A Burning From Of Old

Imagine a day in Athens on a hill overlooking the city. This part of the city looks much the same in the twenty-first century, but this day is mid-first century. As you look out over the moving city below you are taken by its beauty, but quickly as you turn you see a gathering crowd and remember why you are here. Your longevity past the next few hours hinges on whether you are "on" today.
"Here" is Mars Hill in the mid-fifties A.D. and you a Paul the Apostle. You're about to speak to the Areopagus; a regular gathering of philosophers of various world-views -- Stoics and Epicureans mostly.
However, these philosophers aren't just the smartest guys in the room, they are the guides and directors of Greek society. Right under the envious nose of the Roman Empire they could give thinking, approaches, laws, and people the thumbs up or the thumbs down. For a person like you, who is bringing a new religion, and a new god to their attention, they'll give you a chance to explain yourself, however if their appendages go south so do you.
Just ask the beloved Socrates who a hundred years earlier was forced to drink poison hemlock after explaining himself to this same group. They believed that he had introduced a foreign god outside of the mercurial Greek pantheon. So his sentence was death.
So you, Paul, have been invited to address the same group on the same subject. You have the length of a speech to convince them that you are not deserving of the same fate. Many of them already think you are a "seed-picker"; a slur of the day that is meant to describe someone who, though interesting, is not very logical. The Areopagus made its entertainment and living by poking holes in the logic, and thereby twisting their collective cerebral cortexes around the likes of you.
You could have kept your mouth shut in the marketplace and no one would have noticed. It's just you in the great Athens waiting for your companions to show up and take you out of town.
But you are Paul. "Mouth shut" is not an option. So now you've got one shot. What are you going to say? What did he say?
Well, for starters he praised their religiosity. That's a move that all of us could make. But then he basically tells them he's here to inform their ignorance. Whoops, are you sure you want to insult the intelligence of the guys who pride themselves on being the collective brain of society?
Yikes! But as Paul you're used to walking where angels fear to tread. So you open your mouth and tell them this story.
So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: "Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, 'To the unknown god.' What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us,
(Acts 17:22-27 ESV)

What on earth is Paul up to? The same thing God has been up to for the duration of His story for all time. It has been a smoldering story for all that time in the heart of humankind. Paul starts with "the God who made the world and everything in it," because "everything" includes and even feeds this element of which Paul is about to speak.
What's more: That the same burning continues in our hearts in our culture, and arts, and media all of these centuries later.

Thread

'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'we are his offspring.' Acts 17:28 (NIV)

‘So that was the job I felt I had to do when I started,’ thought Sam: ‘to help Mr. Frodo to the last step and then die with him? Well, if that is the job then I must do it. But I would dearly like to see Bywater again, and Rosie Cotton and her brothers, and the Gaffer and Marigold and all. I can’t think somehow that Gandalf would have sent Mr. Frodo on this errand, if there hadn’t a’ been any hope of his ever coming back at all. Things all went wrong when he went down in Moria. I wish he hadn’t. He would have done something.’
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

It was a beautiful fall day. The leaves were dancing in the wind outside, the sun insisted on a cheerful disposition. Rolling green hills stretched out before me as it were Tolkien's Shire, and I was in the paradise in the Pacific Northwest -- a coffee shop.

In my caffeinated heaven the epic soundtrack in my mind came to a scratching halt upon seeing the countenance of my young career professional friend. It had turned flat. He wasn't sullen but he was seriously detached - not quite zoombie-like by close. Gone was his playful curiosity about the world and what life might hold for him. The coffee shop was still alive with chatter. There was a conversation about a dating service and meeting the person of one's dreams. Someone else was laughing uncontrollably after a lame joke about the guy who dressed up in a cereal box for Halloween, painted himself red and went as a cereal-killer. Must have been a slow day at the office.

But not my friend. He spoke in almost whispered tones. "Until I graduated from college a few years ago I really thought that maybe I'd make a contribution, you know?", he said soberly. "I thought that my life would somehow be a part of creating a larger narrative. But now, with this crazy job, life just seems like one useless day after another. I'm a programmer. Big whup! Maybe I'm supposed to be doing something else."

What a relief! That last line showed a flicker of hope. Maybe the thread, or a wisp of it, was still alive. If he was open to "something else" maybe life hadn't killed off completely his previously expectant worldview after all!

On the other hand what about those who can't go and "do something else?" Is finding the sweet spot in life really about finding that perfect job, the one true soul mate out of millions of people, or connecting with the spirituality that's right for you? If it is, then may heaven help the vast majority of us, because more of us just don't have the options of that kind of job search. We don't have the heart-strength for that kind of experimentation. Even in these times of unprecedented travel in the global village we don't have the resources or omniscience to scout out the one person on the planet for whom we are made. We are human beings. We are good at being in the story by not at creating it out of nothing.

The good news of this story is that my friend has engaged in many of the truths we will explore in this blog. He has pulled out of his nosedive. The bad news is that it is an ongoing battle for most all of us in mind and heart to ward off the demons who tell us we don't matter. That's true for him, for me, and if you've got a pulse I'd bet you too.

Life, with it's one darn day after another march tends to do that to us doesn't it? When we're young, unless it's knocked out of us by being forced to grow up too soon, most of us have a sense that we're here for a purpose. We don't talk about it much because it often seems foolish, but we expect that one day we'll see what our role is for being put on this earth. This is true for many of us in spite of being educated in a way that continually reminds us that its "survival of the fittest" out there. So why try, the role you play in the world's larger narrative is programmed in our DNA. Or is it?
...to be continued,

Croaking

The irony of religion is that because of its power to divert man to destructive courses, the world could actually come to an end… Plain fact is, religion must die for mankind to live. The hour is getting very late…

                                             Bill Maher – August 2009

The other night I saw Bill Maher on a cable news program.  He’s gotten even shriller over the last fourteen months.  He zeros in on Christians as particularly “stupid” and “irrational.” 

You could say this is simply his shtick for ratings, but it is hard to deny that he truly believes what he is saying.  He’s certainly willing to stake his reputation on stating such beliefs.  You can rightly say that with his recent cable network switch and his new show, that his market share is a smidge above Congress’s approval rating.  However he still has enough of a following in pop culture to be a national figure.  You may even say “Bill who?” but somebody is listening to his rants because they were willing to produce, and promote a nationally distributed movie promoting his anti-Christian views. 

Maher is the perfect picture of a rationalist in our time.   I don’t mean to say he’s rational.  The core understanding of his worldview is flawed just like the premise of the statement above.  He’s assuming that religion always “diverts” a person to destructive courses.  That premise just doesn’t hold factual water – Really? - In every, or even most cases?

That is why he’s in fact an endangered species in this postmodern culture.  Maher is a good example of someone who is seeking to rehabilitate rationalism as a belief-system and a way of life. 

Rationalism was in it’s heyday from the second half of the nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth.  Typically rationalism is a characteristic of the last great cultural and philosophical era – the modernist era.  Then came post-modernism with its relativism and subjective “my truth is my truth, and yours is yours” approach to life.

Rationalism as defined here is basically the notion that reason or logic is only way of knowing anything -- As opposed to revelation (a divine being has revealed truth to us) or subjectivism (if it feels true to me it must be true – a view also rampant today in the form of relativism).  The person who is committed to rationalism assumes a lot for the power of their own intelligence and rational powers!  After all, how does one really know reasonable certainty that what you see, experience, or can think about is all that is?

Still Bill Maher represents the dual reality of a present day rationalist.  While people on the average American street, are becoming less and less inclined to believe that reason alone can solve humankind’s problems, rationalism sneaks in the back door of people’s thinking via relativism.  If everything is relative, and I have to trust my own thoughts and feelings to show me what’s really true in the universe, then I get to chose.  If logic seems to me like it should reign supreme, then for me at least, it does.  In other words there is enough residue in most people’s brains of the enlightenment idea of rationalism for this kind of thinking to resonate.  When entertainers like Maher say that religion in general and Christianity in particular just doesn’t make any logical sense it will strike a nerve in many people.  So, Bill Maher gets a hearing, and he will for the foreseeable future.  This all raises concerns about his rising militancy.

What Maher and his ilk fail to see is that Christianity is not about the denigration or even the suspension of reason – far from it.  We believe our reasoning capabilities are a gift from our Creator, to be used in understanding the world and his revelation to us.  However, if there is truly a creator as Christians believe, then it is only reasonable that the creation will never trump the Creator as the final authority on what is good, beautiful, and true.  So rather than denying logic Christian epistemology strongly opposes the veneration of the rational – or any other human endeavors – over all else. 

While in exile in the first century the apostle John had a vision of “what must take place.”   He saw a battle raging in the spiritual realms.  In the sixteenth chapter of Revelation the seven bowls of God’s wrath are poured out on the earth.  As the sixth angel pours out his bowl John reports this:

¹³ Then I saw three evil spirits that looked like frogs; they came out of the mouth of the dragon, out of the mouth of the beast and out of the mouth of the false prophet. 

Words are apparently very important to God because we hear a lot about them in his revelation.  In that light one wonders what these voices in the shape of amphibians represent.  Rationalism would certainly be a candidate.  In the next verse these beings go out and convince and pull together the “kings” of the earth to array in battle against God Almighty.  In other words they reason these earthly rulers in to following them on a suicide mission. Do we hear such voices today?

In his commentary on Revelation Dr. Craig Keener points out what many scholars have come to believe today.  John’s apocalypse served a dual purpose.  He was writing what he saw to be the future as God revealed it to him, yes.  However, John’s phraseology also struck at the core of the intellectual and political power structures of Rome.  The metaphor of frogs in that day implied the following.

The image is grotesque; ancients usually viewed frogs as unclean, ugly, and vicious. They could function as a terrible omen, especially if they leaped from another creature’s mouth. One writer close to John’s day remarked tongue-in-cheek that Nero nearly was reincarnated as a viper, but mercifully was allowed to become a frog so he could continue his singing.

So I guess we should expect to hear some croaking with every age and every generation.

I am not at this point meaning to debate whether we are in the end times now (though for the NT the end of days started in a very real sense with the ascension of Jesus).    However, we have to this day that croaking sound all around us.  As we have seen in some cases the chirp is getting louder.   Nor am I questioning the literal nature of the eventual outcomes in what John saw on Patmos.  At the same time we are now in a culture where many, even some “Christians” have the hardware in their heads to rationalize just about anything.  

As a result the scorched-earth technique displayed by Bill Maher is spreading fast.  Thus the devaluing of people with whom one disagrees continues without the slightest concern for getting to the truth about one’s own assumptions.  It is the height of reason to suppose that some light shed on the worldview put forward by ancient Christians just might clarify one’s own.  The creed of survival of the loudest comes more from a perceived threat than from a reasoned position.  Bluntly, Bill Maher’s position is loud but, in fact, irrational.   

All of which appears to be very apocalyptic to me.  As Keener rightly points out “in the end, however, the frogs prove no match for God’s truth as a sword from the mouth of the Word made flesh.”

So croak on frogs.  We’ve heard it before and kingdom come is still here.

This Generation Of Narnian Overlappers

“It isn’t Narnia, you know,” sobbed Lucy.  “It’s you.  We shan’t meet you there.  And how can we live, never meeting you?”

     “But you shall meet me, dear one,” said Aslan.

     “Are—are you there too, Sir?” said Edmund.

     “I am,” said Aslan.  “But there I have another name.  You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”  

I’ve been thinking lately about the final scene and these parting words of C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  My musing is not due only to the fact that the movie is about to be released.  It has more to do with the image of our world that this exchange portrays.  It is a picture I have come to believe the current generation “gets” more readily than those of us who have gone before.

I am talking about the group of people just emerging on the scene – just now taking the first steps toward leadership in the world, and in the faith.  Sometimes they are referred to as the Millennials because they overlap two millenniums.  And that is appropriate, I suppose, because it the ability to see the overlap of two worlds which, I think, Lewis is digging for at the end of Dawn Treader.   I’m pretty sure that Millennials have this gift in larger measure than we have seen in a long time and that is what gives me such great optimism for the future of our faith communities.

Seeing that we are living in “overlap” time is crucial to living authentic Christian faith today.  Jesus has brought the kingdom of God to bear on this sorry fallen world.  Although we have not yet seen the endgame, he is daily accomplishing victories of over the shadow-world cast by the enemy.  Those triumphs reach right down into our own individual lives and the battles in which we struggle.

Aslan tells the youngest two Pevensie children that he brought them to Narnia so that they could know him better in the world they came from.  There are clues all through the Chronicles that they really felt most at home in Narnia, but Lewis’s point through Aslan’s mouth is well taken.  This world is our home, for now.  That’s why the overlap is sometimes difficult to navigate.  There really are two overlapping worlds in existence at this moment. 

The emerging generation seems to be more predisposed to accept this truth.  Yet, we would all do well to lock that image into the foundation of our own worldviews.  The main reason is in the nature of possibility and its influence on faith.  What we believe to be real shapes our attitudes and how we respond to crises, joys, and living. 

The Narnia Chronicles, I realize, were written for children but Lewis was clear that he was really writing a true myth that could apply to all people, young and old.  These stories get us to drop our guard much as the Bible’s stories do if we’re not too jaded to rule them out from the beginning. 

Though youthful exuberance often makes it easier to embrace idealistic hopes and dreams, maybe we should pause before dishing this hope off as we mature.  Could it be that the idea of two overlapping kingdoms, each affecting our everyday lives, is not such a stretch?  Maybe recognizing that some things can only be seen with the eyes of the heart and imagination (also gifted to us by our Creator) is not just meant to be a quality of youth.  It just might be that our mistake is one of mental assent that warehouses our supernatural beliefs in boxes marked “ideas that once inspired us.”  When we chock up the possibility of God’s kingdom being real and present every day as just another Christian belief, no wonder our lives become so disenchanted.  

If the Scriptures are to be believed, then Aslan was speaking reality.  Jesus Christ certainly thought so.  In his “farewell for now” conversations with his followers there was one topic that apparently kept coming up.

After his suffering, he presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.  Acts 1:3

           

Jesus seems to have pretty clearly believed he was leaving us in a supernatural, but half-charged world.  The momentum was now on his side as opposed to evil, so why did he feel the need to make the “kingdom of God” point over and over again over those forty days?  Why not talk about how cool it was being resurrected?  Why not discuss and put to rest once and for all exactly what happened in that tomb on that Sunday morning?  It seems he felt that it was critical that we know about the overlap.

He knew that life would make us blurry on this point.  He knew our experience in the shadows would make us forget what we had learned in the light, and we would struggle with many questions, such as -- If that is true, why doesn’t it seem to be true more often?  And I don’t just mean when things are tough.  Sometimes it is harder to believe there is a God when life is going great, because who really feels they need him when they are on cruise control?  If God is up to something, then why does the world seem so disenchanted, with wonder sucking philosophies, loud talking media, relationship killing wars, joy extinguishing pains, naturalistic worldviews, and just plain more fun things to do than traipsing around trying to find HIM?  If God really is up to something, then it only makes sense that you and I should be able to find him in normal everyday life.

            As with most of New Testament scholarship of the last 2000 years, Dr. N.T. Wright calls the era we are living in the “apostolic age.  In commenting on the worldview we see in the book of Acts he says,

All of that is part of the mystery of living at the overlap between the present age, with its griefs and sorrows and decay and death, and the age to come, with its new life and energy and restorative power.  I don’t think it has anything much to do with the devotion or holiness of those involved.  In the apostolic age they seem simply to have accepted that God can do whatever he pleases and that, when people pray and trust him, he will often do much more than we dare to imagine…

            The depth to which we know and believe the reality of Jesus’ victory in the spiritual realms will determine how much of his winning presence we see in this one.  The degree to which we are successful at living Spirit-filled Christ-like lives today, tomorrow and the next day is not the result of our own skill, will, or even commitment.  It is more a matter of how deep our belief runs in the victory of God in both in heaven and earth.  After all he also taught us to pray, “Your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.”  So Jesus in those forty days must have been proclaiming that in some measure his prayer had been answered.  Do you know to what measure?

            I’ve had conversations too that have been spurring me on to think of these things.  One such conversation was with a person in their twenties after a Sunday service who is facing some genuinely terrible things.  In the course of telling me about it he said with characteristic belief in the dual reality of our world, “I’m just praying that I’ll see God in this mess before it’s over.”

            At which point I could hear the Lion bound in and say, “But you shall meet me dear one.”