Jesus sat with a Samaritan woman (John 4) talking about life and eternity. For all the interesting aspects of the conversation, my favorite detail is this one:
“Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, ‘What do you want?’ or ‘Why are you talking with her?’”
In a highly conservative culture, Jewish men would not be seen alone with a woman who was not their wife. People would talk; assumptions would be made.
Jesus sat eye-to-eye with a woman, on a flat, 180˙ plane, which was not the normal angle. Men looked 45˙ down to women. This was the Creator of the universe parenting all the boys of the world. If you want to be a good man, this is what it looks like. Eye-to-eye.
I love not only that he did it, but that the disciples had already given up trying to change him. They were surprised but surrendered. He’s just going to do it this way. We’ll probably just have to do it this way too. Eventually maybe all men will sit eye-to-eye with women.
“Sabbath, ultimately, is a reminder that God can do more in six days than we can do in seven, a reminder that seems to have gotten lost among those who teach the faith.”
“They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. ‘Come, follow me,’ Jesus said, ‘and I will send you out to fish for people.'” (Matthew 4:18-19)
Jesus called his followers to fish for people. His followers now, across America, largely gather on Sundays to watch a show that might, on a good day, relate to fishing, but which never obligates any of them to head for the shore. We are not the sailors you would expect to find gathered around the teachings of a fisherman.
Fishing for the American church is in a big shift right now. It used to be that if you wanted to attract to people to your church, you would just lay out a big net, and eventually some amount of fish would swim into it, you would be hailed as an evangelist, and you could write a book on church growth. That system is dependent on a culture where
A good deal of the population feels obligated to go to church, and
Church exists in a culture that is generally friendly to and supportive of it
That day is over. The American church is poised to fall like a domino behind the European and Canadian churches.
There are some decent churches which are shuttering their windows and locking their doors for the last time, and the people are baffled as to why it’s happening. They’re such a nice congregation after all. They have a nice facility. They have history. Those are all a net thrown where there are no fish.
The American church is now going to have to switch from net fishing to line fishing. We’re going to have to cast to reach the fish. We’re going to have to walk to new spaces. Throwing out a net and waiting is a fruitless activity, because the fish aren’t swimming to church. The Fisherman is teaching us a new skill, and we either learn or we go home hungry.
Specifically, any follower of Jesus must see themselves on a daily mission to share the good news of Jesus with a lost world. At work, at school, and in line at the grocery store, faithful Jesus-followers and fishermen in training must remember that they are called to a mission. The mission is not to sit in a chair on Sunday.
There is a longstanding debate about how atheists are moral. It shouldn’t be an argument about whether or not atheists are moral, because of course, many atheists follow moral principles to which they are committed. But there is a standing debate as to why. As an atheist, you weren’t created for a purpose and you won’t be evaluated in the end.
This week, it was revealed that “celebrity atheist” Lawrence Krauss has been accused of sexual misconduct by students. Krauss was a physics professor who has just resigned. Of course we can point to any number of clergy and Christian leaders who have done the same if not that which is more shocking.
The issue though is not a matter of whether or not anyone can offend. The question is whether or not anyone can offend consistently with their own worldview. A Christian, by definition, is bound to the teachings of Christ, who condemns the exploitation of the vulnerable. An atheist, conversely, commits herself to a worldview and ethic by choice rather than necessity. The values to which she commits herself are self-selected and do not answer to an ultimate purpose or judgement. So an atheist can consistently say that life has no value, whereas a Christian cannot. An atheist can consistently say that one can establish relations of power with one’s peers in such a way that one’s peers are marginalized, whereas a Christian cannot.
Christians who violate the moral norms of Jesus’ teachings are failures. The question is whether or not atheists who violate mainstream moral norms are actually failing at anything at all.
Metals melt at different temperatures. Gold, for instance, melts at a temperature of just under 2000˙. If you wanted to reduce that gold cross around your neck to a liquid and recast it into a ring for your finger, you’d need an oven stronger than you have in your house. (Most people need to recast their wedding rings with the cross of Jesus, by the way.)
Human hearts are a lot like metals. They come to church made of the right stuff but molded in the wrong shape. The purpose of preaching is to bring people to their melting point. The gospel burns people down to their most basic parts – makes them focus on the purpose of life and consider shedding meaningless excesses. Then, once we’re reduced to materials God can work with, he recasts us into the shape he means for us to be.
The purpose of preaching is to bring people to their melting point.
Worship, after the gospel, plays a cooling role. We are reshaped by the gospel, and then we cool into our redefined shapes, a new and holy form that requires disciplined maintenance. When we sing our response to God, it is an act into cooling into the form of a people of worship. If you leave church a self-righteous, judgmental, gossip-filled religious person, you haven’t reached your melting point, and you’re definitely not cool(ed). If you leave worship with a sense of humility, realizing you are only made right by the God who loves you, if you realize the only message you have for broken people is a message of love, you’ve been reshaped as you were meant to be.
See you on Sunday for worship. God, melt us and mold us.
Satan has scattered a few toys across the face of the earth, and people keep picking them up and playing with them. Bitterness is one of Satan’s toys. Revenge, pettiness, gossip, slander. All the building blocks of revenge. When life is over, Satan gets to come back and take all his toys home with them. If you’re holding onto one of them, just realize you can get dragged down with it. You don’t want to be holding onto the toys when the creepy clown comes looking for them. So if you’re holding onto bitterness towards someone, you might want to drop it. It’s not that fun to play with now, and in the end, it will take you places you don’t want to go.
Grace is not just a nice thing to do or a duty to obey. It’s the lightening up of our souls by shedding the dead weight.
I knew a family in South Africa who took in and raised as their son the boy who had murdered their daughter. In the racially charged atmosphere after Apartheid, this destructive young man with evil in his heart tore apart this family. It was grace that allowed them to steal that victory from the side of evil. If that kind of grace can exist, can’t we practice its most simple forms?
It’s by Belgian surrealist Renee Magritte of a man in a hat with a green apple where his face should be. You can tell it was painted in the 1960s, because when you look at it, you wonder, “What was that guy on?”
Magritte said that the painting was intended to capture that feeling that we all have that there’s something more than what we can see, something behind the visible. We feel it every time we try to communicate and feel that we’re not getting our message across. Know what that feels like? If not, date someone. You’ll experience it.
I was content to give the painting a quick glance and then walk away, but I saw the title of the painting: The Son of Man. That’s a title that is distinctively Judeo-Christian. Daniel uses it in a prophecy about a coming savior, and Jesus takes up the term for himself to refer to his humanity, which often veiled his divinity. So then I wondered at the religious possibilities. An apple has a well-publicized connection to the Christian faith. Adam and Eve ate one and were kicked out of Eden. The Bible doesn’t actually say that the
forbidden fruit was an apple, but the Latin word for apple tree, malus, is also the Latin word for evil, so the play on words contributed to medieval artistic portrayals of the garden.
The apple represents the Fall, the brokenness of the world. And that is the thing that stops us from seeing the Son of Man. His disciples missed it, his family missed it, certainly his enemies missed it. God walked the earth and we couldn’t see him, because we were blinded by our own brokenness, by the Fall.
Coincidentally, Beatles’ member Paul McCartney bought one of Magritte’s paintings of an apple and named his record company Apple Corps (a play on “apple core”). Another young hipster who loved the Beatles started up a computer company and named it after McCartney’s record company – Apple Computers.
So that little icon on your iPhone is courtesy of a Belgian agnostic who couldn’t quite find God, but had a sense that the brokenness of the world stood in the way of us seeing him. Think about that when you see the Apple logo. It sits over devices that are supposed to allow you to see most of the knowledge in the world. And yet, because of human brokenness, we’ll never quite see it right. It’s only because God breaks through our brokenness and saves us that we can ever see.
Faithful churches are looking forwards and backwards – forwards in methodology and backwards in creed.
Dying churches are looking forwards and backwards – backwards in methodology and forwards in creed.
Faithful churches exist for getting the gospel out and welcoming failures in. We are always looking for new, creative, innovative, and box-breaking ways to do it. Credally, we are ad fontes, back to the sources from which we sprang, back to Jesus, the Bible, the early church. It’s an old story we’re retelling. But the language in which we tell is is always new.
Dying churches do it exactly the other way around. Methodologically, they say things like, “Remember how we did it 20 years ago? Wasn’t that great?” They go back to the same styles, the same sounds, the same vocabulary, and often the same (stagnated) leaders. Theologically they may (or may not) then be open to wandering. They have little left to be committed to than the way things used to be. Going back as far as Jesus is a dangerous thing for them to do, because in him they’ll find a pioneer and an adventurer who will leave the religious people who feel safe at church to go looking for someone who is lost (Luke 15). They tend to replace theology with tradition.
If you’re following Jesus, he’s only going forwards. The front windshield is bigger than the rear view mirror for good reason.
I was at a swanky dinner party a couple of weeks ago talking to a stranger about the ripple effects of the internet. By swanky, I mean someone else was paying for the tacos I was eating, which in my world is pretty swanky. I turned to my wife and said, “This is a free dinner.” She replied, “We must be on a date.” Since before we were married, we’ve always tried to get something for free when we go out, which we both think is romantic, so it signifies that we’re on a date. TMI?
So, anyway…
My new friend made a fascinating observation. He noted that the codex, the modern book, was first printed in 1450. It was the Gutenberg Bible. We’re still feeling the ripple effects of that invention. In a sense, Amazon is a ripple effect of it, because Amazon initially started out as a bookstore. It became the one that put Borders Books out of business. It looks to be becoming the one that will put Macy’s, Sears, JCPenny, and Kohl’s out of business. Eventually, maybe it will put printed books out of business. But in any case, it’s a manifestation of the effects of an invention that is over 560 years old.
He then pointed to the internet. He said if we think of the chain of dominoes that will be knocked down as a result of the internet, we are only now at the point of the first domino hitting the second one. There will be hundreds of dominoes down the line, effects we haven’t even imagined yet. We should resist the temptation to take for granted that the use of the internet is settled. It’s not just for word processing and for Facebook. So now is the time to think about what it’s really for and what dominoes might fall next.
Malls are going to go out of business. I mean entirely. The anchor stores are being shut down by online shopping. Most other shopping will go too. One day what’s left of shopping malls will be giant food courts. People still like to go out, eat, drink, and stare at other people. That’s where malls are going. The Westfield Santa Anita mall in Arcadia, CA is remarkably successful, and increasing, what it is is a series of restaurants, many of which have bars. In an online world, people need places to be social face-to-face.
Universities are going out of business. I was in Seattle talking to the President of a small university, and I asked him when his school was going online. He said that that was something they just weren’t going to do. I looked quizzical and told him I thought that that was where university education was going. He was notably defensive and told me he didn’t think it would work. I told him about a university down here in Southern California where I thought it was working. Two weeks later I happened to be talking to a Vice President of that Southern California University, and he happened to mention that the President of a little University in Seattle had called him to ask him how to do what they were doing with online education. There will still be university education of course, but 90% of it will be online. Yale uploading classes to Youtube for free is just the tip of the iceberg. All professors of note will be recorded. For a fraction of the cost of their salaries, they will be given royalties on recorded lectures. PhD candidates will be paid to learn to manage tech services and proctor online exams. Education will no longer be concentrated in wealthy nations, because everyone will have access.
Know what this is? You probably should.
Now here’s the big one. Central banking is up for grabs. Bitcoin was invented in 2009. 8 years later, it is trading at over $10,000 per coin. This is an unregulated system of currency in which people trade $USD for online tokens. They can be used to purchase everything from computers to a cold beer at over 100,000 retailers. More importantly, they are an investment that can be bought or sold. And given the vast expansion, it serves as a potential threat to traditional banking. Picture an utter and entire revisioning of economics. Banking as we know it might just be done completely differently in the future. We might have the option to choose between a nationally regulated currency and an international, unregulated currency that connects nations together the way the euro has connected Europe. Think about the implications. The first bank, which, in the midst of economic crisis, chooses to invest in bitcoin instead of depending on the rate set by the Fed will usher in an economic Copernican revolution. I’m not fantasizing. This is probably going to happen.
Now imagine sitting in your living room, each wall a floor-to-ceiling video monitor, with the capacity to talk to anyone in the world about any subject, both of you capable of accessing resources to answer any question either of you might have. The inventors, entrepreneurs, and creatives will no longer face a lack of resources. Any idea can quickly become reality.
It’s going to get bigger than that.
Imagine you can talk for 5 minutes to someone whose family is starving in a small, faraway nation. Wouldn’t you give them money? Online charity will revolutionize world geography. You are no longer constrained to poverty by geographic necessity. Poverty will be roaming, as will wealth.
And that will then create the final impact of the internet. International boundaries will become irrelevant, and countries, governed by power structures and legal systems, will no longer unite people. Think about how people used to be tied together by a geographic neighborhood, and now they have online networks of people who don’t necessarily live nearby. That will turn into international alliances of people governed by social contract committed to a shared belief system irregardless of geography. Right now I can move to France and be a citizen of France if I want to. What if I could change citizenship without leaving my living room?
Call it crazy if you want to. Or be creative and imagine your own future. But what’s most important is to realize that the effects of the internet have only just begun, and it is, if nothing else, a tool for boundary breaking.
I’ve listened to arguments about the Bible all of my life. I’ve heard it mocked by literature professors and defended by fundamentalists like King Kong cradling Ann Darrow at the top of the Empire State Building (I suspect, if it had a personality, that’s about how much the Bible would want to be protected). Usually attackers and defenders talk past each other. Often, I’m not sure that either have read it.
In part, the confusion arises from the lack of clarity about what kind of book the Bible is. There are different approaches.
A Math Book
Some people think of the Bible like a math textbook. It is a book of brute facts reducible to logical certainty, and if any one of them is wrong, the whole thing is suspect. If there is an error in the math book, we’re going to have to scrutinize every problem to make sure the authors didn’t do it more than once. Aggressors like to point out discrepancies in the biblical texts (Mark 16:5, Luke 24:4), and say that they’ve found a fatal flaw. Defenders foolishly agree to the argument and concoct desperate explanations about how Once Upon A Time there was a perfect Bible, but then there was a copying error. This would be like claiming this blog was written by Tinkerbell, and then when someone presents a video of me typing it myself, I reply, “She’s very tricky, isn’t she?”
The mistake is giving in on the idea that the Bible is like a math book to begin with. The authors had no intention of communicating ideas that work like mathematics. The statement “The Bible is true” makes as much sense as saying “The tree is true.” That’s not a valid way to evaluate it.
A Novel
Some then say the Bible is like a novel. It’s a fascinating collection of stories that might have moral points, but they are not grounded in history. Here, there is immediately a problem – all the history. The authors of the Bible at a number of points clearly think they are reporting historical events, unabashedly with their own opinions about the events – who was the greatest warrior, who was a liar, and why God did what he did. The historical character of the Bible is inescapable. Bart Ehrman, who is not a religious believer and who is deeply skeptical about religion, said of Jesus, “He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees.”
A defender of the novel thesis might argue then that it is historical fiction – a novel created out of historical events, but truly fiction. However, from the earliest recorded events to the present, a growing and countless population have believed that some cross-section of the historical events recorded in the Bible actually happened as the Bible said they did. The authors meant for much of it to be historical, even if inescapably biased, and most readers take that fact at face value. That reduces the sorting out of the historical from the non largely to an act of bias. It’s unsurprising that holders of this thesis usually say the supernatural elements are the fiction, regardless of what else might be historical, and that viewpoint comes from a predisposition to a certain ideology, not to a study of history.
A Compilation
Both of these approaches spring from a kind of fundamentalism that the Bible doesn’t encourage. A better way to think about the Bible is as a compilation of various forms of literature. There are within it long lists of names that were created specifically to be kept in a file cabinet. They were not meant to be devotional material – they were meant to keep a paper trail of land owners. There are poems which have no more truth value than a flower, which is still an infinite kind of value. There are historical narratives that are brute facts – events that happened and which are recorded by eye-witnesses. There are fabricated parables, stories created to make a point that don’t even attempt to pose as history, prophetic and apocalyptic predictions of the future, collections of practical advice, records of military conquests, virtue and vice lists, and more.
No two types of literature are the same. They serve different functions, communicate in their own styles, and must be evaluated according to the norms of that style. That, for any serious reader and serious believer is not a threat to faith. It’s a challenging and thought-provoking invitation to a deep study of God.
“They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. ‘Come, follow me,’ Jesus said, ‘and I will send you out to fish for people.'” (Matthew 4:18-19)
their doors for the last time, and the people are baffled as to why it’s happening. They’re such a nice congregation after all. They have a nice facility. They have history. Those are all a net thrown where there are no fish.
This week, it was revealed that “celebrity atheist” Lawrence Krauss has been 
Metals melt at different temperatures. Gold, for instance, melts at a temperature of just under 2000˙. If you wanted to reduce that gold cross around your neck to a liquid and recast it into a ring for your finger, you’d need an oven stronger than you have in your house. (Most people need to recast their wedding rings with the cross of Jesus, by the way.)
gossip, slander. All the building blocks of revenge. When life is over, Satan gets to come back and take all his toys home with them. If you’re holding onto one of them, just realize you can get dragged down with it. You don’t want to be holding onto the toys when the creepy clown comes looking for them. So if you’re holding onto bitterness towards someone, you might want to drop it. It’s not that fun to play with now, and in the end, it will take you places you don’t want to go.
I knew a family in South Africa who took in and raised as their son the boy who had murdered their daughter. In the racially charged atmosphere after Apartheid, this destructive young man with evil in his heart tore apart this family. It was grace that allowed them to steal that victory from the side of evil. If that kind of grace can exist, can’t we practice its most simple forms?
Here’s a painting that’s changed the world.
Hardwired 