Monthly Archives: January 2007

Eye for Eye?

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So I was at a pub trying to get some work done the other day and I struck up a conversation with some really nice people. Brother and sister…Brits who grew up in France. We started talking sports. Then moved to politics. Then moved to the justice systems of the world. Then moved to religion. Then moved to Jesus. Then back to sports.

But the interesting part was not the sports (while the Colts were in the AFC Championship game and that is interesting)…it was the politics, justice, religion, Jesus talk that has me thinking. Matthew (the brother), politely, mentioned something about how it’s ridiculous that we (Americans) have a president that is anti-abortion, while still pro-death penalty and war. I listened. Then he said that he doesn’t buy the whole ‘eye for an eye’ thing…good thing…neither do I…and neither did Jesus.

Matthew 5:38-39
38″You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.

When I was in the States over the summer I went to a Cigars and Theology group in Loomis. And we started talking about this same subject. It’s somewhat of a passion of mine…and so is speaking up when another voice needs to be heard. I’ve come to a point in my life when I don’t see any benefit to humanity for a war in which profit is to be made by the people fighting. (Just war = a war in which one party is fighting on behalf of the helpless and receives nothing as a reward, only gives of itself.) I don’t see any real benefit to following the still often quoted and practiced ‘eye for an eye’ policy. For one, I don’t want that used against me…I prefer grace and forgiveness. And two, eye for an eye was established by God as a law because He understands our inability to be just when we have been wronged. So he said…if you are already going to be vengeful…don’t escalate the conflict by taking what you don’t deserve as retribution. Yet, on a social level, we have chosen to agree that killing a guy for murder is good…even hanging somebody. We have chosen to buy in to the ‘war is ok if it’s to protect me and mine’ policy.

The real issue for me is that Jesus said…if you are living in the Kingdom of God…don’t resist people who are going to do you harm…turn the other cheek. Jesus didn’t want His disciples to attempt to gain control through retaliation or any other typical solutions that humanity has come up with. He wants us to trust. He wants us to live out the Kingdom reality that God is at the center of justice and forgiveness. If we continue to go about justice and judgement in a worldly way then we prove that God’s ways are not better than man’s.

I was just reading in the Gospel of Mark when Jesus is standing in front of Pilate and offers no defense for Himself despite the many accusations of the Pharisees. It says that Pilate was amazed at Jesus for this. Why? Because Pilate was probably used to seeing people beg and plead for their lives and Jesus remained trusting in the face of being falsely accused. Pilate had never seen anything like it…and neither has our world in many centuries.

Back to the pub…talking about who Jesus was, what He taught, and what He stands for is always an interesting conversation. His teachings are true for all people, good news for all people, and logical to all people on a social and individual level…I love them. Even when they are hard to follow…or seemingly impossible they are good and I can trust them.

When a book is loved…

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TheforgottenwaysI got this book in the mail from Amazon.fr two weeks ago and I’ve not been able to stop reading it. Two pages into it I decided to not write in the margins or do the underlining thing because I know that I’ll be reading it again…I wanted to save the graffiti for round two. I am already somewhat anal about books, so I was taking especially good care of this one…Then last week a group of us guys went down to Invalides and played some American football in the rain and mud…this resulted in ruining my quest to keep this book in pristine condition. The rain penetrated my bag and found it’s way to my book. Now the crisp pages of The Forgotten Ways are extra crisp and have a nice wave to them….this book now looks very loved and it’s just the beginning. There are many marks, underlines, drawings of my own (i’ve not seen a book with this many graphs and illustrations in it since my high-school trigonometry book!), and notes to come.

So about the book: I didn’t think that Alan could have much more to say after The Shaping of Things to Come, but he has plenty to say…and plenty that is extraordinarily beneficial to my passion for the Church (and anyone else’s for that matter) and our work in Europe. Have you ever wondered what made the 1st century Church so potent, or are wondering why the underground Church in China is growing and the Western Church declining? Then you should read this. Alan does great Biblical and scholarly study while using his own experience as a narrative. He would claim that this is not a ‘scholarly work’, but this book is text-book-worthy material on how God has called His earthly expression, the Church, into mission and how mission is the identity of the Church. This book doesn’t just talk about how things may work in theory, it gives both historical and current examples of how the Church can regain it’s influence by allowing the mDNA (missional DNA) that lies within each believer to be lived out again.

I can’t recommend this book enough as it has already greatly inspired, encouraged, and challenged me. Thanks Al for your work…a gift to the Kingdom.

Now…Are you Emergent or Emerging?

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I was hanging out with some friends (Frank, Lammert, and Josh) last night and we started laughing about the distinguishes made between Emergent and Emerging. Some of you could care less about this…and that might be a good thing. But others of us find interest in the organizations and ‘conversations’ that are (whether we agree or don’t) making up the future of the Church, especially in the US.

So here is a great article on Christianity Today.com written by Scot McKnight that talks about the movement called Emergent and what makes it up. It is a good crash course on what’s up and gives the reader tastes of what postmodernism is, the orthodoxy vs orthopraxy conversation, what missional means, etc….these things are all worth knowing about…and there is a lot to know.

Have fun.

sadness

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Screaming2
As you can probably tell from the title, this won’t be the funniest thing I’ve ever written! But a thought I’ll at least chew on.

When I was growing up I experienced the same amount of sadness that most kids feel. The death of grandparents. My group of friends breaking up as our lives went different ways. Problems with girls…etc. For some reason, whenever I was sad, my dog knew. She would come to where I was sitting and put her little black head on my knee and stare off to the side as if the eye contact would just be too much. Ella is a good dog.

But babies are different than dogs…I’m coming to learn. Apart from not pooping in the back yard, they don’t detect sadness in the same way. Today was not a day where I experienced bundles of happiness. That’s ok as happiness comes and goes. But I was a bit sad for some reason.

As I was holding Maisie, her little body screaming in my arms, I asked her, “Do you care that Daddy is sad?”

She just screamed some more.

Then I said, “You’re too all about yourself to realize that I am even sad.”

It was in this moment that I realized that there are times in my life when I am too much about myself to realize the emotions that God must have when He looks over His creation. Sure, it’s not always like this, and God, in some way, probably can experience a mix of emotions at the same time in a way that I can’t understand. But in a time with wars being fought for power, hunger being ignored by the healthy, poverty being forgotten by the rich, dictators being hung for the world to see, the environment being destroyed by greed, etc…I can’t imagine how God must feel…and how I am all too often all about myself to even realize it.

God can handle Life

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There is something that babies do that I think only parents can be ok with…well there may be many things, but one thing in particular. It has happened to me quite a few times recently, with the inspiration for this post coming as I was leaning in to steal a kiss from my little Maisie. This is spit-up.

For some reason her little tummy has not wanted to hang on to all that she has eaten and it has loved to come up while I am am burping her. Last night I had a feeling that one was coming so I put a burp cloth in front of her and…I was right. She spit up. But my arm was in front of her mouth…Two night ago Jen was burping her in bed and I had that feeling. So I said…Jen put a burp cloth in front of her. Moments after I said this it happened, but with such force that it leaped over the cloth onto…ding, ding, ding…ME. The aforementioned inspiration for this post came when I was leaning in for a kiss. Guess what I got? That’s right. Spit up on the mouth.

I am prone to ‘spitting up’ myself, but for some reason this didn’t even phase me. I laughed…after wiping it off of course. I was able to take this because Maisie is my daughter. It didn’t make me mad. It didn’t make me love her less. It did make me wish that it didn’t happen. It does make me wonder what’s up with all of her spit up. But even getting it on/in my mouth doesn’t change my love for her in the slightest bit.

I started thinking about this in terms of me being a child of God’s. I know that I have spit up on Him too many times to count. God can handle the messiness of our lives. Even when we try to hide it from Him it seems as though he seeks out our mess to help clean it. It is as if God wants us to take Him our messes so that we can deal with them together. Reminds me of the book of Psalms in the Bible. I think that there is much freedom to be found with returning to childlikeness in our relationships with God. Where there is an uncontrollable response to get what’s making us upset out and into God’s hands to help us deal with life. He can do it. God can handle life.

Nutrition

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The other day I was craving vegetables, so I cooked up some broccoli for myself. It was so delicious…While I was eating it I wanted to share it with somebody and Maisie was the only person around. I thought “I bet she would really like this.” So I fed her a bite of my broccoli. She had a hard time with this at only 4 weeks old…because she doesn’t have any teeth yet she couldn’t chew it. She had a hard time swallowing it because she doesn’t do any other whole food yet. Then who knows what it did as it cycled its way through her body…I thought, “It’s good for me so it should be good for her too!”

Ok…so I really didn’t feed her any broccoli! That is certainly for analogy purposes only…but if you were thinking…”Is he serious?” then you get the analogy.

It’s amazing to me how Maisie is perfectly capable of living entirely of off milk. She needs no meat, cheese, vegetables, or fruit. All of these can all be good for a person, but not for a baby. She needs one thing and one thing only: milk. From this, her little body gets all the nutrition it needs to grow at a rate that she will never grow at again in her life. This liquid gives her all the nutrients that she needs to help her bones to grow, her sight to come into focus, her muscle fiber to develop, her heart to beat…This is amazing to me.

I hesitate to draw my conclusions to any of my Babies & Spirituality posts as I think that we’ll all see something a bit different in them…so I’ll keep it short each time. Also, if you have something to add or saw this in a different way, please post it!

There is only one thing that a person needs when they begin (and finish) a relationship with God: To be connected to Jesus and stay close to Him. Many times as believers we want to (and should) share with others our convictions or what we find spiritually satisfying or fulfilling. Yet I think we need to give room for the reality that God works in different people at different times, in different ways, and at different paces…and He knows best. While broccoli may be good for me, it’s not for Maisie at this time in her life…I know I’ll be making her eat it one day though! Some questions or topics that are challenging and healthy for me may only prove to be a distraction or unhealthy to someone else. Even though each of us need spiritual nutrition God knows best as to who needs what kind and when. Even if we think that another person is appears to be getting a ridiculous amount of nourishment, if their lives don’t grow up, and produce works of the Spirit then they are only pretending. The ONLY proof we have that milk is truly what Maisie needs is that fact that she is growing. She’s already gained over two pounds and has grown 2.5 inches! The only proof that we can have as to how God is working in the life of another is the fruit that their life produces.

Christianity Rediscovered

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Christianity Rediscovered was written by Vincent Donovan, a Catholic priest who worked among the Masai people in eastern Africa for 17 years. This book is part memoir, part theology, part missionary education, and all insightful.

There were many things about this book that I really enjoyed. I really enjoyed Donovan’s stories of his days in Masailand. I appreciated his heart for discovering where God was already at work in the Masai people and empowering them to lead. I loved his conclusions as to what the point of Christianity is after is experience in Masailand. But there were two main themes in the book that impacted me.

The first is Donovan’s persistence in allowing the response of the preaching of the Gospel to be firstly a biblical and secondly a Masai response. Not one in which he influenced with his western presuppositions. His teaching of the Gospel is summed up as this on page 63:

Repent, believe, be baptized, witness to Christ is the Spirit until He comes again. This is the response to the Christian message. This is the Church.

Donovan’s encounter with the Masai revealed to him how many culturally generated things we consider to be necessary in being a valid expression of the Church. His belief is that any given culture must be allowed to define for themselves a way of being the Church and following Jesus. He says on page 64:

Institutionalized and structured in a way entirely different from ours, or non-institutionalized, non-structured and non-organized, this response of theirs, as strange as it might seem to us, must be recognized as the church, or we are doing violence to Christianity.

His trust in the Spirits work in people is remarkable and an encouragement. It struck me that God wants His Church to be built even more so than I do and, in many cases, our best move is to let God have more control in His Church than we may feel comfortable with.

The second was Donovan’s conviction that the only true expression of the Church is one where mission is not separate, but a defining feature of what Jesus meant for the Church to be. He says it best himself on page 77:

Mission is the meaning of the Church. The church can exist only insofar as it is in mission, insofar as it participated in the act of Christ, which is mission. the church becomes the mission, the living outreach of God to the world. The church exists only insofar as it carries Christ to the world. the church is only part of the mission, the mission God sending his son to the world. Without this mission, there would be no church. The idea of a church without mission is an absurdity.

Well said.

All in all, I think this book is a great read. He flows from story, to theology, to practicalities very nicely and it makes for a good book. I’ve laid in bed thinking about different things that he said and have been greatly encouraged by it. This book was given to me over 4 years ago and I never read it…It came off my shelf and into my head at a good time.

Other notes:
Christianity Rediscovered was originally published in 1978 and then 25 years later published again.