Merry Christmas

I'm pretty sure that no one reads this blog anymore because I havent been posting regularly. However, if you happen to be surfing the net and come across this page I want to wish you and your family a Merry Christmas. Do you ever really think about what your saying when you say "merry christmas"? I had an encounter with I woman on the phone the other day who told me (yelled at me) that she was contemplating suicide then proceeded to wish me a merry christmas and hang up the phone! Of course, I called the local police and had someone dispatched to her house, but they can't watch her 24/7. This time of the year is especially difficult for a lot of people. Holidays just seem to dredge up a lot of memories of times past. Holiday's spent without loved ones that we were once so close to seems to make it that much more difficult. So this season, if you are without someone who has been close to you, be comforted and know that the God of the universe loves you and cares for your every need. He knows your grief, He has himself descended into grief. Jesus is the "reason for the season" it seems odd that we celebrate the birth of a person that was born for the purpose of dying, and that this celebration would cause others to want to die... Unfortunately, this is the reality and if you're in that place I would not try to beguile you from your grief, but just know that God loves you and that He understands and knows your pain in a more intimate way than you might think!

Fear and Loathing

Sometimes it seems as though these uncommon flashes of clarity break in upon me like a wave against the rocks, reality like a flicker of light in the darkness of my mind. The truth is… I see but am blind, I hear but am deaf. It is at these moments of brief clarity that the weight of my commission sets upon my shoulders, like Atlas I bear the burden. It’s almost as if during every other “ordinary” moment I walk around self deceived. This is frightening.
I continue with my life as if nothing has changed as a result of my calling. It’s only begun, and yet it seems like it’s been there my whole life. What exactly am I called to? There has always been a sense that something was wrong with the Church. I never knew what it was but it’s always been there plaguing me “like a splinter in my mind”… My frustration with the Church continues to haunt me. Even now this loathing almost contaminates my sermons. I’m not talking about the local expression of the body of Christ here but THE Church… I just want to see God truly glorified through an authentic expression of Christian faith and action. It’s as if the Church in the West has drifted into a consumer mentality where the pastor is like a check out clerk at a supermarket of religious ideas. I just want to scream at the top of my lungs… “The Father’s house is to be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.” But… that wouldn’t be very loving of me, or sensitive to the needs of hurting people.

The great I am

I am so busy, I am running on empty, and I am more convinced than ever that I am unfit for ministry because I am not "spiritual" enough, I am not loving enough, I am not smart enough, I am not compassionate enough, I am full of pride, I am full of ugliness, I am never going to be able to fully meet the demands placed upon my life.

I need the I AM more than ever.

p.s. sorry for the rant... I am sick right now.

surviving on borrowed capital

"What are we to do? In 1974, we Evangelicals were not ready to step into the vacuum and lead our culture to higher ground. And because the 1960’s revolution had not been around long enough to do its damage, the culture was still living on the borrowed capital of a Christian worldview and could not sense the urgency to return to the faith once for all delivered to the saints. Today, we stand at a crossroad in the American Evangelical church. Since the mid 1800s, there has never been a greater window of opportunity for us to seize the moment and, by our lives and thought, to show our culture the way forward. Now is the time for us to stop being thirty years behind the times. Now is the time for us to gather our confidence and lead…"

- J. P. Moreland


Unfortunately, this is not the sentiment of the majority of established churches in America. Modernism is in its death throws, gasping for air, and the church sits vigilant praying for a swift recovery. We as a culture stand on the brink of the greatest paradigm shift since that of the enlightenment. Consequently, this also stands as our greatest opportunity within the last several hundred years to contextualize the gospel and to redefine the ecclesiological emphasis. Instead of seeing the impending postmodern shift as a threat to existing structures, we should work to identify latent potentialities within the emerging trends. Christianity is neither modern nor postmodern it is an expression of truth which is understood existentially through personal identification with Christ. Shrouded in most systems of thought are touch points or conceptual elements which can be redeemed for the purposes of communicating the gospel. Emerging thinkers have their own exclusive set of priorities associated with interpersonal and community relations. Example: Insights from a narrative are a more effective tool in communication than a simple exclamation of propositional truth. This is not bad, it's just different. The postmodern worldview is not the enemy. True, the emphasis on the subjectivity and relativity of truth pose unique challenges. However, the dogmatic assertion and unwavering commitment to the idea of the empirical and singularly objective nature of truth can do just as much to undermine the testimony of an authentic believer. God can not be fully explained or defined or proved through experimentation and deductive reasoning. There is, and necessarily must be an element of mystery present within any systematic or biblical theology. This is no accident. God is God, and the hidden things belong to Him. As we stand gazing out at the precipice that is before us, let us work together as a community to build a bridge of communication with the culture, engaging non believers in new ways, lighting imaginations with the fire of eternal truth.

"In Him we live and move and have our being as also some of your own poets have said, 'For we are also His offspring.'" -Acts 17:28

AMEN

Pragmatism and the Unknown

"Modern man is responsible to society- HE THINKS TRUTH IS ESTABLISHED BY MAJORITY OPINION. For religious man, responsible to God, God alone determines Truth, and one should avoid judgments based on false, human criteria. God stands diametrically opposed to world. Men were false- God was Truth: an unbounded abyss separated them." ---Abraham Joshua Heschel "Passion for Truth"

It's funny to me to think about the disconnect that exists between pragmatism and faith. We as Christians (more often than not) make decisions based on what we see thus what we "know" in a tangible sense. Jonathan Swift once said that, "Vision is the art of seeing things invisible." I wonder if that's what the Bible means when it says that the people parish for lack of vision? We are not really perceiving God's will and acting upon what we feel He is calling us to do. We've lost our vision, we've lost our purpose, we daily parish... Truth, purpose, direction, are "God things" not "man things". He defines reality and this is His world. This is the beginning of wisdom, the fear of God. The understanding that all is His and in order for us to be fulfilled we need to get with the program! So often, we make choices which we think will lead us to "safe" conclusions. What ever happened to faith? Be still, listen to that soft still voice and know...

Sympathy for the Devil?

Martin Luther once noted that, “Satan is God’s Devil…” I think he had it right. When we look at scripture we find than Lucifer is never working outside the will of God. People often have a dualistic view of life, by that I mean that they see God as being on one side and Satan on the other locked in a battle for the souls of men. I guess we can probably come to this conclusion through a cursory examination of scripture. However, when we look at what the Bible says with a little more scrutiny we find that God is sovereign, and that Satan is limited. The authority of the enemy is quite limited in fact. In the book of Job we find that Lucifer must be given permission by God to test Job. In fact Jesus made mention of Satan’s limitations when he said to Peter, “Satan has requested to sift you like wheat…” Are we locked in a battle with a powerful enemy? The answer is yes… However, the victorious outcome has been guaranteed with Jesus’ words, “it is finished”.

The Greatest Drama Ever Staged by: Dorothy Sayers

Official Christianity, of late years, has been having what is known as a bad press. We are constantly assured that the churches are empty because preachers insist too much upon doctrine—dull dogma as people call it. The fact is the precise opposite. It is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness. The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man—and the dogma is the drama.

That drama is summarized quite clearly in the creeds of the Church, and if we think it dull it is because we either have never really read those amazing documents or have recited them so often and so mechanically as to have lost all sense of their meaning. The plot pivots upon a single character, and the whole action is the answer to a single central problem: What think ye of Christ? Before we adopt any of the unofficial solutions (some of which are indeed excessively dull)—before we dismiss Christ as a myth, an idealist demagogue, a liar, or a lunatic—it will do no harm to find out what the creeds really say about him. What does the Church think of Christ?

The Church’s answer is categorical and uncompromising and it is this: That Jesus Bar-Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth, was in fact and in truth, and in the most exact and literal sense of the words, the God “by whom all things were made.” His body and brain were those of a common man; his personality was the personality of God, so far as that personality could be expressed in human terms. He was not a kind of demon pretending to be human; he was in every respect a genuine living man. He was not merely a man so good as to be “like God”; he was God.

Now, this is not just a pious commonplace; it is not commonplace at all. For what it means is this, among other things: that, for whatever reason, God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—he [God] had the honesty and the courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace, and thought it was worthwhile.

Christianity is, of course, not the only religion that has found the best explanation of human life in the idea of an incarnate and suffering god. The Egyptian Osiris died and rose again; Aeschylus in his play, The Eumenides, reconciled man to God by the theory of a suffering Zeus. But in most theologies, the god is supposed to have suffered and died in some remote and mythical period of prehistory. The Christian story, on the other hand, starts off briskly in St. Matthew’s account with a place and a date: “When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the King.” St. Luke, still more practically and prosaically, pins the thing down by a reference to a piece of government finance. God, he says, was made man in the year when Caesar Augustus was taking a census in connection with a scheme of taxation. Similarly, we might date an event by saying that it took place in the year that Great Britain went off the gold standard. About thirty-three years later (we are informed), God was executed, for being a political nuisance, “under Pontius Pilate”—much as we might say, “when Mr. Johnson-Hicks was Home Secretary.” It is as definite and concrete as all that.

Possibly we might prefer not to take this tale too seriously—there are disquieting points about it. Here we had a man of divine character walking and talking among us—and what did we find to do with him? The common people, indeed, “heard him gladly”; but our leading authorities in church and state considered that he talked too much and uttered too many disconcerting truths. So we bribed one of his friends to hand him over quietly to the police, and we tried him on a rather vague charge of creating a disturbance, and had him publicly flogged and hanged on the common gallows, “thanking God we were rid of a knave.” All this was not very creditable to us, even if he was (as many people thought and think) only a harmless, crazy preacher. But if the Church is right about him, it was more discreditable still, for the man we hanged was God Almighty. So that is the outline of the official story—the tale of the time when God was the underdog and got beaten, when he submitted to the conditions he had laid down and became a man like the men he had made, and the men he had made broke him and killed him. This is the dogma we find so dull—this terrifying drama of which God is the victim and hero.

If this is dull, then what, in Heaven’s name, is worthy to be called exciting? The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore—on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him “meek and mild,” and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies. To those who knew him, however, he in no way suggests a milk-and-water person; they objected to him as a dangerous firebrand.

True, he was tender to the unfortunate, patient with honest inquirers, and humble before heaven; but he insulted respectable clergymen by calling them hypocrites. He referred to King Herod as “that fox”; he went to parties in disreputable company and was looked upon as a “gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners”; he assaulted indignant tradesmen and threw them and their belongings out of the temple; he drove a coach-and-horses through a number of sacrosanct and hoary regulations; he cured diseases by any means that came handy with a shocking casualness in the matter of other people’s pigs and property; he showed no proper deference for wealth or social position; when confronted with neat dialectical traps, he displayed a paradoxical humor that affronted serious-minded people, and he retorted by asking disagreeably searching questions that could not be answered by rule of thumb.

He was emphatically not a dull man in his human lifetime, and if he was God, there can be nothing dull about God either. But he had “a daily beauty in his life that made us ugly,” and officialdom felt that the established order of things would be more secure without him. So they did away with God in the name of peace and quietness.

“And the third day he rose again.” What are we to make of this? One thing is certain: if he were God and nothing else, his immortality means nothing to us; if he was man and no more, his death is no more important than yours or mine. But if he really was both God and man, then when the man Jesus died, God died too; and when the God Jesus rose from the dead, man rose too, because they were one and the same person. The Church binds us to no theory about the exact composition of Christ’s resurrection body. A body of some kind there had to be, since man cannot perceive the Infinite otherwise than in terms of space and time. It may have been made from the same elements as the body that disappeared so strangely from the guarded tomb, but it was not that old, limited mortal body, though it was recognizably like it. In any case, those who saw the risen Christ remained persuaded that life was worth living and death a triviality—an attitude curiously unlike that of the modern defeatist, who is firmly persuaded that life is a disaster and death (rather inconsistently) a major catastrophe.

Now, nobody is compelled to believe a single word of this remarkable story. God (says the Church) has created us perfectly free to disbelieve in him as much as we choose. If we do disbelieve, then he and we must take the consequences in a world ruled by cause and effect. The Church says further, that man did, in fact, disbelieve, and that God did, in fact, take the consequences. At the same, if we are going to disbelieve a thing, it seems on the whole to be desirable that we should first find out what, exactly, we are disbelieving. Very well, then: “The right faith is, that we believe that Jesus Christ is God and man, perfect God and perfect man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting. Who, although he be God and man, yet is he not two, but one Christ.” There is the essential doctrine, of which the whole elaborate structure of Christian faith and morals is only the logical consequence.

Now, we may call that doctrine exhilarating, or we may call it devastating; we may call it revelation, or we may call it rubbish; but if we call it dull, then words have no meaning at all. That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God, find him a better man than himself, is an astonishing drama indeed. Any journalist, hearing of it for the first time, would recognize it as news; those who did hear it for the first time actually called it news, and good news at that; though we are likely to forget that the word Gospel ever meant anything so sensational.

Perhaps the drama is played out now, and Jesus is safely dead and buried. Perhaps. It is ironical and entertaining to consider that at least once in the world’s history those words might have been spoken with complete conviction, and that was upon the eve of the Resurrection.

Take me out to the ball game

Saturday June 16th I made the trip to New England baseball “Mecca”. I had the opportunity to attend a Boston Red Sox game. It was really a Father’s Day gift to my Grandfather, he’s always wanted to go to a Sox game. Aside from dealing with the traffic, “cultural detours” (wrong turns), and crazy Massachusetts drivers, I had a really good time. As I sat and watched the game something interesting also occurred to me… I was at church! I wasn’t really at church in any kind of traditional sense of the word but Fenway Park was clearly a place of worship. Think about it, the people in that stadium are there to worship. They have their own praise songs. They even have a fellowship time (7th inning stretch). I realized something else as I sat and watched… There are those who attend games, and then there are those who are disciples of the game. I’m not really a baseball fan, in fact my wife had gone out to by me a Boston cap a couple days before the game so I would have something on my noodle. I looked (at least on the outside) very much the same as everyone else who was there. All the while I felt disconnected because on the inside I knew that I wasn’t a follower… I was simply a spectator! This got me thinking about the Christian church. How many of us are spectators, and how many are truly followers, disciples of Jesus Christ engaged in His mission to reach the world with the good news? Part of me wants to believe that we are fulfilling the great commission, but when I step back and see the condition of the Church in the West, it’s like I hear God say to me, “Can these bones live”? The church is dying in the West because she cares more about the institution than the organism. She is more concerned to set up a monument than to be part of a movement. The organizational structure has become more important than the life giving, grace living community. Pray God that the Holy Spirit would be poured out upon this State, and this Nation that these dry bones would stand and be clothed in flesh once again. Amen

Brief Overview of Our Enemies Strategic Plan

As I survey the landscape of Western “Churchianity” several things seem to stand out. Things like pride, materialism, apathy, divorce, etc. have become extremely prevalent within the body of Christ (even normal). However, these I believe are symptoms of a larger issue. To address something like apathy for example would be like treating a cancer patient with Tylenol because they have aches and pains, and ignoring the tumor which is the root problem. The enemies most effective attacks do not come from the outside but from within. I believe the real malignancy is our loss of identity as Sons of God “saved by grace alone”. This issue is so critical because it deals with the recognition of the degree of depravity with which humanity has been cursed. When people understand that they are indeed sinners who are worthy of eternal punishment and torment, they intrinsically understand the value of God’s grace and mercy. When we forget who we are in Christ Jesus (and who we were outside of Him) apathy, pride, materialism etc. become part of the “Christian” experience. The enemy whispers in our ear that we “chose” God, and that He’s pretty lucky to have us. The truth is that it’s not that we loved God but that He first loved us… We need revival, but it cannot be a revival of legalism and behavior management. We must have revival centered on grace, where our realization of the LOVE of God moves us to action. The church has become stunted and rendered impotent because of her desire to be “free”. Her longing for independence has brought her into bondage to the outside culture. Gone by are the days when the church could speak from a position of authority. We have squandered our inheritance on a bowl of potage. We have left our first love, neither hot or cold we risk being vomited from the Lord’s mouth. All of this because we love autonomy more than grace, we want to believe that we are saved of our own choosing. If only we grasped a fraction of the truth.
There are a number of different ways the enemy works to achieve this end. Probably one of the most effective ways to accomplish this result is through distraction. For example, instead of putting the cross at the center of our theology, we might replace it with eschatology (study of the end times). This subtle invitation to explore “the deeper” things of Christianity cause us to lose focus on the most important aspects of faith. This isn’t to say that doing a study on end times is a bad thing, but I know of people who are consumed with it and they don’t know anything more about when Jesus is coming back than when they first started the “study”. This kind of obsession is a waste of time and derailment of purpose. Our objective as believers is to make disciples of all nations, not to devise charts which date the arrival of Antichrist.
Are you abiding in Christ and being conformed to his image? Is there anything in your life which distracts you from your mission to make disciples? Do you recognize your own sinfulness apart from Jesus? The enemy is subtle! We are sent out as sheep among wolves, be as wise as a serpent but as gentle as a dove.

A More Excellent Way!

I actually got an opportunity to watch some t.v. the other day. As I was flipping through the channels I came to a Christian television station which was airing a commercial that caught my attention. The advertisement paraded image after image of children in third world countries living in desperate and poverty stricken circumstances. As this pictorial procession marched by before my eyes, I heard a woman’s voice petitioning me for money to help save these starving children. In a compelling and compassionate voice she told me that giving money to their ministry was a “safe, and simple way of making a difference in the world.” The more I thought about her words, the more I understood the brilliance of the marketing executives who wrote that dialogue. Yes, that one line is a stroke of genius. The executives understand “western Christianity”. You see, many Christians (particularly those living in the U.S.) value comfort and simplicity over sacrifice and mission. We in the west want to know that “we’re doing our part to make the world a better place.” Of course, we don’t really want it to cost us anything. Rather than being a missionary we would prefer to send money. Rather than complicating our lives and inconveniencing ourselves for Christ we prefer to keep things simple. We don’t REALLY want to sacrifice. I mean, if we had to make Jesus’ mission a priority then he might ask us to do something crazy like change vocation, and that might mean I won’t be able to afford that huge S.U.V. that costs about $300/day to gas up. It means that we might not be able to buy our “dream house”; you know the one… with the white picket fence. Oh my goodness, Jesus might just ask us to drop our nets and come follow him. Imagine that! But Jesus, what about my health benefits? I can see it now, Jesus approaching Peter and Andrew as they’re fishing out on Galilee, “Hey guys, come follow me. I’ll make you fishers of men. By the way, don’t worry you’ll have a great 401k with a company match program and competitive pay. It’ll be simple, and safe. You guys will have a great time!” I don’t think so.

Whoever does not take up his cross and come after me may not be my disciple. –Luke 14:26

Jesus calls us to be disciples and to make disciples. The problem is that we have too many “Christians” and not enough disciples. Now, I’m not picking on ministries that support kids in third world countries. I have actually supported a little girl name Payel in India for a few years now. I am though criticizing the mindset that says, “I would rather be comfortable than to advance to gospel.” Jesus is radical. He’s more than just a proposition, He’s a person. He is the express image of God. He has revealed the heart of God to us in his personhood. Jesus has shown us that God is a missionary and so are we. In fact, the centerpiece of God’s strategic plan for the advancement of His Kingdom is the person of Jesus Christ. If we are in Christ (as we should be) then we are NECESSARILY on mission with him! The bottom line: A loving and true commitment to Christ and His Kingdom requires humility, servitude, and obedience all of which demand sacrifice.

Nouminous

When desperate times and measures pass, hope goes in search for itself...
The emperor exposed proffers naked mass, THE hound breathes down my neck.

Symbol and icon exalted… acclaimed, in awe of the shadow but never the name.

Disconnected a chasm between heart and head, "what is truth"?
A desire for One who will stand in my stead, where is He?

Clothed in a raiment of light and of love, His blessed appearance a gift from above…

"Here am I, send me".

Mysterium Tremendum

A quivering lip, and tear stained face… I can't breathe...

Time and place has fled away… I can see.


Wrapped in light, a perfect blaze.

Holy, righteous and faultless face.


"Jesus"… His name exhaled in desperation.

Eyes trained fast in adulation.


The Spirit flows forth and like a dove,

Falls… Cascading from above.


Stop! I can't breathe.

Cotton Candy Christianity

I guess I shouldn't really be shocked, but to a degree I still am when I here what passes for authentic Christian faith in popular thinking. There have in fact been poles done which show that the majority of people questioned cannot even name the titles of the four gospels. The absurdity doesn't end there, many people when asked about Sodom and Gomorrah thought that they were a married couple! I note the results of the recent pole as an example of the Biblical illiteracy that exists now within our culture. You may be saying to yourself, "those are people who are non-believers, or not regular church goers." You would be wrong! These same results can be found within the ranks of those who call themselves Christians. What's even more concerning to me is the fact that faith in many circles has been reduced down to either blind belief, or mental ascent. I have a real problem with people to do this kind of reductionism to Christianity because they betray a bias in the direction of either fideism or intellectualism not taking into account the holistic nature of Christ's message. The one factor that either polarity lacks is the centrality of Christ within their theological framework. The fideist has faith in faith, and the intellectual has faith in the mind. I call this reductionism "Cotton Candy Christianity". It usually tastes good when you roll it around on the palate but it will never satisfy, or provide nourishment. It's sad really many of these so called believers, even those who grew up in the church fall away and end up wholesale atheist/agnostics pursuing sexual sin, and all different forms of immorality as if these things were the very life blood of their existence. I'm not passing judgment, I know right now you probably think I am, but the reason I understand this problem is because I have experienced it myself. When religion, pursuit of knowledge, eschatology, or any other thing other than the cross of Christ was put at the center of my life I would… and still do falter. Jesus must be both Savior and Lord. You can't have Him as one and not the other. Jesus said, "By their fruits you will know them." And, "If you love me obey my commands." Jesus doesn't just come and live inside of you and then magically poof you are a perfect person. If you started out in the Christian life and had that expectation, sorry that's not how it works. 2 Cor. 5:17 says that we are new creatures in Christ and that everything becomes new. You may be asking yourself, "how does that happen?" Jesus said in John 15 that He is the true vine and only if we abide in Him will we bear fruit. We are told that if we do not abide in Christ then we are cut off and thrown into the fire. This possibility doesn't sound very exciting. I guess there's a choice… You can either keep eating the cotton candy thinking you're all right or you can submit to Christ as Lord. If you don't believe me, keep living that carnal lifestyle and trying to "believe" in Jesus at the same time and see what happens. A man can't serve two masters.

CURE FOR DEATH FOUND !!! WORLD REJECTS TREATMENT

What is it about Jesus that offends people so much? Seriously, why do folks get so bent out of shape when his name is used during the course of a conversation? Is it because of his great love, compassion, or mercy? Maybe it is because of the awesome miracles he performed like curing people of leprosy? Honestly, I think a lot of the time it has more to do with those who represent him than anything.

1 Corinthians 15:54-57 states:
But when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting? The sting of death is sin; and the power of sin is the law: but thanks be to God, who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

As Christians we have a tremendous responsibility and opportunity to communicate the most important and life giving message that could ever be expressed. So often though, we get caught up in our own agendas and forget that there is a dying world out there in need of the gospel. We frequently take for granted the message that we carry as ambassadors and all the while the world is watching us and seeing a disconnection in what we “believe” and the way we live our lives. This should not be so! If we are followers of the way, then there should be a noticeable difference in the way we carry ourselves and the way the world acts.
Death has not yet been swallowed up in victory, but “it is finished”. The key to eternal life is in your hand… Will you pass it on?

Sex, Love, and the Rock That Rolled

We in America are constantly bombarded by images of sex. It's true, it seems that wherever you look there it is. Whether you're watching T.V. or reading a magazine it seems inevitable you will encounter this imagery. The other day someone that I work with was talking about the church and specifically how the church views sex. I found it interesting that their perspective on the matter was quite negative. I wasn't all together shocked to be honest. I quickly responded to this person by reminding them that God invented sex, and quite frankly I thought that He knew what He was doing when He did. I also mentioned that when God told Adam and Eve to go forth and multiply, that I didn't think this multiplication happened by osmosis. There were a few chuckles after my comments but, I use this illustration to make a point. I don't think the church as a whole does a very good job at emphasizing the positive. We seem however, to have no problems pointing out the negatives. It's almost like the subject of sex is too controversial. Let's be real for a second. If you've ever read the Bible you know it's not rated "G" material. Why then do church leaders continue to insist on trying to "protect" people from reality? I have a theory of course. I think it has something to do with a Gnostic influence that exists within the church. Gnosticism is basically a system of thought which disdains the physical in deference to a higher level of spiritual existence. Basically, someone who holds to a Gnostic thought process looks at the body as a cage of the spirit. They believe that the spirit of a person is the only thing of enduring value. My Bible says that God will resurrect the physical body, just as Christ rose from the tomb on the third day. Jesus is supposed to be the "first fruits" of the resurrection. This means that because He rose, we can have confidence that we will also raise on the last day in triumph over death, and the grave. Jesus said He came to give us life to the fullest. My pastor frequently muses that after some people die and go to heaven God will say to them, "I wish you had a better time down there." The bottom line is that we are a whole being, made of the physical and spiritual. The book of Genesis (first book in the Bible) talks about when God created Adam He breathed the breath of life into him, and Adam became a living soul "nephesh". This Hebrew word "nephesh" has in view a unity of body and spirit. I think it would be inappropriate of us to be schizophrenic in our view of life by thinking of sex as a simple fleshly act. We should view sex more holistically. The Bible says that when men and women are joined together in marriage they become one flesh. This is both a physical and a spiritual union. We can be naked and not ashamed. (This is a bonus given I've gained about 30 lbs in the last year or so). There is something mysterious about the act almost mystical. Sex tells us something about God, about the intimacy He desires with His bride the Church. He wants us to be naked with Him and unashamed, bold and yet contrite, submissive to Him as our Husband. Obviously, God has put some basic "rules" in place to protect us, and we should be responsible with how we use this gift. So, the next time you hear some fundamentalist numb nut going on about how bad sex is, ask him how he thought he arrived on this planet.

Helluva Thought

I have most recently been confronted with the concept of Hell through a class I am currently teaching on end times entitled "Thy Kingdom Come". There are no other Christian doctrines which I would more happily reject than the doctrines of Hell and eternal suffering. That being said, I must also affirm their reality on the basis of scripture rather than reject it on the basis of emotion or human understanding. It seems that the problem of Hell is analogous to the problem of evil in that evil is basically parasitic and its very existence relies upon the existence of absolute goodness, Hell's existence relies upon the necessity of perfection of being and of the existence of a heavenly state. There can literally be no Hell without the existence of Heaven. Therefore, because the existence of evil is paradoxical than we would anticipate that evils natural consequence Hell also be paradoxical. Much imagery has been evoked in the description of Hell ie. fire, worms that never die, outer darkness, a garbage dump, etc. Whether some of these or all of these images are literal to any extent is not my primary concern. However, they do speak to our imaginations. They speak of torment, despair, and hopelessness. I personally have never visited Hell so I really can't say with any certainty what it is like, but my sense is that it is like nothing. I'm speaking from primarily a philosophical standpoint. However, I think that Hell is a place that isn't, wherein everything that is nothing… "is". If using the standard definition of Heaven as an eternal state of perfect relationship, community, and being than by contrast Hell must be existence without being, a loss of identity, sense of community, and even erosion of personhood. It's interesting that oftentimes people use the existence of Hell as an excuse to disbelieve in the existence of God. People will claim that a good God cannot exist because he would not torture His creation in a place like Hell especially if He were "all powerful". While it is true that the Christian God is good, I would suggest that it is also true that Hell exists because He is perfect in love… It is only because God loves that He has granted His creation a degree of autonomy. "I have set before you life and death…" Deut. 30:15 We also understand God's justice to be perfect. A justice which is by the way necessary for the leveling and redemption of humanity. Without love there could be no freedom, and without freedom no diversity of thought. The very diversity that is so valued by society is birthed forth from God's common grace. Granted, the doctrine of Hell is difficult to reconcile with our understanding of God, but it is never the less necessary. It's been said that the height of the mountain is measured by the depth of its valley. Hell is a deep valley, and Heaven… well, nothing compares. Paradox... the aesthetic of the Christian faith. Uncertainty, mystery, and beauty, the mingling of subjective and objective, empirical and abstract… This is where God lives.