You know, Jesus is quite a comfortable guy. He’s spoken words that echo through history, he was loving, and he spoke words of wisdom so undeniable that your average Joe can’t deny them as anything but. He’s a great teacher. He’s a great man. He’s a role model.

But you know what? While Jesus was laying in the cradle in Bethlehem, he was holding the universe together with the word of his power, making sure the sun still shone, and keeping Schrodinger’s cat alive inside its little box. He was love, but he was holy. He came to earth and became earth’s fulcrum, the thing that redefined history, and constantly places our definitions in stark relation to himself.

In that, Jesus isn’t comfortable at all. In fact, he’s a downright scary figure. Can you think of something that you define based on a natural instinct? Here comes Jesus into you little intellectual temple - and he starts kicking tables over! Your natural - or, more to the point - sinful attitudes are always in stark contrast to what he taught. Always.

The first century Jews certainly didn’t have a category for him. They’d already drawn the lines around their Messiah. The problem? Romans. Invaders. Occupiers. The solution? Revolution. War on the heathens, all led by the coming Messiah.

And then the tables are turned and suddenly the context of the story changes. The Jews find out that the problem is actually sin, and the solution is atonement and reconcilliation. And not only for them, the chosen, the special, but for the heathen invaders of their promised land? That promised land a picture of one to come? The sacrifices essentially worthless? Talk about a good smack upside the preconception!

You have to wonder if we’re starting to do the same thing. The problem? Emotional instability. Broken marriages. Bad investments. The solution? A Jesus who looks like Frued, or like a marriage councellor, or like a magic eight-ball for the Dow-Jones.

The problem is still sin. The solution is still atonement and reconcilliation. And faith with its attendant good works. It’s rather shocking when you actually come to imagine living that way - and imagining that Jesus isn’t a nice fellow out to meet your temporal needs. Maybe he’ll do that. Or maybe he’ll wreck your house, kill your family, wipe out your investments, give you cancer before you finally get somewhere. The upshot is, of course, that you’ll enter an eternity full of Romans and heathens, and also first century Jews still shaking their head, going, “Can you believe that Jesus guy?”

Everyone knows that money doesn’t buy happiness. If you’re a preacher and you’re trying to impress that point, every millionaire in your congregation will agree, it doesn’t. Probably every millionaire ever will agree, no matter how much money they have, or how much time they spend tending that money.

That’s because they understand the link between money and happiness is non-defined. But somehow at the same time we know it’s till there. There’s still some way that people go from wealth to happiness in their heads.

Personally, I think how a person gets there is a sign of the times they live in and what those times value. Money once could buy you a donkey or a camel, and though it can still buy you a camel, most people eschew livestock in favour of an automobile. Most. There are still people who insist on riding a camel in New York, but they’re like rebelious goth/punk kids at a conservative Presbyterian church.

Let me illustrate. What did people in strongly paternal societies value? Well, they’re built around family and male leadership and interdependance, and status at least as far as the story goes. In today’s society, most of our favorite buzzwords are about independance and free living and status.

So maybe people don’t think that their money can make them happy in so many words, but they most certainly used to think it would buy them status and help ensure their family was provided for and that they could exercise leadership in a greater extent and that due to their interdependance as a society, more people would have to rely on them. And in a sense, it can give them those things, just not very well. It’s like buying a car with pesos. It’s not going to get you very far, although maybe you like the Volkswagen Beetle. So the route to happiness is paved with gold, just, you need to get some other things first.

And as we know, money does not a happy family make, nor does it buy influence very well, and just because you have some cash doesn’t mean people actually like depending on you. But at least people were pushing for a lofty goal, or the form of a lofty goal.

We moderns and postmoderns have it a lot worse, because not only does money still not lead to happiness, but now our goals suck the monkey’s droppings too. So even if you do have the money, the dots don’t lead to happiness no matter how you slice them. Independance is a crappy idea, and free living is pretty darn boring after a while, and the status that you can get still doesn’t really mean anything unless it’s built on who you are. We’re screwed two ways. Isn’t that just fun?

dan (doesn’t advocate being poor for the heck of it, but geez, this whole wealth thing is pretty overhyped)

In scripture, good works accompany faith: they’re things that go hand in hand and are vital to the Christian life, to following the Way. But sometimes I have to wonder if we’re too restrictive in our ideas of what good works are. I understand feeding the hungry (which I do), and evangelism (which, again, I do), and a whole litany of other Christlike acts. But where do the scriptures say that the Way is only about other people? It doesn’t. In fact, it’s primarily about God, and then about others. Always in that order.

Doesn’t it follow, then, that our good works should be devoted to God and then to others? Or in a different way, shouldn’t our good works toward other humans flow out of our good works toward the Lord?

And let me ask you this, then. What greater work can there be than understanding the gospel, the scriptures, and mapping out its implications in life? It seems to me that you can’t really start the good work of serving your fellow man until you know how to do it properly - and you don’t learn that in a sort of a priori rabbit-from-the-hat way. It comes by study, and I think that something Calvinists properly understand, and maybe instinctively understand (especially because I’ve never really heard of “theology” as a good work). But isn’t that exactly what it is? Theology is a good work, a necessary work, and when I hear Christians in the blogosphere talking about people being critical of others theology and calling that a bad thing, I wonder where they’re really getting their philosophy from.

Of course, theology does primarily flow from the fingertips: you do what you believe, because the head and the heart don’t actually exist in some sort of Kantian holding cells apart from eachother, separate but touching a bit. And if your theology isn’t finding its way to your hands and feet and mouth, you have to wonder what you honestly believe. I ask myself the same question.

But at the end of the day, that’s a personal thing you need to work out for yourself in fear and trembling. Understanding the scriptures is still a good work, and like I said, a necessary one.

Dan (This is what I get for reading the Internet Monk again. Darn the man…)

What will it take to make you weak? It’s a good question to ask, and one that really defines what you think the Christian life is all about. What does it mean to you to follow the Way? And if you do it well, how do you end up looking?

II Corinthians 11:30 says, “If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness.” Why? II Corinthians 12 goes further and says, “He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” That passage may be about persecution mainly, but how much more does it apply to those things we hardly ever admit to eachother? We’re screwed up people, all of us, and I think I can speak for the human race, especially with its history in view.

I Peter 5:5 “All of you, clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, because, ‘God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.’ ” Substitute the words “proud” and “humble” with “strong” and “weak” - our pride doesn’t allow us to admit weakness. Our humility is that we are weak to the last man and woman.

I wrote this in an email today: “I don’t like people to think of me as weak: I want people to think I’m strong. I hide my faults and try to work on them in secret. I’m not really an honest person about my failings, and when I am it’s at my lowest points when I’m my weakest and I need someone else to lean on. And even then I hate myself for looking weak to that person. Why is that?”

I think I know why; it’s because I’m by nature a proud person who likes to look like I have it all together. But I don’t, and neither do you. The fact that we wear masks itself is evident that we’re weaker than we want to admit. It’s hard to take off a mask, to apologize, to admit fault, to confess sin (even to God!), and all those other things we don’t do often enough.

At the end of the day we all think of ourselves as islands, little kingdoms that we rule, where we patch the crumbling walls with our own pitiful spit and clay. And of course when those walls tumble down I realize this much: when I am weak, God is strong. Not the other way around. God’s strength is not displayed in my victorious “Christian” life where my demons have deserted me and I sing lustily with the organ and smile at my friends over coffee and crumpets.

Of course it doesn’t end there, does it? God’s strength is perfected in weakness, and my weakness isn’t the final word in the matter. Christ’s weakness is. If he was tempted at all points like I am, and if he has empathy because of his own human frailty, who else should I lean on? And in what context? To rephrase the saying, we all lean together, or we all fall apart.

Dan (There, I’ve said it. Now I can sleep.)

I think sometimes we modern followers of the Way brush over the Old Testament - you know, the beginning bit of the Bible - far too quickly. If you take a look, all the themes in Genesis (for instance) are repeated again in the New Testament, just louder, and with more clarity. More to the point, the OT deals with the relations of God with his people corporately, whereas the NT deals mostly with God in relation to idividuals. But I don’t think God changes his dealings that much in the 500 intervening years: he’s always dealt with individuals, and always with his people: the tricky thing is that his people are made up of, like, actual people.

Take an OT instance: God saying “I Am who I am.” How many times did Jesus edge those words into a statement or sermon? Think about what it means - I don’t need explaination. Or alternately interpreted “I am the one who is.” I exist, and that’s enough. Or again “I will be here, as I am here.” I will always be present with you. How often does that seminal idea germinate in the New Testament?

I’m of the opinion - can I have some backup here? - that every aspiring preacher should be dumped into an ice-cold bucket of Old Testament study and be held down until they surface into the New and can say “So that’s what it’s like to breathe!”

Dan (Of course, my opinion is light a fart in a tornado.)

I’ve been sitting under a series of sermons on Mark 13 (and its attendant Matthew 24:1-42). Now, I understand how people can get the idea that this passage is talking about the end of the world - it speaks in apocalyptic language about events that seem to correlate with our idea of what the end times will be like. But the question that needs to be asked is, “Is this really talking about what I want it to be talking about?”

Jesus uses phrases like “this generation” and such to describe events that will undoubtedly take place soon after he spoke them. Even though the events described appear to be about the end times - no doubt due to our unhappy obsession with them - I don’t think they really are.

You need to look at the question Jesus was asked to get an idea of what the answer means. The disciples were wetting their pants over the beauty of the temple, and Jesus tells them that the magnificent buildings are going to be razed so badly that not one stone will stand on top of another one when the whole thing’s over. They ask him when these things are going to happen, and he answers. That’s all. He answers a question about the temple and the end of that age. The end, I might add, of the Judean age. Not the end of the world. Why use terms like “the age” when all you’re talking about is the end of the world?

The most straightforward interpretation of these verses seems, then, to be that Jesus is talking about Jerusalem and that’s it. Not about Jerusalem and somehow also about events far in the future. Why would he? He wasn’t asked that question. All of the following verses need to be interpreted in that light. Not in the light of “What would this mean if it were about the end of the world?” That is to say, not in the light of what we want it to say, and not in the light of our degrading social situation. I mean, how many times I have I heard the “already but not yet!” theory about these verses? Why does it always come to that? What evidence is there for it? What scriptural correlations give birth to the idea?

Sure, prophecies are sometimes fulfilled more than once: but always in the light of scripture that reveals it to be so afterwards. The abomination of desolation happened already. Twice, even. Why a third time? Why not look at the history and say “that’s enough”? Besides, the abomination of desolation makes sense only in a physical temple. Yes, the church is spoken of as the temple in the New Testament, but how exactly does one abominate a spiritual building? It doesn’t make much sense at all: it’s reading into the passage something that really isn’t there.

If you read end times into that passage, you have this: tribulation and the end. It gets worse and worse until it ends. And look at things getting worse around us! Wow, it must be the end! But wait a second: it’s always been worse. I mean, right now things are looking a bit bleak here. But what about Africa? China? South Korea? These places are burgeoning with Christian truth and full of the gospel more so than ever before. I go so far sometimes as to say that China may be the next great Christian nation. And my firm belief is that the gospel - the only thing that really makes sense in this world - will one day triumph over its enemies, just like scripture says it will. Have a look at Psalm 72, for one good example. What is that talking about? Every nation will serve God - every nation will worship him - and his dominion will be everywhere.

I’m not the optimistic sort, not really. But this much I know: God will rule on this earth, and he will rule before he sweeps out of the sky like some sort of deus ex machina to save the elect when the devil finally gets too strong for God to do anything but just wipe the whole thing out and start over. Sounds a little ridiculous, doesn’t it? Jesus, who triumphed over Satan in his death and ressurection reduced to watching the world he created good reduced to a complete cesspool of sin until he finally gets enough of it and decides “that’s it!” That’s not even a very good story; the final chapter just sucks.

Here’s a better one: The world was created by and for Jesus. The devil corrupted and was set loose upon it. Sin took root and flourished. God sent his Son to conquer - and conquer he did. But not only did he conquer once, he’s going to grind his boot into the head of the serpent on the old troublemaker’s own ground. Here, now, on earth, in this temporal existance.

It’s not a fight we can’t win here. It’s a fight we can’t lose! No hiding in the corner praying that the tribulation will be too much for these few elect: these few elect will sweep the earth, and we will win the war. You know, the 20th century was filled with more persecution than any other up till this point. I hear it all the time. We’re so oppressed! (Of course, there’s a heck of a lot more people now than ever before, and we have better weapons, and better communication, and better record keeping, but never mind that.) This world is teeming with Christians at this very moment. We are the ultimate antiviral, we of the Way.

Think about it: the way, the truth, the life. How can that not overcome anything in its path?

Dan (Deep thoughts tonight. Feel free to reprimand me.)