Pillar of fire

So last night, I was praying night prayer, or Compline, in my bedroom. (The link is to some short Celtic Complines from the Northumbria Community in England, but I also pray using various versions of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer as well as other prayer books, especially Celtic ones). This is an on-again, off-again habit I've had which I recently resumed following advice from my Discipleship Group leader, Carl. It's been a good thing in my life, so thanks, Carl.

Anyway, it was late at night, and Tina was already asleep, and I lit a stick of incense and a candle (as is my habit) and started to pray Compline. I want to talk a little more about the candle. I had one of those little glass candle holders that's made for a votive candle and is about the size of a small juice glass. It's green. I didn't have any votive candles, so what I put in it was what they call a "tea light", which is one of those little, short, round candles in a little metal cup, about the same diameter as a votive candle but less than an inch tall. I used a regular match from a matchbook to light it, and only after lighting the incense with the same match, so by the time I lit the candle, I came pretty close to burning my fingers. Accordingly, I dropped the match into the little candle glass, where it lit the wick of the tea light in a satisfactory manner.

If you're still reading, I'm surprised. Why in the name of all that's holy am I going into excruciating detail on the lighting of a candle? Well, I'll tell you why. Because somehow, that particular chain of events led to this: right in the middle of a period of silence, while I was trying to meditate, I heard a "Whoosh! Crackle, snap, pop!" I opened my eyes and looked up, and my little tea light candle flame had become a full-on pillar of fire. I'm not kidding. Flames were shooting up more then a foot above the top of the little green glass, then dancing left and right, then subsiding a bit, maybe even sinking below the lip of the glass, then, "Whoosh! Snap, crackle, pop!" and up we go again, twisting and dancing and reaching for the ceiling. This kept up for a good five or ten minutes! I sat there just enraptured at the beauty of it. Then a voice boomed, "I AM WHAT I AM!" No, now I'm kidding. :-)

It occurred to me to wonder whether the glass (which was sitting at eye-level) was going to explode and send shards of itself hurtling into my face, but I decided that to follow that line of thinking would be ungrateful. So I just sat there watching and listening and enjoying it until, several minutes later, it slowly subsided and died, the tea light completely used up.

Now, I don't assign any particular significance, spiritual or otherwise, to this event. But I must say it was pretty freakin' cool!!! And I'm grateful to have experienced it. So I'm going to light another tea light in the same little green glass and pray Compline again tonight before I go to sleep. If I see any winged beasts with four different faces, I'll let you know.

2 Chronicles 8

Well, after a pleasant romp through the epistles of John and the letter to the Ephesians, my daily Bible study book is back in the books of Chronicles. Today's study, on 2 Chronicles chapter 8, has me raising my eyebrow. The last time I posted on a difficult passage from Chronicles, it was the occasion for quite an invigorating discussion. So, here we go. Let's see what happens.

OK, I assume you've read the chapter by now. It's only 16 verses - no biggie. I don't know what you think of it - pretty boring stuff, perhaps - but my study guide zeroed in on two things: Solomon's sin in subjecting non-Israelites to oppressive slave labor, and Solomon's sin of polygamy.

My reaction to these emphases is: whatever happened to the "plain sense of scripture"? Try as I might, I can't detect the slightest hint of disapproval of either of these things in the Biblical narrative. This chapter is a list of Solomon's great accomplishments. How does one get the idea that these are presented as "sin"? Granted, my commentator is correct (from our modern point of view) in pointing out that this oppressive slavery was contrary to the spirit of the Exodus. But my reading of the text is that this point was lost on the Chronicler. I read it as, "Yeah! Solomon conquered Hamath-zobah! Solomon kept the Amorites and Hittites under his thumb! Go Solomon!" And granted, Solomon's son Rehoboam is portrayed as a fool (which he clearly was) a few chapters later when he says to his people, "You thought Dad was bad? You don't know the meaning of bad!!" But here, I don't read any judgment of Solomon's actions. Nor is there judgment of his polygamy. It's just a fact. Solomon built a country home for his Egyptian wife because somebody (Solomon? His wife? The priests?) was uncomfortable with her pagan proximity to where the Ark of the Covenant had been. Sounds prudent, but it's not judged - or if there is a hint of judgment, it's because of her paganness, not his polygamy.

So my commentator springboards from this to an exhortation to safeguard Biblical morality against the "onslaught on Christian values" in today's culture. But what is Biblical morality? To read a passage like this as condemning things like slavery and polygamy is, it seems to me, to impose our concept of morality on the Bible, not to read and listen to what the Bible says. Now, I'm certainly not arguing that slavery and polygamy are good - that's not my point at all - but I am asking: who and what are we serving when we so blatantly make the Bible say what we want it to say? We all do this - it's unavoidable; we're humans and whether we like it or not we see things through our ego-lenses. But I don't know. Am I crazy, or is this kind of Biblical interpretation at best powerful self-delusion and at worst outright deceit? And either way, how can it possibly help us serve God and others?

Anyway, I give you a topic. Discuss. :-)

A stake in the sand

Ignore my idle speculations about theodicy. My friend Mike knows what he's talking about. Please go to his blog for wisdom from real life. And while you're there, say a prayer for him and his family. God, please love and comfort them.

Church model quiz

I like this one! Thanks, Sonja!

You scored as Servant Model. Your model of the church is Servant. The mission of the church is to serve others, to challenge unjust structures, and to live the preferential option for the poor. This model could be complemented by other models that focus more on the unique person of Jesus Christ. Servant Model 84% Sacrament model 78% Mystical Communion Model 67% Herald Model 61% Institutional Model 11% What is your model of the church? [Dulles] created with QuizFarm.com

Why are Christians so ignorant?

That's a very good question. I don't know the answer, but I do know that (at the moment) if you type it into Google without surrouding quotes, this blog is the second hit from the top. Hah! This rocks! Does this mean that I'm the second-most-ignorant Christian on the web? :-D

(Many thanks for the anonymous web surfer who clicked through to my blog from that Google search. I wonder if I shed any light on your question?)

Theodicy and grace

One of the classic problems in theology (and faith in general) has the technical name "theodicy". In a nutshell, here's the problem: if God is so flippin' good and so flippin' powerful, why is there so much innocent suffering? Human free will may partially explain it, but what about the terrible disasters of the year past? The tsunamis, hurricanes and earthquakes don't have anything to do with human free will, unless you subscribe to the somewhat crackpot idea that Adam and Eve's sin (aka "The Fall") screwed up the natural world too. Well, just because it occurred to me, I throw out an equally crackpot idea: what if the creation, the natural world, also has something like free will?

I'm not suggesting that nature is sentient, just that perhaps God is, generally speaking, as hands-off with nature as God is with our own human free will. That is, God is no more likely to prevent Hurricane Katrina than God is to possess the mind of a murderer and force him not to kill. Maybe even for the same reasons, not that I claim to understand them fully.

I don't think this is a new idea, and although it is a conscious acknowledgement of the wisdom of Deists like my friend Jan, I'm definitely not going as far as Deists go in claiming that God never takes an active role in creation. (Jesus is of course the most extreme counterexample to that.) But there is a term for God taking an active role in creation: miracle. Nobody thinks miracles are common. We live in a universe in which the innocent often suffer. If this is a just universe, that justice does not operate using the dynamics of physical or emotional joy and suffering.

I used to believe in karma, but I don't any more. There is cause and effect, but it's not moral. When causes and conditions dictate that something nasty will happen and cause suffering, it usually will cause suffering, regardless of the moral history of those affected. When it doesn't, it's a miracle. It's grace. We're not entitled to miracles, any more than we're entitled to have God step in and take over our wills when we're about to do something stupid or evil. When they happen, we should praise God, but miracles don't happen every day.

I don't know if this is helpful, and I realize I'm presenting a pat, static theory again. But it was on my mind, so I throw it out there.

Both/and

This post was partly inspired by my friend Israel's post here, and also by a post in a Yahoo Group from my friend P3T3, in which he argued for the relative importance of "the means" over "the ends". And the little picture to the left is of a painting called "Either Or, Both And" by Cynthia Tom, which I've used without her permission because I really like it and she doesn't have any copyright info on her web site. Click it for a bigger version. Cynthia, if you'd like me to remove the image, please let me know.

So here's the situation. In this blog, and in the comment sections of blogs belonging to friends, acquaintances, and strangers, I have a tendency to prattle on about theological topics. Many of you have, no doubt, noted this about me.

Due to certain aspects of my personality (if you choose to call them "defects", I won't argue with you), I also have a tendency to want to figure things out. No, not just that - I tend to want to draw some mental lines and boxes, construct some mental structures that I find appealing, wordsmith some nice language around it, and act like I've figured something out. Because that makes me feel better. Because that satisfies my need to reduce something complex and make it controllable. Because when I can control it, it's not threatening. All this is a particularly dangerous personality trait for someone who's theologically inclined. Because when the thing I'm trying to reduce and control is the gospel, then I'm in the land of some very grave sin indeed.

To balance this, I've been blessed with a group of blogging friends and acquaintances who help to hold me accountable when I take a trip to that dark land. They are frequently quick to point out when I seem to have something a bit too figured out, when my carefully constructed theory is leaving out something important. (Actually, I think we all do this for each other. Also, I've noticed - or I think I have - that when I go really far down this road, my friends tend to signal my complete departure into koo-koo-land by utterly ignoring me. I may be wrong about that, but if I'm not - I get it!) :-)

Anyway, what I wanted to do in this post is to present some "both/ands" that I feel I mustn't ever leave out when I'm talking about God and the gospel and the Church. I'm doing this mainly as a corrective for myself, but also as a road map for my corrective friends, and finally as an invitation to add some more to the list. So here are some items that I think are "both/ands" when thinking and talking about God and the gospel. Conceptual constructs that leave out (or greatly minimize) one side of these or the other are, to my mind, reductionist and incomplete. And I realize that by laying this stuff out so neatly like this, I'm only doing it again. Three years as a Buddhist didn't lead me to let go of my love of neat little well-constructed concepts, and probably nothing will.

now AND later: the Kingdom of God and eternal life, two concepts that were central to Jesus' thought, are both about this present time and place, and about "eschatological" or "end-related" things - both this life and the end of this life; both this time and the end of time.

individual AND community: the individual's personal calling, mission, walk with God, etc. is important, and these things are also important at every level of community.

church AND world: the church of Christ exists to love and serve God's people both inside itself and outside itself.

Truth AND truth: absolute Truth and relative, "customized" truth.

Mission AND mission: both the overall, glorious "Mission of God" and "Mission of the Church" and each person and community's individual missional vocation.

being AND doing AND saying: but chief among these (I would say) is being. Being, doing, and saying witness, love, compassion, etc.

ends AND means: where we're going and how we get there are both important, though on balance I agree with P3T3 that the means are probably more important.

truth AND love: we can't sacrifice either one and also live lives worthy of the calling to which we've been called.

So friends, please add to this list if you want to, and also consider yourselves officially requested to whap me upside the head with the rubber chicken of healthy self-doubt if the stuff I write seems to lean so hard toward one side of those tensions that it leaves the other side out. Thanks in advance!

Missional Church characteristics

People sometimes ask me, "What does this mean, this 'Missional Church' thing you speak of?" (I'm not kidding; they really do!) More often, I think, they nod politely and wonder briefly what the hell I was talking about.

Larry Chouinard has started a list of bullet-points which are easy and quick to read and may be an aid to understanding:

http://lchouinard.blogspot.com/2006/01/missional-church.html

Thanks to the inimitable TallSkinnyKiwi for the link.

And now for something completely different...

Tina just found the following story, printed in my handwriting on a couple of notebook sheets stuffed into a book. I don't have a clear memory of writing it, but I think I wrote it by Tina's bedside when she was in the hospital for quite a while after surgery and demanded I write something to entertain her. It's the sort of thing that must be shared with the whole world. It's unbelievably silly, and not the least bit theological. Please note that this story has absolutely nothing to do with the hilarious Big Bunny web cartoons by Amy Winfrey, and I'm pretty sure it predates them by a few years, but those are funnier than this so check them out too. So here, without further ado, is:

The Tale of Big Bunny and Morty Mouse

Big Bunny sat on a tree stump and looked out over the forest floor. He was happy. All of the animals of the forest knew him. They knew he was big and tough. They knew that they should stay out of his way, or he'd chase them and kick them with his strong hind feet.

Sally Squirrel ran by, carrying a nut to her home.

"Hey, Sally!" called Big Bunny, "give me that nut." Big Bunny wasn't really that fond of nuts, but he very much liked being Big. Sally took one look at Big Bunny and ran off as fast as she could, carrying her nut. Her family was hungry!

"Hey!" shouted Big Bunny, "you come back here!" Big leapt off the tree stump and hopped after Sally as fast as he could. Sally ran fast, but Big Bunny was faster. He knocked Sally over, and he started to kick at her with his big hind feet. "Here, you big bully!" Sally said, and ran away.

Big took the nut and tossed it into a stream. He didn't really want it. He just liked being Big. Big Bunny hopped off down the woodland trail, humming a tune.

A little later, Big came upon Morty Mouse, nestled up in a cozy little nest he'd made and taking a nap. Big cuffed Morty in the side of the head. "Wake up, you!" said Big Bunny. "That's a nice little nest you've got there. I'd like to have it for myself."

"My little nest isn't big enough for you, Big Bunny!" squeaked Morty Mouse. "I don't care," said Big Bunny. "I want it anyway." "No!" said Morty. Big Bunny kicked Morty with his big hind foot, knocking him out of the next. Morty went running off.

Big Bunny decided that Morty Mouse needed to be tought a lesson. And there was no point in staying here. He couldn't fit in Morty's little nest, anyway. So Big went hopping off after Morty at top speed.

Morty was a fast little mouse. He led Big Bunny on a wild chase! He led Big Bunny over hill and over Dale and over Chip. ("Hey! Watch it!" shouted Chip.) Morty led Big Bunny to a different part of the forest, where the trees were bigger.

Morty Mouse led Big Bunny right to the home of Wilma Wolf. Wilma heard the noise of the animals running quickly toward her home, and came outside to see what was the matter. Morty saw Wilma, and ran straight between her feet. Big Bunny was so excited by the chase that he didn't see Wilma at first. When he did, he was too big to run between her feet like Morty did. Big Bunny ran "smack!" into Wilma Wolf.

"My, my!" said Wilma. "What a plump, juicy, Big Bunny we have here!" With that, Wilma Wolf ate Big Bunny right up.

Morty Mouse laughed and laughed.

Holiday fun and worship

Just some quick hits about cool things I did in the last couple of weeks:

• Tina and I spent the five days before Christmas with my Mom and Dad and brother Sean at my parents' house near Charlotte. We had a wonderful time - family fun, card games, and lots and lots and lots and lots of food! :-)
• On Christmas Eve, Tina and I worshiped with the community of the Church of the Beloved, an absolutely wonderful "emerging" Episcopal church. The music was great - mostly alt rock arrangements of Christmas carols straight out of the Episcopal Hymnal 1982. The worship was Spirit-filled, exuberent, inclusive of kids and a cool experience for young people - and yet, in its basic form, it was a Rite II Eucharist right from the Book of Common Prayer. Although in many ways it was more "contemporary Anglican" than "emerging", it gave me great home that "emerging" and "Episcopal" can go together - gloriously! And it put me in a wonderfully worshipful and expectant mood for Christmas Eve. Tina and I sang carols at the top of our voices all the way home!
• This past Friday evening, my friend Israel and I attended one in series of Friday night prayer vigils at Langley Hill Friends Meeting for their member Tom Fox and the other members of the Christian Peacemakers Team who were abducted in Iraq and have been missing for more than a month. They're doing those every Friday night from 7 PM to 7 AM. We only stayed for the initial program from 7 to 9 - a traditional Quaker meeting combined with a discussion of, in this case, Roman Catholic "just war" theory, and followed by fellowship. They are looking for folks interested in peacemaking from a variety of faith traditions to join in these discussions/vigils, which will continue every Friday until the prisoners are released. The insights during the meeting were truly thoughtful, faithful, and thought-provoking. If you're in the area, drop by next Friday evening; I probably will.
• On Saturday, Tina and I drove up to south Jersey (near Philly) for a New Year's Eve party at a local Japanese restaurant with our friends Phil, Beth, Peri, and Sally. All you can eat (and make) sushi, all you can drink sake (and a lot of other beverage choices), the very challenging sake drinking game, and lots of boisterous karaoke (both porn and non-porn). Yoshi, our host, was gracious and hilarious. I'm told that my top-of-my-lungs, William-Shatneresque rendition of "Sunny" will live on on the memory of friends and strangers alike for years to come. "Now I feel...TEN FEET TALL!" :-D
• Today Tina and I and our dog Machig decided to go for a hike in the cold rain. We started out on the Fairfax Connector trail, then left it, then found it again, and I said "this way is bound to take us back to our car!" For some reason, Tina listened to me, and we ended up hiking about six miles, only three miles of it in something one might properly call "daylight", much of it along the edges of winding roads with no shoulders and fast-moving traffic in the dark wearing dark clothes with a dog. And it never stopped raining. Adventure! Excitement! A Jedi craves not these things. Then we went home, took baths, and ate Chinese food.
  

And that's just about all the news from chez Croghan-Driskell at the moment. Happy New Year, everybody!

Attention and commitment

TIME Magazine recently named Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates "Persons of the Year". I have to say that I couldn't be happier with the choices. These individuals are truly using their fame and fortune to enable the inbreaking of the Kingdom of God in this world on an enormous scale. They may not think of it in those terms (though I think Bono does), but that's what they're doing. And thank God for them.

In a related article on "Charitainment", James Poniewozik opines that,

[T]he most valuable commodity in ending misery is not money or even will but attention. And attention is the celebrigod's lightning bolt. If the most fatuous celebrity plants himself near a problem, he may embarrass himself. But at least someone will see it. And someone will film it. And a few of us may, little by little, be moved to change it.

I heartily agree. The big problem isn't money. People in developed nations have plenty of money. The problem isn't will. Human beings want to be compassionate. We want to help, at least in the abstract. Both of these facts were illustrated in our response to last year's tsunami and this year's hurricane Katrina. But there's so much misery in the world and there's so much else going on in our lives. And we are eminently distractable. So we're like, "Oh, of course, I'd like to help - what did you say the problem is? Uh-huh? Gee, that's terrible - ooh, shiny!" And then we're on to the next thing. But what if the thing that wants to attract us is itself a shiny and glorious celebrity, capable of capturing and focusing our attention, at least for a little while? Then, as the TIME article said, maybe some of us will be moved to action.

But what happens when the next shiny thing comes along? The first challenge - and it's a huge one, so thank God again for Bono and his ilk - is to get our attention. But the second, even larger challenge is to hold it. To really make a difference in the misery of the world, we need people and groups who are committed - deeply and truly. And here, I submit, is where the Church comes in. Bono and the Gateses can call us to action, but it is part of the mission of the Church and other faith communities to call us to commitment and sustained work for change. I know folks who are deeply committed to compassionate action outside of the context of a faith commitment, including my wife and (to the best of my knowledge) Bill Gates. But nonetheless, faith communities - especially followers of Jesus, who are fundamentally people called to a mission of reconciliation and love - have a unique obligation and a unique ability to call people to compassionate commitment and to equip them for that commitment. That's not a complete description of the mission of the Church or of any faith body, but it's a fundamental part of that mission. Bono, Melinda, Bill, Angelina and the rest are doing what they can. We people of faith, who are answerable to God and who are called to love like God does - like God does! - dare not fall down on our own duty.

Loving God, help us to love like that: with commitment strong enough to keep loving despite our cluttered lives, and with love strong enough to call others into that same commitment. Amen!

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

My most excellent friends Jan and Shaw got me a book for Christmas called Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which (despite having received it only a couple of days ago and being very busy with holiday travel and family revelry) I've almost finished. It's a page-turner, believe it or not, and the reason you might (if you’ve heard of it) be skeptical is that it's a book about punctuation. Nothing but punctuation. History of punctuation, proper usage, suggested vigilante actions against those who use semicolons ignorantly—you know, stuff like that. Its tagline is, "Sticklers unite!" and the agenda of the author, a self-important Brit journalist called Lynne Truss, is nothing less than to organize guerilla legions armed with magic markers ready to deface movie posters for films like Two Weeks Notice and supermarket signs advertising "Banana's On Sale" and add or remove apostrophes as necessary. What an insufferable snob. I love this woman. She's a hoot.

Now, you may rightly object that I have absolutely no business advocating punctuation sticklerhood. I write a blog; my blogging software includes no grammar checker; and I am far, far from infallible. But I just want to confess that I do think these things are important, that I do try to get them right. The many errors I make stem from carelessness, ignorance, or deliberate choice, but neither the carelessness nor the ignorance is itself a matter of deliberate choice or apathy--like I said, I do think clear communication is important, and I (usually) try to get things right, for the sake of understanding on the part of the folks I'm trying to communicate with. If you're going to bother to write anything, what on earth could be more important than that? So even when I'm instant messaging, I (usually) go out of my way to remember that IM is still a written, not an oral, medium, and therefore things like capital letters, spaces, and punctuation (used correctly) are still very helpful in conveying meaning. In a blog, even moreso.

I do sometimes make deliberate errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation; and when I do that, it's for the same reason that I occasionally use profanity in my writing: I want you to notice it. I do that sort of thing for emphasis sometimes, or to adopt a particular voice, intending to enhance communication--but I don't doubt that they sometimes have the opposite effect, like when I set up a whole bunch of different e-mail addresses intending to make it easy for different people to communicate with me and was dismayed to find this only confused folks who wanted to know what my real address was.

But I do care about punctuation, and therefore I should probably come clean (for those who have, rather surprisingly, read this far) about some of my beliefs and practices in this regard.

• In general, I try conform to U.S. standards regarding punctuation and grammar, since that's where I live. There are, however, some exceptions.
• Just as the Brits, and other Europeans, get many other things right where we Americans get them wrong, they're inarguably correct about the placement of terminating punctuation outside of closing quotation marks. The American rule says that terminating punctuation is always placed inside closing quotes, even if the punctuation isn't part of the quotation. The British rule says: if it's part of the quote, it belongs inside the close quote mark; if it's not part of the quote, it belongs outside. The Brits are right. We Americans are wrong. Therefore, I follow the British rule. I honestly don't know how any computer programmer couldn't be mortally offended by the misguided U.S. rule. If you tried to write code like that, it wouldn't compile. This rule, and the awful habits that are created by its teaching in American public schools, probably singlehandedly explains the offshore outsourcing of so many U.S. tech jobs to India and other places where they're taught sensible language practices.
• Incidentally, other things the Brits get right include measurement (the Metric system), date formats (2005 December 24 or 24 December 2005 but never December 24, 2005--what sort of logic does month-day-year have??), and time formats (24-hour; no silly AM/PM).
  
• Back to punctuation: you might have noticed that I have way to much fondness for colons, semicolons, dashes, and (especially) parentheses. This probably explains why I liked this book so much. It probably also indicates that I'm a pretentious git. But that's the way I write. I take comfort in knowing several published writers (my Emerging Church friends will recall a certain Brian) who have similarly pretentious--though probably less extreme--styles and still seem to get books published and read. So maybe there's hope for me; if I ever really published anything, at least I'd probably have the moderating influence of an editor to tone me down.
  

So, on Christmas Eve, I'm blogging about punctuation. Every other day of the year, I blog about faith, and on the eve of our Savior's birth, I blog about printers' conventions. Oh well, this is what was banging on the inside of my skull this morning. This evening I'll go to church and will be in a different frame of mind. Merry Christmas, everybody!!

By the way, you can read the joke that explains the book's title here (third paragraph). Puncuation. Funny. Important. Who knew?

The Missional Church // A Beginning Reader's Guide

Kevin Cawley has compiled an excellent list of books on Missional Church. If you're interested in Missional Church, and you haven't read much on the subject (and you have the wherewithal for some deep scholarly stuff), it's a great place to start.

Thanks, Kevin!

I feel so ignorant

Until a few minutes ago, my blog looked like ass in Firefox. Boy, do I have egg on my face for not looking at it outside of IE and its derivatives. Why didn't anybody tell me? I fixed it. I also (belatedly) thought to check Safari. Looks OK. If anybody uses AOL or Opera or Lynx or whatever and my blog looks offensively bad, please let me know. Thanks!

Ah! Major Gaelic mensch.

The title of this post is my favorite anagram I've found so far (given about 1/2 hour of searching) for "Michael James Croghan". Perhaps "And humble, too!" is the appropriate follow-up comment. ;-) Anyway, the Internet Anagram Server (aka "I, Rearrangement Servant") is a fun time waster. Now I must go to work.

Prayer for a Moral Budget, Redux

OK, I was lame and timid and forgetful, and I waffled too long, and now I'm not going to go get arrested, nor even take the day off to participate in the legal bits of the vigil on Wednesday at the Capitol. Nor did I get my act in gear and organize a vigil at one of VA's Senators' home offices. My sins of omission are multiplying of late, and it dismays me.

However, I do hope to attend the worship service Tuesday evening (19:00) at the Lutheran Church of the Reformation, which is here. I plan to take the Orange Line into the city and get off at the Capitol South station and walk from there (about three blocks, it looks like). If anybody who's in the area wants to come, please let me know.

But what is this God-thing of which you speak?

Gary asked the question above as his parting shot in the longest comment-discussion in the short history of my blog. OK, Gary, I'll give you an answer, and it may or may not be the one you were looking for. As I said in another comment on that post, for me, the three major sources of knowledge about God are 1) the witness of other believers, 2) Holy Scripture, and 3) first-hand experience. So following that general outline,

God is the One who, through a two-way relationship of trust and love, shaped the lives and missions of Jalaluddin Rumi, George Fox, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mohandas Gandhi, Juliana of Norwich, Jim Wallis, Brother Lawrence, Desmond Tutu, the Christian peacemakers currently in mortal peril in Iraq, and many, many other great souls who I know only through their writings and from reports about them.

God is the One who, through a two-way relationship of trust and love, shaped the lives and missions of Papa Bert, Joe, Melissa, Abid, Jaimie, Sam, Grandpa Del and Grandma Marion, Rick, Blair, Lou, DeDe, Dwight, Sue, Frankie, Carl, Allen, Susan, Bob, Cheri, Patricia, Virginia, Christine, Joanne, Susan, Ann, Wally, Hazel, Janice, Shirley, Sandy, Frances, Eleanor, Charles, Jane, Charles, Kate, Lisa, Marlene, Suzanne, Marco, Kathy, Marlene, Norma, Ken, Peg, John, Carolyn, Mary, Mary, Betty, Ellie, Stu, Karl, Blaine, George, Jim, Jack, Chester, Linda, Israel, Sonja, Ross, Pete, Mike, Stacy, Deanna, Helen, Caryn, and many, many other believers whom I do know (or have known) personally (if in some cases largely electronically) and who have impacted my own faith journey.

God is the One who Jesus knew as his Father. Therefore, I know God through those passages in Scripture where Jesus speaks of his Father. (If you follow that link, you'll need to skim past the references to "father", not "Father", since the search isn't case-sensitive.) I also know God as the Holy Spirit and as Jesus himself, the one who emptied himself and became incarnate, fully in the world, as a helpless baby in a cold stable--and who went on to do the other things I mention in this post. Much of this "understanding" I get from the Bible (as well as from the folks I mention above), and all these stories and testimonies are like brush strokes that paint a picture of God that's much more impressionistic or abstract than it is like a technical diagram with clean lines that results in an unmistakably coherent mental picture.

Finally, God to me is the One who called me (and continues to call me), gifted me (and continues to help me discover those gifts), and sent me (and continues to send me) into the world on a mission of love. God has done this through all the people mentioned above and through Scripture, but over time my "knowledge" of God has come increasingly through a personal relationship of love and trust through which God shapes my life. But I hope I'm being clear that it's not really about "knowledge" for me at all. My faith has almost nothing to do with logical propositions about God which I can hold neatly in my head and feel like I have achieved Understanding. (Anyone who thinks he understands God is a virtuoso of self-deception.)

It's about relationship, love, trust, mission, service--these are things which need to be lived, not defined. I leave definitions to the philosophers--I'm no philosopher. As I prayed this morning, and as we pray every Sunday during the Sending portion of our liturgy, we have work that God has given us to do. I'll let the Buddha make my point for me.

God needs agnostics who are ready to get busy. Too much seeking after understanding and the poison arrow may never get pulled out--too much certainty and people tend to start jabbing it into other folks. But healthy agnosticism combined with a conviction that the world needs help and that even I should be helping--that's something God can use. Love is more important than understanding--love is perhaps the only reliable path to understanding. And if the understanding never comes or turns out to be flawed, but the love was real? In the end, I think that's OK with me.

Really good theology for the not-already-committed

Elizabeth M., a reader of my blog and writer of (among other things) truly excellent comments/questions on the same, just finished reading Brian McLaren's A Generous Orthodoxy. She thought it might be a good try at convincing folks who were already committed evangelical Christians to consider allowing a bit more generosity into their faith, but asks,

So, I'm still wondering -- is there anyone out there who isn't only preaching to the choir?

That, my dear, is a really, really, really fine question. I think we're probably all in agreement here that the choir can use some preachin' to, but for all the emphasis in the Missional Church and Emerging Church conversations on evangelism, is there anybody out there writing postmodern, generously orthodox theology for the not-already-committed? Stuff that's not tying to do "the continuing conversion of the church" (like most Emerging stuff seems to be doing) and is also not (completely) beholden to the left/right dualism of modern theology? I know McLaren's got Finding Faith, but I haven't read it and don't know whether Elizabeth would like his approach in that any more than she did his approach in aGO.

I'm tempted to recommend folks like Tom (N.T.) Wright, Dallas Willard, Henri Nouwen, Marcus Borg, though the truth is that they're generally writing for the church too. But they do write stuff that's just good theology, not completely beholden to modern right-wing evangelical assumptions nor modern left-wing "mainline" assumptions (though their roots and theology will tend one way or the other--Willard right, Borg left, etc.). Also, they don't necessarily have an explicit agenda of trying to reform the church, like the Missional and Emerging authors tend to--an agenda, I might add, that's pretty much irrelevant to folks who aren't already part of the church. Maybe Tom Wright's "For Everyone" Bible study series?

I'm dismayed that I don't have a better answer to this question. Help?

Claims about the Bible

Well, several of us ended up having quite a conversation about perspectives on Scripture (among other things) in the comments on this post on 1 Corinthians 13 which I made a few days ago, not really expecting a response. Shows what I know.

That discussion prompted me to think a bit about claims Christians have made about the Bible. What follows is a list of some of those claims, with my brief thoughts on each of them.

Christians have claimed that the Bible is:

Literally true. This is the idea that every word of the Bible that isn't obviously and explicitly metaphorical (such as Jesus' parables) is to be interpreted literally: it really happened exactly as it is described, word for word, and no fair interpreting anything symbolically. This is the point of view which leads to young-earth Creationism and other absurdities. (I'm sorry; I wish I could be more gracious to my fundamentalist brothers and sisters, but young-earth Creationism is absurd.) Obviously, I don't subscribe to this point of view.

Inerrant. This (as I understand it) is the claim that, while it may or may not be valid to interpret some parts of the Bible as symbolic or poetic language, when the Bible does make factual statements, it is not possible that those statements might be in any sense false. I don't believe this claim either. I think the Bible may well say things that are factually false, because it was written by fallible humans--inspired by God, true, but I know of no compelling reason to assume that this inspiration would necessarily prevent God's human collaborators from doing what humans are prone to do: screw up. For example, I think that when the Bible claims that the prophet Elisha used his God-given curse powers to summon two she-bears to rip apart some children who were teasing him (2 Kings 2:23-24), the human author of that story was simply factually mistaken.

Infallible. This, I think, is the claim that when the Bible makes a prescriptive statement that might influence a believer's thoughts or actions, it is not possible that those statements are not what God wants us to do, unless they've been superseded by a later Biblical statement. In other words, what the Bible tells us to do is always what God wants us to do. I think a slightly milder claim is that the Bible is Authoritative: its prescriptive statements always have authority over the believer. I think often when people say "inerrant" they mean these things too, and the reverse may be true as well. I don't hold with these claims either. For example, as much as I love and value the Sabbath, I don't believe that God ever really wanted God's children to kill their neighbors for breaking it, as is prescribed in Exodus 31:15 and elsewhere.

Inspired. This is the claim that God's Spirit was involved, to some extent, in some mysterious way, in the composition of the entire Bible. This I do believe. So what does this mean, practically speaking? For me, it does not mean that I need to believe that the Scriptures must always be interpreted literally and contain no non-obvious symbolic language. It does not mean that every apparent statement of fact must be factually true. It does not mean that every apparent prescriptive statement must reflect God's will for us. What it does mean is this: as a Christian, I believe that all scripture is inspired ("God-breathed") and useful for teaching, correction, etc. (1 Timothy 3:16). Therefore, it's my duty to grapple with "all scripture" (by which I mean the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament--other scriptures may also be "useful" but I'm not bound to study them) and to try to work out what truth the Holy Spirit wants to teach me through a given passage. It may be something different from the literal meaning, the facts presented, or the behavior prescribed in a passage. But as a Christian it is incumbent upon me to Take the Bible Seriously and work hard at allowing the Spirit to speak to me through its pages. And there's a further claim I'd make for the Bible: that for believers, it should be:

Identity-shaping. In brief, I think this means that the Bible should not just be a book we look to for facts, behavioral prescriptions, or even subtle inspiration: it should be a book that we allow to shape us, mold us, form us, sculpt our identity as Christians, and prompt us to both trust and action--to living its truth in our lives. It should be what Scot McKnight calls "living trustable truth", and at this point I'll just direct your attention to Scot's far superior post on this topic. Be sure to read the discussion in the comments on Scot's post. Good stuff.

OK, that's it for my thoughts on claims about scripture. Did I miss any major ones, or screw up the meaning of these? Did any of my perspectives on these claims irk you? Let me know.

Current month's Daily Office

I don't know if this will be useful to anyone but me, but just in case....

I made a web page that will always send you to the current month's Daily Office listing (according to the 1979 American Book of Common Prayer, Rite II) from Mission St. Clare. The URL is:

http://www.shunyata.net/new/do.php

Why is this useful? Well, it's useful for me because I can set it up as an AvantGo channel in my Treo smartphone and always (at least, until they restructure their web site) have the current Daily Office prayers in my pocket without needing to do any manual steps. I don't know why it might be useful to you, but you never know.

Update: I've added pages that take you straight to the current day's morning and evening prayer:

http://www.shunyata.net/new/domorn.php

http://www.shunyata.net/new/doeve.php

Also, for a great discussion on the value of praying in this fashion, see Scot McKnight's blog: this post on Praying with the Church and some follow-up posts too.