The Messiness of the Gospel

Beth and I enjoyed keeping Dr. Anna Griffith last weekend. She ministers to people who are HIV positive or have AIDS.  Anna asked why we don’t hear more about AIDS in our churches.  Is it taboo? Do we feel that it’s not relevant?

Are we afraid that if we start talking about AIDS that we might have someone show up who has it? Then those who don’t might leave, especially the big financial givers, or our friends?

Jesus demonstrated that the gospel is messy. It’s messy because it makes us confront people and ideas that we’re not comfortable with. God’s love led Jesus into interaction with the leprous and the sexually immoral.  His reputation was frequently tarnished by his company and outrageous love.

 Why talk about AIDS? Why seek out someone with AIDS? Do we need Jesus to come again and answer that question for us?

 

The Importance of Grace

Grace is a concept that I have trouble getting my mind around. It’s much easier to try to earn something than receive it as a gift. We are uncomfortable with gifts unless we have something to give in return.

But matching gift for gift ruins the value of a gift. If my wife and I feel that we must continue to outdo, or even equal each other in gift giving, then love gets hurt in the process.

Maybe that’s why grace has to be received from God while on our knees. To be able to earn it, or return it equally, would hurt our loving relationship with God. Instead, God asks us to share it, instead of trying to earn it.

 

The church and capitalism

On my birthday, I’ve been wondering about the effect of capitalism on the practices of the church here in America.

I believe that capitalism affects:
1. What we pay our ministers
2. How we define ourselves by the number of people in attendance (not counted in some cultures)
3. We look for “results” in what we do
4. We move “successful” business people into positions of leadership
5. Successful business practices are implemented to help “stagnant” churches. (church growth movement)
6. We look for the success of the institution over the growth of the individual (of which Bill Hybels just repented)
7. Wealthy people are viewed as more mature, hard working, and responsible than the poor.

Not all of these effects are bad, but are we even aware that they are present? Where is the theological reflection on these issues in our sermons and Bible classes? (Guess I have to point a finger at myself here.)

 

Postmoderns and the Bible

Gertrude Himmelfarb says the following about postmoderns,

“Where modernists tolerate relativism, postmodernists celebrate it. Where modernists, aware of the obstacles in the way of objectivity, take this as a challenge and make a strenuous effort to attain as much objectivity and unbiased truth as possible, post-modernists take the rejection of absolute truth a deliverance from all truth, a release from the obligation to maintain any degree of objectivity or aspire to any kind of truth.”

 

Postmoderns have moved us from a propositional Christianity to a relational Christianity. This movement has pros and cons in my opinion.

 

The pros of this include an emphasis on God’s love and man’s need to emulate this. This movement was also characteristic of the teaching of Jesus. The Pharisees needed to hear this as the Church of Christ of the 1950s needed to hear this.

 

The cons of this movement include the relativizing of Scripture. The Church of Christ is going through interesting changes right now because this goes at the base of its identity as “people of the book.” How do we preach, teach, and organize ourselves when we have a growing population of our own members who don’t want to treat the Bible like a “rule book.”

 

I don’t think this will be solved unless we can respectfully sit down in diverse settings and discuss exegetical and hermeneutical options without demonizing each other.

 

Stranger than Fiction

My wife and I watched the Will Ferrell movie “Stranger than Fiction” this weekend. It was surprising to see Will Ferrell in a little more serious role and even a lesson-to-be-learned at the end.

The main character, Ferrell, leads a boring life as an auditor for the I.R.S. (If you haven’t seen the movie and don’t want me to spoil it, stop reading now.) He begins to hear a voice in his head narrating much of his life. This is a major nuisance as you can imagine. Things get much worse when he hears from the narrator that he will soon die. This fact leads him to try things he had always run away from: pursuing a love interest, learning to play the guitar, taking vacation.

Ferrell is enjoying his new life and is desperate to find the narrator to keep her from ending his life. Except when he finds out she is a novelist who has already written the ending, he accepts it because he is going to give up his own life in exchange for a young boy who would be hit by a bus. I am over-summarizing so forgive me.

It was interesting to me that Ferrell’s character so willingly accepted that his life should be given so readily for someone else’s. The screenwriters must have believed that the moviegoer would understand this as well.

Maybe self-sacrifice is one of the few connecting points that Christianity still has with our culture. The core message of the cross is that someone would give up the good life so that someone else might experience it forever. I was challenged by this movie to show more unselfish love, and perhaps learn to play the guitar.

 

Not smart enough

In order to celebrate mathematics in the new millennium, The Clay Mathematics Institute of Cambridge, Massachusetts (CMI) has named seven Prize Problems. The Scientific Advisory Board of CMI selected these problems, focusing on important classic questions that have resisted solution over the years. The Board of Directors of CMI designated a $7 million prize fund for the solution to these problems, with $1 million allocated to each.

 Thinking that I know a little something about math and dreaming of ways I could use a million dollars, I took a look at some of the problems. Needless to say, I have to face the fact that I’m just not smart enough to solve any of them. I’m still trying to figure out if the explanation of each is in English or not.

Christianity is full of paradoxes. At some points it can be extremely simple, or incredibly complex. There are simple steps to becoming a Christian, and yet the spiritual process of how we become mature in Christ can be quite a complex problem. Is it really complex or do we just make it tough?

Churches argue doctrine on basically every point you can draw out of the Bible. Is it that complex or do we make it that way? The apostle Peter said that Paul wrote things that were difficult to understand. Yet we’d like to believe that the gospel message is clear and straightforward. So what is simple and what is not? Ponder that one while I work on Riemann’s Hypothesis and Hodge’s Conjecture.

 

Getting Real

Being a web geek, I found an interesting e-book about developing website. It’s called “Getting Real.” It actually tells us a lot about our current culture.

  

I thought I would spend a few posts comparing this “business” advice with the way we currently look at church practice.

From the introduction:  

  

Getting Real gets rid of…

• Timelines that take months or even years
• Pie-in-the-sky functional specs
• Scalability debates
• Interminable staff meetings
• The “need” to hire dozens of employees
• Meaningless version numbers
• Pristine roadmaps that predict the perfect future
• Endless preference options
• Outsourced support
• Unrealistic user testing
• Useless paperwork
• Top-down hierarchy

You don’t need tons of money or a huge team or a lengthy development cycle to build great software. Those things are the ingredients for slow, murky, changeless applications. Getting real takes the opposite approach.

My comments: It seems to me that these guys are saying our culture is growing tired of complex, flashy performances, and instead are ready for more simplicity in life.  Could it be that the end of polished church worships is nearing an end?

 

Next question

I appreciate everyone’s responses about God’s will. I have another question ready for you at 7daysermon.wordpress.com.

 

Next question

Thank you to those who posted. The next step doesn’t require as much looking inward, as looking in the Bible. Please go to 7daysermon.wordpress.com for the next step.

 

Help me with my sermon

I am experimenting with a new sermon preparation tool using people’s feedback. It’s a four step process of looking inward, searching the Bible, summarizing a passage, and applying the passage to a specific issue. Please help me out by going to this page and adding your thoughts. Pleaese check back daily if you have time as I’ll have more for you to do.

 If you want to comment on the sermon preparation process, please comment on this post.

Thanks,

 Ryan