Archive for March, 2006

Sometimes You Have to Quit Talking About It

Published
by
Mike
on March 31, 2006
in Church and Church of Christ
. 57 Comments

Part of the charge the minister made earlier this week on the Nancy Grace show is that the Church of Christ is exclusivistic, thinking that they alone have the truth.

I’m so thankful for so many unity movements — some large and formal, but most small and informal — that are taking place. What’s happening with the Christian Churches isn’t the final thing that needs to happen; but for many it’s a place to begin.

This year there is a focus on this move toward unity at ACU, Pepperdine, Rochester, Lipscomb, and the Tulsa workshop (among other places, I’m sure).

I love what Bob Russell said at the Tulsa workshop: maybe we need to quit talking about those areas where we disagree. We don’t have to agree on everything to be brothers and sisters. “You don’t have to be twins to be siblings.” Bob pointed out that most Christian Churches aren’t going to become a cappella, and most Churches of Christ aren’t going to become instrumental. So why keep talking about it? Does it really matter?

There’s a wonderful lead article about this in the new Christian Chronicle. (Actually, there are several powerful stories in the issue. Thanks, Bobby and others! Don’t miss the insightful conversation with Royce Money.)

But then this sobering reminder that not everyone agrees with this unity movement:

“All the panelists supported stronger ties between the two groups. That concerns Howard Norton, a Bible professor and assistant dean for church relations at Harding University in Searcy, Ark.

“Focusing on unity without substantive discussion of instrumental music represents a doctrinal compromise, said Norton, who was honored the second night of the ACU Lectureship — along with his teammates — for mission work in Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s.

“‘I think there is a very strong movement within our fellowship — the a cappella church of Christ — to completely join up with the Christian Church and say that what they are doing by introducing instrumental music, that there’s nothing wrong with that,’ Norton said.”

I agree with Bob: we’ve talked about it and talked about it and talked about it. Has anyone besides Diane and me ever reached this point about something in marriage? You suddenly realize you’re just never going to agree, you’ve heard all each other has to say on the subject, and it hits you that your love is much larger than this one matter.

Let’s recognize that we’re brothers and sisters in Christ and move forward. We can’t all worship in the same building, anyway!

Nancy Grace

Published
by
Mike
on March 29, 2006
in General
. 122 Comments

Strange afternoon. As I walked into a meeting at ACU, someone handed me a note to call a producer at CNN. I didn’t have time right then, so I asked Gina if she’d find out what they want. When I came out of the meeting, she called and said they wanted me to be on the Nancy Grace show tonight.

Apparently yesterday, as they were discussing the murder of the young minister in Tennessee, someone tore into Churches of Christ as a cult, a kind of breeding ground for such crimes. So they invited me to come talk about Churches of Christ.

I had to go right into another meeting with a student. Afterward, I called the producer to get more specific info. I called a few people — some thought it was not a good idea and some thought it was. Finally, I decided to go.

But when I called back, he said he had thought they could do a satellite feed from Abilene but had found out they couldn’t. So they’d need to get me to Dallas, and he was afraid I wouldn’t make it in time.

Anyway . . . my buddy Rubel Shelly is going to do it. Rubel is in Detroit, teaching at Rochester College.

All of this to say: set your recorders for 7:00 CST tonight. Should be interesting. What a great person to represent the healthy direction so many Churches of Christ are taking!

The B-I-B-L-E #8

Published
by
Mike
on March 29, 2006
in Books, scripture and spiritual formation
. 25 Comments

(This is the last in a series on scripture. Earlier posts can be found here: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7.)

For this final post in the series, let me point out the obvious: Bible knowledge doesn’t always translate into Christlike thinking and living. I’ve known some brilliant Bible scholars whose lives were anything but godly.

We can read scripture for a lot of different reasons. Some read trying to prove their preconceived dogmas. Others read just to gain knowledge (as if “knowledge of God” in scripture referred to info on a hard drive rather than personal relationship). And still others read to serve what Eugene Peterson calls the replacement trinity: Holy Needs, Holy Wants, and Holy Feelings. (”The new Trinity doesn’t get rid of God or the Bible, it merely puts them to the service of needs, wants, and feelings.”)

So for this last piece, I want to underscore the image of Peterson’s new work, Eat This Book. He skillfully plays with the image of John — and before him Jeremiah and Ezekiel - being asked to eat the scroll.

“The voice then tells John to take the book from the angel. He takes it and the angel tells him, ‘Eat this book’: Get this book into your gut; get the words of this book moving through your bloodstream; chew on these words and swallow them so they can be turned into muscle and gristle an bone. And he did it; he ate the book.”

He’s pleading for a way with scripture that is more than just packing in the knowledge (as important as that is). We are to read scripture in a way that lets the words dissolve, digest, and distribute to our very nerve endings. These words — as they point us to the life-giving God — will offer health, vitality, holiness, and wholeness.

“The act of eating the book means that reading is not a merely objective act, looking at the words and ascertaining their meaning. Eating the book is in contrast with how most of us are trained to read books — develop a cool objectivity that attempts to preserve scientific or theological truth by eliminating as far as possible any personal participation that might contaminate the meaning. . . . The reading that John is experiencing is not of the kind that equips us to pass an examination. Eating a book takes it all in, assimilating it into the tissues of our lives. Readers become what they eat.”

We read the words of scripture not as curiosity seekers who have an hour to zip through the Louvre (”Quick! Where’s the Mona Lisa . . . Venus de Milo . . . The Winged Victory?”) Rather, we come as disciples of Jesus who live in a story. We absorb the words, reading them carefully and slowly.

Because this story comes sentence by sentence, we enter carefully into our reading as a community. “The more ’spiritual’ we become, the more care we must give to exegesis. The more mature we become in the Christian faith, the more exegetically rigorous we must become. This is not a task from which we graduate. These words given to us in our Scriptures are constantly getting overlaid with personal preferences, cultural assumptions, sin distortions, and ignorant guesses that pollute the text. The pollutants are always in the air, gathering dust on our Bibles, corroding our use of the language, especially the language of faith. Exegesis is a dust cloth, a scrub brush, or even a Q-tip for keeping the words clean.”

Our goal is not to master the text, but to be mastered by it as we are drawn by God the Father, Son, and Spirit into the world of the kingdom. We read humbly and obedient. We pause prayerfully over words and phrases. We memorize sentences. We reflect on paragraphs. We marvel at the overarching story.

I often hear today that our people don’t know scripture like we used to. Why is that?

Maybe it’s our distaste for the kind of arrogance that knowledge often produced. Perhaps it’s also business, laziness, and a general cultural shift from reading to watching.

But I want to close this series by urging us all to enter again eagerly into the world of scripture. Eat the book. Taste the words of the Torah, remembering that they come from a rescuing, life-giving God. Chew on the words of Isaiah 56-66 as you seek to imagine what life after the exile lived before God might look like. Digest the gospeled words of Matthew as he walks you through the story from Abraham to David to Jesus. Be nourished by the encouragement of the writer of Hebrews as you’re called to keep your eyes on Jesus, our high priest who sat down at the right hand of God.

A meal awaits. Feast on it!

The B-I-B-L-E #7

Published
by
Mike
on March 28, 2006
in scripture
. 21 Comments

One of my prize possessions in my library is Adolf Deissmann’s Light From the Ancient East, first published in 1908. When I bought it during my grad school days, it felt like I was being privileged to enter into a wide world of sacred discovery.

But, of course, “sacred” is not what it was about as much as “secular.”

New Testament scholars used to believe that the Greek of the NT was a special type of holy language: a Holy Ghost Greek. Since about 500 of the approximately 5000 Greek words in the pages of the NT were unknown from any other source, many assumed that the Spirit had supplied a special vocabulary that fit the special nature of the documents.

But in 1897, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt pulled a bunch of paper scraps (papyri, actually) from a garbage dump in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt. These were full of the kinds of notes sent by common people: shopping lists, notes from parents to children, bills, receipts, etc.

Before this, most of what we had access to was the stuff from historians, politicians, poets, and philosophers. They had continued to write in the “better” (classical) Greek, rather than the “common” (we use the word “koine”) Greek of the people.

But all of a sudden there was a treasure trove of information. And guess what? Nearly all of those special “Holy Ghost words” started showing up. Deissmann, a German professor, started sifting through the tons of information and soon published Light From the Ancient East, helping others understand that the Greek language in the New Testament was, for the most part, the language of the streets. Common life, common business, common communication.

In Eugene Peterson’s Eat This Book , which was so helpful for writing this little post and about which I’ll say more tomorrow, he celebrates the impact of this:

“The difference that this has made to Bible translation and Bible reading is hard to exaggerate. In retrospect it shouldn’t have been such a surprise that this was the kind of language used in the Bible, for this is exactly the kind of society that we know that Jesus embraced and loved, the world of children and marginal men and women, the rough-talking working class, the world of the poor and dispossessed and exploited. Still, it was a surprise: our Bibles written not in the educated and polished language of scholars, historians, philosophers, and theologians but in the common language of fishermen and prostitutes, homemakers and carpenters. . . . We often thoughtlessly supposed that language dealing with a holy God and holy things should be stately, elevated, and ceremonial. But it is a supposition that won’t survive the scrutiny of one good look at Jesus — his preference for homely stories and his easy association with common people, his birth in a stable and his death on a cross. For Jesus is the descent of God to our lives just as we are and in the neighborhoods in which we live, not the ascent of our lives to God whom we hope will approve when he sees how hard we try and how politely we pray.”

It’s been a long time since I’ve actually read through Deissmann’s tome. But when I was a young, eager student of the Greek New Testament, I soaked it in. These words written by people and somehow inspired by God (so I believed — and believe) came in a language that fit the nature of Jesus’ incarnation.

Again, from Peterson (as he leads up to explaining what he was seeking to do in his transation, The Message): “Virtually anyone can read this Bible with understanding if it is translated into the kind of language in which it was written. We don’t have to be smart or well educated in order to understand it any more than its first readers did. It is written in the same language we use when we go shopping, play games, or ask for a second helping of potatoes at the supper table — and it requires translation into that same language.”

(I plan to end this series tomorrow. For the previous post, check here.)

Soulforce at ACU

Published
by
Mike
on March 27, 2006
in General
. 118 Comments

Soulforce, a group promoting rights and acceptance for gay and lesbian people, is on a 7-week bus tour, visiting what they deemed to be leading Christian universities.

Today the group is at ACU. I’m so proud of Abilene Christian for welcoming the group on campus, knowing that it’s important to discuss this issue and to always extend the love of Christ. Check out what the Soulforce organizers are saying about ACU. I understand that some of the ACU “constituency” is upset that they were allowed on campus. Which makes me even more proud of the administration for doing what’s right.

On their website, they list two issues of concern with ACU: that ACU considers homosexual behavior to be cause for disciplinary action and that ACU lists resources for help for those struggling with same-sex attraction.

What a great chance to talk, to understand, to challenge, and to build relationships.

(The next couple days I plan to continue the series on the B-I-B-L-E.)

Anyone Pick George Mason?

Published
by
Mike
on March 26, 2006
in General and sports
. 11 Comments

A #11 pick is in the final four. I don’t see George Mason in any of the picks from my earlier post!

I nearly struck out with my picks, getting only UCLA right. Missed on Duke, UConn, and Ohio State (live by the 3-point shot and die by the 3-point shot). I glanced back quickly and it looks like three people got two picks right with UCLA/Florida combination.

The Call for Unity

Published
by
Mike
on March 25, 2006
in Church of Christ
. 23 Comments

Last night was a memorable evening with Zoe leading worship and Bob Russell and Max Lucado speaking. The call to unity was clear–as was the plea to announce Christ (as a united body) to the world. Some apparently stayed away from the workshop because they thought there would be less emphasis on reaching out. Wow, were they wrong. I’ve never heard as much on living out the message of Jesus for the sake of the world.

This morning at breakfast I asked Max if he knew why people were laughing when he started speaking (at a time when he wasn’t expecting laughter). He said he had no clue but thought he might have said something wrong. I explained that he was being projected up on the big screens with the words BATTERY IS LOW flashing. I told him I thought it helped lower expectations but that if, indeed, his batteries were low they seemed to become recharged as he spoke.

Bob Russell. Such a great guy. When I visit with him, I forget that he built a church from 150 to 18,000. I just think of him as the kind of granddad every kid needs–a godly man, a guy who loves his wife, kids, and grandkids, the sort of person who is listening deeply instead of just thinking about what he wants to say next.

Tulsa Workshop

Published
by
Mike
on March 24, 2006
in General
. 43 Comments

Pausing for just a moment at the workshop to post.

Already a blast: talking to a delightful member of this blog community from Waco, teaching with Randy, hanging with my dad, visiting with my buddy Don M., chatting with David U. and other friends I don’t see often, listening to Rubel’s great class on how the church began more like the synagogue model than like the temple model.

I just saw the list of requirements Dick Cheney has for any hotel he stays at: 4 Diet Sprites, temperature at 68 degrees (guy temp), every light on, every television tuned to Fox News (of course), decaf coffee brewed.

I was thinking of what I would ask for if I were a celeb:

A fridge with Diet DPs, fresh guac, the temperature at 66, every light on, every television (plasma, please) on ESPN, a copy of the NY Times, a tray of M&Ms, wireless connection, a Bose speaker for my Ipod.

How about you? If you were Queen for the Day or King for the Day, what special amenities would be in your room?

Not Your Father’s Wal-Mart

Published
by
Mike
on March 23, 2006
in General
. 40 Comments

“Every day low prices” looks a bit different in North Dallas.

Wal-Mart has opened a store in Plano with microbrewed beer, $500 bottles of wine, high-end electronics, expensive jewelry, and — of course — a fresh sushi bar.

So what I’m wondering is — what do the high end stores in North Dallas look like?

Meanwhile, as I think about the greatest needs of Dallas (and other major cities), I continue to follow Larry James’s blog.

Tulsa

Published
by
Mike
on March 22, 2006
in Church of Christ and General
. 18 Comments

Anyone out there going to the Tulsa Workshop? Randy Harris and I will be doing a class together on Friday, then I’m speaking Saturday morning on Ephesians 4:17 - 5:21.

My nice, settled life took a dramatic turn in 1989 at the Tulsa Workshop when I spoke on the topic of unity — a topic I was assigned. I had been the preacher for the College Church since 1984, and nothing I said was really new. But it was a more open venue. With cassette tapes (remember those?) that got quickly distributed.

If you’re going Friday evening, get there early! Max Lucado and Bob Russell will be speaking, and Zoe will be leading worship.

I don’t want to publish my Saturday morning message here now for two reasons: first, because then no one would need to come hear it; and second, because . . . well, it’s still a work in progress!

But, here are five of the things that have struck me as I’ve been working in 4:17 - 5:21:

1) Greed is a very big deal, mentioned in 4:29, 5:3, and 5:5. Would we think to list it alongside “every kind of impurity”? Or is it one of our excusable sins? How do these words strike us: “No . . . greedy person — such a person is an idolater — has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God”?

2) The powerful words of v. 20 get obscured some in translations, but it says, after mentioning the life of darkness that comes from ignorance that comes from hard hearts, that this is not how we have learned Christ. Great phrase. We have learned Christ. He’s the teacher; he’s also the curriculum.

3) The goal isn’t just to eradicate sin but to “be like God” (4:24) and to “follow God’s example” by walking in the way of love (5:1-2). I would say this is a rather loftly goal!

4) As we put aside sin, there are positive reasons: we must quit lying becasue we’re all members of one body; we must deal with anger because we don’t want the devil to get a foothold; we should quit stealing and work so that we have something to share with those in need; we must give up unwholesome talk and speak helpful words so we can build others up according to their own needs.

5) The command to “be filled with the Spirit” is explained through four participial phrases: speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit; singing and making music from our hearts to the Lord; giving thanks to God the Father for everything; and submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.

(Note to Highland members: I won’t be back until Saturday evening, but there is a praise night at our building at 6:30. Should be an incredible evening.)