged people to equate devotion with brooding over Christ's bodily sufferings; it has made them morbid about the spiritual value of physical pain and it has kept them from the knowledge of the risen saviour. (Packer, Knowing God, 1973, p50-51)

as for the piss? well, typically we equate pissing on something with disrespect. that's probably why all the controversy. here's what i think, though:

art is about bringing into the physical world, the abstractions of the artist's heart and mind. somehow taking that which is intangible and making it tangible. sometimes these abstractions and the apparent metaphoric connections with life are intentional, but often they are random, unintentional and subliminal. regardless of what the artist might have intended, i take from this piece some interesting (to me) reminders of life, the universe and everything... but most importantly of God's love for me.

if we are gonna just ignore all the 'right thinking' of packer and attach something really significant to the plastic figurine, fine. i'm okay with that, because then this photograph speaks to me of the divine in the presence of the profane; the holy withstanding the unholy; life in death.

we regularly, willfully piss upon all that Christ was and is about... our pissing was and is his suffering on our behalf. as we disrespect and blaspheme through thought and action, we pour out our derision upon the crucified Christ, not even realizing that his suffering was for our relief and freedom.

yet he didn't remain submerged in it. that's where the real hope is.

and, in a miracle of mercy, grace and transformative power, he turned our fetid water into fine wine, beckoning all of us to drink deeply of it as often as we think of him. the cup of his suffering becomes the cup of our salvation because he is God and behold, he makes all things new.

all truth is God's truth. all hope is found in him and him alone.

silence explained

2006-07-09T16:53:00.000-07:00

jollybeggar is off in the mountains listening for the voice of God.

here's a challenge: this summer, instead of taking a holiday from God
(dropping all of your disciplines and slipping backwards in your faith journey)
take a holiday with God... in short, unwind without unraveling.

read more
pray more
give more
live more
love more... all of it... find refuge in him rather than from him.

bless you

the god-makers

2006-06-29T09:22:00.000-07:00

lately this beggar's world has been full of all manner of calamity and wonder. these are days of faith, my friends. i honestly haven't been at 'leisure' to further attend to the discipline of blogging. however, just in case there is anyone who still checks this site for something fresh, i have decided to post something that i came across today when doing some major 'housecleaning.'

it is from a small denominational magazine that i used to write for back at the turn of the millenium...

i remember reading once on someone's blog that it could be rather interesting to repost the 23rd entry on our blogs a year later or whatever in order to note how far from then the now has taken us. well, the article below was published in october, 2000- nearly six years ago- and though my voice has changed a bit, i still hold to the same things (call this redundancy or consistency?)

maybe sometime soon i'll be able to actually put into words all that has been going on at this point in my journey. until then, however, know that life is good and God sustains me, your friend, through all things great and small...

shalom
***
All who make idols are nothing, and the things they treasure are worthless... Who shapes a god and casts an idol which can profit him nothing? He and his kind will be put to shame; craftsmen are nothing but men." -Isaiah 44.9-11

every now and then the word of God gives me a shot right in the chops.

it's really easy to justify involvement in a rather subtle form of idolatry simply by adhering to the maxim: "Give your best to God."

please make no mistake here- i will always maintain that if we are not giving our best to the Father then we are falling short of what he has called us to do for his kingdom. to withhold anything from his will is to be a gripper rather than a releaser.

as a worship leader i work hard to develop what God has entrusted to me. i drill and practice myself to blisters. i listen to maxwell tapes, attend worship conferences, subscribe to leadership magazine, even read the latest yancey title... but sometimes i think that we can carry too much of the burden of worship upon ourselves as leaders. without careful internal scrutiny, we can become too important to the kingdom in our own eyes, and this results in spiritual confusion- maybe not immediately, but inevitably.

the people in the seats become too reliant upon us to rejuvenate them; we become too responsible for the quickening of their spiritual pulse. eventually people end up worshipping the worship.

the danger within any worship context usually arises when people lose track of why they are there. it is this way because of the basic human propensity to become preoccupied with ourselves rather than God.

as spiritual navel-gazers, we allow ourselves to be the centre of our worship, rather than exalting Christ. worship becomes experiencial, rather than sacrificial. we draw energy and joy not from singing the name above all names, but from knowing that when we are singing his name we have his attention.

'all who make idols are nothing...'

personally, i cannot stand the idea of being eternally inconsequential. like a little child, i just want my God to be pleased with the present i made for him myself. i want to grow closer to him with my every offering. in offering it to him, i long for his acceptance of my gift. i want him to be proud of me and i want him to use what i made for him because then i feel less like a spiritual freeloader.

however, if my creative energies are directed towards somehow validating myself by my worship expression then i am wasting both the time and the gifts that have been entrusted to me. Christ's death already established my worth in his sight.

'who shapes a god or casts an idol which can profit him nothing?'

webster says an idol is 'an image of a god, constructed of wood, stone, etc. and worshiped as if it were the god it represents.' one of the things that we seek to do with our words or our music is to paint a picture of God's glory- to somehow make the mind-bending attributes of God understandable for normal, linear, rather blunt-minded creatures like ourselves.

no matter how big or beautifully ornamented the box, God will not fit into it.

furthermore, we must not tuck even a tiny portion of his glory into our own back pockets for our own personal use later. there was a worship leader in heaven who did this long ago and to a certain extent he still works daily at stealing the worship from Almighty God. if the people begin to worship the art as if it were the God it represents, then we are creative heretics in search of company, working away on something that not only profits us nothing, but ultimately costs us everything.

'craftsmen are nothing but men.'

unless God intervenes and transforms our efforts into something that brings him glory, our worship is only temporal. only when God is glorified will anything we do last beyond that final day when we stand, longing to hear him say

"well done, my faithful one, enter into the kingdom...
they're playing our song!"

two sticks in the mud

2006-06-14T15:25:00.000-07:00

june carter wrote
everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die

as to why many christians want to go to heaven but they don't want to die ... i think it is because

a) they're not really sure if they're actually going to heaven because they haven't figured out the whole 'grace' thing and are still trying to be good enough to earn their way in, but are insecure as to their ability to do so (what with integrity lapses, moral failures and just basic self-centredness) in the time provided.

or

b) they kinda like it here and are having trouble embracing the idea that being eternally in the presence of the creator of the universe would be any fun because there would be no one for them to judge or pity.

once a person shakes off these two sticks in the mud, he or she is usually up for the trip.

a friend of mine and fellow marathon runner fell unconscious the other day while jogging. no warning, no clue. running along she feels something a bit buzzy and next thing you know she's being awakened from her slumber in the middle of the road where she has created a warm pool of vomit to sleep in. weird.

afterwards as i met with her in the hospital, she said "you know, it doesn't surprise me at all that right now, with so many exciting things going on, i'd have to deal with a surprise like this. but you know what's killing me? just laying here doing nothing. if i would have died- well that would have been a good day: go for a jog, meet Jesus. but this laying here wondering what's going on and what happens next..."

wondering what's going on and what happens next.

basic existential anxiety. it began when we took the bet and took the bite. everything since then has been about trying to be 'like God' with disappointing results. sad thing is that we were like God anyway- we were made in his image- still are. apparently that has never been enough for any of us because we just don't get it.

bob dylan wrote
something is happening and you don't know what it is... do you mr jones?

dog face

2006-06-09T07:46:00.000-07:00

Dogs of war and men of hate
With no cause, we don't discriminate
Discovery is to be disowned
Our currency is flesh and bone
Hell opened up and put on sale
Gather 'round and haggle
For hard cash, we will lie and deceive
Even our masters don't know the webs we weave

One world, it's a battleground
One world, and we will smash it down
One world ... One world

Invisible transfers, long distance calls,
Hollow laughter in marble halls
Steps have been taken, a silent uproar
Has unleashed the dogs of war
You can't stop what has begun
Signed, sealed, they deliver oblivion
We all have a dark side, to say the least
And dealing in death is the nature of the beast

One world, it's a battleground
One world, and we will smash it down
One world ... One world

The dogs of war don't negotiate
The dogs of war won't capitulate,
They will take and you will give,
And you must die so that they may live
You can knock at any door,
But wherever you go, you know they've been there before
Well winners can lose and things can get strained
But whatever you change, you know the dogs remain.

One world, it's a battleground
One world, and we will smash it down
One world ... One world
(david glimour of pink floyd, circa 1985)

i have recently come to the conclusion that i am a dog of war...
and have always been.

if you were to name any context from life, it would only take me a second to name my other self, my known adversary, my goldstein, my snowball, the ying for my yang. in every phase of my life and in every relational context i can identify one- always just one- on whom i blame my pain, for whom i have only disdain, in whom i am perpetually disappointed and against whom i wage an ongoing and unwinnable war.

having one extreme opposition- a bizarro around which all other relationships fall into place as positive- has allowed me, in seeing the worst in the one to see the best in all others. it appears as though, for me, balance and stability have always existed in the stalemate.

the structure holds together well until one of the dogs lets go of his end of the bone. suddenly there is a hole and, in granting forgiveness, i find myself bereft of both convenient villain and comfortable balance.

the challenge is to be on guard, lest i create from my existing relationships a brand new adversary in order to bring my world back into balance and release me from the change that is imminent.

this is why i commit war crimes in perpetuity. it's circle maintenance.

to break the cycle? i must be of greater things, that my actions and relationships would be of positive eternal consequence. if i cannot break my adversarial nature, then i must choose for myself an adversary who is ultimately as stubborn as i am. my chosen villain must be the personification of all negativity. with him and him alone must i contend.

not to presume to be able to wage war against him on any power i might call my own, but to, by God's power, wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities, powers, against forces of darkness in this world, against self-serving wickedness in the spiritual realm that is enacted here, using regular people as instruments of torture upon their own countrymen.

after all, every action has an equal and opposite reaction
(sir isaac newton)

*note: the photo above was taken by an american soldier last year in the war against iraq- however, it is important to note that this is NOT an american tactic. in this kind of war, it is typical to wire a dead animal up with explosives that are set off by remote control- the person with the remote just has to push a button. when you have a bomb in your belly, anyone is a potential victim- it just depends on when your buttons get pushed and who is nearby when it happens .

a stranger in court

2006-05-29T08:40:00.000-07:00

verily i say unto you...

if exclusion is anti-love then hell is the most exclusive club in town.

it is the nightclub with all the lights and none of the warmth of human conversation- a place where everyone is waiting for someone else more interesting to arrive.

it is being utterly alone in a cold crowd and unable to leave, yet aware of a really great house party just across the street

to what degree does the house of God feel like this to the stranger seeking the taste of hope and the sound of love?
***

you know what i find interesting?
this began as a leftover on another blog- a short metaphor about hell with one little line of question at the end for the institutional church- and turned into something else in the comment box.
(http://northvus.blogspot.com/2006/05/chill.html)

In the end though, the ball falls in both courts...people need to walk into a church and not have an invisible "bar" which all churches are expected to meet. they also need to know that things don't happen overnight. -cinder

okay, this was about hell first, BUT if we are going to see the last line as the point, then let's deal with this idyllic 'stranger' at face value...

the stranger at the end is seeking the taste of hope and the sound of love... one earnestly seeking these things has already come to the net in the 'both courts' analogy and is standing with a hand outstretched, not realizing that we shake hands at the end of a game.

this person is new and doesn't know the rules. this person has come more to hook up with some new people, learn a new game and develop some new aspects of his or her character than to actually win anything. here he or she stands looking and feeling a bit socially awkward, and wondering why the people with whom he or she has come to play are always standing outside the court, poised and ready for a serve instead of coming to the net to greet.

honestly? the fact that the newcomer has even found our little tennis club is a pretty amazing thing, considering all the opposition that has been leveled against him or her from everyone in the spiritual realm who sees even the investigation of a tennis match as a threat.

okay, enough analogizing... i'm getting bogged down and i think i have something to say.

we are sometimes guilty of expecting everyone to know everything about this weird environment called 'church' before they get there. it is very unnatural for people to go to a place in order to investigate an ideology or a theology or a whateverology... especially in canada where we have this fear and mistrust of institutions in general and authority figures in particular. introduce an institution like church with its sovereign authority figure (and all the noisy little subordinate ones like me) into the ongoing life-dialogue of a canadian and then see how ready that canadian is to go to a meeting. as cinder was stating, different people do come bringing with them different experiences which inform everything that happens next, colour everything they perceive and prompt their every action.

so this is where the current rhetoric of the 'go-to church' versus the 'come-to church' links up with our social reality. the church needs to go to the people, not expect the people to come to it. (i think that societyVs has said this once or twice in his social gospel of justice and active love, yeah?) the people of the church need to recognize that if their meetings are the only thing that they do on planet earth then they might be falling a little short of the great commission- no matter how high quality their meetings are.

our church is learning this- she is taking a long time because there were a couple decades under a number of different leaders where the status quo was to just flip the switch on the holy tractor beam and suck the seekers into her midst, but she is indeed learning. she is mobilizing. she is initiating. she is engaging. there is hope for her.

but any canadian who comes in the door has already gotten up, chosen clothes, rearranged sunday breakfast/brunch habits, in some cases battled family before during and after battling traffic lights and the clock which brings them ever closer to the eleventh hour (or whatever- you pick the time), found parking and made their way up the steps and through that door... in the face of, along with everything else, the canadian ethos.

they've already come a long way to meet in the middle.

so to what degree, after all that, does the church feel like "the nightclub with all the lights and none of the warmth of human conversation- a place where everyone is waiting for someone else more interesting to arrive"?

that's the ache i feel. just as societyVs was saying in his comments, i pray that when someone does get here that they will actually want to become part of this fellowship. i pray that, having overcome all of that (not to mention countless other spiritual and psychological missiles launched in the spiritual realm) in order to get to a building marked for the purpose of glorifying God, that the meal at the end of the journey and the laughter and warmth around the table reflect God's love and welcome for that person in every way.

but with all this thought about how to get people to come to the church, i am constantly trying to dream up meaningful ways to leave it.

cracking codes?

2006-05-24T11:38:00.000-07:00

"Some of these clowns even seem to misrepresent scripture and take it way out of whack..." (societyVs)

yep, one of the main reasons why many people choose to disbelieve is because it's just too hard to buy into what some are selling as a Word from God.

kinda like driving in a blizzard- it's a whiteout and you nearly hit the ditch on your right, so you crank the wheel and head over to the ditch on the left. it's keeping it between the lines that keeps you alive and moving ever closer to the end of the journey, yeah?

recently i was sitting in a bible class being held at our church on correct interpretation of scripture- ie: equipping people to not only NOT misinterpret what scripture is saying in their own personal quiet time with God, but also providing them with some tools to discern just what is scriptural and what is a load of self-driven personal hooey.

our teacher is a seminary professor giving us a heckuva deal on some awesome bible-school teaching just because he wants the church to be able to read the bible 'for all its worth.'

(the name of the textbook for the course http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/0310384915/ref=si_1_1/702-6600521-7812852)

so anyway, to illustrate a point about wrongly interpreted conclusions, we turned to the book of nahum and then watched a video clip...

nahum 2.4 says "The chariots storm through the streets, rushing back and forth through the squares. They look like flaming torches; they dart about like lightning."

well, this guy on tv proceeded to enthusiastically explain how the prophet writing this passage is really foretelling fast'n'furious-type streetracing in the final days, rather than the sacking of the city of nineveh some eighty years later...

it appears as though scripture can be much like statistics: you can use it to say just about anything if you have the imagination to do so. the classic approach of proof-texting (coming up with an idea and then finding scriptures to be taken out of context in order to validate the idea, while ignoring others that contradict) is a great example of how scripture gets misused regularly by well-intentioned people. often, like in the passage cited above from nahum, people focus on some connections while completely disregarding other contradictory ones that exist. one thing that scripture doesn't do is contradict itself in the bigger picture. the contradictions we find therein usually have more to do with us than with scripture- with our read on it rather than what we're actually reading in it...

the correct handling of scripture is a sacred task to which we are all called in our discipleship. however, those charged by God with teaching or preaching ministries have even greater responsibility there because they are using scripture to lead others onward. taking this responsibility seriously allows our stories of God to be more than simply theological gossip.

okay, i can't take it anymore- i have to mention da vinci code (don't worry, only briefly, and as an example of what i'm talking about). take the whole grail/chalice theory...

for me, it's important to remember that the grail/chalice theory is a theory... and not a particularly theological one at that. it has more to do with conspiracy, paranoia and politics than with God.

am i saying that this theory is 'a load of self-driven personal hooey'?
nope. not qualified to make that call.

(note: http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/0310273722/qid=1148496606/sr=2-2/ref=sr_2_3_2/701-7380559-6041950
lee strobel and gary poole have written a book called exploring the da vinci code... i'm not saying this is the only book to read on the theories put forth in the recent novel and even more recent film- i haven't read it... i'm just saying that, among the plethora of reactive books having been written on this topic, the strobel/poole book promises to be responsive by virtue of its authors. strobel has brought us strong and balanced reads like a case for Christ; a case for the creator and a case for faith)

i'm saying that we need to be regularly studying and sorting through God's word so that we know what is actually in scripture and what these scriptures tell us about God himself.

in attempting to develop one's own personal theology, it's important to be active without necessarily being activistic- to remember that personal theology is personal... there's a good one to shoot for. we don't need to march around with placards proclaiming for all and sundry that we are militant, underthinking, over-reacting ethnocentrics with an agenda of conquest. we have to come to a decision for ourselves, sorting out what is figurative and what is literal and how these passages studied are set against the larger whole of scripture and history.

let's dig into the theories about God that are all around us and use scripture in order to seek the truth about God in this or that context. let's identify what about any theory impacts our faith, and be willing to thoughtfully consider the ideas of others in the light of scripture. in doing so, let's be both willing to consider scripture in such a way that it can still be the revealed word of God (even if this means changing one's traditional and time-honoured interpretation of a passage) and also intentional about discerning from the original context, genre and apparent intent of the scriptures being set forth as evidence, whether a theory is biblical or merely fanciful.

here's an example. i know i've told this story before- perhaps you've even read it on this blog- i don't remember... all apologies. anyway, during my educational internship, we decided to hold a creation/evolution debate with eighth grade students. notes went home to be signed and off we went. sadly, the creationists used only the bible in their research, while the evolutionists used the whole library. at the end of the debate, we had an anthropologist and a lutheran minister come in on two separate days to share their perspectives with the kids.

the minister began his comments by saying 'i think you've been reading this book (bible) wrong- remember, it was never written to be treated like a science textbook. it was not written to tell us what happened, but who did it." yada yada yada

the anthropologist came the next day (it was early december- blizzard season) and said 'i think you need to rethink the role of science. if you are driving a car in a blizzard and it breaks down, you can pray if you like, but it probably won't make the car start- use science for that. however, if you are looking for the meaning of life in that moment, science has no wisdom to offer.' yada yada yada

making sense of this physical experience called life on fallen planet earth has largely to do with viewing things through the right lenses. once we've figured out what we believe then we can shine that light into the everyday context of our relationships because there are probably people all around us who are seeking the truth and hoping that we'll help them find it.

i'm to be a candle shining in their darkest night
not a blinding flash of light

lest ye be

2006-05-16T13:10:00.000-07:00

"It is too easy to judge people anyways, were idiot humans that know less then we think yet percieve to have all the answers because some book said so." (SocietyVs)

yes- to presume to have arrived is to make plain how great the distance yet to travel. my gosh, i hate it when i sound like a fortune cookie!

what i mean by all that drivel is simply that i agree... especially with the 'too easy' part. nobody's got it all together.

a friend of mine and i were talking recently about whether the difference between judgement and condemnation is simply semantics... you see, we are all reminded again and again from others that we mustn't be quick to judge- however, these statements usually come from people who are busy judging pastors and the like as being too judgemental. i grow frustrated with this whole reverse bigotry thing that leaps to the conclusion that, by trying to understand the behaviours of another in order to help them move ahead in their faith journey, a pastor is sitting in judgement over a parishioner. it's more a case of trying to walk alongside someone, offering some coaching.

in my view, judgement is being able to weigh facts justly and make a decision towards a resulting plan of action. our judgement should be a good thing, an endowment.

what qualifications must a judge in a court of law have? i don't know, but i imagine that, apart from very specific credentialling, things like extensive personal legal experience, a keen understanding of the laws of the land and an awareness of precident all have to be part of the deal. there is, however, one more thing: wise decisiveness. the ability to use all of the information available in order to set out a plan which, through due process, intentionally brings justice back into balance.

i'm not talking about corruption and i'm not talking about abuse of an office- we know those things happen and we know that they are wrong. i'm just acknowledging that in our culture, where the judicial process is still somewhat respected, the judges are not typically suspect- it's the lawyers that often bear the burden of our mistrust, largely because of our huge need for them, and the suspician that arises out of needing someone and having to place our faith and our cash in their integrity as they interact within a system that we find completely alienating due to its jargon and rhetoric alone, much less its power to which we are subject... (but that's a whole nother blog.)

where it breaks down for people is in confusing judgement with condemnation. i think that when we flippantly quote the bible to each other 'judge not, lest ye be judged' we need to be very clear as to what we are really saying and to ensure that we are not implying the condemnation of others. most of the time, when people remind us of how we are not to judge another, they are speaking about the importance of not condemning... sadly, they are often doing simply that to those whom they presume to admonish- defaulting in their suspician to the notion that anyone who uses their endowment of God-given judgement does so in order to condemn others and move ahead in some line.

the easy condemnation call is a dangerous default that hurts people who are just trying to live their lives, attending to the needs made evident to them. perhaps it would help if we spoke of active discernment (in the non spiritual-gift sense) and the importance of applying that discernment in those moments where we are tempted to condemn another.

have i been hurt by this default of suspicion?
maybe once or twice- does it show?

left, left, left right left

2006-05-11T16:15:00.000-07:00

we were talking about this whole holy-militia approach to social issues. a good question came up:

are believers supposed to march or simply stand?

i mean, you can have your own stand on a social issue without marching around trying to spiritually bully people.

next up for incineration- the harry potter series... but narnia is fine.
and we can only drink milk from a christian cow.

onward christian soldiers
marching as to war
with the cross of Jesus
going on before...

i know that the brown shirt variety of believers make it very hard to even briefly consider that the God they serve may be valid, however they are hard right minority and like their islamic counterparts the al qaeda network, they don't speak for us all... they just think they do.

matt7.21-23 comes to mind... it's better to let God do the judging.

but everywhere we look, it becomes apparent that people are getting really tired of a bad-news gospel. take my friend fredcall... please! (jokes)

if i remember correctly, the conversational thread that led to fred's story about his younger brother began when he sent me a note that had been written proudly by a mother whose elementary school-age child had torn nearly the entire book of leviticus out of a bible because of basic justice issues arising from a literal misinterpretation of the scriptures.

i made a remark about this jefferson bible maneouver being simply an anti-religious expression of the same mindset that has books like catcher in the rye and huckleberry finn removed from schools and burned.

and, well, off we went, exploring together the differences between theology and ideology.

Ideology and spirituality are not one and the same. Unfortunately what is passing for fundamentalism (Christian, Judaic, Islamic, Scientologists and Moonies for example) are basing their beliefs on ideology, not spirituality...

Theosophically (or philosophically or politically or scientifically or whaterver) understanding what you are talking about goes a long way toward something along the spiritual line of tackling life's situations. Manchurian Candidate ideology is far short of anything I look upon as spirituality. If you (figuratively you) are marching to war, do you understand why you are marching to war, or are you wound up by an invisible hand- turned key. -fredcall

if i read his attitude towards most things correctly, he is interested in people's ability to sort things out for themselves rather than the simple adoption of a company line with regard to topics of ultimate importance. although fred's approach is confrontational and mildly unorthodox, his quest is the pursuit of enlightenment- not only for himself but for others- and it is fueled by, among other things, love and frustration.

love for his younger brother (which could be pretty much anyone who has been drawn into a faith that has robbed him or her of the capacity for reason amidst the faith) and frustration with empty words and pat answers in an increasingly complicated world.

One time I playfully asked my kid brother what he thought about Free Will versus Determinism (as bandied about by Dante and Milton and lots of others). My kid brother got this far away look in his eyes before saying, "Let me think about this before I answer." To which I said, "Sure, take your time." He went back to his (church) Elders with my question and they told him point blank rote what to say to me. He came back with some kind of response that were not his words. He didn't even understand what he was saying. He had memorized what he was told to reply without the foggiest clue what it all theosophically meant.

I had to bite my tongue cause he's my little brother and it's not my place to embarrass him in front of his fundamentalist friends. I just nodded and left the discussion at that having learned a lesson that I can't engage this (church) ideological bunch in a theosophical discussion.

well, now that is one heckuva playful discussion topic.
yeah, let's keep it nice and light and then we'll go wrestle in the backyard!

yet so much of our take on what's happening with regard to the big questions (and, might i also say, others' big answers) has to do with how we've managed to sort through this one in order to sleep at night.

in the last month, not prompted by anything circumstancial or situational or relational, I have been reading job. interesting book- especially as we read behind the dialogue that takes place between job and his friends. I really believe that these friends love him and that they are sincere, but their theology continues to take them around the horn to one particular notion: job has done evil and is refusing to acknowledge it.

we, the readers, have a pretty nice little role in the story: do nothing and learn all there is to learn vicariously. we read job's words to his friends and feel his frustration. we read his friends' words and hear the conventional, cause-and-effect wisdom. yet we have the luxury of knowing before the whole thing starts that God is in charge and job is, in fact, righteous. the discrepancies and the real spiritual danger for job lie in the fact that these dear friends are being used to cause job to doubt himself, his heart and his life, considering the possible integrity questions that are inherent in the statements that these guys make in order to defend himself against them. when they could be bringing strength, they are instead bringing doubt.

the book of job is a pretty good example that this kind of discussion has been going on for as long as people have been trying to sort out why so many bad things happen to good people in a world created and overseen/manipulated (big fork in the road right here) by a God who is supposed to be sovereign.

but will one man's answer ever really satisfy the longings of another man's soul? hmm.

i was thinking about an interesting quote by brian d mclaren from his book finding faith and decided to try to google it in order to cite his words correctly. i ended up at the site of a blogger whose online handle is based upon the same quote by cs lewis as my own... (http://jollyblogger.typepad.com/jollyblogger/2006/04/tim_challies_on.html)
well anyway, whether by free will, determinism or just a goofy coincidence, this guy has a post dealing with the emergent church... citing and acquiescing with, in particular, one guy's (a certain tim challies) misgivings with mclaren's take on the emergent church in the postmodern world:

The faith McLaren commends is a faith that always questions, always doubts. It seems that the only faith McLaren hates is the faith of a person who knows what he believes and is convicted by Scripture and by plain reason that what God has revealed is truth--true truth. As others have observed, the real enemy of the Emerging Church is conservative, biblical Protestantism.

well, regardless of challies' feelings about brother brian, the description cited is exactly what makes the work of mclaren resonnate with me. since when is questioning wrong? although Jesus likened people to sheep, i don't think that he intended for us to adopt the orwellian animal farm sheep's characteristic blind, unthinking ascent. Jesus also said that we are to have the faith of a child and, as you know, little children ask a million questions a day because it is in seeking answers to questions that people grow. if there's any point at all to this, it is that our asking of questions is as crucial to our brother's journey as it is to our own.

a friend of mine is a successful financial planner who was once a seminarian and decided that he just had too many questions of God to continue. well, whether he missed some sort of calling or not is between him and God, as he seems to be doing quite well managing other people's fortunes for fun and profit. i like going out for a guinness with him because the conversation is always engaging and always challenging.

i once said to him that if he were to ever meet someone who could ask him questions that stretched him and ripped conversational remote control from his hands long enough for him to begin searching for the answers, his faith journey might resume. you see, he knows that no one can respond to his questions with answers that satisfy his reason, so he does not have to change or grow.

i think that the primary factor at work in the heart and life of the 'questioning faithful' is that person's desire to actually discover the answers to the questions posed. sometimes we just ask questions to make points. who has time for all that rhetoric?

as for all this marching, standing, and burning things, there is nothing wrong with being activistic. however, sometimes we can be so convinced that we are the only ones who are right that everyone left is a liberal or heretic. the important spiritual, not ideological, discernment helps us to determine whether to march or to stand still to listen to the message on the wind. (yep, that's a fredcall soundbyte)

how much love is there in calling anyone an anything?

i see dead people

2006-05-08T23:04:00.000-07:00

ethnocentricity... the self-medicated attitude or philosophical position of being members of the only party that knows the way everything is supposed to be done. group arrogance.

well we certainly get tagged with this one from time to time... especially we pastor types!

in the 70's and into the 80's there was a christian band called daniel amos that epitomized the phrase mainstream alternative for a bunch of us christian kids who were looking for something artistic and Christ honouring (at the time it was basically an either-or scenario... if you wanted to be 'spiritual' then you pretty much had to check your aesthetics at the door). originating at calvary chapel under the spiritual toutelage of rev. chuck smith- but don't hold that against them- this band started as an eagles-esque cowboy band, moving through three or four creative stages in as many albums, hitting some really satisfying homages to their influences (beatles, bowie, electric light orchestra,b52's and talking heads a'la eno) along the way. (http://www.danielamos.com/main.html)

there was a song on volume 1 of the alarma chronicles that addressed the whole worship ethos and its inherent ethnocentricity from a satirical, new wave point of view
(note: i've focused on the content aspects of the lyrics, and have cut out the stuff that only works on record...)

you might not recognize, the truth gets colored by
wrong things, bad things do disguise
afraid you might despise the real thing
the real thing...

down in southern cal we don't wear shoes
we lay it way back
when someone with charisma tells me "don't wear shoes"
i tell them "go back- where did you get that?"

down in africa they beat the drum
they like the big beat
white man through the p.a. says "don't beat that drum"
they tell him "go back- where does it say that?"
the real thing...

down at the little church they all wear hats
they feel they're doing right
over at the big church they hate those hats
it get's them uptight- now is that right?

you might not recognize, the truth gets colored by
wrong things, bad things do disguise
afraid you might despise the real thing
the real thing...
-terry taylor

the whole worship style discussion is so totally old that, about halfway through its history, even Jesus got into it. remember the whole whip-wielding 'house of prayer/ den of thieves' (citing isa56.7/jer7.11 in matt21.13) thing? what was it really about- making money off of the poor or turning tennets of worship into something to be done for fun and profit? i think that it was the latter.

the poor were being exploited by everyone before, during, and after Jesus walked the earth. Jesus even spoke to the disciples about it at bethany (in matt26.11 and mark14.7) it's not that he didn't have a heart for the poor- his acts of mercy (healings, feedings, fellowship and the like) are examples of this heart for social justice. however, Jesus also didn't go through the temple with a bullwhip on behalf of the poor who could not afford the extortionate prices of sacrificial animals or the over-the-top exchange rates... he tore the place apart on behalf of Holiness because the temple was meant to be a place of worship and communion with almighty God according to scripture, and the temple officials who had seen an opportunity to turn something that was to be about God into something that directly benefitted them had carpe diemed their way to the bank. Jesus' anger burned because they were stealing from God, not from each other.

scripture records some pretty powerful examples of similar attitudes and actions in the name of piety... it's usually messy. (1sam2-4; acts5) it seems that embezzling from God is a pretty serious deal. why? because in this thievery we see satan's agenda clearly. anytime someone slips some of God's glory into his or her own back pocket, satan's lurking around there somewhere.

okay, so here's where i'm going: is our self-centred flippancy towards the things of God within our contemporary worship experience so great that we die over it? perhaps not to the point that we are actually aware of it, but is awareness definitive? do we have conditions placed upon us that exist before we are aware of them? think of the incubation period of a disease or virus, dormant or remissed cancer cells, arterial blockages not yet diagnosed.

remember the bruce willis film 6th sense, or a close celluloid relative called the others starring nicole kiddman? in both films, people are carrying on life as usual and we only discover through a couple of fun little twists that actually they've been dead the whole time and didn't know it. there is a form of reverse dramatic irony here, which my son and i refer to as a shyamalon twist (after the acclaimed young director of 6th sense, unbreakable, signs and the village) where the audience joins the principal characters in not knowing the crucial piece of truth around which the whole story is wound until a revelation in the final reel.

well what if we are all struck spiritually dead the moment we embezzle from God and, because we don't experience a lightning bolt from on high or something, we think that we're fine?

it is conceivable. in genesis 3 (yep, i'm back there again) the snake whispers that eve won't die if she samples some rebellion. whatever her inference or understanding of death (after all, literal interpretation of the scriptures holds that nothing had died yet) she tastes, looks around to see if anything has changed and then, seeing that she is fine, kills her life's partner too. no worries- he doesn't know it either.

but in that instant the physical and the metaphysical are rent apart. physical bodies begin to die and perspectives begin to cloud. it is now only a matter of time until the body catches up to what the soul is already experiencing and dies too. from that moment on, death becomes part of worship and sacrifices are offered, that the purity of the perfect animal can be exchanged before God for the sin of the one offering the animal- bringing new spiritual life and a fresh new day for the sinner.

Jesus railed in the temple because these religious capitalists were dead people making the very house of God an abomination in the eyes of both God and man. they were taking something that God had set up to ford the gap between the holy and the common and were turning it into something that would repel anyone who had not been raised in that tradition. it's like everyone knew they were dead except them- everyone knew that this place was no more the house of God than the public baths were a place to get cleaned up.
the romans knew it.
the greeks knew it.
the homosexuals knew it.
the prostitutes knew it.
the addicts knew it.
the lepers knew it.
even the blind who begged at the city gates could see with their sightless eyes what the ethnocentrically religious could not... that their so-called worship was an embarrassment to everyone and everything holy because it was all about themselves.

the same is often said of the church today. the hypocrisy evident in the body of Christ is still the most cited reason for achristians to remain that way. in a recent study published over easter in our local paper, i read how only 17% of canadians interviewed in the week prior to holy week admitted to regularly attending church, but that 62% agreed with the statement "through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, God provided a way for the forgiveness of sins." why the numerical discrepency? it appears as though the majority of canadian people still believe in the God, but have trouble believing in the value of a corporate worship experience. are we a nation of beer-drinking mystics, or do we just tend to mistrust other people... particularly when they are part of something institutional? whatever the reason for it, the discrepency between those believing and those joining with others who believe is one with powerful implications upon both the unity of the body of Christ and the potential impact of this body upon the darkened world to which it has been trusted to bring the light of the gospel.

however, this is nothing new. we all know this.

as part of the comment box that spawned this post, curious servant made a typically poignant and poetic observation:

Today, on this spinning ball of dirt, there are a lot of folks who worship our Lord, pray to our Lord, tell stories of our faith, in many different ways. We have Korean churches, and Catholics, and messianic Jews, and the 1,001 other approaches... In the past there was the early church, the medieval churches, the Renaissance, the modern age, the post modern era... and someday we will all share a single reality together. Heaven will be diverse.

So, if we are uncomfortable with some folks speaking in tongues, and others singing very serious, dirge-like hymns, what will happen in our hearts and minds when we are mixed together in one huge congregation?

Are we ready for it?

good question. i think that it is one that believers in Christ need to sort out for themselves. for me the answer has been found in a prayer and personal worship discipline. you see, when i wasn't listening to daniel amos, i was learning how to worship with the recordings of john michael talbot. (http://e-pistles.blogspot.com/2006/01/simplicity-and-four-dollar-perspective.html)

a song that i use regularly as a prayer a quarter-century later, particularly in times when i am tempted to ethnocentrically judge and therefore embezzle, is one of his:

create in me a clean heart o God
let me be like you in all my ways
give me your strength
teach me your song
shelter me in the shadow of your wings
for we are your righteousness
if we've died to ourselves and live through your death
then we shall be born again to be blessed in your love

the cut of one's ephod

2006-05-02T07:02:00.000-07:00

we all go through periods where we ask the heavy questions. who we ask and how we ask often determines the kind of response we receive, as well as whether the response is a satisfying one. people are emotional beings and often the emotions of a moment add so much colour to the events taking place that we start to lose track of what we are really about as people. i received this email from a friend who has a longer story than there is room (even on this long-winded blog) to tell.

short version? he felt disaffirmed when he was spoken to one day by the lead pastor about the importance of considering time and place when exploring worship expressions- being challenged to ask whether this demonstration is impactive or distractive in bringing the larger group closer to God. although he felt like he was being censored, he was, in fact, being invited to take greater responsibility for his role as one of the worship leaders within the assembly.

we are all worship leaders to some degree. our active or passive pursuit of the sense of God's presence affects everyone around us in some way. this is why it is important to understand the differences between corporate and private worship expressions. whether our heart is in the right place or not, the cut of our ephod can be a distraction to others and we need to prayerfully consider them as well, for corporate worship is done together with, not in spite of those around us...

"I can sing praises to my God any way I want. I can't sing praises to your
God any way I want. (My wife) and I do not want to be part of a church that
worships a God like that.
Christ Rules (and likes my style of singing!)"
***

paul addresses some public worship issues in 1 corinthians 12 and 14... here's the first bit of scripture- it is general and deals with the importance of unity and diversity as directed by the Holy Spirit, who presides over all worship expressions and gift employment:

(I corinthians 12.4-27)
There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but the same God works all of them in all men.

Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. To one there is given through the Spirit the message of wisdom, to another the message of knowledge by means of the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by that one Spirit, to another miraculous powers, to another prophecy, to another distinguishing between spirits, to another speaking in different kinds of tongues, and to still another the interpretation of tongues. All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he gives them to each one, just as he determines.

The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.

Now the body is not made up of one part but of many. If the foot should say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. And if the ear should say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.

The eye cannot say to the hand, "I don't need you!" And the head cannot say to the feet, "I don't need you!" On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.
***

the second passage is more directly related to worship expressions. it follows a 25 verse discussion of the importance of speaking words of prophesy and tongues in the right ways for the right reasons:

(I corinthians 14.26-33)
What then shall we say, brothers? When you come together, everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. All of these must be done for the strengthening of the church. If anyone speaks in a tongue, two—or at the most three—should speak, one at a time, and someone must interpret. If there is no interpreter, the speaker should keep quiet in the church and speak to himself and God.
Two or three prophets should speak, and the others should weigh carefully what is said. And if a revelation comes to someone who is sitting down, the first speaker should stop. For you can all prophesy in turn so that everyone may be instructed and encouraged. The spirits of prophets are subject to the control of prophets. For God is not a God of disorder but of peace.
***

(friend) the reason i am sending these scriptures to you for your consideration is that i think that you may be misunderstanding (our pastor's) words to you about singing in church.

no one is telling you how to sing or how not to sing- in fact, i remember a conversation in my office last year where i had just written a song and you showed me how you would sing it... then you said 'but i know that that is probably not the right thing for a morning service.' you have a good sense of humour, and you made a joke about people running for the doors, which caused us both to laugh together.

i am not sure why you feel differently now. there is nothing wrong with being able to identify the right time and place for something. it's called discernment, and it's totally important today just as it was in paul's day. the passage in 1 corinthians 14.26-32 echoes this, maintaining that the purpose of our worship times together is to be the strengthening of God's people (for the spiritual battle that awaits them the other 6 days of the week?)

the passage here deals most specifically with the gifts of tongues and prophesy. i don't go around telling people this, but so that you may understand my heart and the ideas i am trying to communicate here, i need to speak from my own experience... the Holy Spirit gave me such a prayer language to be used for his glorification. the holy tongue that the Spirit blessed me with has in it words which i have never uttered in the open hearing of other people, believers or otherwise. it is a holy thing.

although it is clearly a gift of God that i could have never just conjured up on my own, and although there are times when i am tempted (yes- it's the perfect word, for the temptation comes from hell to use a blessing of God to be a distraction to the body) to utter these words while worship leading, or while praying at the microphone, i choose to remain silent in this way at those times, speaking only words in english within the hearing of the people.

the decision is mine, as a man who loves God, concerning what to do with the gifts that he has entrusted me with. i do not believe that my prayer language would be taken away, were i to use it carelessly, but it would confuse the people in the church. i don't want to do that. when we come together to worship, i want to worship with my friends, not in spite of them... every time i step up to the microphone, there is temptation and there is decision.

(friend), i love you, man- you know that. but saying "i can sing praises to my God any way i want" and speaking of God as being a different person for you than he is for your friends at (our church) is not biblical.

satan wants to steal God's glory away by trying to pollute your heart with regard to worship- don't let him. satan would love for you to 'behave' and be angry about it. he would love for you to put your own preferences first, in spite of the people who might be distracted by that in a small room like the sanctuary on a sunday morning. he doesn't really care whether you are loud or silent... he just wants it to be about you. he wants you to be haughty. he knows that will deflect the glory away from God, and that is his goal.

don't let him succeed. be Christ's and Christ's alone.

much love

epilogue:
although there were a few weeks when my friend did some crowd surfing at some other churches, he eventually recognized that there are already many people who love him and his wife for who they are right here, and building those relationships again elsewhere would not only take time, but would carry with it no guarantees either. he continues to celebrate God's goodness to him in our fellowship, whooping and hollering in the loud parts and falling on his face in the deeper, more intimate parts- which is inspiring to those around. we all grow by knowing one another, yeah?

matters of faith, free will and public education

2006-04-25T08:03:00.000-07:00

an old friend of mine and i were discussing some observations that she had been making concerning cultural expressions of spirituality all over the world- most notably in her travels through israel, egypt, and russia- and the differences between cultural and personal faith...

as for the christian spirituality thing, it is sometimes hardest for people who have grown up in a household where one or two of the parents practice this faith because of the 'choice' element...

free will is such a huge and important part of our response to God as christians that sometimes it gets confusing. i mean, kid puts up with it until such time as the faith practiced is no longer legislated within the household (often, moving away from home is a catalyst but there are others: puberty, driver's license time, high school graduation. i recently read that the 'age of identity' is between twelve and fourteen years of age*- probably just about anything significant that happens any time after that can be a trigger)... ultimately, the faith of the parents is meaningful tradition, foundational in one's becoming who one is- just as everything in life has been. but eventually it has to be adopted as one's own or rejected as the faith of our fathers and nothing more than that. a choice is a choice.

once faith becomes one's own, it seems more organic and, in many ways, can be far easier to invest in. until then, it is simply wearing someone else's spiritual hand-me-downs. no matter how well-kept and 'like new' they are, they are still used garments of praise.

i think that this whole process of adoption is, for many, a bit like their experience with education. high school is mildly socially and intellectually interesting (we are engaged, but as to whether this is positive or negative, that's a whole nother blog) and so on for most of us, but upon graduation everything seems to change: people who didn't do a thing all through high school start working hard for their grades at university or tech school, while some who worked their butts off through high school don't even bother applying anywhere.

like the journey of faith, this all has something to do with ownership, in that while we are forced to attend to it, we simply deal with the force in the way that makes sense to us or is the least unpleasant... but once we are no longer forced into the discipline of learning, it finally becomes about the schooling-or at least about the goals which can be realized through it- not just about the external forces inflicting the schooling upon the young and impressionable (this last cliche phrase was in here because this old friend is a former student of mine, an adult now living in japan... had to make a noticeably self-deprecating remark there- it's the canadian way!)

some choose to make a discipline their own while others walk away from it to explore a different future. as with faith, the outcomes have more to do with free will than with anything tidy like the old nature versus nurture thing.
***

that i have been afforded the freedom to, as a teacher of young people, enter into dialogue that deals explicitely with issues deeper than those covered in our secular-humanist curriculum, rather than implicitely is a gift from God for which i am grateful. it has always been my view that the whole battery of curricula is simply a life-support system for mentoring relationships... the curriculum gets the funding but the relationship bears the fruit.

humUNkind

2006-04-19T22:00:00.000-07:00

well...
while i was holding my breath for forty days, fred_call and i dialogued a bit via email... on one particular day, we were talking about science and the strange things that people do, all the while justifying their actions in the name of progress and the 'greater good for the greater number' thing. my view that science has replaced God for many, and that the people in our western world seem to struggle with accepting a pluralism that would afford attention to be given in different ways to both God and science- recognizing science as a means of understanding God's work more deeply rather than a means of somehow overcoming him (the whole either/or rather than both/and debate)- was probably important context for the views that went charging off of my keyboard into cyberspace. however, there was also some basic human stuff going on in my life- broken relationships leading to betrayal and the like that also fueled my comments. not being able to blog this stuff left me a bit lost, as writing is, for me, a means of bringing sense to the senseless in this life... call it idealistic whining or nagging optimism or something. that others occasionally read the ramblings is just a bonus... but it does also force me to keep my perspectives in check- ongoing accountability is a good thing!

anyway, thanks fred for those emails. likewise, thanks curious servant for your prayers, and marcy and cj for your words. finally, societyvs... we gotta hook up, man.

shalom
***
i was watching this show on the Holocau- i mean History channel one evening. with a motherlode of cadavers to choose from, doctor death was free to experiment away in the name of science, doing strange things like fusing people together surgically and the like. people just love to play God.

the atrocities committed in the name of science almost match those committed in the name of God... almost.

the key difference is probably to whom the justification takes place. with science, we justify our actions to colleagues, citing a higher purpose; with spirituality, we justify our actions to our victims, citing a higher promise.

point of reference and frame of mind are everything some days, but it seems to me that the one thing that humankind does better than anyone else on the planet is exploit.

well, we're certainly a cynical little believer today, aren't we?

this too, shall pass.

40 days

2006-03-02T11:59:00.000-08:00

sounds lame, but i've decided to give up blogging for lent. i'll explain on www.northvus.blogspot.com after resurrection day, if there is anyone around to read...

blessings and shalom.

PS: thanks curious servant

on the tee

2006-02-23T06:40:00.000-08:00

it seems like a trend is developing. about this time last year (perhaps a month later or so, but whatever) my friend icarus issued an open letter to christians, challenging them to articulate why they believe what they believe. recently, kinkazzo sent me an email (exerpted below) asking many of the same questions.

now is it the weather or is it me? i don't know. maybe it's simply that these are the questions that inevitably come up once some time has passed and some dialogue on the things of life has tanspired between spiritual beings having a physical experience. perhaps its just that everyone is getting restless, having been golfing at those virtual golf places all winter. enquiring minds want to know...

Why are you a pastor, why are you a "believer"? How can you possibly hold to a "religion" knowing that our concept of God is invalid? Why does a rational being accept by faith some belief like yours? Why do we pray if God cannot intervene?

well, rather than simply copy and paste last year's testimonial (http://e-pistles.blogspot.com/2005/04/reason-and-bubble-boy.html), i decided to try to put this whole faith experience into new words a year later... here's the 'e-pistle' i sent to my friend in response...
***
so i thought about it a bit and i guess that there are two questions that come to mind:

why do i respond? how do i respond?

the first one's easy: because you asked and because i am learning things about myself by talking to you... there is also that amazing growth thing that happens when one is required to somehow articulate the things he or she believes in the face of strong reasons not to...

however, the second one is a little trickier for me. firstly, there's that whole business of trying to sort out where another person is going ie: whether this note is simply a psalm of lament--- a proclamation more than a prayer per se... spoken about God rather than to him, although loudly enough for him to hear--- full of rhetorical questions intended to express ideas rather than gather them, or is this note and the questions contained therein a quest for understanding as experienced between two friends?

Why are you a pastor, why are you a "believer"? How can you possibly hold to a "religion" knowing that our concept of God is invalid? Why does a rational being accept by faith some belief like yours? Why do we pray if God cannot intervene?

i agree. it would be foolish to hold to a religion, knowing that the concept of God is invalid. i'm just not in any way convinced that this is the case with God. my concept of God, (my theos logos, if you will) may be flawed, but these flaws do not do anything except keep me humble- they don't humble God at all, any more than some strange belief on the part of another concerning who i am actually makes me that belief. a misconception is a misconception and, if nothing else, this example underscores for me the importance of ensuring that my talks on sunday mornings are backed up really well by scripture, commentary, exegesis and other Christian teachings so as to not be relegated to simple theological gossip.

in my view, the validity in the 'concept of God' is in the fact that it is life-affecting (i would like to say 'life-changing' but the reality is that i was born and raised as a follower of Jesus Christ and the things that changed the direction of my life forever or just awhile were not so much the holy moments as the unholy ones... but that's a whole nother blog.)

but why pray? c.s. lewis' response has always worked for me:
prayer doesn't change God, it changes me.

the problem with using that soundbyte in this context is that if this were a proper response to your earlier question about prayer then it would also hold that prayer is "a hopeless exercise. Maybe a gestalt? At time replaced by the therapist's couch? A cheaper way of finding mental comfort?" (these are kinkazzo's words from later in the email) nope, there's got to be more to it for me than a pat answer or some church-childhood leftovers or i wouldn't bother.

is it enough to say that i pray because i know i'm not in charge? perhaps prayer is an ongoing exercise in surrendering my existencial stranglehold on things too big for my little hands anyway. i recently wrote a song that headed in this direction. although no music can heal me and no poem can make me whole (kinkazzo's words again), for me poetry and music are means by which i get in conscious touch with that which is taking place in my subconscious mind (the unconscious mind stuff is a little easier for me to lock in on because i remember dreams vividly... occasionally i can even interpret them in terms of the messages that they invite me to answer or respond to in metadialogue.)

i'm the one who walks upon the wire
i'm the one who works without a net
i'm the one who dances through the fire
i'm the one with nothing to forget

i'm the one who keeps the pie-plates spinning
i'm the one who knew it all along
i'm the one who gambles with his winnings
i'm the one who is yet to be proven wrong

the eye in the sky advises you to find another route home
avoid the twisted metal and broken glass
a crowd has gathered
debris is scattered for miles along the way
one by one people, shudder as they pass

i'm the one who insults in order to flatter
i'm the one who knows how to beat the odds
i'm the one who believes in mind over matter
i'm the one who has no time for your little gods

the eye in the sky advises you to find another route home
avoid the twisted metal and broken glass
a crowd has gathered
debris is scattered for miles along the way
one by one people, shudder as they pass

the eye in the sky advises you to find another route home
how long you'll have to wait is hard to say
the crews are working into the night
to clear away the wreckage
of a car that hit itself going the other way

i think that prayer is, for me, more than a mental discipline like meditation or the like. it is one way that i keep balanced- both big enough to do some things and small enough to let go of others. it is an expression of my belief that relational dialogue is possible between creator and created- a belief that is realized in the interaction.

i do not believe that it is impossible for God to intervene in circumstances, although there are times when i sure wish that i could somehow see the redemptive element of something painful or tragic. however, rather than abandon faith in looking for reasons (or perhaps looking for reasons to abandon faith), i am slowly learning that there are things towhich i am not entitled to understanding, no matter how important i think i am. prayer is the cord i use to lash myself to the mast of faith amidst the worst of storms- it supercedes my sloppy logic and my ever-humbled intellect by providing understanding and peace when there wouldn't be any without it.

however, what God does with things like the crusades and the holocaust (Kinkazzo had been to germany recently and had been profoundly moved by visits to the 'camps') i have no idea... they tell me who or what humankind is at its worst, when humankind is furthest from the heart of God, who seems to be about the weak and the weary rather than the privileged. that people use God's name to increase their privilege or work out their own power and dominance issues on others just reminds me of how small we are. this doesn't change who God is.

but why does God not intervene? is it because he can't or won't?

good questions, but when i ask them, the asking is usually coming from the place that shouts 'foul' rather than that which seeks relationship (and maybe rightly so- for questions such as this question God's justice and who seeks relationship with cosmic injustice? what would be the point of that beyond some good ol-fashioned codependency?). perhaps one needs to be in a certain place to even be permitted to ask such questions- the psalmist speaks of a contrite heart being the thing that God will not deny. when i ask them, questions like these presume to somehow have an understanding of justice that is greater than that of the author of justice. how could that be? is that contrition or pride? subjected to time and space, can i truly comprehend being outside of them, or must i, at best, only imagine them? upon what do i build my imaginings of the unknown but upon the fabric of the known? being spiritually blind, the best i can do is imagine spiritual sight in physical terms- how is this anything but metaphor and how does metaphor work its way into reason?

and then i wonder why God doesn't email his reply immediately.

perhaps God waits patiently while i sort through all the attitude and the intellectual clutter in order to get to the only question that ultimately matters to every soul in the end: how do i recognize and realize my role in all things? insofar as i am involved in this life, what is the chief end of this man? i don't need to be wealthy or experienced or anything else if i can just be real and know that who i am becoming is progressively closer to who i am meant to be.

sure- my road to this realization involves the answering of these questions... or even my place is to question. that's pretty comfortable. i have a friend who prides himself on asking questions that nobody (not even he) can satisfactorily answer. it allows him to remain in charge doesn't it? a constant to which everything else is to relate. as long as i keep bringing up the holocaust or the crusades or tsunami producing plate-tectonics as evidence of God's injustice or questionable nature, i don't have to actually take responsibility for anything because it is clear to me that God does not take responsibility for the things that are, by his silence or lack of intervention, his sins of omission. easy to blame God in order to sleep at night.

so many of our questions can be procrastinations- like checking the direction of the wind, considering various drivers, waiting expectantly for the crowd gathered to be silenced and so on rather than actually approaching the golfball on the tee.
***
Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe."
Thomas said to him, "My Lord and my God!"
Then Jesus told him, "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."
(john 20.27-29)

starting point?

2006-02-06T14:42:00.000-08:00

a friend of mine who used to play in our band is a new-age pantheist. i don't think he'd mind being categorized, as in his view we are all God and simply struggling through varying stages of self-realization and memory. it shouldn't matter to a real part of god if other parts of god have the wrong picture of what it is... it is not the worship of the other parts of itself that a god desires.

so he was talking to me one time about zen moments where one is simultaneously enlightened and confused, and it put me in mind of the richard bach novel illusions. the book relates the adventures of a reluctant messiah. in the story, the main character (richard) is a travelling barnstormer who meets another (albeit suspiciously perfect) barnstormer named don. don never has to change his oil or polish his engine- he's got it all together. richard decides to disciple under don, a new guru.

as will happen within a fallen world of action, reaction and causality, richard's plane needs some repairs one day, and the two find themselves in a hardware store for parts. richard is moving down an aisle when he hears the most beautiful soulspoken music of his life coming from another part of the store. he follows the sonic fragrance to its source, finding don playing a toy guitar in a makeshift toy aisle (how many really good toys are there going to be in a hardware store?).

'i didn't know you could play guitar...'
'what kind of messiah would i be if i couldn't do something simple like play guitar? the only difference between you and me is that my belief in my ability to play guitar is greater than your belief in yours. some people have to practice for ten years before they actually believe that they can play...' (okay, really sloppy paraphrase, but that's the gist of it)

and so on. well, if godhood and guitar prowess are related in any way, then i think that the realization of my friend's own personal godhood is still a long way off. he recently moved to korea and doesn't have to practice as hard or even change his strings. he sends us photographs from time to time, but never song ideas.
***

my friend kinkazzo spoke recently in an email of his restlessness and a desire to unite with the universal mind. he outlined a story of how he had once launched an online cosmic consciousness group that caught on and grew so quickly that they were even to the point of discussing the prospect of holding a convention. yet amidst all of this excitement, and the realization of a lifelong dream, my friend found himself in a funk and told the whole lot of them to piss off so he could shrink back once again into relative obscurity.

i think that it must be really hard to be a god.

it's frustrating to author something that ultimately means nothing. chasing after the wind or whatever. certainly in kinkatso's case, the experience is heavily reminiscent in its conclusions of the teacher in ecclesiastes: it still speaks of an unfulfilled desire to be a necessary part of something bigger than big, realer than real, and above all, satisfying. although he had created something 'ex nehilo', it was not from love but from restlessness that the new incarnation arose. the thrill was all in the chase.

I had something going there, just as I always wanted. But I couldn't follow through, I lost my appetite: that's the way I am. I lose interest quickly, and my dynamism disappears... This is surely due to my disquieting mind, my irregular personality and my pressive character. Right.
But why?
What am I looking for?
Why couldn't I keep it going and create a REAL movement? It would have been sooooo good: just the way I liked -- people talking in-depth; people looking at important issues; people being spiritual and superconscious.
Damn it: I really wanted to CREATE A STAR!
A "conveyor" for my Fire.
A channelling for my Inspiration, my Creativeness -- (all capitalised!)
Egocentric? Sure, but what a goal!
And I ruined everything with my instability...

you can't create something real from something unstable. you can't create something that is perfect, balanced and needing nothing to survive from a personal need to create something that is blah blah blah. it's strength is tied inextricably to its author but realized in the quality of the materials used. it's like trying to create free energy with a mechano set and a bunsen burner... some things cannot be created, only discovered.

a laugh for the man in the eyes of the world trying to make things work
tried to create a new jerusalem and ended up with new york...
(bruce cockburn)

look at humankind. our greatest strengths seem to reflect that perfect ideal personified that we have named God. (i love how God dodged that one from the beginning, knowing that if we were to be given a specific name to address him as, we would just use it wrongly anyway... so he let us identify him in the most meaningful way we could) our greatest weaknesses, by choice, seem to be in direct contrast to those strengths.

however, i just can't subscribe to nietzsche's 'beyond good and evil' thing- that subscribing to a morality which jives with universal law on things like 'goodness' and 'justice' is somehow subjecting oneself to being repressed; and that God's choice to permit free will is evidence of his weakness as a deity: a flaw indicative of the fallacy of God- i choose to push against that one. free will is our greatest gift- superceding even Jesus in God's grace. i mean, Jesus was the remedy for the bad stewardship of our free will which resulted in a severed relationship between love personified and goodness actualized: between the creator of all things and his crowned of creation. the ability to choose came first.

but as long as we choose to be gods we will be frustrated.
we create, but it's never out of the raw material of love alone.

do you think that all creation came from nothing but the word of the intelligent designer in need of an outlet one day? although the creation story begins with the spirit of God hovering over the face of the deep, as it were, how figuratively or literally are we to take this? i love the idea that everything good (including time) was concentrated to a specific location having no dimensions and a specific moment having no duration- a starting point only- and that the voice of God is what the ancients a thousand years from now, schooled in antiquities and curios, will call 'the big bang.'

over the next few days, kinkazzo and i continued the dialogue further. originally i was going to just copy and paste the whole thing in the comment box of this blog, but then i thought 'gee, maybe that's rude...' so instead i've just linked his blog on the side.

(tangentary questions: in this information-processing epoch, to what degree is any dialogue between two consenting adults a private matter? especially among bloggers where so much intellectual property is released into the public domain? i don't know the answers to these questions, except that i believe the more we can interact with each other's ideas, either directly or indirectly, the more opportunity we have to grow as people. i still struggle with what that means pertaining to 'obscenity,' censorship, and ideas that contribute to the moral and spiritual unravelling of our planet, however. my parenthetical point is that, like effects without cause or yang without ying, i can't seem to isolate and articulate ideas from the dialogue without at least partially citing the ideas in italics which led to them... hope that's cool, k-man!)

anyway, he cited eregina:

God is eternally partially self-ignorant. If he knew all of himself, he could define himself. If he could define himself, he would be finite.

but is the lack of definition an inability or a refusal?

i mean, i recognize the logic that binds the infinity of God to the unknown and incalculable, but what if God exists beyond logic as he exists beyond time and beyond evil? what if that which God does further affirms his capacity to be all things and do all things, whereas what he does not do just continues to be that which he has simply not done, neither defining nor deifying him?

"I AM who I AM"- nothing logically comparable- no appropriate simile or metaphor when it comes to his power or his holiness. then the questions return to that old human stomping ground: what does God do? what has he done? what is he responsible for? or, my personal favourite: what is he NOT responsible for?

But all he knows of himself is what he has created. What is created is his knowledge or represents the expressed, revealed and therefore finite aspects of his actions and his knowledge

what is potential is his mystery: mysterious in him and to him. i don't think that God is a mystery to himself. it is like that guitar story- until don had played guitar, all that richard could possibly say was that don had never played guitar- no, not even that... all he could say was that, to his knowledge, don had never played guitar. were don to share, would it be necessary for him to qualify his ability by saying 'yes, of course i knew how to play before playing' of might it be enough for the playing of guitar to be within the realm of don's capability, but not, as yet, something that he had done? does 'if can do' logically imply 'then has done' or are there in fact things that God can do that he hasn't done and, seated outside of time, will never do? there must be. i mean, there are things that i am capable of doing that i've never done- how much moreso God?

i agree that our causative, hierarchical thinking is problematic at best, mainly due to its subjectivity. through this lens we quantify, qualify and classify, attempting to catch a glimpse of some meaning. that's probably the problem. we attempt to examine and explain the rest of the world (let's not even bother with theology, let's just scientifically and experiencially comment on our existence alone, like descartes) from this tiny and subjective point of context rather than to seek to comment on this piece of turf upon which stand against the backdrop of everything around us.

God is caused by what it causes; is made necessary by what it necessitates; we cannot comprehend. I cannot comprehend, and I can't accept it.

i cannot comprehend but i am okay with accepting it. i find the whole fallacy of entitlement to be a bit of a red herring anyway- to conclude that we are entitled to answers that allign with our reason is a bit presumptuous, i think. if i as a man believe that i can somehow comprehend the mind of God without being God, then surely it must follow (although probably not very logically, as my brain doesn't work that way most days...) that i would be able to comprehend the mind of a woman without being one? i mean, there is probably much less difference between the thinking and purposes of a man and a woman than there is between a man and a relationally able, conscious creator of all good things both seen and unseen. yet what an incredible mystery my wife can be somedays...

dare we presume to be capable of drawing finite parameters around one who is, by virtue of basic doctrines like omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, perfection and holiness, absolute and without parameters apart from those which attempt to address his very nature? that might be a bit much for a creation to accomplish, using only created materials and means to measure and summarize the immeasurable. might that be like trying to use a ruler to measure the mass of a beam of light- the tool selected to do the job being not only insufficient, but in fact irrelevent? rather than a box to keep him in, perhaps our understanding of God would be better served by trying to sort out the things that are at the centre of who God is: the things that characterize that location having no dimensions, that instant having no duration. it is from there and then that love and life did begin.

so play the game of existence to the end of the beginning
(lennon/mccartney)

time to go practice...