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It is a wonderful rainy reading day, so I finished Flawed Families of the Bible: How God's Grace Works through Imperfect Relationships, by Daivd and Diana Garland. I am using this book as one of the resources for the sermon series that I am starting on Sunday called "Mosaic of Grace." The series and the book deals with some of the fragmented relationships and people in the Bible that are really quite problematic to deal with. Most of the biblical stories they deal with are those ones that you read and think, "Why in the world did Israel consider this quite tragic story worth keeping?"
This book deals with tragic folk like - Hagar, Leah, Dinah, Tamar, Michal, Bathsheba, Jephthah's Daughter - and deals with them well. The book is very accessible for any reader and is worth wrestling through. David Garland has a theology background and his wife Diana has a social work background and so they bring a nice diversity of academic insight to these troublesome narratives. Although many of the male characters are dealt with (Abraham, David, etc.) the book acknowledges that the Bible gives us many stories about abused and mistreated women. Although the Garlands make good use of some of the feminist scholarship that has been done on these narratives, I thought their interpretations of these stories were a little more gracious and well-rounded than some feminist readings.
This would be a really good book for a small group or Sunday school class to work through together. Especially given the fragmented nature of so many of the family units in the church and the world it is good news to see how God worked his purposes through some pretty disfunctional family systems. One of my favorite ironies of the stories they selected is that these characters end up being included in the genealogies of Jesus. I guess if you think your family tree is crooked, you should check out the Messiah's! :)
I serve on the board of directors at the Bresee Foundation - an inner city community center founded several years ago out of Los Angeles First. The foundation has a health clinic, youth center, and education services. It is an incredible place and I'm thankful to be associated with it.
Last night they hosted their third annual student film festival. Film industry folk, teachers, and other volunteers help the students produce their own short films on a particular subject. This year each film dealt with the issue of the challenge of housing for people living in the city. Los Angeles has the worst average housing cost/average salary cost ratio in the US and so the challenges for finding satisfactory housing for folk living in the city is huge.
The films were very well done and extremely moving. The students who made the winning films were given cameras and equipment. I believe the winning films will be posted on youtube and on the Foundation website soon. Last years winners on the subject of what happens to students who drop out of high school are available on Bresee's website.
I was reminded again that the heroes in this city are the folk who work with these students everyday in schools and in community centers like Bresee. If you are unfamiliar with the Bresee Foundation I encourage you to go to their website: www.bresee.org and check out ways to get involved. On the front page of the site is a recent report done by CBS news on the foundation and other work being done to help with the gang problem in LA.
A former student of mine sent me the following link today - http://www.cafepress.com/nazbeens
It is a link for the "Coterie of the Nazbeens" - translated as an organization for "those who grew up in the Nazarene faith and have since left it (often due to ignorance or a lack of gravitas in the church)." The site offers a line of apparel, housewares, and buttons for all Nazbeens (I assume it is pronounced like Has-Beens).
I cracked up at the marvelous creativity it takes to come up with this stuff. At the same time I continue to weep over the drain of intelligence, commitment, and passion for transformation that is taking place as we lose a generation or more.
I believe we are losing them because we have given them a non-fundamentalist heritage of intelligent wrestling with the questions of faith and a passion to see the poor and broken transformed by the universal grace of God - but we have stopped living out that heritage ourselves. So although many of our young people have left the church to pursue secularism or sensualism, I believe many more have left as a faithful response to the gospel we have given them.
Although this may sound strange, I am proud of those who have left as a response to Christian faithfulness. I wish all of you were still here in the denomination fighting it out and helping her to re-tradition herself, but I understand why the desire to pursue God's call would lead you elsewhere. Keep the passionate faith of Christ embodied in Wesley and Bresee alive. As soon as the rest of us quit majoring in the minors we'll come and join you.
I also finished The Life You've Always Wanted:Spiritual Disciplines for Ordinary Peopleby John Ortberg as part of my Wednesday night class on spiritual disciplines. I've gotten to know John just a little bit over the last few months as we serve together on the Fuller Board of Trustees. John is an incredible communicator and has an amazing knack for simplifying and illustrating important life and faith ideas. Although I have heard John speak several times over the years, this was my first time through one of his books and I really did enjoy it.
In the book John deals well with several practical spiritual disciplines that God uses as means of grace to move us toward Christian maturity. This would be a great book for people looking for a text to use as part of a small group discussion. My new favorite story from John is in his chapter on the practice of confession. Here it is:
Some years ago we traded in my old Volkswagen Super Beetle for our first piece of new furniture: a mauve sofa. It was roughly the shade of Pepto-Bismol, but because it represented to us a substantial investment, we thought "mauve" sounded better.
The man at the furniture store warned us not to get it when he found out we had small children. "You don't want a mauve sofa," he advised. "Get something the color of dirt." But we had the naive optimism of young parenthood. "We know how to handle our children," we said. "Give us the mauve sofa."
From that moment on, we all knew clearly the number one rule in the house. Don't sit on the mauve sofa. Don't touch the mauve sofa. Don't play around the mauve sofa. Remember the forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden? "On every other chair in the house you may freely sit, but upon the sofa, the mauve sofa, you may not sit, for in the day you sit thereupon, you shall surely die."
Then came The Fall.
One day there appeared on the mauve sofa a stain. A red stain. A red jelly stain.
So my wife, who had chosen the mauve sofa and adored it, lined up our three children in front of it: Laura, age four, and Mallory, two and a half, and Johnny, six months.
"Do you see that, children?" she asked. "That's a stain. A red stain. A red jelly stain. The man at the sofa store says it is not coming out. Not forever. Do you know how long forever is, children? That's how long we're going to stand here until one of you tells me who put the stain on the mauve sofa."
Mallory was the first to break. With trembling lips and tear-filled eyes she said, "Laura did it." Laura passionately denied it. Then there was silence, for the longest time. No one said a word. I knew the children wouldn't, for they had never seen their mother so upset. I knew they wouldn't, because they knew that if they did, they would spend eternity in the time-out chair.
I knew they wouldn't because I was the one who put the red jelly stain on the mauve sofa, and I knew I wasn't saying anything. I figured I would find a safe place to confess - such as in a book I was going to write, maybe.
The truth is, of course, that we have all stained the sofa. Some of the stains are small and barely noticeable. But some of them bleed through the entire fabric of our lives...
Great stuff.
I have a bad habit of reading several books at a time. I'm finally wrapping several up - so it's time to get back to the book reviews.
The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More by Barry Schwartz is a very interesting secular study that affirms both the biblical warning against coveting and St. Paul's pursuit of the life of contentment as the way to find happiness.
Schwartz demonstrates how we (especially Americans) associate freedom with having more choices, but how having too many choices keeps us from happiness and contentment because (a) it makes is so hard to choose between options, (b) it leaves us with regret because we have remorse over the choices we didn't make, and (c) it keeps us comparing the choices we have made with the choices of others. In the last chapter Schwartz gives 11 disciplines or habits for contentment in a world of choices. Again I thought it was so interesting how 7 or 8 of them relate closely to traditional spiritual disciplines. I'm not sure the spiritual life always has to "make sense" but it is nice when a secular thinking will hold up the virtuous balanced life that the gospel argues for as also the path to happiness.
Last week was the kids open house at school. This is the one and only year where all four kids will be at the same school and so we had to cruise through several classrooms full of science fair projects, history reports, ancient civilization clay models, artwork, and even baby chicks. It was a great night celebrating each of our four really great kids.
The highlight of the evening for me however, was the "about me" book that Sophie is holding up in the picture. It is hard to read, but this page of her book says, "When I grow up, I want to be ________." She filled in her blank with "a pastor" and then drew a picture of what I think is PazNaz.
Obviously, I was really touched by what she wrote. I think it is a testimony to how loved she feels by the people at church and how much our family really does enjoy being in ministry. I'm not sure she will hold to this dream. The next day she told me that she planned on being a pastor and a zoo-keeper... But my other thought was, "If God does call her, I hope the church by then will be ready for her." On the one hand, I mean that, if you've met Sophie you know that she's 6 going on 36, and so I hope the church would be ready for the little live-wire that she is, but on the other hand, I also hope by then the church would be ready to fully embrace her in ministry.
I don't know if any of our four children will continue the unusual legacy of ministry that our family has carried for a few generations now. I have kind of been hoping that they will all be doctors (the kind that can help people) and support their mother and me in our old age. But usually when people think about one of them carrying on the family legacy of church ministry they usually talk about one of the boys in that capacity. Again, that would be fine with me, but if it ends up being Sophie, I hope the church is ready for her.
On Wednesday a group of Evangelical pastors, leaders, and scholars released "An Evangelical Manifesto." The purpose of the document was to articulate a common identity among those who call themselves Evangelical and to repent the ways that Evangelicals have tended to fault by either privatizing or politicizing the faith. Several significant leaders were among the initial signees: Richard Mouw, Jack Hayford, Max Lucado, Miroslav Volf, Mark Noll, John Ortberg, Ron Sider, etc.
There are two versions of the Manifesto on the website created for it. One is a summary the other is the full version. I have read both and have chosen to sign it also. The full version is long but well worth reading. I believe that this is a wonderful articulation of the problems we have had as Evangelicals but also a call to living as Christ would want us to live in the world.
