Did you hear the one about Lucky Eutychus?

Inasmuch as we're between sermon series at the FreeWay just now, I thought it would be the perfect Sunday to preach a text from my running list of most-obscure-Bible-passages-I've-always-wanted-to-preach-for-the-sheer-zaniness-of-the-text.  It was between the resuscitation of Eutychus (Acts 20:7-12) and the strange case of the Gethsemane streaker (Mark 14:51-52). Eutychus won out in the end, but what to do with Mark 14:51-52 is still simmering on the back burner.

Here's the sermon (with apologies in advance for the sound quality; our audio levels on the recording equipment were a bit off... I wasn't really bellowing the whole way through).

Acts 20:7-12  The Fortunate Fall

Monday Morning Media Round-up

Happy Monday, everybody. In the intrepid spirit of terra incognita I've been exploring some new media these days, and finding no shortage of gems. Like a cyber-Marco-Polo, I offer below some of the very best of my travels for your discriminating consideration:

From the Airwaves:

Seeds, Hey Rosetta!

I heard a track from Hey Rosetta!'s new album on CBC Radio Q, and 15 seconds in I was mesmerized. The whole album has lived up to the promise of that first 15 seconds. While I've wanted to compare it at times to Mumford & Sons, Radiohead, and Arcade Fire, there's something going on here that defies comparison. Every song is an organic, constantly evolving mini-world that becomes something new every 30 seconds. The songwriting reminds me of that line from Heraclitus: "You can't step into the same river twice." Neither can you step into the same Hey Rosetta! song twice, it seems. Oh yeah: and the production is near-flawless.

Unconvinced? Check out one of my favorite tracks from the ablum and tell me I'm wrong:



From the Blogosphere:

Experimental Theology

I stumbled across this blog on the blog roll over at this side of sunday. Richard Beck is a theologian/experimental psychologist at Abeline Christian University, and his work at Experimental Theology combines these two disciplines in fascinating and enlightening ways. I only wish I had the time to explore all the topics tagged in the sidebar (among which are series with tantalizing titles like "Alone, Suburban and Sorted," "The Theology of Humour," "The Theology of Ugly," and "Game Theory and the Kingdom of God").

Strech your mind and heart and check this blog out; and for a starter that's as light as it is heavy, I'd suggest you begin with his playful and masterful analysis of the theology of Calvin and Hobbes.

From the Tube:

The Century of the Self (part 1)

This four-part BBC documentary by award winning film-maker Adam Curtis traces the fascinating and often chilling story of Freud's influence on the shape of American culture. My friend Jon Coutts had posted a link to another Adam Curtis doc. called All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace and after watching it I was hungry for more. A few Wikipedia searches and youtube clicks later, I was watching this one. I'm only 1/2 through it, but already my mind is surging. Give it a watch.

A Sermon for Pentecost Sunday

Acts 2:42-47.  The Church that Plays together...

Commencement

Matthew 28:16-20.  Commencement

37 Good Things

Last week was my 37th birthday.  This time last year I composed a list of "36 reasons I'm glad to be alive" and I thought a similar post for the big 3-7 might be apropos.  Reminders of reasons to love life, after all, might be first on the list.

1.  Sunshine in June
2.  The smell of a Russian Olive tree off in the distance
3.  Camping
4.  Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway
5.  People watching at the Y
6.  U2's Achtung Baby
7.  Q on CBC Radio 1
8.  Dead Poets Society
9.  Officiating at Weddings
10.  That dusty old book-page smell that hangs about
        your face when you're reading an old book
11.  Settlers of Catan
12. Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 "Emperor"
13.  Playing djembe on the worship team
14.  Building "Thomas the Train" tracks with a child
15.  Reading out loud to each other as a family
16.  Memories of backpacking through Europe
17.  Maps
18.  Cumin
19. Watching my son become a man
20.  Canola fields and blue sky
21.  Cool, humid mornings that promise to become
        a scorcher of day
22.  C. S. Lewis books 
23.  Playing Lost Heir with mom and dad
24.  Stumbling across a forgotten piece of one's own juvenilia.
25.  Family movie nights
26.  Rainy afternoons
27.  Walks in the forest park around the corner from our house
28.  Teaching
29.  Eating with chopsticks
30.  The Breastplate of St. Patrick (the prayer and the Irish hymn)
31.  Strong coffeee
32.  Watching home videos on New Years Eve
33.  Dancing with my kids
34.  Fresh garden potatoes with dill
35.  Stationary
36.  Words whose form and meaning are as close
         together as possible-- like sesquipadalian and tintinnabular
37.  Moments of inspiration

On Nehemiah's Wall

The Book of Nehemiah spoke into the life of our church in a very specific way this Sunday.  Here's the sermon:

Nehemiah 1:1-11. 
The City, the Wall, the King and his Cupbearer

Sqaush and the Spiritual Life

If you were like me growing up in church, analogies for the Christian life taken from the world of sport (and somehow these seemed ubiquitous in the pulpits of my youth) always came off as a little contrived.  The ones that didn't leave you flat felt forced.  I recognize, of course, that sporting analogies have a long and deep biblical tradition.  Paul himself likened the Christian disciple at various times to a boxer in training, a runner in a footrace, an Olympic athlete striving for the laurels.  But comparing an Ephesians 1:17 Christian to a basketball player putting up a hail Mary against the final buzzer in the championship game (true story, true sermon) leaves one feeling like the preacher cared more about his sport of choice than the text he was wrestling with that week.

My sport of choice is squash.  And the above paragraph is my disclaimer for the squash-court epiphany I'd like to share today.  I was playing with my regular partner the other day, and, though I started off strong, somewhere around the third game in the match, I noticed things starting to slip away from me.  I was running ragged, wearing down, chasing shots from pillar to post.  Between gasps for oxygen, I could smell skunk on the wind.

Now for those who haven't played, or maybe forget, there's a T roughly in the centre of the squash court (and a little to the back), where the two serving lines converge. It's the prime piece of real-estate in squash, because as long as you're hovering roughly over the T, you can see most of the court laid out in front of you.  From the T, you can anticipate drop-shots before they happen; from the T you can reach the back corners with ease; from the T you're in control of your game, and usually his as well.  But as my game slowly unraveled, I suddenly realized that I'd not been keeping on the T. Instead I'd been chasing balls all over the place-- into the front pocket, digging deep cross-court, down into the opposite corner, now kitty-corner to where I was before.  No wonder I was running down and running out of steam.

As I gasped for breath again between serves, I made a determined decision to stay on the T.  After my serve, hover on the T; after my return, get on the T; after that long lunge to recover a drop shot, back to the T.  And my game came back.  It was actually quite amazing how quickly peace descended on me, as long as I stayed on the T.

Now for the epiphany:  because in that moment, as I realized the difference staying on the T made to my game, I suddenly saw an analogy for the Christian life-- for my Christian life. When we "get off the T," and start chasing balls - our personal ambitions, fears, goals, agendas - into the corners and along the edges of life, the game unravels really quickly.  When won't hover on the T, we risk burning up our spiritual stamina and burning out our hearts.  When we fail to "get back on the T" after every shot, we wind up playing more and more desperately and out of control.

And the T is Christ. 

And almost like the sting of a squash ball between the shoulder blades, it walloped me:  "You've not been staying on the T." Blogs are probably not the best forums for true confessions, but let me at least say that right there on the court, in one of those rare flashes of clarity, I saw how sloppy I'd become in my discipleship of late, and next to that I saw how much burn-out and chaos I'd been feeling in my spiritual life as a result.  And I realized the two were intimately connected:  I'd not been staying on the T, and my heart knew it, and my soul had lost its wind because of it. The welt stung, of course, but it also woke me up:  as long as you're staying as close to Christ as you possibly can, and keep your eyes open for where he is in any given moment, and move there, you'll be playing (as Paul might have said) "in such a way as to win the prize."

I won't tell you the final score that day, but I will tell you that I left the court with new resolve and eagerness to play (if I haven't yet pushed the sporting analogy too far)-- to play with my heart hovering "on the T."

Creation and Covenant

Recently I've been looking through some papers and lit-reviews I wrote during my time at Briercrest.  Two years doesn't seem like a long time, but more than a few times I had one of those, "Did I really write this?" moments. I thought that over the next few months it might be interesting once in a while to share some highlights from what I've been finding on my stroll down amnesia lane (to quote Dead Poet Society alumnus John Keating).

The first comes from a paper I wrote on the book of Genesis. I noticed the other day that the church down the street is hosting a Creation vs. Evolution seminar in the coming days.  Seeing the advert reminded me of this excerpt from a paper where I argue that Covenant is best understood theologically as a Creative act of God.  This particular section talks about ways to read Genesis 1-2 in light of, and over against other Creation accounts from contemporary cultures of the Ancient Near East.  If it at all piques your interest, you can read the whole paper here.

Because of our temptation to limit creation to questions of cosmogony—pitting it against big bangs and primordial soups as the only adequate account of origins, and thinking about it primarily in Aristotelian or Augustinian categories of Primum Mobile, creatio ex nihilo and the like—the suggestion that Israel understood covenant theologically as a creative act of God may strike us at first as counter-intuitive. Before examining the way creation theology informs the Noahic and Abrahamic covenants, then, it is important to examine how Genesis actually develops and defines “creation” as a theological statement about what God does as the maker of heaven and earth. Terence Fretheim gives us a helpful pointer in this regard, when he suggests that “‘creation’ is not simply a matter of origination or a divine activity chronologically set only ‘in the beginning’”; indeed, “the verb bārā’, ‘create,’ so central to speaking of creation in Genesis 1, is used more often elsewhere in the Old Testament … for God’s creative activity in and through the historical process.” He further argues that to limit “creation” to absolute beginnings is “virtually to deny the possibility of speaking of creation with respect to the Bible,” in which acts of creation include acts of originating, continuing and completing—not just the order of the physical universe—but social, cultural and national order along with it.

Likewise, Richard J. Clifford warns us that failure “to be clear about ancient and modern differences [in defining creation] has often obscured the role of ancient cosmogonies in the Bible.” He proposes four distinct differences—the process, product, manner of reporting and criterion of truth— that should inform our reading of Genesis. Ancient cosmogonies imagined the divine process of creation in more anthropomorphic terms of gods moulding the world like clay, or speaking something into existence; they understood organized human society as a natural product of the creative process; they tended to conceptualize, and thus report creation as a drama or story “on the analogy of human activity”; and they held a more dramatic, functional criterion for truth which sought “plausibility or suitability” over “complete and coherent explanation.” With this in mind, it is helpful to consider Genesis creation theology in relation to those narrative patterns and archetypal motifs it shares with the ancient Near Eastern context into which it originally spoke, however radically and subversively it has reinterpreted them. In particular, important parallels among related Mesopotamian cosmogonies include the primordial chaos as symbolized by primeval waters, (cf. the waters of Apsû in the Atra-Hasīs), and the archetypal struggle to order this chaos as dramatized by a god’s battle against a sea-monster (cf. Marduk’s battle against Tiamat in the Enûma Elish). Further to this, the idea of a “creation rest” for the creating god “is commonly found in many of the creation texts of the ancient world.” It is also important to note that ancient cosmogony conceived of creation, not as an historical, linear, one-time event to be recalled, but as a timeless, cyclical and ongoing event to be re-enacted yearly through myth and ritual, whereby the life-giving fertility of the created order was sustained and perpetuated.

To be sure, the extent to which these myths have directly influenced the shape of Genesis 1-2 is subtle; Gunkel’s claim bears repeating that “the difference between the Babylonian myth and Genesis 1 is so pronounced, in terms of both religious attitude and aesthetic quality, that at first glance the two seem to have nothing in common.” But in the broader brush-strokes of Genesis’ creation narrative, we can see shades of that archetypal chaoskampf which colours texts like the Enûma Elish. We see its silhouette, for example, in Genesis 1:2’s description of a primordial world, shrouded by the chaotic waters of the deep, and brooded over by the hovering spirit of God. Likewise, the themes of forming and filling that give shape and content to the six day creation account become, in this context, a central concept for Genesis’ creation theology: to create is to bring and sustain fertile form out of chaotic shapelessness, to fill chaotic emptiness with life-giving order. This theology underlies the various creative acts in Genesis 1, as God, by speaking (1:3), separating (1:4), naming (1:5), gathering (1:9) and blessing (1:22), creates order and fertility—form and fullness—out of empty chaos. Indeed, the language of fertility and order permeate this text: the earth sprouts with vegetation, while lights govern its days and nights (1:11, 15); waters and firmament teem with fertile life, according to ordered “kinds” (1:20-22); blessed beasts increase and multiply, while humans are enjoined to govern and steward them well (1:26). Present, too, is that ancient intuition which understood “creation” as the divine story whereby the created order is continually sustained and cyclically renewed.  We see this intuition at work in the “signs” given to mark the seasons (1:14-15), in the divine mandate for humans to “image” God by further governing the created order (1: 26-27), and especially in the institution of the Sabbath as a ritual of work and rest synchronizing the rhythms of weekly life with those of the creation story. Thus creation extends far beyond merely “originating the natural universe.” By blessing family (1:28), planting and giving fruitful land (2:8-9), mandating work (2:15), sanctifying marriage (2:22-24) and so on, God continues creation by sustaining fertility and order, not only in a non-human “nature,” but also among human life and civilization as a created part of “nature.”

A Second Look at a Mother's Day Classic

This Sunday, of course, was Mother's Day.  They say that, next to Easter, Mother's Day is the most attended Sunday of the year for churches, statistically speaking.  While I appreciate the natural impulse to honour the maternal women in our lives, and the desire to return thanks to God for them, I have to admit that as a pastor, there is always a part of me that holds his breath through Mother's Day.  Not because I don't deeply value the mothers in my own life, but because, as a pastor, my heart is always going out to those who would be mothers but can't, or who have chosen not ot be mothers and feel singled out, or who lost their children through tragic circumstances, or whose mothers were lost to them, or who are struggling with issues of forgiveness or abandonment or failure when it comes to motherhood.  And as a pastor I can't help but wonder how this anthropocentric emphasis on things maternal must exaserbate those feelings.

All this is to explain why in my sermon this Sunday, though I did tackle a "classic" Mother's Day text, I tried to broaden and deepen the classic reading of it, and invite the FreeWay to go a bit deeper with it.

Proverbs 31:10-31  The Princess (?) Bride

More on Word Clouds

After my last post about preaching and word clouds, I was still wondering: what the word cloud for my whole preaching ministry over the last two years at the FreeWay look like?  Not a few cuts-and-pastings later, I had assembled all of my sermons to date into a single document and run it through Wordle's word cloud generator.  Here's what I came up with.  If you could visualize the cloud of talk hovering over the FreeWay these days, it might look something like this:

I find that curious and kind of fun; but it 's even more curious and more than a bit humbling when you compare it to this:  a (pretty stunning) glimpse at the word clouds of all sixty six books of the Bible: 

And because I couldn't resist, I also did this one: it's the word cloud generated by all the papers I wrote during my time at Seminary.    It's interesting to me to see how different the cloud is as it moves from the "Ivory Tower" down into the local church; but perhaps even more interesting are the similarities.