I thought I was done blogging for the night but came across the following article. It's horrific, but the story must be told so people realize what is happening!

God, I pray for these women, yound and old, treated in such a brutal and inhumane way. I ask that in your power and glory you take each one of these women right now and give them a special outpourind of your Spirit, wrap them in your arms, give them the peace that transcends all understanding, let them know you are there, they are loved, that this earth and body are temportal and you are preparing for them an eternity with you. Bring justice to the perpetrators and bring in your hand to STOP this madness right now, we pray and trust in your goodness and power, in the Name of Jesus, AMEN!

I mentioned in the previous post that I would comment on Wright's book here, I want to provide two quotes with minimal comments. As always, looking for discussion or input in the comment section:

1) In writing of (and criticizing) the current practices in the church regarding hymns, the Christian year (more focus on Christmas or other Christian celebrations rather than Easter) and ceremonies of death, he writes:

I hope that those who take seriously the argument of this present book will examine the current practice of the church, from its official liturgies to all the unofficial bits and pieces that surround them, and try to discover fresh ways of expressing, embodying, and teaching what the New Testament actually teaches rather than the mangled, half-understood, and vaguely held theories and opinions...Frankly, what we have at the moment isn't, as the old liturgies used to say, "the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead" but the vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end. (25)

Love this quote, anyone who pushes criticial thinking over maintaing status quo is a hero in my book. Last year when I held the Tumaini dinner in Wisconsin I probably committed the mortal sin of fundraising when I asked the first speaker to get people thinking critically about what sort of missions they support, to get their brains working, not just giving because they know me, but to evaluate if this is something God laid on their hearts and whether it was a good cause. I didn't care, evaluation and examiniation of crucial, in my mind, to continued growth in our Christain walk.

2) It was pepole who believed robustly in the resurrection, not people who compromised and were in for a mere spiritual survival, who stood up against Caesar in the first centuries of the Christian era. (26)

Which emperor would have sleepless nights worrying that his subjects were reading the Gospel of Thomas Resurrection was always bound to get you into trouble, and it regularly did. (50)

Two more money quotes, the first intrigued me since, as you know, I am in a period right now where I am really fighting Christian involvement in politics, not that Christains shouldn't vote or can't hold office, rather that we seem to be placing too much hope in the political process to bring about God's Kingdom. Therefore I initially backed away from this quote, but what turned me back was the idea that in Caesar's time, Christians were persecuted, tortured burned at the stake, etc. That was something worth fighting for! It was about freedom of faith. Today it is at the opposite end of the spectrum for Christians in the West (and I fully admit that my thinking in this matter is from a Western perspective and totally void of any value apart from the Western world). While for first century Christians and a great number of believers around the world today it was about freedom, for us in the West today it is about favortism. We desire to hold the best seat at the table, we want our morals and ethics to dominate the political sphere. There is a great difference in political activism from the perspective of freedom versus favortism.

Since I've been participating in this Facebook Bible Study the past three weeks I can't seem to get two thoughts out of my mind:

1) The importance of Matthew 4:17, "From that time, Jesus began to preach, 'Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near."

I was reflecting on this earlier today, and I find that my entire understanding of Jesus and God's redemptive work builds around this one passage. God, through Jesus, broke into our fallen world and began to take back what was His. This leads to the second thought...

2) One of the many facets of this Kingdom would be repentance, turning your life in a new direction, one in line with the message Jesus would preach for His remaining days. And He goes on to say that it's important, in fact it's so important that if your eye or your right hand or any other part of you causes you to lose focus, get rid of it, throw it away, you can't afford to mess around with this. It's that important! A new way had come, it was time to get on board, to repent, for the Kingdom was at hand!

As an aside, I got scared the other day when a student came up to me and starting talking about their church and their faith and such, not because I don't think those conversations are inappropriate in school, rather because I thought they were going to ask where I went to church. What do I respond, I don't? What kind of Christian am I if I don't go to church? I must be a sinner, what so I believe, I reflected on? What if they were to ask me what I believed, what would I say. A thought hit me, and maybe this is what makes me a little crazy, but I believe what Jesus said...when He said that it was better to gouge out the eye or cut off the hand, I believe what He said was true and that He meant it. Did He want everyone walking around without eyes or arms, no...but if it meant that they were ridding themselves of what was distracting them from the Kingdom or causing them to sin, then yes, He meant that very thing.

Finally, on this same topic, in reading Wright's "Surprised by Hope" (which I will comment on in the next post) I am also reminded of Paul's message in 1 Corinthians 15:29-32 where he addresses the resurrection of the dead. I love what he has to say here, namely that if there is no resurrection, then "why do we endanger ourselves every hour" and "If I found wild beasts in Ephesus for merely human reasons, what have I gained"? Love that!

One of the reasons I find calming in my travels to Africa is that historically Kenya has been one of the most peaceful African countries. Violence exists, but nothing like Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, Congo, etc. I still feel that way, but articles like this are making me much more wary.

Also, I hope to be blogging much more in the near future, at least until my Kenya trip in June. I'll be catching up on some reading and studies in prep for some teaching. Some of the blogging will be just for me to gather my thoughts, others to look for insights into some of my thinking. I hope to have some good dialogue on this site in the coming months.

VERY interesting article from the Christian Science Monitor. I know nothing about the organization or the author, but he brings up some interesting points. A few comments:

1) This does not surprise me at all, nor do I think this is a bad thing. I think the author is right that we have picked the wrong horse in the race and it is going to come back to bite us. He couldn't have said it any better, "We fell for a trap of believing in a cause rather than a faith."

2) One of the main things I want to pass on to my children is not the faith of the "churched culture" but rather the faith that transcends all understanding and is rooted in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ and the love that God holds for His children. We've put our faith in systems and structures that are fallen and when they do fall, so does our faith. Along with that, we need to poass on a faith that will stand up to the coming grander secularization of the world that is taking place where Christianity will be a fringe faith in the West as it is in the rest of the world. That will be all right, true followers will be underground yet their faith will be strong and the Church will not miss a beat.

3) Love the following comment: A significant number, however, may give up political engagement for a discipleship of deeper impact.

4) My comments are fragmented, but as I reread the article I get excited for the future of Christianity in the West if the author is right, it seems that through the loss there will be great gains. Take a look and post your thoughts in the comment section.

Last week I mentioned a Facebook Bible Study I'm participating in. I really like the author, think he is theologically sound yet very challenging in some of his thoughts. The following is one I'm not so sure about, interested to see where he takes it and how he supports it:

We must fearlessly move past our assumptions about Jesus and search for him anew in Matthew's words. Last week we began to try to understand the arching ideas of Messiah/Christ and the Kingdom of God (what Matthew calls the Kingdom of Heaven). Unless otherwise noted I will use the word "heaven" in the Matthean sense throughout this study. I will not be speaking of "heaven" as some other-worldly, postmortem happy state of being, but rather God's real and dynamic coming to earth through the presence and reign of Messiah Jesus. Heaven is partially here now and will be here fully when Messiah returns again to judge and reign. This, in my strong opinion, is Matthew's understanding of heaven. It includes the afterlife, because it is an eternal reign, but Matthew makes it clear that Jesus is abundantly more concerned with the present life than the life than proceeds physical death.

I'm in a Facebook Bible Study with my man Joe Boyd, a comment he made in the first lesson is pretty convicting:

If you fashion yourself a good, Bible-believing evangelical Christian today you would have likely had much more in common with the Pharisees than Jesus' early followers, at least on the surface.