theo|digital

Idolatry is not that far from us. We switch them as often as Israelites did. When you’re young, it’s sexuality. When you’re middle-aged, it’s money. When you’re old, it’s fame before you die.

Dr. Bruckner is my professor of Old Testament. He’s talking about the turmoil of the Kingship and worship of the god Molech, who required people to kill their children with fire for favor in war. He’s the author of a just-released commentary on the Book of Exodus.

Sunday haven’t been the easiest day for me, since being up in Chicago.

I haven’t written outlines or something on my personal theology of “sabbath. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a set of experiences that have formed my assumptions. ” (I hear “sabbath” as a warm word, btw, not dark. And a word I don’t think requires a link to “Sunday” – but here I’m using it like that).

I think the sabbath rest has to do with God as my maker and me as the one he made. That he understands that I am surrounded by the opportunity for unlimited work—that my tasks are bigger than I will ever be—and being not only creaturely, but stubbornly opposed to that reality, I’ll try to finish the work anyway.

Sabbath is the idea that there is a rhythm to rest that I need. 1 in 7. A time for work and a time to remember I’m never going to finish the list.

And whatever I call “rest” has to involve freedom from spiritual, emotional, physical weight that naturally accompanies vocational accomplishment. So if I sit in front of TV all day but worry about my coming week – I’m missing it. Same if I ban myself from yard work – if my daily load is a life of reading and writing, physical tasks might be exactly how sabbath rests me.

But that’s not the component I’ve having trouble with.

The second part of Sabbath seems to be community. There’s something to resting with others. This is something that my sister Erika’s church back in Moscow, ID understood well: that sabbath was barely palatable without the table-leaf installed, wine glasses full, prayer and laughter mingled. I loved Sundays in the DawgHaus in Champaign because they involved a lot of we. We’d sleep in. Flop on couches and chat for hours before showering. Make breakfast together. This year down in Champaign, it seems to look like a regular home-cooked meal on Sunday evening with a movie after — actually the way we did it for a long time in DawgHaus 1.0.

But here in Chicago, I wake up to an empty apartment. I’ve don’t have the community of friends that thinks of Sabbath as gathering day, a laughing day. And by myself, it’s much harder to believe the first part: that I should be free of my list. With others: easy. Alone: I’m gonna work. Which is why I spent the morning reading research materials.

It’s just how it’s been. :-7

My brother-in-law and sister live in DC, and way back in February (emotional distance: 14 years), I took a visiting Saturday morning and walked around DC for some fresh air and photos. This staircase is just one block down from their place, in the historic Shaw neighborhood which they’ve started to adopt as their own.

Dr. Lamin Sanneh, a native of Gambia, is a missiologist at Yale. A quote from his book Whose Religion Is Christianity?: The Gospel beyond the West, which he writes as a series of short questions and answers:

Q: What is the significance of the growth of the world Christianity for the West?

A: The West can encounter in the world Christian movement the gospel as it is being embraced by societies that had not been shaped by the Enlightenment, and so gain an insight into the culture that shaped the origins of the NT church. That might bring about a greater appreciation for the NT background of Christianity. It might also shed light on the issues of the early church faced as it moved between the Jewish and Gentile worlds.

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Now playing: Andrew Osenga – The Letter
via FoxyTunes

I-Life in Champaign has posted the audio for my talk (mp3 -10.5MB) on 5 April in their New Heart series. Like usual with me talking, you miss a bit because we had almost 50 photos, but you can still follow the stories, and why I think Kingdom hearts are to be subversive.

I woke up “in the middle of the night” convinced someone was shaking my bed. Since I’m in a loft bed, it was if there was a lower bunk, and someone was bouncing around down there. You know… or we just had the Midwest’s largest earthquake since 1968. (USGS info). Of course, I concluded I was crazy and went back to sleep.

In Champaign almost two weeks ago, I spoke on “In Search of a Subversive Heart” where we spoke about structural evil, power, and King Jesus who rules over them and calls us to subvert them his way. And we reached into the deep story of elderly Mrs. Ntonsheni, the wise victim of South African apartheid.

“Christians are subversive, they think about power upside down,” we said.

More on the talk later (the audio will be available at some point soon). But already I’ve gotten many questions on the related books, some I relied on or recommend for further reading. So for students and friends that were at SNG:

Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals Shane Claiborne is the guy best known for living a “neo-monastic” lifestyle in Philadelphia. But his thoughts on Jesus’ subversiveness in this book are really nicely done. A sweet looking book too – every page is customized! Although this isn’t a resource I read much directly for our talk (I’m still reading it), If I was going to pick just one book for someone “to know more” – this seems to be it.

The Powers That Be by Walter Wink. Wink is the theologian who has done much work on power and structural evil (and one of the guys Shane Claiborne read). He wrote a more detailed trilogy of books before this one, which acts as somewhat of a summary. He’s classified in “liberal” school of theology, which means I’m going to read him cautiously because our assumptions about Jesus and the scriptures may not be the same. But I think he’s got some stuff that’s really worth the thought. I have some previous posts on him.

The Boy Child Is Dying: A South African Experience. by Judy Boppell Peace. I read from this book when telling the story of Mrs. Ntonsheni. It appears to be out of print – I was lucky to find it – but there a few available used online. A very short book, but very powerful pictures of daily apartheid.

Some of the images we saw together were used with permission from the United Nations photo archive.

“It is a great suffering for the church in the United States, for the church in general, and for me personally that this could happen. If I read the histories of these victims, it’s difficult for me to understand how it was possible that priests betrayed in this way their mission to give healing and to give the love of God to these children. We are deeply ashamed, and we will do all that is possible that this cannot happen in the future.”
…
I would not speak in this moment about homosexuality, but pedophilia, [which] is another thing. We will absolutely exclude pedophiles from the sacred ministry, this is absolutely incompatible. And who is really guilty of being a pedophile cannot be a priest.
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I know that the bishops and the rectors of seminarians will do all that is possible so that we have a strong discernment, because it’s more important to have good priests than to have many priests.”

Pope Benedict, answering a planned question from reporter John Allen on the papal plane before landing at Andrews Air Force base. The pope’s words on this are significant, and the Pope clearly was aware, because he switched from Italian to English to answer the question. Some have accused him of not adequately addressing the sex abuse scandals of the last years. Read the NY Times article, but see the actual transcript of his words. I think his comments felt human and well done. I wonder what the critical abuse victims in Boston in this NPR story think at this point.

(I’m reading through the Pew Religious Landscape Survey. You can read my other posts on it as well.)

Some data on religious traditions that are passed on well (or not so well).

The religious traditions most heavily comprised of people who have switched affiliation include the unaffiliated [they're incorporating this as a category], Buddhists, Jehovah Witnesses, members of “other faiths” category (e.g. Unitarians, members of New Age groups and members of Native American religions) and members of the “other Christian” tradition (including metaphysical Christians). (p27)
This definitely seems to reflect that American propensity to seek something out very different as a self-defining element to replace the original religious category. It obviously also speaks to something about how religious traditions as passed down in families. Like, why do kids with parents who are Jehovah’s Witness rarely follow them?

A friend of mine a while ago let me have his copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking, the voice recognition software. I’ve had limited success with it (although admittedly I haven’t been able to use it a lot).

It has one feature that will take a pre-recorded audio file – i.e. MP3, and transcribe what it hears into a Word doc. Sweet! I wanted to use this a couple weeks ago when I transcribed a talk by Mark Driscoll on the emerging church. It was a one hour sermon, and doing it manually was going to take serious time. This seemed like the solution.

Uh, not so much. Here’s the Dragon transcribed file. Compare to the original I did by hand. Heheh.