Thoughts.

Do Not Judge

Sun, 7 Feb 2010 19:57:35 -0600

It’s been said that if you were to have gone to a college campus a couple of decades ago to survey the most common Scripture known by most students was John 3:16. But if you go to a school today and did the same survey, the most known verse is Matthew 7:1.

Do Not Judge.

And to be honest I get why. I think my generation has seen just too much religious intolerance; from flying planes into buildings, to crazy street preachers condemning every particular soapbox behavior they hate and slapping Jesus name on it. We’ve seen religion divide relationships and make people generally more hateful.

But we haven’t stopped judging, we’ve just done changed the criteria.

Every day on Facebook I get a notification by some application called Compare your Friends, telling me that my peers think I’m smarter/dumber, faster/slower, funnier/boring than someone else. My generation has seen the rise of peer-rating sites like no other. We’re constantly being taught to ask am I hot or not? We’re being conditioned to wonder if I am acceptable, and now we even have a convenient 1-10 scale.

We live in a beauty pageant.

Last night I had to put the SuperBowl on pause to read Eden a bedtime story. And for the first time ever I read her “You are Special” by Max Lucado. It’s kind of like a parable for children, but I know some grown ups who should read it. It’s about a world of wooden puppets, (one Jim Henson didn’t create) and these puppets love to compare.

And when a puppet does something good they get a star, and when they make a mistake they get a dot. So basically you’ve got all these puppets walking around with dots and stars defining them. And one particularly dotted puppet, named Punchinello, is feeling down about all his mistakes. He couldn’t jump high or sing well, His wood was scratched and he wasn’t the best at anything.

Until he meets a puppet without any stars or dots. Because they don’t stick. She tells Punchinello that she doesn’t have any stickers because she goes everyday to see Eli, the carpenter who made them. So Punchinello goes and visits Eli, and Eli tells Punchinello that he shouldn’t let the stickers get to him. Because, “Who are they to give you stars or dots. What they think doesn’t matter, what I do does.”

Now I know this probably sounds pretty cheesy. But I read this to Eden and hoped as deeply as I could that she would get this. Because life is going to throw at her a million different opportunities to compare herself to others and feel disappointed or elated. And I don’t want anybody putting dots on her.

And then I went back and finished watching the Superbowl. It was a great game, I liked both teams, and I know the Saints have reinvigorated New Orleans in a way that no one could have expected. But it’s a still a system of stars and dots.

I’m starting to think that when the New Testament refers to worldly it’s referring to something like this. When Jesus uses the term talking to Pilate, saying, “My Kingdom is not of this world” some translators have said that would be better translated, “My Kingdom is not of this system.”

It’s not a system of power rising to the top, or of the strong ruling the weak.

Think about 2 Corinthians 5. Paul is trying to describe the implications of a New Heaven and a New Earth, and look at what he closes off with:

So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view.
Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer.
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old
has gone, the new has come!

Paul’s trying to bring down to earth a story that’s as big as the redemption of all the Cosmos. And Paul is trying to apply that to the way we look at people. And he still has a word for today.

See Paul has learned the danger of looking at people from the perspective that he used to have. And he learned it first hand from misjudging Jesus. He’d looked at Jesus as a mixed up itinerant Rabbi who hung out with some scandalous people.

And he found out that he’d judged poorly, so he gave it up all together.

So much so that he spent the rest of his life trying to get the churches he planted to give it up too.

Paul had met the Living Jesus, and he’d realized that he’d been so off about his previous judgments that he refused to live with those kinds of systems anymore. Because in Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, Slave nor free, Male or Female.

Christians should be the one group of people who don’t judge based on those things anymore. And they should no longer accept that kind of judgement of others about themselves either.

We don’t deal in stars and dots any longer.

Because we’ve learned they only stick if you let them.

Sola Scriptura

Mon, 1 Feb 2010 22:04:58 -0600

So I’ve been wrestling with the eighth chapter of Acts for the past few weeks, trying to figure out what was going on then, and what that could mean for Jesus’ followers today. The story is pretty bizarre to be honest. A guy named Phillip is swept up by the Spirit (whatever that means) and is taken to meet an Ethiopian Eunuch, a man who’s in a high political position, who’s driving a chariot back to Africa.

Sounds like the beginning of a George Lucas movie, I know.

The Eunuch is a man who’s made quite a few sacrifices to get where he’s going. And he’s made it to the top, but now, and this is my imagination, he’s looking for more. He’s now returning from a visit to Jerusalem to visit a foreign God, and a foreign Temple.* And on his way home, he runs into a hitchhiker wanting to have a Bible study.

A few centuries ago, Scripture was really taking a pounding. The institutional church leaders had a monopoly on who could or couldn’t read the Bible (not to mention most of the culture was illiterate) and so the ruling theocracy of the day interpreted the implications of Scripture to the masses. And sometimes they added a little something in there for their own gain. They pork-barreled the Bible like it was a bill.

They had all these addendum’s about what God wanted, and some of them were meant with good intentions, while some of them were just religiously veiled attempts at furthering their own agenda.

Enter Martin Luther. Here’s a guy, who for all his flaws, saw what was going on with the corruption of the religious establishment, and decided the best way to end the corruption was by getting the Bible out there. Into the hands of the people.

One of the central principles of the Reformation movement was Sola Scriptura, which means Only Scripture. The idea behind it is that we don’t need people’s additions, or interpretation about what the Scripture is saying, just give the people the Bible. And that is a good idea, started with great motives.

The problem is it’s not Biblical.

Because if the Ethopian Eunuch would have been a Protestant, when Philip would have come jogging along side of him, asking do you understand what you’re reading there. The Eunuch would have responded by saying “Of Course, I’m literate. I have no problem understanding this.”

But he doesn’t.

Instead he tells Phillip something I think is interesting. He says, “How can I? Unless someone explains it to me?”

Worked into the Bible itself is the Bible pointing beyond itself. As if it’s incomplete, looking for a body. This is not to diminish the Bible. It’s to say what Jesus himself said in John 5, that Scripture points externally to the person of Jesus.

Which just happens to be what Phillip does from there.

He interprets the passage the Eunuch was reading from Isaiah to be about Jesus as the Messiah.

Over the years, I’ve had people say little comments to me that reflect this kind of worldview about the Scriptures. I’ve had good friends tell me I read too many other books, or that I just need to stick with the Bible. Which, ironically enough, is probably an idea that they got from other books, or at least people who read them. I’ve had people dismiss me because I read scholarly books for school. (To be clear I don’t claim that I’m a scholar or the son of a scholar).

But their argument is just let us read the Bible. The problem with that is we probably can’t. I doubt very many people in our pews would get much out of it if we just plopped down several large stacks of Greek or Hebrew codices. We are already the beneficiaries of someone else wrestling to interpret Scripture for us.

One of the unintended consequences of this kind of view of Scripture is that it can keep us isolated. It’s the product of a culture of individualism that is relatively new. And when we baptize that approach to Scripture, the one thing people rarely point out is that it’s not in Scripture.

We weren’t made to read the Bible by ourselves, in fact that is a pretty new phenomenon. Not that it’s bad, I happen to read the Bible often by myself and like that way better than say, you reading it to me. But there’s also a reason I blog, and read other people’s blogs. Or have conversations, with people on page and in person. There’s a reason that I like Bible studies, small groups, or whatever other name you want to put on it.

I want to see what God is doing in other lives besides my own.

Because maybe God’s showing you something he didn’t show me. Or maybe he showed me something he didn’t show you.

The Scriptures are this story spanning thousands of years, written by dozens of authors.

If God took that kind of process to write it, is it possible He’s trying to say something about how to read it.

Maybe it’s time to let someone else on the chariot.

Like A Child

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:02:53 -0600

I used to hear preachers talk about their experiences with their children and roll my eyes. They’d always say things like how God was teaching them trust through watching their kids grow, or how they watched their own inner turmoil by watching their kids wrestle with tough questions. And I’d think to myself, “Sure.”

But I get it now.

I have learned more from being Eden’s father for the last year and a half than I ever have from reading a book or listening to a sermon. I’ve learned about joy and faith, trust and fear, beauty and silence (or how to appreciate it when it’s there). There’s a reason that Jesus often chose children as a visual aid.

Last week Leslie asked me to make a video for Eden to have when she grows up a little more. A video that looks back to before she has siblings and had to share our attention with others. Just to let her know how much she has always been loved.

So like any video about Eden’s life must have, it begins with L-O-V-E by Nat King Cole, the only song that entire first year that could calm her down when she was upset. The video’s nothing special, but for us it’s great, kind of like Eden’s greatest hits, or at least the ones we had a video camera around for.

I hope one day Eden you drag this old video up and dust it off for to watch with your family. As you laugh at our haircuts and weird clothes, just know that we will never love anybody more than we love you.

You’ll always be our first baby, thanks for being so great.

The Big Lie

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 01:43:05 -0600

Earlier this week, our youth minister, David Fraze sent me an interesting survey about families in America. The survey didn’t appear to have a blatant bias against or toward media. But it did ask a lot of poignant questions about the use, or overuse, of home media in American’s homes today.

Did you know that the average kid spends about 9-12 hours a day digesting some form of media? That’s everything from surfing the web to playing video games. The large majority of that time is of course television. That’s up quite a significant number from even five years ago. The stark truth is that we live in a world that is enmeshed in all forms of media, almost constantly.

In fact the only form of media that we aren’t being exposed to more, is print. That is we’re watching to more T.V. and reading less books.

Now I actually like T.V. and my Ipod and I love going to movies. But whether we want to admit it or not, life is a series of competing narratives. We all are living out some kind of story, my question is who’s telling our’s?

When the movie Patch Adams first came out, I was there opening night. I love Robin Williams and I loved the idea of the guy giving medical help with some soul. There was a girl who worked at Burger King who looked just like Monica Potter (the girl in the movie). And I was smitten.

I automatically assumed that she would be slightly socially awkward. She’d have a great sense of humor and be looking for love with a short man.

I was wrong.

Adolf Hitler wrote about a phenomenon in his book, “Mein Kampf” called the Big Lie. (To be clear, I don’t make it a habit to read Hitler). His point was directed toward the Jewish race. Here’s what he said:

“All this was inspired by the principle--which is quite true in itself--that in the big lie
there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation
are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than
consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they
more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often
tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.
It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not
believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Here’s the only place I agree with Hitler, just not how he applied it. He says that if someone tells a lie, no matter how big it is, if it is repeated often enough, that it will wear someone down. His point was directed against the Jewish people, and ironically he used the Big Lie principle to turn a nation against them. They were responsible for the woes of German society, they cheated, lied, etc.

I have a friend who grew up in Nazi German who said that her father eventually forced them all to stop listening to the radio. He didn’t want them to believe that story.

There’s a story about a guy named Stephen in the book of Acts. Stephen is on trial for his life, the religious leaders of Israel are running a mock trial trying to shut him up as soon as possible. The high priest asks Stephen a question, Are you a blasphemer? And Stephen answers a yes or no question like this.

“Once Upon a Time.”

He spends an entire chapter telling the story of Scripture. Of Israel. To Israel. And then he gets killed. Sometimes we tell a story to change the world, sometimes we tell it so the world doesn’t change us.

I’m not someone who thinks that the television is the Devil, or that movies are bad. What I am concerned about, is how much we listen to alternative stories. I’m concerned that the wrong narratives might become the grid through which we view our own. Because NBC is never going to tell you that in order to live you must lay down your life. Fox is never going to say that the last shall be first.

There’s a reason that the Jewish people every year still celebrate Passover, by having the children ask questions about a story thousands of years old. There’s a reason that God emphasizes parents being intentional about telling their kids this alternative story. In the middle of a world with a thousand stories, they carve out time to tell their own.

Never underestimate the impact of what we imput. Because if you hear a lie enough, you start to believe it’s true. There are a thousand Once upon a Time’s out there.

Which one’s are you listening to?

Prophets and Heroes

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:27:39 -0600

Sometime during college I went through a pretty significant transition about how I considered the gospel. I began to see it as good news for the world, not only in the age to come, but also in this time and place.

And that transition, was due in large part, to a dead preacher from Alabama, named Martin Luther King Jr.

About a month ago, I read a book called “Blood Done Signed My Name.” It’s about the child of a white, Methodist preacher who grew up during the fight for Civil Rights in the South. I think for most of the people my age, we view the civil rights battle with a bit of romanticism. Love triumphs, evil loses, hope overcomes...etc.

But this truth is a bit less rose-colored.

One time, this white country church preacher stood up and delivered a sermon against racism. Afterward one of the parishoners approached him with a fury and said, “I’m accustomed to a Pork-Sandwich after a political talk.” This preacher was forced to move churches several different times because he wouldn’t be quiet about things that mattered. He went through several uncomfortable, awkward meetings with elders. Most of his career his job was hanging by a thread.

I have a friend in ministry who describes himself like this: “I love Jesus and I work for his church. It’s amazing how much those two things conflict.”

I think he’s on to something.

Here’s what I mean by that:

In the Gospel of Matthew there is a time, toward the end of his ministry, where Jesus is finally letting the leaders of the religious establishment of his day have it. He goes through seven different woes (which is Biblical Language for, this sucks). And the last woe is one aimed specifically toward the treatment of the prophets. Look at what Jesus says.

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for
the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, 'If we had
lived in the days of our forefathers, we would not have taken part with them in
shedding the blood of the prophets.' So you testify against yourselves that you are
the descendants of those who murdered the prophets.”

He tells them that they decorate the tombs of the prophets, but they themselves put them there.

Right after Martin Luther King Jr. made his “I Have a Dream” speech, the F.B.I. put out a memo that said Dr. King was the most dangerous Negro alive, and that he had communist tendencies. They tapped his phones and had him under surveillance. And he was a preacher.

But really Dr. King more than that. He was a prophet. He wasn’t perfect, and I’m sure he made plenty of mistakes. But he spoke the truth even eventually at the cost of his own life.

One of the questions that has haunted me the past few years has been: “If I was alive would I have joined the fight for Civil Rights? Or would I have just been silent about a system that I would have benefitted from?” I tend to be a moderate by nature. Most of the times I can see both sides of the issue. But moderate’s are the opposite of prophets. Read Dr. King’s “Letter to a Birmingham Jail” if you ever wonder what I mean by that.

But we don’t just need moderates, or conservatives, or liberals, or whatever other kind of label you feel comfortable with.

The church, our society, the world needs prophets.

So if you’re reading this, and you feel a fire in your bones. If you have noticed an area of deep brokenness in the world that needs some attention. Just know if you speak out there is a chance we might not like it. There is a chance that we might not like you.

But even though we may persecute you while you speak a truth we need to hear, one day maybe we will know better. Maybe one day we’ll get it. One day we might even decorate your tomb, or give you a federal holiday.

So take heart prophets. One day you’ll be a hero.