Headin’ to Kentucky

It’s official. I am moving to Kentucky.

In about a month I will throw a few things in my car and drive across a good portion of the land of the free and the home of the brave to the wild and untamed land known as the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

For  the uninformed, the great Commonwealth of Kentucky (or, the Bluegrass State, henceforth referred to as the BS) is home to the highest per capita number of deer and turkey in the United States. We’ll see what I can do about that. The official dance of the state is clogging.

I am transferring to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY to finish my master’s degree, and will likely spend at least the next three to five years there in the BS.

If this is news to you, dear reader, and are disappointed that I did not inform you of this via personal verbal exchange, or at the very least through some sort of antiquated physical written document, then I am sorry. I did not intend to leave anyone in the proverbial dark.

In all sincerity, I am going to miss California. But even more-so, I am going to miss the people that I have in California. I hope to spend time with all of you before I leave.

The Life You Save May Be Your Own

Is Jesus made to look more glorious in our lives when we fight to provide health care and life to others or when we fight to make excuses to deny such things to others?

Has he not already poured out immeasurable grace upon us who were lazy, stupid, greedy, sick, undeserving, ignorant, worthless, destitute, poor, and all the while taking advantage of the free handout of common grace?

Apparently my life was more important to Jesus than his own. But do I believe that the lives of others are more important than my own?

Every Christian Should Fight for Free Health Care

Temporarily shelving the abortion issue for my present points, every Christian in America should fight for free health care for all, legal citizens or not.

Every person, whether healthy or sick, rich or poor, industrious or lazy, is made in the image of God and therefore their life now is of tremendous value.

Physical life matters. God’s people are not destined for disembodied heavenly bliss, but a resurrected life in new creation. His people must anticipate that future reality by restoring physical bodies now.

Life is more important than freedom, money, and ideologies.

Mining a Technicolor Minefield

More from Wright. This time a great example of the frequent flashes of technicolor writing in a mostly technical tome.

The rabbinic literature is of course a mine of information and a minefield for the unwary.

N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God

The American Dream or the Great Commission Resurgence?

Fantastic sermon by Al Jackson at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Chapel this morning: here is the link.

On a similar note:

No, it isn’t for lack of money that there are 1,568 peoples with no missionaries. It’s because we have so much. The comforts of the West have made us soft and cautious and fearful and indulgent and self-protecting, instead of tough and risk-taking and bold and self-controlled and self-sacrificing. When prosperity preachers fly their personal jets to the Two-thirds World and promise the poor that if they believe in Jesus, they will get rich, they are not doing Christian missions. They are destroying its foundations. That is not the gospel that saves and produces sacrifice.

John Piper, Proclaiming the Excellencies of Christ, Not Prosperity, Among the Nations

Our Story of Reality

More from Wright:

Reality as we know it is the result of a creator god bringing into being a world that is other than himself, and yet which is full of his glory. It was always the intention of this god that creation should one day be flooded with his own life, in a way for which it was prepared from the beginning. As part of the means to this end, the creator brought into being a creature which, by bearing the creator’s image, would bring his wise and loving care to bear upon the creation. By a tragic irony, the creature in question has rebelled against this intention. But the creator has solved this problem in principle in an entirely appropriate way, and as a result is now moving the creation once more towards its originally intended goal. The implementation of this solution now involves the indwelling of this god within his human creatures and ultimately within the whole creation, transforming it into that for which it was made in the beginning. This story, whose similarity to the parable of the Wicked Tenants is scarcely accidental, obviously attempts to ground ontology, a view of what is really there, in the being and activity of the creator/redeemer god. It has, in my own case, already succeeded in subverting all sorts of other stories (including several ‘Christian’ ones) that I used to tell myself about reality. I find that it ‘fits’ with far more of the real world than the usual post-Enlightenment ones. To pretend that this were not the case—to abandon this story in favour of reducing everything to ‘mere history’, just when the Enlightenment-style project is collapsing like the Berlin Wall—would be as dishonest as it would be foolish.

N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God

Biting Off More than I can Chew, Swallow, Digest, or Throw Up

A few hours ago I began what will probably a be a long journey through the first three volumes of N.T. Wright’s projected six-volume Christian Origins and the Question of God series. Here is a taste from volume one:

The New Testament, I suggest, must be read so as to be understood, read within appropriate contexts, within an acoustic which will allow its full overtones to be heard. It must be read with as little distortion as possible, and with as much sensitivity as possible to its different levels of meaning. It must be read so that the stories, and the Story, which it tells can be heard as stories, not as rambling ways of declaring unstoried ‘ideas’. It must be read without the assumption that we already know what it is going to say, and without the arrogance that assumes that ‘we’–whichever group that might be–already have ancestral rights over this or that passage, book, or writer. And, for full appropriateness, it must be read in such a way as to set in motion the drama which it suggests.

N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God

Holey Pockets

The book of Acts has been kicking me in the teeth of late.

And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.

Acts 2:44-45

Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common. And with great power the apostles were giving their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need. Thus Joseph, who was also called by the apostles Barnabas (which means son of encouragement), a Levite, a native of Cyprus, sold a field that belonged to him and brought the money and laid it at the apostles’ feet.

Acts 4:32-37

This should a preview picture of the new heavens and the new earth. Our Christian communities should be holey pockets of heaven on earth.

The Holy Spirit comes to strengthen or comfort us and exalt us to the same place where our saviour Christ has gone before. In other words, the Spirit is the power of heaven come to earth, or to put it the other way the Spirit is the power that enables surprised earthlings to share in the life of heaven.

N.T. Wright

What happens when the Spirit and the power of heaven come to earth? It changes radically self-centered people to joyfully give of what they have for the needs of others. Why? Because the Father gave us an infinitely great gift, his Son, as a sacrifice, and now has been more gracious in giving us his Spirit that empowers and fuels that generosity and love.

The kingdom will come as the church, energized by the Spirit, goes out into the world vulnerable, suffering, praising, praying, misunderstood, misjudged, vindicated, celebrating: always – as Paul puts it in one of his letters – bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifest.

N.T. Wright

The kingdom will not come as members of the American church live plushly in their gigantic houses with swimming pools and huge high definition televisions, fully embracing and fully embraced by the culture around them. The Spirit has not come to give us inner peace as we kick back on our Pottery Barn couch as we await the return of our good buddy Jesus.

When I read Acts 2 and 4, do I try to make excuses? “Well, things were different in the first century and we have to read it in context of that setting, and now our context is different so we have to consider these kinds of things.”

To hell with that kind of pathetic American pragmatism that hides beneath the guise of prudence! Jesus gave up everything and voluntarily put himself through a shameful and horrific death for a bunch of people who hated him. And I am one of them.

Mornings with Bohoeffer part 3

More on suffering:

There remains an experience of incomparable value. We have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled – in short, from the perspective of those who suffer. The important thing is that neither bitterness nor envy should have gnawed at the heart during this time, that we should have come to look with new eyes at matters great and small, sorrow and joy, strength and weakness, that our perception of generosity, humanity, justice and mercy should have become clearer, freer, less corruptible. We have to learn that personal suffering is a more effective key, a more rewarding principle for exploring the world in thought and action than personal good fortune. This perspective from below must not become the partisan possession of those who are eternally dissatisfied; rather, we must do justice to life in all its dimensions from a higher satisfaction, whose foundation is beyond any talk of ‘from below’ or ‘from above’. This is the way in which we may affirm it.

Mornings with Bonhoeffer part 2

On suffering:

It is infinitely easier to suffer in obedience to a human command than in the freedom of one’s own responsibility. It is infinitely easier to suffer with others than to suffer alone. It is infinitely easier to suffer publicly and honourably than apart and ignominiously. It is infinitely easier to suffer through staking one’s life than to suffer spiritually. Christ suffered as a free man alone, apart and in ignominy, in body and spirit; and since then many Christians have suffered with him.

On the hope of building for a better future:

There are people who regard it as frivolous, and some Christians think it impious for anyone to hope and prepare for a better earthly future. They think that the meaning of present events is chaos, disorder, and catastrophe; and in resignation or pious escapism they surrender all responsibility for reconstruction and for future generations. It may be that the day of judgment will dawn tomorrow; in that case, we shall gladly stop working for a better future. But not before.