I’ll keep you updated, but I think if you are already subscribed to my feedreader rss, you won’t even have to change that. I’ll get back to you on that.

But this current format of the blog will be going the way of the buffalo here pretty soon.

Here is however, an update on my life.

Our missional community is growing together well. We’re going through some growth pains and trying to figure out life as a community and such. It could be easy to feel down about it, but I also see so much potential that it makes it hard for me to feel too worried about it. I eally love our community and I think we are just starting to get the ball rolling towards being something, maybe a community that is engaged more and more with our neighbors? If we do that, I’m fine with us staying a small community for a while.

There’s a good likelihood that I’m going to be doing a stint working full-time with Hachisoft doing software development stuff. It could be easy to start feeling stressed out about that and think it’s going to be bad, but I think the challenge of a new task and one where I iwll have to work my tail off for a while will be really good for me. I’ve always learned best by being thrown into the deep end and attempting to swim. I think it will continue to be true, and I’m excited to see how taking on this new thing with Hachisoft will help me develop myself as a developer.

Braxton and I are getting ready to move into a different apartment in our complex. It will be nice, it has an extra room, which I plan to use as an office. I think having an office is going to help me with my productivity, both with Hachisoft and with church stuff. At the least, it will be less distracting than having my desk be right next to the kitchen of our current apartment.

There’s one more thing, maybe the biggest difference out of all.  Last month, I woke up one day and was thinking about a friend who is in Korea for a year doing an english teaching program. So I sent her an email telling her I was thinking of her and hoping that she was doing well. Long story short, that email turned into a lot of emailing back and forth, turned into long conversations on chat, turned into me realizing while I was driving home to visit my folks that I really liked her, turned into me being in a long distance relationship. It’s been really, really good. And not something I was really anticipating. I actually have looked back at it a few times and wondered where the thought to email her came from in the first place. It really was out of nowhere!

Because of things popping up with the long distance relationship thing, having the extra hours at Hachisoft will be an added bonus, because I’m hoping it will mean I can save up to fly out to Korea and see her this fall, which would be really great.

Okay, that’s it for now. I do promise you, I’ve been thinking about the blog. I’ve got a book review for the Ooze Viral Bloggers that I will be publishing this week, with another short to follow after that. And I’ve been thinking about some other things as far as direction. I think I’m going to move more and more towards primarily pastoral writings and writings exploring what I believe to be the essence of Christianity, and maybe less on strategy and leadership and being strategically missional. Those are all good things, they just aren’t really what I’ve felt like my passion is towards.

Oh one last thing. I got told today that my look is very natural for me. That look being the combination of tanktop with striped hooded sweatshirt and beanie and plaid shorts. My words don’t do it justice, so I’ll attach a picture I posted on Flickr.

It’s a new thing for me, and I think something I’m growing in- to be able to give more leeway and lenience for theologies that I don’t necessarily find personally compelling.  Partially, I think it’s that I need to embrace things that are true about God that I don’t find compelling in my mind. But I think it’s also the only way that we ever can really survive as a church, to be able to be at peace while having divergent theologies.

In the end of the day, my friend and I can both affirm this idea, which should drive our spiritual lives: God is God and we are not.

In that light, my friend shared this verse, which has really sat with me and become a prayer for me.

Yet you know me, O LORD; you see me and test my thoughts about you. Drag them off like sheep to be butchered! Set them apart for the day of slaughter!

I find it interesting because it is in the middle of Jeremiah questioning whether or not God is really just. He sees the wicked doing well and asks how that is fair. But in the middle of it, his response is this verse.

Yet you know me, O LORD; you see me and test my thoughts about you. Drag them off like sheep to be butchered! Set them apart for the day of slaughter!

If you’ve read much of what I write, you know I can’t go very far without writing about doubt and questions and how I think they are a vital part of a faith that is real.

I think what I am learning in this phase is that there is a tension in which we need to be honest about our feelings, but also receptive of the fact that God always remains a mystery, never totally understood. and so Jeremiah’s prayer that his thoughts be slaughtered rings true, even while I affirm the need to be honest and wrestle through those thoughts.

Do you have thoughts that it might be time to let go, or to let be slaughtered by God?

Could it be if we let them die that there might be something better, more rewarding for us to be invited into?

No one can say why it is that one was chosen and another not, why it is that here the word came “not only in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost” (1 Thess. 1:5), while there the same word carried no regenerating power. The answer to that question is known only to God. But if we cannot know for what reason one was chosen, we can most certain know for what purpose he was chosen: he was chosen in order to be a fruit-bearing branch in the one true vine (John 15:16), a witness through whom others might be saved. He is chosen in order that through him God’s saving purpose may reach to others, and they too be reconciled to God in and through His reconciled and reconciling people…

And we can also see that wherever the missionary character of the doctrine of election is forgotten; wherever it is forgotten that we are chosen in order to be sent; wherever the minds of believers are concerned more to probe backwards from their election into the reasons for it in the secret counsel of God than to press forward from their election to the purpose of it, which is that they should be Christ’s ambassadors and witnesses to the ends of the earth; wherever men think that the purpose of election is their own salvation rather than the salvation of the world; then God’s people have betrayed their trust.”

I really like this idea from Newbigin, because he says, that predestination or election is a fact that happens biblically and is something that we can’t get around, but also offers that much of how we dwell on it is usually misguided. It seems to me that Newbigin’s stance is that when we ask the how question about election, we can miss the more important why question. That is why are we elected? To be a part of God’s mission of salvation in the world.

It’s comforting to know that we don’t need to agree on how predestination happens, but that we can agree that it happens so that God can send His church into the world.

Still unconvinced about accepting this immense task and still skeptical that this promise of presence will be enough when faced with Pharaoh’s formidable army, he attempts a different strategy: “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, “The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?

Here we can see that Moses is looking for more than some common name.  After all, he already knows whom it is that he is being addressed by.  Instead, the writer is presenting us with someone who is seeking the secret, sacred name of God, a name that will wield unheard-of power, power that will be able to overthrow even the Pharoah himself, power that will enable a stuttering old man to carry out the world-historical task that is being asked.

In response to this query concerning the Name, God replies with the enigmatic phrase ‘ehyeh ‘asher ‘ehyeh, a term which since the Septuagint, has generally been interpreted as a noun and translated in English as “I AM WHO I AM.”

… The narrative is thus interpreted as representing the Israelites’ God as infinitely greater than the gods and goddesses of egypt precisely because the Israelites’ God cannot be manipulated through sorcery and thus has no fear of disclosing the secret name.

I have been thinking about this idea of naming something in order to have power over it, and I think it has a wider range in our lives than just as some sort of vague spiritual principle that other religions at the time of the Israelites believed.  I am firmly convinced that we engage in this process of naming something so that we have power over it regularly.

We name someone as liberal or conservative or catholic or protestant or atheist, because to have a name for that thing is to be able to have some sort of power over it and be able to categorize it.  Don’t we also do the same things with relationship? We name one relationship “friend” and another “lover” and another “mentor” and another “mother” all with the intention of being able to put some control over it.

Surely, this tendency to give something a name so that we feel like we can categorize it or control it is not all bad. It is part of how we cope with life.  But I do wonder if it doesn’t say something to us about how we think of God.  In some forms of theology, there is a tendency to have an answer to every question, to in a sense reduce God from a person to some sort of divine math problem. If we can just find the right variables, we can figure out what that math is and then we will feel in control.

And so we identify different theories of the atonement and say it must be Christus Victor or Penal Substitution or Satisfaction theory. We look at God’s return and argue over pre-millenial and post-millenial and amillenial or over whether the rapture is pre-trib or mid-trib or post-trib, but we do all of it to try to exert some form of control over God.  We feel that if we can name these aspects of God, we can control God. We think that we can go about with no mystery about God as a person.

I find it refreshing that God knows that he cannot be controlled by being named, and so when Moses asks him who this God is, God responds ‘ehyeh ‘asher ‘ehyeh.

I am who I am.

I wonder if there is something to embracing this mystery, this God who is, that has to do with us giving up on trying to control him, on realizing that this God is.

And when I think of that I wonder if it doesn’t also have something to say to us about how we interact with others, naming or labeling them so that we feel like we can control them. Maybe there are times that we need to abandon the names we believe we have for people, and see that they are beyond the name we attempt to give them, because they are made in the image of the God who can’t be controlled by being named, the God who is.

May it be that we realize that our naming things does not give us control, that as much as we attempt to name others with labels, that they go beyond those labels and defy our naming. And may we also realize that while we speak about God that we also never get to control this God by naming him, the God who is has a tendency of smashing our formulas of how we think he is and invites us to figure him out on his own terms.

‘ehyeh ‘asher ‘ehyeh – I am who I am.

The second half of the book is devoted to discussion of the “vertical self” and becomes a crash course in basic Christian ideas about drawing our value from our relationship to God, and explorations into how we be transformed into people who are espousing the “vertical self.”  Included is a helpful discussion about passions/desires and how much of what we experience as negative in our lives can also have a very redemptive side to it as well when ordered in its right place.

All in all I found the book to be a helpful discussion and the perfect book to give to someone in the 18-30 age range in reflecting on the differences between how our culture talks about value and how Christians talk about value. There’s a good chance I will be passing it on to others in my ministry.

The preaching will be more conversation and probably less polished.  In the last class I taught at Regent, a young woman came up to me and was very irritated.

“Dr. Peterson,” she said, “three times during the lecture you did not say anything for 20 seconds. I know because I timed you. I’m from Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, teachers go: Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! I want my money’s worth.”

We’re going to have people like that, people who want very polished and efficient teaching. But when I see people in my congregation taking notes during the sermon, I stop and say, “Put you pencils away. I want you to listen. Listen to the word of God. It’s not something for you to figure it; it’s something for you to respond to.”

[Source: pg 18, Catalyst Leadership Digital]

Eugene Peterson’s pastoral stance is always refreshing for me, particularly when it seems like so many people have a very different, much less reflective idea of what Christians gathering together should look like.

In this parable, Rollins concludes that although only one Bible had been printed for Sophia’s people, Sophia had actually translated the word three times, with the first two being most beautiful.  In this parable, Sophia is our anti-Eli.  Both have been given the task of preserving the word of God so that it might be given to more people, but how they are faithful to that calling is very different.  For Eli, it meant killing any who would stand in his way and ignoring others who were in need of his help.  In our parable, Sophia is presented twice with times that seemingly are getting in the way of her initial calling, but instead are actually the fulfillment of her calling.

Ancient Christians looked at the resurrection as a point of celebration, we have a phrase in latin about this thought – Christus Victor – Christ is victorious.  The ancient Christians saw Jesus resurrection from the dead as a definitive victory over the power that death and sin held over humanity.

On Friday, reflecting on the them of Good Friday, I wrote this:

…for the next two days, we’re stuck. Stuck with a story and a darkness that seems like it can’t be overwhelmed. It’s the sort of darkness that we like to ignore. The things in our lives that we’ve given up on ever changing. The addiction to porn or alcohol or abusive relationships. The addiction to cynicism or talking shit about others to make ourselves feel good. The bad things in our lives that we accept as inevitable and feel like we’ll never get over.  For the next two days, let’s attempt to tear away our protective layers and really sit in how horrifying the death and lack of hope in our lives really is.

The reality of resurrection now gives us resolve to the darkness that we were left in on Friday and Saturday.  That same darkness that we realize is death and hopelessness in our lives, the things that we’ve given up on ever seeing change now appear to us in a different way.

This is necessarily so, because we proclaim a God who comes back to life from the dead. If God can do that, there’s nothing God can’t do. There’s a new hope in those places in our lives that we previously viewed as death.

Christ is risen. Christus Victor. God has defeated the power of death and sin.  There’s nothing this God can’t do.

Tonight, a friend and I went to see Book of Eli at the Bagdad Theater.  I found Book of Eli to be an interesting movie.  The basis of the plot, is that we are in a post-apocalyptic world, there is only one copy of the Bible left and Eli is called to take this text to somewhere where it can be reproduced.  Eli has become adept at using weapons and violence to defend himself and the Bible (as we see throughout the movie-he kills 30+ people).  It could be an interesting conversation to speak of the different views on the power the Bible holds, but that’s not what I’m interested in here.

At the end of the movie (I’m going to give away a major part of the plot here), Eli fails in protecting the Bible. He gives it to the antagonist, so as to save a girls life. He is rewarded by being shot in the gut.  After a dramatic sequence the girl manages to get back and accompany Eli as he continues to travel west. While they are travelling, there’s a scene in which Eli admits that in his protection of the Bible and reading of the Bible, he has failed to take it’s message seriously, a message which he sums up as the golden rule(do unto others as you would have them do unto you). It turns out that the actual written Bible was not that important, for Eli had memorized the entire Bible-his resolution when he reaches humanities hope for reproducing its great works, resolves around Eli citing all of the Bible from memory.

For me, the idea that Eli has not been faithful to the message of the Bible is the crux of the movie and leads us to two perspectives. These perspectives center around this – is the violence that Eli commits throughout the movie justified?  I have seen a number of Christian reviewers argue that yes, it was indeed justified – Eli was only protecting himself and the Bible, not looking for a fight. In essence, it was good that Eli realized he could act differently but his violence was totally justified for the ends it would bring about.

The other, and I think more compelling, perspective is that Eli’s realization that he has been unfaithful to the message of the Bible is itself an indictment that he has not adequately protected it at all.  This indictment could be found to stand as a judgment that all the violence throughout this movie has been unjustified and has been a failure of the Bible’s core message. Eli realizes that he can recite the Bible from memory, and could have turned over the book, thus avoiding much of the bloodshed that the movie centers around.

I think this second perspective (whether or not it is the director’s intent) is the more subversive and compelling perspective because it undercuts our usual viewpoint that violence of any sort is justified as long as the end result is worth it.  It instead offers that at least from a Christian standpoint this sort of violent ethic is not justified, for in attempting to defend the text, violence has been done to it.  When I first heard of the movie, I was quite disinterested because I assumed that the first perspective was the one which the movie upholds. I was unenthused as I think that storyline in general is false and patently not faithful to Jesus.  If this second perspective actually holds weight though, I must say that I find myself pleasantly surprised and excited that a more nuanced approach to faith might actually be possible in media.