The nines Haiku

Warnings about pride
"We don't hear, get impatient"
That was Troy Gramling.

Tim Stevens' three words:
You, your mission, their teammates.
All three must be good.

B. Carter followed
Successors live in shadow
He learned to be self.

Anne's Mad Church Disease
Church work distracting from Christ?
Relying on "Me".

How does one mentor
I do then slowly you do
that's Dave Ferguson

Scott Hodge wants God's voice,
faith and courage to obey.
Mornings are for Him.

Which Way the Wind Blows

Acts 20:22

"And now, compelled by the Spirit, I am going to Jerusalem, not knowing what will happen to me there." -Paul

Acts 21:4

Through the Spirit [the disciples] urged Paul not to go on to Jerusalem.

In studying what the Bible says about the Holy Spirit for a sermon, I was reminded of this strange little movement in Acts.

Did the Holy Spirit want Paul to go to Jerusalem or not? Paul felt compelled by the Spirit to go. The disciples were compelled by the Spirit to urge him not to go.

I think that the Spirit did want him to go, but wanted him to go through that bit of testing to be sure he was ready.

However, this brings us an important lesson for those of us trying to follow the Wind of God. Just because he compels us to try to stop someone from "going to Jerusalem" does not necessarily mean he wants that person to listen to us.

Perhaps also, we should consider that just because he sends us toward a city, doesn't necessarily mean he wants us to arrive there.

Poets, Prophets, and Preachers PART 3

Well, the response I've been getting about Rob Bell (from at least four people just recently) is that he is "out there" on some things. Therefore, I should be pretty careful.

My response has been out where? Such generalities are not helpful to anyone. If there is a problem, define it.

I am not pretending that he is always right. Only my Mom carries that honor (at least, that is what she tells me). I can point to a couple things off the top of my head that I did not think were quite right.

For instance, even though I did find the trampoline illustration in Velvet Elvis helpful in some ways, it fell short in showing how some "springs" are more important than others. (The doctrine of forgiveness is bigger than how often we take the Lord's Supper, for instance). And some are essential. (The resurrection of Jesus, for instance).

However, the same could be said for any teacher I've ever listened to for very long (especially yours truly). We all fail somewhere. I can't tell you how often I groan on Sunday afternoon about something I said Sunday morning. I long to be perfect, alas I'm not.

Overall, I think he is a pretty sound Bible teacher.

He taught five sessions, three of them were 'how-to' construct a sermon. Here are some things that I can tell you about his preaching from hearing those sessions.

1. He is an expository preacher.

Rob Bell always starts his sermon preparations with the text. I already knew this. But he showed how he approaches the passage. He tries to memorize the text way in advance so that it can "live with" him for a long time before he preaches. He focuses on the words, studies their linguistic origins, examines how they are used elsewhere. He researches the backgrounds. He works a passage hard before he starts assembling the sermon, and it shows.

2. He is passionately in love with God's Word.

You can see this in his sermon prep. It also show in his body language when he talks about the text.

3. He is passionate about God's work.

It would be interesting enough for me if he just showed the neat things he discovered in his research. But he works the sermon all the way to applications.
4. He works really hard on his messages.

This was the most striking thing to me. I always assumed he was just really gifted as a communicator. He is that, but wow, he works hard. He showed us his process. Every part of his sermon is the result of a lot thought a preparation.
5. He still believes the sermon is a very powerful tool in the post-modern world.

Many post-modern church leaders are giving up on sermons. They see the method as dated and ineffective. Not so with Rob. Though he doesn't often use the force of the 'bully pulpit, preferring to give the first words of a discussion rather than the final word. (This very different approach is why I think he tends to be misunderstood).

Poets, Prophets, and Preachers PART 2

Rob Bell did most of the speaking. But he had some guests too.

The surprise guest guest was Zach Lind, drummer from Jimmy Eat World. (You can find his blog here) Rob interviewed him about the creative process of song writing, and then applied that to the creative process of sermon writing. The biggest take-away from that was that writing a good song or sermon doesn't just happen. It often takes much working and re-working.

That was probably more fun than helpful.

Peter Rollins was one of the other guest speakers. He had two one-hour sessions. The first he was interviewed by Rob, the second he just spoke. Peter was really funny and charming (with his thick Irish brogue).

Peter, however, might be one of the reasons that so many evangelicals are nervous about all things Emerging. (I'd argue that the biggest reason is that evangelicals get nervous is that they are group that is labeled. Any time that happens, the labeled group is seen as new and therefore unorthodox. But that's a discussion for another day.)

Peter is absolutely mad. I would say that there is a method to his madness, but many will never be able to see beyond the madness. He speaks quickly, rapidly dropping bombs of provocation. He speaks with far more question marks than periods.

I'd argue he is more a performance artist than a preacher. If you understand him in that way, it makes much more sense. Let me give you an example: For Lent, he instructed his group to give up God. For those 40 plus days, they did not read the Bible or pray. Instead they read atheist writers like Freud and Nietzsche. Already, he may have lost you. But by the end, he talked about how a need and a hunger for God had been created.

That's Peter Rollins in a nutshell. His performance art carries the danger of being misunderstood, but it also carries a tremendous potential to speak in ways that a speech canot. The best things I got from him were two illustrations (maybe I'll share them another day) and the motivation to try to work in more performance art into service (attentive to the dangers, of course). His books may be worth reading just to inspire creativity.

The other guest speaker, Shane Hipps, pastors a Mennonite church of about 300 in Arizona. Before he became a preacher, he worked for a marketing firm that had accounts with Porsche and others. As a part of that work, he did much research into how people think in the effort to coerce them into buying whatever his firm was pimping. He left that behind, but now carries some important warnings about what unintentional messages are media carry.

You can can catch the heart of his first message here (It's a 5:40 video) or in an articel he wrote here. (You might want to check out some of the other interviews about virtual community too).

The infromation he gave in his first session should be required for any student of preaching. Really good. Really important.

Since he contends that the medium is the message, his second session was about what kind of message do you as medium convey (beyond the text of your sermon, of course).

That session was confusing to me. I found his blog and asked him to explain the ideas from his second session more. You can find his response here. He deserves a lot of credit for responding so quickly and graciously. I'm still probing more, because it is new to me. I want to know more about what he means before I swallow it whole or deny it completely, or (more likely) do something between those extremes.

Poets, Prophets, and Preachers

This is a review of the Poets, Prophets and Preachers conference I attended last week. It was a preaching conference hosted by Rob Bell.

I have been somewhat careful about telling people I was going to hear Rob Bell, because I grow weary of answering all of the rumors and accusations that surround him. I don't agree with everything he says. The same could be said of any author, speaker, or teacher, though.

Most of the more passionate attacks seem to be from people who have not actually read his books, or seem to completely misunderstand them.

But like I said, I'm tired of this debate. So, I have been listening and reading him in relative silence for a couple of years. When I would quote him, I'd say "I heard a preacher say..." Cowardly, I guess.

Things changed a little when a fellow attender was fired by his church for just being at this conference. Now I feel like saying nothing may be allowing ignorance to handicap the church. I'm not going to commit myself to daily fighting this battle. But I will let you know what I see, good and bad and let you form opinions of your own.

This is already getting lengthy, so I'll break it up into a couple parts.

What enticed me to go:

1. I really want to get better at the craft of preaching
2. If you paid for one registration, it was good for two people, which encouraged us to experience it in community, where you could digest the ideas together. I got to do this with an old acquaintance from college. This was much better than going to a conference without anyone else. I've done that before: not fun.
3. Since we split the registration price, the cost was only $125 for 2 and a half days. Compare that to other conferences and you will see what a value that is.
4. It was in Grand Rapids, a pretty quick drive from here. Compare to Chicago, Atlanta, and San Diego where other appealing conferences were.
5. Rob Bell is an amazing communicator. I was hoping I could learn some of his preparation and delivery techniques. (I was not disappointed, by the way).

I think in the next post, I will give you my impression of the two other speakers, Peter Rollins and Shane Hipps. Then, in a third post, I'll give you my impression of Rob's five talks.

Gluttonous Cannibals

America earned the “consumeristic” label long ago. We consume, gorge, and stuff ourselves until the point of bursting. But this consumption is not limited to food alone. We consume goods, resources, and at times each other. We are gluttonous cannibals, devouring one another.

In the Aramaic portions of Daniel we find an astounding idiom. Though the idiom is translated “to denounce" or "to accuse maliciously,” the literal meaning is “to eat the pieces.” Daniel 3:8 states that the “astrologers” came forward to denounce Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego because they were not bowing down to Nebuchadnezzar’s 90-foot image. Then in Daniel 6 the other leaders, jealous of Daniel’s rise to prominence, used his piety to convict him. After Daniel was delivered, the king brought the men who “ate the pieces” of Daniel before him, and threw them and their families into the lion’s den (Daniel 6:24).

This phrase, “ate the pieces,” is so stark—as though the defamers are literally removing parts of people with their words. But we have similar idioms in English:

nitpicking
tearing them a new one
picking them apart
shredding

All these phrases dealing with words carry some sort of violence being enacted upon the subject of the words. I used to scoff at the silly Public Service Announcements that tell us that “words hurt”:



But I can’t watch such things with an attitude of ambivalence anymore. Words do hurt and lead to all sorts of awful consequences. It is worse when it happens in the church—a place that is supposed to be safe and free from such attacks. And yet, as much as we try put on our Sunday Christian personas and separate our actions outside the church from those when we walk through the doors, our words still come through. After all, “From the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks” (Luke 6:45). And when we attack each other verbally, we may as well be chopping up and eating one another like cannibals.

The entire law is summed up in a single command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other. Gal 5:14-15

A Memorial Service

Tomorrow is Memorial Day in the United States. It is a day that has been set aside by our government to remember. We remember those who answered the call of their country and willingly gave their lives for something bigger than themselves. To remember, millions go to military cemeteries to remember the fallen. To remember, a small American flag will be placed on the grave of every fallen soldier in Arlington National Cemetery and in cemeteries around the country. To remember, many will place beautiful flowers on the graves of fallen soldiers. To remember, we set aside our schedules and our day to day routines to honor sacrifice.

There are a lot of similarities between Memorial Day and our Communion Service. Everyone in church services today has someone who loved him or her enough to lay down his life on the cross for their sins. And so we take time out of our schedules and our routines and we gather to remember.

We remember he was “pierced for our transgressions” and “crushed for our iniquities.”
We remember “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
We remember that Jesus “himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.”

But the key to understanding communion is in the differences between it and any other memorial observance. There is no tomb for us to visit and lay flowers on. No, we serve a risen savior, who’s in the world today. Flags and flowers do not honor him. No, we gather at a table instead of a tomb and we lay our lives at the foot of the cross as a living sacrifice for Jesus.

Each Lord’s Day millions gather around the Lord’s table to remember the crucified and risen Lord. Let us eat the bread and drink the cup “in remembrance” of our wonderful Savior.

A Good Knight

Why does a knight serve his king? (I'm talking about the mythical medieval knight here.)

The reasons are plenty. A knight could serve his king because of the pay, the position it would put his children in, the fun parties, the celebrity status, the power over people associated with the position, family traditions, or a variety of other selfish reasons. There are many ways that a king can get knights to serve him. But none of them would really stick - well, maybe family tradition might. Another king could come along and offer more pay, offer higher societal positions for the knight's children, bigger parties, a higher seat at the table, or more power.

So what is a king to do if he wants a knight that is truly loyal?

He would have to offer a vision of the way he wants to shape the world that would cause the knight will put aside his dreams for higher pay, the societal status of his children, his enjoyment of the most grand parties, his celebrity status, his power over others, and even the traditions of his family. The knight, the kind a king would want, would put aside all his selfish ambitions to help the king bring about his plan for the world.

Does God want any less of us than a king wants of a good knight?

He offers us the opportunity to join with him in making our houses and our neighborhoods a better place. All he asks is that we buy into his vision of the world. We need to put on the breastplate of faith and love and wear the helmet of the hope of salvation (1 Thes 5:8). In the end, we need to put aside all of our selfish ambitions, surrender our hearts and desires to God, and begin to work on shaping the world into the world he planned for it to be. Anything else is just serving for the wrong reasons.

And God is different than a king. A king can be tricked by outward appearances, posturing, and traditions. God cannot. He can see straight into our hearts and see if it is really His.

Encountering the Bible...literally

A few weeks ago I was asked point blank by a church member, “Do you take the Bible literally?” While she did not intend it to be so, this is a loaded question. By saying “yes” you must then do everything written therein literally. By saying “no” you are impinging upon the reliability and authority of the Bible. Of course, anyone involved in such a discussion knows the matter is far more complicated than those two options.


For example, what do we mean by “literal”? Do we mean “historically literal”—that what the Bible purports to have happened actually happened in that way? This approach assumes a few things: that the authors understood history writing as we do and that they had the materials in hand to accomplish such a feat.

Contrary to these assumptions, historiography (how history is written) is a modern construct and applying it to ancient writers is anachronistic and unfair to their intentions. Biblical writers were not writing an unbiased history of what occurred. Rather, it is a theologized history—that is, a history from the viewpoint of a faithful people reflecting upon a saving God.

Even if they were writing with unbiased intent, they did not have the primary materials to accurately convey historical events. Many things described in the Bible were reconstructed from oral transmission since they were not a written culture and did not write things down.

Thus we should not be surprised when there are tensions (or to put it more boldly, “contradictions”) in the text. They were not concerned with transmitting events exactly as they happened. Rather, they incorporated historically based events into their overarching themes and shaped them into a coherent whole. A brief look at the Synoptic gospels belies such a position. When Matthew says that Jesus taught on a mountain (Matt. 5:1) and Luke says he “came down and taught on a level place” (Luke 6:20), is one of them just wrong? No, it means there is more to each author’s presentation than meets the eye and it calls for a little investigation.

All of this is to say, we should be wary to take the Bible as “historically literal” because we open ourselves to criticism when a Biblical account seems to be contradicted by other “histories.” What we can say is that the Bible is based in history and contains some historical accounts, but at the end of the day the authors are far more concerned with the theological message than the historical accuracy.


Well if we don’t mean “historically literal” perhaps we mean “proscriptionally literal”. That is, when the Bible makes a command, we take it literally and do it—no questions asked. On the one hand, such a literal view has its appeal. It removes any interpretation from our part and places it firmly in God’s hands. There is no need to justify our actions because God has the final authority.

The problem with this literal view is that it does not account for all the laws in the Bible. What do we do with the Old Testament laws? Unfortunately, many too easily dismiss Old Testament laws by saying we live under the New Covenant. Also, what do we do with cultural laws—that is, laws whose context can be traced to a specific time and place but whose impact is lost on a different, modern culture? A most obvious example is Paul’s command for women to dress modestly, which excludes braided hair, gold jewelry or pearls (1 Tim. 2:9). Yet even the most staunch advocate for literal adherence to the laws would probably concede that this command was culturally focused and described modern day prostitutes. Yet, literally, women should not wear jewelry or braid their hair. But such an understanding would seem to be ludicrous by today’s standards. Or, more graphically, when Jesus recommends gouging out your eye or cutting off your hand to avoid sin (Matt 5:29-30), who, except the most ascetic among us, would literally follow such a command?


Hopefully my point is clear—patently accepting biblical stories and laws as literal is not a correct appropriation of Scripture. This approach does not take into account genre, metaphor, hyperbole, parables, etc. Perhaps more egregious is that this approach does not consider authorial intent. Though we may never know exactly what an author was thinking, we can generally deduce a probable theological theme. Thus, a literal interpretation is not always a correct one.

By saying that I don’t always take the Bible literally should in no way imply that it is not the main source of truth that God has revealed to humanity. The Bible is true and does not need to hold up under factual and verifiable scrutiny. It reveals God’s relationship with God’s creation and is not a handbook of World, Israelite, or Christian history. It is a revelation of God's saving works and not a handbook of moral or ethical laws.


To conclude, correctly understanding Scripture requires a Spirit of wisdom coupled with a proper understanding of context and background. And each new generation needs to allow the Bible to speak anew to the needs of the community. May we take the Bible seriously, even if we don’t always take it literally.

Unlikely Disciple

I just ran across this book. It looks like an interesting read.

The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University

Here is the article on it that got me interested in it: Liberal Student Infiltrates Liberty University to Write Exposé and Discovers Intolerance...From the Left

A liberal Ivy League student decides to enroll at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in Virgina and write a book exposé (The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University) supposedly showing the intolerance that must be there, or so he thought. The liberal student, however, was surprised to find little of the expected intolerance but is now finding plenty of it from the left because his book was not an outright condemnation of Liberty University nor of Jerry Falwell whom he met during his semester there.

Great Atomic Power

Pandora just played the song from Elizabeth Cook and the Grascals entitled "Great Atomic Power." I would advise checking it out, but I do not know where. It's apparently a popular bluegrass song by how many have made covers of it.

It made me laugh.

Do you fear this man's invention that they call atomic power?
Are we all in great confusion, do we know the time or hour
When a terrible explosion may ring down upon our land
Leaving horrible destruction blotting out the works of man

Chorus:
Are you ready for that great atomic power?
Will you rise and meet your Savior in the end?
Will you shout or will you cry when the fire rains from on high?
Are you ready for that great atomic power?

There is one way to escape and be prepared to meet the Lord
Give your heart and soul to Jesus, He will be your shield and sword
He will surely stand beside and you'll never taste of death
For your soul will fly to safety and eternal peace and rest

There's an army who can conquer all the enemy's great bands
It's a regiment of Christians guided by the Savior's hand
When the mushroom of destruction falls and all it's fury great
God will surely save His children from this awful, awful fate

Are you ready for that great atomic power?

Change Starts with Recognizing Our Condition

All growth is change. And most growth starts with the recognition of our need to improve. On this Good Friday, I am reminded of Christ's sacrifice for me and everyone else and the subsequent failure on my part to always respond to Jesus' loving action properly.

Nehemiah, a servant of the king of Persia, heard of the state that Jerusalem had fallen to despite the recent ritual revival that had occurred there. Nehemiah responded to the sad situation with weeping, mourning, prayer and fasting. Nehemiah 1 records one of his prayers.

Today, I have updated that prayer for our situation. If you want to read the real prayer, go to Nehemiah 1. Here is my prayer on this great day.

O Lord, God of heaven, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love with those who love him and obey his commands, let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer your servant is praying before you day and night for your servants, the church. I confess the sins we Christians, including myself and my local body, have committed against you. We have acted very wickedly toward you. We have not obeyed the command to love our neighbors as you taught.

Please remember the instruction you gave your servant Moses, saying, 'If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the nations, but if you return to me and obey my commands, then even if your exiled people are at the farthest horizon, I will gather them from there and bring them to the place I have chosen as a dwelling for my Name.'

We are your servants and your people, whom you redeemed by the great sacrifice of Jesus. O Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of this your servant and to the prayer of your servants who delight in revering your name. May our lives give you glory. Give your servant success today by granting him favor in the presence of others.

Then Nehemiah went to do the will of God, risking his life, facing scorn and danger, and leaving the comfort of the king's presence - all to bring glory to God. In the end, Nehemiah's struggle was not in vain. None of his success would have happened if Nehemiah was not able to see that the reality of the world was different than the reality God intended. So often we also realize this but justify it away. Nehemiah did not do what we have the tendency to do. He followed the revelation by mourning, fasting, and prayer over the Israelites fallen state. When we strive for that which is better and are willing to change ourselves, God can be glorified.

So the wall was completed on the twenty-fifth of Elul, in fifty-two days. When all our enemies heard about this, all the surrounding nations were afraid and lost their self-confidence, because they realized that this work had been done with the help of our God (Nehemiah 6:15-16).

They realized that God was at work. Let us mourn, pray, and fast that the world will realize that God is at work in their midst, and may we be the people willing to be used for that work. But be assured, we will have to change for that to happen. All growth is change.

Rappin' for Jesus

A few weeks ago I saw an old friend, Marcus, whom I had not seen in about 8 years. He is a bright guy and has his hands in writing, mixing and producing his own music. He is also a writer/contributer/editor of “The Holy Observer,” a satirical Christian news source similar to “The Onion.” Anyway, combine those two aspects of his life and you get this news story in which he made a song just for the story. Listen to the song here and the lyrics are posted below. If you don’t get any of the references, just google them and you will figure out just how clever the song is.

Tru Dawgma – Straight Tribbin'

Eschatological know-how, not evangelical lowbrow
Postmodern cash cow
Revelation based on canonization
The millennial nation looms in dispensation
I spit pedagogy orthodoxy
Prima manifesto in the incarnation proxy
Imprimatur, my roots be the hypostatic union
The theocratic fusion, infusin'

Portiuncula mentalities be waxin'
Straight tribulation factions gaining esoteric traction
No apology, my strict epistemology
Will influence doxology and put you in a quandary
Infralapsarian… tribulation prose
Makes me wary and your pragmatism's blatantly exposed
I Didache your Tim Lahaye while rapture spankin' Jerry Jenkins…
Now cogitate this great awakenin'

Hook
Tribba-what (what?), Tribba-who (who?)
Flex eschatological like straight tribbahs do (2x)

Rapture, comin' at ya, gonna fetch ya, gonna catch ya
I be a theocrat with exegesis comin' natural
Ontology gazes in the wake of Armageddon
Pleroma in soma, not a disconnected remnant
Reviviscence is valid and callus as operatum
While your unbelief and disposition won't even fade Him
Cardiognosis, He knows your thoughts and your dreams
Like the Sadducees, your heresy is leaking out the seams

What, what, who? Henotheistic views
Are romanticized, sanitized, still ain't true
But from the parthenogenesis to the Parousia
We got imputed righteousness until the day we meet up
Since the ascension we got metaphysical nominalists
Refer to Postulates for obedientialis
Hidden like the pseudepigrapha in the
Deuterocanonical pack – the apost-hata's back!

One Faith, One Body, No Lines

There is one faith and one body, but God does not see the denominational lines that we have drawn. Just because one worships at a church that has a book of doctrine (that you might or might not agree with) does not exclude that person from the body of Christ. Likewise, just because one worships at a church that does not have a book of doctrine does not mean they are automatically part of that body. A church without a book of doctrine like our churches still have a lot of unwritten doctrines that are extra-scriptural. God is glorified in the lives of faithful Lutherans and he is glorified in the lives of faithful Nazarenes just as he is glorified in the life of a faithful non-denominational Christian.

Everyone usually goes to the church that they think are doing things the best and have the best grasp on Scripture. But for pride and self-glorification, people argue that their sect is the best and put others down rather than try and build one another up. This is nothing new. It was happening in Corinth.

Paul addressed it in 1 Corinthians 1.

"I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought. My brothers, some from Chloe's household have informed me that there are quarrels among you. What I mean is this: One of you says, "I follow Paul"; another, "I follow Apollos"; another, "I follow Cephas"; still another, "I follow Christ."

Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized into the name of Paul? I am thankful that I did not baptize any of you except Crispus and Gaius, so no one can say that you were baptized into my name. (Yes, I also baptized the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I don't remember if I baptized anyone else.) For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power."

Those who claim to follow Christ alone can be just as divisive as those who claim to follow Christ the way Luther did, the way Wesley did, or the way that any other human did. It is arrogant to think that we follow the Scripture alone without any influence from our forefathers. I read the Scripture the way that Alexander Campbell taught that Scripture should be read, that is a different way than the way that Martin Luther or John Wesley read it. But that does not mean that my faith is far greater than a Lutheran, a Methodist, or a Nazarene. My intellectual pursuit of the faith might be different, but we will not be judged by our intellectual pursuit. Rather, we will be judged by whether we have a heart that is totally surrendered to God.

Isaiah 29:13 states:

"The Lord says: 'These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is made up only of rules taught by men."

Israel was God's people. There was no group that was more God's than them, but they were still out of step with God. Their title or ethnic origin had nothing to do with whether they were right with God; God wanted their hearts. Likewise, God wants our hearts, anything short of that is not enough. We can give him our hearts whether we are in a Catholic church or in the middle of the woods alone. The key to the healthy Christian life is that we realize nothing but total surrender of our heart makes us right with God. There are acts of the faith that we will participate in when we surrender, but I do not think that God looks down and decides who has given him their heart based upon what church they attend or how they read the Scripture.

The law stated and Jesus repeated, "But if from there you seek the LORD your God, you will find him if you look for him with all your heart and with all your soul."

Anything less than our whole being surrendered to God does not make us right with Him, not the name of the church we attend nor the lack of formal doctrines and creeds.

The sectarian lines that we have drawn in the sand wash away in God's eyes. Being part of one sect or another does not outweigh a heart that is totally surrendered to God.

So let us not be like those who divided the church by claiming to follow Christ, Cephas, Apollos, or Paul. Let us follow Jesus with our whole heart, not being judgmental, and loving those that we encounter every day. Let us help everyone we encounter to take their next faith step, whether that is their first or the next one after a life of total surrender of ninety years.

"Kings" - a modern take on an old story

The following is a post I made at another blog. It entails a show that substantially reflects the biblical story of David and Saul. If you have seen it I would be interested in your feedback. If you haven't, give it a try.


I watched the first 2 episodes of “Kings”—a new drama on Sundays at 8:00 on NBC. The commercials intrigued me because I thought it recast America as a monarchy instead of a democracy. So I was interested to see how the writers pictured such a world. However, my assumptions about the background of the show were completely wrong. Rather, it is a modernization of the biblical Saul and David story found in 1 and 2 Samuel. I figured this out immediately as there were many allusions to the biblical story—some overt and some more subtle. Here are a few:

The main city with a New York skyline was Shiloh
The king was named Silas (Saul); the young upstart was named David Shepherd; the king’s daughter and David’s love interest was named Michelle (Michal); the Prophet was named Reverend Samuels
An early scene saw David going up against a tank whose model was named “Goliath”

Others could be listed, but you get the point. A more subtle allusion revolved around the anointing of the Spirit. In the biblical narrative, the Spirit is on Saul and then leaves him and rests on David. In the show the Spirit is symbolized by butterflies that come and settle like a crown on the actors’ heads. I thought this was an interesting and profound appropriation.

No matter how many parallels and allusions are included, many modernizations of classics end up falling flat. However, I put this “Kings” one on the level of Romeo + Juliet (1996) with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. One aspect that sets this show apart from other attempts to modernize ancient stories is the clever mix of modern and ancient language. While Romeo + Juliet tried to keep much of Shakespeare’s language, “Kings” uses modern English while sprinkling in some “spiritualized” language. For example, when Reverend Samuels denounces the king he says, “I bring a message. Since you have cast aside the word of the Lord he has cast you aside as king. He grants you no more favors. He protects what you love no longer. God wishes a man after his own heart. You have none.”

Through the first 2 episodes they have done a pretty good job of conveying the original storyline without too much fabrication or plot twisting. However, I wonder if they can keep it up without too many contrived stories. One problem I have is with the portrayal of the king’s son, Jack (Jonathan in the biblical account). In the TV edition he resents David, while the biblical account shows a man, who though he should resent David, loves him and accepts David’s ascension to the throne. Unless a plot line makes them best buddies, it will be a pretty significant divergence from the original.

As I said, my biggest fear is the writers turning this story into something it is not, or choosing to show one side of the characters over against another. But if they do, they will be in good company since the Biblical writers do the same thing. 1 and 2 Samuel tell all the dirty secrets of David, while Chronicles cleans up his history and presents a more pristine “man after God’s own heart.”

I don’t know where this series is going, but I like it thus far and recommend you give it a try. You can watch the first three episodes on the NBC website.