Who died and left you judge?

I've blogged before about how I don't really watch TV anymore, which I only mention here to explain why, on a recent flight to Alberta, I spent almost the full four hours staring blankly at that tiny little screen on the back of the seat in front of me. I just wanted to see what's been happening in TV land since I last watched.

So I watched a show about some dancers who think they can dance, but find out from three well-dressed and articulate judges who know better, that they really can't in the end.

A show where people who sing ballads or juggle flaming chainsaws or some such stand under the scrutiny of their fellow Americans so that three discerning judges can tell them if their nation has any talent after all.

And a show about some people who think they know what to wear, but find out from well-meaning experts that, when it's all said and done, they don't really.

And I have to say: four hours later, I left the plane feeling really judged. Really. I can't dance anywhere near as well as the worst of those dancers who thought they could; and if they can't then where does that leave me? And I sing way worse than that guy who just got "x"ed off the stage; and if he sucks, then how long would I have lasted? I thought I knew what to wear, too, but now I'm not so sure, because I sure don't dress as sharp as that guy. And, of course, I use none of the gadgets, products, services or media that any of those 30-second narratives peppered between shows kept insisting I needed if I wanted to fit in.

For a fleeting flashback of a moment, I felt like I was in junior high all over again, standing, like I always did, in the wrong jeans with the wrong coloured school bag on the wrong side of the hall. I almost slunk off the plane.

But today, having recovered from all the gawking and name calling and finger-pointing, I'm left wondering: does our media-bombarded world walk collectively under a looming shadow of judgment like this all the time? Is this why shows like these are so popular after all, because they confirm for us what we always suspected about ourselves anyways: no one's good enough, but if I'm not, then at least I know they aren't either.

Do we judge because we feel judged?

But I'm also wondering about Romans 8:34. There Paul asks a question I always thought was little more than a rhetorical lead-in to the gospel, but after four hours of reality TV I'm hearing with new ears.

"Who is the one who condemns?"

Because if "reality TV" is a glimpse of anything real at all, then it's a glimpse of that system of social condemnation that we all participate in, and stand under, and perpetuate, and that is, perhaps, as old as civilization itself.

And that's where Paul's answer shines out as the Good News it really is. There really is only one who's in any position to condemn, because only he stands apart from this whole system of social condemnation, and thus is himself the only Righteous Judge: Christ Jesus.

And as Paul reminds us, the Good News is that this Judge has already passed his judgement on us. The verdict is delivered: in the cross we are found guilty of the worst godlessness and at the same time loved beyond all reckoning ("Forgive them Father they know not what they do" is a judgment on our ignorance as much as it is a plea for our forgiveness.) And in his resurrection victory over sin and death, Jesus judges all our hypocrisies and self-judgments and condemnation of others as the idolatrous systems of human power that they really are, unable to speak the final word on the value of human life.

In that perfect judgment he sets us free from the glare of those televised judges who stare us down from their benches on national TV, or where ever else their eyes are watching. He sets us finally free to love our neighbours as ourselves, knowing that we ourselves have already been judged and claimed by the love of God, and no power on heaven or earth can speak a word of judgment to the contrary.

Happy Birthday Mr. Hopkins

Today is Gerard Manley Hopkins's birthday. I've written before about my deep appreciation for the poetry of this Jesuit priest: like a pint of Guinness for the soul, maybe.

He has this short poem called "Pied Beauty." Maybe the only poem where you could say something like "I read it with the ears of my eyes, and my heart heard what my imagination saw..." and not feel totally ridiculous.

See for yourself:

Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:
Práise hím.

Not that I feel I ever could, or should add anything to that, but I while ago I wrote a little ditty based on the themes of this poem. It's really not much, but in celebration of the 166th birthday of my favorite poet, I thought I'd share it here. It goes like this:



And while I'm at it, I thought I'd re-post a song I'd posted before based on another Hopkins poem: Windhover.

And while I'm still at it, here's a poem I wrote about 6 years ago or so, in response to his beautiful and arresting sonnet #45, "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day."

Logos

O! to be pierced in the soul with words, their nails burning.
Pierced hands and feet, pinned body driven down against the thought,
the bright stab of the shining logos touching to the very heart
and letting flow the mingled blood and water of my yearning.
Encompassing my brow within the twisted knot of thorny verse
to beat, break, bruise but balm my crown, let stream the wish,
your ringing, swinging phrase at once can flay and salve my flesh,
and lift against my lips a vinegar to slake and hone my thirst.

See! There! Look! Led by the heart, you've held me by the ear
brought to the root of the triumphant tree on gleaming wings.
Ah! There! In the bubble of my passion, in you passion, springs
as flotsam in the flowing fountain of His passion, pure
haloes, light, and streaming blood, doves, bells, stars and other holy things:
To praise the Word that that was the first, my broken word now sings.

Back (with a Book, a Flick and a Song (or two))

My hiatus from blogging ends today. Back at the end of June, the blog-well had almost run dry altogether, so in the last few weeks away from my posting post, I've spent some time deliberately doing other things: reading some books, watching some movies, listening to some fresh music, and generally letting the water come back up. I'm just about ready to start putting the bucket down again, but I thought, for today, I might start by sharing some of the other things I've been up to in the in-between-time.

Read a good book: The Year of Living Biblically

This book is a gem of a read, and I would enthusiastically recommend it to anyone, but especially to Christians who've grown up with phrases like "inerrant" and "authoritative" tinting their faith-coloured glasses, and want to see the Good Book through an unexpectedly fresh lens. A. J. Jacobs is a self described agnostic (he's actually Jewish, though he says he's "Jewish the way the Olive Garden is an 'Italian' restaurant"); he's also a witty and insightful writer interested in issues related to religious fundamentalism and its impact on culture. The premise of his book: to spend a year following the 1700 or so commands in the Bible as literally as possible, including the most obscure ones like not wearing mixed-fibre clothing, letting his clothing be always white, not taking a mother bird along with the egg, and playing a ten-stringed lyre. He writes about the Bible with an honesty, humility, affection, sense of humour and self-awareness that a good number of "Christian" books I've read never achieve, for all their Evangelical "high view of Scripture". And along the way, the fresh insights and spiritual discoveries he makes-- about this beautiful and baffling Book that has so shaped my life as a Christian-- are sometimes arresting, often challenging and quite refreshing (even the times he left me wanting to scream: "no, you just don't get it!", it was a refreshing impulse).

Saw a summer flick: Inception

I saw the trailer for this movie when I was on holidays, and right away I thought: that looks like my kind of movie. It's the first movie in a long time whose release date I've marked on the calendar. It didn't disappoint-- or mostly didn't disappoint. Thematically, there's a lot less going on there than the premise might have made possible. A "dream thief" who specializes in infiltrating the dreams of others to steal their thoughts is hired to reverse the process and plant a thought in another man's mind through a risky procedure known as "inception." With a plot like that, I actually expected a more Salvador Dali-esque exploration of the human psyche than I got. But, if not quite so surreal as Dali, the movie is at least M. C. Escher-esque, with its contorted dreams-within-dreams-within-dreams and its labyrinthine convolutions of time and space. And as an action movie, it's original and unexpectedly riveting. (While this is not normally pointed out for special mention in a review, I also want to add that the sound production on this movie was exceptional, drawing you into the action almost like an additional character.)

Listened to an inspiring song (or Two): Ending is Beginning (Downhere)

I saw this CD in the library about a month ago, when I was there helping my kids get some reading material. The founding members of Downhere, I knew, were Briercrest alumni, and though I'd never heard them before, I'd heard a lot about them in my time studying there, and thought I'd give it a try. It's been getting a lot of play time over the last month. Eclectic musical styles, hopeful but honest lyrics, engaging songwriting with creative arrangements and top-notch production: it's a CD that rewards repeated listens. And then there's lines like these:

.

I'm so far from what I want to be / Oh I really am my own worst enemy / Please don't let me get the better of me / Take this earthly thing and make it finally something heavenly

.

It's justice and mercy the old dichotomies / all along the front lines of my heart / in both doubt and belief /the sinner and the saint, the old arch enemies / all at war in me

Some Summer Specials

Things will be quiet for the next few weeks here at terra incognita, as I take a bit of a summer break from blogging. Conventional wisdom says that guests will stop visiting for supper if there's nothing on the table for them when they do, so I thought I'd put together a little menu of some of the "daily specials" we've served at terra incognita over the last number of months, to whet your appetite until I'm back online.


I'll be back some time before the end of July, but in the mean time, might I suggest...

1. These thoughts on the Triumphal Entry

2. This reflection on Sabbath and Rest

3. My home-made video game, served with a reflection on faith, longing and gaming

4. Some thoughts on youth, served with a review of Wal-Town as a starter

5. A love letter to Saskatchewan

6. Reflections on joy and grief in the community of Faith

7. A very funny comedy routine by Brian Regan, with some reflections about listening on the side

And for those with a bit more theological appetite, I've also put together a couple of "main course" items, namely a few papers on bible, theology and/or ministry that I've had kicking around on my hard drive for a while and thought they might be worth making available online.

1. A paper on art, aesthetics and church ministry


2. A theological/historical study on baptism


3. A research project on drama and Christian Worship


4. A paper on the temple theme in the Gospel of John


5. A theological study on Worship and the Mediation of Christ


And for dessert, here's a very simple guitar arrangement of the hymn, "Holy Holy Holy" that I recorded a while ago for an altogether different blog post idea that never came to be. It's been on the shelf for a while now, and I didn't want it to go to waste, so I thought I'd offer it here.

Enjoy, and I'll talk to you again in a few weeks.

Thoughts on Prayer (3)

Here's my third sermon in the series on prayer I've been doing at the FreeWay.

Romans 8:22-27: A Tale of Two Gardens

Thoughts on Prayer (part 2)

And here's sermon number 40, the second installment in our series on prayer:

Luke 11:9-13: The Perfect Father's Day Gift?

40 foci for preaching

When I was studying preaching, my homiletics prof, Blayne Banting, taught us about the importance of the sermon "focus." In biblical preaching (i.e. preaching that is focused specifically on a biblical text), the "focus" is that single sentence that distills, encapsulates, crystallizes and summarizes the message of both the text and the sermon. Ideally, everything in the sermon, in some way or another, feeds into or flows out of the focus, and anything that doesn't is shelved for another sermon. Hadden Robinson called it "the big idea"; Blayne Banting called it "the focus." In biblical preaching-- and Blayne Banting was quite clear about this-- the focus of the sermon must emerge from, and tie directly back to the focus of the text. Whatever the text says-- at its heart-- that's what your focus should say; the focus statement should be the result of careful prayer, thought, theological reflection and disciplined exegesis of the text.

The idea of a "homiletical focus" has been very important in my own development as a preacher, and I've found writing the focus statement to be one of the most arduous but invaluable and rewarding initial steps in my process of sermon prep. Sometimes the focus statement will go through up to 10 or more drafts before I finally have it clear.

Is it worth it, all this fuss about a 10-word sentence? I don't know, but I do know that a couple of weeks back, someone mentioned the first sermon I preached at the FreeWay, a year ago, and, without knowing any of this finicky stuff about "homiletical foci" she said: "I remember, you told us: we need resurrected eyes to see the resurrected Lord" (see item 1 on the list below).

So I preached my 40th sermon at the FreeWay this Sunday. I've mentioned before how I'm not one to let biblical milestones like 3s or 12s or 40s pass by unnoticed, and so today I'm thinking back through the last 40 Sundays in the pulpit at the FreeWay (Daniel might call it 40 sevens, maybe?), and mulling over the first 40 foci of my preaching. I admit that some are better than others, but here's the last 40 things I've told the FreeWay about God and life together with him.

1. Luke 24:13-33: We need resurrected eyes to see the resurrected Lord.

2. 1 Kings 19:8-18: God's promises never have to go back to the beginning.

3. Luke 13:1-9: If it don't bear fruit, it's time to uproot.

4. Luke 14:15-24: God is determined to throw the greatest party in history.

5. Luke 16:1-9: Be a scandalous spendthrift of God's grace.
6. Luke 18:1-8: Kingdom come prayers never fall on deaf ears.
7. Genesis 11:1-9: No height of hurt is impossible in the community built on sameness.

8. Jeremiah 29:4-14: God has peace plans for his people.

9. Amos 5:8-26: God rejects empty religious show.

10. Galatians 5:13-15: True freedom is servanthood; and servanthood is true freedom.

11. Mark 1:14-15: God's revolution is happening now, turn around now and believe it.

12. John 3:1-15: God's Spirit is birthing believers into his kingdom.

13. Luke 9:28-35: This chosen one fulfills the history of God's life with his people.

14. Mark 10: 35-45: The king of God's kingdom rules as the servant of all.

15. Acts 1:3-11: In the meantime the Spirit holds us out to the world.

16. Psalm 45: He will reign forever and ever.

17. Luke 1:67-80: The promising God has visited us.

18. Isaiah 7:13-14: God is with you in the mess.

19. Matthew 1:1-17: The Christ's family tree is rooted in scandal and faithfulness.

20. Luke 2:22-36: This little baby is the God-hope we've been looking for.

21. Matthew 2:13-23: The Son of God will weep and wipe Rachel's tears.

22. Luke 2:41-51: We'll find this child of destiny in his father's things.

23. Luke 2:52: The Son of God grew God-wise, God-strong, God-loved.

24. Job 41: 1-11: God's faced the chaos on a scale we can't imagine.

25. Revelation 22:1-5: A day's coming when all manner of thing shall be well.

26. Psalm 1: There's no two ways about it with God.

27. Psalm 26: We walk right with God because his Christ walked blamelessly for us.

28. Psalm 29: The Lord is the real life-giver.

29. John 12:12-19: Death is defeated when the king of love rides into town.

30. Matthew 27:50-54: It really is a good Friday.

31. Mark 16:1-18: God rolled back the stone because we were helpless to move it on our own.

32. Colossians 2:11-13: Baptism is our heart-circumcision.

33. 1 Corinthians 15: 35-49: The God who creates is the God who resurrects.

34. Colossians 3:1-11: You've been raised from the dead: make your life extraordinary.

35. Isaiah 49:13-16: The Lord God out-mothers us all.

36. Hebrews 9:11-15: Jesus is our perfect High Priest.

37. Acts 2:1-13: The Spirit of God has begun the harvest.

38. Genesis 48:8-20: God doesn't choose the way the big-shot executive world chooses.

39. 1 Timothy 2:1-8: Pray for them all, starting at the top.

40. Luke 11:9-13: The Perfect Father will give his children the perfect gift.

Thoughts on Prayer (part 1)

1 Timothy 2:1-8

Everything, Everyone, and all you need to know about prayer

Hark the (Other) Herald

Each of the four gospel writers put something different on the lips of the crowds as Jesus rode his triumphant donkey into Jerusalem the week before Passover. For Matthew, it was a reference to his Davidic pedigree. With a hosanna. For Mark, it was a reference more broadly to the coming "Kingdom of our father David." With a hosanna. For John it was a reference to Jesus as simply "the king of Israel." With a hosanna. (And yet not so simply, inasmuch as for John, Yahweh himself is the only true King of Israel).

But for Luke there was no "hosanna." Instead, the crowd shouted: "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord." And then they added: "Peace in heaven and glory in the highest."

Now if I were a stout harmonizer, I'd want to throw in one of Matthew's Davidic references or one of Mark's Hosannas here for good measure. But because I'm not anymore, something jumped out at me when I read Luke 19:38 the other day that I can't get out of my mind.

"Peace in heaven and glory in the highest" cheered the crowds; and I wonder: did they know they were echoing the very words of the angelic host that heralded Christ's birth so many chapters (and some 33 years) earlier, when he was wrapped in swaddling clothes and a celestial choir declared "Glory to God in the highest / and on the earth peace ... "? Whether they heard the echoes or not, Luke doesn't seem to want us to miss them: in the original Greek, the parallels are quite striking. 2:19 reads "Glory in the highest to God, and on earth peace..." while 19:38 echoes back: "in heaven peace and glory in the highest" (almost as though they were open and close brackets respectively to the gospel narrative that has brought us to this point.)

But this is more than just a clever literary device. With its subtle echo of those of herald angels who sang glory to the newborn king back in 2:19, Luke's account of the Triumphal Entry here actually teaches us what it means to sing "God and sinners reconciled" in the fullest sense. Because as the God-Man, Jesus Christ always acts both as God before man, on God's side, and as man before God, on our side. Or as Paul put it, there is only one mediator between God and man; the man Christ Jesus.

So, when God-come-in-the-flesh was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger, God made peace with humans-- in Jesus, the fully divine Messiah. Thus heavenly heralds filled the skies declaring peace on earth. But as the mediator between God and humanity, Jesus not only reconciles God to sinners, he also reconciles sinners to God. So when the true King of God's people rode humbly into the city of God's people to be enthroned as God's Prince of Peace, man made peace with God-- in Jesus, the fully human Messiah. Thus earthly heralds declared peace in heaven.

Jesus has reconciled heaven to earth; and he has reconciled earth to heaven. And in Jesus, and through faith in Jesus, we are invited to become ambassadors of that reconciliation in the fullest sense: declaring with radiant angels and dusty disciples alike that Jesus Christ has made perfect peace between Creator and creation.

Prayer for the Offering (3)

Not that I'm planning to make this a regular feature or anything, but with the blog-well running a bit dry these days, and feeling like, after all, a bit more theological reflection on the offering couldn't hurt the Evangelical tradition, I thought I'd post few more of the offeratory prayers that we've prayed at the FreeWay over the last few months:


God, behind this offering lies the busy world of our working life—the market, the classroom, the office, the shop, the home, the open road. You gave us this work to do and you were present with us in it all. So we ask your blessing on those places, now, and the people we work with: bosses, clients, colleagues, partners and peers. Can you make us lights of your grace and goodness towards them all?

And Jesus, can you spare us from creating a world where wealth accumulates, but our souls shrivel. Let this act of offering today remind us of what you taught us so beautifully: that if we gain the whole world but lose our souls, we`ve really profited nothing.
Because it`s in Your name and it`s for Your glory we pray. Amen.




God, we remember how your word says:
“The one who’s stingy with the seed at planting time will have a stingy harvest; And the one who’s generous with the seed at planting time, will have a bountiful harvest."
We want a bountiful harvest, God;
so can you help us to sow seed generously today?
Not just our money,
but our time, and our talents, and our spiritual gifts
our availability to each other and our encouragement of each other
our availability to you, and our commitment to your ministry in this world
our laughter with those who laugh, and our tears with those who mourn
our love for Jesus, and for his people, and for our enemies
forgiveness and compassion and reconciliation and peacemaking
God, can you make us generous sowers of these kinds of seeds today?
So that we’ll also reap these kinds things richly at the harvest?
And can you make our act of offering today that kind of a seed-sowing?
And a sign of the generosity that you’ve begun to sow in our hearts.
Make us into the bountiful people of Jesus, in whose name we pray.
Amen.