Preaching Transcripts and Mp3's

Failure Mode Analysis: Disaster Proofing Your Romantic Relationsip

2012-01-24T08:34:00.000-08:00

So this is the last night of our relationship series…tonight we move from friendship and family to talk about romantic relationships. And I may strike you as an odd choice for tonight’s topic…but you see…I might not have Christian’s warm family background or Dan’s modeling career (come on, Dan is so good looking that one person who looked like that wasn’t enough)…but I have something to offer that neither of them do…You see, I’m an engineer…

Now, I understand if maybe you don’t immediately connect engineers and romance in your mind.

Yep, that would be understandable…

But here’s the thing… there is a reason societies keep Engineers around despite our famed inability to have a conversation that is not awkward…Engineers figure out how things fail…and the really remarkable thing is that engineers usually figure how things fail BEFORE they fail. And that is why normal, well adjusted people like you keep us around.[1] We are odd, but useful (pic).

Some failures are pretty obvious and mildly comical.

Others are difficult to predict and have more devastating consequences.

But catastrophic failures like this are relatively rare…because of engineers.

Engineers predict how things fail…before they fail. It’s called ‘Failure Mode Analysis.’

And when it comes to bridges and buildings, we can be happy to outsource failure mode analysis that to a community of superheroes with thick glasses, stained ties, and low social intelligence. But it seems like we could all use a little ‘failure mode analysis’ when it comes to our romantic decisions…because the world of Christian dating and romance is strewn with wreckage. People may not agree on the solution, but most people agree that the failure rate[2] is unacceptable. We do this thing poorly. [3][4] In particular, we spend too much time and energy as a community working through relational wreckage…that someone should have seen coming.

You see, we all eventually learn how relationships fail. [5] But there are two ways to learn this. You can learn it experientially, you can have a careless romantic relationship or four that you end up regretting…or you can learn how things fail before they fail. And you see figuring out the how relationships fail before they fail and then avoiding those regrets is what the Bible calls ‘wisdom’.

Now a dating talk on dating is a little hard to do…because the Bible doesn’t really talk about it. Dating as we think about it didn’t exist when the Bible was written. It’s a novel cultural artifact.

Beth Bailey wrote a scholarly book on the history of dating in the United States…a scholarly book with a fun title. From the Front Porch to the Back Seat: Courtship in 20th Century America – dating and even courtship are historically novel cultural artifacts. We have only been dating as a culture since automobile ownership became prevalent. It’s only been a couple of generations…so in a sense it is a grand social experiment, that, incidentally is not going particularly well. And so it is not surprising that the Bible does not have a lot to say on an obscure cultural practice limited to part of the world for a small fragment of history.[6][7][8]

But what’s another novel cultural artifact that Bible doesn’t talk about? Here’s one…pants. (CLer reading the bible thinking about pants) The Bible is almost entirely silent about pants…but I still need to decide if I’m going to put some on before I leave my house….and in that decision, I am guided by what the Bible calls wisdom. You see, on topics that the Bible does not explicitly speak on, where we have to apply Biblical thinking to novel cultural situations, the Scriptures do not leave us adrift. They tell us again and again and again to seek wisdom. [9]

Proverbs 4

5 Get wisdom; get insight;
do not forget...
6 Do not forsake her, and she will keep you;
love her, and she will guard you.
7 The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom,
and whatever you get, get insight.
8 Prize her highly, and she will exalt you;
she will honor you if you embrace her.[10]

To kind of bring back the engineering language…modern relationships are prone to failure.[11] But many of us aren’t doing the kind of rigorous assessment of them that comports with the importance of the decision. Many of us are putting more rigorous analysis into that life altering decision between a droid and an iphone.[12] We have bought the cultural falsehood that romance is something that happens to you…that love is something you ‘fall into’…like mordor or that creepy pit creature in Return of the Jedi.[13]

You hear people say all the time ‘you can’t choose who you love.’ Now, there is a mysterious aspect to attraction…BUT…people hide behind that idea to absolve them of the huge responsibility is attached to their romantic choices.

And so I have used the engineering metaphor of ‘failure mode analysis’ to organize this talk. Engineers talk about 'failure' modes, because there are multiple ways that a structure can fail and each possible 'failure mode' requires careful planning, analysis and reflection before you can have confidence in the integrity of the design. And so I am going to assert that contemporary Christian romantic relationships have at least 4 failure modes. You need to assess each of these and make a plan:

Failure Mode 1: Motivation

The first thing you have to get right is the motivation for romance. You absolutely must have a theology of romance and sexuality before you do romance and sexuality. If you don’t understand these aspects of your humanness theologically, you are not likely to experience them the way they were indented. And so let me pose the question: What is Romance For? What Function Does it Perform? What is the Purpose of Romance?

In other words, What is a sound motivation for pursuing or entering into a romantic relationship? If you haven’t given substantial reflection to this question you may need to put the brakes on getting into one. [14]

If you get this wrong, the whole thing is distorted. And it can end up distorted in equal and opposite ways.

Some are too eager for romance and marriage and some of you are too scared of it.

The reason it is hard to write a talk like this is that some of you want marriage too much and others want marriage too little – some of you have a marriage idol and some of you have an independence idol [15] But you see, the person who is too eager for romance and marriage and the person who is too scared of it have something in common. They are both thinking about how romance and marriage will affect their happiness.

I occasionally get questions like ‘how high should my standards be…are my standards too high or too low’ – well, it depends what kind of heart sickness you tend towards. Do you look to marriage to fulfill your longings or do you fear marriage as an obstacle to your longing?

They aren’t actually two separate idolatries…they are two symptoms of the same idolatry. Marriage is perceived as either a means or an obstacle to happiness. It is neither.

Both motivations are consumptive. They ask the question: “How will I benefit from getting into or not getting into a relationship?” How will it augment or detract from my happiness. They are both self involved.

“Destructive to marriage is the self-fulfillment ethic that assumes marriage and the family are primarily institutions of personal fulfillment, necessary for us to become "whole" and happy.” [16] Hauerwas

Marriage, like the rest of your life, is not fundamentally about your happiness or your misery…it is about Jesus and his Kingdom. [17]

So happiness is a mistaken motivation (though, like so many things in the Christian life, it can be a frequent incidental side effect of a relationship that is built on better things). Viewing romance as a vehicle or obstacle to happiness or fulfillment makes people simultaneously too terrified and too eager. But, what is an appropriate motivation. What is the purpose of romance?

The purpose of romance is to move turn a friendship into a family…it is the process by which we turn a friendship into a (missional) family. (which is the smallest functional unit of that God uses to build his missional community). Genesis tells a story of generations because God tells his story in generations.

The reason we are doing a romance talk in the context of friendship and family talks is that you can only understand romance theologically if you understand friendship and family theologically.

Thesis:
Romance is the means for turning a friendship into a family.

This is the thesis of the whole series.

Romance doesn’t exist for itself or by itself. It has the purpose of family building and is constructed from the raw materials of friendship. If you abstract romance from either friendship or family, If you don’t start with a robust, well developed friendship or have a goal that is something short of a God honoring family that is part of His multi-generational purposes, you distort it.

Because Romance is the means for making a family out of a friendship.

You see, here’s the thing. The whole dating thing, the process by which you choose who you are going to spend your life with…It is a relatively brief life stage (2-4% of your brief life) yet most of our cultural narratives are obsessed with it. Sit coms, film, novels…they all focus on this relatively brief life stage. [18][19][20][21] It needs to be a time when you build something real.

Now, if the purpose of dating is to turn a friendship into a family…then what’s the Goal of dating? Well – friendship and character assessment – It’s the process by which you answer the question ‘do you want to build a community of faith with this person?’ But HOW do you do that? The ‘how’ question leads us to our second ‘failure mode.’

Failure Mode 2: Method

The second way that this can go poorly is method. If you get the motivation right, you have a better shot at getting the method right…but it is not a given. You can understand the why, and still totally blow the how. [22] How do you get there from here?

Now there are some methods that we can dismiss pretty quickly. [23]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7YV3mBo2Bw

I don’t have a lot of time here, so I’m not going to waste a lot of it by telling you that the campus hookup culture is a terrible method. I mean if the purpose of romance is to turn a friendship into a misisonal community, to build something real that will echo for generations, you do not have to wonder very long if getting drunk, having sex with a stranger, having a vague recollection of liking it, doing it a few more times until you develop a kind of complicated sense of obligation to each other end up calling yourself a couple is a successful method for this.

But in evangelical culture the ‘method’ question has become a pretty heated topic of late. There is a bit of a raging debate that pits ‘dating’ against ‘courtship’. Then there are even a few proponents of something called ‘betrothal’ but to be fair, those people are mostly just weird. And there may be a few of you whose parents are mature and admiral Christians of non-Western decent, who have to deal with the fact that ‘arrangement’ is in the mix.[24]

Now, if you are just checking Christianity out, maybe you are a visitor with us tonight, or maybe you are new to Christian community and you hear something like ‘the dating/courtship debate’ and it sounds like something out of the 1920’s…maybe the 1920’s on ANOTEHR PLANET. It just sounds goofy. Here’s the thing. I totally agree. These debates are mostly a matter of semantics.

But here is what they are all essentially getting at.

There has GOT to be a better way to do this thing.

There has got to be a way to move a relationship from a friendship to a family that is not as wrought with spiritual peril…that is more honoring to God and the friend who you have decided is sexy (looking for a synonym-or and enabler). [25]

You cannot just take the sitcom/romcom model of this, Christianize it by subtracting pre-vow sexuality and run with it. You have to forge a counter cultural method that honors God and honor’s the friend who you are auditioning for the role of ‘lifetime companion.’[26] I can’t spell out a method for you. I don’t have enough time and I’m not sure I could if I did. You are going to have to forge it out of the raw materials of respect for your friend and obedience to God. But here are a few things that really need to be part of the package.

i. Your Method has to Include a prominent role for family and community

You see, Christians believe that wisdom requires the practice of ‘self skepticism.’ It requires a cautious distrust of our own motivations. Our hearts are not to be trusted. And if our hearts are not to be trusted in baseline states, it is even more true when they are surging with dopamine and serotonin (comic). Dopamine is not the friends of wisdom. Its purpose is to make you forget how hard it is to raise a child so you will heedlessly engage in the activity required to make one.

Wise friends and ESPECIALLY family are great ‘blind spot mirrors.’ If you let them, they can be really helpful at being skeptical for you when you are not capable of being skeptical about yourself.

You need to outsource some of the authority to assess your relationship to qualified and wise individuals, including some who have been married a long time, whose assessment apparatus has not been chemically compromised.[27][28]

ii. Major on the Friendship.

“Marriage is not basically romance garnished with friendship…it is basically friendship garnished with romance.” Keller[29]

Every married couple eventually figures out the kissing thing. But lots of them never figure out the friendship thing. Romantic exploration has to major on the friendship.

iii. Recognize that life unfolds in season

“A Time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.”

Things are enjoyed in seasons. (Don’t awaken love before its time) which leads to [30]

iv. Avoid dating that is either too casual or too obsessive

– replace these extremes with cautiously purposeful. Don’t leave a wake of flirtation and false hopes…but don’t give yourself too fully too soon.

v. Don’t disappear from Christian community and mission.

It always bothers me when a newly formed couple falls off the map – it is a sign that they are putting too much hope in the connection – and that they misunderstand the purpose of coupling. Because the whole romance thing is the fun but important first step in building a missional community. [31] If you are assessing a partner with which to build a missional community, it seems like community and mission would be a good context to do that assessing. Don’t fall off the map.

Failure Mode 3: Momentum

I have met with a lot of students over the years to talk about relationships. And I have talked with a lot of married couples about how they feel about their dating years looking in retrospect. I have heard a lot of crazy stuff. But there is one thing I’ve never heard. I have never met a couple that said “you know what I regret...going too slow in our physical relationship" [32]

You see, once you DTR you are in a race...it is a race to effectively evaluate if this is a person who you want to build a misisonal community with before physical and emotional intimacy make that evaluation impossible.

Tim Keller, who wrote an excellent new book on marriage and relationships which I highly recommend [33] put it like this:

“Don’t let things get too passionate too quickly….physical exploration can engage romantic obsession…(which ) tends to preclude a realistic assessment of who the person really is.”(Keller)

You need to pace the physical and emotional intimacy. And here is the deal…you are not going to go too slow. So take whatever pace you were planning on…and slow it down…then slow it down again…then slow it down again.

Now, I am going to give you a couple of examples…and they are going to sound absurd.

First: Don’t be in a hurry to give it a label. If the goal of romance is friendship and character assessment…then you can do that pretty effectively as friends…or as friends with a confessed shared interest.

Second: You don’t want to be kissing for more than a year before you can take your clothes off. So if marriage is a couple years off, so is kissing.

Third: The L-bomb. Telling someone ‘I love you’ is a little arbitrary, but it has a ton of cultural power. That thing should be within a couple months of clear dense carbon.

Finally:, everything is better in Christianity is better in community even – especially romance. (I feel like there is a potentially tasteless/dangerous joke here) Friendship and character assessment do not require closed doors, rooms that have beds in them or a lot of intense alone time. In fact, interacting with other people will help with the character assessment.

If public romance doesn’t appeal to you, question your motives

Let me summarize this point for you…SLOW THE FRICK DOWN!

Listen, better men and women than you have failed at this. Many Christians think that as long as they are spiritual enough they won’t be derailed by sexual sin. It is not enough to have passion. [34] Loving Jesus is not enough to avoid sexual entanglement. You have to have a plan. Set your ground rules before you get in a relationship and then call upon your friends to hold you to them.

Failure Mode 4: Materials

But there is one final important failure mode. Method, momentum, and even motivation are meaningless if you aren’t building with the right materials – you can hire the best structural engineer in the world and it won’t matter if you try to build a skyscraper out of jello. You know it would be really convenient and cost effective if we could build bridges out of dog poo [35] – but that doesn’t make it a good idea…I don’t care how much that would delight my 4 year old…or Zach Evans…or the author of my favorite bathroom blog.

And this is why the goal of romance is friendship and character assessment.

The primary building material of a romantic relationship is character.

I pitched the outline of my talk to a friend who is a pastor and his response was, your whole talk should be about that last point. Well, 2 years ago that is exactly what I did. I gave a talk called –“Three things that are more important than hotness”- I’ve burned some CD’s, available in the back and the MP3 link is in your handout…but let me tell you the ONE thing that I think is most important to the long term success of a friendship that elects to transition to a family.

The goal of romance might be friendship development and character assessment…it might be to determine if this person who has caught your attention has the stuff to stand by your side as you try build a family…if this is THE friendship you want to turn into a family. But that is actually not the most important character question in your romantic life.

The most important character question in your romantic life is YOURS.

You see, when it comes to the long term success of your relationship, "who you become is more important than who you marry."

Last year in both fall and spring retreats, we had speakers…Impressive and thoughtful Christian pastors…who both told us stories of their evangelical fairy tale marriages...that went horrifically and catastrophically wrong…both of them coming dangerously close to ending. I think this terrified a number of students. Now, it is only fair to tell you that not all marriages have those kinds of dramatic crises. Amanda and I have never teetered on the edge of divorce…not yet at least. But we’ve had hard times and I don’t know any couples who haven’t. So one of the things a number of students asked Amanda and I after the retreat talks was ‘why is marriage so hard.’ And here’s the answer. It is hard because marriage forces you to face yourself…and what you see is not pretty.

Keller – “the conflict that marriage creates is not conflict with your spouse but with yourself…you cannot run from yourself…in the past if someone revealed your flaws, you could always leave -marriage isn’t hard because it is hard to live with someone else, it’s hard because it is difficult to face your true self”

You want a head start on a successful marriage. You don’t need to learn how to be a good kisser. You need to learn how to face hard truths about yourself and change. You don’t need 10 dating tips, you need spiritual formation.

Both parties need to get really good at two things: -repentance and forgiveness – CH “a marriage is not 50/50…it is 100/100” Marriage requires self-skepticism and self giving grace.

But let me end with the good news. This can be done. I’ve known many couples who transitioned from a rich friendship to a thriving missional family without spiritual wreckage or major regrets. The thing about failure mode analysis, by giving careful consideration to how things fail, you can avoid it. You can turn a rich friendship into a productive missional family that honors God and as a side effect (rather than a goal) provides you a lot of joy. But you are going to have to get the motivation, methods, momentum and materials right. And you all are going to have to help each other do that.

________________

[1] Anecdote about Roman Bridge engineers? - AD comment: Roman bridge engineer anecdote? Say that out loud…. Probably not =)
[2] ‘failure’ is not a relationship ending. It is regretting a relationship.
[3] And, Dan and I are tired of it kicking our collective ass.
[4] Incidentally, this is part of why you never see Dan or I ‘like’ changes in relationship status to dating on Facebook. It doesn’t mean that we don’t like the match, or that we don’t think the people involved are remarkable. More often than not we do. But we know that there is a lot of peril that awaits them and potential spiritual wreckage.
[5] It’s okay if a relationship fails, and that not all relationships can or are supposed to work out, even if your methods, motivations, etc are all right.
[6] you could be led to believe, because it has been this way for a couple of decades – because your parents did it this way and their parents did it this way = that this is normal. Instead, we are the product of a grand (and failing) social experiment. We are just beginning to understand the failure modes.
[7] I mean, just look at your parents. AD “This line is either brilliant or terribly ill advised. I’m leaning towards brilliant…but you should probably ask someone wiser than me.”
[8] ZE “. I think people struggle with physical boundaries even more so BECAUSE of a failure of emotional boundaries. I think the attraction of emotional vulnerability causes clothes to come off in a directly related way”
[9]“Intelligence and education are only raw materials for good judgment…Wisdom is a reality based phenomenon. To be wise is to know reality, to discern it. A discerning person notices things, attends to things, picks up on things…the wise accommodate themselves to reality.” Plantiga
[10]16:16 How much better to get wisdom than gold!
To get understanding is to be chosen rather than silver.
[11]And by that I don’t just mean that relationships end. A romantic relationship that ends isn’t necessarily a failure. But one that ends with regret is.
[12] AD: “I think there’s an idea out there that relationships need to start and be “completely organic” for them to be true love or for them to work long term. The irony is that it’s the opposite. That’s probably why arranged marriages work and divorce rates are so high for “organic” marriages” -
[13]I think there’s an idea out there that relationships need to start and be “completely organic” for them to be true love or for them to work long term. The irony is that it’s the opposite. That’s probably why arranged marriages work and divorce rates are so high for “organic” marriages
[14] Or motivation as in, do I just need a significant other as an identity-reinforcer or arm candy to boost the street cred?
[15]“…the same idolatry of marriage that is distorting their single lives will eventually distort their married lives if they find a partner.” Keller
[16]The assumption is that there is someone just right for us to marry and that if we look closely enough we will find the right person. This moral assumption overlooks a crucial aspect to marriage. It fails to appreciate the fact that we always marry the wrong person.
[17] This is easy to fake and deceive yourself of, especially if you’ve been a Christian for a while and can speak the language well
[18] John Green: “If you spend your life singularly obsessed with romantic love you will miss out on a lot of the things that are fun about being a person.”
[19] You see, romantic love is fantastic, but it is not fantastic enough to carry the emotional freight of our happiness, or to do the work that platonic friendship and community were intended to do.
[20]Dan: the goal of friendship is, “coming up with imaginative ways to resource our friends for doing the work that God has commissioned them to do.” – when he said that I thought, that’s not a bad definition of the goal of marriage
[21]Ash Quote?
[22]But here is the thing about Christian’s talk about method…how do you go from friends to family…what wisdom and practices do you employ? We talk more about what you don’t do than what you do do?
[23] Big bang theory: The ‘he must be very skilled at coitus’ clip
[24] The guy who was president of my undergraduate InterVarsity chapter after me eventually married a woman his Christian parents selected for him. At first I really objected to this. But the more I learn about marriage and the Bible, it is certainly fraught with complexity…but not moreso than ‘dating’ or ‘courting’. I don’t find it any more objectionable to how we do it any more.
[25] Forensic analysis of the cultural model many of us are uncritically accepting. Maybe use the forensic analysis of Katrina as an illustration of how this works.
[26]Eph 4:17-20 17Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. 18They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. 19They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. 20But that is not the way you learned Christ!
[27] I feel like there is a zombie film illustration here. No one can be trusted to assess if they are becoming a zombie…you need a friend to decide if you need your head splattered. Um…or something like that.
[28] (takes time – making out doesn’t help) My brother likes to say that it is easy to predict the benefits of marriage but difficult to predict the liabilities. Conversely, it is easy to see the disadvantages of having kids but almost imposible to predict the benefits. So, you see, the decision to have a baby requires temporary madness. So the stuff that leads up to sex is designed to make you temporarily insane…not a great environment for clear character assessment.
[29] Also, to think you are “good enough” or above falling to the hormones that making out produces, you have an insufficient view of your own depravity
[30] Unusable but Hilarious Stuff AD says: :A time for friendship and a time to f- err, being more than friends”
[31]This is one of the things I have found encouraging about B&A’s relationship.
[32]Stuff Adam Darbonne Says:”If only we had gone faster dating! Our marriage would be so much better! We could’ve had sex a whole year earlier than we did! Which in the context of our 50 year marriage is incredibly significant.”
[33] Now is definitely the right time to read a good book on marriage. A good theology of marriage is one of the best tools you can have in making the transition from friendship to family.
[34] AD: Uhh. Passion is actually the problem =)
[35] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRmko7VxEwo

How to Make a Name That Will Last: The Engineers and The Listener (Gen 11 and 12)

2011-11-07T20:00:00.000-08:00

The MP3 of this talk can be found here.

The two most polarizing contemporary comedians right now are Louie CK and Dane Cook. You are not allowed to like both these guys. You are either a CK person or a Dane Cook Person.[1] But they both have bits about naming kids:

Dane Cook – “I want to a bunch of (my kids) after transformers…That would be great just to say Optimous Prime, come hear, you sit next to Megatron, we are going to have a little chit chat.”[2]

Louie CK – “You can name your kid anything you want. There are no laws…there should be a couple of laws.”[3]

And this makes sense because naming kids is way too big a responsibility for most of us to execute appropriately. But, it turns out that in some countries there are laws. Recently Sweden rejected the following names.

Metallica, 4Real, Lego, Google
(pronounced ‘Albin’)

It turns out that Denmark rejects 20% of all names. Sadly, because my name has been in my family for like 8 generations ‘stanford’ would not have been rejected even if it peaked in popularity in 1910 and fell to <1 in one million babies a decade before I was born. [4]

The reason that there is so much pressure in naming a kid is that that name will last a long time. But, will it really. I mean a lifetime is too long to be named ‘Google’ but even these memorable names will be forgotten pretty quickly.

The truth is, that names are exceedingly forgettable. http://theoatmeal.com/comics/brain

No one remembers my great grandparents. No one. When my dad died…they passed from history as if they never existed.

This is part of what makes cemeteries compelling and a little creepy. They are a collection of names without narratives. The names are preserved…but the stories are lost…they are quixotic monuments to our fundamental forgettabilty. Disembodied names floating in granite…futile attempts to be remembered.

http://youtu.be/0X6q7nt15uk

We are haunted by the idea that our names will someday pass into the abyss of obscurity. That no one will remember who we are. [5][6]

Why do you and the people around you work so hard? For some, it is the fear of failure, or the desire to achieve a modicum of comfort or security or power[7] but for some, it is the existential dread that no one will remember my name…that your existence will be unremarkable and that your name will be lost in the relentless march of time…relegated to the abyss of history’s ruthless forgetfulness. So you study calc and write papers and mess around with your organic chemisty playset in the hope that you can do something that will make you memorable. But you won’t.[8]

Genesis 11 and 12 contrasts two possible paths to for a memorable name…two visions to forge a name that will outlast your heartbeat…a you that will last longer than your little carbon collection:

I. A Critical Contrast

The main thing I want to bring out in this text is that Babel and the Call of Abraham demonstrate two approaches to ‘making a name’…two contrasting approaches on how to matter.

Genesis 11:4Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”

Genesis 12:2And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.

Babel is the last Scene of Act 2 and Abraham’s call is the first scene of Act 3. It is a contrast that straddles the transition from back story to story.[9]

You see Act 2 usually ends really poorly and Act 3 usually provides a glimmer of hope for the final solution. Consider the final moments of the most famous Act 2…the protagonist just had his paw hacked off by his conservatively dressed daddy who he just learned annihilates innocent planets for fun.[10] The story of the Bible really starts with chapter 12 because the rest of the story is about how God brings blessing to all people everywhere for all time all starts with this promise he makes through Abraham.[11]

Four insights emerge from this contrast

1. Choose Venture over Huddling
(What kind of Community?)[12]

So why did the men of Babel really take on this project? They wanted their names to ring out…yes…they wanted to be rememberd…yes…so you could say it was motivated by pride. But look beyond the bravado, and you find something surprising:

“Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”

They were afraid. And so they looked to technology to give them the means to huddle together with those like them. Look at how this contrasts with God’s promise to renew the world through Abraham.

[13]
You see, the problem here is not urbanization…the Bible is decidedly pro-city. Cities tend to be metropolitan mixtures, hotspots of diversity and because of this the gospel tends to thrive in cities. The Babel project was the opposite, it was an experiment in homogeneity.[14] It was an attempt to undo the fall through technology and social planning. And we still do this. We look for security in technology or visions for social transformation coming from the either the political left or the political right. But God’s plan to restore and renew the fractured social fabric is not in huddling with those like you and trying to implement a technologically or politically driven utopia.[15] It is in trusting him in his risky ventures. It is in a willingness to be dispersed for the good of others and do life with people very different than you.[16]

Application: Be willing to Venture. For some of you, you are still coming to terms with the fact that God has dispersed you to UC Davis…others of you have gotten comfortable here and are looking with nervousness to your next dispersal.

Now it is time for the segment of my talk called:

Stuff Adam Darbonne Says:

But this week it is different – This week we here from ‘serious Adam’ rather than silly Adam.

(I miss) being near family. And being near good friends, and the familiarity of the place I grew up, of the restaurants, and roads, and the culture… its having more than 4 months out of the year where I where I see the sun and its swimming in outdoor pools…being around people I’ve known for more than 3 months and who have known me for more than 3 months…I miss home. But God has been really clear that he has called me to Wisconsin right now and I have no promise that he will bring me back any time soon and so I have to be willing to give all that up. I have to be willing…to love Jesus more than California

Davis and CL can become really comfortable places…but God will send you somewhere[17]…and you best go.[18]

Grad school aps due in January – Missions agency apps due soon

2. Build Alters instead of Ziggurats

(What kind of Religion/Monument?)

The second big contrast between these passages is the kind of religious structures that the men of Babel and Abraham build.

Genesis 11:4 “Come let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves…” -Charis – ‘touch the sky’ (NIV)

Genesis 12:7-8 “So he built an alter to Yahweh, who had appeared to him…and there he built an alter to Yahweh and called upon the name of Yahweh.”

Most commentators believe that the tower is a Ziggurat which means that it was an elaborate temple that invited god to come and live in the city. Meanwhile, Abraham just piles up a few rocks a couple times. Surely the men of Babel are more religious.

But the contrast between Babel’s impressive ziggurat and Abraham’s modest alters is the contrast between respectable religion and walking with God in faith.

[19][20]

The men of Babel have a closed conversation (‘let us’) and take on their project…and they include a really impressive and prominent feature of their project for God. They figure, if build a sufficient religious infrastructure, God will have to get involved in our project. And this is what religion is all about. It is the idea that if I do enough for God it will put him in our debt and force him to sign off on our personal projects. But here is the thing…Yahweh does not play that game. Throughout the Bible he rejects that kind of religion. He will not be managed as a part of your life or won over by impressive religion. He wants you to listen. And that is why the little alters are more satisfying than the impressive zigeraut…because they are monuments to listening…they are monuments to one who seeks God’s guidance instead of trying to bribe or appease him.[21]

The first alter was a monument of thankfulness that Yahweh had invited him into relationship:

“So he built an alter to Yahweh, who had appeared to him.” 12:7

And the second was a monument of his dependence on his new God for guidance[22]:

“And there he built an alter to Yahweh and called upon the name of Yahweh.” 12:8

The alters are monuments of dependence and a willingness to walk with God in his project of cultural transformation. They are monuments of relationship…like the ring Brant just gave Anda (which incidentally he made…himself…which is pretty great). Brant didn’t give Anda a ring so that she would marry him, but as a recognition of the bond that had grown between them and that was growing deeper.[23] That is the difference between religion and faith.

One of the most important themes of the Bible is that God cannot be impressed. Religion is an attempt to domesticate God…I’ll build him an impressive tower, but he has to stay in it. Yahweh wants us to enter into a loving relationship of worship and listening where everything is on the table.[24][25][26][27][28]

Application: Build alters not ziggurats. God doesn’t need you to build him an impressive religion. He wants you to listen, to engage in relationship with him.[29]

3. Transform from Blessing Consumers to of Blessing Transmitters[30]
(To What End?)

The great irony of this passage is that Abraham’s name does ‘ring out’. He becomes one of the most famous men in history. And the men of Babel are never named. Their names are lost on the scrap heap of history. And that is because making your name is an issue of ‘First and second things.’ The question ‘How do I make my name’ is the wrong question

Why does God say he will make Abraham’s name great?

12:2 “I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing…and in you all the families of earth shall be blessed.”

God’s care and interest never stop with you. We were not designed to consume blessing…we were designed to transit it. Bronwyn: You are not the final person in God’s receiving line.

“Whenever someone sees God for who he is they loose their consumer mentality…God is a spiritual tornado, he will never bless you except to be a blessing.” -Keller

Consider how similar this is to the passage I taught out of 2 Cor last year:

2 Cor 5:15 “And Jesus died for all, so that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.”

Application: Leayah is going to talk more about this next quarter, but you have to take note that listening to Yahweh and receiving his blessing ALWAYS leads to passing that on.

4. Consider generational timescales
(What kind of Timetable?)[31]

Notice one final contrast:

Babel Abraham
“our names”. “to your offspring”.

The men of Babel wanted to make their names great. It was all about them and their generation. But one of the themes of Genesis is that God’s plans unfold on multigenerational times scales. Abraham will never get to see most of God’s promises.

12:7 – “to your offspring” – God builds things on generational time scales – you may never see his promises – you are building something bigger than yourselves.

Change your time scale. We want to see all of God’s promises right now. But you might be a mess. I am. Your parents might have really messed you up…because theirs did…because theirs did. And so God’s promises to you might be that he will walk with you through the painful process of redeeming the sin bucket your parents handed you so that your kids and their kids their kids don’t have to deal with that crap and will have more freedom to be conduits of Yahweh’s blessing.

It is not about you…It is about your grandkids.[32] This is hugely counter-cultural. It is why many of you are like I was at your age…unable to even understand why anyone would consider having kids. But God sees your story as a chapter in a story of generations. It is not your story – your actions affect your children and are affected by your parents.[33]

Application: Set yourself up to raise children who are listening venturers. That means you need to marry one. More on that in January.

II. A Confusing Complication
(A Confusing anti-Climax)

So we see in the contrast between Genesis 11 and 12 two paths to an unforgettable name. And it could seem like the point is “Don’t be like the men of Babel, be like Abraham.” It might seem like I am saying “Abraham is the hero of this story, be like him.” And that would make sense, if what came next wasn’t totally deplorable.

You see God’s road to a great name starts out hard and badly – the opening story of Abraham’s new life of purpose is both difficult and tragic. It is a story of hardship and failure. It is our story.

So in the opening verses of chapter 12 God initiates his program of species redemption…his great act of undoing the fall and reclaiming us. And what happens next? Abraham has been God’s point man in his cosmic plan for precisely nine verses, before it gets REALLY hard:

10Now there was a famine in the land.

Really? This is how God rewards Abraham’s venture of faith? Really? This is God’s idea of blessing? Famine? I thought of this a couple weeks ago when Lindsey was sharing her testimony and talked about how her life got really difficult about the time God was calling her to follow him in his project of redemption.

“A loving God would not put this much on the new person.” –Lindsey Valdalez

But apparently when God says he will bless us to be a blessing he does not mean that your life is going to be easy. So then we get the story of how Abraham totally gets it and handles this new challenge really well.

Except we don’t…he handles it terrible. In 9 verses Abraham’s remarkable courage evaporates into a puddle of cowardice and fear. So many people read this opening story of God’s brand new plan of redemption and say…What?!? This is the best God can do?!? This guy horrible! He is pimping out his wife like a high end hooker!! [34]

What happened to the courage we saw 8 verses ago.[35]

But here is what you HAVE TO understand about Abraham if you are going to understand the spiritual life. God may have made Abraham’s name great – but it isn’t because Abraham is great.

This guy is mentioned like 70 times[36] in the NT but within X words of meeting him he is pimping out his wife. If you are going to read Genesis without getting yourself totally confused, you have to come to terms with the idea that these guys are not heroes…they are horrible…just like you and just like me. The Bible only has room for one hero…his name is Jesus.

“The Bible is not about good people and bad people…it is about bad people and Jesus.”

But that is the amazing thing about the Abraham path to greatness…you don’t have to be great. You can be a total shmuck…in fact, failure is required…But God responds to you not in accordance with what your actions deserve…but in accordance with his promise and his purpose.

Illustration
Armegeddon is a horrible movie with one great scene - Armegedon – “And they don’t want to pay taxes…ever.”[37] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0vy33Br_3s

The opening story of Abraham is supposed to serve the same narrative function as this scene in Armegeddon. We are supposed to say ‘the fate of the species is in the hands of these guys? Really? I mean, can’t we do better than that?’

If you look at Abraham and say ‘this is the best God’s got’ – that is exactly the way you are supposed to feel. This is not the story of a string of heroes who each advance God’s purpose. This is a story of God’s cosmic rescue plan in Jesus that he enacts through broken people…but who negotiate that brokenness in relationship with him. Abraham is not a righteous man…he is a man of faith.

You see, the Abraham story is littered with errors and brokenness…but the rest of the Bible still points to him as someone of note…why?

Well it is not because he was righteous. It was because despite his great moments and his deplorable lows, he always came back to a lively attentive trust in Yahweh. He wasn’t a good guy…he was a believer. At the center of Pauline theology is the idea from the Prophets that

“Abraham believed and it was credited to him as righteousness.”

And that's what made Abraham special. Despite the famine, he still believed God. Despite his deplorable actions, he still believed God.

Abraham is nothing special. But Abraham+Jesus is something God could utilize to initiate his story of human redemption.

And likewise, you are nothing special. But You+Jesus is something God can utilize to write the next chapter in his story of human redemption.

The contrast here is not between the bad people of Babel and the righteousness of Abraham. It is between a life of self reliance and a life of faith. It is trusting Jesus that will allow you to be a venture, to build alters instead of ziggerauts, and becoming conduits rather than consumers of blessing.

If you are trying to make your name like the men of Babel…if you are trying to work hard enough to matter…you need to know that you won’t. Give up the tower…build alters. Come into a listening, trusting relationship with God through Jesus. And if you are already trying to be an alter builder but are just sick and tired of the hardship and failure…recognize that God’s promises are stronger than your failures. Trust Jesus again. Build another alter tonight. Call upon the name of Yahweh, re-engage him in relationship, and get back in on being the next flawed but meaningful chapter in the story God started in Genesis 12.

____________________________________

[1] For the record…I am with CK. I love the insight, the honesty, the humility, the real attempt to get into the perspective of people he should hate and humanize them and, frankly, the despair.
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98vZuid_744
[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNSf-KQORRk
[4] I thought about expanding my mockery of my name here and do my ‘The Rule of Stan’ bit: You see I have this theory about my name. It is not a very cool name. In fact – it is anti-cool. So, if you are writing a story or script and need a character who is a geek, a nerd, or a tool, don’t have the narrative space or motivation to develop the character, you just name him Stan and the audience will tap into an unspoken cultural expectation that ‘this guy has some glaring personality flaw.’ I have collected evidence for this theory from sources as diverse as Harry Potter, Three’s Company, Sex in the City and Second Hand Lions. But when it came to Gibson boy names…I actually came out the winner. My brother and I were both named after our Grandfathers…I was named after grandpa Stanford…my brother was named after the Italian grandfather…Nicola
[5] Cut a Wire Illustration here: “People do crazy stuff to make their name memorable…for just a little longer. Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell. The compelling antagonists of the first couple seasons of The Wire…They are the perfect team…the business man and the gangster. But then they start to grow apart…Stringer wants to leave the heroin game and make piles of cash in Baltamore real estate…”we could run this town” he tells his friend. But Avon isn’t satisfied being silently wealthy and powerful…he wants a memorable name. Stringer wants to silently control Baltimore…but Avon is content to rule a piece of it, as long as everyone knows whose it is…as stiringer puts it…he wants his name to ‘ring out on some ghetto corners. From Avon’s perspective, his name is going to be lost to the scrap heap of history…at least it is going to ring out now. Russell 'Stringer' Bell: You know, Avon, you gotta think about what we got in this game for, man. Huh? Was it the rep? Was it so our names could ring out on some…ghetto streetcorner, man? Naw, man. There's games beyond the…game.
Avon: Maybe I’m just a dumb gangster…but I want my corners
One of the greatest scenes…If I could only use it…as they reminisce they are planning how they will betray each other: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91CpbRq9Tiw I need to stop wishing I could play wire clips…since it is likely the highest rate of cussing per minute of any show I can think of in recent history.
[6] Unusable clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDMoKfvPe70 Then comes marlo…the coldest, most emotionless villain you will meet…he looses his cool exactly once…when his name is disrespected leading to the chilling ‘my name is my name clip.’
[7] Some of us are like stringer..we want to matter. Others are like Avon…we want people to know we mattered.
[8] “And you are slowly realizing that. And we are very, very pissed off.”
[9] It is the last in the sequence of offense narratives…and shifts into covenant narratives -Walton
[10] Language credit to Klosterman SD&CP
[11] The fall does not culminate in the flood…the pre-flood world is not as bad as things get…Babel is the climax of the fall narrative…Humans seeking greatness through self effort and self made religion is as bad as we get…the desire to create the ideal society has resulted in more human violence against other humans than any other motivation.
[12] Become a venture instead of a huddler.
[13] Jerome – Their scattering is for their own welfare[13] to protect them from their escalating idolatry. Sin has a positive feedback
Both Babel and Abraham are stories of dispersals motivated by grace – The men of Babel are dispersed by grace of protection/preservation from their escalating idolatry and Abram is dispersed by grace of promise/purpose
[14] You could say that Babel was the first suburb…if you wanted to be cheeky.
[15] Attempts a cultural solution to the sin problem – we will build and organize our way out of the brokenness – we will even plan god’s role – optimism of the 1800’s – but it turns out that technology just amplifies our beauty and our brokenness
[16] Bruggerman – Abraham’s multicultural purpose is the immediate response to Babel’s experiment in homogeneous community
[17] 12:1 – Go from your country – for some of you – you are still coming to terms with the terrifying reality that God has scattered you here – others of you are looking forward to another scattering – your 20’s are a gift – you should either put yourself in a position to be a pillar of a church and family – or you should try something crazy –
[18] Walton – be careful of focusing too much on the leaving – “We need to examine the God side of the equation more than the Abram side of the equation.”
[19] Interesting but ambiguous implications wrt technology – hey, the way you are making houses is crazy…lets try this new fired brick thing…then we can finally have some security…we can build a wall to keep our enemies out and build a tower to let the gods in
[20] 11:29 – Family with tragedy – “Haran died in the presence of his Father Terah”
11:30 – Sarah was barren – (with Haran dead and Sarah baren, it seems to a casual reader that this will be a story of Nahor)

[21] “When we treat God as a child to be cajoled or a tyrant to be appeased the Babel syndrome is surging in our veins…it is ‘God abuse’…Needy Gods can only be oppressive Gods.” -Walton
[22] Goldengay – God speaks to Abram about every 25 years – I haven’t even been serving God 25 years – I’m roughly on pace and I’m not even a mystic - ‘God is indeed economic with interventions.’ – says the guy who’s wife has been unable to communicate with him and required constant care for years – God is not chatty – because of the compressed narratives we get the idea that the patriarchs were just chatting it up with God – but only Adam and Eve had that kind of access
[23] I feel like there is a Beyonce joke here about God wanting you to ‘put a ring on it’ -
[24] If we do all this for god he will come down and bless our project. If we build a temple as part of our city, he will be in our debt become part of what we are doing. This is the heart of religion. I am going to live my life with my agenda, but I am going to do these things for God so he owes me and blesses my project…I’ll build him an impressive tower, but he has to stay in it.
[25] If your religious system somehow limits God’s claim on you by compartmentalizing him…it doesn’t matter how elaborate it is…it is offensive to him.
[26] –Walton – Up to chapter 11 humans are morally corrupt – they are violent towards each other and forgetful of God. But now, they have done something new. They have begun to re-create God in their own image. We have the beginnings of idolatry and human effort to ‘achieve’ god’s favor, to domesticate god and put him into our debt. The ziggurat of Babel stand in for all our attempts to domesticate god by instinutionaliszing him and putting him in our debt by rendering impressive acts of self selected devotion.
[27] And here is the thing, the men of Babel were way more impressive than Abraham. They were an impressive team of planners and engineers and God really should have been impressed. I mean they built an enormous ziggurat in the middle of their city so that he would get involved. They made sure god’s part was the most impressive part of their project…surely they deserved his involvement (or at least his disinterest) in their project to make their names great.
[28] They were engineers (which we all know is super impressive)…Abraham was a wandering Mesopotamian herdsman. But one of the most important themes of the Bible is that God cannot be impressed. You cannot earn his favor. You cannot put him in your debt through your efforts. Abraham’s alters were the better monuments because they were monuments to listening. They recognized that God takes the initiative in our relationship with him.
[29] The irony is that the men of Babel thought their god required maintenance and care…The revolutionary idea in this passage is that the true God does not require maintenance, care or appeasement…the true God provides care but requires open listeners. Do your gods require maintenance and care? Consider trading them in for one who will care for you.
[30] Make Others the Focus of Your Quest
[31] I might save this material for the relationship talk
[32] Lilies – Updike’s 4 generations remind me of Genesis
[33] The only story we get about Isacc is that he repeated the habitual sin of his father.
[34] Love the Kidner insight that we think it is weird that Sarah would be so old yet considered hot…but that we are far too preoccupied with the idea that beauty is co-equal with youth while ancient cultures may have been able to see a striking beauty in the stark wisdom and poise of a seasoned matriarch.
[35] I love this clip as an illustration (or attention re-set) for what is going on with Abraham and Pharoh…but I don’t think it has broad enough appeal to warrant the time. Thoughts?
http://a.espnradio.com/espnvideo/maynestreet/com_091102mayneSt_kimmel_revised.mp4
She felt like the only grown up in the room.
[36] I found numbers between 68 and 72
[37] I also like the Decemberist’s Castaways and Cuttouts as a picture of God’s call to unremarkable ‘heroes’ but think I will leave it on the table: “We're calling all bed wetters/And ambulance chasers/We're lining up the light-loafered/And the bored bench warmers/Castaways and cutouts,

‘But it’s the Other Way’: How Things go Wrong, Why Thing Suck and A Foreshadowed Rescue (Gen 3)

2011-10-17T22:21:00.001-07:00

art from here

Talk MP3

Note: The talk I ended up giving differed significantly from this manuscript, to the point that the title changed. But I am posting this because I think there is some valuable stuff in here that got cut.

There are a number of things that make me odd…but one of them is that I love to fly. I had to travel a lot for work this summer, and found the days I spent on the plane to be among the summers most relaxing, productive and restful. So a good chunk of this talk was written on planes while I flew over the random rectangular states. I spent so much time thinking about this passage in my little window seat with my little tray table that I thought about calling tonight’s talk “Snakes on a Plane.” I was excited about the tag line:

“There are bleeping snakes on the bleeping campus”

But I actually knew what my title for this talk would be before I had written a word. There was a show several years ago called ‘The Wire[1]’ which was about the Baltimore Heroin scene. I am going to show you a clip. In this clip, Marlo Stanfield the newly undisputed king of the corners and just about the coldest dude you could imagine. Now Marlo just got taken by a smooth old dude in a high stakes poker game. He ends up in a convenient store to buy a bottle of water, and decides to exert a little power to remind himself that he is still the king:

In the next scene Marlo’s muscle disposes of the security guard’s body.

I remember seeing this and thinking, “That is the story of Genesis 3.” Marlo just explained Act 2 of the gospel narrative as well as I have heard it explained.

“You want it to be one way…but it’s the other way.”

Marlo’s assessment of reality resonates with our own empirical assessment. For some reason, we feel like the world should be one way…but it’s the other way. We desperately want to live in a world where children aren’t orphaned by AIDS and the mentally ill don’t sleep under bridges and a few self interested institutions can’t topple the world’s economic system and come out of it rich…but it’s the other way.

And even in our little worlds, we want to live in a world where upper level mathematics is tractable, and parents are still deeply in love[2] and boyfriends don’t cheat and there are plenty of good jobs when you graduate and professors use just, non-arbitrary criteria to evaluate you and, I don’t know, maybe just once a College Life speaker would go short…but it’s the other way.[3] Marlo’s right. The question is why.

Genesis 3 claims to answer this question.

But, the interesting thing about Genesis 3 is that it actually addresses this question in several ways. There are at least three ways the church has historically interpreted this text. First have looked to it as essentially a manual to understand and survive temptation – to personally negotiate the brokenness in our world. Second, we have read it as the Act 2 in the cosmic narrative of creation-fall-redemption; the big answer to the question ‘why isn’t anything the way it is supposed to be’. And finally, we have seen in it the foreshadowing of God’s solution to the problem the passage itself explains. You see, Genesis 3 is a multi-scale story. It has personal, cosmic and temporal scales which tell us (respectively): How things go wrong, Why things suck, and a foreshadowed rescue. So let’s take those in order:

1. Personal Scale: How things go wrong.

The first answer to the question of why things are not the way they are supposed to be is you…and me. We are supposed to see ourselves in this story. The story of how Adam and Eve fall is the story of how we fall.

“Genesis is not a story of what happened, it is a story of what always happens.” Mark Driscoll

“When we read Genesis 3 we find the same dynamics of temptation and disobedience as we ourselves experience.” John Goldengay

And so, this passage has historically been read as a temptation survival guide.

Now, survival guides have been pretty popular recently.

This one for example, includes such useful tips as: I am trying to get a hold of the zombie survival guide and glean a couple fun tips from it.

But the first fourteen verses of Genesis 3 is a survival guide you can actually use against an enemy that actually exists and regularly kicks the crap out of you like the second grade bully who waited for me every day at my locker. So let’s briefly look at 5 insights for surviving temptation from the first thirteen verses.

A Temptation Survival Guide

1. Don’t Underestimate Your Enemy: “the serpent was more crafty”

The passage starts out by introducing us to a cryptic enemy[4] and does not linger to identify it. But in the first 6 words we learn 4 important things. 1) God has enemies. 2) Their aggression against God is waged through people. 3) They are not in God’s league. 4) We are not in their league.

By depicting God’s enemy as a serpent, the most earthly[5] of his motile creatures, the passage is intentionally opposing dualism, the idea that we are in a situation where good and evil are embattled and have roughly equal power. God’s enemy is just another created thing…and has to resort to guerilla warfare against the other things God made in order to do any damage. God’s enemies are not in his league. But by saying that ‘the serpent was more crafty’ it suggests that we are not in its league. God’s enemy is terrified of God, but is clever enough that we must not underestimate it.

So, my job often takes me places where my employer feels there is a kidnapping risk. In the last few years I have been to Kabul, Kenya, Paraguay and Guyana. And before each trip, I have to take “kidnapping training.” Now ‘kidnapping training’ is not nearly as cool as it sounds. It is not training on how to kidnap people or training on how to rescue people who have been kidnapped….it is training on how to survive being kidnapped. The training starts with the assumption that you have a bag over your head.

Anyway, what I have always found most interesting about this training is the part about being interrogated. They tell us that the interrogator has every advantage. He is eating well, getting sleep, is not fearful for his safety and generally has a lot of experience interrogating. He is likely really, really good at his job. What they tell you is to not to try to outsmart him. You won’t win. It is just stacked against you. We were told ‘Interrogation is not a battle of wits…it is a battle of wills.’ Don’t underestimate your enemy…and don’t get pulled into his games. But have a plan in place to resist him.

And I thought of this as I read in the first words of this chapter how clever God’s enemy is. Don’t underestimate the enemy, don’t get pulled into its games and have a resistance plan in place.

But, the serpent is an intentionally ambiguous figure.[6] Historically the church has believed that it was the devil, but by using this cryptic creature as the tempter it could stand in for any of God’s enemies, either the chief cosmic tempter, subordinate cosmic tempters, or anyone really who set themselves against God…including us.

The identity of the tempter is left a little ambiguous so we could see in its place any voice that asks us ‘Did God Really Say?’ Because some temptation is cosmic and some is very earthy. The serpent can stand in for anyone who asks you ‘did God really say?’ Anyone who says ‘come on, you don’t really believe that? ‘That’s just goofy.’ ‘Surely you won’t die.’ ‘Surely God wants you to be happy and successful, so he can’t be serious about all those restrictions.’ Which leads me to the second page of the temptation survival guide:

2. Temptation is fundamentally an assault on God’s truthfulness and generosity
“Did God actually say?”

Genesis 3 rests on the command in Genesis 2 where God said “You may surely eat of every tree in the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” And the tempter uses a two pronged offensive against this command…first he questions its veracity…temptation calls God’s truthfulness into question:

“Did God really say?”
And this should sound familiar to you…because every day on this campus, there are voices saying to you “did God really say?” But this was just the first step in a two stage assault. The tempter followed up questioning God’s truthfulness by questioning his generosity.

Now, the most obvious thing that emerges from a casual acquaintance of the command is that there is a dramatic asymmetry between God’s permission and prohibition. There is WAY more permission than prohibition. If you look at this command and find it somehow ungenerous, it says more about you than it does about God.

But the genius of the tempter is to convince the humans that God hid all the best stuff[7] is not in the plentiful permissions but in the single prohibition.[8] Questioning God’s truthfulness laid the groundwork…but the real temptation emerged from getting the humans to question God’s generosity.

But then something really interesting happens. Eve plays along. In verse 1 the serpent makes God more restrictive than he actually is. And then in verse 3 Eve does the same, relating God’s restriction with an additional limitation. This is the first recorded act of ‘legalism’ – which is adding arbitrary human rules to God’s protective boundaries. But here is the thing we see. Legalism is complicit with temptation…because it aids and abeds the lie that God is not generous.[9] (This is one of my favorite ideas of the talk – it used to be its own point - but I could cut it if it is a distraction)

But as I said a couple weeks ago…it turns out that God’s prohibitions are as generous as God’s permissions. God wants us to know the difference between good and evil without having to experience the evil. By trusting that God is truthful and his generous we gut temptation of its power.

You see, the serpent told a kind of half truth – their eyes were opened…their eyes were open to horrible horrible things.

Every once in a while a clip shows up on Youtube. It is a famous cartoon that is designed to get parents to show the clip to their kids while they do dishes or pay a couple bills. The cartoon plays for a little while, but then, a few minutes in, it suddenly switches to a grotesque and terrifying scene from a horror film. It moves without warning from elmo to chuckie. Sin’s promise of meaning or adventure carries a payload of fear and shame.

This was what Adam and Eve experienced. One commentator called their experience ‘a grotesque anticlimax to the dream of enlightenment.’ They got the sophistication they craved, but it came with a payload of fear and shame. Which leads to the third insight…

3. Temptation Specializes in False Advertizing 10-11

Plantinga “People do sometimes rebel literally for the hell of it, but this is rare. Usually they are after peace of mind, security, pleasure…freedom, excitement. Evil wants good…” 90

Walton – “Adam and Eve accept something illicit because they have been persuaded that it is for their own good…Temptation is most effective when it dangles something before us that can be easily interpreted as good.” 213

Temptation specializes in false advertising. Most people want the true the good and the beautiful. We are wired to long for these things and rarely, initially chase evil or self destruction for its own sake.

The serpent promised wisdom, insight and sophistication.[10] And what was it that finally drew the humans in? It was the commoditization of insight. “she saw that..the tree was desired to make one wise.” Now, we know Wisdom is valuable, how could this be a corrupt motivation. But she didn’t want wisdom…she wanted to be wise. That is a huge difference. We do a lot of crap to e perceived as smart. A lot of people reject the faith because they don’t think they can love Jesus and be perceived as intelligent. Jesus following is insufficiently sophisticated.

The fall out was fear[11], shame, and a loss of spiritual intimacy and it still is. Their rebellion turned them on God and each other…it made them see God and their lovers as the enemies[12]. The worst that sin does is not making people bad but making God distant and fragments relationships.[13]

While fear and shame are devastating payloads that sin sneaks into our lives attached to something we thought would be good…by far the most devastating impact of sin is diminishing intimacy with God. Adam and Eve shrink from his presence[14]…and we have been that way ever since.

So your temptation survival guide has to include the recognition that sin specializes in false advertising. And that is a truly counter-cultural assertion. We have been led to believe that the good is safe but dull while rebellion is risky, but stimulating, engaging and fun. But temptations great lie is that the good is boring and evil is exciting.

“Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good. No desert is so dreary, monotonous, and boring as evil.[15] This is the truth about authentic good and evil…With fictional good and evil it is the other way round. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive profound, and full of charm.” - Simone Weil On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God

4 Keep Repentance Drawn and Blame Holstered[16]

Both the man and woman blame shift when God comes on the scene. One of the central ideas in the Christian theology of human falleness is that, not only do we tend to act in self interested, God dishonoring ways…we tend to convince ourselves that we are not culpable. No one sees their own sin clearly.

“Clashing perspectives give rise to a glaring incongruity: in a world so manifestly drenched with evil everybody is innocent in their own eyes…Yet all know and agree that somebody must be guilty; somebody’s eyes must be deceiving them badly. But whose eyes?” (79) Volf EAE

The Genesis 3 answer is yes. Your eyes are deceiving you and my eyes are deceiving me. The world is this way because we are this way.

GK Chesteton is said to have written a letter[17] wrote a letter to the editor to a periodical that ran an article titled “what is wrotng with the world”. He letter was brief:

“Dear Sirs,
Regarding your article ‘What is wrong with the world?’
I am.
Yours Truly, GK Chesterton”

I thought of this idea when this image showed up on my facebook feed[18] last week:

The Christian story, including Genesis 3, includes the unsettling but deeply helpful insight that the problem with the world isn’t ‘out there’…it is ‘in here’. The Christian call to make repentance rather than blame our first impulse is based on the radical insight that it our eyes that deceive us badly.

Just like our spiritual parents, we are self justifying creatures and generally bear more fault than we own.

And so, one of the insights in the ‘Temptation Survival Guide’ is to “Keep Repentance Drawn and Blame Holstered.”

Make a parallel between an asset and a liability in fighting zombies. Something like, Repentance is your sawed off and blame is human attachment. That doesn’t work, but you get the idea. Maybe just a pic of a famous zombie hunter with a sawed off brandished (labeled repentance) and a holstered side arm (labeled blame).

5 God is Still There to Walk You Through the Mess[19]

So shame and fear work their way into this beautiful picture of human flourishing…and it is ruined. And Adam and Eve try to deal. They try to patch up the mess. They make themselves these pathetic little cloths out of the biggest leaves[20] they could find. And then God shows up. And he asks a couple questions, drawing them out of their hiding. But there is no going back.[21]

Miroslov Volf argues that one of the horrors of our condition (and one of the reasons that the gospel is the best paradigm for negotiating it) is that so many of our actions are tragically permanent. It is impossible to undo so many of our simple acts of destruction.

God looks at their sad little attempts to mitigate the situation…and he loves them.[22] He knows the difficulty of the harsh reality that they unleashed upon themselves and knows that their sad little coverings will not cut it. They knew that they needed cover…but God knew their solution was absurdly thin. They had lost innocence but had not become wise enough to actually survive.
And so he makes them cloths to cover their shame and protect them in their stark, terrifying new reality. They have staged a rebellion. And God responds with care.[23] God is still there to walk them through the mess. God is already providing comfort even as he is handing them over to the consequences of their rebellion – it is a picture of grace and care and a foreshadowing that this is not the end of the story.

And so on the personal scale, we can mine this story for a survival guide for dealing with temptation. But there is a bigger scale with which Christians have historically read this passage. It answers the bigger question:

2. Cosmic Scale – Why Things Suck – verses 14-24

The story of Adam and Eve teaches more than how to negotiate our own psychological and spiritual conflict with temptation. The story upscales…it also tells how your struggle exists within the context of the cosmic story of salvation history. You see our spiritual parents bought a very simple lie: You don’t need a god…you can be god. And this has been the fundamental problem ever since. Every violence, every injustice, every indignity that one person has done to another or to the world God has made is a microcosm of this big lie…that we can come up with a better way to do this thing. This deception propagates from generation to generation leaving us in this new broken reality. (yes, I am totally dodging the theological question of imputed tendency vs imputed guilt. Call me a chicken, but I don’t have the time…and I go back and forth on it myself.) It is the reason why, Marlo could glower at that security guard and tell him…’it’s the other way.’ Because things are not the way they are supposed to be.

In verses 14-24, God reads humans into the new reality. We often call this ‘the curse’ but humans are not actually cursed in this passage. God is simply letting us know how things go when we assert our autonomy from our creator. Genesis 3 begins the second act of a 3 act play of creation-fall-redemption

It is the story of a cosmic rift in our relatedness with God and each other that echoes through each generation, into ours, and will echo into our children’s generation.

Both our work[24] and our closest relationships (romantic and parental[25]) get difficult and complicated – not because God has ‘cursed’ us but because we have lost the capacity for contentment in the vortex of our self centerdness – by supplanting God as the ultimate end we have evacuated our relationships and work of their meaning. Work becomes toilsome, raising children becomes heart breaking[26] and relationships accrue a dark degrading shadow.

There is a lot we could draw out of this passage…but let’s look at just one really tragic verse. God says to the woman “Towards your man will be your desire, but he – he is to rule over you.” John Goldengay says “These are some of the most poignant, sad words in Scripture.”[27] [28]Romantic relationships are scarred – in these few sentences we see that this cosmic tear allowed the exertion of power and unrequited longing to enter into our romantic relationships – which is at the root of most of our relational brokenness. God is not ‘cursing’ them. He is laying out the implications of their new mode of self reliant existence.

And most of our attempts to fix it have just made it worse because they are just advanced forms of the same error of self reliance, self rule and self worship:
http://xkcd.com/592/
Xkcd comic (not sure if a funny turn works here – and I am at a all time high for editing expletives in this talk already – but it would be an easy edit)

Our experience is marred by cosmic disappointment. The girl you want doesn’t want you…or maybe she does, and it turns out that you just weren’t that into her. The guy you hoped was the one treated you like crap. A relationship that was promising turned degrading.

This is why the most important thing you can look for in someone to date and marry is someone accomplished at ‘repenting’ and ‘forgiving’ because those are the currency of our relatedness. Whoever you connect with will eventually hurt you and you will hurt them. That is our state. We can only mitigate it with repentance and forgiveness. And the church has historically pointed to these events, which we have called the fall, and which echo throughout every succedding generation, and held them up as the answer to the question ‘why things suck.’ This is why ‘it’s the other way.’[29]

“Human nature, indeed, was created at first faultless and sinless; but that human nature in which every one is born from Adam, now needs the physician, because it is not sound. All good qualities, no doubt, which it still possesses in its constitution, life, senses, and intellect, it has from the Most High God, its Creator and Maker. But the flaw…darkens and weakens all those natural goods, so that (we have) need of illumination and healing…” Augustine – On the Nature of Grace

Total depravity does not mean that we are as bad as we could be – that is, obviously, empirically false.
The ‘Total’ in the phrase total depravity is not a word of intensity but of scope. We are not as bad as we could be…but everything aspect of our being that was created good in God’s image, is tainted. Our capacity for beauty justice and truth all still exist…but they are all distorted…so we can be easily deceived into thinking that something degrading is actually beautiful or that something oppressive is actually just or that something deceptive is actually true.

So if all of our capacities are distorted, if self destructive self centeredness and self reliance are our inheritance from our spiritual parents…how do we negotiate it?

Well, as always…grace breaks in.

Genesis 3, the beginning of Act 2 of the creation-fall-redemption story includes an epic foreshadowing of Act 3, of God’s story. Which leads us to:

3. Temporal Scale (Conclusion) – Foreshadowing the Solution (The Christological Turn) - v 3:15

You see here is the thing…even in the statement of the problem, Got plants the seeds of the story of redemption. Act 1 foreshadowed Act 2 (with the mention of the trees) – and with a brief mention of the defeat of God’s enemy, Act 2[30] foreshadows Act 3.[31]

When God turns to the serpent in verse 15 he says

15”I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel."

He foreshadowed the solution before he is even done describing the problem. Historically, Christians have seen in this verse, the seeds of the entire story…an epic foreshadowing of the entire narrative. Humans would live at odds with each other and a malevolent cosmic force until a special human child will take it on and bring down this enemy at huge personal cost. “He will crush your head and you will strike his heal…hope breaking through the despair. And this verse always reminds me…of course…of the Honey Badger…

At over 19 millions views you have probably seen the Honey Badger clip. I know some of you have (water polo pic). If not, well, you might just have an actual life. But if you have seen this you both know why I have to narrate it myself and why it will be a disappointing substitute for the skilled narration of the actual clip.

That’s right, in this illustration, the Honey Badger is Jesus. The story of the cross and the empty tomb is that a cosmic champion in mortal personhood plays out this script from Genesis 3:15. Jesus takes down the serpent but is mortally wounded in the process. He wounds its head but it wounds his heal.

The days that passed between the cross and the resurrection are like the moments in the video where our hero, the Honey Badger, is overcome by the snake bite. In those seeming interminable clicks of the YouTube clock, his bravery looks like foolishness. We don’t have the data to do the toxicology in our heads but we know that the King Cobra is mythically deadly. Surely the Honey Badger could not survive that. The first time I watched this clip, I mourned the protagonist in those moments, sure he was dead. But he knows something about being a Honey Badger that we don’t. He is actually far more bad ass than we ever guessed.

The Honey Badger’s fearlessness (he really doesn’t give a bleep) is motivated by appropriate confidence that the serpent mortal bite can only inflict a fleeting death…that he will emerge the victor and that the cost is worth the prize.

And that is the story of the gospel. Jesus lets the serpent bite him instead of us…he takes on the penalty of Adam and Eve’s rebellion and ours…because he can take it. He can emerge on the other side of death and wrap up his victory over the decimated serpent.

Even while the first humans stared into the dark, degrading consequences of their rebellion, God was telling them, I will send a champion, who will undo the irreversible.[32] I will win you back.

Col 2:15 – “He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame by triumphing over them in the cross.”

Rom 16:20 – “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.”[33]

So Genesis 3 tells us how things go wrong, and why things suck, but more importantly it also forshadows a rescue from the predicament. The victory Jesus brings over God’s enemy and our brokenness will be finally experienced in the next age, but at the heart of the gospel is the idea that you can switch teams now, from the serpent to the badger. From the enemy to the champion. And when God wins the final victory over his enemies, even though you and I are among them, he finds us on the Jesus team.

_______________
[1] A show I cannot remotely endorse from the pulpit…but happens to be the best television content in the history of the medium.
[2] Or Don’t fight or are still together
[3] A couple decades ago Cornelius Planting wrote what has become the most famous contemporary work on ‘sin’ – which he titled “Not the Way its Supposed to Be.”
[4] Walton – “The text brings the serpent on the scene with little introduction and no strategic identification.”
[5] There is nothing supernatural in appearance or approach about the tempter – it is totally mundane…apart from the fact that the snake is chatty (which hasn’t been my experience with reptiles), the tempter is totally unremarkable. Goldengay: “Genesis emphasizes the nonsupernatural, earthly character of the tempter, one of the wild creatures that God made.” Though it is worth noting that: “Throughout the ancient world, [the serpent] was endowed with divine or semi divine qualities; it was venerated as an emblem of health, fertility, immortality, occult wisdom, and chaotic evil; and it was often worshiped. The serpent played a significant role in the mythology, religious symbolism, and the cults of the ancient near east.” Walton 203
[6] Genesis 3 is about as interested in telling us where evil came from as Genesis 1 is interested in telling us where DNA came from. They are Acts 1 and 2 in the Jesus story.
[7] “the woman saw” she reinterprets the visual evidence in light of the serpent’s suggestion that God is neither trustworthy or generous - Note: the tree is useful and beautiful…just like the other trees that God generously provided in 1:9 (the same phrase is used)
[8] Goldengay: “In its shrewdness, the snake begins by making God much more restrictive and much less generous than God was. The story has emphasized the plentiful nature of God’s provision and the single constraint. The snake makes it all constraint….The snake comes back immediately for round two, questioning God’s goodwill and generosity in a more radical fashion…(suggesting that) it was jealousy that made God deny people access to the good-and-bad-knowledge tree.”
[9] There is a religious impulse that some thinkers call the principle of ‘magnification.’ The idea is that if one rule is good two are better. Because his prohibitions are generous protections, and not the rules of a game in which we gain brownie points for a final count up to see if we earn his love… that’s not the way God’s law works - if one rule is good one rule is good.
[10] Kidner – “The man and the woman have been sold a false idea of evil, as something beyond good; of wisdom, as sophistication; and now of greatnesses, as greed.” – Eve despises her innocence and wants to trade it for grown up sophistication – but it turns out that ‘grown up sophistication’ is just the façade of despair erected over the loss of innocence.
[11] Goldengay “But we were never supposed to be afraid of the one who wants to go for a walk with us.”
[12] Kidner “To be as God, and to achieve it by outwitting him, is an intoxicating program. God will henceforth be regarded, consciously or not, as a rival and enemy”
[13] We tend to think of sin psychologically – how it affects us…the Israelite perspective is how sin affects God – it defiles his presence and prevents us from access to him – it does not change him, but dishonors him - Walton
[14] Dan and I see it all the time, CL leaders get entangled in sin, and it diminishes their productivity
[15] Walton – “Any independence we experience is fleeting as old dependencies are simply replaced with new ones.” – Genesis 3 is the story of the search for independence from the creator of 1 and 2 - The failure of autonomy to deliver has led to the cultural shift to postmodernism and the re-comttment to community
[16] “Keep your trigger finger on repentance and the safety lock on blame.”
Our Fist Impulse is Blame Instead of Repentance
[17] There is no citation of this, though it has been widely circulate…but it has not been debunked as urban legand.
[18] Incidentally, ‘Ride a Bike Around’ is another indispensible piece of advice from the Zombie Survival Guide which the characters in John Green’s ‘Zombiecorns’ seem to think is silly.
[19] Temptation’s Fallout is Characterized by Permanence AND Grace
Sin Has Consequences, But God Cares for us Through Them
Even when we push God away, he isn’t going anywhere
[20] “The fig leaves were pathetic enough, as human expedients tend to be, but the instinct was sound and God confirmed it, for sin’s proper fruit is shame.” Kidner
[21] There was a scene in the last season of Mad Men where Peggy and another creative are sequestered to a hotel room to come up with an idea for an account. The dude talks about how all our social equiptment to make us feel shame about being naked is just BS and we should all be freer and more comforatable with our body. Peggy calls his bluff. Nakedness is never innocent in sexualized adults. No matter how many people assert that the shame surrounding nakedness is a social construct that we should transcend…there is no going back.
[22] It’s cool, we got this…um, no you don’t.
[23] v22 – having fallen, God restricts the availability of eternal life because it is no longer a gift…but a curse. It becomes available again after we can handle it. (Rev)
[24] The same anxiety and frustration you have with your studies will eventually come from your work and, even more so, from your children.
[25] This is why, when we start the winter quarter out with a relationship series, we are going to do 3 parts: Friendships, Family and Romance…because the scars of our brokenness go deep into what makes each of these complicated.
[26] The commentators have a TON to say about this. It is all very compelling…but just not the best conent for a community of college students. Here are a few thoughts on it anyway:
Pain in childbirth – agony, wory, nuisance, anxiety all have the same root – not typically used for physical pain but mental and psychological anguish – and the reference is not to delivery but conception- Walton 227 – sex is complicated, but for many, so is getting pregnant – same word used for the toilsome nature of work
The ‘pain of bearing children’ – not just the physical pain of the act but the turmoil of raising children that reflect your broken image – we distort the image of God in us, and they reflect that distorted image
Same word ‘toil/sorrow/travail’ used for the woman and the man for his work and her labor
-“conception anxiety” – it creates an image that we will see again and again in Genesis – of a couple who wants children but cannot have them…but I suspect on this campus “conception anxiety” means something entirely different (could use a condom advert)
-family relationships will be complicated, painful and anxiety riddled from conception to adulthood
[27] ‘desire will be for your husband’ – the principle of lesser interest – “In a relationship involving two partners, the one with the greater need of the other is more vulnerable, while the one with the lesser interest in the relationship is in the position of dominance.” – Walton 228 – note male domination is default in the cosmic violence to the good that emerges from self worship
[28] I kind of want to do something like, “a lot of the things you learned in Women’s Studies are true…and God knows and cares.”
[29] Walton – “The purpose of this section of the text is to explain how humanity, corporately and individually, came to be outsiders and lost access to God’s presence. Israelites understood that it was not supposed to be that way.” 232
[30] I feel like there has to be a scene in Empire Strikes Back, a fundamentally depressing movie, that indicates that victory will be attained – something like “he’s our only hope. No there is another.” But better.
[31] The next few chapters – a total s&$# storm – narrative exposition on how this plays out – But then Act 3 begins with Abraham
[32] In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when Aslan emerges from death, he says:
“Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward."
[33] ‘take and eat’ – echoed in the Lord’s supper – kidner, I never saw that ‘take and eat become verbs of salvation’

“Packing the Parthenon with Powder”: Doing College in the Image of God

2011-10-03T21:02:00.000-07:00

A couple years ago Cracked.com ran an article they called: The 6 Stupidest Things Ever Done with Historic Treasures. It was predictably hilarious and depressing. Apparently, a guy named Chester Arthur was the twenty-first president. Yeah, I didn’t know we had a president Chester either. Anyway President Chester fancied himself a fashionable guy and when he moved into the Whitehouse he found the furnishings and contents insufficiently fashionable. So he had…I kid you not…a garage sale. Now, just to be clear, this wasn’t a high end art auction it was a full on, garage sale. Countless priceless historical artifacts were sold for pennies to make room for the hottest fashions of 1880s. But I mean, to be fair, who can really resist those frilly frock coats thingys, the reverse goatee, and those dresses designed to make butts enormous.[1]

And the list goes on. It seems that, part of Stonehenge was ground up by some overzealous engineer and used to pave roads and some rich dude in California took priceless medieval art and ancient manuscripts, stretched them out and stitched them together to make… lampshades.

But the most devastating story is also the most well known. The Ottomans (who controlled Athens in the 17th century) found themselves at war with the Venetians in 1697 and thought that the Parthenon which, at the time was 2,000 years old and nearly intact, would make a good place to store gunpowder. Apparently, this went poorly. You’ll never guess what happened. The Venetians lobbed a few torches into it and it blew it up. I bet you didn’t see that coming. This great historic structure[2] is now a tattered shell of what it could have been.

The reasons these stories make us recoil is the thing they all have in common. They are stories of mis-assessed value. They are stories of someone taking something with enormous intrinsic value and damaging it by using it for something it was never intended for. In most cases they used these things for pragmatic purposes that ‘seemed like a good idea at the time’ because they underestimated the value of the object and misunderstood its purpose.

But here is the thing. You are in the position to make a very similar decision. How you experience the years that you spend in this place depends on the assessment you make of your value and your purpose. If you make an accurate assessment of your value and purpose, these could be really fun and ennobling years that effectively set a wise and ennobling course f or the rest of your life…because we all want to look back on college and be happy about the way we did it. But if you mis-assess what you are worth and why you exist for, they could be frustrating and even degrading years.

So let me start out with a simple question: ‘Who do you think you are?’ It is a question usually reserved for angry moms, spurned lovers and mediocre Spice Girl lyrics, but it is a question you need to answer early in your college experience.

In fact Immanuel Kant one of the most important post enlightenment philosophers, thought the ultimate question of human thought is ‘Who am I?’

More recently, Mumford and Sons[3] got to the same idea:

Because I need freedom now
And I need to know how
To live my life as it's meant to be

Who you think you are and why you think you exist (whether you actively decide what you believe about these things or just absorb a default cultural narrative) will determine how you live…especially in college.

And that is what Genesis 1 and 2 are about. They are not scientific documents intended to walk us through the details of the physical origins of the universe, biodiversity and physical anthropology. These narratives were written to tell us who we are, to help us accurately assess our value and purpose. And answering the question ‘who am I’ is the first step in answering the question ‘how was life meant to be lived?’

The opening pages of the Hebrew Scriptures offer an answer to the question ‘who am I?’ They tell us that we are unique creatures fashioned ‘in the Image of God.’ I mean, it is easy to believe that humans were made in the image of God when you look at certain specimens (Dieter and Ryan - really really rediculously good looking) but others make it a little more difficult (stanford and Dan).

But the passage here is not talking about the fact that we are bipedal hominids with opposable thumbs regardless of our relative handsomeness. It is talking about how we are what Dan called, half way creatures that inhabit empirical and spiritual reality. How we are ‘dirtlings’ but with a special quality that reflects God in a way the other metazoan don’t.[4]

Now, much is made of the two creation accounts, and if you want to hear me talk about the technical details of that, you will have to come to the seminar tomorrow. But functionally, Genesis chapter 2 is like the zoom function on google earth. Gen 1 is cosmic – it is earth centered, but then Gen 2 zooms in on the human story and tells a story that expands and illustrates what it means that we were made in the image of God.

If you accept this answer to the question ‘Who am I?’…if you answer Kant’s question with ‘I am a creature made by God in his image,’ it will dramatically change your college experience. …and I’ll argue, for the better. Tonight we are going to look at Genesis 2 which make the case that recognizing that you bear the image of God will make two big differences that will dramatically change your experience of these years.

Recognizing that you were created in the image of God, will affect the way you think about your Purpose and your Dignity.

I. Purpose

The first thing we see about being created in the image of God is that it is on purpose. I’ll talk tomorrow about what the first two chapters of Genesis do and do not assert, but regardless of how you read them, they offer a definitive ‘no’ to the prevailing university narrative that we are trying to scrape together the illusion of a purposeful existence from an accidental and purposeless origin. The simple assertion that we were made on purpose means we were made with purpose. There are a lot of things I could talk about here, but let’s stick with the text and look at three aspects to the intended human purpose from these early chapters of Genesis. We were made for work, worship and community.

a. Work

The first really counter-cultural thing that this passage teaches is that work is good. We were made to participate in useful and ennobling labor. Look with me at v 15:

“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.”

To briefly use theological language, this story clearly shows that work is what we call a ‘pre-fall ordinance.’ Before things go horribly wrong in chapter 3, in the ultimate setting of human flourishing, humans are working.

All around us we are bombarded with this idea that work is bad and leisure is good and the goal of life is to gradually do less of the former and more of the latter.[5] We generally try to order our lives so we can work less and play more. Maybe this idea has even influenced some of you in the selection of your majors. But in the garden, where things conformed ideally to God’s plan for human flourishing, people worked. We were made to work. Now work is not our only purpose, and next week Liz will talk about how God commanded us to intentionally punctuate our work with rest to protect ourselves from it.

But we see in this narrative that Work is not just the absence of leisure, it is worshipful and purposeful activity. Being made in the image of God means that you have been made to be a maker.[6] You have been created to create. We will see in 2 weeks, the fall did not make work, it made work toilsome. Being made in the image of God means that part of our purpose is to create and to care for what he created.

This insight can breathe vitality into your studies. Christians have a mandate to curiosity. People like to say that I have a school addiction or that I collect degrees. During welcome week I was often introduced as the guy with X degrees, where X was an integer between 5 and 95. And the mockery is deserved…I am, in fact, strange. But I would argue that insatiable curiosity is a simple byproduct of Jesus following…well that and I’m a little strange.

Richard Dawkins, one of our faith’s most virulent modern detractors argues that “I am against religion because us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.” This is mistaken theologically and empirically. The premise that God made the world and can be seen in it makes both curiosity[7] and creativity a Christian mandates. The academic disciplines at their best are simply careful observation and reflection on the reality God has fashioned and the creative response to these observations. But it also means that your studies are an arena of worship

You see, the Hebrew word used for work in verse 15 is often used in the context of worship. It is used most often in the Scriptures to describe priests as they care for the temple.[8] This is a cool idea because it gives real dignity to caring for the earth and people. But it also means that whatever aspect of God’s world your work brings you to, your work is an opportunity to worship. When you look at a blank word document that has to become a paper on (specific absurd example) or sit down to do a problem set to re-derive principles of calculus discovered centuries ago, you get to reflect the activity of your creator by bringing order out of chaos. And that is an opportunity for worship. Which brings us to the second purpose we see in this passage:

b. Worship

You see, work can and should be worshipful, but we were for times set aside for undistracted worship. The picture painted in these first few chapters of Genesis of a world of ideal human flourishing is one where God and the humans he has made talk frequently, take walks together, enjoy being together. This picture is actually painted most vividly in the beginning of the next chapter.

3:8 “And they heard the sound of Yahweh God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.”

Life and work were intended to be done in the presence of God. If you ignore this in college, you miss the point. If you want to do college ‘in the image of God’ order your days around a regular times of worship. Now, since the events of Genesis 3, worship is simply harder than it was in this text. But we have pretty good tools at our disposal in the form of prayer, reflective Scripture reading and joining a Jesus community that worships together. Which leads me to the third purpose:

c. Community

In verse 18 God says, ‘it is not good for the man to be alone’ which is a really stark statement, because until now everything he has made has he has declared good without qualification. The goodness of everything God made was not only the theme of Genesis 1, but it was a repeated refrain. But in chapter 2 God looks and sees solitary humanness…he sees loneliness…and he says, ‘This is not OK.’

Now this is a famous verse, and we know what comes next. You see, I know that some of you hear ‘it is not good for the man to be alone’ and immediately go to work on how you can turn that into a pickup line:

“You know, God said it’s not good for me to be alone…want to go for a walk in the arboretum.”

We immediately vest that verse with romantic implications. And we will get there…but not just yet. You see there is a more fundamental principle here. Christians believe in a Trinitarian God, a God who is one but is also intrinsically a community from eternity past. If that kind of God makes you in his image, he made you to be in the lives of other people who are also pursuing the presence of God

It is not good to be alone.

If you hang around this community long enough, you will hear me say ‘If you spend these years on the margins of Christian community, you are ripping yourself off – you are missing out on one of the great experiences your brief life offers.’ So let me formally invite you to do life with us. But if not with us, find a place in one of the several great Christian communities on campus here like InterVarsity, Crew or AIA.

But let me say, I really love this community. What you see here is a group of remarkable individuals who are passionately doing college and worship together. The up side of that is that it is a fantastic thing to be part of. The downside is that sometimes it can be difficult to break into particularly because it is so big.

Now I was talking to my friend Adam Darbone about this talk. Adam graduated last year and was part of the teaching team. And when we got to this part of the talk he said, ‘You should totally compare it to something that is hard to break into because it is so big but once you do, it’s awesome…like the Death Star.

So let me offer you this deal. We will work hard to make space in our lives and community for you, but you are going to have to make an effort to get to know us. The best way to move from the margins to the center of a community like this are to join a growth group and to go on retreat. If you only come on Tuesdays…particularly if you only come sporadically, you will join a club but you will not experience community.

OK, so the first thing we see in this text is being made in the image of God gives us purpose. It calls us to a life of work, worship and community. And if you take these mandates seriously, it will improve your college experience. But there is a second major implication of being made in the image of God. If it is true that we were made in God’s image then that means you have an enormous intrinsic dignity…and as with the dudes who made roads out of Stonehenge or blew up the Parthenon, you can do damage if you mis-asses your intrinsic value.

II. Dignity

Remember Dan’s story about Marduk last week on e of the alternative creation stories to Genesis. In this story our world was the result of sex and violence. And the sex was not the caring self giving of two kind and self respecting deities in the Plaza after a great meal magical evening of spiritual connection. This was a lewd skinemax encounter in one of those trashy west sac motels that charge by the hour and don't change the sheets."

The author was subverting the basic idea that our existence and consciousness were the result of violence, rape or seduction. But the contemporary naturalistic creation story essentially asserts the same thing. You and I exist because our ancestors were the winners…the managed to get genetic material into future generations by power and seduction.

The Genesis account of Yahweh’s making stands in contrast to this. We were not a cosmic accident or the product of lewd or violent means. It is a story about our dignity as the loving making of a good, kind and wise artist. It is a deconstruction of the ancient and contemporary stories of power and seduction. And it continues to deconstruct prevailing world views.

This informs the way we live on this campus, because you do not have to spend more than a few days on this campus to realize that many people negotiate this place either by power or seduction (which, are also the primeval forces behind the materialist creation story). Genesis 1 offered them and offers us a better way. By asserting your dignity and the dignity of others, it argues that you can do these years well in the space of self-giving creativity. You can reject the programs of power and seduction and go for beauty and the mandate to find order in chaos. You can be a gatherer rather than a scatterer.

The first implication of -If we recognize that humans are all made in God’s image, each one immediately takes on infinite value. It makes us a people who love justice.

a. Justice (social and environmental)

You see, if we take seriously that humans were made in God’s image and are not just gene propagation machines each involved in a subversive struggle to get more of their genes into future generations, it allows us to use words like “justice” with intellectual honesty and personal consistency. If you are a materialist, you have to do some philosophical gymnastics to get to a place where you can assert what we all fundamentally know, that people matter. And that is why Jesus and the NT spend a lot of time calling us to be a people of justice. (something about Kingdom projects?)

But one of the really interesting things about this passage is that it is not just people who matter. The rest of the world that God made matters. You see, there is a common misconception about this passage, that it tells a story about how God made the world for humans. But if you look carefully, it is pretty clear ‘creation was not made for us’, it was made for God. It’s not our house; we just get to care for it. We are not the king of this castle, we are the butler. (CLer as buttler and king)

Check out the really interesting comment in verse 9.

“God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.”

Genesis 2 argues that the natural world has functional as well as intrinsic value. It turns out that biodiversity is ennobling to humans – and our first two jobs were to worshipfully care for creation and to catalogue biodiversity. (maybe a riff on how we are not ‘sell outs’ – that taking the bible seriously sometimes leads us into what the rest of the community believes. In fact, Christians should care more about the environment and justice than their non-Christian counterparts, not less.)[9]

b. Boundaries

So social and environmental justice are themes from this passage that play well on a University. And that is cool because it means that we could potentially partner with people in the larger UCD community to work for these things. But the next implication of being made with dignity is less popular. Because, this passage teaches that God protects our dignity, he safeguard his image in us by giving us boundaries: he gives permissions and prohibitions. Look with me at verses 16 and 17:

16And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die."

You need to recognize that God commands stuff. What I want you to see from these verses is that being made in the image of God means that you have too much value and dignity to waste it experimenting with things that God can already tell you will diminish you. He protects your dignity with generous boundaries. And the point of the story is that God’s prohibitions are always for our good. Boundaries are an affectionate act of love, not a capricious act of restriction.

Like God, we were meant to know the difference between good and evil without having to experience both.

God’s prohibitions are simply an extension of his generosity – they are guardrails for our dignity
-and ignoring prohibitions can leave spiritual wreckage…like blowing up the Parthenon or selling priceless, irreplaceable insights into our country’s history at a garage sale.

But, I want you to notice that there is an asymmetry to the permissions and prohibitions. There is way more permission than prohibition. Is God not generous, because he kept one tree from them for their own good? If you read these verses and come away with a picture of a God who is not generous, it says more about you than him. But that is precisely the way most people read this passage and it is precisely what you will find here at UCD.

God is extremely generous with you here with the things he permits. There are piles of joy available to you in friendship, academic discovery, artistic expression, and athletic enjoyment both on the field and in the stands just for starters. But when he asks you to trust him and live in counter cultural ways wrt substances, value structures and sexuality…that is also part of his generosity.

Which leads us to the final topic that the passage deals with regarding dignity and being made in the image of God…which is nakedness

Yup, it’s my first talk of the year, and I’m already talking about Nakedness. (Krage) But because it is only my first talk of the year, I’ll spare you the other picture where he uses a fluids text as a fig leaf.

c. Nakedness

You see Genesis 2 suggests that the dignity that comes to you by being an image bearer of God extends to the questions of when, where, how and with whom you take your cloths off.

One of the things I love about the middle part of chapter 2 Adam is in the same position many of you find yourself find yourself in. He is doing his work with God, looking for a companion, and not finding one. Ladies?? He is unsuccessfully seeking romantic companionship. Can anyone here identify with that? The story turns into a flat out comedy. Adam does a bunch of biological field work. He explores and classifies the biodiversity of this highly productive patch of the Mesopotamian floodplain that God has selected for his home. I can imagine him alive with the sense of discovery and wonder. But there is a longing that all the science in the world cannot satisfy. So Adam essentially says, “Um, the Mesopotamian gerbil is adorable, but it isn’t exactly what I am looking for.” I kind of like bigger boned woman. [10]

But then he sees the naked woman and literally breaks out into song like he’s the straight dude from glee. I mean, this is pretty funny – and honestly kind of sweet.

The whole passage is something of a sexy romantic comedy. If this were a movie it would be rated R and not because of the F-bombs…it unashamedly celebrates sexuality…but bounds it with a protective prohibition. Look at verses 24 and 25 with me:

24“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his WIFE, and they shall become one flesh. 25And the man and his WIFE were both naked and were not ashamed.”[11]

You see, Genesis 2 gives us a lot of clues about things that are intrinsic to our humanness: curiosity, creativity, productivity, justice, and, it turns out…monogamy.

If you are going to do romance in accordance with the image of God - before you get to see her naked, you leave your immaturity and childhood behind, man up and pledge to her in front of God and your community that she will always and forever be the only one. Genesis 2 argues that marriage is not an arbitrarily social convention, it is intrinsic to who were made to be. It is fundamental to our dignity and purpose and it is part of God’s generosity towards us.[12] And to play at nakedness, to experiment with sexuality as if it were some sort of simple pleasure inducing drug …well that is like packing the Parthenon with gun powder. It demonstrates a misunderstanding of the intrinsic value of what you are dealing with[13], and it is going to do damage.

You will have many opportunities to get naked in college. Now, admittedly, some of you will have more opportunities than others. In college, I liked to think that the ladies general indifference towards me was God’s special grace protecting me from temptation…but maybe it was just the mullet. In my defense, I grew up 20 miles from Canada where the mullet is still cool.

But campus life is sexually supercharged. If you accept the proposition that you were created in the image of God it will affect the way you negotiate that

There is a reason that the passage moves from God commanding permissions and prohibitions and setting boundaries to talking about nakedness, shame and sexuality. It is because God’s commands about sexuality are counter-intuitive. Especially on a college campus, God’s commands about sexuality don’t make a lot of sense to those of us raised on sit coms, pop songs and romantic comedies until after experimentation has done its damage.

Most of the best secular artists have the same basic approach to reality: Try to sustain a credible illusion of belonging, dignity and purpose on the ontological backdrop of total cosmic indifference. The opening notes of the Christian lyric offer something better. They suggest that we have this intrinsic hunger for belonging, dignity and purpose because we were made for these things.

The Christological Turn: So in Genesis 2 we see a picture of the purpose and dignity that God meant for us when he made us ‘in his image.’ But this is the end of the first act of a three act story of Creation-Fall-Redemption. This picture of Purpose and Dignity was the original design. But as we will see two weeks when we talk about Genesis 3, our current existence is just a pale reflection of the original intent. When we really try to live a life in accordance with our created dignity and purpose it turns out to be waaayy harder than it seems like it should be. So where does this leave us? Well this is where we have to use a name we have not used a lot yet. This is where we need to talk about Jesus.

You see, the image of God in us has been so badly damaged by our misuse of God’s generosity and our indifference to his boundaries, that we can no longer ‘just do it.’ The new testament teaches that we still bear the image of God but that it is distorted in us. But there is somewhere we can look to see God’s undistorted image…Jesus

Colossians 1:15
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

The image of God is corrupted on this canvas, but we can look to Jesus to see it. But the gospel takes one additional step. Not only can we look to Jesus to see God’s original intent, the prototype of intended humanness, but through the cosmic victory of the cross and resurrection, we can invite Jesus to undertake a program of re-creation in us, patiently restoring God’s image in us.

2 Cor 5 – new creation – The Biblical narrative of creation-fall-redemption means that our legacy of the first creation was squandered, but Jesus came to restore it.

It points to a second creation. A personal re-creation. God made us in his image, and we have lost it, but Jesus came to rehabilitate that image in us. Paul uses ‘new-creation’ language to describe coming into relationship with him. The key to maximizing purpose and dignity in college, despite all of the inertia built up against it in our culture and in our hearts, is to do college with and for Jesus.

My favorite illustration of this comes from a really old book, called “The Incarnation of the Son of God”[14] written by a man named Athanasius in the fourth (?) century. He describes us as a damaged self portrait which the painter goes to work restoring.

You know what happens when a portrait that has been painted on a panel becomes obliterated through external stains. The artist does' not throw away the panel, but the subject of the portrait has to come and sit for it again, and then the likeness is re-drawn on the same material. Even so was it with the All-holy Son of God. He, the Image of the Father, came and dwelt in our midst, in order that He might renew mankind made after Himself – Incarnation of the Son of God - 14

This is an amazing picture of how this all points to Jesus. Imagine that there is this sublime painting that all the scholars agree is the greatest work of all time. And it turns out that if you look really carefully, it is a self portrait of the great artist. But there is a fire or a flood in the gallery, or the Visigoths come through and just tear the thing up…leaving the painting violated and the image of the artist unrecognizable. Scholars and artists get together to try to restore it, but it is too deeply damaged. They can patch it up but they can’t recover the image of the artist that made the painting so special. So finally the artist comes back. He looks at his damaged masterpiece. And what does he do. Does he shrug and move on? Does he decide it would be easier to just repaint it on a new canvas? No. He goes to work on the damaged masterpiece, painstakingly restoring it so it imperfectly but undeniably reflects his image. This is what the Jesus story is all about. God who created space and time, entered it to restore us to his image.

Jesus and the Spirit are the restorers who carefully rediscover the unrecognizable visage of the creator. They can take the rubble of a glorious creation, devastated by misuse, and restore it to its original dignity and purpose.

And that is what we are about here. We are broken people in a broken world who are doing life together with and for Jesus as he patiently rehabilitates God’s image on our scarred canvas. So I’d encourage you to dive in to one of the great Christian communities on this campus. And I’d like to personally invite you to join this one. And stand with us as Jesus re-teaches us our intended purpose and dignity and works on us individually and collectively to God’s image in us.

_______________________________________
[1] Sight Gag: President Chester with bubble “I like big butts and I cannot lie”
[2] Interesting, unrelated story. My parent’s first kiss was on the acropolis of the Parthenon. My Dad had waaaayy more game than my brother or I ever did.

[3] That’s right, I listen to music that is less than 10 years old, though you wouldn’t know it by my ‘worst of the 80’s and 90’s references so far in the intro.
[4] Adam: “And for evidence of that, I’d like to direct your attention to Kiho Song.” You could also use Ryan B., Peter, or a number of other guys I’d throw a good picture up of someone too.
[5] There are several historical reasons we believe this but you can trace this distortion back to our intellectual roots in ancient Greece and our cultural roots in the 1920s. And some have argued that the monastic movement and the advent of vocational ministry ‘Christianized’ this idea that spiritual activities (especially prayer and reflection) are good and the business of other activities are bad. This idea is absent from the pre-fall paradise. We were made to work.
[6] Sayers Quote
[7] and this isn’t a post scientific reconstruction…many historians credit this perspective with the very birth of science in the Western world
[8] In his commentary on Genesis John Walton unpacks this a little: “The verbs abed (‘serve’) and smr (‘keep’) do not indicate what people are to do to provide for themselves but what they are to do for God…Adam’s duty in the garden was to maintain sacred space…The significant thing about these words is that they describe actions undertaken not primarily for the sake of the doer, but for the sake of the object of the action.” 185
[9] UCD has one of the two largest biological sciences departments in the world. There might be a tie in here.
[10] Zach, “…What I need is someone to cook that gerbil for me!”
[11] “May we unfashionably suggest/the unmarried not undress.” – (mewithoutyou - Bullet to Binary pt 2)
[12] Louie CK consistently amazes me with his honest and insightful analysis of our nature and our time.
[13] You miss the intrinsic value of both you and her.
[14] Visual gag: “I like ancient texts and I cannot lie.”

Proof of Life: Three Marks of Authentic Christianity

2011-07-25T22:56:00.000-07:00

Amanda and I enjoy watching spy shows and films. We got into Alias a few years ago[1] and are currently banging through the dvd’s of Burn Notice. The spy genre appeals to us because she likes action and gun play and I like problems solving and moral conflict.

And a staple of spy themed fiction is the hostage scenario. From time to time in this genre, our heroes have to negotiate for or rescue a hostage. Now, I always find hostage based fiction interesting, because my job takes me to cities and counties that have required me to be receive training that trains us how to survive a hostage situation…not as a negotiator…but as a hostage. I may not be Michal Weston or James Bond or Sidney Bristow…I am not qualified to negotiate for hostages or free hostages…but I am now totally qualified to be a hostage.

Anyway, if you watch enough spy fiction you become familiar with the basic stages of a hostage negotiation. For example, I suspect many of you know the first step in a hostage negotiation. What is the first thing a hostage negotiator will ask for?

…a proof of life.

You want to make sure you are not paying money for someone who is not already dead. So you ask for a proof of life. There was even a whole movie about hostage negotiation a few years back, with Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan. And that was the title of the movie…Proof of Life.

Well this is what came to mind when I was working on 1 John 3. John is calling us to produce a ‘Proof of Life’…of our life. Look with me at the first verse of the passage:

“We know that we have passed from death to life, because…”

And then three more times in ten verses he uses the phrase “this is how we know”…look for them as we read the passage:

John 3:14 We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love each other. Anyone who does not love remains in death. 15 Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him.

16 This is how we know what love is[2]: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. 17 If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? 18 Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.

19 This is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence: 20 If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. 21 Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God 22 and receive from him anything we ask, because we keep his commands and do what pleases him. 23 And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us.[3] 24 The one who keeps God’s commands lives in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us.

In tonight’s passage, John asks us to produce a ‘proof of life.’ He asks us to evaluate if our Jesus following is the real deal. And here is why. One of the things that Christianity teaches is that our ability to self evaluate is compromised. We tend to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt. But John is writing to a church that has been decimated by Gnosticism, a false version of Christianity. And it produced beliefs and behaviors that do not comport with the heart of what Jesus taught and did. And so John says, it is possible to affiliate with Jesus, but not really get it.

And so he offers some definitions and criteria for these early Christians to differentiate actual Christianity from self important spirituality in Jesus’ name. He asks us to produce a proof of life.

_________________________
[1] My wife was Sidney Bristow for Halloween a couple years ago.

[2] I picture John here like Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride saying ‘You keep using that word, but I don’t think that word means what you think that word means.”
[3] This is a really remarkable verse because it undermines the dichotomy of faith and works. Faith is prior to love, but love is the proof of faith. You cannot please God without faith in the Son, but faith is not genuine if it does not lead to very practical behaviors including meeting the needs of others.

Spilling Over: The Fluid Mechanics of Grace

2011-04-25T23:12:00.001-07:00

MP3 here

There is a long standing college tradition to head south for the vacation that happens in March or April …some people like to call it (air quotes) “Spring Break”. Apparently the way this tradition goes, you are supposed to go to a beautiful place...

...with beautiful people...

...and do things that you will almost certainly regret...

…and of course the pictures end up on facebook.

Now, even though I have had a full time job for over a decade, I have been continuously enrolled at one university or another for over 15 years…but had never actually experimented with this tradition. So this year, when spring break rolled around, I got on a plane and I headed south.

But I’m not sure I did it right…because 91% of Latin American countries have beaches…but I went to one of the two that don’t…I went to Asuncion Paraguay…and while I was there I averaged 12 hour work days…It began to occur to me that perhaps I missed the point of this tradition.

But, really, how much can you expect of an Engineer on Spring Break. Well, except maybe for these guys.

“Engineers Gone Wild”[1]

(I don’t know what I am going to do for images when Frank graduates.)

But the cool thing about doing your Spring Break travel for work is that you don’t have to pay for it. My trip was paid for by one of the biggest slabs of concrete in the world…the Itaipu dam. It is 5 miles long, 640 ft high and produces more power than any dam in the world. Each one of those spillways releases more water than Niagara Falls.

But as I stood in the bowels of this almost comically immense structure, watching one of the penstocks turning water into power, I was reminded of my favorite themes in 2 Corinthians.

We talked about a number of great topics this year from the pages of 2 Corinthians: including stuff like comfort, joy, thankfulness, reconciliation, generosity. But you see, one of the great puzzles in life is how to tap into these things in a regular and sustained way.

What is the process that gives us sustained access to these things? How are they most fully and consistently experienced?

Many of us have had fleeting or episodic encounters with joy or comfort. Most of us have flirted with generosity and thankfulness. But…I don’t know about you, but more often than not, I find these things elusive. They seem like they are harder than they should be. Which is why I perk up when one of the Biblical authors gives us a clue about how they work. In 4 different places in 2 Corinthians Paul uses a metaphor to describe our experience of these things…and it has struck me that maybe things like joy and comfort and generosity elude us because we don’t entirely understand how they were meant to work. So we have spent 13 weeks over the course of the year studying this book and it has exhorted us to a bunch of helpful stuff. But I just want to wrap up this series and anticipate an evening of worship by asking one final question:

How do we move our experience of these things from episodic events to consistent lifestyles?

How do we experience these things more consistently.

And, it turns out, that for this talk, my expertise as a hydraulic engineer is useful for the first time ever here at college life…or actually, for the first time ever outside of my cubicle. Seriously, being an engineer is not really that interesting at dinner parties. One of my best friends is a wine maker, that is a great job to talk about at parties. When people ask me about my job, I try to change the subject as quickly as I can to keep the icy grips of boredom from taking control of the conversation. But, being a water engineer happens to matter tonight, because Paul actually uses a hydrologic metaphor, when he talks about how things like comfort and joy and generosity and gratitude work in our lives (Joy mechanics sight gag)…which is why it came to mind in the dark depths of that huge dam. The metaphor he uses to describe how we are supposed to experience these things: overflow. Look at four verses with me from different places in the book.

2 Cor 1:5 “For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.”

2 Cor 4:15 “All this is for your benefit, so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God.”

2 Cor 8:2 “Out of the most severe trial, their overflowing joy and their extreme poverty, welled up in generosity.”

2 Cor 9:11 “This service that you perform is not only supplying the needs of God’s people but is also overflowing in many expressions of thanks to God.”

There are two aspects of this metaphor that I find interesting and that I want to briefly talk about tonight. If the dynamics of joy, thankfulness, comfort and generosity in our lives are best described by a metaphor of ‘overflow’ then there are two implications for tapping into these things in a consistent rather than episodic way. You need to:

1. Look for Opportunities to Spill Over
2. Hook into a Reliable Source

First, If you want to really experience joy, comfort, thankfulness or generosity you need to look for opportunities to spill over

Usually, when we think of something that we want more of, we see ourselves as a control volume, with a deficit. Say that our joy levels are at 30 units of joy and we need to acquire another 70 units of joy to fill up. And essentially, to keep joy levels up the sources of joy have to exceed the sinks.

But the implication of this ‘overflow’ language is that stuff like comfort and joy and gratitude and generosity are not things that you can really possess. They are only things you can experience as they pass through you.

This is the first way that the things God offers us are like the Itaipu dam. The dam doesn’t do any work by simply storing water. Water only becomes power when it passes through the dam.

Comfort was never meant to be just received. Joy is not a private exchange between you and God. These things do not really become what they are, until they pass through you on the way to someone else.

We are not designed to be receptacles of the things God gives us, we are meant to be conduits of these things. We are not vessels – we are superconductors.

And this is why Christianity is not a private faith. This is why Christianity is only Christianity if it is built around mission and in community. Essentially, joy, gratitude, generosity, comfort…these things we want from God…they cannot be stored. We can’t fill up on joy and then use it over the course of time. You don’t get to hoard joy. It has to pass through you to do its best work. The only way to get a sustained effect is to pass it around.

In Cory’s passage from a couple of weeks ago, Paul compared the stuff we get from God to the mana of the Exodus narrative. In this story, as God’s people wandered the desert, God essentially made it rain bread every morning. But it couldn’t be stored.

If they tried, it got moldy and wormy and, just plain gross. After one day, it looks like a container of mashed potatoes that had been hiding in the back of “The Bulge” fridge for six months. Joy is like Vitamin C…It doesn’t matter how much you consume today…I mean you walk out of here, go to the DC and flat out OD on 24 grapefruits… you will still need it tomorrow. You are going to need new joy and new generosity tomorrow… which means you are going to need to tie into a reliable source.

And this leads to the second insight from this overflow metaphore.

Second, If you want to really experience sustained joy, contentment, thankfulness or generosity you need to You need to hook into a reliable source

The ‘overflow’ metaphor is apt for our experience of joy, comfort, gratitude and generosity because if these things have a short residence time in our hearts. They don’t stay long. Our hearts generate entropy against them. So, we need to find a reliable constant external source.

You see, the Itaipu dam is not the biggest dam in the world – the Three gorges dam in China is bigger – but the Itaipu dam produces the most power because it is fed by rain forests and has new water flowing in year round. The water source for Three Gorges is mountainous which means it is flashier, more episodic and less reliable.

You could look at it this way: the overflow metaphor connects worship with community/mission. And this is why I am talking about this on a worship night. If joy is maximally experienced by passing through you to others – in the context of community and mission – then you need to tap into a consistent, reliable source of joy. And that is why worship is at the center of so much Christian theology and practice.

Now before I talk too much about worship, let me take a second to say, this thing we do, where we stand here each week, turn down the lights and sing for a while…it can be a little awkward. Some of us have been around the church long enough that we have just forgotten that it’s weird. But for some of you it is a little bit like a bad Family Guy gag (click)

that goes on just a little longer than you are comfortable with…

(Peter emerges from the copy room)

and then just keeps going.

I mean the aggie pack guy is raising his hands…he should have more dignity than that…well, unless UCD is beating Sac state.

And if you are a little confused about the purpose of this, well you are not alone…Google has demonstrated that they are a little confused about sung worship – and you can tell by their seemingly misguided attempt to monetize it.

I’d like to believe that this is highly misguided.

We get it…its weird. And I’d also like to be very clear that the musical expression of worship is a very small part of what Christians mean when we use the word ‘worship’…but it is the emphasis of tonight so let’s run with it. Though culturally strange, we do not apologize for sung worship. This Christian practice has a very specific and valuable purpose. Artfully rehearsing truths about God and the gospel - together with others who have also experienced these things, but without the distraction of what the people around us are wearing or who they are looking at...this is one of the ways we ‘tap into’ the sorts of things that we want to pass through us.

Like a dam turns water into power (video)…you were designed to turn worship into contagious joy and surplus thankfulness. You were constructed to generate generosity, service and reconciliation from the raw materials of worship.

Postscript

But let me say one more thing about this overflow metaphor. So far we have talked about being an agent of overflow. But, every mature Christian I have ever met, and nearly all of the great theologians and mystics that constitute our 2000 year old tradition, they agree that for some reason, it is impossible to maintain a full time connection to the gushing source of joy, gratitude, generosity that is our God.

The Christian life is cyclical. Now, to unpack the hows and whys of this, it would take another talk. But, let me just assert that if you stick with Jesus, there will be days that he will be more real to you as than person sitting next to you, and there will be days where you will wonder if he called in sick to the whole ruling the universe thing. And there are theological reasons for why he seems to prefer to interact with us in this way. But part of the provision for this is ‘overflow.’ If we are in a worshiping community, then there will be days in which we are the overflower and days in which we are the overflowee. Essentially, the way God worked it out, there is always enough joy to go around, but that it is not always evenly distributed. If you are tapped into it, you spill it over into those you love…and if you are not getting it directly from the primary source, it is entirely legitimate to get it indirectly, from a secondary source. In addition to worship, meaningful Christian community is your rain forest. It keeps you flush with comfort and joy and generosity even when worship is hard work.

God intended for us to spill his goodness over into each other. And this is true with respect to psychological states like thankfulness, joy and comfort…but it is also true about material resources like time and money, which is why the ‘overflow’ metaphor shows up in the chapters on generosity that Cory covered. We toss around the phrase ‘God provides’ all the time…but the truth is that God does not provide on the level of the individual. God provides on the level of the community. He expects us to overflow into each other.

So, there are really just two things I want you to get out of my favorite hydrologic theme in the Bible. First, if you want to experience the things God offers, you have to be tapped into the source of these things. We call that worship. And while we recognize that some of our cultural expressions of worship are odd, we do not apologize for them. While our cultural expression of worship is somewhat arbitrary…the fundamental need to be worshipers is at the heart of our world view.

And second, God provides these things to a community, not necessarily to individuals. Even as a consistent worshiper, you will not experience the consistent joy or contentment that God wants for you alone because you will you will have no one to spill them into…and you won’t have anyone to spill them into you when you go dry. For you engineers, the control volume isn’t drawn around the individual, it is drawn around the community.

So, let me wrap up by unpacking this separately for Seniors and underclassman. First, Seniors, You have been an epic CL class. I count many of you as friends. Many of you have repeatedly overflowed grace into my life. And most of you have left it on the field. But even the most spiritually mature and theologically prepared of you are in for an enormous challenge . Making the transition from CL to a local church is probably going to be harder than you expect it to be. It is simply harder to find these meaningful friendships in an intergenerational local church. We have friends who have squandered their twenties trying whining about how the church is not like college ministry. So yes. It is going to be harder when you have a 9-5, and aren’t living within 100 yards of 50 Christians. But it’s possible…and it’s on you. If there isn’t a compelling structure set up for you to share your lives deeply with people you respect…make it happen. Don’t wait for someone to set up a compelling community for you…build one.

But most of you are underclassmen. Which is awesome, because it means that you have more years to represent Jesus on this campus. But if you are on the margins of this community make it your goal over the next 5 weeks to start build something that you want to come back to in the fall. The problem with a community this size is that it is hard to break into. And as much as Tuesday nights are the highlight of my week, you cannot find community at a gathering this size. If you want to connect with this community…if you want to find lifelong friends that you can spill over into and who will spill over into you – you have to eventually get into a growth group…or…COME ON RETREAT! There simply isn’t a better, more efficient way to you’re your people in this community to spill over into and that will spill over into you, than to come with us on retreat this weekend. If you have found Tuesday nights intriguing but look around the room and there still aren’t people who are spilling over into you…don’t leave Geidt tonight without filling out that little yellow sheet. But take some steps to put yourself in situations to know some of these really remarkable people sitting in this room.

You need people to spill your joy and gratitude over into and you need people that will spill over comfort and generosity into you. That is the way the system was set up. Do what it takes to find those people.

[1] The pictures got better than this…but I thought I’d limit the internet post to this one.

The Mission and the Message: 2 Cor 5: 14-21

2011-02-07T21:07:00.000-08:00

MP3 (coming soon)

Most people are surprised to learn that I applied to colleges as an art major. I didn’t last long. I ended up switching to physics during orientation. But in retrospect, this was an excellent decision for one very important reason… my art was terrible. I mean my art, made Napoleon Dynamite look like Caravaggio.

But throughout my undergraduate education, I would often stop by little gallery in the basement of the union where the art department displayed their work to see what my alternate life might have been like. One day, I walked in, and there, in the back of the room, in the position of honor, was a little 3 inch sculpture of Jesus on the cross. What made this sculpture memorable was that it was constructed entirely out of cigarette butts.

Now I was pretty new to the Jesus following thing and to be honest, it startled me. But years later I learned that it was not that different than the earliest depiction of Jesus ever found. The first image we have of Jesus is not sympathetic. It is a caricature that was found on the wall of a Roman prison. It pictures him on the cross, with the head of a donkey, with the inscription: “Alexamenos sebete theon”

Alexamenos worships his god.

Two different artists, two thousand years apart, the same idea. A dying God is absurd.

A lot of people find this aspect of Christianity weird. I was talking to my friend Mark, a couple years ago. He told me that he found out that he shared a name with one of the books of the Bible, so he decided to read it. So I asked him what he thought. His comment was striking to me. He said, “Honestly, it kind of bummed out. It turns out that’s the one Jesus dies in.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him, that it was just one of four that Jesus dies in. But I kind of get that. We can deal with the picture of Jesus as a baby – I mean, it’s a little weird, but we’ve kind of gotten used to it. We can deal with Jesus as a teacher; that one is easy, that is what we expect out of our religious figures. But there is a kind of indignity even an immodesty to Jesus stripped naked and nailed to a cross bar until his lungs fill with blood and his heart explodes. It can seem incongruous with the rest of the story.

So if you are going to understand Christianity, you are going to have to come to terms with the question: “Why did Jesus die?” Why is the cross at the center of our iconography? What’s the point?

Today’s passage takes that question on. I have often considered the second half of 2 Corinthians 5 to one of the clearest articulations of the central ideas of Christianity.[1] If you are looking for the cliff notes version, of this big book, If you are trying to get your head around the big message…you came on the right night. This passage argues that the death and resurrection of Jesus are the heart of the Christian message and the Christian mission. These events are the primary motivation of what we believe and what we do.

I. The Message

The first thing you need to know about the death of Jesus is that it somehow confers a benefit to people. Look with me at the first verse. At the center of the Christian message is the message that: one died for all.

Jesus’ death was purposeful. It was for me and it was for you. But you already knew that…because it seems that Christians feel inclined to write something to this effect in the strangest places…

And sometimes with less skill that the task calls for…

The cool thing about this passage is that it unpacks the details of that idea. It answers the questions: why did we need him to die for us and how does this work. First Why? Look with me in verses 18 and 19

1. Why: to reconcile us to God

“All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ…God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them”

The point of Jesus’ death is reconciliation. His mission was to make things good between you and God. Of course, there is a countercultural assumption built into that answer. It assumes that you and God aren’t already good. It assumes that things between you and God are not cool. Reconciliation assumes a starting point of enmity. And this is what the Bible means when it talks about sin.

Now sin is a word that has ceased to have meaning. For most people I know, the only real concrete thing that sin corresponds to is the derivative of cos.

For other people, it is shorthand for a simple indulgence…things are sinfully delicious or a couple who is living together will smirk that they are ‘living in sin’…It is a simple shorthand for fun.

Chuck Klosterman kind of got at this idea in his brilliant book: Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs – A Low Culture Manifesto. One of his essays is on the book Left Behind, a book that was written from a theological perspective that believes that God will eventually take Christians out of the world. He writes:

But the Bible means something much more fundamental when it uses the word “sin.” It argues that we each have a fundamental tendency to make ourselves the center of our lives, in the process, revolting against God’s right to occupy that position. It is more than just a few mistakes, it is a condition of enmity. If you don’t understand this, the cross will seem absurd. If you operate from the perspective, “well, I’ve made a few mistakes, but no one is perfect and God will overlook it” – the cross will seem absurd. But if you get a hold of the idea that our attempts to forge our own lives for our own happiness and our own advancement is a rebellion against God’s claims to direct our lives based on the fact that he made us…the cross starts to make more sense.

The problem isn’t a few mistakes that God needs to overlook, it is a fractured relationship that needs to be healing. You and God are not ok. Me and God, we’re not ok either. We all need to be reconciled. We have knowingly or unknowingly made ourselves into God’s enemies. In a sense, our lives represent a mutiny. God designed our lives with a purpose and a destination…but have taken over the ship and are sailing it wherever we want. We are in a state of fractured relationship

The good news is that he has taken the initiative to bring healing to this fractured relationship. Jesus. Jesus’ life, death and resurrection are the mechanism of reconciliation…the means by which you can be restored to God. The passage, says that because of Jesus, people’s sins, their rebellions, are not counted against them.

So, that is the why. Why did Jesus die – to reconcile us to God…But how does that work? How does Jesus dying end up with your sin not counting against you? It sets up a cosmic exchange.

2. How: By exchanging our rebellion for his innocence

5:21 “We implore you, on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin, to become sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

I remember the summer that aluminum cans became recyclable. I was twelve. In NY, where I grew up, they do recycling a little differently. You pay 5 cents a can when you buy them and can get 5 cents a can by bringing them to any grocery store. So my brother and I went to a memorial day parade in a little town called Theresa NY they passed the recycling law. Now Theresa is a little rural town that is 3 blocks long and has 3 bars and a liquor store…so let’s just say that not only were there discarded empties everywhere, but a substantial fraction of them were 40’s. Nic and I were skeptical, but we got a bag and started walking around collecting empties. Now you have to remember, no one used to do this. Up until that summer, we just threw cans out. And we got some strange looks from the very gentlemen who were discarding the empties. The whole thing was kind of humiliating. But eventually, we walked into the Big M grocery store with an overflowing bag of cans. We were embarrassed and smelled of sweat and Pabst Blue Ribbon. But then, in our little pre adolescent minds, something magical happened. We handed the lady at the register a bag of trash, and she gave us money. It felt like stealing.

That is how the cross works. It's an unfair exchange. It’s an exchange in which we had over the trash of sin, self-absorption, and compromise, and we receive the cash of forgiveness, new life, and adoption into God’s family.

"God made him who had no sin, to become sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God."

Jesus, who was himself, in a fundamental but confusing way, God himself, and was totally innocent, totally without sin died the death of a rebel and a traitor. But this made way for a cosmic exchange…where we can trade our sin for his righteousness (to use the language of the passage). Or to use other language, we can trade our rebellion for his innocence. We can trade our estrangement from God for his intimacy with God. Our indifference to the poor for his generosity. Our lustful objectification of women for his loving respect for women. Our self centeredness for his God-centered and other centeredness.[2] This transaction does not make us good, but it makes us as if we were good in God’s eyes, and then we try to live like God sees us.

He identified with our brokenness and we were cosmically associated with his goodness and his justice. We are not good…not really, we are not really just, we are not really generous, we are not really loving – we dabble in these things…and you might even be able to talk yourself into thinking that these things define you, but the results are always tainted with self interest and mixed motives. But in this cosmic exchange, we can be considered just, good and generous, and, in exchange, Jesus takes on our pettiness, self centeredness and bigotry.

And God’s offer of reconciliation is universal. It’s for absolutely everyone. Look with me in the text:

v. 14 – “one died for all”

v. 15 – “he died for all”

v. 19 – “God was reconciling the world to himself”

But it has to be appropriated. He does not force reconciliation on anyone. As it stands it is just an offer, and unless you accept it you remain in the ambient state…of fractured relationship with God. Which brings us to Paul’s punch line in verse 20:

“We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God.”

If you had to choose 4 words to summarize the message of the Bible, these four would be a pretty good choice. “Be reconciled to God.” Appropriate the reconciliation Jesus made available to you.

So, the Message is that Jesus died and raised so that we could be reconciled to God through an exchange of our sin for his goodness. But, surprisingly, this passage also contends that the death of Jesus not only motivates the Christian message, it also motivates the Christian Mission:

II. The Mission

You see, the cross is not all about you. I mean, it is clear, through Jesus’ death and resurrection, we have the opportunity to be made right with God. Because of those events, your sin does not have to count against you. But there is another level of this. Look at v 15.

“And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.”

Reconciliation re-establishes the correct order where you no longer live for yourself but for God. Now, on the face of things, this seems like a cost. It sounds like Jesus is saying “Listen, I’ll make things good between you and God…but then I own your ass.” But it is actually part of the rescue. Jesus not only saves us from the consequences of our self involvement, he saves us from our actual self involvement. You were not designed to live for yourself. Living for yourself is a psychological cul-de-sac. You end up obsessing over your desires and neurosis. Part of the rescue that Jesus brings is a new mission of living for Jesus which manifests as living for others. Here is the thing, the reconciliation Jesus brings does not make you reconciled. It makes you a reconciler. There is no intermediate state where you receive the benefits of reconciliation but do not reorder your life to pass them on to others:

18 "All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation"

19 "And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation."

20 "We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.
What Jesus offers is not just a rescue, it is a rescue into a mission."

So before Battlestar Galactica put the Syfy channel on the mainstream map, they made their living off the stargate series. In Stargate Atlantis, there were two characters Tayla and Ronin, who were part of the team that was trying to save the Pegasus galaxy from a malevolent, oppressive, ruthless enemy. But the interesting thing about these two characters is that they had both been enslaved by this enemy. So when they were freed, they immediately joined the mission of resistance and rescue. They weren’t just rescued to move on with the rest of their lives. Neither of these characters could conceive of being squandering their rescue on themselves, they had to use it to become agents of rescue. They were rescued into the mission. And that is the way Christianity works. We are not just made good with God so we can move on with the rest of our lives for our selves with the God box checked off. We are reconciled to become reconcilers.

One of my soccer buddies from high school went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to study Mechanical Engineering. So I ended up doing numerical modeling of rivers and he ended up designing submarines…but we found that these very different fields converged on a shared passion. We both loved fluid dynamics. He told me the story of his fluid dynamics class. Apparently the professor offered two exams. Everyone had to show up for the first one. If you passed, you got a B. Those that passed, could call it good, or they could show up the next day for a harder test, which would give them a shot at an A. What surprised him was how few people showed up for the second exam. But I feel like this is how a lot of Christians view the gospel. That accepting the reconciling exchange of the cross to make us good with God is like the mandatory B exam…but becoming agents of reconciliation is extra credit. It is the optional A exam for the overachievers or the nerds who want to go to Grad School.

But here’s the thing, it is impossible to disentangle the message of reconciliation and the mission of offering that reconciliation to others. Paul speaks of them together. They are the same thing. I went through the passage and marked the parts that talk about the message and the parts that talk about the mission…and there is no tidy sequential separation. They are intertwined:
Reconciliation doesn’t just make you reconciled…it makes you a reconciler.

Now the immediate context here refers to offering the Message of reconciliation to anyone who is interested. And that is the primary meaning. Most people only have the vaguest understanding of the Message of God’s reconciliation mission in Jesus, and so we should offer the story to anyone who is interested. But in the broader scope of the Scriptures it can also include acts of care and justice…acts of practical good that demonstrate God’s intent for a restored creation. This is one of the reasons I really like the “Ambassador” language this text uses. An lives in one country but their primary allegiance is to a different country. Their primary mission is to deliver the message from their home. But they also live and work for the practical good of the people they live among out of a general affection for them and to demonstrate offer of peaceful relations between the two nations.

These are not primarily programmatic sorts of thing. You just need to be constantly on the lookout for opportunities to be agents of reconciliation, both in terms of offering the message and, what we refer to in our mission statement as practical ‘creative acts of courageous love.’ But there will be some community wide opportunities coming up. Next week Layeah will be talking about global opportunities and the week after Alyssa and Mike will be talking about local opportunities to be agents of reconciliation.

So, we say all the time here that our hope is that this gathering would be a place for two kinds of people. We hope that it is a safe place where those of you who are spiritually curious could investigate and experiment with Jesus and Christian community. And we hope that it is a place where those of you who have made a commitment to Jesus could come together and figure out what that looks like. And so it would seem like this talk divides[3] along those lines. For those of you who have experienced and continue to experience intimacy with God because of the reconciliation of Jesus, you were reconciled to become reconcilers. The Mission of the Cross is to become agents of reconciliation. For those of you who are checking Jesus out: The Message of the cross is pretty simple. Take Jesus up on the offer to exchange his goodness for your brokenness…“We implore you on Christ’s behalf: be reconciled to God.”

___________________________
[1] This text is exceedingly full of matter, and might require many treatises, and even multitudes of folios, to bring forth all its meaning. Holy Scripture is notably sententious. Human teachers are given to verbiage; we multiply words to express our meaning, but the Lord is wondrously laconic; he writeth as it were in shorthand, and gives us much in little. One single grain of the precious gold of Scripture may be beaten out into acres of human gold leaf, and spread far and wide. -Spurgeon
[2] Reconciliation is an act of remaking – it is an innocence infusion. Like a medical procedure where contaminated blood is exchanged for pure blood
[3] But it is actually not as tidy as that. You see, for the spiritually curious, The Mission is the fine print. We, like Paul, sincerely hope that you will decide to accept the reconciliation with God offered to you in Christ, but you need to know the implications of that is a massive priority change.
And Christians need to recognize that The Message of the Cross is not just for the spiritually curious. We do not graduate beyond the gospel. The minute we think we are good with God based on our own goodness, we become self-righteous, religious prudes. We are tempted to exchange self-centered hedonism for a self-centered moralims, which is a little more refined but just as broken. The exchange of our sin for Jesus goodness happens once and for all, but we keep bringing sin to the table. The gospel is for Christians. That is what keeps us from lapsing into self righteousness, when things work right…because the righteousness is not ours. The more often and the more deeply we recognize that our relationship with God is not based on our goodness but Jesus’ the less likely we are to be condescending jerks to those who don’t accept the Christian story.

'as a madman': The Life of Francis Xavier

2011-01-25T00:29:00.001-08:00

MP3 of this talk is here

Once upon a time, before the internet was cool, “The Onion” was just a little satirical Midwest newspaper and you could only get it if you lived in Madison, Wisconsin… fortunately, I did. You could literally hold it in your hands…it was adorable.

So one day I picked it up and found the following headline on the front page.

A previously unknown and unexplored land mass discovered between the New York and California coasts – here is what the article said

A U.S. Geological Survey expeditionary force announced Tuesday that it has discovered a previously unknown and unexplored land mass between the New York and California coasts known as the "Midwest." The Geological Survey team discovered the vast region while searching for the fabled Midwest Passage, the mythical overland route passing through the uncharted area between Ithaca, NY, and Bakersfield, CA.

"I long suspected something was there," said Franklin Eldred, a Manhattan native and leader of the 200-man exploratory force. "I'd flown between New York and L.A. on business many times, and the unusually long duration of my flights seemed to indicate that some sort of large area was being traversed, an area of unknown composition."

I think of this article every time I teach historical theology like we have done the last few weeks. You see, I feel like a similar headline could be written about contemporary evangelicals that might go something like this:

“A previously unknown and unexplored time period appears to have elapsed between the writing of Revelation and Blue Like Jazz”

But we are part of something bigger than ourselves. We are just a small part of a continuous story that God has been fashioning with the pen of his Spirit on the materials of human hearts. And both Dan and I have found that studying the lives and events that comprise that story have been helpful and nourishing component of our Christian lives. We have found that CS Lewis was right and wise to say:

“I have lived nearly sixty years with myself and my own century and am not so enamored of either as to not desire a glimpse beyond them.” C.S. Lewis

So that is why we have done this little series. We design the teaching so that if you come to CL for 4 years you will get teaching on a gospel, a NT book and an OT book, but we also wanted to give you some exposure to the benefit we have gotten from what Malcolm Muggeridge called ‘The Third Testament’ – the continuing story of Jesus making something beautiful out of broken lives and deeply flawed individuals.

Tonight is the final part of this series. But to introduce you to our last character, I first want to tell you a little bit about my family. I have 2 daughters who I adore…but they were impossible to name. Amanda and I had a boy name since well before we had kids but we can’t seem to agree on girls names. So when we found out we were having a third kid, we started working on a third girl’s name. Charis didn’t seem to understand the problem. She thought naming that there was a totally obvious name for our third girl. From day one she has insisted that regardless of the gender the new baby should be named “Christmas Tree.”

But as it turns out, we don’t need another girl name. We are having a boy. We finally get to use that boy name we have had cued up for years. We will probably name him Xavier. And tonight I am going to tell you why. You see, Francis Xavier, like Pascal and Bonheoffer, is a complicated guy. His story is scarred with bad choices, unfortunate alliances, and personal brokenness. He is associated with colonialism, which modern people from the east and west alike see as a period of enormous injustice and a sympathetic biographer once said: “Never were the Cross and the sword more blandly or shamelessly identified than in those days.”

Even the most admirable Christians in an era like this will come away tarnished. And there is a lot about Xavier that I do not wish for my son. But that is the really remarkable thing about Christianity. Christianity is the condition that allows heroism in despite brokenness. Christianity is the absurd hypothesis that a human does not have to be defined by his or her failures. There are dark chapters of his life and embarrassing moments in his story…which makes him like Pascal, Bonheoffer, and you and me. But Jesus was able to utilize him in truly remarkable ways in spite of this. And that is the story I want for my kids…that despite the brokenness and failures they have in front of them, Jesus will still use their lives to tell a beautiful story.

So here we go…Francis Xavier grew up at the beginning of the sixteenth century in a family of quasi-nobility. The Xavier’s had their own castle in north Spain…which I mean, come on, is pretty cool. His youth was pretty unremarkable. He wandered through it but had access to a good education. And in his early 20’s he found himself at the University of Paris, the premier European university at the time. He spent over a decade at college getting a Masters in philosophy and working on a doctorate. He was a descent student but was mainly affable and popular and mostly known for his wit and athletic accomplishments.

I mean, I’m not sure if you can picture this….

His story doesn’t really get interesting until he’s been at school for 9 years. He’s 28 and still in grad school when he got a new roommate. Ignatius of Loyola, moved in with Xavier.
Ignatius was a soldier, also from Spain, and had fought in a battle opposite Xavier’s family. In his final battle, he took a cannon ball to the leg. That’s gonna leave a mark. During his convalescence he did a bunch of reading and praying and had a pretty dramatic conversion experience. After he could walk made a pilgrimage to Israel and then returned to Paris and started college at the age 33, convinced he needed a theological education to prepare for a life dedicated to bringing the message of Jesus to anyone who would listen.

Another friend, who lived with them at this time, later said “Xavier was not at first very much taken with Inigo.” And there was no reason these two should become friends. Xavier was a bright but under-motivated student, essentially a trust fund kid from an affluent background hoping to luck into a professorate so he never had to leave the university. Ignatius was a soldier from a rival family turned religious zealot. He was, so possessed by his new faith and his single minded goal to tell people about Jesus that most people found him abrasive and annoying to be around. But they both spoke the same relatively rare language and ended up living together and, within six months, they were inseparable.

At that point things started to happen fast. Xavier, Ignatius and five others begin to meet regularly and formed a little group that dedicated themselves to purposeful Christian community. They called this little group ‘the society of Jesus’ which would later become the Jesuits, one of the most significant missional movements in the history of Christianity. It all started with two guys that didn’t like each other sharing a sqalid[1] dorm room. They became the perfect partners. Ignatius was a charismatic leader and forward looking visionary, while Xavier was a man of action and limitless energy.

Despite their passion to serve Jesus in the world, they all stayed in school for two more years to finish their education. And over the course of the next two years, they spent time praying together and separately about what God would have them do. Here is how one biographer described the little group:

“They ate in one another's rooms, compared their college notes, and discussed plans for the future. Once a week they confessed and communicated. It was during those months that Francis Xavier cemented the strongest and tenderest friendships of his life. The expression of this great affection for the fellow-members of his company, and above all, for Ignatius, runs like a thread of gold through his letters from the East.” Edith Anne Stewart

I just want to pause here and note, that this is how the vast majority of major world changing Christian movements begin…with a small group of Christains living together in non-trivial Christian community purposefully praying together. These years will set a trajectory for your life. If you are living at the margins of Christian community, dive in. And if you are surrounded by Christians but not sharing experiences like prayer and confession and discussing your studies together…you are not getting everything you can out of your time here. The people who I prayed with in college are scattered around the globe serving Jesus in a variety of ways today…and these are some of the most influential people in my world.

After they graduated, they decided that the way they could optimize their usefulness was to go Rome, showed up at the Pope’s flat and offered to do whatever he wanted done. This seems weird because we are moderns and mostly Protestants…but their reasoning was pretty convincing. They thought: “This dude has the best vantage point of all the needs and is most likely to put us to work at the most needed tasks.”

As they put it: “To do anything which will help Jesus Christ, that is our business.”

The Pope is cautious at first, but as they prove to be theologically orthodox and willing to do literally anything, he starts sending them on some of his craziest missions. They become a sort of ‘special forces’ unit for Jesus. Now about this time, a priest who had spent time in South Asia hears about these guys and convinces the King of Portugal to make a direct request some of the society to go to the Portuguese colonies in India. The Pope hesitated. He said that he could not command anyone (even these fearless young meant) to take such a dangerous journey, but that they were free to go.

Francis immediately wanted to go, but Loyola who was running the growing operation from Rome, felt like he needed Francis’ near him…but the other guy got sick, so 24 hours before the boat left he called Francis and assigned him to South Asia. Xavier replied:

““Well, then, forward! Here I am!””

At that time less that 60% of the people who made the trip from Europe to India made it. Xavier’s journey was difficult; it took a year, twice as long as the standard trip. But he gave away his quarters and spent his days caring for the sick and dying and his nights sleeping in the anchor rope.

They finally landed in Goa, the principle Portugese community in South Asia. Xavier was horrified by what he found. There was no justice or accountability for the Portugeese. There was a shared harem of indigenous women and rampant theft from each other and the South Asian people. It was a place of excess among the wealthy and suffering among the poor. He immersed himself in the lives of the suffering. He wrote to Ignatius in his first letter home,

“Here in Goa I have lodged in the hospital.”

Which meant, that he spent his nights sleeping on the floor next to the dying so he was available to be of comfort to them if they woke in the middle of the night. He cared for the sick in the hospital and tried to raise some money from the wealthy Portuguese to care for the leper communities and the slums. He visited the prisoners and preached in the streets. And in the churches, he taught Sunday school and had over 300 people began to show up. Before he left he had convinced the governors to set up a seminary and it already had 60 Indian students by the time he left. This seminary would become part of his work for the next decade…as each new place he went and set up churches, he would bring back promising young Christians to train at the Goa seminary and replace him. But Xavier was always looking for the next big risk he could take for Jesus.

He heard that 20,000 Indians had become Christians on the Fishery coast but that had been mostly abandoned. And so he went to the South Indian coast worked in these communities for years, teaching the gospel and serving the poor, training people to replace him. But before he felt like he could move on, he needed to find some money to support the people who would replace him. So he wrote a letter to the Queen of Portugal suggesting that she send annually the $ that she spends on shoes for the care and instruction of the children of the fishery coast, writing:

She sent the money, and sent it again every year after that even after Xavier’s death. Brought several of the most promising young men to the school in Goa to replace himself.

Next he went to Malaysia and did the same. He served and taught in several communities that had aligned themselves with the Christian faith…with the same effect. Churches grew and started to become self sustaining and, once more, sent promising young Malaysian leaders to Goa, to prepare them to lead and care for these churches. But in Malaysia, he had mostly reached the end of the Christian world. And Xavier had found that despite his love for the Church he was not principally a pastor to Christians – he thrived surrounded by those who did not believe.

Now, for some of you, this is an uncomfortable idea. We have been intellectually bullied so often and for so long that we many of us have come to believe that any attempt to offer someone an alternate world view is an act cultural imperialism…We might be tempted to project our modern standards to look back across the centuries and judge Xavier as being an inexcusable imperialist. But this is one way in which Xavier speaks to our generation by simply living out something we have forgotten. At the heart of Christianity is the idea that if Jesus is worth crossing an ocean for, he is worth telling people about. There is a temptation to admire Xavier’s acts of justice…as he stood up to colonial powers on behalf of the local people and his acts of service as he wore himself out serving the sick and poor…but to look at this preaching the gospel as a quaint cultural artifact. But these things cannot be separated. The only reason Xavier served and fought for justice was because Jesus is fantastic…and if Jesus is that fantastic, it would be absurd not to share him with anyone who will listen. And so he started to go to places where people might not have heard.

He had heard that in Indonesia there were some Christian communities, but the crass wickedness of the Portuguese traders and politicians had caused most to reject the new faith and in one place in particular del Mor – they had actually poisoned all the missionaries. So, of course, this was, precisely where he wanted to go next.

The land of Moro is very dangerous, because its people…put poison in food and drink. So the people who should have looked after them…stopped going there. I hope within a month to go to an island where those killed in war are eaten.

In Indonesia he saw things that he had never seen –active volcanoes, tropical rain forests – his letters home captured the European imaginations.

He was able to reestablish the church in del Moro and quipped that it would be better to call them “The Islands of Hope in God" Ten years later, del Moro, most established Christian community in the region.

While he was Indonesia, he met a young Japanese man. This young man was interminable curious and eventually became a Christian. Xavier was extremely impressed with him and set his sights on making it to Japan. Plus, he was tiring of having to overcome the example of the Portuguese colonists with the message of Jesus. He was finding that the islanders were having trouble accepting any world view that the Portuguese professed. So Japan made a lot of sense to him, as the Portuguese had not really made it there yet.

“I am almost fleeing to Japan,” he said, “not to waste any more time."

So it was back to Goa with young men from the islands to train at Goa and then he set out for Japan. However, the very thing that made Japan attractive to him, made it difficult to get there. There were no ships going that way. So we get to one of my favorite details in his story. At this point, to make it to Japan, Xavier and his little team, catch a ride with Pirates. Now, I want you to imagine this scene. Xavier is sitting on the deck reading his little book of scriptures and praying, watching the sun go down and enjoying the quiet presence of God which fueled him…except this was going on. (Enter Pirates).

Francis Xavier's letters from Japan were the earliest first-hand reports of that country to come to Europe. Japan was really difficult at first. Initially he was welcomed in an eastern province, but as soon as a few people became Christians the governor made becoming a Christian punishable by death. So Xavier made a 3 month journey to the capitol by foot, through the mountains, with little food or shelter, through snow and several war zones. He would later write to Ignatius that in the future, those selected to serve in Japan should come from Scandinavia and Germany because they would be accustomed to the cold. But when he got to the capitol he found it in ruins from war and the emperor refused to see him. He expected a “Paris of the East” but found the capitol so war torn that he estimated that nearly half of the residences had been destroyed. And they turned around and walked back. The emperor never met with him and he was told that it didn’t matter, because there was the political landscape was so fractured that his permission would not carry far. And they turned around and walked back. Most of Xavier’s biographers consider this the most discouraging moment of his story, but his companions said that he was singing a psalm as they walked out of town.
Things turned around in the Southern Coastal towns. They were able to plant churches in several towns and in one in particular, Yamaguchi, 500 people became Christians. One of these converts was a blind, poor street performer. He talked often with Xavier and had a lot of questions. But Xavier noticed in these conversations that he was startlingly intelegent and had a disarming wit. He became the first Japanese member of “the society of Jesus” and grew the church by over 1000 people after Xavier left.

Once the young churches were stable, Xavier again traveled back with young leaders to train at Goa, this group included two young samurais. But while he was in Japan he found that many of them held the philosophy and religion of China in high regard. One question he repeatedly got was, “If this is true, why did the Chinese not know about it?” So he decided to go to China.
Now China was not just unvisited by the Portuguese, it was hostile to them (and, honestly, rightly so). The only Portuguese in China were rotting in their dungeons for their attempts to land in Chinese ports. So he hatched a plan to meet a Chinese trader who would smuggle him into China (so no Chinese people would be implicated in his entrance)…then he would show up at the door of the Palace and ask to see the emperor. He waited on an island just outside of Canton for the merchant to show up. The agreed upon date came and went. He waited. Then one day, he got sick…and within a week he died…waiting to knock on one more door to offer Jesus to one more people.

His last words: “In you O Lord, have I hoped; let me never be confounded.” Ps 71:1

So what is it about this story that has captured my imagination so much, that I would want to name my son Xavier? What is there in this story that I hope for my son? Well let me wrap up briefly with 3 things I see in Xavier, that I hope for my children…and for myself…and for all of you:

1. He lived a Life of Abandon for Jesus

We are living in a time that values safety and comfort above almost anything else. Xavier’s story shakes us free of that myopia. Like his brother Dietrich Bonheoffer, Jesus had domesticated death for Xavier and somehow made suffering a friend. Xavier believed that Jesus was worth it. And I want that for my kids, and for myself, and for you.

2. He had a Global Worldview

He realized that if a world view is going to be valid, it has to be global. He took Jesus seriously when Jesus told us to tell ‘all nations’ about him.

“Many times I am seized with the thought of going to the schools in your land and crying out there, like a madman…telling those…who have a greater desire for learning (and ecclesiastical position) than desire to prepare themselves to produce fruit with it…(to give up their small ambitions and come east to preach the gospel of Christ).”

The lesson here, don’t just assume that God is calling you to life in the American church. Really seek him out to see if he has some global task for you. Many, even most, will be called to stay. Each one of you needs to ask Jesus, very seriously, if he has something for you outside of the safe and comfortable confines of North America. In a couple of weeks, Jerrod and Laeya are going to present overseas Missions opportunities that will be available to you this summer. Don’t just assume that that is the kind of thing someone else does. Ask Jesus.

3. He Spoke Truth to Power

Finally, Xavier was not intimidated by power. He utilized the Portuguese infrastructure for his service of Jesus, but they never owned him. He repeatedly wrote scathing letters to the King of Portugal about the evil and injustice he saw at the hands of the Portuguese colonialists. He saw:

To the King of Portugal: “Those who have been added to the Church (have been) wrenched from it…because they have been offended and terrified by the many wrongs and grievous injuries they have endured, especially from your Highness’ servants…(do) not continue to delay and procrastinate any longer, for no matter how swiftly you act, your diligence in this regard will always be late."

“…help them in their needs by speaking to them who have power and authority…”

I think one of the lessons we can learn from Xavier’s courageous stand against the colonial powers as well as from some of his emberresing associations with their policies is that we cannot let Jesus be co-opted in someone else’s quest for power. Both political parties would like to use Jesus to give them power…they want to co-opt the church. We need to not only resist aligning too closely with structures of power and …but we need to stand against injustice and the marginalization of people.

Now I want to finish with one final quote from Xavier. Because lets face it, Xavier was a high capacity person. None of us are going to have a life like this. And it can be exhausting to hear about a life like this while you are all working really hard at your studies and many of you, in addition to carrying substantial ministry loads. Xavier got that. Listen to what he says:

I fear that the enemy is disturbing some of you by suggesting that you would be performing great and arduous tasks in the service of God if you were in some other place than where you now are. The demon contrives all this in order to make you sad and troubled because you are not reaping fruit within your own souls or in those of your neighbors in those regions where you presently are, making you think you are wasting your time. This is a clear, common, and manifest temptation for many who are eager to serve God…resist it…Each one of you should therefore diligently labor where you are…being convinced with regard to yourself that nowhere can you serve God so well as where you have been placed by obedience. 302-3

Faithfully serve those who have needs and articulate the gospel to those who show interest as you go through this great opportunity of a UC Davis education, and remain proactively open to things God might have for you after college.

__________________________
[1] And Erasmus writes of it :
the beds were so hard, the food so meagre, the labours so exacting that many youths of splendid promise, after the first years of their sojourn in this college, became mad or blind or leprous, if
they did not die. Some of the bedrooms, because they were close to the lavatories, were so dirty and infected that none of those who lodged there came away alive, or without the germ of some grave disease . . . Oh, how many rotten eggs I ate there, and how much mouldy wine I drank ! http://www.archive.org/stream/lifeofstfrancisx00stewrich/lifeofstfrancisx00stewrich_djvu.txt

The Life and Thought of Blaise Pascal

2011-01-10T23:40:00.001-08:00

MP3 Here

All of history’s greatest scientists were playing hide and seek one day. Several of them were extremely good at this. Schrödinger was particularly good at this. He kept hiding in a sealed box with a cat who didn’t seem at all happy about the arrangement.[1]

Heisenberg just climbed on a giant triple beam balance every time…because as long as he was making a precise measurement of his mass it was impossible to detect his location.[2] Now you can understand how Sir Isaac Newton finally got tired of losing to these guys. So finally, while Einstein was counting, he just stood in the center of the room and used a piece of sidewalk chalk to carefully draw a box around himself. When Einstein finished counting he looked up and saw Isaac standing in the middle of the room. He said, “Dude, I found you.” Newton responded, “No you didn’t. You found Pascal. I’m a Newton per square meter.” [3]

So this is how I got interested in Pascal. I was in grad school for engineering, and I had written down the abbreviation for this guy’s name roughly 1000 times (giving me a kilopascal) and heard he had written an insightful and accessible work of theology, so I picked it up.

I had never read a book by a dead guy and was a little skeptical. I wondered if it could possibly have any contemporary merit. Interestingly, I found that Pascal had anticipated this concern:

You see, there are two temporal fallacies when it comes to our quest for insight and wisdom. The first is traditionalism. Traditionalists prefer ancient wisdom to modern insight. Ideas with more history get more weight. Until approximately the time of Pascal, most cultures held to this view. A new idea could only prevail with difficulty because ancient wisdom was generally trusted and novelty was received with skepticism. However, in Pascal’s time (around the fifteen century) things began to change. There was a flourishing of optimism in human ingenuity and science. And there this led to a relatively sudden cultural reversal. Ancient ideas were suddenly viewed with skepticism in favor of novelty. The fallacy of Traditionalism was supplanted by fallacy of Modernism. The Modernists fallacy was to allow modern insight to uncritically trump ancient wisdom. CS Lewis calls this, “chronological snobbery.”

Tonight, and over the course of the next two weeks, we are going to test Pascal’s hypothesis that wisdom is a middle path between these fallacies. We are going to test the hypothesis that while novel ideas and contemporary reflection have a lot to offer us, powerful minds that have been silent for centuries have something special to offer our age, because they can speak free from our paradigms and prejudices of our time.[4]

Tonight we are going to briefly tell Pascal’s story and then look at just two of the principle ideas of his philosophy.

Pascal lived through the middle of the seventeenth century. He was a contemporary with Descartes and just before Newton and Spinoza. This meant he occupied one of the most turbulent eras of intellectual discovery and ferment in western intellectual history. It was ‘the enlightenment’, ‘the scientific revolution’, ‘the age of reason.’ And he was lived in Paris, which was the heart of the action.

Pascal’s story starts with tragedy. His mother died when he was three, leaving Blaise and his two sisters in the care of their eccentric father who was, essentially a Paris tax collector. His father decided to home school and despite the fact that Blaise showed uncanny early potential he was forced to studied classics (Greek and Latin) because his father believed that “mathematics was too intoxicating for a young mind.”[5] Though something came across my facebook last night that made me wonder if he wasn’t on to something.

This kept up until (as Blaise’ older sister reported later) his dad walked in on him deriving Euclid’s principles alone in his room – you get the picture of a dad walking in on his son looking at porn. So his father relented, and he began to study math. When he was 17 he published his first major publication. By 19 he had invented the first calculator (in order to help his father with his job). This should not be underestimated:

I realize how this could be underwhelming to an Iphone/Droid/blackberry generation – I mean it is just a single function device. But listen to what Douglas Groothis said about this: [6]

In his early twenties he turned to physics and performed a series of experiments on hydrostatics (which is why we use his name as the SI unit for pressure). This was the beginning of his tendency to champion unpopular views, as he argued for the possibility of a vacuum, which most of his contemporaries believed could not exist. This debate put Pascal head to head with Descartes himself, but, Pascal was, of course, correct. The vast majority of our physical universe is in fact a vacuum.

Now despite these early achievements, he was sick most of his life, and began to really suffer from his illnesses in his 20s. His doctor told him that he needed to spend less time on stressful things like math and science and more time on social diversions. Now I want you to imagine this. You are a 24 year old dude in the world’s most fun city and the Doctor officially prescribes more partying.

Let’s just say he was extremely contentious in medical compliance. He was introduced to Parisian high society and was very well received. Even though as the son of bureaucrat he was not really in their social class, there were two reasons this was generally overlooked. First, Scientists and Philosophers were the celebrities of 17th century.

Descartes was Tom Cruise and Spinoza was Russell Crowe. A couple years ago it came out that people pay Paris Hilton to show up at parties to make those parties successful. Pascal turned out to be a seventeenth century version of this…except he was also clever, articulate and witty. You do not have to spend very long with his writings before you can imagine that he could be highly entertaining. The second reason he climbed socially was a simple matter of mathematics. Many of his friends were gamblers and some of his early work in probability stemmed from his attempts to solve gambling puzzles.

But he found that a life of diversion was fundamentally unsatisfying. His life was full of anesthetic. Diversions did not make the big questions of the universe or the human condition go away, it just made him forget they were there. Later he wrote:

“Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things…That is why men are so fond of hustle and bustle; that is why prison is such a fearful punishment…”

“The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished forever.”

Peter Kreeft who wrote a fine commentary on Pascal’s writings wrote “The word “boredom” does not exist in any ancient languages. It first appeared in the 17th century.” 187
Pascal came to believe that the reason boredom had become so intolerable, the reason
there were so many ways to occupy their minds with insubstantial things, was because bordom makes mental space for dread of a vacant universe. The realities of a vacant universe and our true condition are too dreadful to allow it to maintain our attention.

“We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us (from) seeing it.”

About the same time Pascal’s father broke his leg. He hired two amateur bone setters to help him heal and rehab and they lived with the family. They were simple men whose lives revolved around their Christian faith, and Pascal found himself drawn to them. This is one of my favorite details of the story, because these were very simple, unassuming men. They were not in the intellectual ballpark of the precocious young Blaise, but he would eventually adopt their worldview. And this is one of my criterions for evaluating a worldview. Does it have generality across the human condition? Is similarly compelling and useful to simple tradesmen and world class intellects?

For the next few years, these two influences, the Jesus of the bonesetters and the high life of the Parisan cultural set each pulled at him. We only know how that resolved in retrospect. He did not let anyone in on the final decision as far as we know. But when he died, his family found this document, dated Nov 11, 1954 (which would make him 31) sewn into the lining of his jacket (as though he had resolved to always have the reminder of this night close to his person).

“The year of grace 1654.
Monday, 23 November, feast of Saint Clement
From about half-past ten in the evening until about half-past midnight.
FIRE.
The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.
Not of the philosophers and intellectuals.
Certitude, certitude, feeling, joy, peace.
The God of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
Forgetfulness of the world and everything except God.
One finds oneself only by way of the directions taught in the gospel.
The grandeur of the human soul.
Oh just Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.
I have separated myself from him.
They have abandoned me, the fountain of living water.
My God will you leave me?
May I not be separated from him eternally.
This is eternal life, that they may know you the one true God and J.C . whom you have sent.
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
I have separated myself from him. I have run away from him, renounced him, crucified him.
May I never be separated from him.
One preserves oneself only by way of the lessons taught in the gospel.
Renunciation total and sweet.
And so forth.”

This changed the trajectory of the last decade of Pascal’s life. He began to study theology and take an interest in Paris’ poor. His last big project was to implement the first public transportation system in the Western world. He used his own money to set up a series of omnibuses with prescribed routes and public time tables with the intent of giving Paris’ poorest citizens a way to get around the city. He also started to write his major work of philosophy, collecting fragments in a shoe box. Pascal never finished the book. He died before he turned 40. The autopsy revealed at least 3 terminal disease so advanced they couldn’t tell which one killed him. But his sister fond the shoe box published the fragments as she found them, under the title Pensees (simply the French word for ‘thoughts’). Now for not being an actual book, Pensees is one of the great works of history. It is easily one of my five favorite books. IT is a shockingly raw and subversive dissenting opinion to the rest of the triumphalistic philosophy that came out of that age. In some way, a non-traditional work was appropriate legacy for Pascal. Kreeft says: “To ask such a man to write an ordinary book is like asking lightning to sit for a portrait.”
At his funeral there were eminent scientists, members of Parisian high society, renowned members of the religious community, but the account reports that the much of the church was full of the Paris’ poor that he had assisted following his conversion. And I think that sums up his life pretty well, and I think that scene alone, makes his writings compelling. What kind of world view generates a life like this?

Well with the time I have left I just want to briefly look at two of the organizing ideas of his world view. To understand Pascal’s world view and why it was so radically different than the others of his time, you have to understand how he answers two of the big questions: “Who are we?” and “How do we know stuff?” or his anthropology and his epistemology.

First: Who are we? (Pascal’s Anthropology)

Pascal was fundamentally an empiricist. In the debates about a vacuum, he put the emphasis on experimentation and data over theory and principle. And he felt like, if you are going to achieve a stable view of the meaning and purpose of life, you first have to take some data on what it means to be human. So he undertook a new study later in life. He called it his study of “The Human Subject.” And he concluded that there were two fundamental and paradoxical things that any world view has to reconcile about the human condition:

“The more enlightened we are the more greatness and vileness we discover in man…” (613 – p51)[7]

“What sort of freak then is man? How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe!” (131 - 107)

He argues that if you are going to try to answer the question “Who are we?” your answer has to account for two very different stories. First, you have to account for the capacity gun down 5 perfect strangers (including a 9 year old) outside an Arizona grocery. But you are also going to have to account for an 18 year old that used her college money to start an orphanage in Nepal and by the age of 24 was the sole caretaker of over 40 children, sharing her bed with a fussy infant.[8] You are going to have to account Stalin and Teresa, for our tendency to destroy and our tendency to create, our darkness and our beauty.

Pascal felt like the Christian story made the most sense of this paradoxical data. He argued that we are all metaphysically valuable but morally flawed. We are fundamentally good but existentially broken.

“(Human) greatness and wretchedness are so evident that (a successful world view) must necessarily teach that there is in (us) some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness. It must also account for such amazing contradictions…It must acknowledge that we are full of darkness…(and) teach us the cure for our helplessness.” (149 – p65)

The great irony is that most contemporary world views invert this. They argue that there is nothing intrinsically valuable about us, we are just carbon and chemicals, the accidental animation of cosmic dust, yet, we are all basically good at heart. We are intrinsically valueless but morally good. [9] Pascal says:

“What amazes me most is to see that everyone is not amazed at (their) own weakness…” (33 – 106)

Someone once asked Ravi Zacharias, a notable South Asian Christian for the primary reason he followed Jesus. This is a particularly fair question for him, as he grew up in India, one of the few places on earth where all of the major religions are well represented. He responded, “I follow Jesus Christ because he diagnosed my condition most precisely.”

Second: How do we know stuff? (Epistemology)

What Pascal demonstrated in the vacuum debates was that he was interested in data than theory. And he felt like, if you are going to achieve a stable view of the meaning and purpose of life, you first have to take some data on what it means to be human. And he concluded that there were two fundamental and paradoxical things that any world view has to reconcile about the human condition:

“Two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason…Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go as far as to realize that.”

And this is why we have to understand Pascal’s anthropology before we can understand his epistemology. His answer to “Who are we?” informs his answer to “How do we know stuff?…and so does yours. If we fit Pascal’s picture of beautiful brokenness, there is a reason to be skeptical about our ability to penetrate reality ourselves.

He found that despite the immense power of his own mental faculties, that reason and the senses are helpful but slippery guides. “I found myself so often making unsound judgments that I began to distrust myself and then others…I realized that our nature is nothing but continual change.” (520 – p93)

Even the greatest minds will have trouble differentiating between their reason and their passions.

“The internal war of reason against the passion has made those who wanted peace split into two sects. Some wanted to renounce passions and become gods, others wanted to renounce reason and become brute beats. But neither side has succeeded, and reason always remains to denounce the baseness and injustice of the passions and to disturb the peace of those who surrender to them. And the passions are always alive in those who want to renounce them.” (410 – p97)[10]

Pascal anticipates the existentialists and the post-moderns (even as modernism itself is just getting started) by arguing that there is no ‘view from nowhere.’ All knowledge is perspective and fundamentally self interested.

“The aversion for the truth exists…in everyone to some degree, because it is inseparable from self love.” (978 -150)

He found dogmatism unsatisfying but was skeptical about skepticism. He needed a world view that allowed him to use his mind but also recognized the limitations of our equipment.[11]
Pascal believed that because we are beautiful and broken, it distorts the way we perceive reality. Like looking into a shattered mirror. We see some aspects of reality exactly right, but the big picture eludes us. And this state is supposed to supposed to lead us to look outside ourselves for the interpretive key that pulls the story together.

“You cannot be a skeptic without stifling your nature. You cannot be a dogmatist without turning your back on reason. Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you. Listen to God.” (131 – 109)

Disillusioned with the capacity of his powerful mind to penetrate reality, he looked for help. And he found a tutor who seemed to see it all clearly.[12] He found someone who had a fundamental understanding of how we work and how the world works that fit Pascal’s empirical . He found Jesus.

“Not only do we know God through Jesus Christ but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ.”(417 -313)

Concluding Thought:

Let me just wrap up with a couple words on how Pascal’s mentorship has enhanced my experience of the University and the reflective life.

Letting Jesus inform your interpretations of your sense data does not have to devolve to dogmatism. But in the end, I have found the same thing Pascal found, the Christian story makes the most sense of the cloud of paradoxical data I have encountered in my studies. However, I am far more curious about science and philosophy, about how the world works and how we work, than I was without Jesus.

“I believe with (our) curiosity changed into wonder (we) will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than to investigate them with presumption.” (199-122)

Pascal’s Jesus provides a robust approach to the academic life. Study hard, enjoy the accumulation of facts and the evaluation of ideas, develop your powers of reasoning, observation and experimentation. But instead of leading to arrogance, let them lead you to wonder. Consider the possibility that the one who made all this wants to walk with you through your discovery of it. And consider the possibility that if Jesus describes the human condition with such precision, that you might want to look to him for the solution.

____________________________
[1] “Schrödinger’s cat walks into a bar…and doesn’t” My friend Zach
[2] My friend Steve brainstormed a bunch of these:
Schrodinger could hide in two boxes at once and when a box is opened/observed he could "collapse" to the unopened box (maybe leaving a dead cat behind?).
Einstein could change himself into energy and travel at the speed of light (since he would be massless) and then change back to matter.
Plank could hide inside of a really, really, really, tiny distance.
Feynman could be particularly good at finding people by making a diagram of every possible path the other scientist might use to try and hide.
[3] You English majors will just have to take my word for it…these jokes are hilarious.
[4] They are, no doubt, restricted by the prejudices and assumptions of their own age, but these are easy for us to sniff out. What makes looking to past figures for insight particularly valuable is that they do not have to dance to the fiddler of our moment and can provide an ‘outside’ opinion. Rather than musty, their ideas are often fresh because they would never occur to us.
[5] Seriously, you’ve got to love the seventeenth century – where they say stuff like this. Sometimes I hear would-be-hippies bemoan that they were born in the wrong decade…that their natural temporal home would have been the sixties. Well sometimes I sympathize…sometimes I feel like I should have been born in the sixties too…the 1660, when people talked like this.
[6] Douglas Groothuis On Pascal, p 17.
[8] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504464_162-20027569-504464.html
[9] Kreeft: “Psychopaganism is infinitely inferior to existentialist nihilism because it does not even rise to the dignity of despair.”
[10] “One must know when it is right to doubt, to affirm, to submit. Anyone who does otherwise does not understand the force of reason. Some men run counter to these three principles, either affirming that everything can be proved, because they know nothing of proof, or doubting everything, because they do not know when to submit, or always submitting, because they do not know when judgment is called for.” (170 - 236) 3 kinds of fanaticism
[11] He actually believed that the cloudiness of our cognitive equipment and our inability to see things clearly was a gift from God to point us to our need for an external interpretive key.
[12] “Let man both hate and love himself, he has with him the capacity for knowing truth and being happy, but he possesses no truth which is either abiding or satisfactory.” (119 p61)

What Motivates Change?

2010-11-22T22:23:00.000-08:00

2 Cor 5:11-17

MP3: here

Tonight I am just going to start with a simple question:

Do people ever really change? And if so, How?

One of the great shared experiences of our humanity is that most of us in this room, at one point in our life, have probably undertaken some long term project of behavior change and…and failed. Either there was a behavior or habit that we want to minimize or discontinue all together: say carbon usage, porn, or procrastination - I mean, how many times have you told yourself, ‘next time, I am going to start writing my paper more than 12 hours before it is due.” Or there is some behavior that we would like to do more than we do (this quarter I am going to exercise more. And as you get older and start making money it will be what portion of your resources will you allocate for the poor and/or the environment instead of spending it on yourself). One thing we all have in common, is that we have all tried to change…and most of us have found it harder than it seems like it should be. It can get discouraging. You start to wonder “do people ever really change?” And if so, how?

Today’s passage seems to answer the first question with an unequivocal, YES. Look with me at verse 17:

2 Cor 5:17 "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!"

Now this is kind of an inspiring verse. Chances are that if you have been hanging around the church for more than say six months, you’re familiar with it. And it takes a definitive position on the first question I posed. Tonight’s passage holds out the brazen claim that Christianity offers the resources to motivate sustained, non-trivial life change. But the verse is a little fuzzy on the second question…how? So how do you motivate long term, sustained change? Well the famous verse 17 starts with a ‘therefore’, which means to find the mechanisms of this change, we simply need to look up. And sure enough, the passage includes not one, but 2 surprising answers to the question: ‘How do we motivate change?’ Look with me at verses 11 and 14

Paul offers two, motivations for substantial and sustained life change: fear and love. Does that strike you as odd? I mean, these hardly seem like compatible motivations. And many people would contend that they are not. In fact one of the great poets of my generation, Ben Gibbard of DCFC, articulated his resistance to this:

Machiavelli famously agreed. He said

He takes it as axiomatic that fear and love are not compatible motivations…a sovereign can only select one to motivate his kingdom…and was better off choosing fear.

Commodus the Roman emperor depicted in the film Gladiator went the other way. Unable to inspire respect, he tried to win allegiance by making the people love them with ‘bread and circuses.’

So what happened here? Did Paul get confused? Are fear and love mutually exclusive?First, we need to ask if we really know what these words mean. Words have what semantic range. The meaning we attribute to them based on our experiences and background was not always the meaning the author intended. Take two examples from the retreat:

When we hear ‘fear’ and ‘love’ in terms of motivation we think ‘reward’ and ‘punishment’. We think God is holding out the cosmic Carrot and stick – what psychologists call extrinsic motivations – trying to coax us into good behavior with pie and spankings. But psychologists who study motivation suggest that punishment/reward motivators can generally only produce short term results. They don’t have the power to generate long term change.[1]

So what is actually going on here? Christian motivation is not based in what God can do for me or to me…but in who he is. It is god centered. And from a God-centered perspective, ‘fear’ and ‘love’ do not refer to ‘punishment’ and ‘reward’, they refer to ‘awe’ and ‘affection’. God motivates change by capturing our imagination and will with awe and affection. But that brings us back to the question: can the same God claim both?

At the bottom of the question of whether we should be motivated by fear or love is a fundamental question of what God is like. There are two basic ways to approach God. The first is to stress transcendence. This is the approach taken, for example, by our Muslim friends. Stressing god’s transcendence stresses distinction. Got is totally other. He is characterized by qualities like omnipotence, and inscrutability and holiness.

The other basic way to approach God is to stress immanence. This is at the heart of the approach taken by our Hindu friends. God is literally everywhere…all around us, in us. God is indistinguishable from the world, and fundamentally is expressed in each one of us. God is fundamentally accessible.

Transcendence stresses distinction, and the appropriate response is awe…and lots of it, so that the appropriate emotional response flirts with fear. Immanence stresses nearness. God is close, accessible. The appropriate response is affection. And so which way does Christianity go? Is the Christian God transcendent or immanent? The answer is ‘yes.’

Christians believe in a Trinitarian God. Who is entirely transcendent but fully immanent. He is holy, totally other, and morally inapproachable in his perfect justice in the person of the Father…but in the person of the Spirit, he is nearer to you than the person sitting next to you, giving you constant and total access. And in Jesus, God become flesh, the cosmic king of the universe soils his swaddle in a cold barn in a backwater town on the edge of the Roman Empire. He is simultaneously totally other and as identifiable as he possibly could be. That which was unapproachable invades our reality and works our salvation. Incidentally, that is what Christmas is about. In the incarnation, Jesus becomes the living embodiment of the transcendent immanent.

You see, some of you have a god like Commodus. You elevate his imminence at the expense of his transcendence. He is so in need of showing and receiving love that he has no moral seriousness. He is trivial. And so you are not inspired to serve him. Others of you have a god like Machiavelli’s prince. You elevate his transcendence at the expense of his immanence. He becomes so hard that you are terrified to cross him. You are scared of him. Eventually, this terror exhausts you, and you give up trying to serve him. But neither of those gods are worth service let alone worship.

So lets revisit the original question with these categories: what is the engine of real life change? What motivates the life transformation that Paul talks about in v 17? Awe and affection. Standing in awe of and cultivating affection for a God who is totally other, unapproachably holy, and perfectly just yet grants us total access and to the point that he is interested in our deepest hurts and our most trifling worries.

And what is the shorthand for Awe+affection in response to a God who is immanent and transcendent… Awe+affection = worship Actual, sustained change is wrought by worship. All sin is fundamentally a worship issue...a deficit of worship. You want to change? The carrot and stick form of religious motivation does not work in the long term. You need to cultivate a bigger awes and deeper affections. That is called worship. Worship (much more than, but including, corporate Christian musical worship) is the engine of transformation. Are you struggling with porn? Then your God is either not big enough or not near enough. Are you indeffeeent to the poor and the environment? Than your God either needs to be more just or more tender.
Sin is fundamentally a worship issue. It is organ failure of our capacity for wonder. If you are stuck in a behavior that diminishes you or are trying to cultivate a behavior that ennobles you, strategies will help, but fundamentally, you need a bigger and nearer God. You need to love the good and the beautiful more intensely. You need to cultivate more awe and better affections. You need to exalt in a fiercely beautiful God …so that our bleak lives of self centeredness looks as pitiful as they actually are. You need to worship.
______________
[1] See Daniel Pink’s Drive

The Riddle of Seeing: 2 Corinthians 4

2010-11-08T20:54:00.001-08:00

MP3: here

2 Corinthians 4

About a year ago I woke up at 4 in the morning and could not get back to sleep. This doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, I usually get up and go for a walk. And so was walking around the North Davis green belt and I started to pray. And no one else was out at this hour so I started to pray out loud because it helps me focus. Plus, it is not as embarrassing to get caught praying out loud as it used to be. It used to be that the only other people who talked out loud with no visible companion were the mentally ill. Now if someone catches you praying out loud in public they just assume you have Bluetooth.

So anyway about 10 minutes into my walk, around Northstar Park, I hear a strange sound. It is the unmistakable rhythmic periodicity of trampoline. And before long, I see the occasional head and shoulders of a a college age dude bouncing behind his fence, just to the left of the bike trail. It was just him, no one else, He wasn’t practicing any trick or anything like that. It was just him, bouncing up and down on a trampoline in his backyard, in the dark, at 4:30 in the morning. Now, this struck me as totally absurd. And I wondered what his story could possibly be. How does someone end up bouncing on their outdoor trampoline at 4:30? Was he high, was he drunk, or maybe he was just weird. But then it occurred to me. I was walking around the neighborhood at 4:30 in the morning talking out loud to my invisible friend…Suddenly his choice does not seem quite so strange. I thought to myself “Bounce away morning trampoline guy.”

So let start with a question:

Why do you believe in something you cannot see?
And if you don’t, why on earth should you?

A lot of people, especially intelligent University types would say that you shouldn’t. You are at one of the top universities in the world. You are getting a first class education, many of you in the sciences. Surely you do not have confidence in realities that cannot be verified by sense data.

This perspective was popularized in the 1940’s and 50’s by the famous British philosopher AJ Ayer, the and came to be known as Logical Positivism. Ayer argued that all talk about god was, strictly, non-sense in the strict definition of the word…in that it could not appeal to sense data and, therefore, fundamentally has no meaning. He argued that a statement can only have meaning if it can be verified by sense data. Of course, positivism was not long lived, largely because the idea that statements are only true if they can be verified by sense data cannot be by sense data…but we have all felt the sting of this critique.

Well, the critique is not new. Paul, one of the authors of the New Testament, felt the weight of it as well. And he winks at it in the end of chapter 4 with this subversive little riddle. He says: “We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.”

Excuse me, What?

In this passage Paul reflects about why some people believe in Jesus and others do not. I mean, it’s an interesting question right. I know brilliant people who believe and brilliant people who do not. There is too much brain power on either side of that equation for it to be a simple matter of intelligence.

In fact, the most famous paleontologist in the world, the late, venerable Steven Jay Gould wrote in the pages of Scientific American, that “Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs—and equally compatible with atheism”[1] Gould suggest that there are just too many smart people on both sides of this question to be definitively adjudicated by intellect. So this evening, I want to look at a couple of surprising things that the Scriptures say about how we come to know God…and then why I want to look at two brief applications. First, Paul lays the groundwork with ‘Why God seems so hard to know.”

1. Why God Seems Hard to Know

You do not come to know God in the same way you Calculus, Chemistry or Kafka. Knowing God is different. But why? To address that Paul starts out with a curious and borderline offensive observation.

He says that “the god of this age has blinded the minds of those who do not believe” and then follows up with this “God…made is light to shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory…”

Do you see what he is doing there? Do you see the contrast he is making? He seems to think that the mind might be a liability. Now, I don’t know about you, but my first impulse there is to be a little embarrassed by Paul. If you are a scientist, like me…Paul just lost you. But stay with us for a minute. You will have a hard time finding a bigger nerd than me. I love the life of the mind. Shoot, I am working on my fifth degree…my fourth in engineering and the hard sciences.
And while at first it seems like by questioning the role of the mind he is playing into the stereotypical religious anti-intellectual bias…what you have to understand is that Paul was a nerd too. He loved the life of the mind. He was better educated than 99% of the Roman Empire and was a rigorous thinker. So what happened here? Well, Paul is warning, that while learning and rational thought are incredibly valuable, overemphasizing them can distort our humanness. Paul is suggesting that perhaps we should not…”believe everything we think.” He suggests that though the life of the mind has immense value in the Christian life it can also be a liability if it is not experienced in the context of the other things that make us human.

Think with me about what Jesus says was the central purpose of life. He said to “Love God with all your heart, mind, soul, strength.”

But what I have always loved about this passage is that it also gives us insight into what it means to be human. Holistic personhood is a balance of these components. By elevating any of these components of our personhood to a dominant position we become a distortion of who we were meant to be. Think with me for a minute….what happens if you place too much emphasis on the life of the:

Emphasize the Heart (Emotions) – You Become Emotional
Emphasize the Soul (Supernatural Experiences) – You Become a Mystic
Emphasize Strength (Action) – You Become a Pragmatist[2]
Emphasize the Mind (Sense Data and Thought)- you become an Intellectual

CS Lewis, a man who did not lack intellectual firepower, called this distortion, of intellectuals who put disproportionate emphasis on the life of the mind…‘Men without chests’

“(Excessive emphasis on the life of the mind will) produce what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardor to pursue her…It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.” CS Lewis – The Abolition of Man

This is like that guy at the gym who only works out his upper body and looks like a distortion.
What Paul is trying to say is: The mind is not unproblematic and our affections are not without value.

This passage doesn’t undermine the usefulness of the mind. It undermines the primacy of the mind. It deconstructs the enlightenment paradigm that our best shot at understanding reality is to figure it out by dispassionate analysis. What Paul is saying is that if you want to know something…but especially if you want to know God…you are going to have to engage it with your passions, your actions, and spiritual realities.

Paul suggests that what we think, the way we perceive reality is a function of what we love and what we expect.

Now I know this sounds countercultural, especially at an institution dedicated to intellectual development. But think about this with me for a minute: If knowing God was a matter of analytical ability, smart people would have an advantage. That does not really seem fair. Doesn’t it seem like a just God would set things up so that people who don’t have your IQ had an equal shot at knowing him. Smart people are welcome, but you have to recognize that the analytical analysis of sense data is not the only or even the primary process that God is known by.
So, you have to consider the possibility that you do not see God because you do not expect to. How we process sense data is influence by what we expect to see there.

One of the first movies I went to see as a kid was ET. Now, I am the same age as Drew Barrymore, so that will give you some idea of the age I was when I went to see it. But there is a scene in that film where the kids are hiding an alien from their mother and the mother walks into the bedroom. ET hides in the stuffed animals…but he is a brown leathery alien with an enormous dome…so plush kitty cats are not exactly a stellar camouflage. But she looks right at him and does not see him because when you look at a pile of toys in a child’s room, you expect to see toys, not an extra terrestrial being. You see what you expect to see.[3]

If we learned anything from the philosophical gyrations of the twentieth century it is there is no ‘view from nowhere.’ All knowledge is perspectival, it is affected by our passions, our categories, our loves, our hates. Sense data is not impartial.[4]

So how is God known if not through hypothesis testing an empirical observation?

Well that leads me to the second big idea in this passage...

2. You Can Only See With The Right Light

So Paul says you cannot know God in the same way you know Calculus, Chemistry or Kafka. He says, do not trust everything you think because the mind is not an unbiased tool. It is influenced by your affections and your expectations.

Well, OK Paul, then how do you suggest that we come to know God? Paul’s response…You have to turn the light on. In verses 4-6 he uses the metaphor of light four times. Paul says you have to process sense data under the right light. This, of course, reminded me of my favorite 15 seconds of the Office of all time:

I understand there was a similar incident at a CL Halloween party. The way the story goes, Brant came dressed as Fred from Scooby Do but when the black light came on, it became clear that Brant’s house had a mouse problem and that he probably should not be hugging anyone that night.

The black light illuminates reality to reveal the unseen. But there are less disgusting examples of phenomena or entities that are only visible under the right light. It is common for scientists to use polarization or phase contrast to illuminate realities that would otherwise be unseen.
Paul says, ‘you want to understand the essence of reality…you need the right light.” He suggests that there are fundamental realities that we simply do not see until we illuminate them with the right light.

And then he goes on to say…that light, is Jesus. Jesus is the black light of reality. He is the interpretive key by which things make sense. He is the seen thing that makes sense of the unseen. He is the empirical reality that gives us access to the unseen realties. In verse 4 he calls Jesus the ‘Image of God’. Elsewhere in scripture Jesus is called “the image of the unseen God.” The key to seeing unseen reality is to look at it in light of Jesus.

So, wrap up by unpacking this idea a little with two brief applications

Application 1: Want to Know God, Look into the Face of Jesus

Check out v 6. “God…made his light to shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God[5] in the face of Christ.”

He says you want access to light, knowledge, and glory of God look to Jesus. But I love the language here. He doesn’t say ‘learn about Jesus.’ You know God by looking into the face of Christ.

Some of you here tonight just need to realize that God is not known like you know Calculus, Chemistry or Kafka. He is not known by accumulating facts. He is known by looking into the face of a lover. If you want to know God, read the accounts of Jesus…but go beyond that, try talking to him. At first this will seem awkward. But you will start to see things differently. It is a lot like that scene in the matrix, where Neo has just been flushed, and he laying on that bench with all those weird electrodes in him to rebuild his muscles. He is going in and out of consciousness, and he asks Morpheus ‘Why do my eyes hurt.’ Morpheus replies “because you have never used them before.” If you look into the face of Jesus, your eyes will be calibrated to a new reality.

So, read the stories, talk to him. But then, the Scriptures teach something kind of strange. A third way you can look into the face of Jesus is by hanging out with his people. Now this is counterintuitive, because we are nothing special. You would not know that we have any special insight on reality by looking at us. We are messed up and often kind of strange. But Paul anticipates this in verse 7 where he describes us as ‘jars of clay’. He says that Jesus’ people are like unremarkable clay pots. Nothing special…but yet, they contain treasure. That is what you will find in Christian community. We are unremarkable, and sometimes we are just plain peculiar. But that is the way Jesus has always preferred it. He came to earth in a barn and now hangs out in Kliber 4. Look into the face of Jesus.

Application 2: Do Not Lose Heart

And finally…Paul’s whole point of going into this topic of ‘seeing the unseen’ is kind of surprising. He says it two times: in verse 1 and in verse 16. He says therefore, because God we have found ‘the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ’…’We do not lose heart.’ And then he goes on to describe…midterms. He says we were ‘hard pressed’, ‘perplexed’, we were ‘struck down.’ I mean is there a better three word description of the academic life. But you see, this is a dark chapter in Paul’s life. He is discouraged. He has been physically and emotionally hurt. But he says, because we can see what is unseen, we do not loose heart.

It is discouraging get all our data from our eyes and minds and when we look out there, and in here all we see are broken people, broken relationships and broken things, piles of history books, blank word documents, impeding deadlines and more chemistry, more calculus, more Kafka. It's hard to remember the glorious and eternal things God is doing beneath the surface. So I think the point of this text is to remind us about the unseen REALITY: not seen, but real nonetheless, which is of greater value and glory than the pressing/discouraging/broken world we live in.
“We are hard pressed, but not crushed, perplexed but not in despair, persecuted, but not abandoned, struck down but not destroyed…though outwardly we are wasting away, inwardly we are being renewed day by day.”

Our circumstances do not define our reality. We have insider knowledge that gives us courage and strength. I think if Paul were here tonight speaking into our context he might say “You are the loved child of a cosmic King, you have access to the face of Jesus. Don’t you dare allow some professor to tell you how much you are worth. No one can define you with a number.” The reality of your value is unseen. So go home and work hard to develop your mind and your ideas. But refuse to let the grade you see at the top of your paper define you.[6]

Paul says, look into the face of Jesus, let his light illuminate the true nature of your reality…and because of that, press on with and for him and don’t lose heart…because:

“We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.”
____________

[1] Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge "Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge," Scientific American, July 1992, 267(1):118-121;
[2] This could also turn into a moralist. If you put all of the emphasis on what you do…action…then correct action becomes ultimate. This is interesting because there are conservative and liberal versions of this. Conservatives tend to stress personal action (what bad activities do I avoid) and liberals tend to stress communial action (what good actions do I do for the public good) but both are distoritions by evaluating human value based on actions.
[3] This happens to me all the time as a scientist. Last quarter I went on a field trip with an entomology class I was taking. We went to a vernal pool and the whole class stared at this pool for 20 minutes looking for anything interesting. For 20 minutes we saw mostly nothing. Until someone said, what are all those little black things jumping around. There, right on the water edge, were hundreds of colembola jumping all over the place. They had been there all along, and once we were looking for them, you could not miss them, but it took 15 scientist 20 minutes to see them…because “How we process sense data is influence by what we expect to see there.“
[4] There are impediments to knowledge that are not purely cognative – how we interpret sense data is affected by personal and cosmic influences, and some of the cosmic influences are pernicious
[5] Ravi Zacharias has a great contextual note here where he points out that the pursuit of the Hebrews was light, the pursuit of the Greeks was knowledge and the pursuit of the Romans was glory…in other words, the highest pursuit of each person who was in Corinth (a Greek city, under Roman occupation, with a substantial Jewish community – especially in the new church) is culminated in Jesus.
[6] This is harder than I make it sound. I am intentionally trying to get sub-optimal grades in my most recent degree because it is superfluous. In a sense, getting an A in my current class is evidence I need to spend more time with my kids. Still, I got an A- on my first paper and it stung.

Live Free or Die

2010-09-28T00:24:00.000-07:00

The MP3 of this talk is here.

You have all seen the commercial. British soldiers line up ready to do battle. Their formation is tight and they look formidable. Then, there is some mysterious dust in the horizon and out of the woods, comes George Washington driving a crappy American car but doing it with flair and purpose. The British soldiers scatter. And the announcer tells us un-ironically cut to Washington and the car : “Here’s a couple of things America got right. Cars and freedom.”

It seems like everyone wants to talk about freedom. It was the title of a horrid, six and a half minute George Michael[1] song that was released the year some of you were born and it is the climactic line of one of the best movies of all time. Shoot we even briefly used the term to describe fried potatoes.

Everyone wants to talk about freedom, but it seems like one of those words (like love or happiness) that so many people use to mean so many different things that it doesn’t really mean anything in particular any more.

But whatever freedom actually is, we’ve all felt pangs of something we want to call freedom. For each of us in this room, there was a moment freshman year, for some of you, it was in the past week, when it suddenly dawned on you, “I’m totally free.” I could literally do whatever I want right now. I could be whoever I want. I remember exactly where I was when the full impact of my new freedom dawned on me freshman year. It was exhilarating…and a little terrifying. All of the constraints I had felt in my parents’ house were gone…but so were the excuses. I was totally free, which meant I was totally free to fail.

You see, culturally we usually use the word freedom to refer to an unqualified good. Freedom is always better than constraint. But when the prolific existential philosopher and famous atheist Jean Paul Sartre tried to summarize his philosophy in a few words, he said that the stark reality of the human condition is that we are ‘condemned to be free[2].’ Sartre found the weight of unlimited options crushing because it brought with it such a dreadful responsibility. I suspect some of you are experiencing that tension, whether you are freshman and are new to this peculiar social experiment we call college, or maybe you got a couple years under your belt and feel like there has to be a better way to negotiate the freedoms and responsibilities of these college years. Well, what we want to do with our introductory series, over the next three weeks is to look at some counter-intuitive things Jesus and the Christian scriptures have to say about freedom and explore some of the resources the Christian worldview offer to help you actually experience freedom and avoid counterfeit versions.

You see, Jesus and the Christian Scriptures have a pretty radical vision of what freedom really is…and what it isn’t. According to Jesus, freedom is not just autonomy. It is not just the absence of constraints. It is not just being able to do whatever you want to do. Freedom, in the Christian worldview, is voluntarily selecting the constraints that were designed for human flourishing. The Christian paradox of freedom is that it costs you your autonomy. But the subtle paradox of autonomy is that it is usually an illusion.

One of the things we want to say to you tonight, as you are just starting a new year in this place (and maybe just starting your first year in this place), is that if someone is promising you freedom, make sure they can deliver. The Scriptures warn, that many who promise freedom, don’t actually even know what it is. Look with me at this passage from the Christian Scriptures:

2 Peter 2:19 They promise freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity—for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him.

When I read this verse, I immediately think of a little green bear.

I went to undergrad at a little state school in upstate NY. And in the center of town, just east of campus, there was a big fountain in the middle of the road. And on top of that fountain there sat a little bronze bear. Now this little bear is a celebrity in this town. It even has its own facebook page.

But this local celebrity also had a legend associated with it, which I heard for the first time during my freshman orientation. Legend had it that if anyone ever graduated this school and by some cosmic confluence of bad luck and prudishness was still a virgin, that on that day, this little bronze bear would climb down from his perch, and walk out of town. Yet year after year, (click) there he sat, for 122 years, a little bronze monument to the sexual freedom of the American University.

So…you can imagine my surprise, when I logged on to the university web site recently and found this.

About a year ago, the bear went missing. And so, it had finally happened. Some poor, repressed, soul had gotten too busy with chess club and made it through 4 years at a college campus without having sex, and the little bronze bear, well that was just more than he could take.[3] He up and left town.

Now, the real story was that the bear had just been removed as part of a project to restored the fountain which, after 122 years of Western NY winters, was totally falling apart.[4] But the message of this little morality tale that I was told on the first day of my freshman experience was clear. The morality tale of the bronze bear was meant to offer us freedom. The moral of the story was that everyone gets laid in college. It is a time of sexual experimentation. So don’t be so uptight about it. Have fun with your bodies. Enjoy your new freedom.

But be careful, because “They promise freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity—for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him.”

The thing I didn’t get about this from the start was “How is this really a message of freedom? “ What is the actual message of the parable of the bronze bear?
The actual message here is that:
Your sexual appetites are too strong
…resistance is futile
…you are at the deterministic mercy of your biology.
Therefore sexual degradation and experimentation are inevitable in college.

And somehow, this is supposed to be a message of freedom. How is that freedom? How is that not constraint?

Those who are offering freedom are saying that sexual forces that will pull at you in college are too powerful to be denied. Your sexual impulses are stronger than you are given the buffet of opportunities that university life provides. So just let it happen and get over the antiquated social pressures that cause you guilt. In other words, your sexual impulses are your master. You serve your sexuality. It owns you. Or, in other words, you are the bear’s bitch.[5] That is not freedom. Many of those who claim to offer you freedom in this place, are not themselves free. They serve their appetites.

“They promise freedom, while they themselves are slaves of (their impulses and their appetites) (φθορά[6])—for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him.”

Three years before David Foster Wallace tragically took his life in 2008, he gave a commencement speech at Kenyon college. Now, I love Wallace. His has actually had a pretty substantial influence on me and his death was a blow. But to my knowledge, he was not remotely a Christian or even a theist. Which made his comments in this speech particularly intriguing. He said:

Here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. …

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.

Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out….

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on these default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self…The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.

Or in other words: “They promise freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity—for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him.” or in DFW’s language – a man is a slave to whatever he chooses to worship.

Because freedom is not the absence of constraints, it is choosing the ones that were designed for our best.

Appetites are brutal masters – the more you give them the more they want.

Academic recognition and professional success are merciless masters. If you live for academic success and fail, academic success is not going to forgive you. It doesn’t love you. Your dreams will not let you off the hook if you fail them.

There is only one master who cares more about you than you care about yourself. There is only one master whose constraints are, without exception, for your good. Jesus.

You see, freedom is not autonomy. Freedom is not living without constraint. It is not living for your impulses and appetites. Freedom is choosing the right constraints. Freedom is choosing the right master. Freedom is selecting the master and constraints that enhance our humanity, that optimize human flourishing. But the world (particularly the University) is full of stuff that would entangle our hearts and diminish us.

And this is the central message of Christianity. The great paradox of the Christian worldview, is that freedom comes from giving yourself to Jesus. But the reason this ends up making sense, that freedom comes from belonging, is that he does my life better than I would. There is a poem in the Hebrew Scriptures that says ‘his boundaries are set for me in pleasant places.’ He is the only master who cares about you more than you do and his constraints are not arbitrary and capricious rules for your torture but wisdom for your best. Our hope from the start has been that CL would be a place for two kinds of people: those who have made a commitment to belong to Jesus and are trying to figure out what that looks like and those who are spiritually curious and wonder who this Jesus guy is. But really we are all the same. We all need to do the same thing to experience more freedom in our lives. We all need to give ourselves to Jesus.

And so, the heart of the Christian teaching on freedom is that Freedom counter-intuitively emerges from choosing the right master, Jesus. But over the next three weeks we want to look a little bit more carefully at a few specific resources that the Christian world view offers to help you find freedom at college.

In two weeks, Laeya will talk about how a Christian theology actually leads to a life of balance…how belonging to Jesus helps you to achieve a peaceful equilibrium between competing claims on your time.

Next week, Dan will talk about the life of the Spirit, and how the Christian scriptres teach that there are supernatural resources available to help you experience the kind of freedom that you were designed for.

But, finally, with the seven minutes or so I have left, I would like to investigate the primary resource Jesus gives us to maintain a life of freedom, which is not particularly supernatural seeming but is extremely effective. Jesus’ primary resource for helping us maintain a life of freedom is community. The second paradox of Christian freedom is that it is not only found in giving yourself to Jesus, but also in giving yourself to a community of his people. Let me read you one more scripture.

Hebrews 12:1 Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”

I just want to observe two quick things about verse. The insight the Scriptures bring to an understanding of personal freedom is that our hearts entangle easily.[7] Our heart desperately wants to love something intensely. If it is not set on the one it was meant to love it can end up fixated on disappointing half loves. This verse warns that it is easy to get entangled.
But the second really interesting thing about this scripture is that even though it is using a race metaphore, which is an individual event, it uses corperate language.

“Let US throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let US run with perseverance the race marked out for US.”

One of the surprising things about Jesus following is that it is irreducibly corporate. Many people are willing to belong to Jesus, because, well, he is pretty great, but they draw the line at belonging to a people, because, well, we are often annoying, hypocritical and socially awkward. But notice the corporate language in this passage. If we want the freedom Jesus offers…if we want to avoid the things that can entangle our hearts[8] we can’t do it as an ‘I’. We have to do it as an ‘us’. Christianity is irreducibly corporate. Experiencing true freedom, selecting the right constraints, and avoiding entanglement by vesting our affections in things that disappoint, these things are most effectively accomplished in community.

I want to wrap up with a brief illustration. This is Hank Green a video blogger who alternates posts with his brother John. In this post, he talks about a new project that another video blogger by the name of “Dan Brown” has taken on:

I am convinced that Dan and Hank have tapped into something totally fundamental here. Jesus meant us to help each other to figure out what to do with this. And that is why we think that the most important thing you could do at the beginning of the year is to join a small group. It will cost you some autonomy. You will give a weekly night to six to ten other people, which, I get it, is an enormous cost. But it is worth it. community is fundamentally empowering. By helping you avoid entanglement and helping you ‘figure out what to do with this’ community generates opportunities for you to flourish, which isn’t a bad working definition of freedom.

Don’t confuse Jesus for a Jedi master. The way of the Jedi is non-attachment…but look what happened to them. The way of Jesus is community. In Christianity, community is the conduit of freedom. It is helping each other avoid entanglements and to choose healthy constraints. It is helping each other to figure out what to do with this.

In summary, freedom from a Christian world view is not the absence of constraint. It is selecting the constraints that were designed for human flourishing and the master that cares more about us than we do. And the first great resource that Christianity offers to get there is a community of Jesus followers, involved in each others lives in non-trivial ways. So we really hope that you this community or one of the other excellent Christian ministries on campus. We hope you will stick around, join a small group and:

“Help Me…Figure Out…What to Do With This.”

__________________________
[1] Really, the only kind of George Michael song there is.
[2] “because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” Being and Nothingness
[3] Just an aside, it is kind of creepy that this thing kept such close tabs on our sex lives.
[4] And we knew this, because many of us did, in fact, graduate from that school as virgins, including myself, my wife and many of our friends.
[5] This should be cut, but I really don’t want to.
[6] Phthora - (fthor-ah') - From phtheiro; decay, i.e. Ruin (spontaneous or inflicted, literally or figuratively) -- corruption, destroy, perish.
[7] Jesus, as is his way, articulates the idea in the form of a story. He says that some people’s spiritual journeys are like a seed that grows quickly early on but is eventually entangled by weeds. When he was asked what the story meant he said that some make take an initial interest in him but “as they go on their way they are choked by life's worries, riches and pleasures, and they do not mature.” They become entangled by their fears and appetites and loose the opportunity for a life of freedom
[8] I want to do something with this like The human heart can not bear a vacuum. It is not satisfied unless it has something to love intensely. – maybe after the sower passage

Acts for the Rest of Us: Underrated Accounts of ‘Ordinary’ Christianity

2010-04-12T22:32:00.000-07:00

Note: This was an odd message from a construction point of veiw. It actually grew out of a blog post that I wrote a couple months ago. The post is more technical than the message, but tries to convey the same content. It can be found here.

Mp3 here

A few weeks ago, I posted a question on my facebook. I’m going to repeat it here, and I promise you this is going somewhere.

“Why is it that movies usually include kissing and seldom include pooping?”

You can always count on me for important philosophical questions. This led to a lively exchange. Some of my some of my friend’s felt is was important to remind me of famous pooping scenes from various films. But my favorite response was by a man of many talents. Ray, the guy who probably gave you your nametag, wrote:

Apparently, he is not just an accomplished grant writer and a Mexican wrestler…he’s also a poet.
It can be summarized in one word. “Selection.”[1] Story telling is by its very nature selective. Take, for example, the recent film 500 days of Summer. It was 95 minutes long. That means that they left out 719,905 minutes of the story. If you have to make those kinds of cuts, sleeping and bathroom time are the first to go. But you can bet they include the first kiss, because it is important to the story.[2]

On the whole, this is good and helpful. No one is clamoring for more bathroom scenes in films. But, you have to understand the nature of selective story telling when you read the narrative books of the Bible, like, say, the book of Acts. Think about it, the book of Acts took 30 years to happen and only takes a couple hours to read. This is, on the whole, a good thing because, let’s face it, the Bible is a relatively longish book with a fair number of nap inducing sections as it is. But the selective nature of Biblical narrative can also be problematic. We can be left with the idea that normative Christianity is a string of miracles, cataclysmic break throughs and harrowing adventures.

When we read the Book of Acts we remember the miracle at the pool, Peter’s great sermon, Paul’s conversion…the dramatic moments. And then, when we compare them to our relatively normal lives, we can feel diminished…disappointed in ourselves and underwhelmed by the acts of God in our generation. There appears to be an empirical disconnect between the dynamic works of God on the pages of Scripture and the repetitive monotony of our daily lives.

In two weeks we are going to start our ‘big questions’ series and I am going to lead off with the #1 vote getter by any metric. The Problem of Uninspiring Christianity. But one of the issues with looking out over contemporary Christianity and finding it uninspiring in comparison to the Biblical story, is that you are comparing real life, which is unfolding in real time with all of the proverbial ‘bathroom scenes’ to a highlight reel. Do you wish that your life was more exciting, that you heard from God more, that you saw more miracles like the people in the Bible…well, you know what, so did they.

What Biblical narrative necessarily omits is the tedium. So you have to read the ‘white space.’ You have to read it with your eyes open for the uneventful MONTHS that Paul spent on the road between Antioch and Ephesus. You have to feel the lonely hours of chasing elusive sleep on some cold bumpy surface as Paul and his companions shivered the night away on a creaky ship navigating uneven seas.[3]

Between Paul’s conversion in Acts 9 and the account of Barnabas seeking him out to help with the church in Antioch 18 unremarkable years pass where Paul presumably stays put and does nothing worth recording. But this is hardly surprising. Remember Moses spent 40 years tending’s sheep before God used him for a couple years to lead his people. Shoot, the God of the universe spent 30 years working as a carpenter before a 3 year ministry.

In a sense, the last three weeks (my talk on Acts 17 at the end of last quarter, Adam on Acts 19 two weeks ago and me again on Acts 20 last week) have been, in a sense, a mini-series within our larger series on the book of Acts. In each of these passages, Adam and I mined the methods and message of Paul to find some principles that could inform our attempts to serve Jesus in this place. But the truth is, for most of us Paul is hard to indentify with precisely for the same reason that he makes such a good story. His passion and discipleship are normative and worth modeling…but his life and calling were peculiar to him.

Even in Acts, we see that the strength of the church was not in a few all stars, but in many quiet individuals making unnoticed contributions, undocumented sacrifices and understated adventures. Paul’s life makes good story precisely because it is NOT normative Christianity. Some of you may be called to those kinds of crazy adventures, but most of you will be called to contentment in the midst of raising children for Jesus, being faithful in a marriage a job and a ministry, stinging together several dozen quiet but strong years of love and service.[4] Instead of enduring ship wrecks and snake attacks you will be called to open your home to your co-workers and mentor the youth in your community.

But the truth is, that careful reading of Biblical narrative, yields compelling stories of people living ‘normal’ Christian lives well. So I just want to spend the rest of my time to relate two stories that Luke tells about guys not named Peter or Paul…stories that mostly reside in the white space of your Bible. I like to call them two stories with high coolness to ink ratio.[5] Two underrated stories in Acts, compelling in their ordinariness. Acts for the rest of us, if you will.

Philip’s Second Adventure: The Daddy Years

But Philip is the most interesting human character in the book of Acts, as far as I am concerned. But his story hardly seems like it should count as one of the underrated stories of Acts. We have already had a whole talk about him. In the fall Kevin told us Philip’s story from Acts 8.

He was a multi-cultural pioneer.[6] He was young, adventurous, brash, spiritually sensitive, and slightly impetuous. Acts 8 describes him performing miracles, preaching and healing the sick in Samaria without regard to the bitter racial hatred that should have kept him far away from ‘those people.’ He baptized an African man chapters before the rest of the church realized that Christianity was more than just a Jewish sect. He lived exciting months as a gospel pioneer from city to city; going on adventures and living daily the power of God. But the last we hear from him in Acts 8:40 is in Caesarea.

Acts 8:40 “Philip, however, appeared at Azotus and traveled about, preaching the gospel in all the towns until he reached Caesarea.”

After that he simply disappears from the story. Most people extrapolate from his early adventures and figure he spent his life doing crazy stuff for God in lands so distant that the stories simply didn’t make it back to Luke, due to their shear remoteness.

But that is not what happened.

We meet up with Philip one more time 20 years after his adventures. Paul stops in Ceserea between Miletus (where he met the Ephesian Elders in last week’s passage) on his way to Jerusalem (Acts 21[7]). Verse 8:

Acts 21:8 "Leaving the next day, we reached Caesarea and stayed at the house of Philip the evangelist, one of the Seven.[8] 9He had four unmarried daughters who prophesied. "

Paul finds Philip just where we left him, in Ceserea. The English text says he had 4 unmarried daughters but the Greek word is woman of marriageable age, meaning that for the youngest to be of marriageable age, the oldest would have to have been 18 or 19…in other words, his oldest child was born shortly after his arrival in Caesarea 20 years ago in Acts 8. FF Bruce essentially says, ‘Do the math…Philip met a girl in Caesarea and it put an end to his missional gallivanting.’

The shockingly normal story told in the white space of the text is that the fiery young Philip almost certainly met a girl when he reached Caesarea and live 20 faithful years as a generous, committed, active servant to his local church and community…and as an exceptional father. Some of the earliest church historians describe these daughters as key figures in the second generation of Christianity. According to these accounts, one of them went on to become a physician tending almost exclusively to the poor and destitute. God had a second adventure for Philip…as a daddy.

Philip spent 18 years elapsed between his brief adventure (in Acts 6) and hosting Paul (in Acts 21) changing diapers, whipping spit up, getting out of bed every morning and going to work, dealing with the drama of drama teenage girls. Yet Luke still esteems him ‘Philip the evangelist’. These are good strong years for Philip…the kind of years that the kingdom of God is built out of…the kind of years he should be proud of…the kind of years we could be proud of…but not the kind of years that ‘make the Bible.’ And, this is what is so widely misunderstood. The fact that we don’t hear the story of these years is evidence that they are more, not less, normative

Some of you may go to Uganda or Italy this summer or any of a range of wild adventures. Like Barnabas or Paul, you might decide that long term cross cultural ministry is for you. You really should go totally open to the idea. God might call you to a different sort of adventure, of having a family and raising kids to serve God in our broken culture.[9]

There is a subtle warning of the story of Philip is that the desire for adventure and significance can be an idol.[10] It can be unspiritual pride. If you are doing the Jesus thing for the adventure or for feelings of significance and not for Jesus himself, something is wrong. God could ask you to a sacrificial itinerant life like Paul or, like Philip, after some early adventures he could ask you to the sacrifice of parenthood and contentment serving Jesus in a community and a local church.

John Mark’s Second Chance: Failure is Never Final

The second story, shocking in its normalness, is the story of John Mark. In Acts 13 Mark accompanies his cousin Barnabas and Paul on their first trip. But, after they have a mildly terrifying encounter with a sorcerer at their first stop, Mark decides it is not for him. He goes home instead of continuing on with the team. Luke scarcely mentions it:

Acts13:13 “From Paphos, Paul and his companions sailed to Perga in Pamphylia, where John left them to return to Jerusalem.”

But this decision led to one of the ugliest stories in the book of Acts…starting in chapter 15 verse 36 (printed on your handout):

Acts 15:36“Some time later Paul said to Barnabas, "Let us go back and visit the brothers in all the towns where we preached the word of the Lord and see how they are doing." 37Barnabas wanted to take John, also called Mark, with them, 38but Paul did not think it wise to take him, because he had deserted them in Pamphylia and had not continued with them in the work. 39They had such a sharp disagreement that they parted company. Barnabas took Mark and sailed for Cyprus, 40but Paul chose Silas and left, commended by the brothers to the grace of the Lord.”

I’ve said this before in our series on Acts, but this is a really messy story. If Luke was simply interested in painting the best possible picture of the early days of Christianity he would have conveniently omitted stuff like this.[11]

But what we see again and again in the Scriptures that it is the grit and mess of life that is often the most fertile ground for redemption.[12]

The point of the story of John Mark is that, if you belong to Jesus, failure is never final.[13]

Years later, Paul writes a letter to the Church in Colosse and in the boring list of names at the end of that letter, we find this gem.

Colossians 4:10 “My fellow prisoner Aristarchus sends you his greetings, as does Mark, the cousin of Barnabas.[14] (just to make sure they are clear which Mark he is talking about) (You have received instructions about him; if he comes to you, welcome him.)[15]”

Colossians finds Mark, once again, in Paul’s small inner circle of trusted traveling companions. Paul tells the church, forget what you might have heard about me and Mark, we’re good. Mark gets another chance because, in Jesus, failure is never final.

Think for a minute about the implications of this principle: failure is never final. Think of how freeing that story is. The application is, try stuff, take risks…because even if it flops, in Jesus, failure is never final. If we were to take this seriously, the church could be the most innovative place on earth, full of daring new ideas, because it is the only place where failure is never final.

Rock Band and Relay for Life Illustration

At some point in your life, you will be John Mark. You will try something and it will go catastrophically poorly. Count on it. The question you need to ask yourself, is are you going to let it take you out, or will you recover, and try something else.

There is another side to this idea, however. At some other point in your life, someone you care about will let you down. They will disappoint you. Think about Paul in this story. It is easy to see how he could have harbored bitterness towards Mark. Mark not only disappointed him but was the catalyst of an ugly confrontation and a deep rift in his closest friendship. But if failure is never final in Jesus, the people who let you down, they get another chance.

So, what I wanted to do with my last talk in this great book was to try to demonstrate that it is not just a story about a few special people like Peter and Paul. It is a story about a lot of normal people like you and me. Don’t be intimidated by the Biblical highlight reel. Live for Jesus today. Live for Jesus tomorrow. And when you look back on your complete story, you will have a pretty remarkable highlight reel of your own…but more importantly, you will have many faithful days lived for him.

_________
[1] I planned to show a great clip here from Sports Night (season 1 episode 2) where Jeremy is in charge of making a 30 second highlight clip of a baseball clip and is unable to get it under 8 minutes.
[2] There is one exception to this…24…but even in 24 there are several stories going on at once and Keifer Southerland can somehow mysteriously make it across LA at rush hour in 15 minutes.
[3] I mean, it is highly likely, that Paul got sea sick and booted over the side of a boat often…but it doesn’t make the Bible.
[4]Here is what I find annoying about Acts. Believe it or not, I don’t particularly like Paul. I find him abrasive and a little annoying. I don’t think he and I would be close friends. As a side note, I think this augments rather than diminishes his qualifications to be used by the Holy Spirit to author Scripture. One of the outstanding things about the scriptures is that God used personalities as diverse as Paul and John to write it. Far from undermining its message, it shows that the Christian story is not only for a single temperament and that ministry is not pigeon holed by personality type. I don’t have to enjoy Paul to esteem him.
[5] Sometimes the best stories only get a few words, and are only yielded to the careful reader.
[6] He was the first to realize that the gospel was for the Gentiles. He baptized an African guy chapters before the rest of the church felt comfortable extending the faith outside of the Jewish community.
[7] on his way back from his meeting with the Ephesian Elders
[8] Luke adds this to assure us that this is, in fact, the same Philip from Acts 8.
[9] But you will notice, Philip jumps at the opportunity to host Paul, he never looses interest in the global mission of the gospel.
[10] If this idea is new or intriguing to you, I highly recommend my brother, Nic’s, excellent talk “Anatomy of a Sellout” – mp3 here
[11] I looked in vein for art illustrating this passage. Once again, it seems only the skeptics like this passage.
[12] Fruit grows best out of s***. Failure is the metaphorical Nitrogen of the Kingdom.
[13] We usually read this passage as Mark’s failure but as I already implied in an earlier note, I often wonder if it wasn’t extremely difficult to serve with Paul. For all his dedication and intellect and reckless passion, he may have overwhelmed more sensitive personalities. I wonder if the Collosians text isn’t a mea culpa.
[14] Notice, again, the care taken to make sure we know he is talking about the same Mark.
[15] Ancient traditions credit the young man with authorship of the second gospel.

Doing College Without Regrets: Paul’s Reunion with the Ephesians Elders (Acts 20)

2010-04-04T15:20:00.000-07:00

Acts 20:13-38

MP3 here

In the opening scenes of Gladiator, Maximus Decimus Meridius of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions is about to lead the Roman cavalry in a risky and courageous charge in the epic opening battle. He clasps forearms with his Quintus his first Lieutenant, looks him in the eye and says three words: ‘Strength and Honor’ – Quintus replies ‘strength and honor’ and the phrase ripples through the ranks of those closest to him: ‘strength and honor’ ‘strength and honor’ ‘strength and honor’. Now fast forward 90 minutes into the film, Maximus is a slave and a gladiator. He is trapped in a compound with surrounded by the Roman guard who want to kill him. There is a brief pause in the action while the soldiers break down the gate. Riddley Scott uses this pause in the action for a brief, quiet scene where Maximus looks around at a small unsavory group of gladiators who until now had fought out of motivations of self preservation. He says to them:

“I only need moments, so do not be careless with your lives.”
“If you don't want any part of this, go back to your cells.”

They do not flinch. They have obviously come to love him. To a man, they look back at him and reply in unison “Strength and honor.” This scene kills me. At this point in the film, the room invariably gets mysteriously dusty. But this is actually a conventional narrative device in action movies. I call it ‘the buddy scene.’ Near the end of many action films, there is a brief break in the action, where the characters who are about to face their death in the final scenes, have an opportunity to talk and communicate how much they have come to care for each other. There are great examples of this in Glory, Serenity[1] and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid[2] to name just a few.

Maybe the most famous ‘buddy scene’ of all pre-dates these other examples by about four centuries. In Shakespeare’s Henry the fifth, just before the young king is about to lead his army into a battle where he is outnumbered 5 to 1[3] he gathers his troops and says:

This story shall the good man teach his son…
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother

So, why do I go into all this? Because I am convinced that this is precisely what Luke, the author of Acts, is doing in chapter 20. The later chapters of Acts read like an action film. Extended speeches that characterize the early chapters are replaced with riots and shipwrecks and snake attacks in the later chapters. And the opening verses of today’s passage fit the frantic pace of an action film. In fact, v 16, actually sets the pace by explicitly stating ‘they were in a hurry.’ Then they hit 5 islands in 2 verses. If this was a film, verses 14 and 15 would be a sea faring montage.

And this is how the final chapters of Acts go, Luke takes us from city to city, from danger to danger, from jail cell to ship wreck. It is a high pace action film…with one major exception…the rest of Acts 20. Acts 20 is Luke’s ‘buddy scene.’ Before they face their respective deaths in the final chapters of Acts, Paul gathers the Christian leaders he served with during his years in Ephesus one last time and it becomes clear how much they all mean to each other. NT Wright describes Acts 20 like this:

“Here we see Paul in a different mode, vulnerable, meditative…It is as though we have finally found him, no longer running around in a blur, but sitting for long enough to have his portrait painted.”

You almost expect the passage to end with the Ephesians elders saying ‘strength and honor.’

Acts 20 is a totally different kind of story.[4] This is the only speech in Acts addressed to Christians.[5] In it Paul reflects on the three years he spent in Ephesus with the people he came to love there.[6] And it becomes clear has no regrets. It is not a coincidence that the first time this passage really came alive to me was in my last semester of undergrad. I remember the day. I had found a quiet corner of the music building one morning and was just casually reading through Acts. I had read this story several times before. But, but this particular time, with my college years mostly in the rear view mirror, as I looked back over my own three years in that place, I resonated with Paul’s reflective, tone. A lot of people get to that point, where they look back on their college years, and say: “They were supposed to be the best years of my life…and they weren’t that great.”[7]

But as Paul looked back at his three years in Ephesus, Paul gives us at least three keys to doing college without regrets.[8]

1. He Finished the Race

Well, when Paul looked back on his three years in Ephesus, he used an athletic metaphor to describe that season of his life. He described it as a race. He said:

24However, I consider my life worth nothing to me, if only I may finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me.”

He ran the race. Having been a runner, I find this metaphor an extremely vivid way to describe the college experience and I just want to highlight two things about it. The first thing you need to know about doing these years without regret, is that you need to do them with and for Jesus. You need to run the right race.

Almost ten years ago I was had a business trip to Denver and after the meeting I took a couple days off, rented a car, and climbed a couple mountains.[9] The first day I noticed that there was a major race through the town that I was staying near. The second day I climbed Mount Massive.

When I got to the summit I hung out there a while and several other climbers eventually came along including an attractive young woman who had climbed the mountain alone. There was also a dude that had climbed the mountain alone and I watched as made his way over and started to hit on her. I felt bad for the guy because it was pretty clear that she had just climbed the second tallest mountain in Colorado and wasn’t really interested in being chatted up.[10] But pretty soon it came out that they had both been in the race the previous day. Then they discovered that they had both placed second in their class. And she was totally beginning to warm up to him. I have to say that at that point, I thought his chances of getting a phone number were in the range of , say, 40%...until…he admitted that the reason he came in second was that he had missed a turn and cut several miles off the race...and even with that, someone beat him. Let’s just say, he went down that mountain alone. I think about this guy from time to time, though. He worked really hard. I’m sure he had a great race. But it was the wrong race. And he was left with regret…and no shot at the cute hiker.

The key to doing college without regret is to run the right race. You could work really hard in college. You could run a great race for your parents or for your future or for some cause or for some girl or some guy…but it’s the wrong race. Paul says that the key to looking back on his three years in Ephesus without regret was that he ran the race that Jesus Christ had given him. He ran with and for Jesus.

Paul could look back on his three years in Ephesus without regret because though, as we shall see, he had a lot going on while he was there, including a full time job, his time there belonged to Jesus from beginning to end.

Some of you may be running the wrong race. Maybe you are part way through your college years and are just realizing, ‘there has to be more than this.’ There is. You can finish the race for Jesus. Doing college with and for Jesus is the road to looking back at these years without regret and the great thing about Christianity in general and this community in particular, is that it is never too late to start running the right race.

A few months ago, Zach put this clip up on his facebook.

I love that clip, but my favorite part is the contrast between how the guard and the tackle respond to the broken play. The tackle realized that the game is going on without him and just lets it go. He is refused to join the play late. But the guard, once he realizes that the game is going on without him, he jumps out of his stance and makes a play. And a disaster turns into a respectable gain.

But some of you have been faithful in your first few years, and are thinking about coasting into the home stretch. To you, I think Paul would say, you want to leave this place without regret, leave it on the field…finish the race….complete the task.[11]

I have a close friend in who leads a college ministry comparable to CL at the University of Buffalo. We spent some time together this summer and he told me, ‘you can’t build a college ministry on seniors. They are done. They’re already looking to the next thing.’ I want to challenge you[12] to buck this trend. When I look at the kind of Senior Years that (just for example) Casie Wilson and Michelle Balaz are turning it, I think it is clear that you can build a college ministry on seniors running hard to the end. They are leaving it on the field.[13] (Of course, I also get the feeling they enjoyed their college experience). So Paul says the key to doing his three years in Ephesus without regret was to run the right race, the one Jesus set before him, and to complete it.

The second thing we notice about Paul’s look regret free retrospective is that:

2. He Worked Hard[14]

34You yourselves know that these hands of mine have supplied my own needs and the needs of my companions. 35In everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said: 'It is more blessed to give than to receive.' "

Paul’s time in Ephesus had something in common with your time at Davis. Christian community and ministry happened on his own time despite substantial competing commitments of a ‘secular vocation’. He was what we call ‘bivocational’ just like many of you who are trying to balance Christian community and ministry and enormous academic and even work commitments. The flat reality is that if you are going to make time for God at college, you are going to have to work hard.

But here is the interesting thing about Paul’s approach: did not separate his life into ‘secular’ and ‘spiritual’. Both his ministry and his work were done for God. Whatever he was doing, he was throwing himself into it. But he also worked hard so that he would have something left over to give.

Don’t write your studies off as unspiritual. Whatever you do, do it fully. Work hard at your studies because they are a great privilege and the vocation that God has called you to in this season. But if you are going to make time for Jesus, his people and his purposes in college, you are also going to have to work hard at your studies to produce the margins your life needs to ‘run the race’.

But here is the thing about Kingdom hard work done with and for Jesus. There is a lightness to it. There is a sweetness to it. There is a joy in it. And, Paul teaches elsewhere, that it is because in a non-trivial way, God himself gets involved with it.[15] Check out these two other places where Paul talks about hard work:

1Cor 15:10 “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.”

Col 1:29 “To this end I labor, struggling with all his energy, which so powerfully works in me.”

But here is the catch. You only get to claim his power if you are after his purposes.

Finally, the third thing we see about why Paul looked back at his three years in Ephesus without regret is:

3. He Developed Intimate Jesus Focused Friendships[16]

36When he had said this, he knelt down with all of them and prayed. 37They all wept as they embraced him and kissed him. 38What grieved them most was his statement that they would never see his face again. Then they accompanied him to the ship.

This is almost a romantic passage. This passage practically drips with tenderness and intimacy. These guys have so much genuine affection for each other that they are sneaking around despite the non-trivial risk of death, just to see each other one last time.[17] The Ephesians had to make at least a day’s journey to Militus and Paul must have paused at least three days for this meeting…each day increasing the probability that he would hit rough winter seas on the way to Jerusalem. You cannot read this passage carefully without coming away with the realization that it documents a serious ‘bromance.’ And this made me think of a song:[18]

From: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL4L4Uv5rf0

Slide: “Can’t one heterosexual guy tell another heterosexual guy he thinks his booty’s fly”[19]

Platonic guy love is considered weird in our culture…but it thrives in the church. And particularly, here in this community. And there is a reason that bromance (as well as substantial, intimate relationships between women that is more socially expected and, thus, does not have a cool moniker) is a mark of Christian community.

It is because the strongest most intimate friendships are about something bigger than the friendship.[20] The great irony of friendship is the same irony we found when we talked about marriage. Relational intimacy is undermined by the quest for relational intimacy in and of itself. It emerges from a shared external passion.

Friendships based on the emotional goods and services that the friend provides are fragile because as soon as they don’t offer that service, the friendship is disposable. My favorite line in mewithoutYou’s new album gets at this idea: “when they say my love is real, they mean I like the way you make me feel”

But friendships based on a shared passion or mission tend to sustain. The emotional benefits are a substantial side effect of a relationship that is based on bigger things but they are not the thing in itself. The paradox is that because the friendship is focused on something other than the friendship, it is more durable and more fulfilling. [21]

CS Lewis tackles this idea in his book: The Four Loves “That is why those pathetic people who simply “want friends” can never make any. The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends…[22]There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers.”

Friendships that are based on something bigger than how the person makes you feel are more substantive, more intimate and last longer. Friendships base on a joint passion for Jesus have the added benefit of outlasting death itself. If you throw yourself into a Jesus centered life during your college years and are intentional about doing it in community, there are people in this room who will be at your wedding…because you cannot be involved in something as real and as transformative as serving Jesus without developing sustained and genuine affection for those who are doing it with you.

And here is one of the truly original things about friends in the Church. It often looks weird because of its intimacy but also because of the pairings. You find some of the most unlikely friendships in the church because the intimacy does not emerge from sameness of personality but sameness of passion.

Let me wrap up with a story. Near the end of my college experience I was in the science building studying for my last final. The lab started out full of well meaning students but as it wore on, one by one, they opted for either their beds or the bars (and more for the latter than the former). Finally, it was just me and a geologist named Lauren. Then, three guys from the campus ministry I served with showed up. These are guys who, for three years, I had prayed with, worked with, grown with and faced disappointment with. They convinced me to take an hour study break to toilet paper our college pastor’s van. And so I did. I made it back to the lab around 2 just as Lauren was leaving, so I offered to walk her home before I got back to my studying. On the way to her place she asked where I disappeared to suggesting ‘I don’t exactly have you pegged as a bar guy.’ I told her what had happened and wrapped up the little story by saying, without really thinking about it, ‘It was totally worth it. I really love those guys.’ She was quiet. Then she looked at me and said, “You know Stan, you’re really lucky. I am about to leave this place, and can’t say that about anyone I have met here.”

You want to do college without regrets? Do you want to look back on your three to five years here and feel that they were well spent? Get connected to a Christian community if you aren’t. If you are…leave it on the field. Run the race to the end. Work hard, in your studies and in ministry. And throw yourself into friendships that are about something bigger than the friendship.

_________________
[1] I think this is the clearest example of what I am trying to get at. But I am sensitive to my own Joss bias, so I did not feature it.
[2] Amanda and I had a long discussion if this actually ‘counts’ as a buddy scene by my definition because it is, in some senses, a comedic deconstruction of the genere (despite being the oldest example). But I think that in the passive aggressive banter between Cassidy and Sundance (culminating in the epic line ‘for a minute there, I thought we were in trouble’) is the evidence of deep, mutual affection.
[3] Note: I was scanning the web for Henry V images and I found this film version rated NC 17 for “violence, action, bad hygiene”.
[4] And the detail. You get the sense that you are actually there. The passage starts with ‘we’ suggesting that Luke joined the party at this point and that this is an eye witness account.
[5] Several commentators agree that this is why the content of this speech, more than any other, correlates with the content of Paul’s letters – which essentially serve the same purpose but by a remote communication rather than a meeting.
[6] The longest he spent in any one place.
[7] I think I owe this observation to Cory Randolph
[8] Why is March Madness so popular? Why do people LOVE college football, even prefer it to the NFL, when the skill level of the athletes does not really compare. It is because it college sports are devastatingly final. Labron, Wade, Linscome, Manning, Brady, they will all have another shot at it next year. But college athletes, many of them will never again experience that sort of perceived significance. You can bet that they don’t wish those years away. Their stories are public. We get to experience their joy and heartbreak with them. We get to watch their regret. But their stories parallel the short window of potential significance and potential regret that typify the college years.
[9] Which, after sex and preaching, is my favorite thing to do…hold on, did I say that out loud. Actually, I didn’t – I cut it. This is just one reason why I write a manuscript and try to minimize extemporaneous banter.
[10] My wife wasn’t even there and I could hear her say, ‘get a clue dude, bad time’ as she has said about so many ill fated attempts to hit on her at the gym.
[11] Way too many sports illustrations in this point, but I had this one here:
I used to run track in HS to keep in shape for soccer. I ran the two mile. We had a distance coach that would run with us sometimes. I remember times that I felt like my body was about to shut down, he would tell me, “just run to the next telephone pole.” Then at that pole he would say ‘How about one more?’ and that went on until I had run through the pain and found the pace again.
“Run to the next pole.”
[12] I want to call out the Junior class here. We all know that you are one of the epic CL classes of all time. There is a tendency to fade out in campus ministry.
[13] For my fifth sports illustration in this point (interesting, since I don’t think I’ve used even one before in 1.66 years preaching at college life) I wanted to tell the story of the final soccer game of my High School year…but I will refrain.
[14] This point got cut in the final talk
[15] Rejected sports illustration #4 – this reminds me of the Olympics a few years ago when the Dad came out of the stage to help his injured son cross the finish line.
[16] This point may appear as indebted, as usual, to Keller. The truth is, in this case, the similarity is convergent (independently developed and later recognized as similar) rather than genitive (due to me stealing). I would be lying if I said that this did not thrill me.
[17] I didn’t have a good place to put this, but really liked it: “to need and to want deep friendships is not a sign of spiritual immaturity but a sign of maturity. It is not a sign of weakness but of health. If you are lonely, you are not dysfunctional, you are fine. You are lonely because you are not a tree.” -Keller
[19] Flight of the Conchord’s reference:
[20] It is only weird if the foundation of the intimacy is soley the emotional connection.
[21] Amanda and I have talked about this and realized that many of the friendships that we maintain from college have moved beyond the point where the friendship is based on the performance of the friend. They have become grace based. We are unconditionally for them.
[22] ellipsis: “Where the truthful answer to the question Do you see the same truth? would be “I see nothing and I don’t care about the truth; I only want a Friend,” no Friendship can arise—though Affection of course may.”
Here are two more Four Loves quotes: "It is therefore easy to see why Authority frowns on Friendship. Every real Friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion. It may be a rebellion of serious thinkers against accepted clap-trap or of faddists against accepted good sense; of real artists against popular ugliness or of charlatans against civilized taste; of good men against the badness of society or of bad men against its goodness. Whichever it is, it will be unwelcome to Top People.”
“The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others.”

Paul Visits Davis: The Startling Familiarity of Acts 17

2010-02-27T16:09:00.000-08:00

Acts 17: 16-34

MP3 is here (right click and Save As)

How would you describe an average day on this campus? Or, what about this question: Can you think of a verse in the Scriptures that describes an average day on a major university campus? Let me propose one v 21 of Acts 17 from the story of Paul in Athens.

‘they spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.’

When we think of Athens, we probably think of a world class city like Rome or Alexandria or Antioch…but that is not really the case. John Stott describes Athens as ‘a small town despite its intellectual acclaim.’ Is this sounding familiar.

In Acts 17 Paul finds himself in a small town that was one of the world’s great intellectual centers and found himself surrounded by Stoics and Epicureans. Now this is a pretty substantial simplification, but these worldviews roughly correlate to today’s humanists and hedonists…both would consider themselves religious skeptics but the Stoics rooted the meaning of life in dispassionate duty Epicureans believe that happiness or pleasure were the chief end of human existence.

So what happens when we ask a number of UCD students:
What is the most important pursuit in life?

(I'd like to thank Matt Pye, Alyssa Barlow and Kiho Song for putting that video together. And I'd like to thank the students wh answered for their courage and candor in answering such a deeply personal question.)

Again, is any of this sounding familiar?

Almost two years ago, now, when Dan first pitched me the idea of teaching Acts…the first thing I said was ‘I want Acts 17.’ Here’s why. The thing I love about Acts 17 is that it paints a picture of ministry in a small town that is one of the premier intellectual and academic settings in the world. A small town with intellectual acclaim where people pass their days sharing and listening to ideas… …where there is a mix of prevalent but vague spiritual devotion as well as religious skepticism and where most people tend to order their lives either around the idea of social responsibility or the pursuit of happiness[0.5]…In other words welcome to Davis. There may not be a passage in the Bible that is more directly applicable to what it means to be a Christian on the UC Davis campus. So I have titled this talk:

We are going to make three observations about how Paul approaches ministry to this most UCD like of Roman Cities that can inform our attempts to engage our campus with the gospel. We are going to see what we can learn from:

I. Paul’s Character[1]
II. Paul’s Method
III. Paul’s Message

I. Paul’s Character

There are a couple things in the first verse that point to aspects of Paul’s character that prepare him to engage the academic center. The first thing I want you to notice is that he looked for God’s purposes in inconvenience. Look at the first four words. In verse 16:

‘While Paul was waiting.’ The first thing you have to understand about Paul’s stop in Athens is that it was decidedly inconvenient. Acts 17 is an unplanned, accidental story. He was headed to Macedonia. You could say that getting there was his dream, his life’s purpose. He was convinced that going to Macedonia was what God wanted him to do. But things didn’t go well. At this point in the story he has just run for his life from a nearby town[2] and was essentially in hiding. Getting discouraged at this point and just checking out for a while would be totally understandable.

But the first thing we notice about Paul’s character in this passage that equipped him to effectively engage the academy is that he looked for God’s purposes in inconvenience.[3] He recognized that a dramatic and inconvenient change in his plans might, actually, be a kingdom opportunity.

The second thing I want to notice about Paul’s character comes from the other half of the first verse. Look with me at v 16: “While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols.” Notice, that he cared enough about God’s glory and people that the worship confusion and misplaced loyalties of the people he observed in this great intellectual center affected him deeply and personally. He was not offended or angry. He was heartbroken. He cared enough to be moved by the spiritual confusion in this town.

And so, here is the questioned posed to us in our cultural moment by the first few words of this passage. Do you see college an inconvenient diversion on the way to your real life…or do you see it one of the greatest opportunities of your Christian journey? People’s worldviews tend to harden in their mid-twenties. You will never again, in your life, be surrounded by so many people so open to ideas. You will never again have so many culturally acceptable outlets for the exchange of ideas. For a kingdom possessed person, every week you spend in this place is gold. Don’t wish it away. Don’t coast to the finish. Paul’s character…his willingness to look for God’s purposes in inconvenience and his general concern for God’s glory and people made him an effective kingdom agent in the academy.

II. Paul’s Method

The second thing I want you to notice about Paul’s approach to this great intellectual center is his method…in particular:

His method was typified by cultural curiosity AND conversational courage.

Paul begins his ministry in Athens by taking a long walk with his eyes wide open. He figured out where the culturally appropriate places were for the free exchange of ideas. But he didn’t immediately jump in there and start dropping Bible verses whether or not they would be welcome or understood.[4] Look in v 23 Paul describes the first step of his method of engaging this town ‘I walked around and looked carefully’. He took some time to try to understand these people’s deep longings.[5] He watched, observed, and listened.

Here is the really shocking thing about Paul’s method in this passage. He assumed that God would already be revealing himself to the people of Athens. He did not presume that he was ‘bringing God to them.’ He just tried to figure out how he could fit into what God was already doing. [6] Paul expected God to already be at work. This made him exceptionally observant and a careful listener.[7] It made him culturally curious. He doesn’t just start talking. He took an interest in the deepest longings of the people of this town. He went so far as to acknowledge and compliment their religious impulses and searching and, (look, in v22 “Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious.”) Paul was culturally curious.

What I want you to notice is that Paul is not culturally curious to be hip or edgy or to smuggle the gospel into the conversation without anyone noticing. He is culturally curious because he believes that God is already at work all around him.[8]

And while we see in v 16 and in v 23 that Paul took some time to understand Athens when he got there…he probably hit the ground already conversant in pagan poetry.

Bruce: “He does not quote Hebrew Scriptures which would have been quite unknown to his hearers; the direct quotations in this speech are quotes from Greek poets.”

His cultural curiosity was not just an isolated thing that he did when he got to a city.[9] He drops two quotes from pagan poetry during his presentation of the gospel. He probably did not read up on this in the day he was in Athens…he had likely been cultivating a working familiarity with pagan poetry hoping to find echoes of truth in it. Which leads to an important aside from this passage: How do Christians interact with culture?[10]

Andy Crouch offers a model. He suggests that there are at least six tools available to Christians as they approach culture:

Condemning Culture
Critiquing Culture
Cultivating Culture
Copying Culture
Creating Culture
Consuming Culture

Crouch argues that each of these is useful in certain situations, but that none of them is universally appropriate.

There are cultural artifacts that should ‘greatly distress’ us just like Paul found in Athens. There is stuff in our culture that we simply must resist. But there is other cultural content that we can simply consume as a form of Sabbath…a rest. One of the unique aspects of Christian theology is that in the idea of Sabbath it contains relatively robust reflection on the human experience and utilization of fun. But, there is a subtle distinction between entertainment and Sabbath. Consuming culture should be invigorating. It should recharge you.

But Crouch argues that what we see Paul doing here is in the realm of cultivating and creating culture. He becomes conversant with the surrounding culture and then makes a third thing out of the best the culture has to offer and the content of the gospel.

This would be the equivalent of us demonstrating the Christian theology of human nature by appealing to Arcade Fire

“And there’s something wrong in the heart of man,
you take it from your heart and put it in your hand!”

Or to pitch the human need for and desire for cosmic mercy from Linkin Park:

In this farewell,
There's no blood,
There's no alibi,
'Cause I've drawn regret,
From the truth of a thousand lies.
So let mercy come, and wash away...

What I've done[11]

Paul believed that Jesus was the fulfilled hope of Israel…but he also believed that Jesus was the fulfilled hope of Athens…it was just going to take more work to be able to tell that story. He zeros in on the ‘temple to the unknown god.’ The way the story goes; there was a famine in the land years earlier. When the leadership asked a prominent philosopher Epimendies why this was happening despite their many religious centers and monuments he suggested that they must have missed a god and that had made him angry. So they constructed a ‘catch all’ temple. This is like multiple choice answer (d) – all of the above. Incidentally, the actual existence of a temple like this is verified by other historical sources.[12] And this is another way in which Athens is like UCD. University students are extremely spiritual as a whole.

The Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA reports in a recent study:

College Junior that believe:

- in an afterlife (64.8%)
- in a higher being (83.4%)

A faculty survey found:

- 81% of college professors consider themselves to be spiritual persons
- 69% report actively seeking out spiritual development

But the ‘Unknown God’ is the only one widely acknowledged. The more we claim to be able to make out the characteristics of our God, the more skepticism we encounter.

The first thing we notice about his method is that Paul was culturally curious. Here is the application. If you are a Christian, committed to engaging the university, look and listen carefully. Keep your senses sharp for ‘God sightings’ in the wider culture…recognize that ‘secular culture’ is punctuated with efforts by artists to ‘seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.’

Are you having trouble coming up with kingdom projects? If you are having trouble identifying the deepest longings of your fellow students or ways that you can serve them…try following Paul’s example from v 16 and in v 23.[13] where he says “I walked around and looked carefully”

Go on a long walk through the campus and ask God to help you understand what are the most fundamental longings of the students on this campus?

Mark Driscoll, is the pastor of a church named after the hill in this passage. It is the largest church in Seattle, which is widely considered one of the most secular cities in our country. This is how he describes his method “Our approach has always been two handed - what we believe is timeless and what we do is timely."[14]

That comes right out of this passage. The form of Paul’s message was flexible, the content was not, which brings us to the second part of Paul’s method.[15]
He was culturally curious AND conversationally courageous.
It is important to articulate the gospel as good news to the deepest longings of your cultural moment…but it must retain the major facets of the message. By introducing Jesus as the ‘unknown God of Athens’ Paul saw the gospel as the ultimate fulfillment of a very specific cultural longing. But he was not shy about its basic content of his message that included repentance, judgment and resurrection.[16]

And at this point, the passage continues to reflect the experiences many of us have had on the university campus. In v18 they mocked him and in v32 ‘they sneered’.[17] Paul gets laughed at…he gets ridiculed…but he remains conversationally courageous. I think I usually respond to ridicule with self doubt. Honest reflection and self assessment is always in order, but being a messenger of the gospel also requires a courageous confidence in the message…a kind, gentle, but thick skin.[18]

Paul did all this work to be culturally clear – and, in the end, most just sneered at him…but a few didn’t. If you take a risk and try to articulate your world view in an intellectually rigorous and culturally appropriate way on this campus, you are probably going to get worked…but there are a few who will be listening very closely. There are a few who will want to hear more. That is the story of what it means to be a messenger of the gospel in the University. It is hard work. It is often frustrating. But there may not be a more strategic place in the world. Paul was culturally curious and conversationally courageous.

So, Acts 17 has a message to those of you who are committed to the Christian story and are tying to figure out how that works on a pluralistic, post-Christian campus.

III. Paul’s Message

But maybe some of you are here tonight and are feeling more resonance with the Athenians than with Paul. You are interested in lots of ideas. Maybe you find the god-hypothesis far fetched or maybe you worship an ‘unknown god.’ You are legitimately interested in understanding the fabric of reality but don’t want to derail that process by prematurely committing to a world view. Well, first, I want to say that we are thrilled that you are here. We desperately want CL to be a place for two kinds of people: those who have made some sort of commitment to Jesus and are trying to figure out what that looks like, and the spiritually curious that are wondering if Jesus might be somehow related to your spiritual hunger. Let me just say, that from this passage, I think Paul himself would commend your spiritual tenacity. I hope that if you followed the message until now, you will realize that we don’t presume to be introducing you to God. We believe that if you have a legitimate spiritual hunger, that you have made progress looking for him. But, we also believe, that there are some specific things about Jesus that you really need to understand and appropriate.[19] There are three themes in Paul’s message that are worth noting. Judgment, Repentance and Resurrection. These ideas have two things in common: they will generally get you mocked on this campus, and you simply cannot understand Jesus apart from them.
You will not be able to appreciate the work of Jesus apart from judgment.[20]
You will not be able to access Jesus without repentance.
You will not be able to understand Jesus apart from his resurrection.
But this passage includes some phenomenal news for those of you who are on an as-of-yet unfulfilled spiritual quest. And that is, that God, is really bad at hiding.

27God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.

My daughter is just over two and a half. And one of her favorite things to do is to play hide and seek. Now, most of us have played hide and seek long enough to understand the objective…it is to NOT get found. But she has no interest in that form of the game. For Charis, the objective of hide and seek is not to stay hidden, but to be found. If I take too long to find her, she will poke here head out and smile at me. The object of hiding is not the hiding itself but the affection I show her in the pursuit.[21]

Well, there is one thing we can all agree on whether or not you are committed to the Christian story. If God exists, for one reason or another, he seems to prefer a certain measure of hiddeness. But, this passage resonates with my experience of that hiddeness. God doesn’t hide like a self interested adolescent playing hide and seek, who’s objective is self preservation. God hides like my daughter hides. He hides with the objective of being pursued and found.

v 27 says ‘God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.’

If you are on a spiritual quest…or even if you are a Christian who is just going through a bit of a dry patch and feel like God is distant…Paul’s message is keep looking, because God is really bad at hiding…he only hides to be found…and he might be hiding in plain sight…in the one place you have not yet looked…in Jesus.
__________________

[0.5] I have to admit, I expected more students to cite social responsibility as the most important persuit. Such a heavy weighting on happiness suggests that the University campus is far more Epicurian than Stoic. This was a surprising result to me. I guess I expected both
[1] You can not believe the compulsion I felt to alliterate this point. I considered ‘makeup’. Bronwyn recommended mojo, manliness and malleability (the latter I almost used)
[2] Why do we insist in calling them the ‘noble Bereans.’ Sure they checked the scriptures to see if Paul was right, but they were weak minded enough to be incited to try to kill him and chase him out of town. We forget the end of the story because they look like good protestant Biblicists. But I think there is a larger message here. The passage is definitely elevating biblical literacy and verification but also arguing that Bible knowledge is not enough to keep us from crass and dramatic deception.
[3] A contemporary equivalent would be something like “Paul realized that he didn’t have the right classes and had to stay at UCD an extra quarter” or “The only job he could find out of college was an internship in a disreputable Oakland neighborhood.”
[4] He actually doesn’t even quote the scriptures.
[5] Keller points out that to extrapolate from this that Christians are called to street preaching or contact evangelism is to miss the point of the passage. Street preaching is weird in our culture. It is dismissed as eccentric, offensive, and obnoxious. It is a breach of social contract. Paul figured out the appropriate places where there was likely to be a free exchange of ideas in a culturally appropriate setting. We need to identify those places in our culture. Where do people congregate to
[6] v25 Paul knows God does not need him, but he is thrilled to be involved…he didn’t overstate his own role. Note: Rightly ordering our importance in God’s work is imperative for ministry longevity. The human spirit can not bear the weight of the tasks we are involved in. We can not bear the guilt of ultimate failure or the intoxication of ultimate success. Either will destroy us, either by crushing or by self seduction. Most people I know who have persevered for years approach ministry like Paul or Nehemiah: “They are your servants and your people who you redeemed by your great strength and your mighty hand.” (Neh 1:10)
[7] v 25 He knows that God does not need him, but is excited to be used. He didn’t overestimate his own role
[8] Paul acknowledges the effort and desire of a people seeking the transcendent. We learn elsewhere in his writings that Paul actually believes that behind these idols there lie, no kidding, demons. Personal, invisible, malevolent nastiest. But he does not lead with that (he doesn’t even really bring it up). He finds something to affirm on the front end of his address. He doesn’t offend by tearing down their world view but by standing on the resurrection.
[9] And lest we think that his knowledge of pagan philosophy was from his life before being a Christian…remember…he was a Pharisee of Pharisees.
[10] Note: The idols did not aggravate or exasperate him. The Greek word is a medical term. He was grieved. He was saddened. He didn’t take it as a personal affront, but as the symptom of a spiritual sickness.
[11] Incidentally, I have not been able to listen to this song in quite the same way since it was on the Transformers soundtrack.
[12] FF Bruce. Bock argues convincingly that Luke fares very well when his accounts can be empirically tested with external historical data. I am fully convinced that, while he was certainly a polemical historian, he was as conscientious in the accuracy of his history as can be expected given the communicative limitations of the era.
[13] Incidentally, Nehemiah and Jerimiah take long walks in their cities, in the attempt to understand God’s vision for the service and redemption of their communities.
[14] He goes on to say, in his normal brash but hilarious tone, ‘We are theologically conservative and culturally liberal…It’s not whether or not a church contextualizes its to what year...Some churches are on the cutting edge of the 17th century.
[15] Theologians and missiologists make the distinction between contextualization vs accommodation. The former seeks to articulate the message in a context that makes sense in a particular culture without violating the basic principles of the message. The latter changes the message so it has a higher chance of adoption in a particular culture. You can imagine the debates that ensue about whether individual practices constitute contextualization or accommodation.
[16] Much is made between scholars that the cross does not play prominently in this address. But Luke’s presentations of apostolic preaching are almost certainly selective, highlight reels. For more on the cross in Acts see Stott’s The Cross of Christ.
[17] He didn’t offend them because he was a jerk. He didn’t offend by his manner, but by his message. Way too many Christians measure their success by the number of people they piss off, saying ‘the gospel is foolishness to those who are perishing.’ But this can simply be self serving justification of intellectual laziness and cultural illiteracy. It is incumbent upon someone who is trying to articulate the gospel to make the distinction between a fundamentally offensive message (that God calls all people everywhere to repent and acknowledge his preeminence) and simply being an a@# h#$%. Even this week, in commenting on Kira’s facebook page, I used careless, condescending language, and people were offended by me before they even considered the content of the message.
[18] Postscript: So, how did he do? Well Paul’s ministry was validated neither by its success or its failure. It was hard work for small victories. Hardly the 5,000 of Pentecost or the exponential growth of Antioch. But in campus ministry, this is normative.
[19] I wrote three unrelated drafts of this paragraph and one or them is entertaining enough to include: And if you are here tonight, and are in the positions of the Athenians. You came to college and are interested in lots of ideas. Maybe you find the god-hypothesis far fetched or maybe you worship an ‘unknown god.’ Well, thanks for coming tonight. It was honestly courageous of you to walk into a room like this, and I recognize that you and God have been doing business far before you walked into Kleiber 3 to listen to an over educated guy with lopsided eyes. But I think Paul’s words in v 27 should be of special interest to you.
[20] FF Bruce - ”Like the biblical revelation itself, his argument begins with God the creator of all and ends with God the judge of all.”
[21] I got this illustration from Bronwyn Lea. She offered it while giving me feedback on a different talk several months ago, but it was just such a perfect picture of this story that I saved it.