tim keller’s “the prodigal god”

23 June 2009 Leave a Comment

I’ve been reading a good bit lately. Mostly some books on ministry skills, which is good. But it is important not to get too stuck in those.

So, I just in the past few days read Timothy Keller’s The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith. It is fantastic. He takes Jesus’classic parable from Luke 15, which he reminds us ought to be called “the lost sons”, and helps us inhabit the text by interpreting both it and us well.

Both sons are lost, but only the younger knows he is. The older brother has been a faithful rule-keeper, but lacks love. In the words of Paul, he is a “resounding gong” and “clanging symbal” of a man. He does not know he is lost. Neither have chosen the true way of life, loving the Father for his own sake. Keller unpacks the parable, and with it the gospel, so wonderfully I felt engaged by the reconciliation of Christ once again.

On Tim Keller — If you don’t know who he is, he’s become more widely known in just the past couple of years. He’s had a couple of books published of which this is the second one. The first, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, is an apologetic work. I’ve got it, but haven’t read it yet. Keller is pastor of Redeember Presbyterian Church in NYC. Christianity Today recently ran a feature on him here.

Go ahead and pick up The Prodigal God… and read it sooner than later.

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tech, faith, and communication – shane hipps, the onion, the atlantic

22 June 2009 2 Comments

How we say it is at least as important as what we say. I think that statement captures what Shane Hipps (former advertizing guy for Porche, current Mennonite pastor, and author of Flicking Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith), The Onion’s recent “story” (“Report: 90% of Waking Hours Spent Staring at Glowing Rectangles“), and an essay from last summer in The Atlantic that I originally linked here titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“

A new friend recently read Flickering Pixels and blogged some of the big points here, here, here, and here.

And here’s a short video of Rob Bell interviewing Shane Hipps at the National Pastor’s Convention.

For communicators of the gospel, this means that we need to work very hard at our preaching/teaching and invest what it takes to become very good. I think it is alright to utilize video, but we should exercise a lot of caution and be judicious in our frequency of use. Big, even oversized, props are better I think because of their ability to spur on imagination before, during, and after the message.

Another big take-away from all of this is: READ!

I’m glad I’ve become a reader as an adult (didn’t like it as much as a Jr High/HS student). Reading is better for our brains in lots of ways. One thing I’ve done to decrease my TV time (I still have a few shows I like) is not replace a show after the series finaly wraps it up.

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a new economic geography and the church 4

19 March 2009 Leave a Comment

These posts represent reflections on the implications of the economic crash for the Church based on The Atlantic March 2009 feature,  “How the Crash Will Reshape America” by Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class. 

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For further exploration of this essay and potential implications for ministry, check out the suburban ministry blog site “sub-text”, which has a post linking and quoting someone who presses back on Richard Florida’s position in this essay. 

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In my last post on this subject (yes, it’s been a little while…), I gave an initial look at the author’s “mega-regions” lens on a new economic geography. I’d like to take the next step, with Mr. Florida, which follows very closely behind his assertion about the multi-city geographic centers that he posits will dominate the economy in the future. 

First, however, a factoid about current mega-region trends that I failed to include in my previous post. Having rattled off a few global mega-regions for the sake of broader context, he underscores his point about mega-regions as a growing trend (and his counter-argument against Friedman’s “The World is Flat” argument) thusly: 

 Economic output is ever-more concentrated in these places as well. The world’s 40 largest mega-regions, which are home to some 18 percent of the world’s population, produce two-thirds of global economic output and nearly 9 in 10 new patented innovations. (p. 50)

Moving along… Following close on the heels of shifting population trends toward mega-regions, he predicts a similar shift according to education demographics, noting differing abilities among areas to “attract highly educated people” (p. 50). He gets more specific to bring the point into sharp relief: 

Thirty years ago, educational attainment was spread relatively uniformly throughout the country, but that’s no longer the case. Cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, Raleigh, and Boston now have two or three times the concentration of college graduates of Akron or Buffalo. Among people with postgraduate degrees, the disparities are wider still. The geographic sorting of people by ability and educational attainment, on this scale, is unprecendented.” (p. 50) 

We might add to that—not a little disturbing given the element of homogenization in that data despite the reputation for cultural diversity among all the cities named (which seems especially popular the more highly educated one is). I’m not saying that this sort of trend can be pushed in a different direction; the drivers behind and within it seem too complex to manipulate it in that way. 

The shift away from relative uniformity in educational attainment on a national scale recalls a David Brooks column from almost a year ago. Set in the context of the Democratic presidential primary battle between Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton, Brooks observes the difference education makes today within communities or states, after noting the difference it didn’t make in yesteryear: 

In those days, the owner of the local bank lived in the same town as the grocery clerk, and their boys might play on the same basketball team. Only 7 percent of adult Americans had a college degree. 

But that’s all changed. In the decades since, some social divides, mostly involving ethnicity, have narrowed. But others, mostly involving education, have widened. Today there is a mass educated class. The college educated and non-college educated are likely to live in different towns. They have radically different divorce rates and starkly different ways of raising their children. The non-college educated not only earn less, they smoke more, grow more obese and die sooner.

Retailers, home builders and TV executives identify and reinforce these lifestyle clusters. There are more niche offerings and fewer common experiences.

There’s an innovation (therefore, economic) incentive, Florida tells us, to this “talent-culstering.” In essence, a denser concentration of persons with higher educational attainment translates into both a higher and faster rate of innovation and growth (Perhaps analogous to the way compound interest works? The concept is referred to as urban metabolism). 

Here’s the rubber-meets-the-road piece of this: These factors are good to the good times (metabolism and talent-clustering), “but they’re even more [important] when times get tough” (p. 51). 

It’s not that “fast” cities are immune to the failure of businesses, large or small… It’s that unlike many other places, they can overcome business failure with relative ease, reabsorbing their talented workers, growing nascent businesses, founding new ones. (p. 51) 

Some impressions are coming together in my mind regarding ministry in this context. But for now, I need to mull over those impressions a bit longer, and simply repeat the missional question: What does incarnation look like here? What are the implications of becoming educationally homogenized even while pursuing and valuing cultural diversity of every other sort?

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preaching study: mark 8:31-38, pt 2

5 March 2009 1 Comment

In “preaching study” posts, I’m really interested in fostering a “community” approach to study and prep for the message, so please interact as much as you like. All Scripture quotes are from the TNIV unless otherwise noted. Thanks!
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Part 1 is here. The text is here. Here are a few more thoughts as I prepare for Sunday’s sermon in our contemporary worship service. I’ll appreciate any engagement with these.

There are basically two issues in the narrative of this text that seem to be demanding attention. First is the exchange with Peter; second is the call to discipleship addressed to the disciples and the crowds. 

Jesus’Exchange with Peter

We must give Peter credit for picking up on the scandal of Jesus’suffering, rejection, and death, having freshly identified Jesus as the Son of God. This is the scandal of our neediness, speaking to and within the American Church of such incredible privilege and resources. Our being made right with God is utterly dependent on the grace of God, a grace that we see on display in the juxtaposition of Jesus’social location and our own—a man of spiritual wisdom and power, a teacher among the Jews, though located within marginalized demographics: homeless, jobless, a member of an ethnic group with a tenous relationship with the military government. This Jesus is killed on the outskirts of empire in order to keep the Pax Romana, the Peace of Rome. This is who we, more-or-less successful folks, need for salvation? Perhaps Peter is on to something, we think in the moments when we abandon our church training that pretties up the Gospels right before our eyes. 

So, one issue for preaching this text is to re-narrate the exchange between Jesus and Peter in a way/s that points out the legitimate gripe that Peter has with Jesus that we’ve been trained to safely categorize as yet another misunderstanding of poor Peter’s part. It’s a misunderstanding to be sure. But Peter understands something about the scandal of our salvation and his response to Jesus has a distinct logic to it. 

Jesus’Call to Cross-taking 

Then, Jesus’teaching on discipleship addressed to the crowds and the disciples: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Self-denial seems pretty accessible. Even if we don’t practice it ourselves, we understand what’s bascially meant by the phrase. We basically get the “follow me” past too. After all, we’ve been doing go vicariously through The Twelve anyway. 

But this business of “take up your cross” is a little harder to get our minds, and therefore our lives, around. We have a saying, “that’s just your cross to bear,” but it seems to lack something that Jesus seemed to be addressing. 

Here’s where I am at present: “Take up your cross” must be interpreted in light of the nature of Jesus’cross. What the cross meant for him illumines what our cross must mean for us. With that in mind, Jesus’cross was his vocation, his calling. Jesus’cross also necessarily entailed self-sacrifice (suffering, rejection, and death) that was used redemptively by God for the sake of others. 

So it would seem, if Jesus’cross is instructive, that whatever our specific cross might be, it would be a divine vocation, a calling from God, that necessarily entails self-sacrifice used redemptively by God for the sake of others. 

One of the unique challenges of American Christians, particularly those of us with exceptional resources even by American standards, is that we can afford to be quite generous without having to become self-sacrificial. It’s hard to think this way, but this text seems narrate cross-taking and not just generosity, even of the extravagant variety. But this points to an opportunity that is almost singularly ours in the American church. If we can embrace the call to cross-taking discipleship, a discipleship that insists on sacrificial living, then we can move beyond generosity concerning our wealth and all the way to prophetic living, offering a new narrative to the world concerning the use of wealth. 

This is but one implication of the definition of “cross-taking” I’ve offered here, but one with powerful potential. There are other implications that bear naming and sharing, but I’m out of time for this post. 

Thoughts?

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garden, city, suburb?

16 February 2009 4 Comments

NT Wright and other have pointed out that the story of Scripture begins in a garden (Genesis 2-3) and ends in a city (Revelation 21-22, esp 21:1-4). 

So, what does it mean that many of us live in suburbs?

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american christianity…functional buddhism?

8 July 2008 6 Comments

From many streams of my reading and study and reflection lately, I keep coming back to something that runs throughout Scripture: Christ comforts us in sorrow, loss, trouble, trial, etc. But he is not interested in making us comfortable. The meaning of life is not the Anglo American suburban dream (I’m writing this as an Anglo American living in the suburbs).

Are we functional Buddhists? In Christianity, the problem that must be dealt with is sin; in Buddhism, the problem is suffering. I’ll be careful here not to venture further into the Buddhist religion than this lest I speak wrongly of its tenants. But isn’t much of what we do with ourselves, even in the name of the gospel, designed to eradicate suffering from our lives and to make our lives not more meaningful, but more comfortable?

One wonders, then, where people like the civil rights freedom riders could come from today. Where might suffering for the sake of the gospel arise? I’m not talking about a masochistic interest in martyrdom here. Rather, I’m talking about persons whose lives are so radically formed and lived according to gospel, kingdom values that, when they are purposefully placed in a milieu that is opposed to that gospel and kingdom–here’s when you should read the freedom riders link if you haven’t already–that suffering for the sake of that gospel and kingdom is practically inevitable.

This is, after all, what Jesus did. His life, proclamation in word and action, and teaching about the kingdom, was so radically oriented around gospel and kingdom values that, lived in a milieu that embraced values opposed to the gospel and the kingdom, the predictable, probable end was characterized by violence and suffering and death. But the suffering and death of Jesus is a redemptive one.

If the problem is suffering, we don’t have a terribly ascetical approach, but we have a seemingly effective one–avoidance. If the problem, however, is sin–that is, evil within the world, including within ourselves–then suffering can be meaningful.

There is a critical distinction to note. In describing suffering as potentially meaningful, we do not profess that all suffering everywhere is redemptive in and of itself. What we are saying is that Jesus’vocation called him to a life and a life’s work that eschewed comfort and embraced a path that would put him on a collision course with the injustice of suffering. But that suffering would end up being for the sake of others’reconciliation with God and restoration in God–setting everything right, that is.

This is the part of our United Methodist praying around Holy Communion that has me thinking about this once again: “Pour out your Holy Spirit to bless these gifts of bread and cup. Make them be for us the body and blood of Christ, that we may be for the world the Body of Christ, redeemed by his blood.” (my emphasis)

What does it mean to pray this, to receive the sacrament, if not to enter into the very life of Christ in the present world? Would that not press us out of our “functional Buddhism” that solves the problem of suffering by attaining comfortableness and into the gospel of the kingdom that lays “comfortable” aside for the sake of relieving the unjust suffering of others, the power of sin that keeps them in its grip? Yes, we need forgiveness badly. Yes, we need repentance, and we need a savior to deal with our sin. But if our baptism means anything, does it not mean we are cleansed of our sin in order to be fit for this sort of gospel and kingdom?

Best I can tell, New Testament seems to think so.

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elie wiesel’s “night” and the gospel call to justice

27 June 2008 1 Comment

I got back from vacation one week ago tonight. On the drive up in the car, when it wasn’t my turn driving and when the kids were either occupied or sleeping, I read Elie Wiesel‘s Night. I know, not exactly light-hearted vacationy reading, but it was something I’d been wanting to read for a little while now (afterward, at my in-laws’, I read Grisham’s The Last Juror–not his best, but more light and vacationy and I enjoyed it). Truly horrifying but something that must be read lest we forget the depths of human evil and what we as a race are capable of. If you’re not familiar with the book, Elie Wiesel is a Jew who survived the Holocaust and Auschwitz as a teenager and Night is a memior written about that experience. Of the many thoughts that I’ve been mulling over from reading this short, powerful book, two stick out at the moment.

  1. Those who regarded the Jews as un-human were the ones becoming less human by their grotesque cruelty and raw evil. This is the terrible irony of history and the human experience. Racism and other hatreds seem to help us reduce others’humanness in our own minds, which allows us to treat them (individually and collectively) as less than human through oppression, cultural shaming/humiliation, widespread extermination, and abuse/torture in its various forms–psychological, physical, sexual, etc. The gross irony in such terrible rationalizations and actions is that we ourselves forsake and surrender (degree by degree) our own essential humanness. In de-humanizing another, we allow ourselves to behave as if we are beasts.
  2. The copy I read included the text of Wiesel’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1986, in which he said, “…I swore never to be silent whenever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” Chilling and truthful words that we need to heed today as we read and hear news reports in the “modern” world in which we live.

I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about the biblical call, not just to charity, but to justice and its essential place within the robust gospel of the Kingdom of God. Reading this book came on the heels of hearing really great presentations from Peter Storey, a white South African retired Methodist bishop who teaches at Duke University Divinity School and who, during his career, participated in the movement to end apartheid and to resolve the past through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, alongside Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Powerful and prophetic stuff.

So, a gospel thought I’ve been thinking over in light of this is that the gospel may be appropriately comforting to us in some respects, but we are not called to comfort. The meaning of life is not middle and upper-middle class suburban comfort, it is life in the Kingdom of God. That means joy, peace, hope, love, and many other things, but–lest we forget stories like the one Wiesel tells in Night–it is not really about comfort. It inescapably includes working for justice for those who are suffering, humiliated, oppressed, and tormented. Or, as Jesus put it, reading from the prophet Isaiah in Luke’s Gospel, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19 TNIV)

That confronts the dickens out of me, so I continue to wrestle with it, like Jacob, not wanting to avoid it lest I lose my own soul in the midst of gaining everything but the kingdom and the gospel, seeking the blessing of being wounded by God in just the right way as to mark me as his and set me about his robust gospel and kingdom work.

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