i was born and raised an orphan
in a land that once was free
in a land that poured its love out on the moon
and i grew up in the shadows
of your silos filled with grain
but you never helped to fill my empty spoon

and when i was ten you murdered law
with courtroom politics
and you learned to make a lie sound just like truth
but i know you better now
and i don’t fall for all your tricks
and you’ve lost the one advantage of my youth

you kill a black man at midnight
just for talking to your daughter
then you make his wife your mistress
and you leave her without water
and the sheet you wear upon your face
is the sheet your children sleep on
at every meal you say a prayer
you don’t believe but still you keep on

and your money says in God we trust
but it’s against the law to pray in school
you say we beat the russians to the moon
and i say you starved your children to do it

you are far across the ocean
but the war is not your own
and while you’re winning theirs
you’re gonna lose the one at home
do you really think the only way
to bring about the peace
is to sacrifice your children
and kill all your enemies

the politicians all make speeches
while the news men all take note
and they exagerate the issues
as they shove them down our throats
is it really up to them
whether this country sinks or floats
well i wonder who would lead us
if none of us would vote

well my phone is tapped and my lips are chapped
from whispering through the fence
you know every move i make
or is that just coincidence
well you try to make my way of life
a little less like jail
if i promise to make tapes and slides
and send them through the mail

and your money says in God we trust
but it’s against the law to pray in school
you say we beat the russians to the moon
and i say you starved your children to do it
you say all men are equal all men are brothers
then why are the rich more equal than others
don’t ask me for the answer i’ve only got one
that a man leaves his darkness when he follows the Son

I was unable to find a clear statistic on how many of those single people have kids, how many are divorced vs. how many have never been married. However, it does look like 33% of first children are born to unmarried women.

So what’s my point?

Driscoll mentioned that many churches try to be ‘family friendly,’ which I think ours does. He then pointed out that if you focus solely on families, you’re missing over half the population … ‘who are not families yet’. What strikes me is that these two don’t necessarily go together. Again, one third of women are unmarried when they have their first child. (In Britain, it’s 40%) Factor in that over 40% of unmarried people living together have children under 18 in the house, and it starts to become clear that we do need to reach families, but that we may have a misconception about what the typical American family looks like.

I did a quick mental check of our church. Last week, among the several families with children under age 12, there were more single-parent than two-parent homes. Actually, there were twice as many – 6 to 3. What does your church look like? What does it mean for how we do ministry?

Primarily, it means we need to adapt our understanding of what the typical American family may look like. In some congregations, it may mean we need to stop excoriating the immoral society we live in where women have children ‘out of wedlock’ with no condemnation, and focus instead on introducing people to Jesus and helping them move forward into spiritual formation. We also need to move beyond the stereotype of the welfare mom. All of the single parents in our church last Sunday were working mothers with full-time jobs. The Cleavers are great-grandparents now, if they ever existed, and at least a couple of their grandkids are single parents.

When we try to reach families, we shouldn’t assume that both a mom and a dad are present … maybe our events need to be less couple-oriented. The division between between the ‘family ministry’ and the ‘singles ministry’ will have to become a thing of the past.  In fact, this may even become yet another reason for simplifying our ministries programatically (that may not be a word, but it should be). Maybe we should try the approach of drawing people together by addressing needs that are universal, rather than trying to have a ministry to a dozen different demographics we’ve artificially created.

What do you think? Has this reality affected anybody else? Does it change your perspective at all?

Who do you love?
Girl I see through, through your love.
Who do you love?
Me or the thought of me?
Me or the thought of me?

- John Mayer, “I don’t trust myself (with loving you)”, Continuum

This lyric caught me when first listening through the album, because it directly addresses our tendency to idealize on some level the people we love, or more generally to see what we want or expect them to be instead of what they are. For that matter, it’s not even limited to the people we love. We do this with a wide variety of pretty much everybody. Our perception of a person is largely based on our own expectations, desires, and feelings regarding that person.

If we do this with people we physically see and interact with daily or weekly or monthly, how much more likely are we to do it with Jesus? Anthony Bradley at Resurgence condemns a mural that portrayed Jesus a feminine dude in a pink ‘dress,’ and then questions (far less strongly) the image of the black Jesus portrayed in an African-American megachurch.

Mark Driscoll frequently berates what he he sees as a humble hippie Jesus, or marginalized Galilean peasant Jesus, as not being tough enough or bad (ironically) enough to earn the respect of masculine men. Understand that I love Mark Driscoll’s preaching and what I know of what he is doing in Seattle. But that doesn’t mean I agree with him on everything, and we can take pretty much anything too far. In an effort to find a different Jesus, Mark turns to revelation, where he finds what frequently refers to as ‘ultimate fighter Jesus’:

“Some emergent types [want] to recast Jesus as a limp-wrist hippie in a dress with a lot of product in His hair, who drank decaf and made pithy Zen statements about life while shopping for the perfect pair of shoes. In Revelation, Jesus is a prize fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.” (Relevant Magazine, 2007)

So who’s right? The big question is not how Jesus really looked or dressed. We should acknowledge that the imagery in quotes like Driscoll’s above is really meant to communicate what kind of person the speaker thinks Jesus was and/or is. Old hymns talk about Jesus as lowly, meek, or mild. Some people do speak of him as a marginalized Galilean peasant. Then you can come back to Driscoll.

The problem with Ultimate Fighter Jesus is that the image is at least as heavily culturally influenced as meek and mild Jesus. How can we hear Mark or read the quote above and not wonder if this picture of Jesus doesn’t come from projecting the images of Braveheart, Gladiator, UFC, and the entire Highlander series onto the book of Revelation? Even in that book, which contains the most aggressive imagery describing Jesus, he is portrayed as coming to dispense justice, not to gratuitously create a bloodbath. In addition, Mark reasons that we should think of Jesus this way because this is how he’s coming back to earth in victory.

The truth is the Bible presents a multi-faceted Jesus. He was compassionate towards sinners and rejects, condemning of self-righteous religionists, but open to anyone from any clique or club who came to him honestly, humbly, and trustingly. He cried when his friend Lazarus died and was apparently quite angry when he found crooks selling crap in the temple. He called people names (vipers! whitewashed tombs!) and wouldn’t allow a woman to be stoned to death for adultery.

In addition, the problem with saying ‘we only worship the victorious fighter Jesus’ is that Jesus’ victory over death and sin and the devil was won during his time on earth as … well … a marginalized galilean peasant. The second coming follows through on that victory, it fulfills it, but it was won through death and resurrection, accomplished at the end of his life on earth as a complex, inspiring, loving, condemning, blessing, sad, joyful prophet/teacher/human/God.

What we cannot do is reduce Jesus to a caricature. We can’t simply put our faith in rebel Jesus or UFC Jesus or simple happy Jesus or liberation theology Jesus or American flag-waving Jesus or, God forbid, zombie Jesus.. Instead, we need to start learning about and trying to live like the Jesus of the Bible. That’s at least a good beginning.

We want people to:

Know God (primary corporate venue: Sunday morning service)

Love others (requires building relationships, hence: upcoming introduction of small groups)

Make a difference (means contributing to the kingdom: getting involved in a ministry)

It’s not meant to be an overlay of a new framework on an old way of doing things, but a new guiding principle that determines what we do and don’t do.

So that’s that for that.

There’s a lot going on these days. We can look forward to a couple more months of Hillary and Barack beating each other over the head by proxy (or sometimes directly), an indeterminately long period of economic recession and $4 a gallon gasoline, and the continued ascendancy of Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus/the good girl of pop with a million names over all the world.

Also, lots of good movies out these days: There Will Be Blood, for which Daniel Day-Lewis totally deserved his Oscar; Gone Baby Gone, the well-directed and well-acted movie that kept me in the dark until very very nearly the end (which rarely happens); Atonement, which moves like an incredibly interesting glacier that in the end runs over your grandmother’s house (at least that’s how jolting it is); and Into the Wild, a fascinating story about searching for the meaning of life. Plus of course the ones I want to see but haven’t yet, like No Country for Old Men.

In slightly bigger news, I am very much looking forward to becoming a dad. Becky is starting to show her pregnancy in her ridiculously cute belly, and there’s a small heart pounding like mad in there. I know, because I’ve heard it.

I find myself thinking a lot about theological and ministry issues, like: What is the nature of Biblical inspiration? What did Paul mean when he said scripture is “God-breathed”? Why do I feel like even the best churches I see around me frequently marginalize women?

Trying to take more of a role in helping move in a positive direction at the church. Pushing certain steps to strengthen the ministry. Also starting a small group in my home to help develop relationships.

Did I mention Becky is having a baby? Yeah, that’s cool.

Check it out here.

As a child, I was told “God is watching you all the time. He sees everything you do.” Unfortunately, this was communicated in a negative sense … ‘God is watching you, so shape up kid!’ So the idea of God watching me became a distinctly uncomfortable concept, because I knew I sinned fairly frequently and that God didn’t like that. My childlike response was just not to think about that.

But a few years ago, I noticed for the first time the story of Hagar. She’s the mother of Abraham’s other son … the mother of Ishmael. (You can read the story in the Bible here.)She becomes a type and symbol in the Bible of lack of faith and illegitimacy, along with her son Ishmael. She represents doing things the world’s way instead of God’s way. Also, she’s Egyptian, so she probably worships not Jehovah but Ra and Ishtar. What’s more, she has been rejected by her master’s wife, whose orders she was following in the first place in getting pregnant with Abraham’s son. So she does what all of us do when we experience hurt and rejection. She runs. And the results of her running are about as positive as the results when we run … she ends up not only hurting, but alone in the wilderness and in danger of starving to death or worse.

Suddenly, she is confronted by an angel of God. Amusingly enough,he asks her where she’s come from and where she’s going. Isn’t this the question we all need to be asked? After all, God already knows Hagar’s answer as he knows ours. But we so often don’t think, don’t consider … all we can see is the moment. And all Hagar can see is that that old barren crone Sarai has chased her out into the desert. She is not considering or thinking, but feeling and responding. “Where have you come from, and where are you going?”

Hagar knows the answer to the first part of the question, but not the second. So he tells her where she’s going. He shows her what she needs to do next, and promises God’s good plan for her. She listens, and as she’s preparing to go back, she says, “You are a God of seeing. Truly here I have seen him who looks after me.” To understand the depth of that, we have to remember all that we know about Hagar. This is a slave woman, owned by foreigners, used as a child-bearing object, who has been looked right through for years. Her masters probably don’t even notice she is there most of the time. She is not a person of worth; she is property. But when she is at the end of her rope, alone in the wilderness … God sees her. And he helps. He doesn’t let her die or get lost. And in his care for her, he lets her know that she does have value, she does have worth. He sees her.

I am reading through Genesis at the moment, and getting ready to preach about Abraham on Sunday. And I never cease to be amazed at what a goober he is. It is so odd and wondrous to look at the biblical accounts of people like Abram and and realize that all throughout history, God has been putting up with people’s crap.

We’re not just talking about crap from people in general here; I think we kind of assume that. We’re talking about crap from those we consider “giants of the faith”! This man Abram has been called and chosen to found God’s chosen people, through whom God will bless the world and demonstrate his love, and at the first recorded sign of adversity, he demonstrates that he’s a total weasel! (See Genesis 12:10-20 for the details.) I could get into all the details of the story, but you’ll have to just read it for yourself. Suffice it to say that Abram deceives a pagan king and sells his wife into a harem. And what does God do?

He scoops Abram up, drops Sarai back in his lap, and dropkicks them out of Egypt and back towards the promised land … complete with the additional wealth Abram had picked up in Egypt. And although the Bible is silent on this point, I think we can be quite certain that was not the last Abram heard about that from his wife. And he deserved everything he did and didn’t get for quite some time afterwards.

But why would God do this? Actions like this would certainly disqualify anyone from leadership in most evangelical churches. And this is the man God is going to use to found his chosen nation?!

God had a mission for Abram. He had a higher calling. The reason he scooped Abraham out of Egypt safely was not because Abraham deserved it, but because God had better things for Abraham to be doing. What a bizarre and comforting story.