• Here we go again!
• One of the great tragedies of the modern church is that we’ve for the most part lost the language of covenant. We still have some of the ideas. But there’s hope. Imagine, if you will, the power of context and the power of covenant wedded to each other; perhaps this is an unholy union of the ancient and the post-modern, but which covenant doesn’t have context? The church and God in the context of his schema of salvation; the covenant of marriage in the context of God and the church’s covenant; these are powerful concepts.
• Share the Well is — and I hate to say this, as much as love Long Line of Leavers — probably the best Caedmon’s Call album ever. So many years and I still love CC. It’s true. I’ve listened to them longer than I’ve been a Christian.
• I’ve heard it said that if God seems distant it’s probably because you’ve drawn away; the implicit assumption is, of course, that God is static and that he always wants to be close. In light of scripture, does this seem true? Are there not many people in scripture who were desperate to draw close to God only to find him still distant? I think when we talk about God we need to remember that he’s also a person, or a Person if you will, who has thoughts higher than ours and a plan greater than we can understand. God’s not static. He moves, we move, it’s the grand danse (as you may have heard said). If God seems distant and you don’t understand why — if you want to draw near and nothing happens — all you can say is that there is a reason. It’s almost blase in its simplicity. But there is a reason. Sometimes you don’t get to understand, sometimes you do, but there’s always a reason.
• It’s hard to synthesise the appalling poverty most of the world labours in and the almost limitless prosperity we enjoy. The question is, of course, at what point does prosperity become a curse? This very blog begs ask that question: I have enough money to buy a computer and enough free time to contribute this ocean of dross that is the internet. How much time do I spend feeding the hungry and how much time do I spend feeding my own various hungers? How much should I?
• Candace is getting baptised on Saturday, which is totally awesome. Baptisms are amazing things, no matter which side of the spectrum you fall on. It’s a powerful symbol no matter how you look on it. I’m a paedobatist by preference, but anyone who fulfils God’s command to baptise is terrific in my books. I have a special bit of confusion for “Reformed Baptist” (decide which side you’re on, you freaks!) who seem to have forgotten that Reformed theology leads inexorably to the baptism of children, but hey, it’s all good.
• It seems to me that a little introspection and self-knowledge is a good thing, but a http://www.aldaily.com/lot leads to confusion. Maybe it’s because people function on a sort of quantum level: You measure yourself enough and you change. Then you have to start over again and it becomes a full-time occupation. And not a fun one.
• Beer is proof that God loves us; dentist are proof he can change his mind.
• I’m less three teeth, by the way.
• You ever have it where you say, “It can’t get any better than this?” and then it does? Yeah. I got that. It’s called marriage. I’m an incurable optimist, it’s true.
• This is probably the best thing I have in my feeds.
• It seems every nation has its legacy to overcome. US, India, China, all the big ones.

In reading N. T. Wright’s book Surprised by Hope, I’ve (thus far) drawn together a bunch of strings in my own thought that I hadn’t really put together. This surprises me because I was not at all expecting this book to do that.

In the last few years I’ve harboured a suspicion that most popular Christian thought about the kingdom of heaven is simply missing the point. The seminal moment for me was reading Brian McLaren’s The Secret Message of Jesus, which tried very hard to weld together the ideas that God’s kingdom is about saving souls, yes, but also about making the world a better place. Now, if McLaren got there by saying “I am not a Platonist, I am post-modern, I am trying to re-envision the true meaning of the church”, and if N. T. Wright got there by saying “I am not a Platonist, I am orthodox, I am trying to re-discover the true meaning of the church”, there’s something to be said about looking differently at the physical world and what comes after it and what that means for today. And where McLaren offers a compelling vision, N. T. Wright provides a brilliant theological underpinning for the whole idea.

Take for instance the miracles of Jesus. We often — and I’m as guilty of this as anyone — suppose that Jesus’ miracles are signs that point to his authority as the Messiah. Then we stop there. Of course they are that, but they are also more. They’re woven into God’s story, the story that we often skim over while calling the kingdom of heaven something else entirely. Jesus’ miracles are directly related to his saying that the kingdom of heaven was there right then, and look what happens when the kingdom of heaven enters the world: spiritual healing, yes, but also physical healing. The language of scripture is absolutely, starkly clear on this: your sins are forgiven, your body is made whole, you are saved. As N. T. Wright points out, our ingrained division between spiritual salvation and physical salvation didn’t really occur to the early church, and they weren’t really bothered by both being part of the same ball of wax.

The point is, when the kingdom of heaven is here, healing happens. This is both spiritual and physical healing because when Jesus rose from the dead he didn’t simply redefine death as something that happens to release you from your earthly body so that you can spend eternity as a disembodied soul in paradise. He conquered death. His resurrection is a sure promise that death itself will one day die, but also that in death dying we will reclaim the sort of physicality we were meant to have.

I believe this is part of God’s story, a story that has so many times bewildered Israel, and I’m firmly convinced will bewilder the church as well: we have signposts pointing into a bright mist, but we don’t know exactly how things will turn out. God’s story seems to be a tale of flowering, of outgrowth. Every time we think we’ve got the whole thing down pat, God grows something amazing and new and unforeseen and barely hinted at out of our familiar surroundings. Take the children of Israel. We know in retrospect that they are the seed from which the entire world will be fed, but for them the ultimate question was “How is God going to save Israel?” God comes along and says, “I’m not going to. I’m going to cause an outgrowth from you that will save the world, and in that, you will also be saved.”

It’s the same for us. We ask, “How is God going to save our immortal souls and bring us to heaven?” God comes along and says, “I’m not going to. I’m going to grow from you the kingdom of heaven on earth that will eventually transform the world, and in that, you will be transformed.”

Which of course means that what we do now, in this world, has significance. What we do here is not all doomed to be cast away, to be burned, and to be no more after we die or after Christ returns to earth. No, the opposite is in fact true: what we do here matters because what we do here effects who we are are what we will do eternally. It makes me quite happy to think that one day, when I receive a glorified body and am living in the earth made new with the New Jerusalem’s grand appearance, I am going to be writing poetry there too. My hope is that I will be much better at it then than I am now. My confidence is that I’ll still enjoy it then as much as I do now.

But this whole train of thought also underpins the whole idea of the Missional Church. The idea that we must be God’s hands and feet in our community derives from the fact that when we help people by giving them food and clothes and credit counselling and HIV/AIDS relief, and when I steward God’s creation by recycling and attempting to be sustainable and spewing less carbon into the air, I am fulfilling part of God’s mission on earth, that I am really being a member of the kingdom of heaven.

It’s bothered me for a long time that the vanguard of evangelicalism seems to be simply co-opting their secular liberal counterparts’ fashionable concern for this world without knowing why exactly they’re doing it. (Not to mention those who don’t like it because it smells a bit like those dirty Christian liberals who’ve converted Jesus into a mascot for world change.) But here are the underpinnings. This is the engine that drives the whole thing. If one day we are going to rise physically and inhabit this physical world, when heaven and earth are made new and the New Jerusalem (a picture of the fullness of the kingdom of heaven, and heaven itself, natch) meets up with earth, our labours now matter. It makes sense of Paul urging people to labour in Christ, and makes sense out of our post-modern urgency to do something, anything, about the state of the word our liberal secularist forefathers left us in.

It’s all there. The great flowering of the church is when we are resurrected and glorified and then go about doing exactly what we’re supposed to do exactly the way we’re supposed to do it. That’s the bright fog: all I can say is that it will be sometime in the future, and that it will absolutely blow my and your mind.

In the meantime, we have our mandate. We are the kingdom of heaven, right here and right now, and we are called to bring healing into a very, very broken world. And not just one kind of healing, but a holistic healing that not only prepares the soul for glory, but the body as well.

Cerebral theology can be an escape route, I think. It’s a lot harder to get the home crowd riled up about predestination, for example, than about knocking off the gossip, or being a light in the community, or what is the difference between conscience and preference.

I’m not saying that anybody’s trying to avoid anything on purpose; people just do this by nature. Unless you’re a sociopath like me, you probably don’t want to stir the pot or disturb the peace. What better way to do that than by ignoring tricky real-life issues and sticking to the tried and true dictums of theology passed down from the fathers? There’s nothing safer than a precept filtered through the scrutiny of those great men.

You’d have to be crazy to disagree with that.

Try to make me live like Christ in a pagan culture by eschewing their value system, though, and you’ll have to take me kicking and screaming to the bank. Even then you’ll probably only get my pocket change.

Sometimes I think this is because we don’t really get a whole bunch of things. Like for instance if I believe that the end times are right now, I am first of all on the edge of being a crazy person with a sign, but this is also going to change the way I live and see the world. If I believe that humans have free will and can freely choose this than and the other thing, this is going to change the way I live and see the world. Theology affects things. It effects things, too, now that I think about how that word is spelled.

I imagine you could show this connection by doing this progression: Scripture –> Theology –> How To –> Vision. That seems simple enough, for people that like formulas.

I have something like three topics in my head, none of which would make a proper blog post on its own; I think if I roll them all up into one big post it’ll go much better, and I’ll probably end up remembering that one last nagging thought I think I thought but can’t remember thinking, though at some point I thought I thought that thought and forgot that thought, you see.

* * *

Normally, I’m okay with James MacDonald. He’s generally a decent preacher, and I’ve had opportunity to be blessed by a number of the things he’s said. On Saturday I caught a snippet of a sermon he did on post-modernism, a snippet that I’m going to go on to criticise mercilessly. I’m not even going to pretend that I don’t like criticising, just to be nice, because I generally do analyse things in my head. This is no exception.

I’m well acquainted with the art of making a straw-man and then tearing it down: it’s a useful skill in certain circumstances. For instance, showing people what a straw-man is. Making a straw-man out of post-modernism, saying it’s all about relativism and denying truth claims, etc, is disingenuous at best, and outright dishonest at worst. The only way someone could come to such a conclusion is if he had never, ever actually joined the conversation and instead sat in the bleachers and listened to the hecklers.

Any post-modern worth his salt will admit that right now post-modernism is a tag applied to a whole bunch of junk, all of which is unified by the undeniable supposition that modernism is no longer good enough to meet today’s challenges. In short, modernism is broke. When modernism first burst onto the scene — or I should say evolved out of the Middle Age’s chaotic ruins — I’m sure the first generation considering themselves modern had no idea what that even meant. It took hundreds of years for the philosophy to coalesce. It took a long time to look down and see where the world had planted its feet. And even modernity as a definition fails to capture every facet of modern thought: after all this time we’re not quite sure where we stand.

I’m sure the first generation to question the King’s divine right to rule raised a few eyebrows. The first generations to question rationalisation, alienation, commodification, decontextualization, individualism, chaos, and industrialism should raise a few eyebrows too.

But the post-modernism as a philosophy, as a way of life, is in its infancy. Mocking its shortcomings or even its perceived shortcomings is like making fun of a budding artist’s paintings. It’s not in good taste, and it smacks of pure meanness.

Besides, no post-modernist will say that 2 + 2 does not equal 4. But if you can’t see the difference between that and saying that truth claims are contextual, that narrative matters, and that not everything can be measured and sorted into a list, then you’re the one who deserves a good mocking. It’s not hard to make straw-men for modern American churches — pastored by a Canadian or not — especially when they cater to a rich middle-class audience by tickling their ears while explaining why they’re better than those dirty post-moderns. Thank you, Lord, that I am not like them, that I believe in truth claims! (See what I did there?)

That said, I don’t consider myself post-modern. I don’t think it’d be a good idea, as it seems to be every good Evangelical’s whipping boy lately. I have, however, read books by Brian McLaren and Donald Miller, and see a lot of good in them. Though I fear I’ve said too much…

* * *

Today’s message reminded me that there’s quite a difference between hearing the stories of Jesus and hearing lists of attributes of Jesus. Maybe it’s just me, but I can list facts all day and no one will give a toss (facts are by their very nature boring; even documentary film-makers understand this). Novels and poetry and stories and songs aren’t simply entertainment, they’re also communicative mechanisms.

Once, when was a lot younger than I am today, I started volunteering at a soup kitchen. My motives weren’t that great, I suppose, as it gave me an excuse to not attend one service of a church I had begun to dislike quite a lot. But I still did it, and I think that counts for something. Most of the people that came there were pretty much the dregs of society. I was trying to think of them as noble and loved and the sort of people that Jesus would have had a meal with or maybe healed of something, but I had hard time seeing them as anything but very smelly and dirty. I honestly didn’t like myself for feeling this way, but I just couldn’t get past it. To me they were just people who needed a bath.

Then this one guy — he looked about fifty years old — sat down at this badly tuned piano, pulled out a sheaf of dog-eared music, and played. And man, could he play. I presume to play keys a bit here and there, but nothing, nothing like this man. Later the staff told me he was a hardcore alcoholic, that he had destroyed his life with booze, and I’m sure this was very true. Yet it seemed to me that amidst all that brokenness there was this indestructible beauty that simply couldn’t be kept in.

I don’t how he did it, but this man helped me as much as I helped him. I gave him a meal, true, but he gave me the ability to see past the surface into the inherent nobility that is contained in each person’s soul, whether that person is a redneck or is homeless or is a soccer mom or is an annoying television preacher with bad hair.

Sometimes I tell this story to people to show them that there is beauty even in ashes, that there is joy in an alcoholic’s music, something like that. I suppose I could simply tell them that, or maybe make a slide with some bullet points, but it isn’t the same, is it?

* * *

Laura and I just got back from celebrating our six month anniversary. It’s flown by! In that time, we’ve had no major problems or even any major fights. My mum thinks this is because we’re essentially still honeymooning. I like to think it’s God’s grace. See, I’m much more spiritual than my mum, though of course I’m not. She’s got me beat by a good kilometre or two.

We stayed at a local hotel, since local hotels cost a fair bit less than non-local hotels, and feasted on Elliot House food. Both were excellent. We even had a whirlpool bathtub. I made it too hot to get into when I first drew the bath. I’m stupid like that, but you can see how my wife is long-suffering.

It’s still odd to say “my wife”. My wife. Yep, still odd.

I think everyone has probably met that girl, the one who’s obsessed with marriage, who thinks her life will magically make sense or something if only she could get married. Guys can smell that kind of girl a mile off and I can’t remember a single guy who enjoyed the scent. It was off-putting. There’s something wrong with these kinds of people.

Guys don’t want their women to be crazy about getting married or any of that hoopla. Most of the guys I know can just barely tolerate the commotion or the expense. Guys want their women to be crazy about them. I want my wife to be crazy about me.

Sometimes I think God must feel like a dude surrounded by a bunch of chicks who really want to get married. Sure, they want the best groom available, but pretty much anything will do. He must wonder why we call it so many different names like fulfilment and making the most of life and being all that you can be.

From what I read in scripture, God doesn’t want people to be crazy about being fulfilled. He wants people to be crazy about him. He wants the church to be crazy about him, for his wife to be crazy about her husband. And, if I’m honest with myself, my emotions are pretty much everywhere else, and I don’t think I’m along on this one.

A short point, here. Churches are called to be a light and salt in this world. This is not an ambiguous suggestion; it’s a clear command. There’s no fancy theological hand-waving that can conceal the facts as they stand.

Bring to bear the parable of the minas (or talents, or cash deposits, or whatever you like to call it) on the issue and you have a pretty damning condemnation of inwardly-focused churches.

Like a selfish person, an inwardly-focused church is more concerned with itself than with the world at large, when the world at large is the very thing Jesus came to redeem.

On Monday, Laura and I read from Romans, where Paul talks about Abraham and faith. Or belief, as the Old Testament would call it. The strange this is the emphasis Paul puts on the order of events in Abraham’s life. Was he circumcised and thus made a child of God, or was he made a child of God and then circumcised?

Obviously he believed and then the evidence followed. Faith, and then works. But first of all, faith. It’s amazing, really, how this idea of faith is so radically important to the congruity of the scriptures, and to the congruity of our day-to-day experiences. I get the sense that the scriptures speak of faith the way you and I might talk about electricity: without it, we’re essentially dead hunks of metal and plastic. With it, we’re alive, moving, aware of the world as it really is.

And, like electricity, there’s a source. Faith comes from God. Faith goes to God. It’s a feedback loop that should never end, if only to show his glory.

This Sunday at Freshwater, Joel spoke about actions without meaning, religion without heart, that sort of thing.

I won’t be long here, but it made me think of the song, “The Heart of Worship”, which — love it or hate it — says something profound about the way I do anything, really. It begs ask, “What have I made worship into?” On one hand, this entertainment, a worship of preference, some sort of spectacle; or on the other, a rigid system, a theological construct, a bunch of made-up rules? Either way I can draw near to God with my lips and be ever so far away from him in my heart.

Or the way I treat God. Sometimes I feel like I put God into little containers and just open the containers of God Time whenever it seems appropriate. On Sunday I open a big one, and on week nights and before meals I open little ones, and sometimes during the I get out a medium sized one. But God is bigger than that, right? This is what Brother Lawrence means when he talks about the practice of the presence of God, I think, that God is everywhere and in every moment, and even though there are certain times that focus in on him, the rest of them belong to him as well. God gets all of my time. Yet throughout the day, I forget about him, abandon him, and kick him in the face. As the song goes, prone to wander, prone to leave the God I love.

How often am I exactly like the people in the Old Testament? The entire collection of books is like a macrocosm of my life. Obedience is better than sacrifice. I draw near to God with my lips, but am far from him in my heart.

I have a head stuffed full of theology. Yet there’s an essential disconnect there: theology doesn’t necessarily lead to a good life. It’s just knowledge, and knowledge gives you a big head. There needs to be something that connect the two, theology and practice.

I think that thing is relationship. How do I draw close to God in my heart? By having a relationship with him, a real thing that happens, not some pseudo-relationship that involves a lot of hand-waving and good-sounding words. But I’m so far from God: how do I draw so close? There needs to be something that connects us.

I think that thing is Jesus.

Jesus is what makes the heart and head and perfect God and imperfect man connect. He connects what I say to what I mean. He is bigger than my containers.

If Jesus said, “Get behind me, Satan!” to you, how would you respond?

I don’t know how Peter responded — it isn’t in the Book — but I can say I’d be mighty unhappy. A little hurt. Wounded pride, that sort of thing.

Pride aside, it goes to show what happens when you’ve got your own ideas about what the Messiah’s supposed to be. What happens is your ideas get out of the way.

Peter was, I imagine, pretty caught up in the messianic vision of the day: A conquering king come to kill Romans and wrest the holy land away from the pagan empire. It’s actually a pretty cool idea, come to think of it. On an earthly scale it weighs a lot.

Of course, that’s not what the Messiah was, or what he had come to do.

Doesn’t that raise a question for me and you, though? What funny ideas do we have about Jesus that are getting in the way of what he’s really supposed to be doing?

I know some people who look at Jesus like a national hero. Others who look at Jesus as a focal point for a precise doctrinal framework. Others who see him as a good man, a teacher of morality. Others yet who say the right words but in reality see Jesus only when things go wrong, if even then.

Lots of people have lots of funny ideas about Jesus. What about you? What about me?

Who is he really, and what did he really come to do?

Are you getting in the way?

Interpreting the Bible is hard thing. If you do it wrong, you can literally make the Bible support almost anything.

I find it difficult to extract myself from the reading. There’s a cultural context to everything I do — if I’m honest with myself — and that cultural context is often in conflict with what the Bible says.

Is it just popular culture, though? Every group of people has a particular slant, a way of looking at things. Could it be possible that Christians read certain sub-cultural things into the scriptures?

This seems to be a real problem. In the hands of the Greeks, the Bible became a philosophy textbook. In the clutches of the Enlightenment, the Bible turned into something rational, something factual. In slippery fingers of the modern western world, it’s been transformed into a manual for a better, more fulfilling life.

I don’t pretend to know what God was thinking when he inspired the scriptures. I don’t even know — neither do you, admit it — what that process looks like or what it means. I don’t know what the original authors thought of truth, whether they were what we think of as modernist or post-modernist, what their approach to facts was.

All this highlight how difficult it becomes to understand some things. Certainly most things are clear, but modern life brings up issues people in Biblical times couldn’t have dreamed about. Obviously you can’t write a blank cheque and say, “Well, if the Bible doesn’t mention it, it’s okay!” There are principles for almost everything.

Which is, of course, when things become tricky. When things start creeping into the interpretation that just might not really be there.

The question becomes how much you let your viewpoint inform the scriptures and vice versa. What does the Bible have to say about that? For example, the idea of verbal plenary inspiration is a very rationalist doctrine: is it actually in the Bible, or is it something a bunch of rationalistic theologians came up with because they were so fixated to a certain mindset that the Bible must obviously have been inspired that way?

I’m not saying this is what happened: I’m just asking the question.

Still, at the end of the day, how far can imperfect humans with biases and an imperfect perception of reality really read between the lines?