Category: Longform
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Some fun for Friday
I had about five things turn up in my RSS reading today that I want to blog before long. But it’s Friday, which merits things entertaining and lighthearted.
First up: a jazzy cover of Radiohead’s classic song “Creep”, with American Idol singer Haley Reinhart on vocals. (They replace the F word in this version with something cleaner, so it’s safe to turn on in front of small children.) I love how great songs manage to be viable and stay great even when transformed into a different genre. This is a good example.
Next up: Sesame Street reminds us again that it writes most of its humor to amuse the parents who would otherwise grow unbearably weary of its puppets. The latest example: “Game of Chairs”. Fans of Game of Thrones should be quite amused.
American Oligarchy
The kerfuffle around Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act this week has been a mess of ugly rhetoric and heat generated without creating a lot of light on the subject. The RFRA was passed by the Indiana legislature and signed by the governor, only to elicit massive outcry from corporate leaders who immediately did reactive things like restricting business travel to Indiana.
Joe Carter lamented thus on Twitter this morning:
He was quickly retweeted by, among others, Russell Moore, who is president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission for the Southern Baptist Convention.
The fact that American is (and has been, for some decades) functionally an oligarchy isn’t really breaking news. I find it interesting, though, that the religious wing of the GOP is suddenly this week finding it concerning.
More interesting is that, if you want to try to change things and eliminate that oligarchy, you’re going to have to take steps that the GOP opposes. (The obvious first one that comes to mind is restricting the amount of money that corporations can dump in to influence elections.)
Hmmm…
And the youngest turns 6...
We’re finishing up Birthday Week at the Hubbs house by celebrating today as the youngest turns 6. KP is a pistol - always moving fast to keep up with her sisters, often singing quietly to herself while she plays, she loves to laugh and dance and wear shirts that have flouncy tutu waists.
Given the photos available to me on my phone for sharing here, she also appears to like eating ice cream and taking selfies with dad.
Happy birthday, little lady!
The best sports weekend of the year
It’s the best sports weekend of the year: the first weekend of the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament. So many games, so many great stories, something always happening.
Then you get highlights like this one. The 14-seed Georgia State down 2 against Baylor with time running out.
Craziness.
Matt Maher: Glory Bound
I’m not a big listener of CCM and Praise & Worship music, but Matt Maher’s stuff has been growing on me lately. He has a new record out this week called Saints and Sinners, and I’ve been enjoying it quite a bit.
Here he goes full Springsteen on “Glory Bound”, which is a heckuva lot of fun:
Not to deal with sin, but to save...
Grace is a difficult pill to swallow. A dangerous doctrine. The fact that the evangelical church has bought into that thought hit me between the eyes at my men’s bible study yesterday morning.
We’re in Hebrews 9 at the moment, the most familiar verse of which was a frequent memory verse in AWANA and whatever other church things I was in growing up. It was always presented for memorization this way:
…it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment. – Hebrews 9:27
This verse was frequently packaged in a set of verses designed as what we would’ve called a Gospel presentation. Inherent message: you’re gonna die, you don’t know when, and after that you’ll be judged. So, if you haven’t asked Jesus into your heart, do it today! And if you have, repent of that sin and clean your life up so you won’t have to fear judgment for your sins!
Yesterday we read the verse in context with the rest of the chapter, and here’s what we read (emphasis mine):
24 For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. 25 Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own, 26 for then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. 27 And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, 28 so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him. – Hebrews 9:24 - 28
What a change of message! Now Christ is the one who died once for all, took the judgment, so that we, who accept that gift by grace, can wait eagerly for him to return and save.
Now that’s awesome news.
Then there’s this reminder from Sean Palmer guest-posting over on Scot McKnight’s blog today:
God loves you, just as you are, not as you might be some day. Embrace that.
Amen.
Happy Birthday to the AG! (2015 edition)
Our middle daughter, Addison, enters her last single-digit year today. Hard to believe that nine years have flown by so quickly!
This young lady is a free spirit, a voracious reader, and a math whiz. Life is never dull with her around. She has a sense of style and funky attitude that set her apart from the crowd.
I love this young lady dearly and couldn’t be prouder to be her dad.
Can you name 5 ways the church differs from America?
There’s a challenging riff from pastor Brian Zahnd over on Missio Alliance today.
How, he asks, does the church differ from America?
The particular challenge for the American Christian is to distinguish the American way of being human from the church (the Jesus way of being human). If there is no essential difference between being Christian and being American (as a way of life), then what is the point of the church? This is a problem. Many American Christians would find it difficult to list five ways in which the Jesus way (the church) differs significantly from the American way. For them the church and the American way are essentially the same way of being human. Which in essence means this: The church does not actually exist. What exists is America. The church (and every other institution) exists only to support the supreme idea of America. Oh, boy.
He goes on to list 12. How many could you list? It’s worth considering.
Stopping ISIS
Pastor Rick Warren’s tweet echoes a sentiment that I’ve been hearing a lot lately around evangelical Christianity: that ISIS is an evil that must be stopped. Unsaid but clearly implied is that the USA should be stopping ISIS by “wielding the sword” - in other words, send in the military.
On one hand, I’m sympathetic. I’m a red-blooded male who gets motivated by the idea of going and fighting evil, and who today appears more evil than ISIS? I’m horrified (as nearly everyone is) by the videos of beheadings, and my heart is wrenched when I hear the accounts of children being kidnapped from families.
And yet… I get a little uneasy at the rhetoric I see going around, and believe that Christians should rethink that rhetoric, for at least a couple of reasons.
First, there’s a legitimate case to be made for Christian pacifism. I’m not sure at the moment quite where I fall along the just war - pacifism spectrum, but I respect those who believe that when Jesus said “love your enemies and do good to them that hate you”, it has a practical implication that means you won’t call for your enemies to be killed.
Yeah, the pacifism argument doesn’t work for me.
“And yet…” I hear some say, “…Paul says that the government has the responsibility to wield the sword, to reward those who do good and punish those who do evil”. True enough. But, even if you subscribe to that, I’ve got some more thoughts.
Second, I have serious reservations about whether or not sending the US military back in large numbers into the middle east to fight ISIS is a solution that will actually improve things. Unless you’ve been under a rock since 1990, you’re most likely aware that the US has had troops on the ground in the Middle East for the past 25 years, and that they don’t seem to have greatly stabilized the situation. It also looks a lot like ISIS is intentionally spoiling for a fight. How many more decades do we need to continue with this strategy before we start considering other approaches?
Third, while “you don’t negotiate with evil, good people stop evil” is great rhetoric and makes a punchy 140-character tweet, it doesn’t hold up as a consistent axiom even in a very brief reading of 20th century history. Sure, we went in to stop Hitler, and most would agree it was the right thing to do. But Stalin and those that followed him in Soviet Russia were at least as broadly evil as Hitler’s Germany, and what did the USA do? Well, we fought in a handful of proxy wars that were pretty much all disasters. And then finally Reagan negotiated and outmaneuvered them until their economic system imploded.
Would Rick Warren like to argue that Ronald Reagan was wrong in that course of action, and that he (or Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, or Truman before him) should’ve just nuked Moscow because they were EVIL? I’m guessing not.
Finally, I’m concerned when I hear appeals urging Christians to write our congressmen and demand action against ISIS because it comes with the strong implication that our leaders either (a) don’t understand that ISIS is bad; (b) don’t care enough to want to do anything about it; (c) are secretly radical Islamist sympathizers who hate America; or (d) All of the Above.
And maybe I’m just not cynical enough, but I think it’s quite likely that our President and congress DO understand that ISIS is bad, that they DO want to do something about it, that they’re NOT secretly radical Islamists, but that they’re people a lot like me who are trying to make very difficult decisions while getting counsel from the foremost experts in these areas that the country (and probably the world) has to offer.
So what SHOULD we do?
First and foremost, we can pray. Pray that the innocent would be protected. That Christians would be strong in their faith, even to the point of death.
Then pray for ISIS. Pray that they would be challenged by the faith of the Christians whom they are persecuting. Pray for their repentance and that they would come to know Jesus.
I love what Matt Chandler said back in a sermon in August:
I have been reading over and over the conversion of Saul of Tarsus (Acts 9). Murdering Christians. Well known terrorist among evangelical followers of Christ in the first century. Brutal. Powerfully converted and becomes one of the greatest missionaries of the Christian faith. I feel powerless about what’s happening in Iraq, but I’m also praying that God would raise up a Paul out of the leadership of the ISIS. Why not? God is God. He’s done it before. Why wouldn’t he do it today? Lets ask.
Now that’s something worth asking for.
A famous scene minus the dialogue
OK, I’m just shamelessly reposting something Jason Kottke dug up, but it’s fascinating - somebody took the courtroom scene from A Few Good Men and edited all the dialogue out. It holds up really well; a sign, I would imagine, of the quality of the filmmaking.