Coffee Culture Kingdom

Luther's Gospel

nobody@vox.com(Phil) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:14:20 -0700

Most Christians don't understand the significance of Luther's understanding of God's grace:

In the righteousness of faith, we work nothing, we render nothing to God, but we only receive and allow another to work in us.

If Christians understood this basic Gospel fact, I mean really understood it, people would notice. Trust me, they would.

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Tween Thongs

nobody@vox.com(Phil) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 20:24:54 -0700

How far will marketers go?

David Kuo has a great post last month highlighting excerpts from a troubling article by Stacy Weiner from The Washington Post. Ms. Weiner's article is called, "Goodbye to Girlhood." In his blog, David laments the "nauseating trend of younger and younger girls being taught to be 'sexy' with their bodies, their clothes, and their attitudes."

The article itself reads long, and pits one side vs. the other. But, there are some startling statistics that emerge; brace yourself--here are a couple of the more disturbing claims:

Ten-year-old girls can slide their low-cut jeans over "eye-candy" panties. French maid costumes, garter belt included, are available in preteen sizes. Barbie now comes in a "bling-bling" style, replete with halter top and go-go boots. And it's not unusual for girls under 12 to sing, "Don't cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?"

and:

...in 2003, tweens -- that highly coveted marketing segment ranging from 7 to 12 -- spent $1.6 million on thong underwear, Time magazine reported.

David Kuo finds himself angry and dumbfounded after reading the piece. (Here is the link to the APA's original report.) As the daddy of four precious girls, I can't help but resonate with his initial reaction.

But then, as is always the case, there is a bright lining to this cloud. Statistics aren't people. And girls who are doing this respond to love and acceptance. The statistics sit there unmoved, but these girls blossom when they are welcomed into families where real beauty and strength are prized, not in a formula, or a home-brewed recipe, but in the grace-lived life of the Gospel.

He is risen! Resurrection power still has the last word.

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Cheer Up!

nobody@vox.com(Phil) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 17:43:38 -0700

Cheer up!

A friend the other day challenged me that if I really was interested in making disciples, I'd get out of the church-business. (That's what a pastor does, you know: he's in the church business.) Why? My friend was convinced that he had never seen a disciple made in all his years in the church. So he's stopped going and does "church" differently. "The Church (big "C") ," said he, is "hopelessly lost."

I like my friend. Few people have the passion and sharpened focus he seems to have. But I'm not that discouraged. I thought of a poem and song by an artist I appreciate, who sends this message to the Church. As the poem develops, the message is on the lips of a faithful pastor:

Cheer up church
You're worse off than you think
Cheer up church
You're standing at the brink
Don't despair, do not fear, grace is near.

I guess in a way my friend is right. There is no hope for the Church. None but Jesus.

After all, Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. Did He take a pristine virginal people, or a wandering whore to be His Bride? The healthy do not need a physician; the holy do not need a priest. The Church is His Body; He gave Himself up for Her. So will I.

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Feasting and Death

nobody@vox.com(Phil) — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 22:51:06 -0800

Persephone

Reading the New Yorker recently, I came across a fantastic quote:

Without a killing, there is no feast.

Doing a quick search online, I found that it is quoted nowhere else except here, by an actor and instructor of acting, on his blog. (Interesting blog, too.) I'd love to know the author of this quote, someone who is, apparently by the author of the article, a "philosopher."

But its significance to me goes beyond the field of acting or even philosophy.

Think for a moment: the Christian faith is compared to a feast. Themes of satisfaction, fullness of joy, and being filled (with the Holy Spirit, with grace, with love, etc.) abound.

What is remarkable is that this bounteous feast of grace has been prepared for us through the death (and resurrection) of Jesus. Even more remarkably, the one who prepared it, the Host, is the one whose death was required.

Reading elsewhere online, I came across this quote from Old Spurgeon, the famous 19th century Baptist pastor:

Gospel joys are elevating, they make men like angels. As in the gospel God comes down to men, so by the gospel men go up to God. I might also have shown you how absolutely peerless are the provisions of grace. There is no feast like that of the gospel, no meat like the flesh of Jesus, no drink like his blood, no joys like that which crowns the gospel feast. (Spurgeon on Isaiah 25:6)

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Breathtaking Grace

nobody@vox.com(Phil) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 06:31:26 -0800

Steve Brown, in a recent issue of the Reformed Quarterly (Fall 2007) writes about Amazing Grace:

I have also observed that those who first learn about the amazing grace of God often do, for a period, sin more than before. They are like the college student who, finally out from under the parent’s strictures, tests his or her newfound freedom. These also will slip into the darkness.
But the most important thing about those who understand grace and slip back into the darkness is that they always come back. Those who were trying to be righteous by their own efforts sometimes never come back.
What is grace? Grace is what saves you, holds you, and finally gets you home before the dark. Its called Amazing Grace because when you finally understand and experience it, it takes your breath away.

May you have a breathtaking Christmas season this year praising God for His grace, and, even more, experiencing it every day.

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Waiting for Christmas.

nobody@vox.com(Phil) — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 21:09:26 -0800

Rembrandt's Simeon

I love Christmas. Its like an old friend: it has its faults, to be sure, but when you’re reunited with her after not seeing her for a while, all you can think about is catching up on an old conversation. Then, of course, after the first glow, reality sets in and we have to reckon with the darker side of our relationship: busy schedules, traffic, stretched budgets, and, for some of us, reminders old heart aches and breaks.

Since then our reality so rarely doesn’t live up to the rhetoric, it is good to be encouraged to hang in there and persevere in keeping Jesus, the Christ in the holiday, front and center in our otherwise often conflicted and confused thoughts and feelings during this time of year.

Who better to bring that reminder than Old Simeon, a first century Jewish prophet whose perseverance through years and years of waiting finally paid off? Who better than Simeon, ancient visionary to whom God Himself had spoken.

God’s message to the old Mystic, Simeon, was something like being told, “Mr. Henry, you’re the proud father of a brand new baby boy! But I’m not going to tell you when. Just hang out in the hospital waiting room for the next thirty years; it’ll eventually happen.”

Simeon would see with his own eyes the Redeemer that God’s people had hoped for for thousands of years: the Savior of the World. But he didn’t know when.

What would this have been like?

Day after day, Simeon, a loyal God-listener went to the Jewish temple checking his mailbox for the message that God’s Good Word had finally arrived.

What did he say when the package finally arrived? Read it for yourself, from Luke 2. Read it carefully and you can almost taste the relief in his soul; it is palpable:

29 “Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace,
according to your word;
30 for my eyes have seen your salvation
31 that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,
32 a light for revelation to the Gentiles,
and for glory to your people Israel.”

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More than Revelation

nobody@vox.com(Phil) — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 20:40:25 -0800

To welcome December and the Advent Season, a meditation on the Incarnation seems apt. This one is provided for us by C. S. Lewis, who, musing on the nature of God says...

All three persons of the Trinity are declared ‘incomprehensible.’ God is pronounced ‘inexpressible, unthinkable, invisible to all created beings.’ The Second Person is not only bodiless but so unlike man that if self-revelation had been His sole purpose He would not have chosen to be incarnate in a human form. (C. S. Lewis, Miracles, chapter 10, “Horrid Red Things,” page 77)

If in fact the Creator-Creature distinction is what Scripture says it is, then the value in Lewis's observation and hypothetical question is simply this: more than revelation, the Incarnation shows us redemption.

Now think about the implications of this truth for our lives. Those who claim to follow Jesus should perhaps remember the saying, "You are the only Jesus some people will ever see." Try turning the incarnation from a noun (something to see) to a verb (something to do). God's Incarnation redeems. As we incarnate God to others, they are, by God's grace, redeemed.

Merry Christmas world!

How can you bring the good news of the Incarnation to others this season?

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Beauty in Ft. Collins

nobody@vox.com(Phil) — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 14:52:31 -0700

Undeserved Redemption

At this year's annual gathering of pastors, elders, and church leaders for the Presbyterian Church in America (my denomination), I picked up a copy of Ruminate, a magazine by artists and poets for anyone who enjoys a different angle on the Christian faith.

I finished the Spring 2007 issue today and look forward to meeting with these folks the next time I visit my parents in Ft. Collins, and, when I have the money, to subscribe.

Meanwhile, here's a piece from the issue I just finished for your poetical appetite:

Profit by Joe Ricke
When the whore, his wife
Staggered back to their run-down dump of a home
And cursed him quick before collapsing
Spread-eagled on their tainted bed,
When he kissed her drunken, fevered lips
The taste of her many lovers mixed
With cheap liquor and the flesh of pork,
Hosea believed in Yahweh

(Joe Ricke teaches English at Taylor University. He mostly writes about early drama, but sometimes waxes poetic.)

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Muzzled Oxen

nobody@vox.com(Phil) — Fri, 25 May 2007 19:02:02 -0700

A muzzled ox

There are days when I'm so busy working I don't take time to stop and eat lunch. Then, when 2:30pm or so rolls around, I find myself running on "fumes" as it were. As if in desperation, I stop, grab a bite (literally, "refuel") and I'm set for the rest of the afternoon.

One can't help but wonder, however, about this approach to bodily nutrition. Would not a better approach be to eat at a less urgent interval?

St. Paul, in exhorting the Corinthians on all manner of Christian practice, gives a marvelous picture of the complex nature of the pastorate in his two epistles to that famous ancient Greek church. Among his instructions are included these immortal words:

For it is written in the Law of Moses, “YOU SHALL NOT MUZZLE THE OX WHILE HE IS THRESHING.” (1 Corinthians 9:18).

The apostle quotes from the Pentateuch (Deuteronomy 25:4) in saying this, and adds, in an explanatory tone, "God is not concerned about oxen, is He?"

Besides giving us an intriguing, if enigmatic, paradigm for Old Testament pentateuchal hermeneutics, we clearly are given an imperative regarding the material compensation of ministers of the Gospel. And, if that weren't clear from the context in Corinthians, he repeats the admonition in 1 Timothy 5:18--

For the Scripture says, “YOU SHALL NOT MUZZLE THE OX WHILE HE IS THRESHING,” and “The laborer is worthy of his wages.”

Returning to the theme of nutrition: if the ox is permitted to eat while in the process of threshing the wheat to which he is yoked, then the minister of the Gospel is permitted to be sustained materially and financially from his work in Gospel preaching and teaching (compare Galatians 6:6, "The one who is taught the word is to share all good things with the one who teaches him.").

Has it occurred to you, as it has to me, that the food to which the oxen is entitled may also, in fact, be the Gospel itself? That the minister of the Gospel, like the oxen, ought himself to feed upon the Gospel of God's free grace, as he works to grind and process it out of the ore of God's word in his preparations to feed God's people?

Too many ministers are too busy grinding away, smelting away, in their exegetical mines, to stop and sit amongst the golden bejewelled riches God is extracting all around them and simply enjoy them. Feed on them. Recline in their majestic shalom. May God have mercy to give us an appetite for the very heavenly manna we prepare for others.

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Common Grace Development

nobody@vox.com(Phil) — Thu, 17 May 2007 12:11:09 -0700

Trash Collection

Christians are not known for seeking out common ground with others. When we do, it is typically labeled--and not altogether without reason--compromise.

But isn't it true that Christians have much in common with those who are not of the faith?

This morning, our trash was picked up by the Tucson Waste Management employees. We don't know his name, but he's very friendly and always does a good job. (Nowadays, he doesn't even have to get out of the truck, but uses a mechanical arm to fling the garbage into the back.)

Interestingly enough, God--from whom comes every good and perfect gift--caused not only my garbage to be picked up but everyone else's on the street as well.

I think I have something to say to those who want to talk about good garbage removal. I believe the Faith has something to say about that. I think, in an ideal world, the street that a Christian lives on ought to be cleaner than the one where one does not live.

Too often, however, Christians, in pursuit of their special grace blessings, lose sight of their common grace responsibilities. Since they have Bible studies, mission trips, and worship meetings, they don't have time to pick up the trash in their yards.

What I love about the Faith is that by doing common grace things people outside Christ take special notice.

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