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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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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The tension between doubt - hope - questions - faith is a very Christian one. Unfortunately, the latest breed of Christianity (in fear) has tried to snuff this tension out. Our inherited enlightenment sensibilities have no room for mystery, dialogue or pain, thus any talk about Heaven and Hell intersecting on planet earth makes for less than thoughtful conversation.

Our default (over the last hundred years specifically) has been to grin and bear this life until we can finally escape this planet. Here vocal branches of Christianity have assumed the role of fear mongering, doomsday prophets announcing a ‘turn or burn’ vendetta from a blood thirsty God.

Thankfully, the Bible makes no mention of such things. Instead we see a pattern, a series of course corrections, and a divine check mate from the Grand Master Himself. The Scriptures tell the story of a God who methodically and ultimately has and will cure humanity of its sin. It’s a tale of a people and planet reclaimed, restored, redeemed and reinvented.  A narrative where humanity is invited, yet free to choose, whether or not to participate in the fix-it job. In fact, everyone is in unless they opt out.  To opt out is to move in the opposite direction of God’s healing work which ultimately results in humans moving in the opposite direction of who they’re intended to be. So far removed in fact, as CS Lewis puts it, we stop being human all together. Separated from God and distanced from our true selves.

From here the big picture gains new clarity. We track with what God has done; biblical flash-forwards reveal what is to come, and in turn we become aware of the part we were always meant to play.

And what part would that be?

Renewal Artists, working hand in hand with God for the redemption of all things.

Here are some thoughts and ideas from outside sources that have helped influence our learning and action.

"I am and I am not a universalist. I am one if you are talking about what God in Christ has done to save the world. The Lamb of God has not taken away the sins of some — of only the good, or the cooperative, or the select few who can manage to get their act together and die as perfect peaches. He has taken away the sins of the world — of every last being in it — and he has dropped them down the black hole of Jesus’ death. On the cross, he has shut up forever on the subject of guilt: “There is therefore now no condemnation. . . .” All human beings, at all times and places, are home free whether they know it or not, feel it or not, believe it or not.”

 

But I am not a universalist if you are talking about what people may do about accepting that happy-go-lucky gift of God’s grace. I take with utter seriousness everything that Jesus had to say about hell, including the eternal torment that such a foolish non-acceptance of his already-given acceptance must entail. All theologians who hold Scripture to be the Word of God must inevitably include in their work a tractate on hell. But I will not — because Jesus did not — locate hell outside the realm of grace. Grace is forever sovereign, even in Jesus’ parables of judgment. No one is ever kicked out at the end of those parables who wasn’t included in at the beginning."
(Robert Capon)

“Humans give glory to God by excelling at who they have been created to be – by loving one another, by enjoying themselves and each other, by reaching out to one another in cooperation and service, by tending the earth by participating in worship and fellowship, by embracing joy and forgiveness and generosity by seeking the good of all in the good of each.”
(Michelle Bartel)

“Understanding your place within Creation means that you see yourself as a part of some greater organism, that the presence of something very holy permeates and unifies all being. It means that you play a sacred role in Creation’s unfolding. And that, when viewed from a point of high enough vantage, everything is revealed to be in the hands of God.”
(Rabbi Lawrence Kushner)

“Even when sin is familiar, it’s never normal.”
(Platinga)

“Our concern is not finally the origin of evil, the appearance of death or the power of the fall…it is rather the summons of this calling of God for us to be his creatures to live in his world on his terms.” (Walter Bruggemann)

 

“Hell is where sin eventually leads; it is the endpoint of the path away from God—a state of being outside the presence of God.  When we see the worst of what goes on in this world, we can see that hell is not only a place people might go after death, but the condition of destruction and utter misery in which people can find themselves here and now.”
(Debra Rienstra )

“In what sense, then, did Jesus declare that the Kingdom of God was present? Our answer must at least begin with His own answer to John: “The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the poor have the Gospel preached to them.” In the ministry of Jesus Himself the divine power is released in effective conflict with evil.”
(CH Dodd)

“God will redeem the whole universe; Jesus’ resurrection is the beginning of that new life, the fresh grass growing through the concrete of corruption and decay in the old world. The final redemption will be the moment when heaven and earth are joined together at last in burst of God’s creative energy for which Easter is the prototype and source.”
(NT Wright)

“Ooh, baby, do you know what that's worth? 
Ooh heaven is a place on earth 
They say in heaven love comes first 
We'll make heaven a place on earth 
Ooh heaven is a place on earth”
(Belinda Carlisle)

“When you set the table

When you chose the scale

Did you write a riddle that you knew they would fail

Did you make them tremble

So they would tell the tale

Did you push us when we fell?”

(David Bazan)

“When Jesus directs us to pray “thy kingdom come” he does not mean we should pray for it to come into existence. Rather, we pray for it to take over all points in the personal, social, and political order where it is now excluded: “On earth where it is in heaven”. With this prayer we are invoking it , as in faith we are acting it, into the real world of our daily existence.”
(Willard)

“The gospel, you see, is not just a message for individuals, telling them how to avoid God’s wrath. It is a message about a kingdom, a society, a new community, a new covenant, a new family, a new nation, a new way of life, and therefore, a new culture. God calls us to build a city of God, a New Jerusalem.”
(John Frame)

“The church latched on to that old doctrine of original sin like a dog to a stick, and before you knew it, the whole gospel got twisted around it. Instead of being God’s big message of saving love for the whole world, the gospel became a little bit of secret information on how to solve the pesky legal problem of original sin.”
(Brian McLaren)

"Even a commitment to an inspired bible is not a commitment to inerrant interpretations."
(Gregory Macdonald)

"The christian understanding of hell is crucial for understanding your own heart, living at peace in the world and knowing the love of God"
(Tim Keller)

"The concept of eternal punishment does not occur in the Hebrew Bible, which uses the term Sheol to designate a bleak subterranean region where the dead, good and bad alike, subsist only as impotent shadows. When Hellenistic Jewish scribes rendered the Bible into Greek, they used the word Hades to translate Sheol, bringing a whole new mythological association to the idea of posthumous existence. In ancient Greek myth, Hades, named after the gloomy deity who ruled over it, was originally similar to the Hebrew Sheol, a dark underground realm in which all the dead, regardless of individual merit, were indiscriminately housed."
(Stephen Harris)

"The only resource powerful enough to both passify the human hearts desire for justice and at the same time keep us from getting sucked into that cycle of blood and vengeance is to say there is a God and he will put everything right. If you think not believing in God is going to keep people from being sucked into the cycle of violence, you're wrong. If you don't believe that there is somebody that is going to make everything right, then you will pick up the sword and you will get sucked in. If you don't believe that the doctrine of of God's judgment is a resource for living at peace on earth you've had a sheltered life. Belief in a God of judgment is crucial for a Croatian to live at peace on earth."
(Miroslav Volf)

"First they would threaten sinners with hell. Second, they would extend the reward of resurrection from the heroic martyrs to all good people--good meaning those who fulfilled the Pharisees' idea of good. Finally, they would use the language of hell to accomplish what they felt they needed to accomplish--to frighten sinners enough to repent and change their ways for the good of the nation."
(Brian McLaren)

"We tend to try to turn the rich and varied biblical lexicon into a limited range of synonymous technical terms. For example, judgment for us equals hell or condemnation. Condemnation equals hell, etc. We should be more careful than this in assuming words are synonyms, because the Bible is horribly disappointing as a modern-style technical textbook, even of theology. The Biblical lexicon of judgment includes sheol, hades, tartarus, gehenna, the abyss, death, darkness, fire, lake of fire, unquenchable fire, where the worm does not die, the Day, the Day of the Lord, etc"
(Maundet)

"Most of the passages in the New Testament which have been thought by the Church to refer to people going into eternal punishment after they die' is not about Heaven and Hell at all. The great majority of them have to do with the way.
(NT Wright)

"There was no single concept of hell in Second Temple Judaism but a cluster of images and concepts that held in common the claim that God would bring the wicked to account and punish them. Jesus and his followers took and made use of some of the language and images employed in the discourse of the time without endorsing every aspect of Second Temple Jewish beliefs about this fate."
(Gregory Macdonald)

"The Pharisees used hell language one way. Jesus turned it around and used it in the opposite way. They threatened marginal people will hell unless they submitted to their religious dominance. Jesus threatened the religious establishment with hell unless they showed compassion for the marginal people. Hell has been used and abused, back and forth, ever since. He uses power language of hell to disempower the injustice of the powerful and to empower the disempowered to seek justice."
(Brian McLaren)

"Contrary to the usual opinion that the good go to heaven and the bad go to hell, Jesus sets up his stories so that goodness and badness don’t count at all in the final judgment. The only thin judged at the end of these parables is faith, not works."
(Robert Capon)

"The doors of hell are locked from the inside."
(CS Lewis)

"Like the Kingdom of God, the subject of Hell is treated differently among the gospels and other NT writings. In the synoptics, the primary command of Christ seems to be to follow and do the will of God. In John, and in Paul's writings, the prime detective is more often to believe in Jesus, or the gospel. Evangelicals tend to conflate the former into the latter, so that believing in some ways seems to negate the need to follow and do the will of God. Meanwhile, even in Paul's writings, judgment is consistently associated with the phrase 'according to their deeds,' not 'according to their beliefs.' Also, while the synoptics frequently use similar language regarding hell, John uses a different kind of language. So, it seems to me that we are left with an embarrassing failure to take all of Scripture seriously, and we are left with a difficult challenge: how (or whether?) to integrate the various approaches to hell found in scripture."
(Maundet)

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