Sunday Quote 13110

St John Chrysostom on free will:

“We are directed by free will and not, as some say, subjected to the compulsion of inescapable fate. That is why God has given us the promise of his kingdom but also threatened us with punishment.  He would not have done that to people in the toils of necessity.  He would not have laid down laws, he would not have given us exhortations if we had been prisoners of destiny. . . The myth of a compelling destiny is nonsense.  Our lives are subject to no unavoidable fate.  Everything, as I have argued, points to the beauty of free will.”

Thank-you to Tony Woodlief of Sand in the Gears, who had this quote up.  You can read his post about it here.



jj

This Humble Pie is Very....Tasty??

I recently wrote a blog post that I was very proud of.

It succinctly outlined and introduced certain ideas that have been forming and reforming in my mind for some time now, and it was nice to put the ideas out there for all to read and comment upon.

I got some hits that day, and was fairly pleased with the numbers.

Then, later in the morning, my cousin posted a link to my blog on his facebook account, with a small blurb saying how he thought it was a good blog post.

I was super stoked, excited, and instantly began to think that I had gone viral and would, at the end of the day, be right up there with The Huffington Post in terms of popularity.

The Only Easy Day was Yesterday.

The training to become a Navy SEAL is probably the most rigorous training a human being can be subjected to.

The first phase of the training is seven weeks of almost non-stop physical activity:  timed runs (in boots and fatigue pants), endless sets of push-ups and sit-ups, ocean swims.  In addition to this,

Sunday Quote 12410

My pastor is fond of saying that church is more than just the grey chairs.  It's more than just Sunday morning.  This is from his book, Jesus Wants to Save Christians:

"The measure of a sermon is not whether it affirms what you already believe.  A sermon is not a product to be consumed and then evaluated according to who good it was or whether it was pleasing or enjoyable.

If a sermon can be resolved in the time it took to deliver it, then it misses something central to what a sermon even is, which is connected with what the Eucharist is.  The gathering of the church, in a service or worship or teaching setting, is to remind, instruct, and inspire people about being the Eucharist for the worlds they find themselves in.  It's written in the letter to the Hebrews that they shouldn't give up meeting together because they should "consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds."

The phrase "good deeds" comes from the Hebrew word mitzvot, which refers to actions taken to heal and repair the world.  It's a concept rich with significance in the Jewish tradition.  For the writer of Hebrews, the church gathers so that the body will spur one another on to live a particular way day in and day out.

These gatherings aren't the end; they're the beginning.  They're the start.  They put things into perspective, they remind, they provoke, they comfort, they inspire, they challenge, but ultimately they are about the Eucharist.  About these people in this place at this time being equipped to be a Eucharist.

The sermon is about starting the discussion.  The sermon is about having the first word.  The sermon is a catalyst that inspires people into whole new ways of seeing their lives.

The Eucharist is ultimately about what we do out there, in the flow of everyday life."

Rob Bell and Don Golden, Jesus Wants to Save Christians pp159,160


jj

You Know What the News is. In a Moment...(connections 3)

...You're Going to Hear The Rest of the Story

There is always more to the story, isn't there?  Here's my "more".

I wrote about how my backyard landscaping prompted me to look into this beautiful Creation and our Creator, and how it spurred me to write on how this beautiful Creation-and the honest study of it-fits together in my mind.

But it really didn't start there. I could also tell you about college, and how college was for me, as most young people, a time of broad stretching and learning and growing. New ideas colliding with old ideas, and no idea exactly what I would be at the end of it all.

But it really didn't start there either.

Sunday Quote 11710

I have emphasized what I think is the meat and potatoes of this quote, and quite honestly, of our walk with Christ.  Blind adherance to a certain political party will not change anything, nor will blind adherance to a certain denominational stance.

"We need a transformation of our religion and our politics that acknowledges that the old ways don't work.  But we need more than critique.  We must ask what's wrong, but also what the answers are.  At it's heart, we must offer a challenge to hope, which is the only real path to change.

Our private religions have failed, but we must not lose a personal God.  Instead of trying to strike an elusive "balance" between private piety and the social gospel, we must go to the heart of the prophetic religion itself in which a personal God demands public justice as an act of worship (emphasis mine).  We meet the personal God in the public arena and are invited to take our relationship to that God right into the struggle for justice.  Indeed, without that personal relationship we will lose the political struggle.  That shift-bringing the personal God into the public arena-is at the heart of the prophet's message and will transform both our religion and our politics."

Jim Wallis, God's Politics pp40


jj

Cue the Beatles

Elijah Jason turned two years old today.

We're doing cake.  We're doing ice cream.  We're doing Chuck E. Cheese. 

And then tomorrow?  More cake.  More ice cream.

And pictures.  Lots and lots of pictures.


He used to sleep only in our arms as we walked him around the house.  Last night, we put him in his big boy bed for the first time.

He used to not have any teeth.  Now we fear for those times when we need to fish something out of his mouth, wondering if we'll get our whole finger back.

Two years ago, he weighed 7 pounds, 4 ounces.  Now he weighs almost 40 pounds.

If someone were to ask me for ways to make two years go by in the next month, I would tell them to have a kid.

"Hurricane Eli" has been a whirlwind adventure for us, all three four of us, and though we are fatigued and tired even before he wakes up, we are energized by the anticipation of what he might do that day.

We love him dearly, and would not trade these past two years for anything.

Happy Birthday Eli!

We love you and pray that God will abundantly bless you as you continue to grow into the man He made you to be.


jj

Haiti

Just a quick note.

My cousin is doing mission work with a medical organization in Haiti.  He was based about ten miles outside of Port Au Prince.

I cannot imagine the pain and suffering he is experiencing right now, as he works to help those around him.

From the early information we have, my cousin and those he works with are okay, and we pray that God will use him and the rest of the staff to the best possible end in the midst of this horrible tragedy.

jj

Backyard Landscaping (connections 2)

How I came Upon Chunks of the Canadian Shield in Jenison

In the Beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Roughly 13.7 billion years later, I did some landscaping in my backyard.

It struck me, as Shan and I were helping Elijah pick out some neat rocks from our rockpile, just how connected we are with God's creative story.

The small pile of rocks in my driveway came from a mound of sediment left over from the last glacier to grind it's way south about 11,000 years ago.  When the glacial ice retreated, it left the newly formed Great Lakes, as well as the glacial till that covers most of the Upper Midwest.

This glacial till was ground and scraped off of some exposed bedrock up north, probably somewhere between Lake Superior and the Hudson Bay.

The exposed bedrock came from the remnants of the Canadian Shield, part of the North American craton that was formed by plate tectonics about 1 billion years ago.

The oldest rock formations on this North American craton, an area relatively untouched by fault lines and other major geologic events, has been dated to nearly 4 billion years ago.  The Earth itself isn't much older than that, so these rocks may have been present when the Earth and the rest of our Solar System cooled enough to separate the planets and our Sun from the collapsing molecular cloud surrounding and forming it.

These molecular clouds, also called stellar nurseries, provide the correct conditions for the formation of matter as we know it.  If we can imagine a molecular cloud as a balloon, we can begin to understand how stars and planets form.  If we have inflated a balloon outside on a hot day, the higher temperature will provide the molecules within the balloon with enough energy to keep the balloon inflated.  If we take that same balloon, and place it into a freezer, the temperature will drop, and we will notice a drastic change in the size of the balloon.  It will appear to have deflated, though it will have the same amount of matter inside it.

When the molecular cloud shrinks, the material has to go somewhere.  Because even molecules have gravity, some will be pulled together.  If this happens over and over again, eventually we will end up with stars, and other solid bodies that have pulled themselves together by their own gravitational force.

So the material that eventually made it's way into the rock pile on my driveway was at one time floating around inside a molecular cloud, a molecular cloud very similar to countless other molecular clouds that were, at one point, the only things found in the entire universe.

And then,

13.7 billion years ago, give or take,

God spoke.  His words set in motion a series of events that would eventually lead to me shoveling rocks in my driveway and putting them in my backyard.

You see, we tend to read Genesis with the mostly unconscious thought that it happened a long time ago. We treat it like history, as if those stories happened somewhere else.  As if now, today, those stories don't mean much. We distance ourselves from the creation story. But in the process, we distance ourselves from the Creator, and His Creation. When we read Genesis like we read any history text, the words remain rather dry and unimportant to us.  We need to understand that we are connected to Genesis, and the rest of God's story, just as closely as we are connected to our house, to our community, to our families.

The Battle of Gettysburg takes up quite a bit of space in textbooks and historical works.  We can study the battle, the commanders, the soldiers, the equipment used, the weather, the terrain, the social circumstances around the battle.  We can analyze, in excruciating detail, nearly every single second of the battle, what was done, what was said, what happened and why it happened.  We can memorize every single detail about the battle.

But we remain disconnected to that knowledge until we actually visit the battlefield.  We can stand on Cemetery Ridge.  We can climb Little Round Top.  We can walk where General Pickett walked, and be amazed he even made it as far as he did.  And only when we glimpse the personal view of the battlefield will we begin to understand everything we know.

History did not happen in a textbook. It happened on this planet, in a real and very physical place. The Bible is no different. It happened here, on this planet. In this solar system, within the Milky Way galaxy, within our universe.

And it all started with God speaking.

jj

Sunday Quote 11010

N.T. Wright is one of my favorite writers.  Here's a short sampling as to why:

"Christian spirituality normally involves a measure of suffering.  One of the times when Jesus is recorded as having used the Abba-prayer was when, in Gethsemane, he asked his Father if there was another way, if he really had to go through the horrible fate that lay in store for him.  The answer was yes, he did.  But if Jesus prayed like that, we can be sure that we will often have to as well.  Both Paul and John lay great stress on this.  Those who follow Jesus are called to live by the rules of the new world rather than the old one, and the old one won't like it.  Although the life of heaven is designed to bring healing to the life of earth, the powers that presently run this earth have carved it up to their own advantage, and they resent any suggestion of a different way.

Suffering may, then, take the form of actual persecution....But suffering comes in many other forms, too: illness, depression, bereavement, moral dilemmas, poverty, tragedy, accidents, and death.  Nobody reading the New Testament or any of the other Christian literature from the first two or three centuries could have accused the early Christians of painting too rosy a picture of what life would be like for those who follow Jesus.  But the point is this: it is precisely when we are suffering that we can most confidently expect the Spirit to be with us.  We don't seek, or court, suffering or martyrdom.  But if and when it comes, in whatever guise, we know that, as Paul says toward the end of his great Spirit-chapter, "in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us" (Romans 8:37)"

N.T. Wright, Simply Christian pp137, 138

jj

Sunday Quote 10310

So, I've never considered myself to be a very good Calvinist, even though I'm Dutch (and therefore supposed to like TULIPs), and attended his collegiate namesake before I couldn't afford it anymore.

But some recent blog and facebook conversations have brought my web-scanning eye to this quote, and I thought I would share it here:

"That there exists in the human minds and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity, we hold to be beyond dispute, since God himself, to prevent any man from pretending ignorance, has endued all men with some idea of his Godhead, the memory of which he constantly renews and occasionally enlarges, that all to a man being aware that there is a God, and that he is their Maker, may be condemned by their own conscience when they neither worship him nor consecrate their lives to his service. Certainly, if there is any quarter where it may be supposed that God is unknown, the most likely for such an instance to exist is among the dullest tribes farthest removed from civilization. But, as a heathen tells us, there is no nation so barbarous, no race so brutish, as not to be imbued with the conviction that there is a God. Even those who, in other respects, seem to differ least from the lower animals, constantly retain some sense of religion; so thoroughly has this common conviction possessed the mind, so firmly is it stamped on the breasts of all men. Since, then, there never has been, from the very first, any quarter of the globe, any city, any household even, without religion, this amounts to a tacit confession, that a sense of Deity is inscribed on every heart.”

Thanks to Unpacking Forgiveness author Chris Brauns for providing this great quote on his blog, A Brick in the Valley.


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