Half Marathon

I thought I'd add the link to the Maui Marathon web page so you can check out the run, past results and photos. I don't know how soon they will have this year's results posted, but you can always check to see.

Also here's the link to our vacation blog where we will try and update daily with pics and stuff.

John

Changing the World

No doubt you’ve all seen them at book stores. There’s one for just about everything—computers to cooking, gardening to gambling, the stock market to the local market. I’m talking about the “Idiot” books and the “For Dummy” books. We love those books. They get to the point. They don’t waste our time with a lot of theory, long stories that all too often seem to miss the point. They tell us what we need to know—how to make that stupid “error” message go away on our computer screen—and that’s it. They make life easier, not more complex.

The Bible, though, is different. It’s not a “how to” book. It’s not an “owner’s manual.” It definitely has a way of making things more complex—much more complex. David called it a lamp to his feet, and a light to his path. A lamp illuminates. A light shines. They allow us to see what could not be seen otherwise. They help us see things differently.

The Bible is not so much a “Life for Dummies” kind of book, a manual that helps us through life so we can get to heaven. Rather it is a book that challenges us to change our perspectives. It’s a book that dares us to be different, a book that provokes us to transform our world. As Will Willimon says, “From Scripture, the church is given more than directives, rules, codes for contemporary Christian behavior, The main gift of Scripture is a world, a culture, a reality constructed (as all worlds, cultures, and reality are fabricated) through words. Words make the world.”

Theologian George Linbeck says that in the Bible we engage a complex redescription of reality. He says that when we read God’s word we are to put our “reality” within the “scriptural framework rather than translating Scripture into extrascriptural categories” (which fundamentalist tend to do). He says “It is the text, so to speak, which absorbs the world, rather than the world the text.”

Anyway, I think I’ve gotten a bit sidetracked (sorry). The point I think I’m trying to make is how we approach Scripture makes a world a difference in how Scripture affects us and our world. We need to approach God’s word as if we were opening a package that contained a ticking time bomb. It’s full of complexity and mystery. It pulls us into its world. It challenges us with a “strange new world,” one that is wild and unpredictable, one full of grace and boundless mercy. And then it sends us back into our world. But we come back with a whole new perspective, a “redescription of reality.” And this new scriptural framework slowly absorbs our world, recreating it according to God’s word. The kingdom of God has come near. And nothing will be the same.

I've been thinking a lot about Karl Bath’s essay “The Strange New World within the Bible.” I've been thinking about this whole notion of unleashing our ideas of God, Jesus, and the Bible.

You see, by reducing the Bibles to a source of propositions we have chained God. In his essay Barth talks about how we can find most anything we want in the Bible. If we look for history, it is there. If we look for morality, it is there. If we look for religion, it is there. If we seek to defend a certain from of religion, or worship, or whatever, we can find the ammunition to arm ourselves with all the propositional firepower we need to defend our position and defeat all other positions (except, of course, they too have armed themselves and fight just as sure of their version of the truth as we are). The point for Barth is there is something more contained in the Bible. The problem is, in Barth words, “we measure God with our own measure, we conceive God with our own conceptions, we wished ourselves a God according to our own wishes.”

I think that’s part of Paul is warning Timothy about when he says that “the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths” (2 Timothy 4.3-4). We tend to think of this piece as talking to heresies and “vain philosophies of the world.” And certainly it does. But I also think that it addresses the issue we face today with folks thinking their idea of truth is the Truth. I think it has to do with the tendency for religious folks to build their doctrinal fortresses around propositional proof-texts, thinking somehow they have defended God and truth when in fact all they have done is put a leash on God. I think part of what Paul is saying is there is a wildness to God that makes us uncomfortable. So our tendency is to want to tame that wildness, put a muzzle on the bite in the Bible, and control the Spirit.

Personally I think that is the great flaw of many fundamentalist movements of the church—especially here in America. They have gathered around themselves preachers who are willing to scratch their itchy ears. Not so much in the sense that they have “watered down the gospel,” or they are preaching a “prosperity gospel,” but in the sense that the Truth of the Bible is reduced to truths (or propositions about truths) about the Bible that can be codified and defended. Preaching the wildness of God is replaced by defenses of propositions. For many, the itching ear that needs to be scratched is the right human thought about God—as they define it.

Here’s where Barth really helps. In a brilliant piece from his essay, Barth says:

It is not the right human though about God which forms the content of the Bible, but the right divine thoughts about men. The Bible tells us not how we should talk with God but what he says to us; not how we find the way to him, but how he has sought and found the way to us; not the right relation in which we must place ourselves to him, but the covenant which he has make with all who are Abraham’s spiritual children and which he has sealed once and for all in Jesus Christ.

When we forget that it all begins and ends with God, we begin to tame the wildness of God. When we begin to think that it is how we think about God that is important and not how God thinks about us, we begin to develop an itch and go looking for someone to scratch it (maybe that’s why there’s so much church hopping in our modern world). When we begin to think that we need to find a way to God, and loose sight of the fact that it is God who has already made a way toward us, we drift away from grace. When we begin to think that somehow our faith (and ultimately our salvation) is synergistic, we have caged God, putting God on display in our churches.

Cheap Grace

Boy do I feel stressed... pressed in... overwhelmed. Things just seem to have piled up. Next week is NMI Convention and District Assembly, pile on top of that school, and church. Anyway, I'm just feeling stretched a bit thin.

For class I just finished Bonhoeffer's Cost of Discipleship and now need to write a paper on it. I'm thinking along the lines of "Cheap grace makes for a cheap God." Bonhoeffer talks a lot about the idea of how cheap grace is being peddled in churches. He calls it a cheap covering for sin. "Cheap grace," he says, "is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion with confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate."

You see, I think we've made grace about us. And that cheapens it. We've made grace about forgiveness, about what we get. We've even created a cheesy little acronym: GRACE, God's Resources at Christ's Expense. The implication is, of course, that it is God's resources for our use (or misuse).

Grace, though, God calling us to follow. And as Bonhoeffer points out, "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." The thing about grace is it has very little to do with us. It is about God; it is about God taking on flesh and blood, coming into a world of suffering to suffer with it, and ultimately to die for it. Nothing cheap about that. Grace is about God becoming incarnate. And that's why grace is so important for the church to get hold of--not cheap grace that is dispensed as a doctrine or a principle, but costly grace that bleeds for sin. You see, the Church is the presence of Christ just as Christ is the presence of God. And when the Church peddles cheap grace it turns God into a dollar store God.

Mystery

Mystery is safe and a danger.

Danger first:

First it scares me because I must loose control.

Control is something I like—an idol—

An idol I worship by holding.

Holding it creates the danger because it’s all I know…

Know nothing else… nothing more.

More is what mystery calls me to.

To let go;

Go beyond…

Beyond what I hold—what holds me.

Me, it’s the idol, the image I keep…

Keep so secure in secret crying.

Crying to be free…

Free to let go…

Go beyond the danger to the safe.

Safe comes when mystery is embraced.

Embrace, let go, enter the mystery.

Taking in the Whole

I remember seeing a picture of one of Rembrandt’s painting in a magazine. I can’t remember which one it was. But the thing that struck me was the shear size of it. In the picture they had a person standing there in front of the painting so you could see the scale. It was enormous—bigger than life-sized.

As I thought about that, I thought the only real way to truly appreciate a masterpiece of that size is by standing back far enough to take in the whole painting. While there is value, no doubt, in getting up close and studying the brush stokes and how the paints are layered on, if you want to catch the full impact of what the artist was trying to capture, you need to take in the whole.

I’ve begun thinking of Scripture in that way. Reading and studying isolated texts has value. It is important and should not be neglected. We need to dig into the syntax and linguistics of the text. But at the same time we cannot neglect the discipline of standing back far enough to take in the whole—tracing the broad brush strokes of important Biblical themes from OT to NT… from Genesis to Revelation.

It seems to me that we’ve spent too much time with the pieces that we’ve neglected the whole. That’s something the Biblical writers never did. That’s something the early Christians never would have done. See the whole was what enabled them to understand the pieces. Our post-enlightenment mind set has turned that around: we seek to understand the whole by dissecting and studying the pieces.

The problem is, we’ve been standing so close to the painting for so long that we’ve forgotten what the painting is about. Maybe we need to remind ourselves to step back every once and a while and take in the whole.

The Good News of the Kingdom

I just read through Matthew and came across a phrase that kind of struck out for me. Matthew 3.23 says, “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news (or gospel) of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.” The phrase that struck me was “good news of the kingdom” or “gospel of the kingdom.”

Here’s what I thought. What is the gospel? For must of us evangelicals it is the “salvation plan.” It’s “Jesus dies on the cross for my sin.” But here Jesus says the good news of the kingdom. Here Jesus is proclaiming the gospel before the cross, before the atonement, before the resurrection. And I don’t think it’s his way of looking forward to it (although, there is something of that sense there).

What if our view of the good news is only part of the good news? What if we’re missing a piece—a big piece—of what Jesus came for… to bring? What if there’s more?

We’ve got the “saved from” part right. We are saved from sin. We are saved from being slaves to sin. We are saved from self-idolatry. We are saved from a myriad of evils and iniquities that pollute our humanness. But we miss the “saved for” part. We are saved for the kingdom. I think that’s what Jesus meant when he “proclaimed the good news of the kingdom.”

The Christ event is about the kingdom of God being brought into our world. It’s about heaven and earth being knitted together. It’s about God’s future coming into our present. It’s about God turning the tables of evil. It’s about God turning an upside-down world right-side up. That’s why the proclamation of the good news of the kingdom is followed by curing every disease and every sickness. Sickness and disease is what comes from an upside-down world.

We are saved from sin. But even more important and more to the point, we are saved for the kingdom. Our task is to implement the future Jesus inaugurated by his life, death and resurrection. The good news of the kingdom is that it is here, waiting for the followers of Jesus to implement.

Too Small

I’ve always had a problem with preaching that seemed to focus on, “seven ways to… have a healthy marriage… raise the perfect child… financial freedom… (you fill in the blank).” Lately, I’ve started to see why. Even that old cliché that the Bible is our “owner’s manual for life,” is misleading. It misses something—it misses the gospel. It seems we’ve got a problem.

A quick survey of some of the books highlighted on the most resent Family Bookstore flier points out part of the problem. Just listen to some of the titles: Perfect Weight; Self Talk, Soul Talk; 8 Steps to Create the Life You Want; Destined to Reign: the Secret to Effortless Success, Wholeness and Victorious Living; Becoming a Better You; The Elephant in the Room: Sharing the Secrets for Pursuing Real Financial Success. Oh, and the list could go on. Even books on the Bible or on Spirituality seem to be focused on one of two things: how I can survive this world, or how I can turn this world to my advantage. Both are unbiblical.

I’m still working things out in my own mind and heart and life, but here’s what I think I think I’m starting to see… what I’m beginning to understand. First of all the Bible is not an owner’s manual. It’s more of a love letter. But even that, though closer, misses the mark. The point, though, is it’s not a book for us to use to pull out “secrets” in overcoming this world, or in trumping this world and getting a “one up” on everyone who doesn’t have these secrets—that, it seems to me, smacks of Gnosticism.

The other related thing is that no where in the Bible are we told that our ultimate goal is to escape this world. No where in Scripture are we told that we need to somehow hang on and survive this horrid and troubled world, and wait for the day that God will zap it all. The Bible is not a book of escapism; it’s a book of transformation.

We are not to hide from this world (in our churches and our ecclesiastical sub-cultures). We are not to compartmentalize our lives (Church over here, and the world over there—and we play by different rules depending on where we are). Again, we’re not simply to survive this world (hanging on till that day when our “souls are set free”).

We are supposed to engage this world in a way that brings the Kingdom of God. We are supposed to engage our world in a way that knits heaven and earth together—even if only in a small way. We are supposed to engage our world in a way that transforms, renews, and redeems creation.

We are called to be change agents, living by the laws, principles, and values of God’s coming kingdom. We are called in implement the new age of the Messiah that Jesus has inaugurated by his life, death, and resurrection. The problem is, it seems to me, we’ve settled for something far less… something far smaller than God’s grand and glorious plan of bringing his kingdom to this world, of his will being done on earth as it is in heaven. Our vision is too small.

Tipping God

We were out for lunch yesterday at the Olive Garden (soup and salad special). And as usual when we were all finished the waitress brought us that little black folder with our bill. As I pulled out the money to pay for the bill, my mind almost automatically started figuring out the tip. This time, though, I paused for a moment.

You see, I’m old enough to remember when a phone call was a time and a postage stamp cost 7 cents and a tip was 10%. That’s not the case anymore, is it?

As I was pulling out my money, I told Deanna, “It’s funny isn’t it? No one tips just 10 % any more. It’s 20%... or at the very least 15 (if you’re really cheep). The only one who gets a 10% tip any more is God—and then only grudgingly (if at all).”