A Few Remarks on Poetry

I finally finished Stephen Fry's book, The Ode Less Travelled. As I mentioned in a blog several months ago, it is an excellent book on poetry written especially for those unfamiliar with poetry and many of its terms. He actually has an excellent glossary in the back of the book. I thought I would share a few quotations from his concluding chapter.

I am suggesting that language be worked, as a painter works paint, as a sculptor works marble. If what you are writing has no quality that prose cannot transmit, then why should you call it a poem? (p. 313)

Be always alert to language: it is yours as a poet in a special way....Every word has its own properties. (316)

Laziness is the worst vice a poet can have. Sentimentality, cliche, pretension, falsity of emotion, vanity, dullness, over-ambition, self-indulgence, word-deafness, word-blindness, clumsiness, technical ineptitude, unoriginality--all of these are bad but they are usually subsets and products of laziness. (p. 320)

Concentration and total commitment to language are far and away the most important qualities needed for poetry writing. (p.321)

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Thought for the Day

Language is sacred at its core. It has its origin in God....language maintains its sacred creation and salvation core as we human beings continue to speak and listen to it, but especially as we use language to reveal to one another who we uniquely are.
--Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book

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Missional-Incarnational Impulse

Hirsch continues his discussion of Apostolic Genius in chapter 5 of The Forgotten Ways with the third dimension, Missional-Incarnational Impulse. I found his argument compelling, I must admit. He notes that most Western churches if they are serious about growing are evangelistic-attractional. The goal is reaching people in order to bring them into the church: the church is a magnet and the people we are seeking are iron filings.

However, the apostolic church and the church in China grew because it was missional- incarnational. Followers of Jesus are primarily a sent people. He writes,

As God sent the Son into the world, so we are at core a sent or simply a missionary people.
This "sending" is embodied and lived out in the missional impulse. This is in essence an outwardly bound movement from one community or individual to another. It is the outward thrust rooted in God's mission that compels the church to reach a lost world Therefore, a genuine missional impulse is a sending rather than an attractional one (p. 129).

Think about it. It seems to me that the average parishioner if they have a mind of wanting to grow the church thinks in terms of "how can I get this person into church" and church frequently means into the building itself, probably to worship. We tend to think of the spiritual stuff as happening "in the church" and mostly we think of "in the church" as things that occur in the church building.

"Incarnational ministry," he writes, "essentially means taking the church to the people, rather than bringing people to the church" (p. 135). It is spending time with people and loving them in the context of living our lives in the world, and understanding "that Jesus actually likes to hang out with the people we hang out with. They get the implied message that God actually likes them" (p. 134).

Many people today have a stereotypical view of the church based on either past experience, what they read in the newspapers or what friends have shared with them. They would never think of coming into a church building and expecting to find anything interesting or applicable to their lives. Of course there are some who might for various reasons venture into a church for a service, but I suspect these are in the minority. So for the church to exist in the attractional mode, when most of the society is not likely to respond to this mode is to miss the opportunity to share the love of a God who loves everyone.

No doubt, a church that is missional-incarnational will end up attracting people to the building to the services, but this result needs to be understood as a by-product of the missional- incarnational impulse. What are you, missional or attractional?

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Thought for the Day

Forgiveness may be the one miracle that we can experience daily, if we are but willing to risk our pride and renounce our need to be ‘right’.
--Darryl Tippens, Pilgrim Heart

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Flash Forward

If you want to get a jump on the sermon this Sunday, Palm Sunday, you can read Zechariah 9:9 and Luke 19:28-44, standard Palm Sunday texts. I want to zero in on the sub-story of the disciples procuring the donkey for Jesus and on Jesus weeping over Jerusalem. The title of the sermon is "Downward Ascent."

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Thought for the Day

While efficiency and control are the great aspirations of our society, the loneliness, isolation, lack of friendship and intimacy, broken relationships, boredom, feelings of emptiness and depression, and a deep sense of uselessness fill the hearts of millions of people in our success-oriented world.
--Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus

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Naked Prayer

The more that I continue reading God on Mute by Pete Greig the more I like the book. I am impressed with the author's wisdom about prayer. As I mentioned in an earlier blog on this book, the focus is why God frequently seems silent when we pray. Some people avoid the problem by not praying for specific things for themselves or others. He does not subscribe to this understanding of prayer and advocates praying about everything from the big through the small.

One of the things that I especially like about the book is his honesty about prayer and his own experiences with God's silences. He doesn't sugar-coat prayer, nor does he blame the people for praying when their prayers are not answered the way that they ask. He does advocate being brutally honest with God about what we are feeling and thinking when we pray. He writes,

When we open our hearts to be honest with God in prayer, He hears us and steps through the door to be with us, totally unfazed by the mess of our interior world. The thing that keeps God out of our lives is not our sin. It is our compulsion to pretend, to cover up our nakedness with fig leaves, to climb sycamore trees in order to see without being seen (p. 78).

When you stop to think about it, God knows what we are feeling and experiencing whether we acknowledge it to God or not. But there is great power when we do strip off the facade and openly admit to God exactly what we are feeling, including all of the forbidden, shameful, doubtful, and unwanted ones.

I have found in my role as pastoral counselor and psychotherapist that for lasting change to take place in a person's life, he or she must name and own the truth of his or her own life no matter how unwanted or ugly it is. When we bring up these aspects of ourselves that we would rather remain buried and submit them to the light, it is then that we can begin to address them. I can suspect that they exist in a person, but until the counselee acknowledges and owns them, there is little I can do. I think that in some ways this is analogous to our relationship with God in prayer. God knows what is going on, but because of God's incredible love and respect for each of us, God does not force Himself on us.

How honest are you in your prayers?

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Thought for the Day

In an age of psychologizing, clarity about oneself supersedes devotion to an ideal as the model of right conduct.
--Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic

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The Forgotten Ways: Disciple Making

In his description of mDNA and Apostolic Genius, Hirsch believes that discipleship is the most critical factor. He writes, "For the follower of Jesus, discipleship is not the first step toward a promising career. It is in itself the fulfillment of his or her destiny. We never move from being a disciple on-the-way" (p.. 103).

He believes that the Western church, by and large, has lost the art of making disciples. He attributes this to a number of factors, the most important of which is consumerism. I thought this was the most powerful and challenging part of the chapter. Consumerism functions in many ways as an alternative religion, according to Hirsch. Traditionally religion has functioned to offer people a compelling sense of identity, community, purpose, and meaning. He argues that currently advertising functions in just this way: offering people identity, community, purpose, and meaning. He writes,

Much that goes by the name advertising has nothing to do with inherent aspects
of the products themselves. Rather, advertising has everything to do with
managing the value and significance people give to products and the relative
status we derive from them. In our day there is little doubt that as a
culture we have totemized the product. In other words, it has
acquired religious significance for us (p. 108).

How consumerism works itself out in the church is that it creates an ethos of religious consumerism. People attend a church as religious consumers, and based on what the church can do for them will determine to a large extent their involvement or connection to the church. The church becomes a dispenser of religious goods and services, in other words. The underlying attitude is "What's in this for me?" "What can I get out of this?" Rather than surrendering our lives to this God who calls us to radical obedience and discipleship; rather than an obedience and discipleship that includes suffering and bearing the cross; rather than following Jesus in a life of transformation, people want to pick-and-choose from a smorgasbord of ideas and behaviors that will conveniently enhance their lives.

Hirsch argues that churches need to make discipleship the top priority of their mission and ministries if they intend to regain apostolic vitality. What do you think?

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Thought for the Day

The only way to propagate a message is to live it.
--Jim Wallis

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Bible Eating

I am currently reading Eugene Peterson's book, Eat This Book, for my devotions. The subtitle is "a conversation in the art of spiritual reading." He addresses the practice of lectio divina which followers of Jesus have been practicing for the last 1500 years or so. Lectio Divina means "divine reading" the purpose of which is to get the scriptures inside of us.

Peterson is a wonderful writer and the person who translated the Bible into The Message. Words are precious to him, and he is passionate about opening up the Bible so that we can marinate in it and let it soak into the very core of who we are, letting it transform us from the inside out. As modern or post-modern people, we tend to read for information and keep ourselves at a safe distance from what we read. This way of reading applies to the way that we read our Bibles. He wants us to enter into the stories, let them flow in us and through us; he wants God to capture our imaginations through these texts that we read.

He writes,

Christian reading is participatory reading, receiving the words in such a way that they become interior to our lives, the rhythms and images becoming practices of prayer, acts of obedience, ways of love (p. 28).
The Bible is a most comforting book; it is also a most discomfiting book. Eat this book; it will be sweet as honey in your mouth; but it will also be bitter to your stomach [he is referring to Revelation 10:9-10]. You can't reduce this book to what you can handle; you can't domesticate this book to what you are comfortable with. You can't make it your toy poodle, trained to respond to your commands (p. 61).

Lectio divina consists of four parts: lectio (reading), meditatio (meditating), oratio (prayer), and contemplatio (contemplation). He distinguishes meditatio from contemplatio by saying that the former "moves from looking at the words of the text to entering the world of the text," by using the imagination to to enter into the text (p. 99). About contemplatio he writes, "It means living the read/meditated/prayed text in the everyday, ordinary world. It means getting the text into our muscles and bones, our oxygen-breathing lungs and blood-pumping heart" (109). In other words, the Bible is for eating, digesting, and metabolizing so that we have the energy and wisdom to live well and faithfully in the world.

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Thought for the Day

Trying to get the answer before one has understood all the right questions is a prime source of error in human affairs.
--Phillip E. Johnson, The Right Questions

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Prayer for the Day

O Christ Jesus, when all is darkness and we feel our weakness and helplessness, give us the sense of Your presence, Your love, and Your strength. Help us to have perfect trust in Your protecting love and strengthening power, so that nothing may frighten or worry us, for, living close to You, we shall see Your hand, Your purpose, Your will through all things.
--St, Ignatius of Loyola

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Language is sacred at its core. It has its origin in God.
--Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book

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Thought for the Day

For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods; even rich men and those in possession of office and of dominating power are thought to need friends most of all; for what is the use of such prosperity without the opportunity of beneficence, which is exercised chiefly and in its most laudable form towards friends?
--Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics

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The Heart of Apostolic Genius

At the core of what Hirsch calls Apostolic Genius in The Forgotten Ways is what he calls "Christocentric Monotheism" captured by the early church confession, "Jesus is Lord." He writes, "at the heart of all great movements is a recovery of a simple Christology (essential conceptions of who Jesus is and what he does), one that accurately reflects the Jesus of New Testament faith..." (pp. 85-86).

Monotheism is important to Hirsch because he wants to recover the understanding implicit in the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament and in particular in Deuteronomy that there is no division between the sacred and the secular but that all of life is subject to God and thus is sacred. He refers to the Shema: "Here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart and all of soul and all of you mind and all of your strength." As he writes, "Monotheists (authentic biblical believers) have only one reference point for life and existence--namely God. The Shema is the first and original instance of this complete and systemic claim on our lives" (p. 89).

Christocentric monotheism is the faith of Israel that has been redefined around the role of Jesus. Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, is the center of the church and the center of missional expansion. It is nicely summed up in the phrase, "Jesus is Lord." Caesar is not Lord, the king is not Lord, fame is not Lord, money is not Lord, and all of the myriad gods and goddesses in our world that claim lordship over our lives.

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Thought for the Day

There is no feeling more desperate than that of being free to choose, and yet without the specific compulsion of being chosen. After all, one does not really choose; one is chosen. This is one way of stating the difference between gods and men. Gods choose; men are chosen. What men lose when they become as fee as gods is precisely that sense of being chosen, which encourages them, in their gratitude, to take their subsequent choices seriously. Put in another way, this means: Freedom does not exist without responsibility.
--Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic

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Apostolic Genius and mDNA

The center of Alan Hirsch's thesis in The Forgotten Ways revolves around two important terms: Apostolic Genius and mDNA. Apostolic Genius is what Hirsch calls the "life force that pulsated through the New Testament church and in other expressions of apostolic Jesus movements throughout history" (p. 77). mDNA means "missional DNA" and is a metaphor for how Apostolic Genius is "coded" in every single follower of Jesus. He writes, "I come to believe that every church, indeed every Christian, if truly birthed in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit, has the full coding of mDNA and therefore has direct access to the power of Apostolic Genius" (p. 77).

He describes Apostolic Genius as a complex interaction of several factors which if all present and unleashed lead to a vibrant and reproducing church that is full of spiritual power. I will name the factors here and then over time unpack what he means by each factor. Apostolic Genius has Jesus at the center surrounded by 1. Disciple Making, 2. Missional-incarnational Impulse, 3. Apostolic Environment, 4. Organic Systems, and 5. Communitas, Not Community. He defines missional church as

a community of God's people that defines itself, and organizes its life around, its real purpose of being an agent of God's mission to the world. In other words, the church's true and authentic organizing principle is mission. When the church is in mission, it is the true church. The church itself is not only a product of that mission but is obligated and destined to extend it by whatever means possible. The mission of God flows directly through every believer and every community of faith that adheres to Jesus. To obstruct this is to block God's purposes in and through his people (p. 82).

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Thought for the Day

Nowadays, the world is full of tame Christians; in consequence, the churches are empty of life, if not of people.
--Philip Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic

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Reflections from Brewster

I have to admit that I feel as though I'm in hog heaven: surrounded by a lot of books, and no other schedule but to pray, read, write, and ponder. I have been thinking a lot about prayer lately and the essential nature of prayer for a discipleship church. Most people believe that prayer is important in principle, I think, but most of us actually engage in prayer in an anemic way or not at all.

One of the most readable and best books on prayer that I have read (I finished reading it yesterday) is Prayer by Philip Yancey. I highly recommend that you read it. One of the things that I like about Yancey is his honesty. He doesn't try to sugarcoat things and make them appear more appealing or more consistent than they really are. He doesn't skirt the issue of unanswered prayer as well.

Speaking of unanswered prayer, another book that I started reading yesterday and was highly recommended by Scot McKnight (of Jesus Creed fame) is God on Mute: Engaging the Silence of Unanswered Prayer by Pete Greig. As we all know and have experienced, God does not always answer our prayers. Sometimes it feels like God doesn't answer any of them. Greig writes, "If you are hurting and secretly wondering 'Where is God?' and 'Why's this happened to me?' and 'How come my prayers aren't working?' then I dedicate this book to you..."

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Thought for the Day

We must become holy not because we want to feel holy but because Christ must be able to live his life fully in us.
--Mother Theresa

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While I'm Away

While I am away this week on a spiritual retreat, I will try to blog daily with a Thought for the Day, and possibly a quick thought about something else. One of my goals on this retreat is to broaden and deepen my prayer life and would appreciate your prayers that God would work in my life in this way.

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Thought for the Day

...a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbor. Otherwise he is not a Christian. He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbor through love. By faith he is caught up beyond himself into God. By love he descends beneath himself into his neighbor. Yet he always remains in God and in his love.
--Martin Luther

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Prayer for the Day

Lord Jesus Christ, you said that you are the Way, the truth, and the Life. Help us not to stray from you, for you are the Way; nor to distrust you, for you are the Truth; nor to rest on any other than you, as you are the Life. You have taught us what to believe, what to do, what to hope, and where to take our rest. Give us grace to follow you, the Way, to learn from you, the Truth, and live in you, the Life.
--Desiderius Erasmus

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Reading Well

A while back I came across an interesting book by Susan Wise Bauer entitled, The Well-Educated Mind: a Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had. In it she describes how to read well in general, discusses various categories of literature that one should read, and then makes specific recommendations of books in each category.

I thought that I would share three of the general principles she gives for reading well. The first principle is giving yourself permission not to have to understand everything the first time through (She is assuming that for great literature you will read it more than once.) As she notes, "In truth, it's impossible to fully understand difficult passages until you know how they fit into the rest of the writer's schema" (p. 42).

The second principle, and one that I am happy to report I learned a long time ago, is to write in the books that you read: underline passages, write notes in the margins, turn the corners of the pages down. A lot of people learned from public school where you didn't own the books, you aren't supposed to write in books. But as she notes, since we are grownups, we should if at all possible, buy our books so that we can write in them.

The third principle is to read the title page, then turn and read the back cover, and then move to the table of contents. She recommends not reading the preface unless the author has written it. The preface written by anyone other than the author can give you an interpretation before you have read the book yourself, and in a way prejudicing the way that you read it.

How many of you actually read a book more than one time? How many of you actually write in the books that you read?

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Thought for the Day

...all human persons, no matter how well educated, how scientific, how knowledgeable, are, at bottom believers. We are all necessarily trusting, believing animals, creatures who must and do place our faith in beliefs that cannot themselves be verified except by means established by the presumed beliefs themselves.
--Christian Smith, Moral, Believing Animals

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Hunting on the Web

In last Sunday's New York Times Magazine (3/11/07) there was an article entitled, "Should Killing Be Merely a Mouse Click Away?". You may not have heard of this, but some enterprising individuals have developed a way of hunting--literally hunting--from your sofa. John Lockwood, an entrepreneur, began a website where anyone subscribing could, with a high speed computer connection, shoot wild pigs, antelope, and other game on his 220 acre farm in San Antonio, Texas. A computer operates a rifle and a web camera mounted onto a remote controlled rig which a subscriber could operate from the comfort of his or her own home. When the game appears on the screen and within range a mere click of the mouse will fire the weapon. If desired, Lockwood would send to you the head of the animal you had just killed.

Thankfully, Texas outlawed this business before it got off the ground. Many states are following Texas in making this kind of hunting illegal. Even most hunters find this practice repugnant if not unethical. Lockwood, however, is concerned about those who have disabilities or servicemen overseas who are not able to hunt.

It seems to me that this is another example of the blurring between fantasy and reality. On the one hand you could say that this is just another evolutionary step beyond the violent video games. You shoot an animal and never see it, the struggle, the blood, unless of course you have the head sent to you. At least you have a memento that something died. This without even addressing the ethics of shooting animals for sport, without any intention of using the meat for food or the skins for clothing, etc.

I shudder to think about the next evolutionary step after remotely killing animals...

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Thought for the Day

...the wages of goodness are oblique and obscure, and not even assured.
--Michael Blumenthal

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More on the Atonement

The Hebrew word for atonement means "covering." Leviticus 16 describes the Day of Atonement. According to God's instructions, Aaron was to sacrifice a goat after cleansing himself and to do so in a specific manner. A second goat, the scapegoat, was also part of the ceremony. Aaron was to place both hands on the goats head, confess all of Israel's sins, and then send the goat into the wilderness. The purpose of this was "to deal" with the sins of Israel and the estrangement from God that they have created.

In the New Testament John the Baptist refers to Jesus as "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." This is one way of understanding atonement which is further explained in Hebrews 9: expiation. Expiation means cleansing through a sacred rite. We need to be cleansed, and in this understanding we are cleansed through the blood of Christ.

Another term that is used to understand the atonement is propitiation. Propitiation has to do with appeasing the wrath of God. The idea is that God hates sin and it instigates God's wrath. However, by Jesus dying on the cross, his blood saves us from God's wrath (Romans 5:9).

Another way of understanding the atonement is that it is substitutionary: Christ's life was given for our life. I Peter 2:24 says, "He himself [Jesus] bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live fro righteousness." He died in our place. You can combine understanding with either expiation or propitiation.

The ransom theory says is a close cousin of the substitutionary theory. According to this theory, which some scholars believe is the oldest of all of them, Satan has a claim on humanity because of the fall. Jesus' death on the cross and his shed blood is understood as the ransom that was paid to Satan to liberate humans from their bondage.

The Christus victor theory understands the atonement as fundamentally about Christ's conquest of evil. Colossians 2:15 says, "He [Jesus] disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it [the cross]."

I don't think that any one theory can capture adequately all that happened on the cross. As I said in a previous blog, the concept contains an excess of meaning. What happened on the cross was huge and has implications for the whole world. It demonstrates the depth and breadth of God's love for humans.

Someone commented on my previous blog about the atonement asking if the Jews hadn't gotten it all wrong and that Jesus showed them the "right" way. That was a common interpretation until mid- 20th century. I don't believe that is accurate, however. As a Christian I would say that God has brought his grand rescue operation to its climax in Jesus. As New Testament scholar N.T. Wright notes in his book, Simply Christian,

Christianity is all about the belief that the living God, in fulfillment of his promises and as the climax of the story of Israel, has accomplished all this--the finding, the saving, the giving of new life--in Jesus. He has done it. With Jesus, God's rescue operation has been put into effect once and for all. A great door has swung open in the cosmos which can never again be shut (p. 92).

Israel is God's covenant people and God's intent was to bless the world through them (Genesis 12:1-3). As followers of Jesus, Christians believe that God has blessed the world through Israel and must fully in Jesus. The heart of Israel's faith--Torah and temple--are embodied in Jesus. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, I didn't come to abolish the law but to fulfill it. The sacrificial system that happened in the temple is embodied in Jesus death on the cross.

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Thought for the Day

We do not want to be beginners [at prayer]. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything but beginners, all our life!
--Thomas Merton

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Thought for the Day

Nothing is more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than achieving a new order of things.
--Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

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Atonement

Someone asked me to blog about what it means that “Jesus died for our sins.” What did his death accomplish? That’s a bit of an overwhelming task since there are large books written by scholars addressing this issue. I assume the question relates to atonement and atonement theory. Atonement means “at one” and while the Hebrew word we translate “atonement” occurs frequently in the Old Testament, the only place in the New Testament where the Greek translation of the Hebrew word occurs it is used is in Romans 5:11, and both the NIV and the NRSV Bibles translate the word “reconciliation.

Over the course of time a number of atonement theories developed which include, penal substitution, ransom, satisfaction, Christus Victor, etc. Some people will go to the wall for their particular theory. But the truth of the matter is that atonement carries what you might call “an excess of meaning.” Trying to capture the specific meaning of the atonement is akin to trying to capture the meaning of the imago dei, the image of God: they don’t fit neatly into our cognitive boxes.

I think that Dallas Willard says something important about the atonement that doesn’t get us bogged down in reductionistic meanings. In The Divine Conspiracy he writes,

…[Jesus] went to execution as a common criminal among other criminals on
our behalf. We don’t have to understand exactly how it works. Anyone
who thinks he or she does fully understand what theology calls the atonement
undoubtedly has some surprises coming. Nowhere, I think, is theological
arrogance more commonly displayed than on this subject. But the fact is
something we must always have before our minds. That is the good reason we
wear or display a cross. For all the false and misleading associations
that may surround it, it still says—even without the knowledge of the one
displaying it—“I am bought by the sufferings and death of Jesus and I belong to
God. The divine conspiracy of which I am a part stands over human history
in the form of a cross”…No one can have an adequate view of the heart and
purposes of the God of the universe who does not understand that he permitted
his son to die on the cross to reach out to all people, even people who hated
him. That is who God is…It is God looking at me from the cross with
compassion and providing for me, with never-failing readiness to take my hand to
walk on through life from wherever I may find myself at the time (pp. 334-335).

I am interested if you find this helpful or more confusing.

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Thought for the Day

We can't make disciples based on a consumerist approach to the faith. We plainly cannot consume our way into discipleship. All of us must become much more active in the equation of becoming lifelong followers of Jesus. Consumption is detrimental to discipleship.
--Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways

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The Monday Morning Quarterback

In yesterday's sermon I suggested that the fall involves basic mistrust: Adam and Eve questioned whether God really had their best interests at heart and whether God was good enough. This basic mistrust can either manifest itself as overreaching, trying to supplant God and take things in our own hands, or as underachieving, not living up to our dignity as being made in God's image. It leads either to rebellion or anxious inaction.

The New Testament portrays the basic problem as a lack of faith. Faith and trust in this context are nearly synonymous. Jesus constantly exhorts his followers to trust in God. The Sermon on the Mount contains a significant section in Matthew 6 about trusting God. That is what 6:33 is fundamentally about: "Seek first the kingdom of God and all these things shall be given to you." "These things" is daily provision.

I also noted that we frequently expect God to come through and protect us from any kind of suffering if we follow God. God makes no deals like that. The truth be told, God calls us to trust in spite of our suffering, or in our suffering. Any thoughts?

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Thought for the Day

The Bible tells us that the Christian is in the world, and that there he or she mus remain. Christians have not been created in order to separate themselves from or to live all of from, the world. When this separation is effected, it will be God's own doing, not man's...The Christian community must never be a closed body.
--Jacques Ellul, The Presence of the Kingdom

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Prayer for the Day

Christ the lowly and meek,
Christ the all powerful,
Be in the heart of each to whom I speak,
In the mouth of each who speaks to me,
In all who draw near me,
Or see me, or hear me!
--St. Patrick

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Would-Be Writers

Several months ago Scot McKnight, author of The Jesus Creed, dedicated a lengthy blog to writing. He is a prolific writer having written a number of books, he is a professor at North Park University, and writes a daily blog that covers a lot of material. To the question that someone asked him, "How do you do it?" he wrote the blog on writing.

I am one of those people who wants to write well, and would at some point like to have some things published: poetry and a book especially. But as busy pastor, I have difficulty finding the time to write. I do know it is possible for a pastor to write, because there are very active pastors who do indeed write.

What the people with whom I have talked or read seem to agree on is that you can't write "on the side." About a year ago I called one of my favorite Christian authors, Eugene Peterson, and asked him how he was able to write. He was a Presbyterian pastor for approximately 30 years at a church in Maryland, and was able to write many books. He told me that he believed he had a calling to both write and pastor, and arranged his schedule to accomplish both. Mary Oliver and Jane Yolen both talk about the commitment to writing and writing daily. McKnight writes in his blog,

...writing can't be done on the side...

In other words, writing is a lifestyle, a way of life, a way of being, a modus operandi, a way of breathing and eating and drinking. Better yet, writing is a way of learning, a way of coming to know what someone wants to know, a way of discovering.

Writing is not something to do when everything else is cleared off the desk; no, it is something that makes order of the desk. I don't get up wondering what I will write about, but I write about what I'm wondering...In other words, as Augustine spoke of "faith seeking understanding," so writing is a pen seeking understanding...

In other words, writing isn't done on the side. It's in the soul, it's a way of being, and it's not for everyone. It's a scribbler's itch to get it down.

I wonder how you would-be writers out there feel about what McKnight has written. Does anyone have any secrets they would like to share with the rest of us would-be writers?

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Thought for the Day

Purpose and principle, clearly understood and articulated, and commonly shared, are the genetic code of any healthy organization. To the degree that you hold purpose and principles in common among you, you can dispense with command and control. People will know how to behave in accordance with them, and they'll do it in thousands of unimaginable, creative ways. The organization will become a vital, living set of beliefs.
--Dee Hock, The Birth of the Chaordic Age

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Religilous Ignorance.

An article in the Boston Globe last Sunday and an article in the 3/12/07 issue of Newsweek focus on Boston University Professor's, Stephen Prothero's, contention that we live in a religiously ignorant society which has negative consequences for understanding and engaging with the world.

He has recently published a book, Religious Literacy, in which he addresses the lack of religious literacy and what he recommends as a solution. He notes that even thought 90% of Americans say they believe in God, very few know a thing about religion. He writes, "Given a political environment where religion is increasingly important, its' increasingly important to know something about religion. The payoff is a more involved [political] conversation."

He advocates that public schools teach religion, that every student should take one course on the Bible, and one course on world religions. The purpose is not to proselytize, but to teach children about religion so that they can have a better understanding of religions and their impact on the world.

What do you think of Prothero's recommendations? Do you think it is possible to teach religious texts in an objective format or that it would be possible to accomplish this in public schools? Do thou think it would be a good thing?

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Thought for the Day

There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
--Albert Einstein

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"The Forgotten Ways"

As I mentioned in a blog yesterday, I have recently purchase The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch. He is a passionate advocate for revitalizing the church and has developed a way of understanding and reconfiguring the church that I believe has merit. I intend to blog on this book from time to time over the next several weeks.

In the "Introduction" of his book he offers some interesting statistics. By AD 100 some historians estimate that there were approximately 25,000 Christians in the world, which would have been the Roman Empire. In AD 310 they estimate that there were 20,000,000 Christians. Clearly, in 200 years Christianity exploded. And this despite the fact that christian were an illegal religion throughout this period, they didn't have any church buildings, the New Testament was not completed, there was no professional leadership, and they made it hard to join the church.

He then points to the explosive growth of Christianity in China. At the time that Mao expelled the missionaries and started severe persecution scholars estimate that there were about 2,000,000 Christians. After Mao died and missionaries were allowed to reenter the country, they expected to find a fragmented and anemic church. Instead they were amazed to find a church of 60,000,000 people.

Hirsch asks what can account for this phenomenon, one ancient and one modern example. He believes that he is rediscovered the secret to the church's flourishing and shares what he has learned in this book.

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Flash Forward

This Sunday we will continue our exploration of Genesis 3 in search for what it means to be human. We will focus on the first 5 verses with particular attention paid to the serpents question, "Did God say...?" It presents as such an innocent question, as though the serpent was merely seeking further information. But in fact, inherent in the question is the seed of mistrust which the serpent planted in both Eve's and Adam's hearts, the reverberations of which powerfully affect us today. The sermon will focus particularly on this notion of sin as fundamental mistrust, a mistrust that has generalized to all of our relationships.

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Thought for the Day

The ship is safest when it is in port. But that's not what ships were made for.
--Paulo Coelho

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When Was the Last Time You Defragged?

A new book that I am very excited about reading arrived, The Forgotten Way, by Alan Hirsch, author and specialist on missions. The "Forward," written by Leonard Sweet, caught my attention.

He notes how computer hard drives over time become scrambled by random data that is placed in various places on the disk. The result is that the computer will slow down and eventually can crash if not addressed. He writes concerning Christianity and the book,

Christianity has undergone untold crashed and clashes in the past two thousand years. In the last five hundred years its original hard drive has wiped out so many times, especially in the West, that it has almost ground to a halt. In The Forgotten Ways, a voice from the place that gets to the future first has provided twenty-first-century Christianity with the best disk defragger available.

I intend to blog from time to time on this book as I read through it, but for now I want to focus on his metaphor of defragging. It is an apt metaphor for a 24/7 world. At the speed at which we live, our hard drives become confused with data scattered over various parts of the disc where they don't belong, and if we continue at the break neck speeds at which we live, sooner or later we slow down and in some cases break down.

When did you last carve out some time to defrag your own life and/or your families life? How would you go about defragging your life in the first place? I suspect that the six marks of discipleship--daily prayer, weekly worship, daily bible reading, service, spiritual friendships, and generosity--are ways that we defrag our lives. Do you have any suggestions about ways to defrag our lives?

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Thought for the Day

We can only live changes: we cannot think our way to humanity. Everyone of us, every group, must become the model of that which we desire to create.
--Ivan Illich

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Snobs, One and All

I just finished reading Snobbery: The American Version by Joseph Epstein. A lecturer in English and writing at Northwestern University, the former editor of The American Scholar, and the author of numerous books, Epstein is a skilled writer whose wit and humor are evident on nearly every page. Yet at the same time, he is a keen observer of human nature and captures our missteps and foibles in such a way that the book becomes a mirror for the reader.

I was particularly interested in his philosophizing in the last chapter, especially since it relates to the sermon series I am doing "On Being Human." He writes,

What ties all snobberies together is the need we all seem to have to elevate ourselves above those among whom we live--to feel an edge, however slight, over the next person. even caring a great deal for someone does not lessen the need most of us feel to think ourselves oh just a touch better: smarter or wittier or more common-sensical or better looking or larger-hearted or subtler, better adjusted, more logical--pick any three, and add a few items of your own invention not listed here. Why can we not simply allow that another person is our superior, without qualification of stipulation, and walk away, pleased with what we have, content to be what we are, happy not to be limping. But most of us cannot...
Yet how difficult to be reconciled to oneself, to be oneself and nothing more. This is especially difficult if doing so means conceding one is not extraordinary, unusual, powerful, great, and shall in fact disappear tomorrow without leaving a scratch on the earth--a being, like the vast vast majority, whose life did not finally, as the Victorians used to say, signify? Is there something in our nature that prevents us from cultivating this kind of difficult but useful objectivity about our true standing in the world? (pp 241, 242)

I can guarantee that as you read this book, you will find chapters that talk about your own snobberies. I must confess that I did not want to admit to my own snobberies, ones that I had never really considered; but the joy of the book is that he both names your snobberies and lets you laugh at yourself.

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Thought for the Day

To be authentically human is to fully embrace the two poles of humanity: the image of God in which and for which God created all human beings, and the creaturely finitude that constitutes humanity's kinship with the dust from which it was shaped. Authentic human existence involves living in and for the image of God while fully aware that one comes from the dust.
--Mark E. Biddle, Missing the Mark

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The Monday Morning Quarterback

I focused on Genesis 3:8-19 in yesterday's sermon. The point that I wanted to make is that sin is fundamentally not about rule-breaking, but about broken relationships. The fall affected all of our relationships: with God, with others, with ourself, and with creation. There is no area that remains unaffected by sin.

At the New Member class last night someone raised an interesting question about the connection between sin as breaking rules and sin as broken relationships. They then mentioned the 10 Commandments. I basically told him that God put the rules in place to preserve healthy relationships . The 10 Commandments are like an owners manual which gives the parameters under which the human person will flourish. By breaking a rule, you exceed the limits or conditions under which humans were created to thrive and will inevitably lead to a breakdown in relationship.

Any thoughts about the fall, sin, and the nature of sin?

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Thought for the Day

The whole law of human existence lies in this: that man be able to bow down before the infinitely great.
--Fyodor Dostoevski

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Prayer for the Day

My dearest Lord,
Be Thou a bright flame before me,
Be Thou a guiding star above me,
Be Thou a smooth path beneath me,
Be Thou a kindly shepherd behind me,
Today and evermore.
--St. Columba

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The Challenge of Writing

I envy those who write well. I have always wanted to be a good writer, even in high school, but always feared that I was a poor writer and to protect myself had to pretend that I really didn't care much about writing. It has only been rather late in my life that I can openly say that I love writing. I suffer from the delusion that writing should be easy.

I guess it seems to me that writing shouldn't be so difficult. I have the fantasy that writing should "just flow" and after a little bit of editing, it should be ready for print. I know that this is delusional.

I don't like how hard it is to write well. But slowly I have begun to accept this fact, especially as I read books on writing by truly outstanding writers and hear what they have to say. In A Poetry Handbook Mary Oliver writes about the "unimaginably difficult goal of writing memorably. That work is done slowly and in solitude, and it is as improbable as carrying water in a sieve" (p. 9). Elsewhere in the book she writes that only after revising a poem forty to fifty times does she begin to feel some degree of contentment with it. She writes, "But this is the usual way: hard work, hard work, hard work. This is the way it is done" (p. 111).

It is not, after all, different in this regard from doing anything well, whether it is playing a sport, mastering a musical instrument, or becoming proficient at some vocational task like surgery or accounting. Oh well, back to work...

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Thought for the Day

...courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.
--C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

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Missional or Attractional?

I was perusing Scot McKnight's blogsite yesterday and skimmed his entry concerning the review of The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch. Two words caught my eye: attractional and missional. Missional is the term that the emerging church movement uses to describe the church's outreach. It is meant to be a holistic term that incorporates the both the "social gospel" and "evangelism."

Hirsch notes that most churches--what we might call membership churches--are attractional as opposed to missional. Churches are attractional because they try to attract people to come in through the church doors and join the congregation. Missional churches tend to be outward focused and incarnational, bringing and embodying the gospel to the world outside the doors of the church.

As I pondered this distinction, I concluded that there is nothing wrong with attracting people. Hopefully our congregation practices love and service in such a way that we will attract people to worship. I think it is a matter of emphasis. As a discipleship church we are trying to reach out into the world and be missional, and in the process attract others who are moved by this strategy. In other words, I hope that our missional attitude works in an attractional way.

How do you assess UCC Medfield? Our we more missional or attractional?

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Thought for the Day

To know much and taste nothing--of what use is that?
--Bonaventure

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Flash Forward

I will continue my series, "On Being Human," this Sunday and focus on verses 8-24 of Genesis 3. The sermon title is "Humans Interrupted" and I want to focus on the multidimensional ramifications of the fall and the entry of sin into the world. It is not a minor detail, and to live well, to live the way that God has intended us to live, we need to have an accurate assessment of the fall's effect on ourselves and on our relationships.

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Thought for the Day

You can't hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only if you are being addressed.
--Ludwig Wittgenstein

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