Chasing Lions in 2010

Each winter I pull back and decide on a theme for the upcoming year. As I pondered my new challenges, opportunities and responsibilities I really felt I needed to go after challenges I had ignored for months or years. Dana recommended our pastor's book In A Pit with A Lion on A Snowy Day because it is about this same idea. The book delves into the short story of Benaiah in 2 Samuel 8 who chased a lion into a pit and killed it. This and other courageous acts got Ben a place of honor in the king's service.

Inspired by this story, my wife's example of determination, my dad's challenges, and my own yet-to-be-realized and missed opportunities, I am determined to live 2010 Chasing Lions.

Video: Jesus People

This is a pretty good parody of too many of us in the church

Notes: spirituality of the cell phone

What does a Porsche salesman turned Mennonite pastor have to say about media and culture?

These are my notes from a relevant and important message from Shane Hipps at Mars Hill in Detroit.

Shane authored the book The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture: How Media Shapes Faith, the Gospel, and Church

buy the book at Amazon.com

shane hipps

mars hill church

2008/03/29

spirituality of the cell phone

http://marshill.org/teaching/index.php

the medium is the message.

it is how they are used that counts.

the content of any medium is the juicy piece of meat carried by the burgular to distract the watchdog of the mind

regardless of the content, the medium changes us

everything around us is media

electronic age: disorienting blindness in which it is increasingly difficult to discern reflection from reality

we are growing increasingly incapable of sustained face to face communication

hidden biases

the immense power of presence

how can you just be there in an email ? (ex. kathy)

location (being there) is anything but trivial

'the word became flesh' emmanuel

you are the message of the gospel

we are the body of christ

we are his media

This entry is part of Water Cooler Wednesday at randyelrod.typepad.com

Sweeter as the Days Go By

A guy is born. He gets his first tooth, walks, goes to kindergarten, loses his first tooth, first girlfriend, first heartbreak, sports, prom, homecoming, graduation, car, college, marriage, children, career, house. The list goes on. We have many firsts in our lives. It's all part of growth.

For the first thirty years of life we're anticipating the next step. After forty people tend to look back. It seems like most of our life is spent in the future or the past. For some reason we neglect now.

In the Baptist churches I grew up attending we often had a testimony time. I don't know where the tradition started, but wherever the church, it was usually the same formula. We start with a hymn or two -- always singing the first, second and last verse -- then two or three people would stand up to say how good God had been to them; it sounded something like this:

"Jesus saved me when I was (fill in the age). I asked Him into my heart. When I lost my (fill in the blank) I leaned on Him. Through all of my pain He's been there. God is so good!"

It was followed by a few hearty Amens and a similar testimony.

In all of those testimony meetings, rarely do I remember hearing someone talking about God -- or Jesus, or the Spirit, for that matter -- like they would a close friend they had just run into that afternoon. Really, we tell people they can have "a personal relationship with Jesus" then freeze up when put on the spot to talk about our own "personal relationship" with him.

Throughout Scripture the relationship between the Lord and us is as a groom and his bride. Now, I know some couples who aren't close to each other as they ought to be, but really healthy couples have intimate moments over the years and special moments amost every day. They are, well, intimate. Too many of us -- myself included -- don't have an intimate relationship with the Lord.

For most Christians, we got hitched to the Lord some time in the past and go to church and do stuff here and there because we're Christians. It's not really much of a personal relationship when I think about it. If I spent my Christian life working around God and for God but never really with Him would that be a "personal relationship?"

I hear people talk about their Christian walk getting sweeter as the days go by. As I think about some sour-looking and mean-sounding people who call themselves Christians I wonder whether they have that daily walk with the Lord. I wonder what it would say to people on the outside looking in if people who call themselves Christians really had a "personal relationship" with the Lord that was growing sweeter each day.

Christian Citizens

This month, I've been wrestling through Romans. Let me start by saying how refreshing it is to be able to wrestle with scripture unashamedly, instead of just sitting back and listening to it then bumping along. Back on track, this morning I was reading in Romans 13 about Christian citizenship.

In short, Paul writes two things that caught my eye.

1Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. 2Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.

This wasn't written by a guy who is in some tolerant, God-fearing, fair society. Jews in Rome [at the time] were admired and despised. Some saw them as neighbors, business partners and patrons; others considered them a threat to the Empire. The new sect -- Christians -- were especially peculiar, what with their teaching on the Messiah and the Kingdom of God. The Jewish peolple had been kicked out of Rome and were just coming back (see Wikipedia, etc.) and even had disputes with Gentile believers who were running church affairs in their absence. All of this to illustrate things were neither fair nor rosy.

Fast forward to the 1700s. This idea of Democracy catches on, emphasizing individual and community over a central authority. All of a sudden, everyone has a voice. This philosophy catches on like a wildfire. In government, education and even church, everyone's view is relevant. Spawning from democratic thought came schism in the Catholic church and the revolt of the Americans (as well as revolution worldwide). The democratic ideal became our model.

Now, consider the American civil rights movement. Precipitated by unfair treatment, Dr. King rose as the leading voice for "civil disobedience". He got this idea from Ghandi, and East Indian monk, by the way. By nonviolent disobedience, these civil-rights activists changed the laws and perceptions.

Consider, now the second scripture:

5Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience.

Many throughout history put up with unfair treatment and even torture because they were submitting to the higher authority. The history of the church in the middle-ages is full of corruption because thoughtful people "submitted to governing authority" because it was the God-ordained order. Many Christians felt it was their duty to obey the laws that stirred the civil rights movement because of the role of government. Catholics and protestants fought it out because it was so sanctioned.

We admire the free-spirits and long to assert our freedom today. We are often admonished to do so in light of what's good. But have we lost something of the fear of the Lord and submitting ourselves in our self-determined culture? Have we become authorities unto ourselves, tossed around by the opinions of men because of our democratic ideals? What is the godly model for society? Are we living that out?

Are You Sure about That?

Recently I'm learning a little more about my own theological interpretations. Raised in the Bible belt of the U.S., some things were taught as certainties. The Scripture was open to extremely strict interpretation and those who didn't agree with our interpretation had gone off into a divergent faith. From the method of baptism to the way churches did fundraisers, the answers were in the Bible, plain as day, for everyone to see.

Fast-forward to my post-high school years. An impressionable (but grounded) young adult, I entered college. Faced with secular history that starts somewhere before the Genesis account and tracing human history with Judeo-Christian history thrown in the middle I realized the real, valid challenges to my faith. Looking through the eyes of others, I was able to acknowledge the seeming discrepancies and realize absurdities I had embraced when I was younger.

Thanks to my secular education and the challenges of listening to different views, I have learned to look at the Scriptures as more than a strict instruction manual. Don't get me wrong, the Bible is to me God's word and the foundation of my faith, but it's now more than it was.

Take Genesis as a sart (afterall, that is where the story begins). Some are adamant to argue that everything in Genesis happened just as it was written, even arguing that if this is not the case, we could dismiss the whole Bible. A secular viewpoint -- which it's taken me a long time to understand -- looks at the account as allegory: a way for a nomad named Moses* to get his mind around how this world and his people came to be. Before you dismiss me as a heretic, please consider this: Almighty God could have inspired Moses to communicate this history to his people to illustrate important truths and build a way to relate to mankind.

With a less-literal viewpoint, I can see creation and the fall as a beatuiful allegory of how God Almighty values humanity and the tragedy of every person's self-will that carries us away from His perfect will, tarnishing everything, and the need for a redeemer. God becomes our benevolent provider in a way that anyone can acknowledge. All of this communicates the same creation story beautifully, opening the door to the gospel, without ostracizing someone who doesn't interpret the scripture literally.

This begs the question: when you feel lead to defend your faith, or perhaps the way you've been taught to view that faith, are you sure about that? Is your viewpoint the only valid way to look at it? Does your translation get in the way of you communicating the essence of the message, leading to arguements about viewpoint and semantics, not about the gospel message? Can you learn something of another's interpretation that enriches your own faith?

As John admonishes, "Test the spirits"(1 John 4). Perhaps by listening and pondering others' viewpoints of Scripture and faith you can strengthen your own and better communicate your faith with others.

*Some would argue that these stories are accumulations of years of oral history compiled post-Moses. This acknowledged, the mystery is the same.