It’s been said that everyone has a price. Great or small, this ‘price’ inherently slots us in categories, reveals our biases and ultimately exposes our values. For example, this Harvard lecture (video below) details the story of when automaker Ford is faced with the realization that it would be cost effective to pay off settlements to the injured or the families of fatally wounded customers than to recall defective automobiles.  It sounds creepy, but we all make similar choices on a daily basis.

What would you do?

What’s a life worth?

What’s the price tag on morality, pleasure and general welfare?

What’s your price?

We’re turning this dilemma into a First Friday installation that will take place on Friday, March 5 outside of theStory from 7-9pm. Below you’ll find the questions that we’ll be asking via anonymous means. There will be a live DJ, food, and probing creativity…all for ‘free’…

Tallied results will be posted on this site by Sunday, March 7, 2010.

See you on Friday.

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Recently there has been a resurgence in popular media in what some call ‘The God Debate’. Most thinking falls into one of two categories: Either ‘God Is Now Here’ or ‘God Is Nowhere’. In Acts 17, the Apostle Paul is wading through the same waters and its from there that we’ll be taking our lead this next month. Our aim will be to exegete the anti-God vibe that exists in our culture not in an attacking or defensive way (as some continue to do), but instead in a fashion that both legitimizes the questions and people who hold this worldview. In addition, our hope is that this series will lead to informed conversations while also creating fertile soil to form Christian response and engagement.

Regardless of which ‘side’ one finds themselves, it’s worth taking a second look at one another.

‘Look twice, Live once’ you could say

“Where does that leave God? The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear. Evolution is God's redundancy notice, his pink slip. But we have to go further. A complex creative intelligence with nothing to do is not just redundant. A divine designer is all but ruled out by the consideration that he must at least as complex as the entities he was wheeled out to explain. God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.” (Karen Armstrong from the Wall Street Journal)

 

 

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If Scripture is a means of God’s self revelation, then understanding it (on its terms and not ours) is of primary importance. Grabbing it by the right handle (literal parts as literal, figurative as figurative, historical as historical etc.) not only bring life to the reader, but also protects the text from saying, and humanity from doing, things that were never meant to be said or done. Understanding that the Scriptures are being co-authored – that its God’s story told through human lives and means - reminds us of the intimacy shared between Creator and creation. Continually adapting the text assures the reader that it has no shelf life, that its Truth is without expiry date.  And finally, with all this in mind, the Bible can be understood more as a transformational document then an informational one…which really has been God’s ultimate point in the first place. All told, the Bible becomes an experience to be entered, and not a book that one should probably read.

Below you’ll find some of the authors and ideas that helped form our thoughts this past month.

"You can't help nobody if you can't tell them the right story." (Walk the Line)

“I always thought of my life as a story; if there is a story there must be a story teller.” (GK Chesterton)

"A storytelling friend once told me a story about an anthropologist who happened to be in an African village when the first television was introduced.  For about two weeks, the people were captivated by its images, sounds and shows.  The old man who was the tribe's greatest storyteller stayed by his fire.  After a while, people began to drift away from the TV and gather again by the fire.  The anthropologist, observing this, asked on of the villagers why they no longer watched TV.  "Don't you think the television knows more stories than the old man?  He's never left the district and the TV brings in shows from around the world."  "Oh yes," replied the villager.  "The television knows more stories, but the storyteller knows me.""  (Dan Yashinsky)

“…our exposition must recognize that what we have in the text is proclamation.  The poem does not narrate “how it happened”, as though Israel were interested in the method of how the world became God’s world.  Such a way of treating the grand theme of creation is like reducing the marvel of any moving artistic experience to explorations in technique.  Israel is concerned with God’s lordly intent, not his technique. (Walter Brueggeman)

“… the biblical story cannot be narrowed down to something private, such as being sorry for your sins and ready to make amends. The aim is to return to God and the ways of God with his people. To return to the Story and everything and everyone in the Story. It has to do with entering a new way of life, taking up membership in the kingdom of God. Jesus is calling men and women to join him in a way of life that wills inclusion in the kingdom.” (Eugene Peterson)

“The Bible is essentially an open, imaginative narrative of God's staggering care for the world, a narrative that feeds and nurtures us into an obedience that builds community…” (Walter Bruggeman)

“…in the course of revealing God, the scriptures pull us into the revelation and welcomes us as participants in it. What I wan to call to attention to is that the Bible, all of it, is livable; it is the text for living our lives. It reveals a God-created, God-ordered, God-blessed world in which we find ourselves at home and whole.” (Eugene Peterson)

“Tradition is the living faith of the dead; Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” (Jaroslav Pelikan)

“What we’ve got in the pages of the NT are first century expression of the gospel and church life, not permanent, timeless expressions. They are timely expression; they are spirit inspired expressions, but they were and remain first century expressions. We aren’t called to live first century lives in the twenty first century but twenty first century lives as we walk in the light of the revelation God gave to us in the first century.” (Scot McKnight)

“…in the journey of faith, hope and love, we are challenged. To be truly biblical does not mean being preoccupied with some golden age it the ancient world and God’s word to people back then.  It means learning for the past to let God’s story, God’s will, and God’s dream continue to come true in us and our children.” (Brian McLaren)

“Christians feed on Scripture. Holy Scripture nurtures the holy community as food nurtures the human body. Christians don’t simply learn or study or use Scripture, we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus’ name, hands raised in adoration to the father, feet washed in the company of the son.” (Eugene Peterson)

"Unfortunately, we have been trained as informational readers, not spiritual readers.  When we do informational reading, we exercise almost total and complete control over the text.  We usually select the material we are going to read.  We read te text with our own agenda already in place, knowing in advance what we expect to receive, what problems we want the text to solve for us.  We read the text analytically, viewing it as an object over which we as subject exercise our control, to ensure that it conforms more or less comfortably to our desires and purposes.  We read the text as rapidly as possible, to amass as much information as we can in as little time as possible.  (Have you ever caught yourself marking your place and looking ahead to see how much was left?) The final goal of informational reading is our mastery of the text for the fulfillment of our purposes.
Spiritual or formational reading is the exact opposite of informational reading.  Spiritual reading is entered into best, perhaps, when the text is chosen for us--for instance, but the use of a lectionary.  This way we begin by yielding control to someone or something outside of our agenda.  This facilitates one of the primary purposes of spiritual reading--to allow the text to have control over us and become a place of encounter with God.  Instead of the text being an object controlled by us, the text becomes the subject; we, in-turn, become the "object" addressed by God through the text."
(M Robert Mulholland Jr.)

"Juggling is a right-brain activity that involved letting yourself go, letting things happen.  To make three balls go around with two hands is so contrary to reason that it just makes you giggle.  It's mystical.

The most interesting part of my work is learning how to touch an object, and discovering how the objects give up their secrets.  What I'm after is the essential spiritual magnetism of a shape.

I made a rule that I would never close my hand around the ball, that I would always keep my hand open.  It's virtually impossible to have real control over an object if you're doing that.  It was the most difficult of choice I could make, because it's the opposite of what a juggler is supposed to do.  it offers only vulnerability.  Juggling could be less about control than about the struggle to accept the fear and turmoil surrounding uncontrollable events." (Moschen)

"A juggler is not a secure person.  A juggler, by definition, should be an insecure person.  The exhilaration of a breathtaking performance can be shattered in an instant by the dreaded "drop"."  Moschen who tens to acknowledge the occasional drop by gazing querulously at the wayward ball, claims not to be averse to being exposed as mortal.  "If you want to get anywhere you have to embrace failure, not flee from it."

"Do you see what that allows you to say about the Spirit's "failures" in Scripture?  Is the Bible's apparent date of 4004BC for the creation of the world a problem for you in view of the astrophysicists' contention that it happened billions of years ago?  Does the Spirit's inclusion of factual errors give you pause? (The hare does not chew the cud, despite Leviticus 11:6.)  Are you upset by the early church's expectations that the second coming of Christ was just around the corner?  Don't let such things bother you.  Don't let them take your eye off the mysterious revelation that's at the heart of the Spirit's whole juggling act.  They aren't problems to be solves; they're simply wayward cigar boxes that got out of the Spirit's hand at one point.  They're failures that he embraces -- he gazes at just as querulously as we do -- without letting them stand in the way of getting on with his astonishing performance.  When the Spirit inspires the Bible, he doesn't operate as a puppeteer, controlling its authors and editors and reader like to many marionettes.  He deals with whatever is available to him.  He gets his way by embracing their intractability, not by overriding it." (Mosche

"The matter is simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world.

Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian Scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming to close. Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament." (Soren Kierkegaard)

"The shortest distance between a human being and Truth is a story." (Anthony de Mello)

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From whisper to print then back to whisper.  Living and life giving, the Scriptures are a collection of images, a series of revealing finger prints that tell of the Divine Mystery. But this isn’t the kind of mystery that is to be solved, instead, it’s a mystery that permeates all, revealing and inviting humanity into God’s staggering care for the world.

Open to interpretation, but bound to community, the Bible transcends language and context to become an experience. Tragedy, comedy, fairy tale woven together from past thru present and into future – It’s God’s epic in progress.

These stories are Handled. Handled in the sense that they’ve intentionally been passed down to us through human hands – for better or for worse. But also Handled in the sense that one needs to know how to pick them up in order to be fed and not burned.

In this light, it’s not so much we that read the Scripture, but the Scriptures that read us. Signaling who we are, where we’re from and where we’re headed, it’s these whispers from the Divine Mystery Himself that cut and heal, break and form.

Something’s cooking. Pull up to the stove and see for yourself.

"You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilization to pieces, turn the world upside down, and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of good literature." -Gandhi

Jeremiah 29:4-14 tells an old story that intersects with our present day story. Israel’s elite were in exile, God’s divine relocation program. We too can find ourselves in places of physical, emotional or spiritual exile. Dislocated from where we feel at home, removed (sometimes by choice, other times by force) from where we really want to be. Yet for whatever reason, God allows or sees fit for us to walk through these seasons of discomfort. Most often, its in these times that God gets our attention, or at the very least, we’re finally able to see what’s been in front of us the whole time.

It’s in this space/exile that God challenges us to create dangerous memories. Life altering, game changing, course correcting happenings that not only influence but also set the trajectory for our lives, and the lives of those we love. Exile thus becomes a sweet spot, where we (re)engage our own stories and context, ever attentive to God’s holy interruptions.
Its in this physical and spiritual space that we become conscious of the stories we are writing, and the stories that will be told about us on our shift as citizens and as the church.

You are here. Wait, trust, be aware, join in. It’s where you’re supposed to be, even if its just for now.

Below you’ll find some of the ideas and authors that helped us out this month:

“The exile was the crucible of Israel’s faith.  They were pushed to the edge of existence where they thought they were hanging on by the skin of their teeth, and they found that in fact they  had been pushed to the center, where God was.  They experienced not bare survival but abundant life.  They now they saw their previous life as subsistence living, a marginal existence absorbed in consumption and fashion, empty ritual and insensitive exploitation.  Exile pushed them from the margins of life to the vortex of where all the issues of life and death love and meaning, purpose and value formed the dynamic everyday, participation-demanding realities of God’s future with them.” (Eugene Peterson)

“The Church is the only society on earth that exists for the benefit of non-members.”  (William Temple)

*Britain had animal welfare laws before it had child welfare laws

*American couples now find just twelve minutes a day to talk to each other.

Over the last generation, the time parents spend with their children has declined by as much as 40%

*Time diary expert John Robinson says family time spent together is of a different quality – now much of it consists of parents chauffeuring their children from one event to another

*Kids are terribly overscheduled as ‘market values have invaded the family.’ Parents often see family life as about instilling competitive values in their children so they can compile the best resumes to get into the best colleges to get the best jobs to earn the most money.  Meanwhile, the number of families regularly eating dinner together and taking vacations together has dropped by a third since 1970.

*The new homelessness: We have people living in houses with one another but not connecting with one another. They’re not interacting because, quite simply, they all have their own toys to play with. Dad is on the internet, mom’s upstairs watching a movie, the kids are downstairs playing video games. Everybody is connected to something outside the home even though they are physically within the home

*In 1967 2/3 of American college students  said developing a meaningful philosophy of life was ‘very important’ to them, while fewer than on third said the same about making a lot of money. By 1997 those figures were reversed. A 2004 poll at UCLA found that entering freshman ranked becoming ‘very well off financially ahead of all other goals.

*Asked about their highest priority in a 1999 poll taken at the university of Washington, 32 percent of those surveyed cited ‘looking good/having good hair” another 18% listed ‘staying inebriated,” while only 6 percent checked ‘learning about the world’

“God is always at work. We can never walk into a situation where that is not the case.” (Mindy Calguire)

Sarnia Stats

"It's a complicated area that includes whether people feel they have opportunities," he said. Those who engage in "risky behaviour" may feel that no matter what they do, others will be much better off than they are, he said. (Rod Beaujot, a sociology professor at the University of Western Ontario)

*Sarnia-Lambton also led the way amongst similar-sized communities when it came to impaired driving charges in 2008; stats going up, province down

*Our community also has a large number of high-risk drinkers, according to a recent Canadian Community Health Survey. Thirty per cent of residents admitted to downing five or more drinks in one sitting at least once a month, the second highest percentage in Ontario.

*As for over-eating, a Canadian Community Health survey found that 49.6 per cent of adults in Lambton County are either overweight or obese. That's one in seven who are obese and one in three who are over-weight.

“Jeremiah’s letter is a rebuke and a challenge: “Quit sitting around feeling sorry for yourselves. The aim of the person of faith is not to be as comfortable as possible but to live as deeply and thoroughly as possible – to deal with the reality of life, discover truth, create beauty, act out of love…Don’t just get along, waiting for some sort of escape. Build houses, plant gardens, marry, have kids, pray for the wholeness of  Babylon, and do everything you can to develop that wholeness. The only place you have to e human is where you are right now. The only opportunity you will ever have to live by faith is in the circumstances you are provided this very day: this house you live in, this family you find yourself in, this job you have been given, the weather conditions that prevail at this moment.” (Eugene Peterson)

"My whole life, I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted until I discovered that my interruptions are my work". (Henri Nouwen)

“…there is none of this passivity in the Scripture. Those who are waiting are waiting very actively. They know that what they are waiting for is growing from the ground on which they are standing. If we wait in the conviction that a seed has been planted and that something has already begun, it changes the way we wait for the future. Active waiting implies being fully present to the moment with the conviction that something is happening where we are.” (Henri Nouwen)

“When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don't throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.”
(Corrie Ten Boom)

“Normal life is full of distractions and irrelevancies. Then catastrophe: Dislocation. Exile. Illness. Accident. Job loss. Divorce. Death. The reality of our lives is rearranged without anyone consulting us or waiting for our permission. We are no longer at home. All of us are given moments, days, months, years of exile. What will we do with them? Wish we were someplace else? Complain? Escape into fantasies? Drug ourselves into oblivion? Or build and plant and marry and seek the shalom of the place we inhabit and the people we are with? Exile reveals what really matters and frees us to pursue what really matters, which is to seek the Lord with all our Hearts.” (Eugene Peterson)

Joe was interview for a series that Royal View Church is doing in London.

 

Wrong place at the wrong time. It’s unavoidable, but most if not all, of us have been there at one time or another. Feelings of powerlessness, second-guessing and ‘what if’s’ dominate our minds as we cobble together a method of escape. Things are out of place. We’ve been Dis-Located, and it hurts. Israel knew this pain well. Better known as exile, their Dis-Location (particularly) in Babylon created a ripple effect of anger, self pity, false hopes and sheer misunderstanding. In addition to these uneasy feelings, Jeremiah the prophet delivered a message from God that was less than expected: Sink roots. Plant gardens. Have kids. Love your neighborhood. This is where you’re supposed to be…oh, and by the way I put you here Myself. This month, we’ll be using Jeremiah 29:4-14 as a springboard into an honest and transparent conversation about what it means for us and our church to truly be the local, flesh on bone incarnation of the living Christ. To move away from the anti-kingdom notions of self-centered, escapist, Dis-Located lives. To move from just living here, to being invested here. From merely tolerating Sarnia to taking a bullet for her. To be mindful of God’s bigger plan, and not just our own personal welfare. We’re not meant to Dis-Located lives. Sink roots. Plant gardens. Have kids. Love our neighbourhoods. This isn’t the wrong place at the wrong time. This is where we’re supposed to be. This is where God has put us.

When the teenage girl missed her period, all the world could do was wait.

Advent is the season of active waiting for Christ’s arrival. We intentionally relive and remind ourselves so as to not forget. We bare ourselves to the good news of the coming arrival permitting it re-order our lives and communities.

While there is an expectation for the culmination of prophesies and promises, at the same time there’s a raw humanity to it all: A teenage girl is expecting – morning sickness, cramps, unreasonable cravings. In her belly, a fetus develops in stages; In her belly she incubates hope. As Mary and Joseph sneak into Bethlehem under the stars, Jesus smuggles himself into humanity.

Amidst the busyness of the next few weeks, may our hearts and minds be in a place of expectancy for the one who has come to make all things new.

*Special Note* As a special project for this month, our goal is to raise $1000 for the Inn of the Good Shepherd. They do great work locally amongst the poor in Sarnia, and it would be swell if we could pitch in during this Christmas season.

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Being in sync with God is less like stringently following a playbook of do’s and don’ts and more like humming that tune that’s stuck in your head and allowing it to put a directional spring in your step. That spring leads us in the direction of sacred rhythms…rhythms of grace, awareness, surrender and peace. Conversely, modern society cultivates and infects us with its violent rhythms…rhythms of production (you’re only as valuable as what you can do) rhythms of speed and space (always moving at an insane clip, ultimately concerned with filling our space with stuff) rhythms of fear (you're not good enough, so what are you going to do about it?)

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Life is a dance: An improvisational, unscripted work of art set to sound and tempo. When Creator and creation are in tune and step the display is magical. Love and hope, pain and grief are key changes taken in stride. All of life harmonizes in a ode to joy.

This is made possible only because art, at its best, is not measured by a score or a judge. Value cannot be attached because calculators don’t go that high. And even if they could, it wouldn’t matter, because that’s not the point.

That said, beware of counterfeit, cheap imitations of true life - cheap knock offs, a million sold, paint by numbers copies. This type of existence is a violent one. Immersed in a cult of speed, productivity, efficiency, gain and growth, insanity is touted as normal…or at the very least, strongly suggested.

Is this really how we were meant to “live”?

This month, we will explore the rhythms of grace, peace and rest. We will share stories of inner lives that run deep and outer lives that spread wide. Together, let’s find our tune and part in the Spirit’s song.

"Above all, remember that the meaning of life is to live it as if it were a work of art. You're not a machine." (Abraham Heschel)

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