Elliot Ritzema

Author: Elliot

  • September 2009: Books Read

    September has been a busy month – with starting to drive again and continuing to get ready for the wedding. October probably won’t be any less busy, since we’re getting married on the 24th and are busy moving stuff into our new apartment.

    1. Under the Overpass: A Journey of Faith on the Streets of America by Mike Yankoski. My friend Janet, who is in my church small group and who is a current Regent student, lent me this book to read a couple of weeks ago. It is written by a young man who, in the summer and fall of 2003, left his studies at a Christian college in California to spend five months living as a homeless person. He did it, he mentions in the book, for three reasons:

    1. To better understand the life of the homeless in America, and to see firsthand how the church is responding to their needs.
    2. To encourage others to “live out loud” for Christ in whatever ways God is asking them to.
    3. To learn personally what it means to depend on Christ for my daily physical needs, and to experience contentment and confidence in Him.

    He started off by living for a month in a homeless shelter in Denver, and then lived with a friend on the streets of Washington, D.C., Portland, Phoenix and San Diego. They lived off of donations that they received from playing guitar on the streets. They made an odd pair of homeless people: they didn’t drink or smoke or do any drugs, and they only played praise songs on their guitars. Despite their difference from many street people, they seem to have been accepted by many of the people they encountered.

    It was particularly interesting for me to read about how they were received by the Christians and churches they encountered. With a few exceptions, the vast majority of Christians did not help them, and many churches either ignored them or actively tried to shoo them away. As they hung out on the campus of a large church in Phoenix one Saturday morning, a church staff member yelled at them for loitering outside the sanctuary. As they walked away, they prayed that God would change their frustrated attitudes and that God would convict the man who had kicked them out. When they went back to the church the next day for the service, the same man sought them out and apologized with tears. The powerful part about the story, I thought, is that if they had allowed themselves to be embittered and unforgiving, they would never have had the opportunity to be reconciled to that man. Yankoski ended the story by saying, “Love can’t cover wrongs if we let frustrations and failures keep us apart” (168-9).

    Even though Mike’s descriptions of life on the streets may be something that will make many Christians uncomfortable, I can’t help the feeling that he was holding back. He mentions at the outset that he has cleaned up the language out of consideration for his publisher. This reminded me of the quote from Tony Campolo that I heard many years ago: “I have three things I’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a shit. What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.” I can understand the consideration, but I think it’s a shame that a Christian publisher is more concerned about sanitizing bad words than it is about being honest about the desperate situation that many people face on the streets of America. Nevertheless, this book is a start, and I’d recommend it for all American Christians who need to be challenged to treat the poor with love, as God commands – and that’s a whole lot of us.

    2. Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts: Seven Questions to Ask Before (and After) You Marry by Les and Leslie Parrott. As Mary and I have been getting ready for marriage, we have been reading a few marriage books. This one, by a married couple who teach at Seattle Pacific University, could be a bit corny at times, but was very good. The questions at the end of each chapter were good conversation starters for Mary and me. I’d recommend it to Christian couples who are getting ready for their marriage and would like to talk through some of the issues of perennial conflict that might come up.

    3. Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt. I was excited to take a look at this book ever since I saw the author mentioned in an article about driving in the NY Times. The article looked at why some people are early mergers and some are late mergers when they are approaching a construction zone. I learned a lot of interesting facts over the course of reading the book, but overall it was not a page-turner. I enjoyed, for example, reading the story of how Sweden switched from having everyone drive on the left to having everyone drive on the right, was interested to hear why people in SUVs tend to speed more, and was fascinated to find that roundabouts are safer than traditional intersections. What I didn’t like about it was that it lacked an overarching argument that Vanderbilt was building from chapter to chapter (or if it did have one, it was extremely subtle). The chapters, while many of them were interesting, could have been individual essays with no relation to one another. I learned a lot of facts while reading the book, but the book as a whole lacked focus.

    Here is my favorite paragraph from the book, from the chapter “Why You Shouldn’t Drive with a Beer-Drinking Divorced Doctor Named Fred on Super Bowl Sunday in a Pickup Truck in Rural Montana: What’s Risky on the Road and Why” –

    Grimly tally the number of people who have been killed by terrorism in the United States since the State Department began keeping records in the 1960s, and you’ll get a total of less than 5,000 – roughly the same number, it has been pointed out, as those who have been struck by lightning. But each year, with some fluctuation, the number of people killed in car crashes in the United States tops 40,000. More people are killed on the roads each month than were killed in the September 11 attacks. In the wake of those attacks, polls found that many citizens thought it was acceptable to curtail civil liberties to help counter the threat of terrorism, to help preserve our “way of life.” Those same citizens, meanwhile, in polls and in personal behavior, have routinely resisted traffic measures designed to reduce the annual death toll (e.g., lowering speed limits, introducing more red-light cameras, stiffer blood alcohol limits, stricter cell phone laws). Ironically, the normal business of life that we are so dedicated to preserving is actually more dangerous to the average person than the threats against it. (271)

  • The Bible as Story

    Here are the notes for the sermon I delivered today at Bellingham Covenant Church. Again, these are just the notes, so they may seem cryptic at times.

    (Hebrews 1:1-2, Acts 17:22-33)

    Intro: This short sermon series (three weeks) draws on the book “The Blue Parakeet” by Scot McKnight. The title comes from a bird that he saw in his backyard one day… …he calls “blue parakeet passages” the parts of the Bible that we are uncomfortable with and don’t know what to do with.

    Today’s sermon is about how to read the Bible in the right way so there aren’t passages that we ignore because we’re uncomfortable with them. The best way to do this is to see the Bible as Story.

    The Big Story: Creation (Genesis 1-2), Crack-up (Genesis 3-11), Covenant Community (Genesis 12-Malachi), Christ Redeems (Matthew-Revelation 20), Consummation (Revelation 21-22).

    Reading the Bible as a Story is difficult, because it means that we need to know the Bible. It has to be in our bones. It has to shape our imaginations, and how we see the world. But that’s hard, and Scot McKnight in his book points out five shortcuts we take around reading the Bible as Story:

    1. the Bible as Lawbook: People come to the Bible saying, “Just tell me what to do.” The Bible does have laws in it, but when you treat the Bible as lawbook only, you distort it. Laws are ALWAYS in context. They are expressions of how the people of God are to live at a particular time in history. Examples: Exodus 20:2 – “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” Matthew 5:1-2 “His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them.”

    2. the Bible as Catalogue of Blessings and Promises – When you read the Bible as catalogue of blessings and promises, there are a lot of passages that are useless, like Job or Ecclesiastes or anything about exile. Or anything in the New Testament about persecution. When we treat the Bible as a catalogue of blessings and promises, we don’t know what to do when life gets rough.

    3. the Bible as Rorschach Inkblots – The Rorschach test is a series of inkblots, where the psychologist asks you what you see. When we read the Bible like this, we see what is in our head. Republicans think Jesus is a Republican. Democrats think Jesus is a Democrat. We see what we want to see, and ignore everything else. People who read the Bible like this open the Bible and say, “Tell me I’m OK.” They don’t want to be challenged. But the Bible should challenge us.

    4. the Bible as a Puzzle – These people cut out certain verses and organize them in stacks. In the end, the Bible doesn’t have to be read, because they already know what it says. If you read the Bible like this, you end up having to bend over backwards to explain away passages that don’t fit in with your puzzle. These people put the Bible in a cage.

    5. the Bible through the eyes of a Maestro – There are two main maestros in the Bible: Jesus and Paul. The Reformers read everything in the light of what Paul said. Martin Luther wanted to cut James out of the Bible because he was reading the whole Bible through what Paul said. We have to embrace each biblical author in order to get a sense of the whole Story. Each biblical author told his part of the story in his day in his way, and we need to listen to each of them to get a sense of what the Story is about.

    We just read two passages that show the Bible is a story.

    The first one is the author of the letter to the Hebrews saying that God speaks in various days in various ways. He spoke in Moses’ days in Moses’ ways, in David’s days in David’s ways, and so on.

    The Bible is a big Story, but in every age there are different expressions of it. It is a Big Story made up of little stories. God always speaks in a way that people can understand. Now God speaks to us in our day in ways that we can understand. He’s not too proud to come down to our level; he has never been too proud to do this.

    The key to these stories is Jesus. He is the ultimate revealing of what God is like.

    The second passage we read is Paul telling the Story to one group of people – non-Jews in Athens – in a way that they can understand.

    The next time you read the book of Acts, focus on all the different sermons. You will see that Peter, Stephen, Philip and Paul preach basically the same story, but they tell a slightly different version every time so that the people they are speaking to can understand it. When Peter speaks to Jews, he draws on the Jewish scriptures (our Old Testament) to show that Jesus is the Messiah prophesied in those scriptures.

    Here, when Paul talks to Greeks, he quotes Greek poets in verse 28. But he’s not saying, “What you believe is OK.” He speaks to people in a way that they can understand, but he challenges them by criticizing their idolatry and talking about Jesus’ resurrection.

    These two passages (and many others!) show what reading the Bible as Story is all about. It is about understanding that the Bible is a Big Story that is made up of little stories held together by that Big Story. And the only way to make sense of the blue parakeets (the passages that we don’t understand or that make us uncomfortable) is to set each in the context of the Big Story.

    In closing, I want you to take away a few points about seeing the Bible as a Story:

    1. In order to know the Bible’s story, you need to spend time with the Bible. No Shortcuts! Otherwise it won’t make sense, and there will be blue parakeets flying all over the place.

    Example: Scholars say that the book of Revelation contains over 500 allusions to the Old Testament, and not one of them is a direct quote. It never says, “Isaiah said this,” or “The Psalms said that.” John assumed that his audience would get his references. If we don’t know the Bible, including the Old Testament, we won’t understand how each book fits into the whole.

    You can read through the Bible in a year if you read about four chapters a day, or in two years if you read two chapters a day. Study Bibles are very helpful for background information.

    2. The Story continues. The last two chapters of the Bible, Revelation 21-22, tell about the end of history, and we’re not there yet. That means the church is part of the Story, and you and I are part of the Story.

    If we want to make sense of our stories, we need to know the Big Story. When we know the Big Story, we will be better able to understand how our stories fit in.

    The Story continues in the church. “Sola scriptura” doesn’t mean we should only have the Bible. It means that the Bible trumps tradition and can correct it. If we act like we are the first people to ever be able to read it correctly, we have made a mistake. This is how cults get founded.

    3. When we share the Story with others, we need to do our best to tell the story in a way that people can understand.

    Peter spoke to Jews one way in Acts 2, and Paul spoke to Greeks a different way in Acts 17. And they both told the story differently from the way the Old Testament prophets told it. They were telling the same story, but in different ways so that different people could understand it.

    Telling the story so people can understand it does not mean that we take the plot out of the story. We need to say, “Your story gets some things right, but here’s a story that gets everything right.” This is offensive to some people. We should be humble and say something like, “There are some things I don’t know about the Bible’s Story, but what I do know is true.”

    When we share the Story with other people, we need to listen to them and do our best to figure out what parts of the Story will grab them. In all this, we trust the Holy Spirit to open people’s hearts. We can’t do that. All we can do is tell the story the best way we know how: as the story of God’s rescue mission to save a hurting and broken world.

  • Driving Again

    This summer has been great. Since I stopped driving a school bus for the summer in late June, I’ve devoted more time to reading, working at the church more, and wedding planning. School started again last Wednesday, and despite the fact that I won’t have time to do those other things as much, it is good to get back to work.

    One major change from last spring is that I am now working much more than I did at the end of the school year last year. When I was hired on as a bus driver in April, I got the route that nobody else wanted: a 4.25-hour route where I was only driving elementary school kids to school. Most other routes have a high school/middle school route in addition to elementary, which kicks them up quite a bit in hours.

    There was some shuffling that went on this summer, though. Because of budget cuts, three routes were eliminated. This would have put me and the others at the bottom of the food chain in jeopardy, except for the fact that four drivers left, three of them through retirement. The day before school started, all the bus drivers got together in a room, and when the “bidding” process was over, someone had taken my 4.25-hour route (which had jumped up to 5 hours over the summer because it was combined with another route). That was the bad news. But the good news is that instead I took a 6.25-hour route. And not only that, but it is the same route that I drove for five months last school year as a substitute – so I know most of the kids already. Despite the fact that it is a longer route than my former route, nobody wanted it because it mostly picks up kids from the “projects” (subsidized housing) on a nearby Indian reservation. Because of that, it has a bad reputation with the other bus drivers. And honestly, the elementary kids on the route can be a little wild – mostly, I think, because some of them don’t have a lot of structure and parental supervision. But the middle school and high school kids are no worse, behavior-wise, than any other route. So, despite the fact that I have to get up at 5:30 in the morning, I’m satisfied with where things sit. With a wedding coming up, I can use all the extra cash I can get.

  • August 2009: Books Read

    1. Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: Moving From Affluence to Generosity by Ronald J. Sider. This book came out in 1977, and is regarded by many as a “classic.” The version I read was the fifth edition, updated in (I think) 2004.

    The book comes in four parts: the first part depicts the state of the world today, in which there are billions of poor people and millions of affluent people who could help. The second part shares a biblical perspective on poverty and possessions. The third attempts to answer the question, “What causes poverty?” And the fourth shares practical steps that Christians in rich countries can follow to both simplify their own lives and make wise contributions to making the world a more just and fair place.

    This was a challenging book for me. Although I don’t think of myself as affluent, I certainly live in an affluent part of the world and enjoy many more conveniences than those people who have to live on a few dollars a day. The main things that I got out of this book were 1) practical tips on living more simply, while simultaneously fostering community, and 2) a greater understanding of the economics of poverty. Lack of understanding the latter, I think, is a major obstacle that keeps Christians from helping the poor. We think that the foreign aid rich countries give to poor countries is a lot, but most actually give less than 1 percent of their GNP in foreign aid – and much of this aid is tied to their own foreign policy interests. We think that this aid is more than enough to make up for inequalities caused by things like tariffs and the abusive practices of some multi-national corporations, but it is not. This is definitely a book that all Christians in wealthy nations should read. Even if not everyone agrees with Sider’s practical proposals, the problem of poverty is something that all Christians – if they are reading their Bibles and are genuinely seeking to be more like Jesus – are called to address.

    2. Praying With the Church: Following Jesus Daily, Hourly, Today by Scot McKnight. McKnight was raised in a Christian tradition that had no use for daily set prayers, but as an adult he has come to appreciate and even love them. Like McKnight, I was raised in a Christian tradition that did not have set prayers (though we did recite the Lord’s Prayer and the “Gloria Patri” every week in church). As an adult, I have been more and more interested in the practice of daily prayer times as I have come to understand how deep they go in the Christian tradition.

    McKnight’s book is a quick read and it comes in two parts: the first deals with Jesus’ own use of set prayers (Jews of his time recited prayers daily, and what we call the “Lord’s Prayer” is Jesus teaching his disciples something to pray every day). The second part serves as an introduction to four prayer books: the Orthodox Manual of Eastern Orthodox Prayers, the Roman Catholic Liturgy of the Hours, the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, and Phyllis Tickle’s modern ecumenical Divine Hours. I would recommend this book to anyone who, like me, wants to have a richer prayer life and who is less familiar with the tradition of set prayers and how to use a prayer book.

    3. The Ascent of a Leader: How Ordinary Relationships Develop Extraordinary Character and Influence by Bill Thrall, Bruce McNichol and Ken McElrath. Throughout my time in graduate school, I felt that it was more important to spend my time reading deep theology books than leadership books. But as I grow closer to (hopefully) taking on more leadership in a church setting, and as I become more aware that it is rarely bad theology that gets pastors kicked out of churches, I’ve become more interested in leadership literature. Earlier this year I read Now, Discover Your Strengths, and I’ve just recently completed The Ascent of a Leader.

    The “ascent” the authors talk about is climbing the “character ladder” rather than the “capacity ladder.” The capacity ladder is what leaders are able to do on their own, and it comes with four rungs: discover what I can do, develop my capacities, acquire a title or position and attain individual potential. Climbing up just this kind of ladder can lead to loneliness and failure. Rather, spurred on by environments and relationships of grace, leaders should climb the character ladder: trust God and others, choose vulnerability, align with truth, pay the price and discover destiny. Once you start to climb the character ladder, you can integrate it with the capacity ladder, “leveraging our capacities far beyond what we could have accomplished without character” (143). I found this book to be a good reminder of how important character is in everyday life.

    4. The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible by Scot McKnight. I’d heard a lot about this little book in recent months, and when I was at the Covenant’s annual meeting in Portland this summer, I was able to pick it up. The title comes from a time when McKnight was sitting in his backyard and saw a strange blue bird that he had never seen before. Turns out it was a parakeet that had escaped from someone’s cage. The “blue parakeets” of the title are “oddities in the Bible that we prefer to cage and silence rather than to permit into our sacred mental gardens” (208). Issues like Sabbath, foot washing, tithing and women in ministry are blue parakeets that many of us don’t quite know what to do with: do we try to retrieve all practices from biblical times? Do we try to retrieve only what we can salvage for our day and our culture? Do we read through tradition? Or do we read in dialogue with tradition? McKnight counsels us to read the Bible as a Story. We should read this Story in order to get to know the God behind it. And we should discern through God’s Spirit and in the context of our community how to continue living that Story in our own day. McKnight provides an example of discernment in the issue of women in ministry.

    This is a wonderful book, and I hope it finds its way into the hands of lots of people. All Christians interpret the Bible in some way, but there are so few books for a popular audience on how to best interpret it. As a result, many are left thinking that the way their pastor or their immediate community interprets the Bible is self-evidently the only way. This is unfortunate.

    This isn’t a perfect book, by any means. Since it is short, and meant for a popular audience, McKnight ends up dealing with some complicated issues very briefly. As a result, I doubt whether he will convince many people who, for example, are thoroughly antagonistic to women’s ordination. But since the book is for a popular audience, and no popular book can deal with these issues in great detail, I still highly recommend it.

    5. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. I have never seen the movie version of this book, and I was surprised on reading it to find that Scarlett O’Hara is one of the more malevolent and despicable literary protagonists I have ever read about – and I have read Anna Karenina. Like Anna Karenina, the real hero of this book is someone besides the main character: in Anna Karenina it is Levin (who, I’ve heard, Tolstoy modeled after himself), and in Gone With the Wind, it seems to me that the heroine is really Melanie Wilkes. But in both books, the intended hero is far overshadowed by protagonists who are such finely written, true-to-life characters that, despite their badness, they steal the show. It’s a great credit to Margaret Mitchell that she could create such a believable character as Scarlett – even if she is so believable that I genuinely didn’t like her.

    6. The Theology of the Book of Revelation by Richard Bauckham. We have been reading through the book of Revelation in our Bible study, and I have taken it on myself to do background reading and lead the discussion. Part of that background reading has been this fantastic little book (it’s only 169 pages). Bauckham, who retired a couple of years ago from being Professor of New Testament at St. Andrews, digs into the theological content of Revelation and finds that it has perhaps the most developed trinitarian theology in the New Testament. He doesn’t spend a lot of time criticizing various interpretations of the book, but it’s clear that he doesn’t think futurist or historicist interpretations do a very good job of making sense of the imagery in the book. This is a dense little book, and it doesn’t move chronologically through the text. For those who want to read it, I’d recommend reading Revelation first to get a sense of it, then read this book, and then go back and read Revelation again with new eyes.

  • July 2009: Books Read

    1. The Essential Shakespeare Handbook, by Leslie Dunton-Downer and Alan Riding. Since I went to a contestant tryout for the game show Jeopardy! in May, I’ve suddenly grown very curious about certain subjects that show up repeatedly on the show. Like Shakespeare. I took a Shakespeare class in college, but there were still lots of things I didn’t know about Shakespeare’s writings. We read several of his plays, but I didn’t get the overview of all his works that might come in handy if I were ever on the show. So I decided to get that overview from this book.

    It’s a great book for the purpose I read it for. There are shelves and shelves of books about Shakespeare, but I found that not many of them are very good for getting plot synopses and character listings for all his plays. Also, not all of them have nifty color photographs, like this one. It also mentioned later stage and screen adaptations of various plays. I found it helpful for finding out information that I didn’t know about Shakespeare’s lesser plays (like The Two Noble Kinsmen, or Pericles), and also deciding which ones I haven’t read that I might like to someday (like King Lear).

    2. Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life by Douglas V. Porpora. I picked this book up for free from the religion editor of the LA Times eight years ago. I had never heard of Porpora, but something about the title and a few pages I read stuck out to me. After sitting on my shelf for eight years, I decided to pick it up and see what it was about.

    Porpora, a sociologist who teaches at Drexel University (or did, when this book was published), sets out to affirm moral meaning in a society where meaninglessness presses in on all sides. He seeks to call us back to our human vocation – or rather, to the idea that humans have a vocation that can be discerned and fulfilled.

    While I found some aspects of his argument to be fascinating and dead-on, the overall argument I thought was weak and inadequately supported. It seemed like he meandered through a land devoid of meaning for several chapters, then mustered the energy for a final chapter that was meant to inspire, but fell flat. A big reason for this was that I thought he was not specific enough in what his call actually entailed. Will the idea of a human vocation (even if we do not know what it is) be inspiring or comforting for people who feel a lack of meaning or purpose in their lives? Porpora identifies himself as a Catholic in the book, and I was disappointed, as a Christian, that he did not enunciate the Christian vision of the human vocation. Even if he finally believes that the Christian view of human vocation is not the only one, it would have been more helpful for him to say something more specific.

    Nevertheless, the book was worth reading for some inspired passages, like these:

    The tendency is to think that belief in objective truth makes us intolerant of others’ perspectives. It need not. What belief in objective truth should make us intolerant of are those beliefs of our own we cannot justify. Unless we subject ourselves to such rigor, we entertain no critical thought and experience no intellectual growth. (21)

    Secular humanism has been attracted to Judeo-Christian morality, but it has scrapped the Judeo-Christian cosmos that underlies it without putting anything in its place. Without such metaphysical grounding, rights talk threatens actually to become the empty rhetoric that postmodernist philosophers suppose it to be. (74)

    Although atheists and agnostics rightly assess the objective evidence for God as inconclusive, they tend to forget that the objective evidence is not the only evidence anyone brings to the case. Even atheists and agnostics are also entering into evidence their own personal experience. It is just that in their personal experience, God is absent. (127)

    For Jesus, God is our moral exemplar. Thus, if Jesus’ ethic were to be formulated as a rule, that rule would not be, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” but rather, “Do unto others as God does unto you.” … Without either Jesus or God as exemplars of the heroically good, the Christian ethic atrophies into a banal norm of reciprocity, what we now call the golden rule. No wonder other discourses, those of utilitarianism or self-fulfillment, encroach on it. (165)

    The real religious divide in America does not concern belief. It concerns emotional attachment to the sacred. There are those who are emotionally attached to God and those who are emotionally alienated from the God in whom they believe. (299)

  • If Calvin Had a Worship Band

    2009 is the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth, and his theology has had a huge impact on the life of the church. Particularly influential are his doctrines regarding predestination, and the later systematization of them into the Five Points of Calvinism.

    However, there are areas of church life that have not been greatly influenced by Calvin. One very important area of the church that has unfortunately been minimally affected by Calvinism is that of hymns and praise songs.

    If you look at the songs that we sing from our earliest years in the church, you can see that little of Calvin’s influence can be found. Take the classic children’s song, “Jesus Loves Me,” as an example. Would Calvin have written such a saccharine-sweet ode to the love of Christ? Perhaps, but he would have changed just a few words. I would like to propose a new title for this song, which would reflect the Calvinist influence on the church: “Jesus Might Love Me, if I’m One of the Elect.”

    Or take the first two lines of another popular song that we teach children in our churches, “Jesus Loves the Little Children/ All the children of the world.” Does he REALLY? Come on! You and I both know that he doesn’t, or at least if he does, he doesn’t extend saving grace to all of them. If we were to edit these lines to add a more Calvinist flavor, we might end up with this version: “Jesus loves some of the children/ We don’t know how many for sure, but I’m guessing around 18 percent.”

    The Calvinist reformation of our worship would extend far beyond what we teach our children in Sunday school. Let’s now take a look at one of our most popular hymns, John Newton’s “Amazing Grace.” The first verse goes: “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me” – nothing to tamper with here. The word “wretch,” in particular, is excellent. When we move on to the next line, we find: “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.” Whoa! Wait a minute! Once was LOST!? This simply will not do. The elect were chosen before the beginning of the world! How about this: “I once was unaware of my found-ness, and now I can see that I was never lost in the first place.” There. MUCH better.

    Now that we’ve looked at a classic hymn, why don’t we turn our eyes to something more contemporary? How about the praise chorus, “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus”? For those of you who may be unfamiliar with it, here’s how it goes:

    I have decided to follow Jesus
    I have decided to follow Jesus
    I have decided to follow Jesus
    No turning back, No turning back

    Pretty simple. But the first lines need a little work. First of all, WHO decides to follow Jesus? Not us! We’re dragged into following Jesus, whether we like it or not (but of course we are MADE to like it)! The second line of the chorus is a bit better, although it does imply that there is a possibility of turning back, which of course there is not. I would propose re-writing this chorus in the following way:

    Jesus has decided that I will follow
    Jesus has decided that I will follow
    Jesus has decided that I will follow
    No turning back — As if that were an option

    Even some of our most beloved Christmas songs could stand a little Calvinist fine-tuning. On the extreme side we have “The Little Drummer Boy,” which should more appropriately be titled, “The Little Pelagian Drummer Boy Who Thought That He Could Bribe God With His Filthy And Useless Good Works.” But most other Christmas songs seem to be just fine, since they mostly stick to talking about the scene in Bethlehem, or divine attributes. However, there is one lyric that raises the eyebrow somewhat: the second verse of “Away In A Manger,” which says, “The little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.” Well, now, we must admit that this indicates a laudable desire in the author to preserve God’s wholly otherness, even in the person of Jesus. But it would be rather strange for a baby to not cry at all, and in fact this seems dangerously close to the heresy of Apollinarianism. A satisfying compromise might be to amend the offending lyric to read as follows: “The little Lord Jesus cried, but in his humanity, not in his divinity.”

    In short, we have a long way to go before Calvinism influences our worship as it has influenced our theology. There are many fine hymns and praise songs out there that speak of the glory and mysterious will of God, but they’re vastly outnumbered. If only that Arminian Charles Wesley had been on our side. . .

  • Bureaucracy at its “Best”

    I got a letter recently that made me angry. It was from the U.S. State Department. It was writing me with regard to my recent passport renewal application.

    It said, in part:

    There is a discrepancy between the data written on your current passport application and the data shown on your previous passport.

    To which I responded, in my mind, “No S%$#, State Department.”

    Let me explain. In 2000, before studying abroad for a summer, I sent in a passport renewal application. I filled out the required form, and wrote down my birth date: April 6. When my shiny new passport came, it contained a birth date that was almost, but not quite, my own: it had the same year and month, but read “16” instead of “6.” I thought at the time, “This is unfortunate. But my trip is coming up too quickly for me to do anything about it now. Hopefully it won’t cause any problems.” And it didn’t. At least, not then.

    Two years later, in 2002, I was teaching English at a secondary school in Prague, Czech Republic. In order to have this job, I needed a visa provided by the Czech government. I waited a very long time for my Czech visa. I wasn’t too worried about it, though, because other foreign English teachers at the same school were waiting a long time for theirs too. But when December rolled around, and I had already been teaching at the school for four months, I got the bad news: my visa application was rejected. The Czech government never told me why my visa application was rejected, but my guess is that the birth date on my visa application and on my passport were different. The State Department peon who mistyped my birth date had, most likely, now cost me a job.

    Now that I realized this birth date discrepancy could cause me problems, I went immediately to the U.S. Embassy in Prague. There, I was able to talk to the appropriate people and produce the appropriate paperwork, and an official stamp was added to my passport. It said, in effect, “The birth date of the bearer of this passport has been corrected to read April 6.” There the matter has rested for seven years.

    Fast forward to July 2009. I have applied for a renewal of my passport, and what has reared its ugly head again? What has returned from the dead like a monster in a B-movie!?! This mistyped birth date!!!

    The frustrating thing about dealing with bureaucracies as large as the U.S. State Department is that there is no way I can find the person who originally mistyped my birth date. He or she may no longer work in the State Department. I can’t sit down and have a heart-to-heart in which I share, perhaps with tears, how much trouble this mistake has caused, and urge him or her to be more careful next time.

    However, there is good news (I think). Despite my misgivings about navigating such a huge bureaucracy, I called the State Department, talked to a couple of different people, and referred the second one to my corrected birth date. She said that I would be contacted again if there were any further problems. Otherwise they would just continue to process my application. That was a week ago, and no news has been good news. So perhaps bureaucracies can work efficiently at times, after all.

  • “A New Kind of Normal” – Loneliness

    I preached this sermon yesterday at my church. It was a difficult one to write. I think this is because it was more topical instead of being based on a single Bible passage. That made it harder for me to decide what to put in and leave out. In the end, I may have put too much in. In spite of that, my prayer is that God spoke through a fragile instrument.

    p.s. – These are my notes, slightly fleshed-out so that they make sense. Not the entire text of the sermon.

    Introduction:
    We are in the midst of a series called “A New Kind of Normal,” based on the book by Carol Kent. We are examining places where our lives are not what we would want. We would prefer for things to return to our definition of “normal.” Instead, we sometimes need to redefine “normal” based on our actual experience.

    Often when we think of people who are alone, we think of single people, divorced people and widowed people. But those are not the only people who struggle with loneliness. Married people can also be lonely. This sermon is directed toward all people who experience loneliness, whether they are single, divorced, widowed or yes, even married. The sermon is in three parts: the first looks at our experience of loneliness, the second looks at what the Bible says about loneliness, and the third presents two steps to a “solution” for loneliness.

    Our experience of loneliness

    Loneliness is a big part of our society, and it has become bigger in the last 50 years or so.

    The most recent census showed that 25 percent, or 27.2 million of U.S. households consisted of just one person. In 1950, it was just 10 percent.
    Robert Putnam wrote a book ten years ago called Bowling Alone, about the loss of community in American life. The book gets its title from the fact that the number of people who bowl in America has gone up in recent years, but the number of bowling leagues has gone down. People today are less likely to form associations with others than they were a generation ago.

    Loneliness has even become more prevalent in the last 20 years or so.
    A study in the American Sociological Review from 2006 showed that the average American had just 2 friends with whom they could discuss matters important to them. The number of people with NO close friends in 1985 was 10 percent. In 2006 – 25 percent. Another 19 percent said they had just one: their spouse.

    This may seem strange, because we have much more connecting technology now than we used to: cell phones, e-mail, Facebook. And yet people are lonely. People have an itch for community, but it’s not being scratched by how we use technology. Why is that?

    What the Bible says about loneliness

    Let’s look for an answer in what the Bible says about loneliness. If you look up “loneliness” in a concordance, you won’t find much. The Bible was addressed to a culture that was much different from our own. It’s not that people didn’t experience loneliness back then. It’s that if you were on your own, loneliness was the least of your problems. The three most vulnerable types of people in ancient societies were widows, orphans and aliens – people who didn’t have the support structure of family.

    But the Bible does have something to say about loneliness. Let’s begin at the beginning. You may want to write these passages down to look at later.

    Genesis 2:18
    In the beginning, God made Adam, the first human, and put him in the Garden of Eden. After he put him there, God said, “It is not good for man to be alone.” Then, after having Adam look at and name all the animals, God created woman.

    Then along came the serpent and convinced them to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which God had told them not to do. Then come the events of Genesis 3:8-13. They hear God coming, and for the first time they hide. They are alienated from God. Adam blames the woman, the woman blames the serpent, and the serpent didn’t have a leg to stand on, as the old joke goes.

    The roots of loneliness are right here: because our ancestors suspected God was not working in their best interests, there is now a loss of intimacy between humans and God. Our natural inclination now is to be alienated from God and from other people. Is it any wonder that people struggle with loneliness?

    Leviticus 13:45-46
    In the rest of the Old Testament, from time to time you see people who have lost family or community. Here in Leviticus, people with leprosy or other skin diseases are told they must live alone. This gives new meaning to the fact that Jesus healed lepers in his earthly ministry. Part of his purpose was to restore community. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

    1 Kings 19:1-5a, 13b-18
    Here we see the prophet Elijah after he had killed 450 false prophets. Despite this great victory, he was afraid of Jezebel and ran away. This is a kind of loneliness that was his own fault. He was not really alone, but he had pity on himself and was afraid of the queen more than he was afraid of God.

    The Psalmist’s loneliness: Psalms of Lament. Two good examples: Psalm 88:8, 15-18, 102:1-11. In psalms of lament, the psalmists feel abandoned by God and by other people. So far we’ve seen at least two kinds of loneliness: sometimes loneliness happens because community is taken from us, but sometimes loneliness happens because we are feeling frightened and sorry for ourselves.

    New Testament loneliness: Jesus did not experience loneliness for most of his life. The only time he experienced loneliness was on the cross. In Matthew and Mark’s accounts of the crucifixion, Jesus calls out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He is quoting the opening of Psalm 22. Jesus was experiencing a distance from his Father that he had never known. Jesus always referred to God as his Father, but here he uses the less intimate term “God.” At the end of Psalm 22, the psalmist is vindicated by God, and Jesus knew that he, too, would be vindicated by his resurrection. All the same, he experienced abandonment on the cross, even if he knew it was temporary.

    2 Timothy 4:9-18. The final stop on our tour of loneliness in the Bible has us look at Paul’s loneliness at the end of his second letter to Timothy. Paul is in prison and writes to his protege Timothy toward the end of his life. He expresses the desolation that several of his friends and associates have left him. He knows that God is always with him, but that doesn’t take away the pain of being betrayed and deserted by humans.

    So what do we learn from this crash course in what the Bible says about loneliness? We learn that:

    1. Loneliness is a result of alienation from God and other people.
    2. Loneliness can happen because of self-pity and self-absorption (as in the case of Elijah).
    3. Loneliness can happen because we lack a community, or have been abandoned by our friends (as in the case of Paul).
    4. Loneliness can happen if we feel abandoned by God.

    The “solution” to loneliness: moving from loneliness to solitude with God and from solitude to community.

    “Solution” is in quotes because there is no permanent solution to loneliness in this life. It is part of the human experience. Even if we go through long stretches where we don’t experience loneliness, none of us is completely immune.

    Some of you may ask “Why isn’t marriage a solution to loneliness?” Two reasons: First, we’re not in the Garden of Eden anymore. Even if we get married, it’s still possible to feel lonely. Loneliness has a lot to do with our expectations of other people. If we expect a marriage partner to ease our loneliness and make us feel good all the time, we are going to be disappointed. Second, not everyone is going to get married. I don’t want to present marriage as a solution for single people, because we will not all experience marriage.

    The first step in the “solution” is solitude. When we’re lonely, the biggest temptation is to distract ourselves. We call or e-mail people; we check our Facebook. But the way to make loneliness productive is to turn that loneliness into solitude. We need to go into the desert of loneliness and turn it into a garden of solitude. Henri Nouwen wrote,

    “When we live with a solitude of heart, we can listen with attention to the words and the worlds of others, but when we are driven by loneliness, we tend to select just those remarks and events that bring immediate satisfaction to our own craving needs.” – Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out

    When we are lonely, we are restless and unhappy, and we reach out to other people in order to have them meet our needs. When we are in solitude, we are content, we are listening to God, and we are able to listen to, care for and be present with people. What does solitude look like? Jesus gives us an example. He often sought solitude with his Father:

    Mark 1:35 – “In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.”
    Luke 5:15 -”Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.”
    Luke 6:12 – “One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God.” Jesus led a very busy life, but always made time for solitude. When we’re lonely, shouldn’t we at least ask ourselves: am I reaching out to people for selfish reasons? Do I need solitude with God right now?

    There are lots of ways to practice solitude. Spending daily time in prayer is one. Setting aside regular time to go on silent retreats is another. People who are really experienced with solitude can do it even in the midst of people. Richard Foster wrote:

    Solitude is more a state of mind and heart than it is a place. There is a solitude of the heart that can be maintained at all times. Crowds, or the lack of them, have little to do with this inward attentiveness. It is quite possible to be a desert hermit and never experience solitude. But if we possess inward solitude we do not fear being alone, for we know that we are not alone. Neither do we fear being with others, for they do not control us. In the midst of noise and confusion we are settled into a deep inner silence. Whether alone or among people, we always carry with us a portable sanctuary of the heart.” – Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline

    The second step in the “solution” is moving from solitude to community. And it’s really a two-step. We go from solitude to community, then back to solitude then back to community.

    The Bible tells us that God’s people ought to be a community that reaches out to the lonely. God’s people ought to be a family:
    Matthew 12:46-50 – Jesus: “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”
    John 19:26-27 – Jesus on the cross: “here is your mother,” and “here is your son.”
    Acts 2:45-47 – “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.”
    Galatians 6:10 – “let us do good to all people, especially those who belong to the family of believers.”
    Eph. 2:19 – “you are members of the household of God.”
    The early Christians knew this. When there were plagues in the cities of the Roman Empire, nearly everyone cleared out, except for the Christians. They stayed behind to take care of the sick and dying, whether they were biological family or not. Julian the Apostate at one point wrote to his pagan priests, saying that Christians put them to shame because Christians took care of everyone. The reason why pagan priests couldn’t do this as naturally is because their gods didn’t humble themselves and die like outcasts.

    Julian’s question to the pagan priests is a good question for us in the 21st century: “Why can’t we do the same thing?” We need to look to Luke 5:12-16 for guidance. Like the leper, we need to turn to Jesus to heal us from sin and the things that make us lonely, whether it is our self-pity, or whether we have been abandoned by others. When Jesus heals us, he always restores us to community. We always go from loneliness to solitude, and from solitude to community.

  • Truth Project 12: Community & Involvement (God Cares, Do I?)

    Now we have reached the final “tour” of the Truth Project, on Community.

    Del begins by quoting Matthew 22:33-40, wherein a Pharisee asks Jesus what the greatest commandment in the Law is. Jesus responds (referring to Deut. 6:4-9), “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Del also quotes a similar passage from Luke 10:25-29, in which the Pharisee, wanting to “justify himself,” asks, “And who is my neighbor?”

    Then Del takes us back through the “spheres” that he has introduced in the last several tours: God, the family, the church, the state, the general economic model and the labor sphere, saying that God has stamped his divine image on each one. Then he says that the sphere of community looks a little different because it doesn’t have any “authority” roles, but only “responsibility” roles. He says maybe this is why we neglect this sphere, because there’s no power in it.

    Returning to the passage in Luke, Del says that the Pharisee, in asking who his neighbor was, was looking for a checklist. Instead, Jesus told him what we think of as the parable of the Good Samaritan. Del calls it the “Story of the Good Neighbor.” In telling the story, Jesus didn’t answer the Pharisee’s question; he responded with what the man needed to hear. “He said what a neighbor was, and told him to go be a neighbor.” Del draws the “sphere” of community on the board, with Christ at the top, the neighbor below and to the right, and the needy below.

    Del quotes a series of passages from the Old Testament (1 Sam. 2:8, Job 5:11, Ps. 12:5, Ps. 72:4, 138:6, 12:5) and sums them all up by saying that “God has a deep heart for the needy.” Then he asks, “Who are the needy?” It’s the poor, orphans, widows, the sick and prisoners, but it’s also outcasts, the unpopular, the neglected, the left out, the homely, the last and others. Del tells two stories to illustrate how the needy are everywhere: the first is of a girl who everyone made fun of when Del was in school, and the second is of his first school dance, where Del’s dad called his attention to the fact that there were girls whom no one was asking to dance.

    Del then quotes another series of Bible passages, and ends by asking, “What other gods have a heart for the lowly?” This causes him to focus on the nature of God. He quotes Matt. 11:28-9, and says that for him, it was easy to think of God as powerful but the idea that God was humble was foreign. This is hard to miss in Jesus, though. At the Last Supper, he washed his disciples’ feet, and in John 14:4-9, he says, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.”

    But Del hastens to point out that humility is not timidity. He read a book about Jesus once called Man of Steel and Velvet. This is what Jesus is like.

    Then Del plays two videos. The first is of Fr. Robert Sirico, who says that Christian charity is different from philanthropy because of its view of the person as sacred. He quotes C.S. Lewis as saying, “You’ve never met a mere mortal.”

    The second video is of Flash, a tattoo artist who has made several appearances in previous video segments. In previous segments, he has come across as rough-edged and hostile to Christianity, but in this one he tells his story of abandonment and abuse, of pain and rejection by the church. He says, “I’ve only met a few Christians who act like what they say they are.”

    Del then asks why we are not involved. Sometimes it’s because we don’t care. But if you want to follow Jesus, you must get involved. If we don’t engage the culture, he says, how are we going to understand where people are coming from, their needs? “We have a serious credibility gap.”

    Then Del turns to the book of Jonah, in which God calls the prophet to go to Nineveh and prophesy but he runs away. Del says the focus of the story is on Nineveh. God cared about it and wanted to save it. “Should I not be concerned about that great city?” Del asks, “Do you think God’s not concerned with our culture?”

    Del says that we are called to transform culture. He says that Christianity changed the world through involvement. He points to the British anti-slave trade campaigner William Wilberforce as an example. He points to five characteristics that Wilberforce had that we can learn from:

    1. HIs whole life was animated by a deeply held, personal faith in Jesus Christ.
    2. He had a deep sense of calling that grew into conviction that he was to exercise his spiritual purpose in the realms of his secular responsibility.
    3. He was committed to the strategic importance of a band of like-minded friends devoted to working together in chosen ventures.
    4. He believed deeply in the power of ideas and moral beliefs to change culture through sustained public persuasion.
    5. He was willing to pay a steep cost for his courageous public stands and was persistent in pursuing his life task.

    There have been many Christians like him, Del says, and we are in good company. So what do we do? What is the next step? Del says that he has no clue. He isn’t going to advise people on what to do. But he does know the one who does: God.

    I thought that this was a great “tour” to end on. It would be easy for people to go through this whole curriculum and say, “Well, now I have a Christian worldview. Good for me,” instead of actually having it change the way they live. I liked the way that the title frames the question: “God Cares, do I?” God is not content to sit comfortably in church and scoff at the world; should I be?

    I also thought that the video of Flash was very powerful. As noted above, he comes across as being pretty rough around the edges, and in earlier tours he said some harsh and disturbing things. It was important to see the story behind who he is, and show that he is a human, made in God’s image, who God calls us to love and respect.

    And finally, I think on the one hand that Wilberforce is a great example of Christian cultural involvement, and on the other it was wise for Del to refrain from saying what people should do next. They should look for God to call them to what he wants them to do.

    There are just a few nitpicky things about this tour to point out. The first is that Del again bases a “sphere” on God’s internal relationships, saying that “He stamped that divine image on each [sphere].” I’ve already mentioned a couple of times, especially in Tour 7: Sociology, that I think this is a mistake and unbiblical. We can say that God wants our relationships to be a certain way, but I don’t think there’s enough biblical warrant to say that he wants our relationships in these “spheres” to look like the Trinity.

    Second, I liked that Del came across in this tour as concerned about where people are coming from. But I wonder whether this is enough to counteract the scoffing and dismissive tone he adopts elsewhere in the Truth Project. For example, in tour 10, he scoffs at people at Harvard, saying, “I’m not even sure they know what [truth] means.” In an earlier tour, he scoffs at his college philosophy professor, dismissing him by saying, “How foolish!” Del appears conflicted. On the one hand, he seems to have a real heart for people, and knows that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood” (Eph. 6:12). On the other, he seems at times to get carried away into an “Us vs. Them” mentality. I wonder which Del watchers of the Truth Project will listen to more?

    Finally, Del says that “we’re called to transform culture.” I don’t think this is the best way to frame things. Culture is a big thing (within our society, you could even speak of several different cultures), and transforming it is really out of our control (I get this idea from Andy Crouch’s book Culture Making, which I read recently). Even making laws can’t transform culture; laws are downstream from culture. Instead of talking about “transforming culture,” I would be more partial to the language of “being faithful” – listening to God’s call, and following him as faithfully as we can. We can make culture, but we can leave the culture transforming up to him.

  • Paleontologists at the Creation Museum

    I read this article yesterday about a group of paleontologists who visited the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY. For those interested in the interaction between Christianity (or, at least, one version of it) and science, it’s great reading. I found the following paragraphs most fascinating:

    Many of the paleontologists thought the museum misrepresented and ridiculed them and their work and unfairly blamed them for the ills of society.

    “I think they should rename the museum — not the Creation Museum, but the Confusion Museum,” said Lisa E. Park, a professor of paleontology at the University of Akron.

    “Unfortunately, they do it knowingly,” Dr. Park said. “I was dismayed. As a Christian, I was dismayed.”

    What I found most interesting about this is that here is a Christian paleontologist who thinks that her work is being misrepresented and ridiculed by other Christians. I think that those who run the Creation Museum have every right to interpret the Bible and scientific evidence the way they want, and argue publicly in the marketplace of ideas for their position. But ridiculing opposing points of view strikes me as being un-Christian. Yes, I know that those who run the Creation Museum are not the only people who ridicule opposing points of view. But for Christians to do that – and to draw attention to this ridicule by institutionalizing it in a museum – doesn’t seem right.