June 25, 2009.
Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett.
Two American-culture icons.
Dead on the same day.
The cynic says,
Why all the news coverage for Jacko and Farrah? There's more important news than the death of celebrities.
That's one way of looking at it.
The following is not a fully developed essay, as I often do when posting a blog, but just some thoughts I will share in our staff chapel tomorrow morning. Feel free to read them if you like.
"The true light which enlightens everyone was coming into the world." -John 1:9
Once a person comes to believe that Jesus is the Christ, there are two options for responding positively to this reality. Allow me to set them forth.
"We have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world" 1 John 4:14
Do you believe that Jesus is the Savior of the world? This is what the Apostle John claimed in both his gospel and his first epistle. But do you believe it? Do you really believe that Jesus is the savior of the world?
You know how the famous verse goes...
For God so loved the world, etc. And then the next verse:
For God did not send his Son into the the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.
Then in the next chapter the Samaritans in Sychar declare that they have come to believe that Jesus is the savior of the world.
(And I suspect they believed this because they saw how Jesus was capable of mending the breach of historic hostility which separated Jews and Samaritans.)
But do
you believe it? Do
you believe that Jesus is the savior of the world? I'm not asking if you believe if Jesus saves
individuals who are in the world, but whether you believe Jesus is the savior
of the world. Is Jesus the savior of God's creation and God's dream of human society living in harmony and exercising dominion as creation's caretakers? Do you believe that what was lost by the First Adam can be recovered by the Last Adam? Do you believe that the one Mary Magdalene thought was the gardener can restore the Garden?
Since the publication of
What to Do on the Worst Day of Your Life in March, I have given a few dozen interviews, mainly on talk radio, and I have noticed something that bothers me. These interviews have been pretty evenly divided between mainstream format radio and Christian format radio. Generally, the questions I'm given on mainstream radio are thoughtful, and at times challenging, leading to a lively and substantive conversation. Conversely, the questions I'm typically given on Christian radio are shallow and trite and I have to work at preventing the conversation from becoming glib. That may sound a bit harsh, but I'll stand by it.
Philip in the highlands
Peri, Philip and I spend Memorial Day well above treeline.
My heart's in the Highlands wherever I roam.
Highlands. I love this song. It's long. 16 minutes and 32 seconds. So slow down and enjoy life.
Enjoy Life. That's what I'll preach on Friday night. When we return from the highlands.
My heart's in the Highlands, can't see any other way to go.
Blessings,
BZ
Here's the tune...
Veritas. Truth.
Your first allegiance must be to truth.
You must love truth before you love God.
For without a primary love of truth, how do you know that the God you love is the God that
is?
Without primary allegiance to truth, you may just love your own
ideas which you call God.
If you don't love truth enough, you will sell it cheap.
Without a costly commitment to truth, you'll trade truth for certitude.
Certitude is a poor substitute for truth.
If all you want is cheap certitude, that's easy enough to come by. Just land on some opinion one way or the other, tell yourself you're certain, and that's that. No wrestling with doubt, no dark night of the soul, no costly agonizing over the matter, no testing yourself with hard questions. Just accept a secondhand assumption or a majority opinion or a popular sentiment or an inherited tradition as the final word and settle into certainty. You don't have think about it ever again. Ignorance is bliss. So is certitude.
But...
We live in a loud culture.
Religious rhetoric.
Political propaganda.
Commercial cacophony.
People can grow deaf to a constant din of shouting.
They shut it out as annoying background noise.
That's when a whisper can be heard above a roar.
A whisper that is a revelation of a real secret.
A whisper that belongs to a hidden mystery.
A whisper that people want to hear.
A whisper that can change the world.
No doubt, there is a time and place for a shout.
But there's something to be said for a whisper.
God's voice in the garden whispering like the wind.
God's whisper to Elijah in a voice still and small.
In a culture grown weary of angry rhetoric,
I hear the Holy Spirit say...
Truth can change a man in the wisdom of his days,
It whispers soft, but constantly,
You cannot live this way
I know a secret.
A beautiful secret.
But some secrets are too holy and too beautiful for buttons and bumper stickers.
Some truths are only desecrated when they are turned into slogans.
But once you believe something beyond being a slogan—
You believe it more, not less.
Like this...
The problem is I’m trying to say something with words, and that is by no means a precise medium; and it should not be assumed that words are anything more than an approximate representation of reality. What is the spoken word but puffs of air? What is the written word but a series of symbols? A-P-P-L-E is not an apple. And so trying to communicate what you are feeling, sensing, thinking with puffs of air and inscribed symbols. . . well, let’s just say it’s not an exact science. And what if what I’m feeling, sensing, thinking has to do with G O D?
(Sigh.)
Trying to use puffs of air and cute little symbols to say something about The One who is transcendent to the universe itself seems almost arrogant.
But then again God is not
only transcendent to the universe (though he is that too), but he has chosen to be a participant in the universe; and not only in the universe but in that curious species that is the human race. For God entered the human race through the most human event of all—conception and birth. And he continued his human journey all the way into death and clear through to the other side—resurrection. Incarnation and Resurrection. Everything that is genuinely Christian is in one way or another a manifestation of or a reflection upon Incarnation and Resurrection. If we understand Incarnation and Resurrection reasonably well, there is a reasonable chance we might get Christianity somewhat right. But if we don’t t do good thinking on Incarnation and Resurrection there is no chance at all of getting Christianity right. Instead, we’ll cook up some religious this or that and call it Christianity, but it will be nothing of the kind.
On this day of internal revenue
some of us are paid up,
some of us owe,
some of us await a refund,
some of us have no income to tax.
But all of us are taxed,
by war,
by violence,
by anxiety,
by deathliness.
And Caesar never gives any deep tax relief.
We render to Caesar. . .
to some it feels like a grab,
to some it is clearly a war tax,
to some—some few—
it is a way to contribute to the common good.
In any case we are haunted
by what we render to Caesar,
by what we might render to you,
by the way we invest our wealth and our lives,
when what you ask is an "easy yoke":
to do justice
to love mercy
to walk humbly with you.
Give us courage for your easy burden, so to live untaxed lives.
—Walter Brueggemann
So I ask you for the umpteenth time, dear blog reader, what does it mean to be saved? Does it mean some
part of you, your spirit let's say, is saved to exist in a non-spatial, non-temporal existence following your death? That your spirit is "harvested" for a "spiritual" postmortem existence? A saved ghost preserved in a heavenly museum? If so, small wonder that some think we've got heaven and hell all rolled into one.
Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
Yes, I know the Bible can be read in such a way that salvation looks like this -- part of you is saved for another time and place -- but it's a tragic misreading. And, sadly, it’s a common misreading. Which, I suppose, is to be expected, thanks to the massive doses of Platonism and Gnosticism which seem to be the very religious air we breathe. The "vapors" of Gnostic Platonism have caused popular American Christianity for the past two centuries to be unabashedly dualistic; to the extent that a dualistic reading of Scripture seems to be orthodox, when in fact it is entirely unorthodox.
It's frustrating.
made an observation about For Whom The Bell Tolls