D.R. of Congo

Yesterday morning I woke up and turned on the Today show while I was fixing breakfast. As I sat down to eat, I watched a special report on the crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I dont know if you are aware of the atrocities that are going on in the D.R. of Congo so I posted these two videos. This mornings video made me realize the strength of these people as their lives are being torn away and destroyed through war. It is through watching these stories that it must cause us to pray for God's kingdom and His will to be acomplished on, "Earth as it is in heaven". God has promised us that he will heal this broken world and we MUST rely on Him to do it, but we must be the agents of change. Please pray with me that God will bring healing to this land and that we as Christ followers will do our part in assisting in whatever capacity we can.

This freaks me out.

Read this article and I will post something about it later
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/us/05liberty.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Putting The World to Rights part III

I struggle with materialism all the time especially when I think about how we as Western Christians focus our year and train our children to do the same. Why is it that the climax of my year has always been Christmas? Is it because I share in the communal understanding of God becoming flesh or is it purely out of selfishness of, “What am I going to get?” Certainly Easter has always been a lackluster holiday, other than the fact that I get candy.

We have trained our children from a very young age that the way we focus our year is completely about materialism, not about Christ and what is so sick about it is that we put these holidays in the name of “Christ”. I almost condone our culture not using terms like “Merry Christmas” and replacing it with, “Happy Holidays” because I am not sure that it is right for us to be saying terms in the name of Christ when in reality it has nothing to do with Christ.

What is the answer? I am not sure. I don’t even think that it is as cut dry as I wish it could be. This could be something that could rule a person’s life…every time they go to the grocery store to buy cereal, “Should I buy the off brand or Kellogg’s?” It really amounts to how I know my own heart to be in light of what Scriptures teach. It can become overwhelming and I don’t think it is suppose to be. However, I also don’t think we should act as though it is not that big of a deal. The only think that I know is we need to have relationship with Christ and ask Him to lead us in decisions. If there was a formula or if all of this was cut and dry I am not sure that we would even need the relationship with Christ that helps us to make good decisions. So maybe we do need to realize that we will not reach comfortable conclusions on our own accord.

I had a professor once tell me that when we bear our cross, we are sharing with Christ in His suffering. His point was that the best of relationships are built on shared journeys, interests, pains, fears, etc. How awesome is it that we have a creator God with whom we can share our burdens?

Putting the World To Rights part II

Materialism is a beast that I believe we all battle at some point in our lives. I know for me it is a daily struggle. Again, I think it is the principle with coming to God with open hands and allowing Him to put whatever in my life and taking whatever crap out of it. What I have noticed with my relationship with God is that He doesn’t want me to rest my security on anything but Him; rather it is money or a guitar.

That last part strikes a chord (No pun intended) with me. This last year I sold my electric guitar, amplifier, and foot petals for an emergency. It was painful to say the least. After I did this, I became aware of how little I played my electric guitar and how I just wanted more. The reality is that I wasn’t playing my electric guitar very much at all, but I still wanted an expensive guitar because it was one more possession that I could get that would make me feel better. Crazy huh? I have seen this in my life time and time again where it isn’t about the item…it is something going on much deeper…it is about the achievement of possession. Music is another huge example (Especially for me). It isn’t about having an MP3 player full of my favorite music; it is about achieving the status of possessing a huge amount of music. Do you really think that a person with an ipod that is full of over 160 gigs enjoys all of that music, or do you think it is about a status?

I don’t believe that ownership is wrong, but it comes back to a principle of checking your self to see if it is about the item or about a deeper issue. I am not sure if any of this makes sense or I am just getting on my soap box.

For me, I know it comes back to this materialist principle. Somehow someway, we are broken and we feel like if we can tangibly latch on to some part of creation and own it, that it will bring satisfaction. Perhaps it is because we can never “Own” anything. I don’t know if it is a Western thought pattern, but I experience this mindset the most when I look at our culture. I think this whole, “War on Terror” is a big part of what America has become. We feel like it is our job to be the bully in the school yard and tell how people should think and act. This is not new though. We have done this type of thing time and time again. Why is it that we are ok with free trade amongst other nations? It is fully expected when our culture thrives in injustice, but when Christians who are called out of this mindset still follow it, well then we have a problem. Christ says that His kingdom is not of or out of this world rather it is politics or Empire. If we don’t show people how we care about the sick, the poor, ecology, materialism, free trade, etc then how will they see Jesus? I think that they will see a very distorted view of Him as the right wing republican conservative American who wears a red tie and drinks his Starbucks. I am not sure if Christ was here in person today if he would even be in America. We are suppose to embody the kingdom of God and yet we fall right in line with the culture. I struggle with this and wonder how I am to play my part or how I am enabling it to continue.

It is way easier to escape than to stick with something and enact change. It is amazing how so many Christians will say, “Well God is going to destroy this world and I am going to go to heaven any way so it really doesn’t matter.” As if this argument is satisfactory with God or lets us off the hook. It isn’t an argument for or against any type of escotology but a statement that bares examination. It is as if a person was to go to a pastor and say, “I really struggle with lust but I am going to go to heaven anyway so it really doesn’t matter.” Hopefully that pastor wouldn’t sit back and say, “Good for you! I am glad you are going to heaven.” I should hope the pastor would say, “Precisely because you are going to heaven you should rectify your problem.” This may seem disconnected from the rest of what I was saying, but it is symbiotic in the way that we just give up before we start to reach solutions.

Time Magazine's interview with Bishop NT Wright on Heaven

N.T. "Tom" Wright is one of the most formidable figures in the world of Christian thought. As Bishop of Durham, he is the fourth most senior cleric in the Church of England and a major player in the strife-riven global Anglican Communion; as a much-read theologian and Biblical scholar he has taught at Cambridge and is a hero to conservative Christians worldwide for his 2003 book The Resurrection of the Son of God, which argued forcefully for a literal interpretation of that event.

It therefore comes as a something of a shock that Wright doesn't believe in heaven — at least, not in the way that millions of Christians understand the term. In his new book, Surprised by Hope (HarperOne), Wright quotes a children's book by California first lady Maria Shriver called What's Heaven, which describes it as "a beautiful place where you can sit on soft clouds and talk... If you're good throughout your life, then you get to go [there]... When your life is finished here on earth, God sends angels down to take you heaven to be with him." That, says Wright is a good example of "what not to say." The Biblical truth, he continues, "is very, very different."

TIME: At one point you call the common view of heaven a "distortion and serious diminution of Christian hope."
Wright: It really is. I've often heard people say, "I'm going to heaven soon, and I won't need this stupid body there, thank goodness.' That's a very damaging distortion, all the more so for being unintentional.
TIME: How so? It seems like a typical sentiment.
Wright: There are several important respects in which it's unsupported by the New Testament. First, the timing. In the Bible we are told that you die, and enter an intermediate state. St. Paul is very clear that Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead already, but that nobody else has yet. Secondly, our physical state. The New Testament says that when Christ does return, the dead will experience a whole new life: not just our soul, but our bodies. And finally, the location. At no point do the resurrection narratives in the four Gospels say, "Jesus has been raised, therefore we are all going to heaven." It says that Christ is coming here, to join together the heavens and the Earth in an act of new creation.
TIME: Is there anything more in the Bible about the period between death and the resurrection of the dead?
Wright: We know that we will be with God and with Christ, resting and being refreshed. Paul writes that it will be conscious, but compared with being bodily alive, it will be like being asleep. The Wisdom of Solomon, a Jewish text from about the same time as Jesus, says "the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God," and that seems like a poetic way to put the Christian understanding, as well.
TIME: But it's not where the real action is, so to speak?
Wright: No. Our culture is very interested in life after death, but the New Testament is much more interested in what I've called the life after life after death — in the ultimate resurrection into the new heavens and the new Earth. Jesus' resurrection marks the beginning of a restoration that he will complete upon his return. Part of this will be the resurrection of all the dead, who will "awake," be embodied and participate in the renewal. John Polkinghorne, a physicist and a priest, has put it this way: "God will download our software onto his hardware until the time he gives us new hardware to run the software again for ourselves." That gets to two things nicely: that the period after death is a period when we are in God's presence but not active in our own bodies, and also that the more important transformation will be when we are again embodied and administering Christ's kingdom.
TIME: That is rather different from the common understanding. Did some Biblical verse contribute to our confusion?
Wright: There is Luke 23, where Jesus says to the good thief on the cross, "Today you will be with me in Paradise." But in Luke, we know first of all that Christ himself will not be resurrected for three days, so "paradise" cannot be a resurrection. It has to be an intermediate state. And chapters 4 and 5 of Revelation, where there is a vision of worship in heaven that people imagine describes our worship at the end of time. In fact it's describing the worship that's going on right now. If you read the book through, you see that at the end we don't have a description of heaven, but, as I said, of the new heavens and the new earth joined together.
TIME: Why, then, have we misread those verses?
Wright: It has, originally, to do with the translation of Jewish ideas into Greek. The New Testament is deeply, deeply Jewish, and the Jews had for some time been intuiting a final, physical resurrection. They believed that the world of space and time and matter is messed up, but remains basically good, and God will eventually sort it out and put it right again. Belief in that goodness is absolutely essential to Christianity, both theologically and morally. But Greek-speaking Christians influenced by Plato saw our cosmos as shabby and misshapen and full of lies, and the idea was not to make it right, but to escape it and leave behind our material bodies. The church at its best has always come back toward the Hebrew view, but there have been times when the Greek view was very influential.
TIME: Can you give some historical examples?
Wright: Two obvious ones are Dante's great poetry, which sets up a Heaven, Purgatory and Hell immediately after death, and Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine chapel, which portrays heaven and hell as equal and opposite last destinations. Both had enormous influence on Western culture, so much so that many Christians think that is Christianity.
TIME: But it's not.
Wright: Never at any point do the Gospels or Paul say Jesus has been raised, therefore we are we are all going to heaven. They all say, Jesus is raised, therefore the new creation has begun, and we have a job to do.
TIME: That sounds a lot like... work. Wright: It's more exciting than hanging around listening to nice music. In Revelation and Paul's letters we are told that God's people will actually be running the new world on God's behalf. The idea of our participation in the new creation goes back to Genesis, when humans are supposed to be running the Garden and looking after the animals. If you transpose that all the way through, it's a picture like the one that you get at the end of Revelation.
TIME: And it ties in to what you've written about this all having a moral dimension.
Wright: Both that, and the idea of bodily resurrection that people deny when they talk about their "souls going to Heaven." If people think "my physical body doesn't matter very much," then who cares what I do with it? And if people think that our world, our cosmos, doesn't matter much, who cares what we do with that? Much of "traditional" Christianity gives the impression that God has these rather arbitrary rules about how you have to behave, and if you disobey them you go to hell, rather than to heaven. What the New Testament really says is God wants you to be a renewed human being helping him to renew his creation, and his resurrection was the opening bell. And when he returns to fulfil the plan, you won't be going up there to him, he'll be coming down here.
TIME: That's very different from, say, the vision put out in the Left Behind books.
Wright: Yes. If there's going to be an Armageddon, and we'll all be in heaven already or raptured up just in time, it really doesn't matter if you have acid rain or greenhouse gases prior to that. Or, for that matter, whether you bombed civilians in Iraq. All that really matters is saving souls for that disembodied heaven.
TIME: Has anyone you've talked to expressed disappointment at the loss of the old view?
Wright: Yes, you might get disappointment in the case where somebody has recently gone through the death of somebody they love and they are wanting simply to be with them. And I'd say that's understandable. But the end of Revelation describes a marvelous human participation in God's plan. And in almost all cases, when I've explained this to people, there's a sense of excitement and a sense of, "Why haven't we been told this before?"