A post in which I conclude with an obvious thought...

I have walked or ridden my bike to work most days for the last 8 years of teaching. I enjoy the walking and what it means: that I live close enough; that I get to walk the same paths as my students; that my own footprints and not carbon's are the only ones I'm leaving. I remember one of my former delinquent students giving me a lift in his car which smelled densely of weed. I see the grin of Frank, a former student whom I'd worked hard to get into a therapeutic school,  as he flagged me down to introduce me to his own son. I hear a rooster's crow one winter morning, welcoming the sun and the day and filling me with thanksgiving.

On top of these moments, I enjoy the sense that I'm a part of something larger than me.  When I get to see third-world level poverty, drug deals and police hold ups it feels like I'm part of a movement of heroes of mine who have joined with their neighbors pain, and walked alongside them.  The walking pace is important, too, because it binds me to consider my neighbors and their lives for longer than my fickle, self-gravitating mind would allow me if I drove. In short, walking to work allows me to live out some ideals that are important to me.

But this school year, the one that ended last Friday, has been different from the others. My group of students was the hardest I've ever taught - the most emotionally needy, the most resistant to authority and instruction, the most directly challenging. The gang violence and influence in my classroom and on my route has been more pervasive. And I know that every bit of un-health in the streets and in our schools is just a fraction of what exists in peoples homes. My walks are often laden with the weight of my students' pain and questions of how I or anyone might reach them. With each dysfunctionality and violence I come across, my footsteps grow heavier.

Just last week as I walked up my front stairs after a long day of work, a pair of 9-year-old boys yelled "suck my dick" and added gestures for clarity, to a pair of girls, probably 10. The girls yelled equally offensive things right back. Friday morning's particular heaviness started around 8 o'clock, as I walked by the home of a former student, Sara, whose gang-banging brothers were up early, looking down the block, at some commotion. I followed their gazes and found Frank (the proud dad) held up against a chain-link fence while two cops waited for back-up. His niece, who graduated from 8th grade this week, was held up right next to him.

I shook my head, as my feet banged like bricks on the pavement. I trudged on past a group of early-arrived students, greeted the office ladies, ascended to my classroom and plopped down at my teacher's desk. As I stared at the black screen of my computer, all I could think was, "I gotta get a car!"

As much as I am a man of ideals, I'm seeing a  limit to the extent to which I can embody them. A crucial part of my teaching job is bringing fresh energy to students, who already at age 12 and 13, have given up.  But if walking past their houses each day brings me to despair before I even get there, well,  I suppose something's gotta give.

It's the same with our chickens. In November we bought 4 ISA Browns (like Rhode Island Reds), and have enjoyed all sorts of benefits from them. The amount of waste we had to have hauled to garbage dumps each weeks was cut drastically. We were able to better appreciate the work that goes into food production. And It gave the kids some meaningful chores, and an understanding of how breakfast got to their plates. There were lots of other benefits, too, but when the rats showed up in May and wouldn't go away no matter how carefully we managed the coop, it was time to give them up.

So I'm learning that in one life, in my one life, I can't do everything I care about. When I write that statement it feels laughably obvious, but I think it's worth saying anyway: We can only do what we can do.

N.T. Wright talks about reading the bible

My friend Tony posted a link to this video on his blog. It's so good and intriguing and instructive that I'm just plain stealing it. He wont care.

Slow me

I've been writing short poems lately. Here's one.

Slow me: Thoughts from A Midday Break

Draw me in to what's not new or news.
Envelope me in what could never be hawked or branded.
Touch me with the oldest truths.
Slow me.

Show me the dust that I was and will be.
Let me hear the unending song,
and glory in whatever notes I can hear.
Open my ears.

Give me eyes to see beyond the here and now
so that I can see the now and here for what they are:
fractions, negative exponents of time and space,
and at the same tiny time and in the same tiny space, somehow,
filled with meaning.

On Mumford

The British band called Mumford & Sons has lately overtaken the space in my brain that furnishes the songs I hum. Stylistically the band is a mix of folk, rock and bluegrass. They write lyrics like philosophers and poets, drawing themes and lines from the likes of Shakespeare and Steinbeck. I aim in this quick review to examine the lyrics of a few songs on their only album, Sign No More, for what seems to me a close alignment with the Christian faith.

The album begins with its four singers slowly and pleadingly lamenting the way life is: full of pain; disappointment; hurt; bruises. Mid-song, they then seem to have found hope. The song changes styles; the banjo slung, the tempo rises, the toes tap, and it feels like they're possessed by the idea that the pain doesn’t win.

“Love, that will not betray you

Dismay or enslave you

It will set you free

Be more like the man, you were made to be.

There is a design,
An alignment to cry,
At my heart you see,
The beauty of love
as it was made to be.”

Man and Love being made, even designed, for a purpose; the notion that this purpose can be re-found; salvation from life’s pain; a future when sighing will cease…all persistent themes of the Bible’s story, all present in the title track, Sigh No More.

The vision for renewal of the "ought" comes back to us in the final track of the album, After the Storm. The Bible’s final track, the last chapters of Revelation, could have the same title. It says:

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.  He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.

Mumford & Sons looks forward similarly, 

 There will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.

Here again we have the Bible’s theme of salvation, and the new order of things, but this time with the addition of grace in the center, a distinctly Christian understanding of salvation. The idea of grace comes back over and again in the album, and each time it sounds Christian.

Mumford & Sons seem to use friendship as their canvas. Roll Away Your Stone sounds like one man inviting another to full life. The singer is the friend who in the end rejects the invitation. But the honesty of the conversation itself is a thing of beauty, highlighting the fact that giving up control of one’s life is not a decision that everyone can take.  More clearly Christian lines come from this song:

Seems that all my bridges have been burned

But you say that’s exactly how this grace thing works

It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart

But the welcome I receive with the restart

The Cave sounds like another conversation in which one man calls another to shake his friend alive. The final stanzas of the back and forth, sung on top of break-neck banjo picking, read:

And I will hold on hope
And I won't let you choke
On the noose around your neck

And I'll find strength in pain
And I will change my ways
I'll know my name as it's called again

These guys may not be believers.  One line asks "How can you say that your truth is better than ours?" Their recurrent use of the "f" word in Little Lion Man is a sign that if they are Christians, they wont be guests on Focus on the Family anytime soon. Whether or not they follow Jesus, though, there is something alive in their hearts and in their music that has been a help in my own Christian walk.

While I sat on my couch writing this review, I heard gunshots out my living room window, part of a recent uprising in traded blows between the rival 26 and Latin King street gangs in our neighborhood. Somehow the bald pain that Mumford & Sons acknowledges and owns, gives backbone to the hope they proclaim. Hope that promises the gunman and victim that there is a purpose for their creation, and that there is a love that can restore them to the men they were made to be. Hope that dares them and me to awaken our souls. Hope that relies on grace and not on a way we might try to save ourselves. Even as I write, it seems like a fool’s hope. But it is this old Christian hope that we hold to nonetheless.

In Deed

Today's Chicago Tribune highlights Christians who have lost family members to murder, and who oppose the death penalty. One said:

"Easter is always such a reminder that violence and death are not the last word," she said. "They don't have power over us. Love and the love of God is the most powerful force on Earth and are eternal. This year as never before, I'm seeing that I not only need to love Nancy and Richard and the baby, I need to love the person who took their lives, love them the way God loves them. That's so brand new to me and makes me see so many things differently. … I feel a stone has been rolled away from my heart."

You can read her's and others' stories here.

Rob Bell's new book

The bad part about Rob Bell is that he's so dang cool. He dresses trendy and makes cool videos and cool Christians everywhere know him to be cool.

The good part about Rob Bell is that he raises really good questions, he's an excellent teacher and that he reads a lot of N.T. Wright, who isn't so trendy.

He wrote a new book called Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. This is a link to a video in which his cool self talks over cool music and cool video footage about some really important age old questions. If you want to explore some of these questions without feeling like a geek, this may be a good book for you.

swiping out, part II

You may have noticed that I’ve been posting less often. This here’s an explanation…

The last time I posted I said I'd be taking a break from media for 25 days as a part of my church's 25-day fast. It was to celebrate our church's 25th year. (Boy, was I glad we're not Catholic!)

During the fast I found surprising communion with God, inner peace and efficiency at work related simply to not using the Internet, reading, or listening to music. As if my soul was taking a much-needed deep breath. And like I often do during fasts, I asked God, “How can I keep this going after the fast, in normal life?”

I sensed a clear response that I should limit my Internet usage to one hour per week. So for now, that’s what I’m doing. The result of this change has been continued efficiency while at work, far greater presence of mind when I’m at home with my wife and kids, and a surprising amount of enjoyment at the simplicity. I went from hopping on to check any number of sites whenever I pleased throughout the day, to saving all my Internet business to one sitting. And you know what’s weird? The same sites I used to go on multiple times per day, I don’t even care to look at anymore when my new hour quota recharges on Sunday. Nothing on the Internet feels urgent. Nothing is.  

So at least for now, I’ll be blogging less often. My wife, my kids and my soul are glad.

Just this...

Read more.

swiping out

I'll be starting a 25-day media fast on Monday, so that means no Internet for me and no blog posts for you. How we'll suffer.

If you've never rested for a while from reading and hearing, I strongly encourage it. I do it a couple times a year, and it's something I've come to look forward to. The space that I generally cram full with information or entertainment will stay empty for a while. The quiet is hard to get used to at first, but after a week or so, it grows beautiful. Before long I will see and hear things that I wouldn't under "normal" circumstances. If past fasts are any indication, the Lord will speak. Rather, I will hear.

Upon returning to consumption of media, my first order of business will be to listen to an album by Mumford & Sons that I bought and loved tonight. They caught my attention because they have a song called "Timshel." The word forms the heart of East of Eden, John Steinbeck's masterpiece, and one of my favorite books. I'm right now finishing my second bout with the book. Maybe someday I'll write about the book and the word, Timshel.

For now, though, here's a video of a different Mumford & Sons song, The Cave. Maybe you'll love it too.

A 5-year-old's monologue

My Suzy doesn't realize she's recording, so she thinks her camera clicks are snapping pictures.
 

The Sadness of Christmas

As a kid, I looked forward to Christmas with the best of 'em. 3 huge gift receivings awaited me each year, and I would be getting most everything I wished for, plus some pleasant surprises, too. In my mind, Christmas was the time to get set. All my problems, from acne to holey underwear, from boredom to nerdy clothes were on their way out the door. Satisfaction was just around the corner. Jesus had come, Santa was coming, and life would be better.

Looking back on those days, I recognize a recurring theme of sadness that crept to my heart in opening gifts. I would realize as I stacked the final presents onto my impressive mound that I was not, in fact satisfied. Even with my super-cool new Reebok windsuit, my Kirby Puckett rookie card (pictured), my silk shirt and my Steven Curtis Chapman CDs, I was still Brian. I would haul my wares happily to my room, admire them Gollum-like, and then feel the sadness come on.

As I got older I came to understand the sadness as greed's melody. So I reacted by trying to forget my own presents. I'd try not to think about what I might get, or to focus on others' happiness. As I failed in this effort, the sadness would come again, but with guilt as its dissonant accompanist. In opening presents, I found a limit to the fulfillment I longed for on Christmas day, and this in itself left an emptiness.

But it wasn't just the giving times that left a hollow. It was the fun with grandparents and cousins that I longed for all year that had to come to an end. It was the last game of bumper pool or Carroms. It was the race to see which cousin would get the last of Grandma Stipp's chocolate covered peanut-butter cracker sandwiches, or my Grandma Flint sneaking me a  few coconut and cream cheese snowballs for the ride home. As joyous and peaceful as these days were, they came to an end. And I remember feeling something more than sadness that comes when things don't go one's way. It was grief that seemed to always come with Christmas's end.

I think I know why.

As an adult, by celebrating the week's before Christmas during Advent, I have come to understand that Christmas day is only one part of the holiday. The whole Advent season celebrates the day of His first coming, but also points to Christ's return as the time when the world will finally be judged and put to rights; the time when my own greed would be gone, when the surrounding of profound love and safety would not end. We look forward during this time to Chirst's second advent, which means looking past today, dreaming of a new reality. He will come again, but He has not yet.

I believe there is a grief and longing native to this Holiday and even to our religion.  All is not celebration and praising. While the greed, the guilt and the loneliness that little boys and girls will feel this weekend will someday be wiped away, while the beautiful vision cast for us in Revelation 21, when he finally crushes once and for the forces that leave us empty is to come, it has not yet. And for that we have only to look forward. 

So when the sadness comes these days, I urge you to take it in stride. Look beyond the day to the future God has promised.

The Christmas Wars

I like this article's perspective on "Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays." It says that pressuring people who don't believe in Christ to use His name may be at the very heart of what it means to take the Lord's name in vain. Yet another suggestion from Evangelicals for Social Action's E-pistle.

On the way to Montgomery

We’re driving down the country headed to Motgomery, Alabama to see our friends, the Jecks. We’re going in a way that runs against many of our ideals. Instead of taking the trip slow and drinking our country in with long drafts, we’re zipping along. We’re sticking to the unnatural and boring interstates opposed to the beautiful, intriguing countryside. Right now, in fact, we’re in Louisville, just 30 minutes from Wendell Berry’s Port Royal, Kentucky, a place whose beauty and significance I have read and thought much about. But we’re not stoppin’ to see, baby.  Not this trip. We’re blazing right past at 70 miles an hour. Instead of packing meals or getting supplies at small-time grocery stores we ate at a Dairy Queen and got coffees at McDonalds. Our Days Inn is within earshot of the zooming cars of I-65.

At some point, our interests and the kids’ needs come into competition. Here on this trip, their needs win. We find that as much as we need to live out what we believe, our kids have greater and more urgent pulls on our energy. They desperately need our training – a big job that takes all our attention. Suzy needs to feel protected and to be heard by her mommy and daddy. Eli needs to learn that apologizing first and then biting his brother just doesn’t fly. Isaac needs to hear when told to change his undies, “I already changed them once this week” isn’t an acceptable stance. And Leeli needs to stop every few hours for her mama’s milk, which means that the trip is long enough even on the interstates.

So instead of beholding the beauty outside our van, we’re focusing on the beauty within it. And there’s is a beauty as breathtaking as any we’re passing. And it is ours to nourish. 

Christmas music suggestions

The existence of the Christian music industry boggles my mind. Not that Christians shouldn’t be making music, or singing about the Lord. We always have, and should. But what we find on the radio, benefiting from the industry, has been a poor imitation of secular pop music since I’ve been old enough to compare the two. The following are examples of good music that celebrates the coming of the Christ. Its singers’ discipleship is an inspiration to me moreso that their musicianship, which is also quite good.

1. Sara Groves is giving away copies of a live Christmas show she did in a women’s prison here in Illinois. This live album is good not for its sound quality but for the statement she is making by giving the concert in the first place. When my kids asked whose were the voices singing along with Sara, it was a joy to answer them, and let the joy-filled voices of women who did God-knows-what fall our ears together. Singing of Christ’s hope with inmates. That is both a proclamation and an enactment of the Kingdom.

2. Andy Gullahorn and Jill Phillips are a husband and wife team, and their first album together is called "Christmas," the unoriginality of which sounds like a sad conclusion to a marital argument to me. The album is good, but their rendition of "Nations that Long in Darkness Walked" is great. It adds a bridge that shows how this old hymn captures the central  message of the gospel, and the Christian's Advent longing.

“Nations That Long In Darkness Walked” by Andy Gullahorn



3. Randall Goodgame made a very fun kids' Christmas album, A Slugs and Bugs Christmas to accompany his and Andrew Peterson's Slugs and Bugs and Lullabies. Very good stuff. On the song the Happy Birthday Jesus, the "lump in my throat," is what I hope my own kids get as they realize all the hubbub is about the most important event in history.





4. And if you've never heard Peterson's Behold the Lamb of God: The True Tall Tale of the Coming of the Christ, it's the best. And you can hear the whole album here.
 
Items 2-4 can be purchased at the Rabbit Room Store, which I (obviously) frequent.

Family Pictures

A friend of ours from church gave us a family photo shoot as a welcoming gift to Rozalie. Here's a link to her blog where you can see a sampling.

N.T. Wright, on hell, my thoughts

I just wrote a long response to the N.T. Wright excerpt. Then I re-read his excerpt and found that I had pretty much written the same things as him, but not as well.

So very briefly, I really liked his tone on hell, "I am well aware that I have now wandered into territory that no one can claim to have mapped." And his suggestion that sin does more than separate us from God but threatens our very humanity was a new idea to me, and I think he's wright. (sorry)

Also, If you were too lazy to read the original post, or if you dig British accents, here he is saying many of the same things.

N.T. Wright, on hell: The Excerpt

Part 1 gives some context for this rather long excerpt from N.T. Wright about hell and final judgment. I hope you'll take the time to read it and give it some thought. 


God is utterly committed to set the world right in the end. This doctrine, like that of resurrection itself, is held firmly in place by the belief in God as creator, on the one side, and the belief in his goodness, on the other. And that setting right must necessarily involve elimination of all that distorts God's good and lovely creation and in particular of all that defaces his image-bearing human creatures. Not to put too fine a point upon it, there will be no barbed wire in he kingdom of God...

For "barbed wire," of course, read whichever catalog of awfulnesses you prefer: genocide, nuclear bombs, child prostitution, the arrogance of empire, the comodification of souls, the idolization of race. The New Testament has several such categories, functioning as red flashing lights to warn against going down a road that leads straight to a fenceless cliff. And in the analysis offered by early Christians from Paul onward, such patterns of behavior have three things to be said about them.

First, they all stem from the primal fault, which is idolatry, worshiping that which is not God as if it were. Second, they all show the telltale marks of the consequent fault, which is subhuman behavior, that is, the failure fully to reflect the image of God...Third, it is perfectly possible, and it really does seem to happen in practice, that this idolatry and dehumanization become so endemic in the life and chosen behavior of an individual, and indeed of groups, that unless there is a specific turning away from such a way of life, those who persist are conniving at their own ultimate dehumanization.

This is at the heart of the way in which I believe we can today restate the doctrine of final judgment. I find it quite impossible, reading the New Testament on the one hand and the newspaper on the other, to suppose that there will be no ultimate condemnation, no final loss, no human beings to whom, as C.S. Lewis put it, God will eventually say, "Thy will be done." I wish it were otherwise, but on cannot forever whistle "There's a wideness in God's mercy" in the darkness of Hiroshima, of Auschwitz, of the murder of children and the careless greed that enslaves millions with debts not their own. Humankind cannot, alas bear very much reality, and the massive denial of reality by the cheap and cheerful universalism of Western liberalism has a lot to answer for.

But if there is indeed final condemnation for those who, by their idolatry, dehumanize themselves and drag others down with them, the account I have suggested of how this works in practice provides a somewhat different picture from those normally imagined.

The traditional view is that those who spurn God's salvation, who refuse to turn from idolatry and wickedness, are held forever in conscious torment. Sometimes this is sharpened up by overenthusiastic preachers and teachers who claim o know precisely which sorts of behavior are bound to lead to hell and which, though reprehensible, are still forgivable. But the traditional picture is clear: such human beings will continue to be, in some sense, human beings, and they will be punished in an endless time.

This account in then opposed by the universalists. Sometimes they suggest...that God will be merciful even to the utterly abhorrent, to mass murderers and child rapists. Sometimes they modify this: God will continue, after death, to offer all people the chance of repentance until they finally give in to the offer of his love.

A middle way is offered by the so-called conditionalists. They propose "conditional immortality": those who persistently refuse God's love and his way of life in the present world will simply cease to exit. Immortality, such theories point out, is not (despite the popularity of Platonist!) an innate human characteristic; it is something that, as Paul says, only God possesses by right and hence is a gift that God can choose to bestow or withhold. According to this theory, then, God will dimply not confer immortality on those who in this life continue impenitently to worship idols and thereby to destroy their own humanness. This view is therefore sometimes known as annihilationaism; such people will cease to exist. That word, however, is perhaps too strong, suggesting that such people are actively destroyed rather than merely failing to receive a gift that had been held out to them and that they had consistently rejected.

Over against these three option, I propose a view that combines what seem to me the strong points of the first and third. The greatest objection to the traditional view in recent times - and the last two hundred years have seen massive swing toward universalism in the Western churches, at least the so-called mainstream ones - has come from the deep revulsion many feel at the idea of the torture chamber in the middle of the castle of delights, the concentration camp in the middle of the beautiful countryside, the idea that among the delights of the blessed we should include the contemplation of the torments of the wicked. However much we tell ourselves that God must condemn evil if he is a good God and that those who love God must endorse that condemnation, as soon as these pictures present themselves to our minds, we turn away in disgust. The conditionalist avoids this at the apparent cost of belittling those scriptural passages that appear to speak unambiguously of a continuing state for those who reject the worship of the true God and the way of humanness, which follows from it.

Using that analysis, though, presents us with the following possibility, which I believe does justice both to the key text and to the realities of human life of which, after a century of horror mostly dreamed up by human beings, we are not all too well aware. When human beings give their heartfelt allegiance to and worship that which is not God, they progressively cease to reflect the image of God. One of the primary laws of human life is that you become like what you worship: what's more, you reflect what you worship not only back to the object itself but also outward to the world around. Those who worship money increasingly define themselves in terms of it and increasingly treat other people as creditor, debtors, partners, or customers rather than human beings. Those who worship sex define themselves in terms of it (their preferences, their practices, their past histories) and increasingly treat other people as actual or potential sexual objects. Those who worship power define themselves in terms of it and treat other people as either collaborators, competitors, or pawns. These and many otehr forms of idolatry combine in a thousand ways, all of them damaging to the image-bearing quality of the people concerned and of those whose lives they tough. My suggestion is that it is possible for human beings so to continue down this road, so to refuse all whispering of good news, all glimmers of the true light, all prompting to turn and go the other way, all signposts to the love of God, that after death they become at last, by their own effective choice, beings that once were human but now are not, creatures that have ceased to bear the divine image at all. With the death of that body in which they inhabited God's good world, in which the flickering flame of goodness had not been completely snuffed out, they pass simultaneously not only beyond hope but also beyond pity. There is no concentration camp in the beautiful countryside, no torture chamber int eh palace of delight. Those creatures that still exist in an ex-human state, no longer reflecting their maker in any meaningful sense, can no longer excite in themselves or others the natural sympathy some feel even for the hardened criminal.

I am well aware that I have now wandered into territory that no one can claim to have mapped. Jesus, Christians believe, has been to hell and back but to say that is to stand gaping into the darkness, not to write a travel brochure for future visitors. The lat thing I wants is for anyone to suppose that I (or anyone else) know very much about all this. Nor do I want anyone to suppose I enjoy speculating in this manner. But I find myself driven, by the New Testament and the sober realities of this world, to this kind of a resolution to one of the darkest theological mysteries. I should be glad to be proved wrong  but not at the cost of the foundational claims that this world is the good creation of the one true God and that he will at the end bring about that judgment at which the whole of creation will rejoice.

N.T. Wright, on hell: A Preface

I finished Surprised by Hope. It took me reading a simpler N.T. Wright book, several starts and stops, and 2 1/2 years, but I got through, and it was worth it.

I want to offer a long excerpt that he wrote about hell, but in doing so I'll be cutting out the most important part of the book to share what was to me the most interesting. I read an interview where he said he almost wrote the book without this hell section, but so many people wanted to read his thoughts on the matter that he decided to include them. Before I get to the excerpt, let me share what the rest of the book's about.

Wright starts by showing all the ways that the myriad Christian churches are  confused about what happens after death, and that much of this confusion can be cleared up with some good understandings of history and early Christian thought. He explains the same point he made more thoroughly in Simply Christian: that the Bible's first readers understood heaven not as a place apart from earth, but as the place God's realm intersects with us. He devotes a whole chapter to the Jewish idea of bodily resurrection; explaining that the earliest Christians' hope was never to be in a heaven that was removed from this world, but to be raised with Christ after death, in an earth renewed. He delves into how early believers and non-believers both would have understood the first Easter, and applies sound thinking to the problems that some skeptics have with believing in His resurrection.

Here is a decent summation of what he has to say on life immediately after death:
"My proposition is that the traditional picture of people going to either heaven or hell as a one-stage postmortem journey...represents a serious distortion and diminution of the Christian hope. Bodily resurrection is not just one odd bit of that hope. It is the element that gives shape and meaning to the rest of the story we tell about God's ultimate purposes. If we squeeze it to the margins, as many have done by implication, or indeed if we leave it out altogether as some have done quite explicitly, we don't just lose an extra feature, like buying a car that happens not to have electrically operated mirrors. We lose the reason for working. Instead of talking vaguely about heaven and then trying to fit the language of resurrection into that we should talk with biblical precision about the resurrection and reorganize our language about heaven around that. What is more...when we do this we discover an excellent foundation, not, as some suppose, for an escapist or quietist piety (that belongs more with the traditional and misleading language about heaven), but for lively and creative Christian work within the present world. (p. 148)

So all of that is the point of the book.

But there's this really interesting part on hell, and that's why I'm writing this post. Why, I wonder, does hell so intrigue me?

I think because I long from deep inside me for judgment against the forces of evil that now reign in this world. And the evils of the world must surely not get off scotch free. Also, I think the way hell is "used," in the evangelical circles I tread must be wrong. Used, I mean like bait to get someone to say a sinner's prayer. Or used with certainty, like the speaker knows who's going and who's not.

This passage by N.T. Wright on hell is the best I've read on the subject. I think it gets to the heart of what the language in the Bible about judgment is all about. It  has a ring that I find congruent with the scripture. I'll finish typing out the rather long excerpt and I'll post it soon. I recommend printing it out, reading it with others, wrestling with it until it sinks in deep.

3 things, totally unrelated

This is a picture of my Eli, who just turned this many:

This is a very good piece of writing about Halloween. It's by Jason Gray, a singer whom I've never heard sing, but who is a very good blogger.

This is another very good piece of writing on Christians' relationship to homosexuals. It's by Ron Sider, with whom I almost always agree about politics. He is the founder of Evangelicals for Social Action, which puts out the weekly "E-pistle," whose name I find very corny, but whose content I like.

Before 6 this morning

This morning, at 5:50, I pulled my mini-van into a gas station. It was still dark out; cars and people were sparse.

My credit card wouldn't work so I headed inside to empty my wallet of cash for as much gas as it would buy. On the way in, the owner of a new, blue, Buick Rendezvous asked me if I had any spark plugs. I told him I didn't and asked what was wrong. He told me he needed a jump. I could hear from his speech that he was from the streets, and because this sort of talk just comes out sometimes I told him, "I gotchu when I come back out,"

"Alright, coo" he replied.

Once I started pumping, he double-checked anxiously, "Yo, chico, you outta here in a hurry or what?"

"Naw, man, I told you I gotchu. I'm just gonna pump here, then I'll pull over."

"Alright, then," he replied, and he went to pop the hood.

It took him a few minutes to connect the cables because he wouldn't put down  his thin, brown cigarillo. But we finally got it going, and I put the cables back in my nifty little white-boy, mini-van jumper cable bag.

As I moved towards my car, he raised himself up on his and thanked me the best he knew how. "Hey man," he shouted, "anything you need, I can get it for you."

My terse thanks made him think I didn't understand what he meant, which was drugs. So he called me over to his rolled down window, and he said to me, "Listen man, I can get you anything. Anything! Money, drugs, bitches. I can getchu bitches, man!" I guess he was right; I hadn't understood.

"Whatever you want, man. I mean, how's a man gonna turn down bitches?"

He misinterpreted my smirk as interested. "You want some bitches, don't you. I'm gonna getchu a  bitch."

"Naw, man, actually I don't," I told him, "I'm happily married."

"Really, man?" he asked, "that's coo den." He paused a moment and thought, "You know what, man? Tha's coo. You wanna know how I really feel from da bottom of my heart? I wish I was happily married, too. Man, I respect you for this, fo real. This means you just did this for...for...for..."

He searched for words, it seemed he didn't have a category for this sort of behavior. I finished his sentence. "just tryin' to help out a neighbor."

"Yeah man, thank you," he said. And we drove away to our worlds.