The Sermon in a Nutshell: November 1

Our sermon this week was titled “The Church & Me: Called Out & God-Grown.” The Scripture text was taken from 1 Corinthians 3:6. The Bible uses the imagery of plants in frequently in both the Old and New Testaments. For instance, Jesus likens the good works we do with a tree bearing fruit (Mt 7:15-20); He compares His message with seed that is sown in soil (Mk 4:3-8); He compares the Kingdom with a tiny mustard seed which grows into a large tree (Mk 4:30-32). There are too many uses of plant imagery to list in this short news letter, these are just a few examples.
The Apostle Paul picks up on this plant imagery in 1 Corinthians 3. When the young congregation at the First Christian Church of Corinth got to fighting amongst themselves over who their favorite preacher was, Paul told them “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but it is God who is making it grow” (1 Cor 3:6). Paul said this to draw these Christians' attention back away from the messengers and to the message itself. While this could make for a good sermon in and of itself, I would like to suggest that we can learn an important lesson about our Christian lives from Paul's use of plant imagery here in 1 Corinthians.
You see, as Christians and members of the church, we are called out and God-grown. There are three things we can learn from being called out and God-grown. First, it is God who makes us grow. Second, we need to seek out gardeners to help us grow. Third, we need to be gardeners ourselves.
First, it is God who makes us grow. A good gardener will do everything she or he can to give a plant the right conditions it needs to flourish. That gardener will make sure the soil is just right, that there is just enough sunlight, water, and nutrients that the plant needs to grow. But once the gardener has planted the seed and given it all the right conditions it needs to grow, the gardener cannot actually make the seed grow. Our Christian lives are like that. Preachers, teachers and mentors can help us to make the conditions of our heart's soil just right so that we are in a position to grow, but those people cannot actually make us grow. It is God who makes us grow. God fills us with His Holy Spirit by whom He guides us and molds us into the image of Christ. Apart from the grace of God's Spirit, we are incapable of making ourselves grow.
This is both humbling and encouraging. It is humbling because it reminds us that no matter how much work we put into the soil of our hearts, our work and effort does not make us grow. This is an important lesson because living a life of discipleship takes a lot of effort on our part and there is nothing our Enemy likes more than turning our efforts in discipleship into exercises in pridefulness. But being God-grown is also encouraging because we have the promise that God will use and bless all of our efforts to grow closer to Him and He will makes us grow!
A second thing we learn here is that the church is called out and God-grown and we need to seek out gardeners. In our Corinthians passage, Paul doesn't say that he and Apollos were of no consequence in the lives of the Corinthian church. Rather, Paul points to the way that he and Apollos were playing their Christ appointed roles (3:5). In our Christian lives, we need to remember that God does use others to help make the conditions of our hearts right so that He can make us grow. We need to seek out men and women whom God will use to tend the soil of our heart. A good gardener will use the plow of prayer to turn over the darkness in our heart and expose it to the light of Christ. A good gardener will use the spade of Scripture to cut out the weeds of sin that steal our sunlight and nutrients and keep us from growing.
One final lesson we need to learn is that the church is called out and God-grown and God wants us to be gardeners as well. In addition to giving us gardeners who will help tend our hearts, God also gives us tools to tend the soil of our hearts. We can bask in the sunlight of Scripture. We can water our hearts with prayer. We can plant ourselves in the garden of community God calls the Church. We can put up a fence of repentance around our hearts to keep the rabbits of anger and hatred from eating our produce, the birds and beetles of bitterness from stealing our berries, and the moles of hurry and haste from tearing up our roots before we have a chance to be grown by God.
My prayer for you this week is that as you put on your work boots and gardening gloves to tend the soil of your heart, that God will bless you with competent gardeners and that He will cause you to grow and grow and grow. Amen.

The Sermon in a Nutshell: October 25

This week we finished our time in the book of Ephesians by looking at Ephesians 5:21-6:9. The sermon drawn from this text was called “The Church & Me: Called Out To Heal.” This Passage in Ephesians is one of the more controversial passages in the New Testament today. The phrases “wives submit to your husbands” (5:22), “children obey your parents,”(6:1) and “slaves obey your masters” (6:5) have been and are misused to justify women being treated as somehow “less human” than men, parents stifling their children's individuality, and the exploitation of people's labor for the benefit of the few. When we come to a controversial section of Scripture like this, it is important that we dig our heels in and take a fresh look at it so that we can see what it is really trying to teach us. As we take a closer look at this passage, it becomes clear that this passage is essential to our growth in our Christian walks. You see, this passage isn't about Paul telling women, children, and workers that they exist for the benefit of the men in their lives. Rather, this passage speaks to all of the most basic social relationships we find ourselves in.
In Ephesians 5:21-6:9 Paul speaks to wives and husbands, children and parents, employees and employers and supervisors and tells all of them to “submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” (5:21). The passage goes on to show what this looks like in the lives of husbands, wives, etc. To summarize Paul's teaching, submitting to one another means keeping Christ in the center of all of our relationships. So wives aren't blindly commanded to submit to their husbands, rather they are to follow their lead just as the church follows Christ's lead (5:24). Husbands aren't to simply love their wives, they are to love their wives as Christ loved the church (5:25). Parents aren't given free reign over their children, they are commanded to raise their children to know the Lord (6:4). It is in the context of parents raising children in the knowledge of Christ that children are commanded to obey their parents. Finally, both slaves and masters, employees and employers are reminded that they share a common master to whom they must both submit and give their obedience.
The reason God gives us this teaching through Paul in Ephesians is that sin has made a mess of our relationships. Sin drives a wedge between people where God intended for them to be united in love. Part of the good news of the salvation offered in Jesus Christ is that God is healing all the relationships that sin has broken and in this process, the church is called out to heal. So as husbands follow Christ's example of self-giving love, marriages are healed. As wives follow Christ's example of freely chosen submission to the Father, marriages are healed. As parents raise their children to know Jesus and as children follow this instruction, families are healed. As employees do their work in a way that honors their Heavenly Boss, the workplace is healed. As employers and supervisors lead by example, just as Christ did, and treat their employees with integrity, the workplace is healed.
My prayer for you this week is that your eyes would be firmly fixed on Christ so that you not only obey His commands but that you also follow His example. As you do this, know that you are taking part in God's healing ministry of salvation. Amen.

Haiku

I wrote this to honor all the poor dead skunks I see on the roads down here. It's like a skunk Apocalypse. Seriously people, please stop running those poor things over! Just because an animal can spray stink on things doesn't make that animal less entitled to a decent life!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So many dead skunks
Flattened, drying on the road
Await redemption
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

LONG LIVE THE SKUNK KING!!!!

The Sermon in a Nutshell: October 18

This week our sermon was called “The Church & Me: Called Out In Unity.” Our Scripture text was Ephesians 4:1-16. One thing that has baffled me, and I'm sure it's baffled many of you as well, is how in the world the church has come to be fractured into so many thousands of denominations today. The estimates range from 20,000 – 30,000 different denominations in the world today, each one of them calling themselves “Christian”! This is a long way from Jesus' prayer in John chapter 17 when He prayed that the church would be brought to “complete unity” (John 17:23).
In order to try to begin to make sense of this situation, we turned to Paul's words in Ephesians 4 this week. This passage begins with Paul encouraging the Ephesian believers to “live a life worthy of the calling [you'all] have received.” What is this calling Paul is talking about and how are we to live in a worthy manner? Well, the calling Paul is talking about is the way God has called all believers to be part of His chosen people, the church. The church is called out in unity as one chosen people. God didn't call out multiple churches, but the church as a whole. The rest of this passage tells us how we are to live lives worthy of this call to unity.
First, in verses 2-3 we see that being called out in unity depends on our actions. This means that even though we do not all meet in one building on Sunday morning, we can still show the unity of the church in the way we treat other Christians.
Next, in verses 4-6 we see that being called out in unity is rooted in who God is. Perhaps the greatest mystery of the Christian faith is the doctrine of the Trinity. When we talk about Trinity we talk about the way that God is three persons and yet one God all at once. God has existed from all eternity in a relationship of love as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Verses 4-6 echo this notion of Trinity when Paul says “there...is one Spirit...one Lord [Jesus Christ]...one God and Father of all...” (Eph 4:4-6). So God is our example of how we can have unity out of diversity.
Thirdly, verses 7-12 tell us that being called out in unity is enriched by the diversity of our gifts. This means that unity is NOT uniformity; the goal of evangelism is not to smash people into a cookie-cutter mold to make them look just like everyone else in the church. Rather, when individuals, each with his or her own unique gifts, find salvation in Christ and become a part of the church, God uses these people's gifts to build up the Church.
Finally, in verses 13-16 Paul tells us that being called out in unity demands our growth in maturity. Verse 14 hints at false teachers that were deceiving immature Christians with lies about the Gospel. These lies, 2,000 years ago as well as today, went something like “We have a secret knowledge that other Christians don't have, listen to us and you can be a 'super-Christian'” or “Those other people in church who call themselves 'Christians' live like a bunch of heathens, but if you follow these rules we will tell you about, you can show that you are one of the 'real' Christians.” Both of these lies divide the church. However, when we grow in maturity in the knowledge of Jesus Christ, we appreciate more and more God's calling of the church in unity.
While this study in Ephesians does not give us a definitive answer to the problem of denominational disunity in the church (this is a wound that is being healed but it will take a long, long time as well as a lot of work by the Holy Spirit), this passage does give us a way to move forward to advance the unity of the church. Because the church is called out in unity, we must take this call seriously! We need to treat other Christians as family, both in our own congregation as well as in other denominations, because we are all brothers and sisters in Christ. More than that, as Christians of different denominations, we need to talk to each other about the way we interpret the Bible. This can be an enriching experience for all of us as we will learn things about Christ and Scripture from our brother and sisters of other denominations while at the same time teaching them things about Christ and Scripture which we have learned from our own denomination. None of this goes to say that denominational differences can't be significant or that we should abandon our dedication to pursuing God's truth in Scripture. However, in our dedication to Scripture, we must not be blind to the inescapable fact that Scripture tells us the church is called out in unity. Amen.

The Sermon in a Nutshell: October 11

This week was the second week of our sermon series, “The Church & Me.” This week's sermon was titled “The Church & Me: Called Out To Live.” The Scripture text was taken from the letter to the Ephesians, chapter 2 verses 1-10. In this rich passage, Paul is telling the Ephesian church that there were two ways a person can walk. There is the way of the world (Eph 2:2), and there is God's way which is the way of good works (Eph 2:10). In this passage, Paul describes for us the characteristics of each of these ways of walking. The way of the world is marked by death, slavery, and condemnation. Paul says, “You all were dead in your transgressions and sins...when you walked in the ways of this world” (2:1-2). The way of the world is the way of slavery, both to “the ruler of the kingdom of the air,” who is the devil, and to our flesh which we can think of as all of our selfish impulses to gratify ourselves (2:2-3). This life of death and slavery can end only in condemnation as God created us for life and freedom in obedience but in following the way of the world, we became “objects of wrath” (2:3). This whole passage hinges on one word in verse 4, the word “but”. The way of the world is death, slavery and condemnation BUT there is a different way, God's way. In contrast to the way of the world, the church is called out to live. God has called the church out from among the world and “made us alive with Christ” (2:5). Not only that, but God has “raised us up with Christ” (2:6) just as He raised Christ when Jesus ascended to heaven (Acts 1:9-11). And, having “raised us up with Christ,” God has “seated us with him [God the Father] in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus” (Eph 2:6). Lest we, as the church, let all that God has done for us go to our heads, Paul goes on in this passage to explain why God has called the church to live. God has called the church to live because God, in His love, mercy, and faithfulness is at work to redeem this world which has turned its back on Him. In redeeming the world through Christ and working through the church do it, God shows us just how gracious He is (2:7). In fact, one of the clearest ways that non-believers can see God's grace is when it is expressed to them through the church. This is why the church is called to walk in the way of good works, which is God's way (2:10). “Good works” has nothing to do with “earning our salvation” and everything to do with God using the church to shower His world with the love of Jesus Christ. The church is called out to live but if we are going to truly live up to our calling (no pun intended), we need to own the power which is at work in our lives. The same power by which God raised Jesus Christ from the dead 2,000 years ago is still at work in the church today! We have been “made alive,” “raised up,” and “seated with [God]” (2:5-6). This means there is nothing we cannot overcome, both as a church and as individuals who make up that church! There is no sin, no addiction, no temptation, no God dishonoring habit or behavior pattern that we cannot overcome by the power of God in our lives because God has called us to live and He will use us to glorify His name as we partner with Him in redeeming His world. Amen.

The Sermon in a Nutshell: October 4

The first part of our seven week sermon series, “The Church & Me” was “The Church & Me: Called Out To Stand Out.” Our Scripture text this week was taken from Paul's letter to the Ephesians, chapter 1, verses 1-14. As we begin to ask the question, “What's the point? Why bother going to church?” Ephesians is a great place to start because in this letter Paul talks about how God is working to redeem the world by working through the church. Although Paul doesn't come right out and use the word, in Ephesians 1:1-14 he is talking about the church. Nine times in these fourteen verses, Paul uses the phrase “in Christ” or “in Him.” This phrase is always used to describe “we” or “us” or “our.” Who are “we” or “us” who are “in Christ”? “We” are the church! Paul sets up an unspoken contrast in these fourteen verses between the church which is “in Christ” and the world which is “in Adam.” You see, in Adam (the first man) the world sinned and turned away from God. In Adam, the world is under a curse (Gen 3). In Adam, the world lives in the promise of death and condemnation. In contrast to the world in Adam, there is the church, which is in Christ (the perfect man). In Christ we, the church are “blessed...with every spiritual blessing” (Eph 1:3). In Christ we, the church, have “redemption” and “forgiveness” (Eph 1:7). In Christ we, the church, look forward to an inheritance when God brings His plan of redemption to completeness when “the times will have reached their fulfillment” (Eph 1:10). So what's the point in going to/being the church? The point is that the church is called out to stand out from the world around it! While the world lives in sin, darkness, and death, the church is called to be a beacon of light, forgiveness, and life! As if this were not enough to inspire us to participate in the church, Paul makes a grand statement about God's plan for calling out the church. In Ephesians 1:4-6 Paul tells us that the church was “chosen in [Christ] before the creation of the world...” This means that the church was called out to stand out in the past, even before God created the universe! In the present, as Ephesians 1:5-8 tells us, the church is called out to stand out as we now have “redemption” and “forgiveness” as we are adopted as sons and daughters of God. This calling goes beyond the present age and into eternity as Ephesians 1:9-10, and 14 Paul tells us that the church will be called out to stand out in the future as well as we are “God's possession – to the praise of His glory.” So what's the point? The point is that from eternity past to eternity future, the church has been called out to stand out by God Himself AND WE GET TO PARTICIPATE IN THIS CALLING! May the God and Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ, by His Holy Spirit, give Christ's View Christian Church the guidance, strength, and faithfulness to stand out here in Christopher and may that standing out create ripples by which God will change the world. Amen.

The Sermon in a Nutshell: September 27

This week's sermon was the last one in our “Finding Ourselves In God's Story Series.” Since we were at the end of the Story this week, our sermon text was taken out of the book of Revelation, chapter 21:1-8. The sermon was called “The End is Just the Beginning” and the main idea was that when we find ourselves in God's Story, we find ourselves playing for keeps. We live in a throwaway society where almost everything is disposable. Our food comes in disposable aluminum cans and plastic wrap. We wash it down with water or coke out of disposable plastic bottles. We bring this food home from the store in disposable plastic bags. Then after dinner we brush our teeth with disposable toothbrushes. When the clothes we wear start to get worn out, most of us throw them away rather than have them clutter up our closets. Even if we give away our old clothes, they will be thrown away by someone else down the line. I'm not saying that all this throwing away is good or bad, but as Christians it does present us with a special challenge when it comes to our faith. You see, living in a world where so much is disposable can leave us with the mindset that everything is disposable, including our faith. This attitude towards faith finds people using Christianity when it “works” for them and throwing it away when it no longer “works” or “feels good.” By looking at the book of Revelation, we see that Christianity is one thing that is not disposable. Because we look forward to a time when Christ will return and all things will be made new (Rev 21:5), when we find ourselves in God's Story, we find ourselves playing for keeps. This future hope we have, this hope of heaven, is given to us to motivate us towards living lives of faithful discipleship in this life (Rev 21:6-8). This can be really important as life has a way of getting us down sometimes and we all know how sometimes it's hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. My prayer for you this week is that you will find encouragement and even refreshment in the promise of heaven.

The Sermon in a Nutshell: September 20

This week our sermon was titled “Jesus Fulfills the Deal” and it came out of Hebrews 1:1-4. We found that the whole book of Hebrews shows us how Jesus fulfilled the Old Covenant by offering Himself as a better sacrifice and becoming a better high priest. For us this means that when we find ourselves in God's story, we find ourselves being led. Unlike the people in the Old Testament though, we find ourselves being led by God Himself in the person of Jesus Christ. Because Jesus was 100% human, He experienced all of the same life situations and temptations that we face in our lives but He was faithful to God and didn't sin. This means that when we find ourselves being led by Jesus, we have a leader who can relate to us; Jesus leads by example. Because Jesus was also 100% God, the sacrifice He made on the cross made it possible to take down the barrier between God and people that sin had put between us. Now, when we follow Jesus, we can follow Him right in to the very throne room of God. Although the book of Hebrews can come across as being packed full of theological language that doesn't seem to really relate to life, we found that looking at it in terms of Christ being our leader makes it very practical for our daily lives. We can follow Jesus in any and all life situations by keeping our eyes focused on Him and the example He sat for us in His life of obedience.

The Sermon in a Nutshell: September 13

This week's sermon was titled “God's People Break the Deal.” As we've been finding ourselves in God's story, I've tried to paint a picture of that story using broad brush strokes. In our first two weeks, we covered all of God's story from the beginning of time up through the call of Abraham when God made a deal with him almost 4,000 years ago. This week I tried to cover the rest of the Old Testament story from God's deal with His people through Moses up until the time when their rejection of that deal had become apparent in the 6th century BC. We learned this week that when we find ourselves in God's story, we have a choice. When God made a deal with His people in the Old Testament, He gave them a choice: either they could choose to obey His instruction and find life or they could choose to turn away from God by disobedience and face death (Deuteronomy 28; 30:11-20). Sadly, as we looked at the way the rest of God's story unfolded in the Old Testament, we saw His people consistently and persistently choosing disobedience. All this disobedience came to a head when Babylon invaded Judah, destroyed the city of Jerusalem and the Temple, and carried most of the Israelites away into captivity in the year 586 BC. Although this was a very dark point in God's story, the light of hope still burned because God is a faithful God. His people continued to look to Him to act in His plans to redeem His creation. This redemption came when God came to live amongst us as Jesus Christ, fully human and fully God. You see, Jesus, being fully human, also had a choice when He found Himself in God's story. Whereas Adam and Eve chose to disobey God by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and whereas God's chosen people, Israel, had chosen to disobey Him by worshiping false gods and oppressing the poor, Jesus chose to obey God by living a life without sin and submitting to death on a Roman cross. It was and is through this death and subsequent resurrection that God brought salvation and redemption to all of His creation through Jesus' obedience. Now today, we too have a choice when we find ourselves in God's story. Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount that we can either enter through the narrow gate, walk the narrow road of obedience and find life, or we can enter through the broad gate, walk the wide road of disobedience and find destruction (Matthew 7:13-14). By God's grace, may we all enter through the narrow gate and walk the narrow road!

The Sermon in a Nutshell: September 6

This week's sermon was called “God Makes a Deal.” The sermon text was taken from Genesis 12:1-3, although we also looked at Genesis 22:15 and following and then connected it to the New Testament by looking at 1 Corinthians 12:12 and following. As we looked at the way God made a deal with Abraham whereby He was going to bless all nations and peoples of the world, we saw that when we find ourselves in God's story, we play A major role, but we don't play THE major role. When God called Abraham and told him that He was going to use him in His plan to restore Creation to His intended purpose, God gave Abraham a command as well as a promise. As we looked at the life of Abraham, we saw that everything that happened to Abraham was part of a faith journey that led him to trusting God's promise to him. We then looked at the way that God fulfilled this promise to Abraham by sending Jesus, Abraham's Offspring, to bring redemption in His death and resurrection. Finally, as we connected to the New Testament, we saw that we all, as members of the church which is the Body of Christ, continue to play a major role in God's story as He uses each one of us to work together to fulfill His plan to bring redemption to all peoples. All throughout God's redemption story, He has used individual human beings to work with Him in fulfilling His plans. While this does give us a sense of just how valuable we all are, we are also humbled as we see that God is at work behind the scenes in each of our lives, giving us strength and wisdom and guidance. This is how we can say that although we play a major role in God's story as He works through us, we don't play THE major role precisely because it is Him working through us.

The Sermon in a Nutshell: August 30

Our sermon this week kicked off a five part sermon series entitled, “Finding Ourselves In God's Story.” This week's sermon was called, “The Story Begins.” The Scripture text for our sermon was taken, appropriately enough, from the first three chapters of Genesis. I tried to focus on the way that when we find ourselves in God's story, we find ourselves both broken and mended. In the first two chapters of Genesis we see that God had created the world to function in an orderly, harmonious way. Originally, there was harmony in humankind's relationship with God, with their selves, with others, and with creation. After Adam and Eve sinned against God in Genesis chapter three, disorder entered the world and the harmony God intended for us was broken. We can still see the evidence of these broken relationships today, both in our lives and in the world around us. The Good News about Jesus is that God is restoring these broken relationships through the death and resurrection of Christ! The invitation to move from being broken to being mended is extended to everyone through Christian baptism. After we looked at the beginning of God's story, we considered Jesus' command to make disciples in Matthew 28:18-20 in light of this. Although the thought of evangelism can be intimidating to us, when we think of it in terms of telling God's Story and our story and inviting others to enter in to this Story, some of the intimidation goes away.

The High-Tech Redneck!

The church where I'm serving has a website where I post the audio recording of each week's sermon. You can find it at http://www.christsview.net/id7.html.

I'm not asking for pity or sympathy or anything, but if you listen I will be glad to know that my mom and granmda aren't the only ones who download it each week =D

New Weekly Blog

I like blogging, I really do. And I'm getting to where I miss it too. But I don't have the internets in my house and the only neighbornet I can connect to is password protected. When I'm in the office, I try to keep my non-pastoral internetting to a minimum, so I don't really have the time to blog on the clock either.

However, one thing that I've inhereted with my new job is the responsibility to write our church's weekly update. This is more or less a written recap of the service for those who weren't able to be with us on a given Sunday. I don't mind doing it because a lot of the older people, and just people who weren't able to be at church in general, seem to really enjoy getting it. Also, this is a great way to communicate our upcoming events and stuff to as many people as possible. So I'm not griping :)

But part of this weekly update is a recap I do of each week's sermon. This is also cool because it gives people a chance to revisit the week's sermon and maybe it helps them process it. The Christian Ed major in me is always looking for ways to facilitate learning :)

It hit me this morning that in leu of blogging, I could just start posting my written summary of each week's sermon. I know it probably won't be widely read, but there's no harm in throwing out a virtual "Hail Mary." So from now on, that's what I'm gonna do each Tuesday.

Deuteronomy 28 and the Sermon on the Mount: or Sermon Work

So I'm laboring to give birth to another sermon this week. Sermon writing for me is a week long process. I don't know if it is because I'm a perfectionist, or because my attention span is shrinking exponentially as my age increases, or what. I'm hoping maybe that by writing a little bit down here it will help me to shape what I want to say this Sunday.

We are currently preaching through a series titled: Finding Ourselves in God's Story. My intention here was to give a brief overview of the overarching story told in and through Holy Scripture. We began by looking at the Creation and humanity's rebellion in Genesis 1-3. That sermon was called, appropriately enough: The Story Begins. The main idea was that when we find ourselves in God's story, we find ourselves both broken and mended. Then we had a sermon on Genesis 12 called "God Makes a Deal." The main idea there was that when we find ourselves in God's story, we play A major role but we don't play THE major role. This week's sermon is going to finish us up in the Old Testament so that next week we can look at the Incarnation and the following week finish with the last two chapters of the book of Revelation.

Now this week's sermon is using Deuteronomy 28 as a jumping off point to cover basically the rest of the Old Testament (since in a sense the rest of the OT is a footnote on DT 28). I'm calling it "God's people break the deal" and I think the main idea is going to be that when we find ourselves in God's story, we have to follow God's script. I'm thinking I will try to run with the metaphor of Torah (leaning more on the sense of instruction rather than law), as God's script for His redemptive intention for His people. Without coming across as anti-Semitic, I'm going to illustrate the way the rest of the OT tells the story of God's people repeatedly failing to be redemptive instruments because of their persistant refusal to follow God's script.

I'm trying to be careful about always making a connection to the New Testament with every Old Testament sermon I preach. I'm not so sure that it is a cardinal sin to fail to do so, but it is helpful to show people the way the two parts of their Bible are connected. So this week my first thought was to tie the story of Israel's repeated failures in to the call to repentance, first through the prophetic injunction to shoov from their wicked ways and turn back to God, and then through John the Baptist and Jesus' call to repent. But the more I think about it, the less I like it. I mean, I'm a big fan of repentance and I'm trying to cultivate a lifestyle of repentance, but homiletically, I'm just not feeling the groove.

So now what I think I'm going to do is make the New Testament connection to the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7. I think what I'm going to do is compare and contrast Moses presenting the two ways to Isreal (obedience leading to blessing or disobedience leading to curses) with Jesus's injunction to enter through the narrow gate which leads to life rather than the broad gate which leads to destruction. In terms of comparrison (and I know there are a plethora of interpretations on this Sermon as well as a wide range of opinions as to how it relates to the Christian life), Moses presented Israel with an Instruction for how to live as God's chosen people whom God intended to use as His redemptive instrument and Jesus basically is calling God's chosen people (who now are no longer determined by ethnicity), back to the heart of God's intention in giving His Instruction through Moses.

But I need to wrestle with the contrast here too because the Incarnation of Christ changed everything forever. So I'm thinking of the way Paul, when talking about God's Instruction, said this Instruction was given to lead people to Christ, almost like the way a babysitter watches over a child (Galatians 3:24). But then Christ Himself points us right back to God's Instruction when He says that He didn't come to abolish the Law but to fulfill it (Mt 5:17) and that our righteousness needs to surpass that of the Scribes and Pharisees (Mt 5:20). I don't think what Christ is talking about here is some kind of Protestant concept of imputed righteousness because in the rest of this Sermon He is calling us to a higher standard of righteousness than mere outward conformity to a set of rules.

I guess the thing that is becoming clear to me as I type all this out is that God's intention to redeem His creation does not change from the Old to the New Testaments. In the Old Testament, God called Abraham and his descendants to be His instrument of this redemption. While ultimately that redemption was going to come through Abraham's Seed (singular), that is to say, Christ, God also gave Instruction to Israel as to how they must live if they were to be His redemptive agents. In the New Testament, Christ comes and fulfills the Old Testament by living a life of complete obedience as the Second Adam and the personification of Israel, and then He extends the Kingdom invitation to all peoples, thus establishing the Church. Now it is the Church, as God's chosen people and filled with His Holy Spirit, that is God's redemptive instrument in the world. But just like Israel was presented with two ways to live in Deuteronomy 28, so too are those who accept the call to follow Christ. Either we live a lifestyle of repentance which manifests itself in good works and by which God brings redemption to the world around us, or we live a hypocritical life of double standards and outward conformity to arbitrary rules which will lead us to our own destruction.

Well that helps. There is so much more I would like to cram in to this though! I want to emphasize the importance of our being created in God's image and called to conform to the image of Christ in every sermon! I also want to explicitly include the Trinity in every sermon! If only we had 3 hours to do church on Sunday......

A lovely jaunt in the park

Alison and I decided to load up in the car Saturday and go see what we could see. Turned out, we wound up seeing Giant City State Park in lovely Southern Illinois so we decided to go for a walk. I was glad she urged me to do this, as my plans for the day had revolved around lying around on the floor and letting the dogs lick my face and then maybe reading a chapter or two out of a book. So we loaded up our pooches in the back of the car and hit the road!

That's Charlie on the right, he's our little beagle/blue heeler mix. Dusty is on the left, he's a German Shephard/Collie mix, but don't ask me what kind of Collie. Our little boys love going for rides in the car. Charlie spends most of his time with his head out the window but Dusty isn't as brave so he only pokes his head out once in a while.

Most of the time Dusty just lays down in the back seat
















Anyhow, we made our way down south of Carbondale towards Giant City State Park. We got turned around trying to find the place and found this instead


But then we found the road to the park. I could tell just by seeing the road that we were going to be in for a treat!



So we finally found Giant City State Park but we weren't sure where to go from there. As good fortune, or Providence (depending on your worldview) would have it, there was a visitor's center to help direct us. This sign was posted on the door of the visitor's center. I wonder what, or more properly who, led the people in charge to post this sign. We've all seen the "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service" signs, but how many people each year really go out to enjoy nature without pants? I didn't notice anyone running around sans pants so I guess the sign did its job.


Once we got in to the park itself, we decided to go hiking on a mile long trail that was rated "moderate" on the challenge scale. The effort we made hiking up hill paid out huge dividends in the beautiful rock formations we got to enjoy.







All in all, Alison and I decided we enjoy hiking in Southern Illinois very much. It's nice to have a state fair down the road to remind me of just how far I've got to go and then to have such a beautiful refuge down the road the other direction to remind me of what I have to look forward to :)








Plus, hiking in the park with our dogs was a great way to wear them out!

Everyone has fun at the fair!

Well I've never lived just down the road from an Illinois state fair before. It used to be that we would have to drive 45 minutes to get to the Illinois state fair in Springfield. We'd go every once in a while, mainly just to bask in the glory of the butter cow. I mean really, how many people live in such a great and glorious state to inspire a cow made of butter? But even the grandeur of the butter cow wasn't enough to keep us coming back to the fair year after year once I got into high school and decided I was much too cool for any of that business anymore.

It's been about 10 years since I've been to an Illinois State fair. But just a couple weeks ago I moved to a little town in southern Illinois which just happens to be about 15 miles from Du Quoin, the home of the Southern Illinois state fair. I hadn't really intended to attend the fair, even though it was just down the street, but between my sweet wife asking to go and the allure of trying a deep fried snickers bar, reluctantly we went to the fair last night.

State fairs, as a rule, are not edifying places. At least not in a positive way (unless you count the guy with the tent asking if you were "100%" sure you would go to heaven [i thought of starting a conversation with him about the epistemological presuppositions necessary for 100% certainty and modernity's failure to adequately support said presuppositions, but that would have been mean of me]). However, state fairs are GREAT places for people watching! It started for us as soon as we pulled up to the gate. I don't know where these people live through the year. Sometimes I think they must just materialize ex nihilo any time there is a fair or stock car race. Anyway, I spent the next 2 1/2 hours observing the oddities of state fair anthropology. Then we ate some fried snickers and oreos and went home.

State fairs are not edifying places. At least not in a positive way. But at least for me, state fairs are edifying places in the way that they bring me to repentance. I like to think I do an ok job of not judging people but that delusion is shattered when I plunge myself into the mass of unwashed, toothless, mouth-breathing hillbillies that is the Southern Illinois state fair.

I heard a story the other day on a podcast about an atheist who went to a monastery and demanded that the abbot show him God. The abbot then went and found the shabbiest monk in the monastery (I think the guy had spent some time working at a state fair before joining the monastery), and brought him to the atheist. The abbot said, "here you go, this is God." The atheist wasn't buying this at all. In fact, he grew angry with the abbot because he thought the abbot was toying with him. But the abbot responded to the atheist, "If you cannot see God in this shabby monk, you will not see Him anywhere."

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Fancy Things What I Seen in the Big City, pt 1

Just like John Mellencamp, I grew up in a small town. With the exception of one summer spent in Naperville, and a couple seasons in Lincoln for school, I've lived all 27 3/4 years of my life in a town of less than fifteen hundred people. I can't tell you exactly how small Assumption is because the population signs vary depending on from which direction you come into town. What I can tell you is that there are somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve to sixteen hundred people here. We don't even have a four-way stop in town to give directions by, much less a stop light. Until a year ago there were three bars and four churches. Now two of those bars have closed (one of the building has been torn down) and at least one of those churches doesn't seem to be far behind.

There is a grain bin factory in town which supports the three small restaraunts, where you can get anything you want (provided it has been fried and smothered in cheese or gravy, excepting Alice of course), and the gas station which stays open by selling beer and cigarettes to the factory workers every day at 3:30 when the shift lets off. The evidence of said beer and cigarette sales can be seen strewn along the country roads leaving town in all four cardinal directions. (Appearantly people who do not see it fit to take care of their bodies also have a hard time wanting to take care of the earth). Last year when Casey's decided to build a new gas station and restaraunt in town, you would have thought our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ Himself, along with at least half the Apostles and Moses and Elijah to boot, was moving to town. While I worry about straying close to being sacreligious with that statement, I'm pinched to find a strong enough metaphor to convey the fervor which is only now starting to die down.

The school district consolodated with the town up the road about twenty years ago now. Both towns have a grade school. Assumption has the middle school while Moweaqua has a high school. Every Friday night in the fall people swarm to Moweaqua to watch their sons, nephews, cousins, etc risk their bodies for the sake of attaining some false sense of accomplishment. While fleeting, this is important for those who will work at the grain bin factory so they will have something to look back on when they look around one day in the future and realize that life hasn't turned out as they hoped. It makes me wonder if there is a negative corellation between success on the field and success after high school, but we'll leave that for another time. When the team won the state championship back in '96 or '97, the aforementioned fervor surrounding the new Casey's was again in the air.

I write all of this as a long way of saying that I don't get out of the house very often. Although I didn't realize it until a few years ago, the rhythms of small town life seeped into my soul and took root somewhere along the way. While my church tradition does not keep to the traditional church callender, we mark the passing of the seasons by Easter breakfasts, vacation Bible schools, Labor Day get togethers, and Christmas pagents. I find myself more and more marking the passing of time by these events and others like them. I'm finding myself at a point where I don't necessarily distrust bigger cities (ok, that's a lie but I don't completely distrust them), but I do prefer to avoid them as they tend to throw a big old stick in the bicycle wheel which is the rhythm of small town life.

Turns out that a lot of neat stuff goes on out there in the wide world while I'm passing the time away here in Assumption. Every once in a while I will get out of town and discover one of the new ways in which the world has moved forward and improved itself and with appropriate slack-jawed amazement, I will come back and tell people about my discoveries. I like to think of these discoveries as Fancy Things What I Saw in the Big City. I still remember the first time I saw one of those electronic sensory operated paper towel dispensers in a men's bathroom at a Bonanza in Western Montana. I was almost speechless. No, there for about twenty seconds or so I was speechless. Then I washed my hands a second time, waved them under the sensor again, chuckled to myself and upon rejoining my party told them about the amazing machine in the bathroom.

Well I had one of those discoveries again last weekend. Alison and I were visiting her family in Naperville because she was preaching at a young adult service Sunday night. After the serivce, her dad suggested we get pizza at Lou Malnatti's. Now it was already well past my 8:30 bedtime, but Lou's pizza is well worth breaking any established rhythm of life, so I quickly gave my assent and decided I would catch up on rest later. As it turns out, I'm glad I went! Not just because the pizza was amazing (did I mention that the pizza there is A-mazing?), because it was (they have really good pizza there), but also because I made another one of my discoveries of Fancy Things What I Saw in the Big City! Once again, suffice it to say that I was speechless. Fortunately, this time after chuckling to myself I was able to whip out my fancy camera phone and get documented evidence




Now here's an even newer, even fancier way of drying your hands! Basically what you do is you stick your hands in here like this and then as you pull them out, this here machine blows air on them and dries them off. To be perfectly honest, I'm still a little bit speechless! I've even debated looking into seeing what it would cost to get one for my bathroom, but it's been a busy week with all the packing and withdrawing from seminary and all that, so I haven't got to it yet. The best thing is that it really dries your hands, not like those other air hand driers that only do the job so far and leave you to finish it by wiping your hands on you pants.

Well there you have it. Although the terrible disasters of the twentieth century went a long way towards destroying the blind optimism inherent in the liberal, secular nineteenth century mindset, the twenty-first century still gives us glimmers of hope in social progress :p

A Pleasant Walk

Alison and I went for a walk with our little boys this evening and it was absolutely beautiful. Although I talk a lot about how I would like to live in the desert or up high in the Rocky Mountains, there are times when I deeply appreciate the flat lands. The corn and beans are almost ready to be harvested and right now they are giving off a scent that is almost intoxicating. No, as much as I hate to say it, the smell is intoxicating. I can't even describe it other than to say that when you smell it in the cool of the evening it smells like all the black dirt and sunshine and fertility of these plains has been sprayed into the air. It's as if the corn stalks were geysers and all year long pressure has been building until this time of year when it explodes forth from the earth and fills the air with the smell of life and sublime goodness.






After smelling that smell, all I can say is, "Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit!"

A Five Day Long Post After a Three Day Long Book....

Two things have happened in the last couple days that have given me the opportunity to sit down and write something on here. The first is that I finished a book! That's really nothing to write home about I guess, seeing as to how I spent almost 8 years in some kind of college or another, but I so rarely finish a book I start reading. For example, as of right now I'm about half way through N.T. Wright's New Testament and the People of God, about a quarter of the way through Richard Foster's Freedom of Simplicity and Streams of Living Water, and about two thirds of the way through Dallas Willard's Renovation of the Heart. This summer I've also started Steinbeck's East of Eden and I've been slowly reading through the Philokalia during my lunch break at work. But yesterday I finally finished a book I started (I'm not counting Max Brooks' World War Z, although that was a fun read :)

The second thing that happened is that God, in His infinite mercy, finally sent that rain storm I've been asking Him for these last couple days. This allowed me to come home early from my job on the golf course because you can't run a weed whacker in the rain. Or I guess you could, but when it is thunderstorming I don't think you call it a weed whacker, I think you call it a lightning rod. As I was riding my motorcycle home and getting soaked I was thinking what it would be like if I got hit by lightning like the guy on the that old John Candy movie, The Great Outdoors, just before I started my first preaching job. One thing about it, I would only need about half as much content to make a 25 minute sermon :)

Anywho, I finished a book. My wife recently had a birfday and her grandma sent her a copy of C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce. It was sitting on the living room table and as I was on my way to have my afternoon meditations in the bathroom I picked it up and started reading it. As it turned out, this book was perfect for reading during my meditations because the chapters weren't too long for me to finish a chapter at a time but they also weren't too short so that I finished them before my meditation time was over.

For those of you who haven't read The Great Divorce, you need to read it (I know, I know, it's no 23 Minutes in Hell, or 90 Minutes in Heaven, but you should give Mr. Lewis a chance) but I will give a brief summary. Basically, C.S. Lewis finds himself in Hell in a dream. Hell is a dreary city where it is always raining and it is always almost sunset. This city is huge and sprawling but it is not densely populated because as people disagree with one another, they move farther and farther apart. In extreme cases, those who really can't stand to be around others wind up living millions of miles away. I think Lewis portrays Hell in this manner to give an idea of what it might be like if people are left to their own selfish devices. While Lewis left out all the good medieval stuff about the fire and the little demons tormenting people with pitchforks, he also left out any sense of joy or love from Hell. When people are left to their own selfish wants for long enough without the grace of God to help them to see past themselves, sufficient torment ensues.

I'm going above and beyond the stating the obvious when I point out that the idea of Hell doesn't get much attenion these days, even in most Christian circles. Part of the reason for that is an over-reaction to a previous generation's over emphasis on Hell. I remember growing up and being prodded into morality with the threat of eternal damnation. If you want to really mess with your six year old's head, put him or her in Sunday school and tell them there is an all powerful Deity who demands good behavior and will torment for eternity all of those who refuse to comply. I'm still struggling to understand God as a lover of His Creation rather than a sadist holding it over the eternal fires of Hell like a sociopathic 13 year old boy might dangle a live mouse over a bon fire. There's this little voice in the back of my head that warns me not to get too carried away with this whole "God is love" thing because that's only going to make Him more angry with me. Christ have mercy!

The bad thing is that I didn't go to a crazy fundamentalist style church! The crazy fundamentalist churches took it even further!

The history of Christian theology works a lot like a pendulum in a grandfather clock. Any time something is emphasied too long or embraced by too many people, the emphasis will inevitably swing back too far in the other direction. For example, take the trend towards universalism in liberal Christianity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries which helped to spur the fundamentalist reaction against it in the 20th century. Hell has gone through that same pendulum swing. First it was used as a club to beat people into submitting to becoming good "Christian" moralists, but then when the baby boomer generation came into power all of the sudden Hell got pushed to the back of the bus (after all, what room is there for Hell in a world where everyone is OK?).

I think a second reason Hell has become overlooked in most Christian circles comes from the way our culture is so darned egalitarian about EVERYTHING! Now I'm all for universal human rights and all that good stuff, but I think we've taken it a little too far. Our society pushes for every single high school graduate to not only have the opportunity to go to college if he or she is sufficiently gifted and financially capable of attending, but for everyone to attend college regardless of gifting and finances because it is their right to have a college degree. I spent four years as a TA in school and I've graded a lot of students' work; let me tell you that not every person should get to go to college just because he or she was able to sign their mark on a piece of paper. It's wasteful in that it brings down the reputation of the institution, devalues the degree that some people actually do earn, and it wastes the time and money of these square peg students trying to fit into the round hole of academia.

Our modern sensibilities have turned Heaven into a big egalitarian party and for the most part, the church in North America has stood by and allowed this to happen. First we conceded that people of other faiths will probably go to Heaven as long as they respond to the Light they are shown in their lives. Then we pretty much tossed out the idea that Christians could ever be denied Heaven as long as they kept their Sunday attendance up and stayed away from all the socially unacceptable sins. Now it's all the rage to concede that monogomous, practicing homosexuals will get into Heaven because after all, they can't help the way they are and don't some of them make the nicest little moralists? We're pretty much to the point where everyone shy of Hitler, Stalin, and the Westborough Baptist Church, are going to Heaven.

I really don't mean to sound like the older brother in the story of the prodigal son. I really do beleive that God's Grace is big enough to suprise all of us and we really will meet people in Heaven we weren't expecting to see. I'm just saying that not many of us believe, in a way that works itself out in our lives, that broad is the road and wide is the gate that leads to destruction and many are travelling that road.

Here's the reason why it is such a problem that Hell has been pitched out the window (and I'm preaching to myself as I think this out and write this down): we can't really take Heaven seriously if we don't take Hell seriously as well. If we don't take Heaven seriously, then we are not going to live out the fullness of the quality of the eternal life promised to us by Christ. I think this is why lukewarm Christianity is such a rampant problem in the U.S. today; we've lost the content out of what it means to be a Christian (again, the quality of eternal life now rather than the quantity of eternal life after we die) after we ceased taking seriously the gravity of the Christian message (namely that people have separated themselves from God and are therefore in desperate need of having that relationship restored).

The great thing about Lewis' book is that it reminds us that Heaven is not a reward given for being a "good" person, or even given for not being a "really bad" person. Likewise, Hell is not a place where a sadistic God gleefully and arbitrarily tosses His creatures in the name of something as cheap as "glory" or "justice." Rather, Heaven is a place where people who have chosen to submit their wills to the Will of their Creator, finding redemption and reconcilliation in a life of repentance centered on the Cross, find their relationship with their Creator growing deeper and wider for time eternal. Hell then is seen as a place where people who have chosen to live their lives apart from God, refusing to submit their wills to the Will of their Creator, are allowed to spend eternity travelling farther and farther away from the God who made them to live in relationship with Him. As Lewis said in Mere Christianity, in the end there are two kinds of people, those who say to God, "Your will be done" and those to whom God says, "your will be done."

Keeping a healthier view of Heaven and Hell forces us to acknowledge the role of our free will in this world. Free will in turn forces us to take seriously the call to live a life of repentance centered on following Jesus. While the gift of the Holy Spirit and heaps and heaps of God's Grace make it possible for us to live such a life, we are still called to play a role in it as well.

I'm reminded of the words of Cheech, "responsibility is a heavy responsibility." Maybe the real reason why we don't take Hell seriously is that it's just too much work!

Thoughts on the Eve of My Marriage

Hey guess what? I'm getting married in two days! Woohoo!!

It's been a long time coming but it feels like time has gone by so fast! Alison and I have been engaged for the last 19 months. I remember a point in time where the wedding was something that existed off in the distant, hazy future. Now it's almost here.

Even though nobody will probably read this, let me recount for you a little bit of our story: I have never really been one who was good at coloring inside the lines. As a matter of fact, when we used to have coloring contests in grade school, I never once had my work exibited. I was threatened with summer skool to help me with my handwriting as well. For the most part, my handwriting still looks like that of a fifth grader. As I become more and more educated, one of the things that spurs me on as skool has become so wearisome to me is that if I just get some kind of doctoral degree, my terrible handwriting will be explained away by my over educated brain. Doctors are supposed to write sloppy, right? Anyway, I've never been one to color inside the lines or do things the easy or proper way. So, when Alison came into my life late in the August of 2007 (ok so technically I started Facebook stalking her about this time, but since she responded to me it was kinda like she came into my life), after spending three or four weeks adamantly refusing to define our relationship, on October 13, I proposed to her that we get married. Aparently she thought this was a good idea, or that it at least sounded interesting, because she concurred that that was in fact a great idea and we should pursue it.

So the first time I met my inlaws to be was when I sat down and told them I was going to be marrying their daughter. Yeah, I know most people don't do things that way, but given that my dad and grandpa had both met and married their wives within about 3 months and 2 weeks respectively, in a way I was just following Lawrence protocol. I figure since both dad and pops are still married after all these years, there's probably no correlation between length of engagement/knowing your spouse to be and length of marriage. After a lovely dinner (I think we had salmon), her parents suggested that I get Alison an engagement ring. Again, most people buy those BEFORE they pop the question, but how was I supposed to know I was going to ask her to marry me that weekend?

Given that we "dated" for such a brief time before getting engaged, when her parents requested we wait until Alison graduated before we got married, I figured that was a fair enough concession to make on my part. Being the open minded person I am, I knew that them city folks do things different up there :)

So, we've been engaged for 19 months now. I think Alison has had a ring on her finger for about 18 of those months :) In that time I finished an internship, finally got my B.A. and graduated with honors, started seminary, come to realize my hopes for seminary were sorely misplaced, and lived in three different places (including spending last summer living in Naperville with Alison and her parents). Alison and I have been completely goofy infatuated with each other, we have learned how to kiss (boy that was awkward at first, lot's of slobbering involved in that learning curve!), I've made her cry for the first time, we've had our first fight, we've had many many subsequent fights, we've put on winter weight and then got back on the road to being healthy again, and we've begun learning to live on very little.

One thing we have both noticed as we have been engaged is the negative attitude so many people have towards marriage. We've encountered this from just as many people within the church as we have from those outside the church or in the mindless drivel on TV like 2 1/2 "men" or everybody loves raymond. Now I'll admit, it's nine kinds of frustrating when you find yourself trying to be a good significant other and student and worker all at the same time. I've come within a breath of smashing my phone on the ground or throwing it against the wall at least twice in the last school year after a heated conversation over the text messenger.

When I look at the prospect of being married, I'm reminded of Peter's response to Jesus after a bunch of people quit following Him and Jesus asked Peter if he was going to hit the road too. Peter said, "Dude, where else is there to go? You are the way to life!" (my paraphrase). I think marriage is a lot like that. I think our society is so utterly selfish and bent on immediate gratification that there is a stereotype of the "independent" man or woman who is successful in business and cannot be hindered by being obligated to an other. Rather, this independent person is "free" to engage in sexual relationships as he or she sees fit without becoming emotionally atatched to the other person.

I guess this stereotype is great and liberating except for the fact that we have this innate, inborn desire to be known by an other (Other). And that generally in life the biggest disappointment we ever face is getting to do whatever we want or getting what we want in general. I would say it is amazing except that it ultimately creates people who have grown into materialistic, hopeless, selfish shells of what a human being has the potential to become through selfless love of an other (Other).

[Sidenote: I took a couple melatonin about half an hour ago and now it's going on 10 so this may have to be a two part post]

Over the last year and a half, I have had to make some sacrifices. I haven't played nearly as much Xbox as I used to. I lived in a place that was almost completely antithetical to everything I value in life. I've spent about three times as much as I used to spend when it was just me (turns out most people don't want to eat pinto beans for supper 5 nights a week, go figure!). In general, almost every day I have had to suspend my own selfish desires for instant gratification and put the good of Alison as an individual and our relationship as a couple above my own selfishness. You know the funny thing? This has been one of the most liberating experiences of my life! It ranks right up there with getting sober and then realizing that sobriety wasn't just tolerable, but preferably to constant innebrieation.

To wrap this up, I'm not the same person I was 19 months ago. In a lot of ways, the stereotypes are right. I don't do as much of what I used to do since I've been engaged. But that's a good thing! Without realizing it, when I got engaged I entered into a lifestyle, a way of training and disciplining myself, that has helped me to begin to move beyond the hopelessness of fulfilling my own selfish desires by putting the good of another in front of my own.

I look forward to continuing to find myself as I loose myself in this covenant called marriage. By God's grace I will become less as Christ is formed in me through the process of loving Alison.

Bicycling and The Dark Night of the Soul

I think it's cool when you get one of those mornings where it's almost foggy out but not quite there but the air is so wet you can almost taste it when you breathe it in. This morning was one of those mornings and as I was riding my bike to school I noticed that the hair on my arms was actually getting wet as I rode.

It's so nice having it finally warm up. This winter has been so long and so cold that I got to the point where I no longer expected it to be warm outside. It's like my mind erased the folder titled "t-shirt weather." Now it is warming up and I can step outside in a short sleeve shirt without being assaulted by the bitter cold wind stealing the breathe from my lungs. The funny thing is that even though it's getting warm now, I still brace myself everytime I open the door because in the back of my mind I'm expecting it to be 25 degrees outside; I can almost feel the cold air pushing against me as I step outside.

But then I walk out the door and nothing happens. There's no cold wind. Even better, instead of that bitter wind hitting me in the face I actually feel warm. For the first time in months I can be warm again without sitting in front of the heating vent.

I'm noticing that the spiritual journey works a lot like the seasons. I go through Springs and Summers where I bask in the warmth of God's presence. I see a dead, brown world turn green and fill with the life of God's presence. These times are great, there's nothing better than basking in God's presence. But innevitably winter comes. St. John of the Cross called this winter "the dark night of the soul."

For some reason God, in His infinite mercy, grace, and wisdom, retracts His presence from us from time to time. Sometimes He does this for a few weeks, sometimes for months similar to the winter season. I hear that sometimes this dark night can last for years.

The challenge of our spiritual winter is that we keep our sense of expectancy for God to act in His world. Just like I lost my expectancy that it would ever get warm again this winter and then when it did get warm I had a hard time feeling it, we can lose our sense of expectancy that God will ever act again. As God's presence is withheld from us, we begin to question whether He was ever there in the first place. We start to ask ourselves if we were diluded and had only been fooling ourselves when we felt God's presence in the past and thought we saw Him at work in our lives and the world around us.

I am just coming into the Spring after a Winter where I did not feel God's presence. In the last few weeks He has been shining His light into the darkness of my soul. I don't know exactly what I was supposed to learn from this. I suppose it has something to do with my ability to be a faithful servant while my master is in a distant land. But what I do know is that I have been amazed at the way I had lost my sense of expectancy. I had pretty much stopped looking for God to act in His world.

But anyway, Spring is here. Life is coming back into the world and things are getting busy again. The good thing about the seasons is that they are always passing. Enjoy and embrace the times of warmth and life and don't lose hope when it gets cold and everything dies. Spring is always coming.

Where William Carlos Williams Meets Zoey the Dog

So much depends
upon

A small black
Dog

Sitting next to
Me

Warming up our
Chair

IDS Blah!

I've been hittin' some hard travelin'
I thought you knowed
I've been hittin' some hard travelin'
Way down the road...

I don't think I've ever hit some hard travelin' myself. But I wonder sometimes. Maybe I have? Have I hit some hard travelin' and out of a false sense of humility I refuse to acknowledge it? Downplay it as normal travelin'?

All I know is I'm sick and tired of sitting through IDS lectures. Maybe it's small of me to bitch about it when people are starving all around the world while I sit here dicking around on the internet?

Let's all be thankful for our thrownness in this crazy world. Historicity: Making me feel better about not being content in my cushy circumstances since way before Heideggar ever articulated it!