The bits we don't like

Jesus and Power-over/under

Power comes in different forms. We are all familiar with power-over physics. As a civilization we have excelled in developing and deploying huge cause and effect mechanisms by which we can shape and control this world according to our desires. We have devised amazing networks of our machines, corporations, governments, societies and other tools to achieve a level of power and control greater than the world has ever know. We’re into power.

Which Kingdom? Which Means? Power over vs. Power Under

Both dialogue and confrontation are well attested in Scripture. There are times when Jesus opens up on people with absolutely withering criticism and other times when he seems soft on Romans, tax collectors, prostitutes, divorce and remarriage, obedience to the law, etc. OT prophets and NT apostles could have very sharp tongues but at other times seemed to compliant and accommodating.

Jack Roeda's sermon this past week, "The Interrogative Mood" I thought was very good on this. He noted the risen Lord's immense mercy, gentleness and kindness in dealing with Paul and Peter. Peter had disowned Jesus in the worst way (Check out Tim Keller's sermon on Witness, $2.50) and after his three-fold denial went away and cried bitterly, as a mother wails having lost a child. We might find in Peter's sorrow some justification for Jesus' gentle restoration in John but there is no justification for Paul's behavior. He's going after the church tooth and nail. In both cases Jesus doesn't appear as he does in the opening of the book of Revelation with a two edged sword, but he begins with a question. Roeda I think rightly notes that even the Risen Lord, now endowed with Philippians 2 status remains in these moments kind and gentle, although also at the same time strong and uncompromising. Roeda is right that there is something to be observed here, learned here and modelled here.

Tim Keller Sermon Outline: Praying our Tears

Tim Keller: Praying our Tears Psalm 39:12-13; 126:1-6

1.   The Psalms give us a gospel third way with your feelings

      a.   Religiosity is uncomfortable with feelings. They want to deny the power, depth, darkness of their feelings.

      b.   Secular people see the discovery of their feelings as a good in itself. If they discover their feelings they must bow to their feelings.

      c.   The Psalms does not say deny or vent your feelings but pray your feelings, bring them before God and process them.

The Blessing of Apostasy

The reality of apostasy is a disturbing one. I often return to the question, "What does it say about the church and the faith when people walk away?"

Before I go any further let me say that I’m using "apostate"on an empirical level. People who have left, walked away, are standing apart form the church on a variety of levels and for a variety of reasons. Some slam the door on their way out and curse the whole package, others just slink away and try not to be noticed but want to preserve some relationship or set of beliefs with Jesus and the church. Some don’t connect with a church for a myriad of reasons. Wikipedia has an interesting article on the word.

Defeater Causes, Issues

Tim Keller is writing a book on what he calls "Defeater Beliefs". He has a shorter paper on the subject freely available on the net. I think there are also clearly defeater causes and issues that the church has to deal with. The list for the USA today contains all the usual suspects: homosexuality, women in church office, abortion, the Iraq War, George W. Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Republicans, Democrats, etc. These are defeater issues or causes for many people because if you come down on the "wrong side" of them there is no longer anything to talk about. The conversation is over, the door is shut.

CS Lewis on "Causes" in Screwtape Letters

Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the "cause", in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war-effort or of Pacifism. The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience. Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours—and the more "religious" (on those terms) the more securely ours. I could show you a pretty cageful down here, Your affectionate uncle SCREWTAPE

CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters. pg. 42, 43

COS MP3 Archives

The return of the "bad seed"

It’s long been in fashion to believe that people are innately good, and that upbringing and environment are responsible for nasty personalities. But research is beginning to show that mean, sometimes outright evil behavior has a strong genetic component. Some of us, in other words, are truly born bad. NYTimes OPED link

Barbara Oakley, a professor of engineering at Oakland University, is the author of the forthcoming “Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend.”

The cultural responses for us when our own evil gets so blatant, so out of control, so obvious are also so predictable. First we are aghast that this could happen even though it has happened many times before. Part of this I'm sure is due to American historical amnesia. Part of it is due to denial. We simply couldn't have imagined we were THAT bad.

The next step is isolating the guilty. We have to find a category and a cause that separates us from them. The categories and the causes change depending upon philosophical and academic fashion. Sociological and psychological causes were in fashion but they have recently given ground to the biological and the genetic. In either case we insure that we are isolated and protected from the root cause. Those people over there who have had those experiences, or those people over there with that genetic material, THEY are the problem.

Once the source of the offending, dangerous and surprising evil is identified and isolated then we can begin the work of setting the world right. Formerly lack of empowerment, opportunity and resources were clearly the cause of the rise of evil. Now we see that we were mistaken. It was, after all, genetics. Good thing science has NOW given us the tools to address the problem. (If I have a hammer, everything looks like a nail...)

Once of course, the "some of us" have been exposed by our new tools, we will employ far older tools to manage, treat, contain, isolate, discriminate and ultimately eradicate the "some".

It would seem more enduring to confess the following.

1. We are all far more evil than we have the moral stomach to confess.
2. We have no human solution to point 1.

pvk

Audio and Video Archives

These are the most available audio (and some video) archives of my sermons and Sunday School lessons. pvk

http://livingstonescrc.com/sermonaudio/old

http://livingstonescrc.com/sermonaudio/2007

http://livingstonescrc.com/ssaudio/old

http://livingstonescrc.com/ssaudio/2007

http://livingstonescrc.com/video/2007

Tim Keller Sermon Outline: Praying our Fears

This is one of my favorite Tim Keller sermons. I wrote an outline for a small group study.

To download the sermon mp3 click here. (free download)

"subdue the earth"

This was a short piece I wrote in response to a Calvin-in-Common question on "subdue the earth". 

Gen 1-3 are obviously foundational for lots of stuff but not in isolation with the rest of Scripture and not just those few words. Notice that in the beginning was a garden and the result of the fall (curse of Adam) was thorns. If you read those great passages in Isaiah where quite unnaturally lions and lambs lay down together the picture is of restoration and peace, the Hebrew word is shalom.

The Hobbit

The Hobbit

I haven’t read The Hobbit since I was in high school. I’m reading it to my smaller three now and enjoying it immensely.

I’ve heard numerous treatments of LOTRs in terms of gospel metaphors, etc., but not much on The Hobbit. As I’ve been reading it though I have had thoughts in my mind about the Christian life. Tolkien famously resisted allegory and The Hobbit is no allegory. It is complicated like the world, not another story with a thin skin to crave our continual hunger for something newer.

Peterson

God has used the stuff of our sins to save us from our sins.

Christ Plays... pg. 204

We're wimps

Revival in the Crystal Cathedral

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/aprilweb-only/115-43.0.html

BOQ: "After it was over, the people said they never wanted to go through a revival again," she said. "It was so agonizing, there was such depth, such conviction for sin, and the things people felt they needed to confess publicly was so difficult."

Blumhofer said that though revivals sometimes are considered evangelistic tools, their real role—whether planned or spontaneous—is to reinvigorate church regulars. "It is a deepening conviction of one's sinfulness, one's need of grace, one's need of God that transforms—and then evangelism flows from that." EOQ

I thought those were interesting lines. I often reflect on what it is that limits God's blessing of us. I think it is our weakness. The whole notion of God's overwhelming presence, one that we can't stand to be near. It's like radiation and like workers in a nuclear plant we wear badges and they change colors when we've gotten too of him. Sometimes he can't wait for us or hold himself back and he "breaks out among us" like from some OT story and we are besides ourselves. The most authenticating element of this story is confession. In authentic revival we see ourselves for who we really are and we are undone. That of course is why we can't handle much of his presence. We are fragile creatures and we can only handle little bits of the truth. I think of the voyagers in the bus in Lewis' "The Great Divorce" and how painful heaven was to the shadows.

Today's Confession

Deeply seated in our unbelief is our pride. Despite a lifetime of empirical, documented, incontrovertible evidence of our wickedness, selfishness and stupidity, we all doggedly assert that we are both more moral and smarter than God. Even though most church-groomed Christians would immediately reject such an assertion, I find it to be in myself and obvious in almost everyone I meet. (I say "almost everyone" so that each of you will breath easily in the assumption that I have of course excepted you from my sweeping condemnation.)

Caught Tim Keller shopping an apocryphal Luther quote

Tim Keller Sermon Outline: Justice (Vision Series)

Tim Keller Vision Series: Justice Isaiah 58:1-14

1.   Introduction

      a.   The importance of justice

      b.   The meaning of justice

      c.   How to become people who do justice

Selfish God-seeking

Ken Bailey paints the picture in even starker terms. He notes that the younger son's speech he generates with the pigs is not only self-centered but manipulative. It echoes Pharaoh's false confession to Moses to lift a plague. (Exodus 10:16) According to Bailey the younger son returns home in order to survive, make good, and to pay his own way. The moment of "conversion" if you want to use that language is when his speach is cut short by the father and the father throws his arms around him, protecting him from the village elders who will officially banish the son (Pharisees and scribes to whom this is directed). That's right, we seek God for lots of unholy reasons.

One of my favorite parables is the parable of the dishonest manager. I never understood it until I had to teach it for a Sunday School lesson. This guy is an absolute scoundrel. No coincidence it follows Luke 15 and with not much of a narrative break. It seems he's using this parable in some way to explain the previous one to his disciples. This dishonest manager selfishly, manipulatively banks on the generosity and pride of the master to save his own skin. He does not rely on his own righteousness because he has none and he's self-aware enough and honest enough to know it. In the end the master praises him at his own expense and doesn't give him what he deserves. Terrific stuff.

More than love

This was a response to a Calvin-in-Common posting.

Borg and Wright are friends. They've worked together but their scholarship goes off in different directions.

There is no question that Jesus preached radical love. Jesus' pronouncements are full of them: love you enemies, love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus also referred to himself in this light: the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The Son of Man gives his life as a ransom for many. Etc.

Doing Justice: Outline of Tim Keller's Lecture at the Resurge Conference

MP3 Audio of the Lecture

Tim Keller Resurgence Lecture: Doing Justice

1.   The Delta Effect: During times of revival disparate kinds of ministry facets: conversions, social justice, cultural renewal, deep community, are all happening simultaneously. After revival recedes churches tend to just major in one or another and churches split up like a delta with different streams going different ways.

      a.   Only with the power of the Holy Spirit will the people in different streams get together.

      b.   Without the power of the Holy Spirit everyone holds onto their one little things they are doing well and throw bricks at the others.