So the splint is off. I still can’t really use my finger, but the swelling is gone and it actually bends now. I can still barely type, but I don’t have that huge splint thingy making all my other fingers completely useless anymore. It’s been a really slow week not being able to do anything at all for myself. I discovered I could kinda hold a mass market sized paperback – so I spent the last few days rereading my favorite fantasy series and watching way too many episodes of Heroes. It was fun for about a day, but then being completely helpless, not being able to take care of Emma, not doing anything productive, and having to eat Mike’s cooking got old real fast… Anyway, just wanted to give a short update.
Sorry, Julie is currently unavailable…
Julie asked me to let you all know that she won’t be able to post to her blog or respond to email for a few days since she recently sprained her finger trying to put Emma into her car seat and therefore cannot type. Hopefully her finger will be healed in a couple of days.
If anyone’s counting, this is the second time this past year that our 2-year old has sent Julie to the ER.
-Mike
The Gospel and Wheaton College
I received my Wheaton Alumni magazine in the mail the other day. Usually I just flip through it and skip to the gossip pages in the back – who got married, who had a baby, who wrote what book, the fun stuff. This issue though intrigued me. It sought to examine why student activism is on the rise.
When I was at Wheaton in the nineties, I knew nothing about social justice. Oh there were a few activist groups on campus that would do things like picket abortion clinics, but the concept of helping the oppressed really wasn’t on my radar. I had friends who would go off about public health issues or American injustices in Latin America, but they were on the fringe. It took my own post-college personal study to realize that caring for the needs of others is a Biblical value.
So, to have student activism highlighted in the Wheaton magazine surprised me. Then I actually read the article. While it does applaud the students for their idealism, it takes a rather apologetic tone in doing so. The section on students for peace devotes a good portion of the space to how those students learned to understand the convictions of those in the army after a panel discussion on campus. The activism article was followed not so subtly by an article about Wheaton alumni serving as Chaplains in the military. Apparently the college wants to make sure that rich alumni don’t get the impression that the school officially supports these rogue activist students. (and before you tell me I’m too cynical, I worked for the Wheaton Advancement department for a few years and know the posture one must assume when wealthy alumni are involved.) But the equivocating and the apologies were nothing compared to college President Duane Litfin’s back page editorial.
Litfin addresses the rise of student activism by asserting that “we must never allow our activism to eclipse our verbal witness… the temptation to reduce the contribution of the church to the so-called ‘social gospel’ is always before us.” Apparently we are tempted to help others so that we can hear the applause and respect of the world, but they should be hating us because of Jesus. Litfin writes, “feed the poor, heal the sick, stand up for the oppressed and the world will often approve. But name the unique name of Jesus and it will often not be applause you hear.” Does he really think that students are following the command of Jesus so that they can be approved by the world? Apparently to Litfin, those commands of Jesus are insignificant parts of scripture that obedience to does nothing to proclaim Christ.
The editorial then goes on to quote and reject the famous saying of St. Francis, “Preach the Gospel at all times. Use words if necessary.” Litfin claims that this saying is false, “the gospel cannot be “preached” nonverbally. The gospel is inherently a verbal thing. It requires verbal expression. Social activism can never take its place.” No wonder I never heard about social justice at Wheaton. All that is deemed acceptable there is the truncated gospel of Christ’s economic exchange. What matters is verbally confessing Christ so that we get into heaven when we die and not following the way in which Christ taught us to live. If Christ was sent to preach the gospel of the kingdom of God and all we focus on is his death on the cross (and condemn his actual message) there are some serious issues going on here. I am reminded of this quote I came across in a Christianity Today interview with Ruth Padilla DeBorst.
When Christianity came into Latin America, many of the indigenous groups simply changed the names of their gods: They gave them Christian saints’ names. But they really continued worshiping their original gods. Churches were built on top of temples. Seventy-five years ago, John Mackay wrote a wonderful book, The Other Spanish Christ, which asks whether Latin America could discover the Christ who was incarnate, who walked the streets and died and rose from the dead and is powerful today. This Christ was not widely portrayed in the first evangelization of Latin America. Christ was either a helpless baby, toward whom we feel affection and compassion, or a corpse, a dead body with no power or ethical demands. This is what happens when religion is too closely linked with power: The problem is not just that religion underwrites oppression, but that the gospel itself is lost. If Christ is just a baby or a dead body, I can keep on living and not allow Christ’s lordship to shed light on all dimensions of my life.”
So can the evangelical church and places like Wheaton College accept not just the Christ who dies, but the living Christ who makes ethical demands? Will the full Christ be allowed to be known within those institutions or will a hollow Christ used merely as God’s sacrificial pawn be all that is allowed to be taught? I know I’ve traveled a long way since my time at Wheaton, but I also know (as this article attests) that there are students at Wheaton now who are embracing the full gospel no matter what protestations the administration makes to the contrary.
Priestess Clawson Responds
nd now for today’s entertainment… The anti-emergent mafia strikes again granting me a place of honor (dubious though it may be). Over at the fairly new diatribe of hate entitled Wonky73 – A Crazy Man’s Utopia (I am so not kidding) the author lists offenders guilty of “emergy oozy chaos.” After reading the trashing the Open Source Theology blog and Emerging Women, I came across a rather amusing description of myself (isn’t it lovely what strangers can tell you about yourself?) Anyway, here is what I discovered about myself, starting with the end of the reaction to the Emerging Women blog –
Clearly, this is a blog of people moving down the train tracks of apostasy. Once you’ve removed the scriptural authority the gates are blown wide open for every kind of error to flood in.
Down those tracks, deeper and deeper, we go where in we find (strap in and hang on folks) the Onehandclapping blog. This can be a very frightening place, if you don’t have experience in radical liberal theology. The writer describes herself as: (read my blog profile)As an aside it’s sad to see Wheaton’s fallen so far as to produce a person like this. A quick perusal of her blog makes it clear. She is a radical liberal femi-nazi. No concern for God or the scriptures will be found here. She’s far to concerned with spreading a feminist agenda, babbling nonsense about social justice, eating ethically, and buying a “just” bra. Most importantly she holds a special contempt for the scriptures and their authority.
Gotta admit I had fun writing this. Let’s finish with a flourish of quotes from Priestess Clawson: (recent quotes from my posts).
Wow – Priestess. Now that’s just too fun. But honestly this serves as the perfect example of the fear I see around us these days. The fear that criticizes a group of women for reading a book that some disagree with (because reading something one disagrees with could be dangerous). And to utterly reject any form whatsoever of social justice and environmentalism – I just don’t get it anymore. I understand tempered limited forms of caring for people and caring for God’s creation, but to reject and mock them entirely? What sort of theology encourages that? This message of fear and hatred is wrapped in Christian language and baptised by Christian theology. This my friends is the church. And people still ask why we emergents think things need to change…
Blessings and the Divine
Are all blessings truly only from God? We talk about being “blessed” and invoke God’s blessing on America (or the whole world if you are of a more generous bent), but are such blessings solely from the divine?
I was thinking about that today because something recalled to me a conversation I had with my best friend back in Jr. High. To give a bit of context to the conversation I should say that my friend was (is?) an atheist. She had grown up in India as her father did research on ancient Sanskrit texts. Having witnessed the effects of organized religion on creating such horrors as the Caste system, she refused to ever follow any religion. That soon led to a disbelief in God altogether.
One day our botany class was outside tending the school garden and she happened to notice the school sign. In typical early nineties feel-good self-esteem public school parlance it read – “We Are So Blessed.” My friend took serious offense at it. She starting ranting about how it violated the separation of church and state to be proclaiming such a religious statement on public school property. Most of us around her were a bit confused. None of us had assumed that the statement had any religious connotation whatsoever. I figured it meant something like “we are blessed to have such great students.” But my friend argued that the entire concept of blessing was a religious one and that blessings could only come from deities. Since she didn’t believe in said deities that sign was forcing religion upon her. She left then to go complain to our teacher who happened to be a rather militant atheist. I don’t remember what happened after that, if the sign was changed or not, but I remember vividly the oddity of that conversation.
So I wonder now if I too trace all blessings to God. If I believe that all that is good comes from God, then all blessings no matter who bestows them are from God as well. If we have been blessed to be a blessing (as the covenant describes), we then are indeed God’s avatars. God’s mystery of working behind and within all things encompasses the goodness of blessing. As a Jr. Higher I brushed such an idea aside in favor of a secular interpretation, but my atheist friend saw the hand of the divine there nonetheless.
Prayer Synchroblog
by R. S. Thomas
Moments of great calm,
Kneeling before an altar
Of wood in a stone church
In summer, waiting for the God
To speak; the air a staircase
For silence; the sun’s light
Ringing me, as though I acted
A great rôle. And the audiences
Still; all that close throng
Of spirits waiting, as I,
For the message.
Prompt me, God;
But not yet. When I speak,
Though it be you who speak
Through me, something is lost.
The meaning is in the waiting.
In reflecting on prayer recently I have been drawn to this poem. Prayer in my life at the moment is something that is in many ways undefined. I pray, but often in ways that seem contrived or hollow. It is when I sit in those moments of silence that my communion with God seems most authentic.
To hear from God and to be inspired to speak words of truth and encouragement from God is often something I rush into. My ideas stumble over each other in the burning passion to have something to say. I might throw in a perfunctory prayer – a ritual to be performed – out of obligation rather than intentional worship. Real prayer, real communion, goes much deeper than that and is full of silence.
Silence is nebulous. It is uncomfortable. It can’t be quantified. I can’t check off that I spent x number of minutes for my “Quiet Time” and prayer. I can’t go through the mental checklist of praying the ACTS (or CATS) acronym. It was easier when I could, but it still felt hollow.
So I’m learning to accept silence. I don’t understand it. I don’t “do it” well. But I have learned that there is meaning in the waiting. And so I wait in silence.
For other contributions to this synchroblog on prayer check out Lyn or Erin’s blogs.
Update – here’s the list of participants.
Cindy Bryan Teach Me to Pray…Again?
Lyn Hallewell God, Prayer and Me
Erin Word Prayer=Sex with God
Rick Meigs Prayer Helps that Get Me Deeper
Alan Knox Pray without Ceasing
Julie Clawson Prayer Synchroblog
Heather Synchroblog Prayer
Alex (Heather’s Husband) Prayer Synchroblog II
Lydia How Do You Pray
Che Vachon My Thoughts…
Paul Mayers Praying and Learning to Pray Again
Sonja Andrews The Appearance of Holiness
Jon Peres How Do I Pray?
Paul Walker One Congregation Experiments with Emerging Prayer
Susan Barnes Synchroblog: How Do You Pray?
Brother Maynard Fear Not the Silence
Nate Peres How Do I Pray?
Barry Taylor Synchroblog:How Do You Pray?
Emerging Grace Clearance Sale on Intercession Books
Jim Lehmer Synchroblog – How Do You Pray?
Lew A How Do You Pray? – Synchroblog
Jon Hallewell When I’m Spoken To
Deb Prayer Synchroblog
Barb Prayer without Throwing Things
Patti Blount How Do I Pray
Doug Jones How I Pray
Glenn Hagar Prayer Phases
Pam Hogeweide The Art of Blue Tape Spirituality
Mary How Do I Pray?
Rhonda Mitchell Prayer SynchroBlog
John Smulo Praying Naturally
Rachel Warwick How Do You Pray?
Barbara Legere How to Not Pray
Jonathan Brink Posture – Sitting With My Daddy
Andy How Do I Pray
Cynthia Clack How Do I Pray
Makeesha Fisher The Mystery of Prayer
Women’s Equality Day
Tomorrow August 26 is Women’s Equality Day in the United States.
August 26th is the anniversary of national woman suffrage. Across the seventy-two years between the first major women’s rights conference at Senecca Falls, New York, in 1848, and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, thousands of people participated in marches through cities like New York and Washington DC, wrote editorials and pamphlets, gave speeches all over the nation, lobbied political organizations, and held demonstrations with the goal of achieving voting rights for women. Women also picketed the White House with questions like, “Mr. President, what are you going to do about woman’s suffrage?” “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?” This was the first time in history that a group of people picketed the White House.
The woman suffrage amendment was introduced for the first time to the United States Congress on January 10, 1878. It was re-submitted numerous times until finally in June 1919 the amendment received approval from both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Over the following year the suffragists spent their time lobbying states in order to have the amendment ratified by the required two-thirds of the states. On August 24th, Tennessee, the final state needed for ratification, narrowly signed the approval by one vote. The vote belonged to Harry Burn, who heeded the words of his mother when she urged him to vote yes on suffrage. The U.S. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby signed the amendment into law on August 26, 1920.
So its been 87 years since one vote decided that women’s voices were not inferior to men’s – at least when it came to the voting booth. The years since have demonstrated that the political decree has had some positive impact, but has done little to alter the prejudice of hard hearts. Women are still despised by some, still paid less, still held back at work, and still forced into stereotypes. To echo Elizabeth Cady Stanton, equality is seeking for women to be judged by who they are as an individual and not solely by a relationship they may or may not be involved in (as she said “In discussing the sphere of man we do not decide his rights as an individual, as a citizen, as a man by his duties as a father, a husband, a brother, or a son, relations some of which he may never fill.”). I would expand that we are whole people and the relationships we are involved in help create who we (women and men) are as individuals, but are not the sum total of who we are. So I am a wife and a mother (and daughter, sister, and friend), but those relationships do not define what roles I am capable of fulfilling. All aspects of my life including my talents, intellect, and passions (as well as my relationships) form who I am. And I appreciate it when I am valued and respected for who I am holistically, and not just seen through the lens of mother, or wife (or college grad, or Pastor). So then, why is it that some corners of the church are the last place where the value of a person is recognized? Why is the call for an equal voice (in practice as well as theory) still an issue? It took 72 years of active campaigning for American women to be counted as worthwhile people, and it has taken (so far) 87 years to get that message heard. And while much has been achieved, there is still a very long way to go.
Responsibility
I get rather annoyed when I hear people talking about how irresponsible youth are these days. Oh, I admit that there are teenagers who are self-centered and flaky, but so are many adults. It’s just that teenagers can be blamed and have rules and laws imposed on them to make them shape up (or at least allow the adults to pretend the problem’s solved). A few kids get drunk and have an accident, all teens then have to have a curfew. A few kids wear gang symbols, then all kids have clothing restrictions imposed on them. Not that rules don’t exist for adults, we at least have the opportunity to complain about their stupidity without being grounded or suspended.
Why does it annoy me? Because in my experience working with youth they are exceedingly more responsible than adults. I can hire a neighbor kid to cut my grass and I can be sure he will show up to do the job. The cable guy, the plumber, or the phone company are never that reliable. Similarly when I was a Children’s Pastor, I do not recall a single year of VBS when there were any adult volunteers who showed up every night. Every single one of them managed to come up with some last minute excuse to skip an evening or two (as well as the entire training period). The teenage helpers on the other hand made it to the training, showed up on time, and were consistently there every night for the kids.
And it’s not just that teens are often more responsible than adults, but that I have seen parents forcing their kids to bail on their responsibilities if it cramps their (the parents) style. One year when I was on vacation, I left the weekly Children’s Club to the responsibility of one of my teenage helpers. He knew the lesson, knew what set-up involved, and was a committed helper that all the kids knew. Well, he talked back to his mom that week and she grounded him from all activities he enjoyed – including helping with the kids club. (and yes his mom was a committed church member involved in other children’s ministry activities herself). Since when was a good punishment (if that exists) to teach your kid that failing one’s responsibilities is a good thing? Similarly when we would train teams of teens for mission trips we got to the point where we had to have the parents as well as the teens sign commitment forms. We had discovered that the parents saw a teen’s commitment as nonbinding if the parent wished. So last minute family trips, or chores, or babysitting siblings came before training sessions the teens had signed a commitment saying they would attend. But then nothing changed even after the parents signed the commitment forms as well. Apparently giving one’s word and signing a commitment held less value for the parents than personal convenience and pleasure.
What really got me though was that the same parents who forced their kids to avoid responsibility then complained to us (as youth and children’s pastors) that their kids were irresponsible and could we please teach them something about responsibility. Somedays I just wanted to shake those parents and tell them to open their eyes. But I didn’t. That wouldn’t have been the nice and responsible “Christian” thing to do. So I just rant about it now.
Things that Make You Wonder…
So I’ve been out and about all day today attempting to avoid actually being outside during the crazy storms and tornados. It’s been one of those days. Just thought I share some of the moments today that just made me have to wonder.
First – in the “you know environmentalism is a fad when…” category.
Target is selling this “Green is Good t-shirt” –
What gets me is that the claim to caring for the environment is printed using conventional toxic dyes on a shirt made of conventional cotton. Tons of environmentally unfriendly chemicals and pesticides were dumped into the environment to create the opportunity for trendy teens to expresses (boldly across their breasts) their deep commitment to caring for the environment. Did they ever stop to think?
Then in further environmental news – I was at Trader Joe’s and of course had forgotten my nice reusable canvas bags yet once again. At the check out I asked the guy to not waste bags since I would just be transferring the food to the cooler in my car. He got really confused and didn’t know what to do with my food. I asked him to just put it all back in the cart. At that point he said, “how about I just put it all in plastic bags.” Because it is so common to not want to waste paper bags so that you can use plastic ones instead! I gave up and he packed it all in paper bags.
And finally in the “does this disturb you as much as it did me?” category, I saw this bumper sticker –
No wonder the world hates us. How can we continue to pretend that we are a “Christian” nation if this is our foreign policy? Forget loving your enemies, forget “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” who needs crap like that when we have a license to kill?
Anyway, can you tell I’m having a “what is this world smoking?” sort of day?
Bible Wars
To add to my ongoing commentary on the nature of Biblical interpretation…
In preparing for my sermon on Luke 22, I’ve once again encountered the ubiquitous disagreements among the commentaries. You know, where people who all claim to have studied the same original languages, studied the same cultures, and read the exact same scriptures “as they are written on the page” present interpretations of the passages that completely contradict each other. In this case the question is whether Jesus was a pacifist or if he promoted violence based on Luke 22:36. A rather small insignificant issue of course. Both interpretations can be supported from the text and so that leaves us with alternative slightly less scholarly methods of assessing the inspired (supposedly inerrant) word of the Lord.
In this case that method involves outright insult. That’s right, to prove that their interpretation is better than others the typical commentator on this passage resorts to insults. There are the basic insults that refer to those of alternate interpretation as “thickheaded” and their interpretations as “impossible.” Then there are the ad hominem attacks that accuse those of alternate interpretations of having base ulterior motives for propagating their interpretation. I always find this one amusing given that I have heard it levied against the emerging church so often. The whole we must obviously be only motivated by licentious desires for promiscuous sex and partying thing. A really thoughtful way to engage with that which you disagree with if you ask me.
While the crap is being thrown from both sides, so far my favorite has been from the minority side which claims that Jesus supports violence. That commentator writes of his opponents – “They cannot stand the idea that we would be told to defend ourselves, our families, and our Christian brothers and sisters with swords or the modern day equivalents. Not being able to find any corrupt texts that left out the verse, and not being able to find any way to make the word for sword (makhaira) mean daffodil, bottle of Jack Daniels, lace panties, young male prostitute, or whatever else that they might want it to mean, they clutched at straws by trying to cancel the verse through perverting the meaning of the word ‘enough’. This is a another great proof of how completely dishonest these snakes are, and it also shows that their claim to rely on a better understanding of the Greek is completely false.” (emphasis mine). This was admittedly from a KJV only guy who describes his mission as – “the preceding is part of a series of examples of KJV verses that arrogant would-be scholars have tried to correct and showed themselves to be fools. These examples are for the benefit of those who would like more ammunition to defend God’s Word against the attacks of the arrogant Bible “correcting” modernists. I hope that some of you find them useful.”
Ah, isn’t this what the Bible is all about?