New Church Garden

Party with God!

"Let Israel be glad in its Maker;
    let the childlen of Zion rejoice in their King."  Psalm 149.
Being a disciples of Jesus means enjoying God.  In fact Presbyterians have identified enjoying God (and glorifying him) as the goal for which people were created.  God created us to take pleasure in him and his work.  And the essential piece of some of Jesus' best stories was God's joy in the return of lost people to himself (Luke 15).

It would be interesting for us to take this command to enjoy God and his work as the theme of a week.  To ask myself--is what I am doing moving me closer or further toward enjoying God?  And this may well be a peculiar and upside down kind of joy.  In his letter to the church in Philppi, Paul writes with Timothy, that he continues to rejoice, even in his imprisonment and suffering.  He has joy because his joy is centered in Jesus and Jesus' activity in the world, not Paul's circumstance.  But his joy is central.

Skeezier

Is our culture getting more sleazy?  I received an email add from Books-a-million this morning.  It included a prominent add for the book Snuff.  The draw paragraph describes the book: "This wild, lethally funny, and thoroughly researched novel brings the huge yet underacknowledged presence of pornography in contemporary life into the realm of literary fiction at last."  At last?  What about D.H. Lawrence and some pretty peculiar passages even in Dickens?  But maybe the point is true--racy descriptions are not the same as movies streamed into our homes by the internet.  Porn is a mega huge industry today.  So with gambling.  Alcohol.  About the only traditional vice that is in decline, might be tobacco use.  But I'm not sure about that.
    Interestingly enough, this should not be any problem at all for Christians rooted in the Bible.  The pagan, first century Mediterranean world was filled with all sorts of vice (and deep concern over moral corruption, too).  That is the climate in which the Good News about Jesus spread like wild fire.  And the worse life got, the darker it grew, the more clearly could people see the bright light of Christ.

Are we our stuff?

The Greek word for goods or possessions (“they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds a(3874) to all, as any had need.” Acts 2:45) is the plural of the word existence. Our stuff is our existence, taken in a rigid sense. That is a pretty surprising idea. I can’t think of any of the great philosophies or political systems or religions that would teach that our material possessions are existence. Economic systems just recognize our stuff as important to our identity. But perhaps this word link tells us something important about how our material possessions does, in fact shape our existence.

 And our culture may not say that our stuff is who we are, but advertising certainly spends a lot of time trying to link some product with the idea of being happy, sexy, rich….

Was it Walt Whitman who asked if we own the house or the house owned us?

What we own or do not own shapes who we are or who are not. When the rich ruler came to Jesus, he directed the man to give away his possessions. To become a disciple of Jesus, that man needed to give away his stuff. He could not be a follower of Jesus and be a guy with all the stuff he had. The material good impacted his existence as a person of God or not.

March Madness (NCAA)

What if someone organized a NCAA men's basketball championship betting pool for good purposes?  I'm not a big fan of gambling probably as much for having lost $35 when I was 12 to some older boys who took advantage of my stupidity as much as for theological reasons.  But what if a someone, or heck even a church, organized a betting pool with a set of brackets.  Each person drops 5 or 10 bucks in the hat like any bracket pool and turns in a bracket sheet for the tournament.  Based on the usual way of setting up a bracket pool, the winner is determined.  But here is the twist: instead of paying out to the winner, the winner gets to decide the charity that the money goes to.  It would be a fun way to tie into March Madness for a church or just a men's Bible study.  I think it would be legal in most states, though I'm not sure. 

Good Friday and the sins of children

The approach of Good Friday and Easter lines up the dead center of what Christians are about.  Jesus, who was entirely innocent, died on the cross for our sin.  On Easter Sunday God raised him to new life.  So we are forgiven our sins, will not suffer their penalty (death) and are connected to God.  The only thing we have to do is to stop doing to bring about our forgiveness and reconciliation to God.  We have to trust what Jesus has accomplished enough not do anything to accomplish what he has already done.  There's lots more details to fill in, but that is the essence of the thing.  So preaching is very simple, though still difficult because it is almost impossible to believe that we don't have to save our own neck.  Or at least help.  Or at least try, in order to receive an A for effort.
    In the face of working to insist that we not only cannot but must not try to pay for our own sins, I am confronted by a dilemma.  One of the children chose to memorialize the dead pet frog with magic marker on the fence.  It is the principle of the thing almost as much as the marker on the fence.  But how can I claim that Jesus has wiped the slate clean for us in matters eternal, but pop a kid on the butt for doing something wrong?  It's a minutia, sure but it illustrates the dilemma.  How can the forgiveness that Jesus won at the cross be real and we still deal with sin, error and wrongdoing?  I decided to let him know that this was a 'no go' but not to drop the boom on him.

Access

The local school district is fairly particular about who gets to send email into their system, which no doubt is necessary.  We can't have teachers spending all day tempted by their winnings in the Nigerian lottery or by ads for enhancements of all kinds.  One of the teachers in our church had me added to the list of approved email senders--the district's 'white list.'  Now she can get email updates from the church where as before, my emails bounced back to me.  She had to get me approved to be able to have communication access.
    We can think of the work of Jesus as 'white listing' us to God.  Our Sin and the Sin of the whole world disconnects us from communicating with God.  Jesus' work was to gain us a connection with God, his Father.  The comparison risks running to the trivial, but it offers the advantage of using modern language and communication to help us see what Jesus has done for us.

Imagination

"I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth,
    blood and fire and billows of smoke.
The sun will be turned to darkness
    and the moon to blood
    before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord."  The Prophet Joel.

It takes a certain kind of imaginative power to see God at work in the events of the world.  A lunar eclipse is finishing outside as I type.  Laura and I just put our three boys back in bed after taking them to see it.  I was able to roughly explain how an eclipse happens using the light from a window and our eldest boy's shadow.  They had only to imagine me as the moon orbiting into Jack's shadow.  To be sure, seeing an eclipse as an omen can also be mere superstition, but labeling people in a an earlier age as superstitious is often just lazy thinking.  It does take a leap of the imagination to see God at work in heavens.  This leap is no less great than Isaac Newton's imaginative connection between falling apples and an orbiting moon.  Indeed, we are perhaps not prepared to see the imaginative power of Newton's discovery either, as they have grown so common to us.  The work of Galileo was matter of huge controversy and excommunication in his day.  Now my four year old twins know that the earth circles the sun, the moon the earth.

It takes imaginative power to look at the cosmos fresh:
"In that day the mountains will drip new wine,
    and the hills will flow with milk;
    all ravines of Judah will run with water."

It is no small thing to imagine hope for the world in the images of the prophet.

Just watch it.

So this may not have a lot to do with new churches, but it was just too funny not to put up. Though the spirit of playfulness is probably worth cultivating.

No Fear

So during the 10 minute ride to school, my 6 year old son asked me to explain the meaning and cause of recession.  NPR primed the pump so he could just say "What's that?" but you get the idea.  I was going to try to explain how much of our current market slow down is caused more by worry than external events, but first I needed to know if he knew what anxiety was.  So I asked, "Do you ever just get worried about things?  Like at School?"
"No."
Other than making me feel pretty good about the old home environment, this amazed me.  What does it mean not worry?  Jesus and angels are about forever telling people "No Fear."  The kid already gets it.

UnChristian coin with an unChristian president

A friend of mine at a cookout recently was showing a new Presidential $1 coin.  He is aggravated because the phrase "In God we trust" is set into the edge of the coin (The phrase was added in 1864).  He is aggravated by the rather inconspicuous placement of the phrase--which is fair, given that it is almost impossible to read.  And that when you are looking.  In fact, he went so far as to say, "Here, you take it.  I don't want it."  So it is now sitting on my desk before me.  Thomas Jefferson is starring up at me.  Which is kind of funny, because ol' TJ was not a Christian in any sense of the word other than cultural.  He did not believe in the divinity of Christ--which explains why he whittled the miracles or the resurrection out of the Bible he wanted to read(The Jefferson Bible--you can read bits of it here.).  Jefferson wanted the moral teaching of Jesus in the Bible, but did not want the Bible's other claims about Jesus.  Part of this must have been one of the unique pitfalls of always being the smartest guy in the room--one begins to think oneself always right.  The rest of us are not shackled with this problem. But it raises this important questions.  Is the U.S. a Christian country?  I mean occasionally people will ask someone could vote for a non-Christian for President.  There is a pretty good case to be made that we have already had at least one non-Christian as president--Jefferson.  Jefferson might have easily agreed with the phrase "In God we Trust" but he hardly would have meant the one God--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--meant by Christians.
God is word that carries so much meaning that people can say the same thing and mean different things.