I just finished reading Have a Little Faith by Mitch Albom. It’s a short book (249 small pages) that tells the story of two people: one a Jewish Rabbi and the other a Christian Pastor. It’s a wonderful little book and I recommend it to you. I don’t think you are going to find every aspect of the book appealing, and much of it will leave you wondering how someone (namely, Albom) could come so close to something so beautiful and come away with so little (I found the last sentence a rather unfitting conclusion to the book even if it is a good thought nonetheless).

One of the stories told in the book is that of Pastor Henry Covington who started a ministry in Detroit, Michigan called I Am My Brother’s Keeper. Pastor Covington’s story is beautiful and full of grace. It was in a chapter about Pastor Covington that today’s thought overwhelmed me.

I thought about how churches and synagogues usually build memberships. Some run schools. Some host social events. Some offer singles nights, lecture series, carnivals, and sign-up drives. Annual dues are part of the equation.

At I Am My Brother’s keeper, there were no dues, no drives, no singles nights. Membership grew the old-fashioned way: a desperate need for God. (Mitch Albom, Have a Little Faith, 217)

The story that led Albom to write this is wonderful and alone makes the book worth its price. Please note: This is not a criticism of the way churches do things. It is, rather, a positive affirmation of how Pastor Covington serves his God and community and how God, through Jesus, meets desperate people in desperate situations.

Have a nice weekend everyone. Be blessed and a blessing.

I think we need a new topic.

I’m tossing back and forth which one of these quotes to put up first because both are wonderful and revealing in their own way. One of them will be a thought for the day, the other will serve as a segue for a short post I will put up later this afternoon. Both tell me something about being judgmental (an icky, gross word); both are patently myopic. And they both come from the January/February 2010 issue of Modern Reformation magazine. Here’s the first, written by Annette Gyson who is an editor at a ‘Christian book publisher’ in Grand Rapids. She is commenting, in conclusion, on the book Why We’re Not Emergent: By Two Guys Who Should Be:

This is an excellent book, one that all Christians would benefit from reading. Emerging Christianity does ask some valid questions, ones that should be taken seriously. Unfortunately, their own answers draw from sources other than Scripture. Like Jude in the New Testament, DeYoung and Kluk remind us that our comfort in life and in death is the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints. (40)

It may not appear to be much, and maybe it isn’t, but that one word ‘unfortunately’ really bugs me for some reason. I know we’ve been down this road before, but let me ask the obvious question: Is it unfortunate?

This will be included in the sermon I will be preaching tomorrow morning. It will be the first time I have been in a pulpit since July 12, 2009.

Methodist Bishop William Willimon was interviewed in Modern Reformation magazine last year. He was asked, “What hope do our kids have of being discipled if we’re busy telling their parents how to be a better you?”

His response, so typically Willimon and blunt, is wonderful and terrifying at the same time:

There is an army base near my home where they’re preparing people to go to Iraq; I’ve noticed they don’t seem to do that with fun and games. They do it by saying, ‘here are some skills you’ve got to have or you could die, and you could cause the death of other people.’ I think it’s kind of an analogy. I feel sorry for kids that think Christianity is about skateboarding and fun and games, and then go off to college and realize it’s like we’re in a kind of war. I would also say that as somebody who’s been trying to follow Jesus for a long time. And it ain’t easy because Jesus won’t make it easy. He loves to take ordinary, faithless, weak people and make them disciples and demand they take over the world with him, in his way. (Modern Reformation, September/October 2008, 43)

Have a nice weekend and worship well tomorrow or today.

I have a friend who doesn’t really believe there is such a thing as love. Oh, I don’t think that she thinks love doesn’t exist, just that in one way or another we are thoroughly incapable of the sort of love the Scripture talks about so often. We have debated this point often. I’m sure I always come away unsettled by the discussion–either because she’s right or because I don’t want to admit it. Either way, it’s become difficult to dismiss her judgment: Does love really exist?

One of the first sermons I ever preached (in first year homiletics) was about love. I childishly, naively, spoke of the glories of love and how love is like a diamond and many faceted. I remember extolling the virtue of love and speaking of its grandeur and magnificence. But it’s easy to write and speak about something being so grand when you have never experienced that part of it that is utterly disappointing. And love breaks the heart at times. There are times when love disappoints.

I am nearly 40 and I have loved and been loved. My mother still loves me; so does my wife. My sons do, for the most part. My dad does. My brothers too. I have many friends who love me. (I know I’m selfishly concerned about the love others have for me. It’s a two way street, I know.) I’m like Peter Gabriel who sang, “I love to be loved.” Yet, too, I love these I have mentioned deeply.

But still our hearts break and heal and break again–sometimes they stay broken. I almost let myself believe, in agreement with my friend, that love really doesn’t exist. Because of… hurt, hate, and helplessness. Here, then, is my thought, or question, for the day:

Why is it so easy to get angry at, or to resent, or simply to grow indifferent toward the very people we once loved? (John Eldredge, Waking the Dead, 113)

And if that isn’t enough, he continues:

A common story, I’m sorry to say. The worst blows typically come from family. That’s where we start our journey of the heart, and that’s where we are most vulnerable. (115)

So, if you want to go further with this, then click below to read the rest, but don’t be surprised if you don’t find what you are looking for. I have no answers here, only questions, and questions that cut deep into the heart of the matter.

Read the rest of this entry »

I am nearly finished with Justification and, as I have said at some point in each post I have made on this book, I am thoroughly amazed at the depth of NT Wright’s understanding. His ability to see an entire letter in one stroke is mind-boggling and a profound example for all exegetes and preachers.

I have just a short thought for today, one that will hopefully generate some conversation about the issue it raises. Here it is:

The Gentiles are fellow heirs! They are part of the same body! They are co-sharers in the promise through the Gospel! And, tellingly, this bringing-the-world-together gospel was the main aim of God’s grace in calling Paul to be an apostle.

Why? What’s the point? Yes, say the scoffers, ethnic divisions are broken down, we know that, but why make such a fuss about it? The answer is that the church, thus united through the grace of God in the death of Jesus, is the sign to the principalities and powers that their time is up. Ephesians is not about the ordering of the church by the gospel for its own sake. ‘Ecclesiology’ may sound secondary and irrelevant to some ardent enthusiasts for the old perspective, but that could just be because they are unwilling to face the consequences of Paul’s ecclesiology. For him, the church is constituted, and lives its life in public, in such a way as to confront the rulers of the world with the news that there is ‘another king named Jesus’ (Acts 17:7).

Why should not the point of justification itself be precisely this, that, in constituting the church as the single family who are a sign to the powers that Jesus is Lord and that they are not, it serves directly the mission of the kingdom of God in the world? It cannot be, can it, that part of the old perspective’s reaction to the new is the tacit sense that once we associate ecclesiology with the very center of the gospel we will have to go all the way and rethink the political role and task of the church? Surely the wonderful ‘objective’ scholarship of so many old perspective exponents would not allow such a motive to affect exegesis! (NT Wright, Justification, 173, 174)

What do you think? Could he be right?

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I am nearing the end of Justification by NT Wright. What an amazing read! I cannot tell you, in a short space as thought for the day, how important this book is, but I can give you snippets of its importance and let you decide for yourself. Here’s a wonderful, beautiful snippet of delight:

But the great story of Scripture, from creation and covenant right on through to the New Jerusalem, is constantly about God’s overflowing, generous, creative love–God’s concern, if you like, for the flourishing and well-being of everything else. Of course, this too will redound to God’s glory because God, as the Creator, is glorified when creation is flourishing and able to praise him gladly and freely. And of course there are plenty of passages where God does what he does precisely not because anybody deserves it but simply ‘for the sake of his own name.’ But ‘God’s righteousness’ is regularly invoke in Scripture, not when God is acting thus, but when his concern is going out to those in need, particularly to his covenant people…God’s concern for God’s glory is precisely rescued from the appearance of divine narcissism because God, not least God as Trinity, is always giving out, pouring out, lavishing generous love on undeserving people, undeserving Israel and an undeserving world (NT Wright, Justification, 70-71).

There’s more to it than that, of course, but I promised a snippet.

I agree with him. There is a big-arch to Scripture and we do well to notice it, preach it, and live it. Oh Happiness! There is grace enough for us and the whole human race! And He wants us to know it.**

**disclaimer: that is not, in any way, intended to be a plug for ‘universalism’ of any stripe. so please, please, don’t go there.

So I’m reading Superfreakonomics these days (one of the books I’m evaluating for a workplace “book club”).  I found a couple of quotes thatstruck me as relevant to some of the conversations we have here, from time-to-time.

This quote brought to mind some of the Christian distinctives and the beauty of the One true God, as noted by Rob Bell in The gods Aren’t Angry:

“Like all the best religions, fear of climate change satisfies our need for guilt, and self-disgust, and that eternal human sense that technological progress must be punished by the gods.  And the fear of climate change is like a religion in this vital sense, that it is veiled in mystery, and you can never tell whether your acts of propitiation or atonement have been in any way successful.” – Boris Johnson

The second quote reminded me of the Ingrid Schlueter’s of this world for whom 1963 seems to be a watershed year (with thanks to Brendt for the link to this awesome blog):

It is a fact of life that people love to complain, particularly about how terrible the modern world is compared with the past.

They are nearly always wrong.  On just about any dimension you can think of – warfare, crime, income, education, transportation, worker safety, health – the twenty-first century is far more hospitable to the average human than any earlier time.

I realize that a premillenial dispensationalist view requires that one believe everything is (literally) going to hell in a handbasket (as a prerequisite to parousia), but Christians engaging in woe-is-me, the-devil-is-hiding-behind-everyone-who-doesn’t-believe-100%-like-me-ism are just pathetic.  And, in the face of all evidence to the contrary (cherry-picking outlying outrages as “proof”), they make a fool of themselves – and the One they claim to serve – in the process.

Utah lawmakers tend to quickly fall in line when the influential church makes a rare foray into legislative politics. So Tuesday’s action could have broad effects in this highly conservative state where more than 80 percent of lawmakers and the governor are church members

From here

To be sure this post is not about Gay rights but more about how influential a church/religion can be.  Conversely it shreds the concept  that there  is actually a seperation of church and state.

As a wise man once told me “I’m in favor of the state when the state is in favor of me; otherwise I don’t give a damn”.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

— Lt.-Col. John McCrae (1872 – 1918)

I’m finally getting around to reading Justification by NT Wright. I’m 40 pages in, and I am happy to say that Wright agrees with me. I do believe that I have finally found a theologian who agrees with the way I have always read Scripture.

It is terribly hard to put the book down, although I must because I have graduate responsibilities to tend to this afternoon, so I wish to give you a glimpse. I know others have written about the book or quoted it here or there. What I propose to do is read and think through the book just as I did with Jesus For President (which, by the way, I have gained some clarity on in recent days, especially in regard to what is referred to pejoratively as ‘redemptive violence’; more on that another time).

So here’s a word from Pastor Wright:

It is central to Paul, but almost entirely ignored in perspectives old, new and otherwise, that God had a single plan all along through which he intended to rescue the world and the human race, and that this single plan was centered upon the call of Israel, a call which Paul saw coming to fruition in Israel’s representative, the Messiah. Read Paul like this, and you can keep all the jigsaw pieces on the table. Ignore this great narrative, and you will have to sweep half of them out of sight or try the Stasi trick. (35; his emphasis)

Wright is simply brilliant here. The last major series of sermons I preached to my former family dealt with just this subject and traced the story of faith from the the creation, to the fall, to the call, through the prophets, to the Messiah, to the New Heavens and the New Earth. It’s all there: We are sons of Abraham.

I hope to share more of this wonderful book with you as I read along. I’m not trying to step on any toes of those who have already written reviews or quoted from the book. I just hope to share some of his wisdom and the beauty of his work in the Word with you who might not otherwise dare to read it.

Blessings.