3 Books

Mrs. Mattingly's Miracle, by Nancy Lusignan Schultz
The King Jesus Gospel, by Scot McKnight
Gospel: Recovering the Power that Made Christianity Revolutionary, by J. D. Greear

No, I have not abandoned the Fandango.  But things have changed a little and I expect this is going to become, at best, a once-a-week blog.  I'm going to try to do something reasonably substantive on the weekends.

I'll report in on things of interest to me.  I'll try to save up my pearls of wisdom from throughout the week (i.e., never leave your bike out in the rain!).  I think this will work best for me, and if on occasion I have the opportunity to post something during the week, all the better.

Did you see this from Ben Sternke? No Mission without the Gospel of the Kingdom.  Important insight.  The good news that Jesus preached, right from the beginning, had all to do with the kingdom, which had come near in him.  Had become available, that is, in and through him. It is not about our missions, but about God's, which is a mention to reign over his creation through Christ.  If you shortchange the good news about the kingdom of God (God's reign), then you will hinder our understanding of Christ, because Jesus and his kingdom are inseparable.

I like reading Ben's stuff, by the way.  Good missional blogger.

I'm getting to know my mates at Christ Fellowship.  We hung out yesterday at an apple orchard, listening to bluegrass music.  Okay, maybe they're just humoring me, but I don't know many people that will actually come near bluegrass music . . . so that's cool!

Anyway, yeah, Christ Fellowship.  I'm beginning to think of it as more than an idea in the mind of one earnest church planter, but something real.

Okay, I need to get going.  So the deal is, one post per week.  I'll try to make it reasonably interesting!

God is the Gospel

Reading John Piper's God is the Gospel, which I downloaded to my Nookie (yes, that's what my disrespecting friends keep calling it).  Anyway, wow.  It looks like a really good book.  Here's a snip:

The critical question for our generation--and for every generation--is this: If you could have heaven,  with no sickness, and with all the friends you ever had on earth, and all the food you ever liked, and all the leisure activities you ever enjoyed, and all the natural beauties you ever saw, all the physical pleasures you ever tasted, and no human conflict or any natural disasters, could you be satisfied with heaven, if Christ were not there.

You can see where he's going with this.  If God himself is not the highest pleasure, the greatest gift, in your own mind, then you will seek your satisfaction in something else.  And Piper follows up with the following word for preachers:

And the question for Christian leaders is: Do we preach and teach and lead in such a way that people are prepared to hear that question [above] and answer with a resounding No?

Yeah, questions worth asking.  I'm going to try to come around here a little more often and share more from this book.  

I feel an obligation to say something in this space every now and then, even though I am no longer much of a blogger.  So it's going to be mostly music for the time being.  I've been listening to a Madeline  Peyroux CD lately, on which she does a beautiful little song called "I'll Look Around,"  which I suppose was made famous by Billie Holiday.  First, Madeline's version, then Billie's.  Enjoy.

Music Monday

September Poem: The Ride

   “This day is not replicable.” Abraham Schechter

Riding my bike up 77, past the neat stables

of the Equestrian School, noticing how

the great chestnut-colored horses

lazy and gentle

delicately munch the grass-tips, mashing

and chewing,

and then on over two hills to the playing-fields on the Cape,

and getting off to run some at the track

and watching a little dachshund

chasing the seagulls from the soccer field,

scampering, ears flapping,

then riding again, up over Old Orchard House Road

and past the stately homes set back

among stone walls and chestnut trees,

and the thorny shells of the fallen chestnuts

crackling under my humming tires,

And oh the flickering glimpses of sea and sea-mist

as I climbed the winding hills

and the long meadows and the pale sun

and the sounding of the horns from the two lighthouses,

yes, and the little startled goldfinches

bursting from hedgerows and then diving

back in, and then horses again,

and the not unwelcome odor

of manure, and then

on to the park by the lighthouse

and stopping to rest on the rocks with the sea crashing,

and out on the water the fishing boats

chugging home, and then, oh,

the sad mysterious sight

of a great blue heron lying dead,

sprawled in the grass,

and on my mind all day were long thoughts

of my old friend, Jan, who'd died

with all her children

and her grandchildren gathered to her,

and them singing the old hymns and thanking God

for the great and lasting gift of her life

and all the many years

of her valiant love,

and so, back on the bike again and home,

struggling a little and tired I was,

racing the sun, knowing now

the light wouldn't last,

but not unhappy.

Scattered Thoughts on Labor Day

1. I like the new Blogger interface. Very clean and easy on the eye.

 2. I've had a long weekend spent mostly alone, since m'lady has gone off to visit her sister. Some chores done, a nice evening bike-ride, a good movie, a lot of reading. I've had a very nice relaxing time.

 3. The movie was Preston Sturges' Hail the Conquering Hero. I've now seen five Sturges films and have a couple more on my to-watch list. Sturges is a recent discovery for me, and I think he's one of Hollywood's best directors and writers ever.

 4. I'm listening to a LocalGrass podcast as I write.

 5. This weekend I began reading Thornton Wilder's The Eighth Day. This novel may not constitute a forgotten book, but it is certainly a neglected one. I'm only about a hundred pages in, but I think it's pretty amazing. Starting on page 106, Wilder summarizes what it means to be a "man of faith." He says that men of faith are "mostly invisible."

You brushed shoulders with a man of faith in the crowd yesterday; a woman of faith sold you a pair of gloves. Their principal characteristics do not tend to render them conspicuous. Only from time to time one or other of them is propelled by circumstance into becoming visible--blindingly visible. They tend their flocks in Donremy; they pursue an obscure law practice in New Salem, Illinois. They are not afraid; they are not self-regarding; they are constantly nourished by astonishment and wonder in life itself. They are not interesting. They lack those traits--our bosom companions--that so strongly engage our interest: aggression, the dominating will, envy, destructiveness and self-destructiveness. No pathos hovers about them. Try as hard as you like, you cannot see them as subjects of tragedy.

And this:

We did not chose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind. We did not choose our parents, color, sex, health, or endowments. Barriers and prison walls surround us and those about us--everywhere, inner and outer impediments. These men and women [of faith] with the aid of observation and memory early encompass a large landscape. They know themselves, but their self is not the only window through which they view their existence. They are certain that one small part of what is given us is free. They explore daily the exercise of freedom. Their eyes are on the future. When the evil hour comes, they hold. They save cities--or, having failed, their example saves other cities after their death. They confront injustice. They assemble and inspirit the despairing.

That's great stuff. Makes you think. I've been a Wilder-fan since I read Our Town in high school, and a couple of years back I read many of his other plays, which have the same startling qualities. I recommend.

 6. OK, what am I going to do today, this last day of my long (but not lost) weekend. Make some killer potato salad for a cookout Wednesday night. Go for a bike-ride/run (if the weather holds). Read. Maybe try to write a poem.

 7. I'm meeting my friend Abraham for coffee tomorrow morning. Abraham blogs meditatively at La Vie Graphite. Something he said in his most recent post: "This day cannot be replicated." I'm thinking the poem I write today will begin with that thought.

 8. Two of my musical heroes are Eric Clapton and Wynton Marsalis. Now I find that they've been collaborating! Here's a sample:

I found following quotation from N. T. Wright's After You Believe over at Ted Gossard's blog.  I think it's profoundly accurate.

Is it paradoxical to say that cultivating virtue is a matter of looking away from yourself? If so, the paradox is only apparent, not real. Of course morality must take root deep within the individual. To insist on that, as virtue does, is to insist that it is neither an externally imposed rule, nor a calculation of consequences that could in principle have been done by a computer, nor a matter of discovering what is in the depths of one’s heart and being true to it. But if “morality” ends up coming to its focal point in faith, hope, and love, then–though it will spring from deep within–its actual focal point is outside the self and in the God and the neighbor who are being loved, in the God who is the object of faith and hope and the neighbor who is to be seen, and loved, in the light of that faith and that hope. Or, to put it another way: at this point, even the words “faith,” “hope,” and “love” can let us down. The point of all three is not “Look, here are three qualities I’m developing in myself.” To say that of faith, hope, and love is to perform a self-contradiction. All three, themselves gifts from God, point away from ourselves and outward: faith, toward God and his action in Jesus Christ; hope, toward God’s future; love, toward both God and our neighbor.

Mark 6

This morning I read the passage in Mark, the sixth chapter, where Jesus walks on the water. His disciples were struggling in the boat, trying just to keep above water, and when they see Jesus passing them, walking on the surface of the waves, their first thought is that it must be some sort of ghost or apparition.

The reason they think that, Mark tells us, is that their hearts here hardened. That's pretty shocking I think. These same disciples had just recently returned from their first experimental missionary journey, where they'd healed people and cast out demons in the name of Jesus. See, demons (demons!) were compelled to obey them just as they'd obeyed Jesus. How thrilling that must have been.

And then, no sooner do they get back from these missional excursions than they watch Jesus multiply a few loaves of bread and a few fish so as to feed thousands of hungry people. It's just after this that they find themselves nearly swamped in their little boat, crossing the Sea of Galilee in a little boat at night, without Jesus.

That "without Jesus" part is important. On another of their frequent crossings of this same lake, this time with Jesus on board, they had been similarly threatened by a sudden storm, and had seen Jesus (who'd been trying to sleep until the terrified disciples woke him up) command the wind and waves to be still.

 But see, the difference now is, Jesus is not with them. They'd left him behind, at his insistence, and now they are going down, with no one to save them this time. And their hearts are hardened.

These were ordinary men, these twelve. I don't think Judas, for example, was really all that different from Peter, and neither one of them was all that different from you and me. The Bible refers to hardness of heart as a kind of inability to believe in God or recognize him for whom he and what he is. Hardness of heart flickers in us like sheet lightning in the summer. I mean, it happens. We are prone to it.

And the evidence is right here, in this frail boat on a stormy sea, filled with 12 deeply distressed apostles ("sent ones"). How quickly our hearts go from soft to hard, from faith to cynicism. This Jesus, isn't he just the carpenter's son? This Jesus, maybe he does these magic tricks by the power of Beelzebul! Or this figure walking on the waves, it certainly looks like Jesus, but it must be a ghost. A sign of our impending deaths. We're going down!

The issue throughout Mark's account is just this issue of recognition.  Who is Jesus?  Do we recognize him for who he is.  Because if we don't, it's because of hardened hearts.

Jesus came to a hard-hearted world when it was almost too late and he said, let me show you what life will be like in the kingdom of God. It will be strikingly devoted to mercy, as I am. Here's let me show you once again that I have the power to save! And we see it, and then later, an hour later, or a day, under the influence of the latest distress, our hearts return to their familiar state of being.

We are not better men than the twelve. We are not braver or more faithful or more consistent. We are not, generally speaking, models of faith. Anyway, a model is essentially not what we need.  If that were so, the disciples would have had no problem at all.  What they needed, and what we need, is One who has the power to work in us from within.