Five thought traps—the foundations for hunger, poverty and environmental catastrophes

Below and in the next few posts I want to share some thoughts from authors Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappé, in their book Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet. The short exposure to this book as impacted my thinking in a lot of ways. Most importantly this line of thoughts is something that should be inherent in Christian thought and theology, but unfortunately it isn’t. Let me introduce the Five Thought Traps first.

1. The enemy is scarcity; production is our savior.

With the human population doubling every fifty years or so, there just isn't enough stuff to go around...like land, food, and water. To survive, we have to produce more and more.

“In the original Diet for a Small Planet, (the authors) set out to explode the scarcity myth with mountains of evidence showing the abundance—and the waste—in our food system.

For me, discovering that here in the US we feed sixteen pounds of grain and soy to cattle to get one pound back in meat was the first real wake up call. Because so much of our harvested acreage goes to feed livestock, the waste is staggering. I calculated that the grain we annually feed livestock could provide the equivalent of a bowl of food for every person on earth every day of the year! So, I thought, anyone who simply looked at the facts would be spurred to make big changes.

But I guess I didn’t appreciate the strength of this thought trap’s grip. Even now, thirty years later, the US Department of Agriculture sees no problem at all. Its economists maintain that the grain to beef ratio is “only” seven to one—as if seven pounds of feed to get only one pound back is some mark of efficiency. (To get their seven-to-one ratio, government analysts must credit grain and soy feeding with all the meat produced, although they know that more than half comes from grass, hay and other things cattle eat.)”

Next Time: 2) We are all selfish and the only thing that counts is the survival of the fittest.

Technorati Tags: Kingdom,Spiritual Formation,community

Worship – A Dialogue on the Purposes of the Church Part 3

Ever watch a group of people who will stand and shout when their favorite team makes a great play or wins a hard fought game? Or how the audience at a concert will stand and applaud a talented musician who just gave a great performance?

I once attended the matinee of a mediocre Mozart opera with a friend. When it came time for the tenor to come on stage, Plácido Domingo came out to sing the role. Everyone stood and gave him a standing ovation--before he even sang!

Compare this reaction to the picture that John gives us in Revelation 4 and 5, of the One seated on a throne surrounded by 24 Elders and angels, and the response of all creation to the Lamb seated on the throne in chapter 5.

Note what N. T. Wright says about this scene:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are a few ideas in this quote from Wright that resonate with me:

1. Worship means, literally, acknowledging the worth of someone or something. All creation worships God, humans, animals, birds, et. al. because he deserves to be praised.
2. Humans have something more to say when they join in the song of worship: They know Why God should be praised. He has made all things, and he has ransomed saints from all languages, people and nations.

I like what Wright says: This is God’s world as it should be, and the way it is in heaven already. I get goose bumps every time I read these two chapters of the Book of Revelation.

The question is, then, how do we worship here and now in our lives that somehow hearkens beyond us and replicates this heavenly scene?

1. How can our worship acknowledge the worth of the one we worship? Who does that work out in a practical way?
2. Do we fully understand the Why of worship? Do we grasp the full implications of what it means to say that God created all things, creature, nature and human, and that he has ransomed saints from all nations, tongues and peoples, to be a nation of Priests?

For me, the practical question is how can I experience or enter into worship that is worthy of God the father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

Again, Wright gives us two ideas:

First, you become like what you worship.

What happens when you worship money, sex or power? We are shaped by our desires to conform to these objects of worship. What happens when we begin to truly worship the God who created all things and has redeemed us for himself through his son Jesus Christ by the power of his spirit?

Because we are made in God’s image, worship makes us truly human.

You discover more fully what it means to be human as well as you begin to shrink as a human; you are no longer the center of the universe.

Good start, but a long journey. I think Carson Pue (p30f)  has given me some insight on this journey. He has stated that we often fall into two camps in our approach to following Christ.

The first group is similar to power-boaters, for whom the destination is of primary importance. The primary concern is to get to the destination as quickly and as safely as possible, and once there, concern shifts to having fun and enjoying the destination. This is what makes the journey worthwhile.

The second group are the sailors. The journey is as important as the destination. They enjoy the various aspects of the journey along the journey as the proceed toward the destination.

I’ve discovered that I need to become more of a sailor and less of a power-boater in my walk with Christ.

I won’t dwell on the implications of the two metaphors, but hopefully they are food for thought.

Technorati Tags: worship,kingdom,Emerging,France,spiritual formation

Worship – A Dialogue on the Purposes of the Church: Who do we Worship?

Sing to the Lord, all the earth. Psalm 96:1b

This post is a part of an ongoing dialogue about the five purposes of the church. The first post addressed the question of Who Do We Worship?  I want to continue to interact and dialog with Marva Dawn as she dialogs about the “Who” of worship in her book How Shall We Worship?

There is an interesting observation in her book (p. 20) about the nature of our cultures today, described by social analyst Christopher Lasch as a Culture of Narcissism.

Lasch stated that social developments in the 20th century, such as the end of World War II and the rise of a consumer culture in the years that followed, gave rise to a narcissistic personality structure in which peoples’ self-concepts led to a fear of commitment and lasting relationships (including religion), a fear of aging (e.g., the 1960s and 1970s "youth culture") and a overdeveloped admiration for fame and celebrity, nurtured in part by the motion picture industry and television. The result is confusion, anxiety and uncertainty about how to live and relate in the world today (see a review of Lasch here).

Marva believes that this culture of narcissism has entered the church, which has resulted in attitudes and views that ask the question, What’s in it for me? (p. 21) Ever have anyone say to you, “I didn’t get much out of the

worship service today.”

Since worship is the response of all creation to “God’s gift of being,” any response that we have that is “hunting for what will please ourselves” can be nothing more than sin.

A couple of the results that we see in churches today is the tendency to see Sunday morning worship as an evangelistic rally, i.e., using the appeal factor of the worship service to attract those who are not yet Christ-followers by appealing to their immersion in our narcissistic culture. Thus a church can entertain and give people the impression that they have been part of a worship experience.

But if worship is for God, can those outside the community of faith enter into worship? Or more bluntly, can we say that these kind of services qualify as worship?

A pastor friend made a comment to my previous post, “One of the things we teach about worship is that it includes every aspect of life, not just what we do together on a Sunday morning. Worship is also our service to God as we serve His people.”

That to me is the paradox of the question of worship: Worship is about God, but yet as we worship, we can also serve the people of God.  The example I have in mind is the Milepost 13 Band that recently came to Grenoble. I saw some aspects of worship that I hadn’t notice before. They are a worship band, so their main purpose or goal was to worship God. But yet they were also evangelistic in their concerts, and one of the biggest benefits was how they served the two congregations in Grenoble –one French speaking and one English speaking, and the fellowship and community we enjoyed as a result.

So for me, this is a marvelous picture of what worship can be, it is more than an subjective experience on Sunday morning. As Marva points out, worship is the glad response to the immense grace of Triune God.” So when God’s grace is pouring out on us, we can experience the outworking of that grace through fellowship, evangelism, service, et. al., which in turn should rebound in our response to that grace.

Yes, grace is amazing!

 

Technorati Tags: Culture,worship,France,Kingdom,Missional,purpose

Worship: Celebrate God’s Presence. A Dialogue on the Purposes of the Church

To worship the Lord is –in the world’s eyes –a waste of time. It is, indeed, a royal waste of time, but a waste nonetheless. By engaging in it, we don’t accomplish anything useful in our society’s terms. (Marva Dawn, A Royal Waste of Time)

I am starting a dialog about the core purposes of the church, , following Rick Warren’s understanding of the Five Purposes of the Church.

To start the conversation, I want to dialog with Marva Dawn, who has written extensively on the idea of worship. Marva Dawn has written a nice little volume called How Shall We Worship?, which looks at the tensions that exist in the so-called “worship wars,” i.e., the battle between traditional and contemporary worship. She takes an in-depth look at worship and its implications for the church. I would like to interact with some of her questions in a few posts.

I actually discovered Marva by accident. I came into a grad class at Wheaton one day to be told that we were going downstairs to attend a lecture by Marva Dawn. Being so full of myself at the time, I determined that I would sit in the back of the auditorium and suffer through this lecture, since sneaking out would not show respect to the professor.

As I sat and listened to this diminutive woman (who did not impress me in the least), she began to speak with a quiet and soft voice. I was slowly pushed up the aisle and out the door by the intensity and passion of her message. So, I like Marva Dawn and listen when she speaks. And which is why I am sharing her thoughts on this topic.

One reason why I like Marva is more about the questions she asks than the explication. Here are some of the questions she deals with in the introduction to How Shall we Worship?:

1. What is worship?  She begins her discussion by pointing out that worship is…

“our glad response to the immense grace of Triune God.”

All of our life is worship if we live in gratitude and reverence, if coupled with a mindfulness of God and eagerness to serve Him, says Dawn.

What Dawn shows me that too much of our worship is about Me, not God. Someone once commented to me that worship is when God is the audience.

I googled the phrase “worship” to find a picture to preface this post (see above), and I began to notice that the focus of 90% of the pictures of worship had a theme similar to this picture:

What do you see when you look at this picture? --someone standing on a hill or mountain, a beautiful sky in the background, with their hands lifted to the sky, ostensibly worshipping. 

But is this worship? It may say something about the subjective worship experience (who wouldn’t want to have a worship experience like this?), but it says Nothing about WHOM we worship.

Unfortunately, much of what passes for worship is summed up in this illustration: 

I am not sure, but I think this is a long way from “a mindfulness of God and eagerness to serve Him," as Marva Dawn says.

I realize that  worship is often a subjective experience, what lifts one person into worship of God will leave another person feeling like they’ve paid good money for a bad concert.

But we come back to Marva Dawn’s questions: “What is worship?”  Is our worship biblically formed, or does it reveal the influences of the culture that surrounds the church? What do the adjectives that you use to describe worship in your church say about your church?

Why don’t our typical Sunday morning worship services cause us to tremble? Are we really encountering God?

Why don’t our churches seem to be affecting our culture? Why do so many people who say they are spiritual want nothing to do with our worship?

I want to address a few of these questions in order to establish a foundation (at least for me) of what worship is, not what how I do it. So, if you are interested in the discussion, come back and sit a spell, and let’s talk.

 

Technorati Tags: Worship,kingdom,France

Practice Resurrection

I've been on an unplanned hiatus since the beginning of January. It's not that I haven't had anything to say, just have been busy, and didn't feel compelled to address anything in particular.

I've been musing over what to do with this blog. I have another blog that is more directly ministry related,  and I thought perhaps it was time to retire this one. But things being as they are, I was, on the one hand. loathe to give up the name of this blog. I like it, and wasn't ready to see it disappear into the ether.

And, I still feel I need a place to pontificate and bloviate from time to time. So, I'm back.

What I think I'd like to do is take a look at a book I picked up on kindle for PC by Eugene Peterson called Practice Resurrection: A Conversation on Growing Up in Christ.

The first sentence reads:

This is a conversation on becoming a mature Christian, Christian formation, growing up to the stature of Christ.

 I'm hooked --you had me at Christian Formation. According to my friend Matt, it's a great read.


There are 13 chapters and an appendix, published by Eerdmans.


So, pick up the book and join me in reading it. A few comments on the reading would be okay.

Intertextuality

(I made a few revisions to this post after ruminating on it after I posted it. Hopefully the line of thought is a bit clearer as a result.)

In my studies in the Book of Acts lately I’ve been thinking about the issue of intertextuality. The term is a school of thought that attempts to investigate the interconnectedness between texts. A good way to describe it is to think of a bricoleur (handyman or craftsman) who creates improvised structures by appropriating pre-existing materials which are ready-to-hand. The bricoleur constructs new arrangements by the practice of bricolage through several key transformations: addition, deletion, substitution and transposition.

Of course, one always needs a good academic quote to explain things:

“The term “intertextuality” is of rather recent coinage in both Jewish and Christian circles. It denotes not just relationships among texts, but also relationships between texts and their cultures.”

Richard Longenecker, Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic period, pg. xx

“The phenomena of intertextuality – the imbedding of fragments of an earlier text within a latter one – has always played a major role in the cultural traditions that are heir to Israel’s Scripture: the voice of Scripture, regarded as authoritative in one way or another, continues to speak in and through latter texts that both depend on and transform the earlier.”

Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, pg. 14

I think the key concept here is that intertextuality “denotes not just relationships among texts, but also relationships between texts and their cultures.” In scripture, it is the enculturation of a concept from one culture to another, i.e., from ancient Hebrew culture to the Greek-Jewish culture of the New Testament.

One good example on intertextuality that recurs throughout the Jewish scriptures is God’s Passover the five books of Moses (Ex. 23:10-19; Lev. 23:4-8), with synoptic views in Ex. 12:1-13 and Deut. 16:1-8, and echoed in Ezk 45:21-24 and Ezra 6:19-22. It is picked up again in the New Testament as the writers wrestled with the idea of a New Passover taking place in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 5:7):

7 Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast- as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.

Paul is the master of intertextuality,one need only to look at Romans and his understanding of Abraham (in Gen. 15) and what God wants to do for Israel.

There are obvious examples of this in the New Testament, such as the use of the texts in the Gospel of Matthew related to the coming of messiah. For example, Matt. 1:20ff:

20 But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:

23 “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel”(which means, God with us).

What I see here is that there is more involved than seeing this passage as a prophecy; for me it resonates with how this fits into God’s plan for his people.

Often prophecy is used for apologetic purposes, more to support the idea how it is mathematically improbable for one person to fulfill all these prophecies of Messiah, yet here is Jesus, who fits the bill exactly. Put this prophecy on the pile with other scriptures that will rationally and intellectually prove beyond a doubt that the bible is true and God is real.

This is the same as someone describing a movie to us, giving us the bits they enjoyed, but missing the plot of the story completely.

By doing this, I think we miss the benefit of seeing what God is doing through out the ages to bring his plan to fruition, if we only see OT scripture as a proof text. To quote N. T. Wright:

God had a single plan all along through which he intended to rescue the world and the human race, and that this single plan was centered upon the call of Israel, a call which Paul saw coming to fruition in Israel’s representative, the Messiah (Justification, p 35).

Wright also states that failure to read scripture this way is like trying to figure out a puzzle with half the pieces missing.

So the key is to maintain the unity of the text without ignoring the bits that help us to understand what God is doing in the world.

As one writer states, it is the “absorption et transformation de l’autre text” (the absorption and transformation of another text.) It is the idea of a dialogue taking place between the writer and another text or dialogue.

I share this because as I look over the writings of the new testament and how it is related to event of the Old Testament, it leads me to rethink the role of what we commonly call prophecy. It is not that I don’t believe in prophecy, but I do believe that we should not lift stories and events about how God worked (and is working)among his people and set them up as kind of a proof text, independent of context and connection to the rest of God’s work. Kind of misses the point, I think.

(image credit here)

Technorati Tags: scripture,kingdom of God,intertextuality

 

 

Gregory Nazianzus on the Holy Spirit

This is a great quote from Gregory Nazianzus on the person of the Holy Spirit:

“XXIX.  This, then, is what may be said by one who admits the silence of Scripture.  But now the swarm of testimonies shall burst upon you from which the Deity of the Holy Ghost  (Luke 1.35; 3.22; 4.1) shall be shown to all who are not excessively stupid, or else altogether enemies to the Spirit, to be most clearly recognized in Scripture.  Look at these facts:—Christ is born; the Spirit is His Forerunner.  He is baptized; the Spirit bears witness.  He is tempted; the Spirit leads Him up (Luke 4.1, 18).  He works miracles; the Spirit accompanies them.  He ascends; the Spirit takes His place.  What great things are there in the idea of God which are not in His power (Acts 2. 4)? 

What titles which belong to God are not applied to Him, except only unbegotten and begotten?  For it was needful that the distinctive properties of the Father and the Son should remain peculiar to them, lest there should be confusion in the Godhead which brings all things, even disorder itself, into due arrangement and good order. 

Indeed I tremble when I think of the abundance of the titles, and how many Names they outrage who fall foul of the Spirit.  He is called the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, the Mind of Christ, the Spirit of The Lord, and Himself The Lord, the Spirit of Adoption, of Truth, of Liberty; the Spirit of Wisdom, of Understanding, of Counsel, of Might, of Knowledge, of Godliness, of the Fear of God. 

For He is the Maker of all these, filling all with His Essence, containing all things, filling the world in His Essence, yet incapable of being comprehended in His power by the world; good, upright, princely, by nature not by adoption; sanctifying, not sanctified; measuring, not measured; shared, not sharing; filling, not filled; containing, not contained; inherited, glorified, reckoned with the Father and the Son; held out as a threat,  the Finger of God; fire like God (to manifest, as I take it, His consubstantiality); the Creator-Spirit, Who by Baptism and by Resurrection creates anew; the Spirit that knows all things, that teaches, that blows where and to what extent He lists; that guides, talks, sends forth, separates, is angry or tempted; that reveals, illumines, quickens, or rather is the very Light and Life; that makes Temples; that deifies; that perfects so as even to anticipate Baptism (As in the case of the Centurion Cornelius, Acts 10. 9), yet after Baptism to be sought as a separate gift; that does all things that God does; divided into fiery tongues; dividing gifts; making Apostles, Prophets, Evangelists, Pastors, and Teachers; understanding manifold, clear, piercing, undefiled, unhindered, which is the same thing as most wise and varied in His actions; and making all things clear and plain; and of independent power, unchangeable, Almighty, all-seeing, penetrating all spirits that are intelligent, pure, most subtle; and also all prophetic spirits and apostolic in the same manner and not in the same places; for they lived in different places; thus showing that He is unconfined.” Orations 31.29 

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