[Sorry I've been AWOL this week - I've been running a KAIZEN which has been eating my days and nights...]

“The Christian message of justification does not provide justification for doing nothing.”

–Hans Kung, On Being a Christian, 588

I want to break from the pattern typically followed in these shorts posts by asking you, on the off chance that someone might actually be reading this weekend, to help me understand this quote.

I came across it in a book I am reading called Leaving Church by Barbara Brown Taylor. I confess that on the surface it seems to make sense, but when I think about it a bit more, I become confused and weary. So in an act of blatant disregard for your opinion of my intellect, here goes:

“If you are willing serenely to bear the trial of being displeasing to yourself, then you will be for Jesus a place of shelter.”

–Therese of Lisieux

Would you, kind reader, please help me understand this?

“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”

~Albert Einstein

I recently took my family to the Creation Museum in Northern Kentucky (children under 5 are free and we had two free adult tickets, so it seemed like an ideal time to go).  The Creation Museum is the vision of Ken Ham of Answers In Genesis and it reflects his (and those who have partnered with him) particular views and opinions about the science of creation.  This view is described as Young Earth Creationism but Ken’s particular subset of beliefs is even more narrow than that of many Young Earthers.

I’ve been involved in a variety of discussions on the museum that, like divisive political issues, quickly turn into “us vs. them” rhetoric.  Like all issues that are not essential to the Christian faith, the writers here fall among the variety of viewpoints within creationism and we have had discussions on the matter in the past.  I personally believe that God created the earth a few thousand years ago.  I’m not particular on the date, or the exact number of years.  In fact, if it were important, then I would think that information would have been included in the holy Scriptures somewhere.

My summarization of what I have seen from negative reviews of the museum over the past few years is that it is antagonistic to non-believers and divisive for believers.  This seems to be reflective of Ken Ham in general and having now been through the museum, I am inclined to agree.  The only view presented as “biblical” is that of Ham’s specific young earth creationism.  But I don’t really care if you disagree with his view, or mine, about Creationism if you believe that God created all things and that scripture is the divinely inspired, authoritative word of God.  For that matter, I don’t care if I disagree with Ham.  I come across so much stuff in ministry that is either stupid or wrong or that I just disagree with, that if I spent too much time thinking about it, I wouldn’t get anything else done.  I also don’t think that any divisiveness perpetuated is the big problem.*

My major problem with the Creation Museum (besides the stupidly high cost for the smallness of it and other minor complaints, which really belong to the category of product review, so I will not include them here) is that it is trying to bring people to faith in Christ by correcting their world view.  This in and of itself is not a bad thing.  People come to faith in different ways.  Some because they want the hurt to go away.  Some because they have seen the very real impact of the Kingdom of God in their lives.  Some because they have been exposed to the knowledge that this world is not as God intended it and that sin is the cause of their current condition and the only cure is redemption through Jesus the Christ.  Even in the midst of a postmodern culture, the last example (which is the most basic expression of a biblical world view) still occurs.  But the creation museum attempts to do this in a void of relationship, community, and commitment.

Even the account of Genesis itself was given to the people of Israel, living in community with each other and with God.  The history and teachings found there were given through Moses to the Israelites coming out of Egypt, where they had spent hundreds of years learning and adopting the Egyptian world view and the worship of the gods that was a part of that world view.  It was a teaching given to the people of God to reorient their lives.  This occurred after God acted on their behalf to save them from the hands of the Egyptians, after they had chosen to walk through the water and committed as a community to be His people and that He would be their God.

We use most of Scripture in the same way.  The church gathers weekly in small groups and corporately in order to reorient our lives to be like Christ.  This is discipleship.  We do not expect an unbeliever to live like Jesus so that they can be saved by Jesus, and rightly so.  We are able to live like Jesus because we are saved by Jesus.  We have chosen to follow him through the water in a lifetime commitment that we would be His people and that He would be our God.  And we spend that life learning what it looks like for us to live as God intended, that His creation would be redeemed.

That all being said, I liked this museum as much as I like most museums.

*Don’t get me wrong, divisiveness in the church is and can be of major concern.  I just think that if somebody is going to be divisive about this particular issue, that you end up seeing it in any issue of biblical interpretation.  It’s the classic problem of, “You disagree with me about what this passage means, therefore you don’t believe in the Bible.”  This, of course is a logical fallacy, one to which we are all prone to commit as we all think that we are right about whatever it is we have an opinion about; otherwise, we wouldn’t have an opinion about it.

I imagine this could be a fun topic to run with for a long time and that I could write a nice piece on it that would justify a certain church’s actions in regard to the Qu’ran. I’m not going to mention the church nor link to their website or their blog. Instead, here’s a link to the story at foxnews.com where we learn that even General Patraeus is warning of the potential danger of burning the Qu’ran.

“Images of the burning of a Koran would undoubtedly be used by extremists in Afghanistan — and around the world — to inflame public opinion and incite violence ,” Gen. David Petraeus said. “Were the actual burning to take place, the safety of our soldiers and civilians would be put in jeopardy and accomplishment of the mission would be made more difficult.”

In the interest of developing a good practical interpretation of Acts 19:17-20, one that all of us can benefit from, I ask you the following questions: Is this particular church right on or suicidal? Is this what God demands of us as citizens in this world? Is this at all helpful in the cause of evangelism?

The foxnews.com story also quoted from the church’s blog:

“We are using this act to warn about the teaching and ideology of Islam, which we do hate as it is hateful. We do not hate any people, however. We love, as God loves, all the people in the world and we want them to come to a knowledge of the truth.”

Is this how we help ‘the Word of the Lord’ increase and prevail? Is this how we demonstrate our love for ‘all people’?  What are your thoughts on this very sensitive, hot issue?

It’s not quite a One Line Thought. It’s not quite long enough for a Thought for the Day. It is just long enough to shake me this morning.

“We have made the bitterness of the cross, the revelation of God in the cross of Jesus Christ, tolerable to ourselves by learning to understand it as a necessity for the process of salvation.”

–Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (as quoted by Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel, 108)

Maybe it is true that I have taken the cross for granted. For all the preaching I have done about the cross in the past, maybe now, while I’m not preaching, is when I am learning just how much I believe what I used to preach about it.

All I am saying is that this wilderness I am in right now is teaching me more about myself than I care to know, and causing me to lean on God more than I am particularly comfortable doing. I am not sure I am particularly comfortable having to take the cross so seriously not just as the means of my salvation, but as the burden I am asked to take up and carry every single day.

I am learning just how bitter that cross was.

This morning, I read an interesting article posted by Andrew Peterson on his personal blog, “Money, Part 1: Not the Root of All Evil“.  It was something that really hit home, and kept coming back to mind as I was at an all-day conference at my work:

Years ago I played several shows with a few members of the Kid Brothers of St. Frank. Remember them? It was the unofficial pseudo-Catholic order started by Rich Mullins in honor of St. Francis of Assisi, and included a few younger musicians like Eric Hauck, Michael Aukofer, Mitch McVicker, and Keith Bordeaux (who wasn’t a musician, but who was on the verge of moving to Arizona to serve however he could before Rich died). I was as big a Rich Mullins fan as you could imagine, so in the years after his death I was honored and a little frightened to find myself occasionally doing shows with those guys.

The day I got the advance for my first record deal we threw a party at our little house in Watertown, Tennessee (a 1000 square foot farmhouse we rented for $500 per month), and I splurged on the following: one cheap propane grill, some ground beef, and one Nintendo 64 game system. We used the grill to make burgers for our friends (several of whom were Kid Brothers) and the Nintendo to play the James Bond shooter Goldeneye until sunrise. All told, I spent $200. I remember one of the guys pulling me aside and gently questioning my materialism. I was flummoxed and a little defensive. Was I being materialistic by purchasing a $100 video game? Was I being materialistic to have bought a cheap grill to cook the food? (Food they were happily eating, I thought to myself.) These guys, back when they were official members of the unofficial order, had taken vows of poverty and chastity. I hadn’t. And besides, for the first several years we lived in Nashville (even after the record deal) we were living well below the poverty line. I stood there by the new grill thinking, “I haven’t taken a vow, but I’m living it, by golly.” It wasn’t a big deal, though. I shrugged it off and partied on. It was a good day, and the fun we got out of that James Bond video game was worth every penny. I love those guys and the mighty honor they paid me by letting me do shows with them. [emphasis mine]

This stung a little bit, with my own feelings, for a few reasons.  At the end of my freshman year in college, Rich Mullins was on campus and I had dinner with him and a couple of other guys, during which he mentioned that he was always looking for guys with desire and/or talent to travel with him on the road (this was during the pre-Kid Brothers, amorphous thought stages of his, I recollect).   That night, I almost decided to leave school and travel with Rich, but in the end I was too scared to leave, and thought that my talents in math and chemistry were probably greater than those in music.  Had things gone differently, I might have been a Kid Brother, and y’all wouldn’t know me and/or Zan.

Later, after Rich’s death, I became involved in the ministry he most loved and cared for during his life, teaching art and music to kids on the Rez.  Whenever I returned from a week of camp, every $7 lunch seemed like guilt-inducing extravagance.  At the same time, I was blessed with a job that allowed me to care for my family and support several missions, including The Legacy.

Peterson writes:

Around this time I read an excellent book by Richard Foster called The Freedom of Simplicity, and I had my answer. What I envied about the Bolivians wasn’t poverty. It was simplicity. They didn’t choose it. It’s a necessary result of living in poverty, the silver lining on a dark cloud. That’s why people come back from Africa with that infectious gladness–not, of course, because of the terrible smell or the sickness or the injustice–it’s the simplicity. It’s a life uncluttered by television and power bills and traffic jams–a life enriched by the intense joy of interacting with other souls at a profoundly deep level, which is what we were meant for. What we miss when we come back from mission trips and church camps and spiritual retreats is life at its simplest.

American culture is one extreme (a land of plenty at the cost of simplicity) and the Third World is the other (poverty with the gift of simplicity). Each has its blessings and its curses. This point of this isn’t to get to the bottom of which of these extremes is better, but to propose a better way. A Christ-centered life of intimate fellowship unharried by either sickness and starvation or the chaos of a capitalistic rat race might be a good picture of the order of the day in the New Jerusalem. We don’t want to thrust electronics and trinkets and McDonald’s fries on Elba’s family any more than they’d want to thrust their dirt floors and malnutrition on us. What I wish for Elba is clean streets and sturdy houses, good food and warm clothes: hope. What I wish for us is walks in the woods, good friends, a tight community with a loving church at its heart: peace.

The only way to usher in that Kingdom is to walk in the way of Jesus. To love well, to push back the fall, to let the Spirit lead. Now, the beauty of it is that each of us carries a peculiar gift to light the darkness. Rich Mullins, God bless him, was single. That meant he could give most of his money away and hitchhike barefoot. It meant he could up and move to Arizona to live with Native Americans and he didn’t have to ask a soul. The Wind blew, and he floated on it. He wrote about his long, lonely, love-struck journey with Christ, and we, the Saints, were edified.

But what about the rest of us? As much as I’d like to be as cool as Rich, I can’t. I got married at nineteen, so as long as I’ve been writing songs I’ve had a family to care for. That means I want a roof over their heads, and shoes on their feet (sorry, Rich and Eric), and beauty and safety and health. In my walk with Christ I have found that at times my footprints align with my heroes’ and other times they don’t, no matter how hard I try. Most of the time, their shoes are just too big for me to fill.

This I understand, and I feel the twinges of guilt/longing/discomfort when I make comparisons of my life with those of others – when, in reality, I need to have peace and seek simplicity and provide for my family in a land of plenty, while still seeking to improve the basic conditions of those in less fortunate circumstances, without taking from them the benefits of their own culture – which are different than mine.

He concludes:

The point: being poor is not the only way to radically follow Christ. Some people are called to it. I have long felt a tension between all that I learned from the Kid Brothers and Rich Mullins about identifying with the poor and the weak, versus my holy responsibility to tend to my family’s spiritual and physical needs. Had Rich ever married, I’m certain his wife would have appreciated a nice dress every now and then, or a bouquet of flowers, or a decent kitchen, and she probably would have lovingly insisted that he not give all his money away, especially after she bore his children and needed to buy diapers, and school supplies, and shoes for goodness sake. And the other thing is, Rich Mullins had hit songs that are still making money. He gave a lot of his money away, but he also had a constant stream of it flowing in. Lots of it. And I’m sure the ministries he supported with the surplus were grateful that he channeled it to them for Kingdom work.

Money isn’t the root of all evil. The Bible doesn’t say that. Here’s the verse: “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” (1 Timothy 6:10) We’re called to keep watch so that we don’t fall in love with money. To be sure, wealth is a heavy burden and isn’t for everyone, just as poverty is a burden and isn’t for everyone. The people of the church are varied in strengths and weaknesses. Money itself isn’t evil. In fact, money can be a great tool for Kingdom work. It’s easy to tout ideals about how wrong it is to be wealthy until you’re on the receiving end of someone’s generosity.

Thanks, Andrew! (Now – get back to writing the sequel to North! Or Be Eaten, my daughters and I are eagerly awaiting…)