matthew henry john bartlett

1. Perhaps the Parable of the Prodigal Son (which Doug Wilson, and I suppose Kenneth Bailey too, would call the Parable of the Running Father) tell us something about the reason for the Fall. God lets humanity run away from Him for a while so that we can know His love a lot more deeply when we return.
2. Reading Phillipians in church yesterday I came upon this:
   

   Do everything without complaining or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe…

   which is a beautiful image and is perhaps intended to bring to mind God’s promise to Abraham, that his offspring will be as numerous as the stars in the heavens. It is possible that this is a false connection though, as the where the NIV has ‘stars in the universe’, the ESV has ‘lights in the world’.

Off to Mt Ruapehu tonight o yeah.

Though it took me almost half the day and a change of rental skis to get in the zone, Turoa with Richard, Sam & Jess was choice. The mountain, morning frost and sunset were very beautiful. Bluebird day. Nice sandwiches from Mrs Steenhof. Amping epic AFI Sing the Sorrow for the way up. A highlight: singing snatches of half-remembered songs in a singularly facetious fashion with Richie on the T-bars.

On the halves debate: One of the principle arguements against the Mehrtens/Marshall combination is the fact that they have never won us a World Cup. Fact: Mehrts and Marshall have never played together in World Cup finals. 87 – they weren’t around. 91 – ditto. 95 – Graeme Bachop was halfback. 99 – Byron Keheller played in the infamous semi-final loss to France. 2003 – Marshall didn’t finish the game after being taken out by George Smith, and Mehrts wasn’t even there.

Discussion on CS Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters [Real Audio]

After about three years of being 202.0.34.69, with a shiny new cable modem I’m now 203.96.154.125. I was 202.0.34.69 through four different phone number & physical addresses, and two different web and email addresses, and I guess I’d kind of assumed I’d be 202.0.34.69 forever. All flesh is grass, however, and all things must pass.

NTW on The Passion (full interview) [via Aaron]

Kiekergaard: Eulogy on Abraham [via Dan M]

Said Stuart Murdoch of B&S:

I’m thinking about Lewis; about The Screwtape Letters, which I’ve just finished reading again. I’m thinking about the world, but I’m trying to think about God and timelessness. Don’t tell me to shut up! Come on, acknowledge there’s something else going on, embrace a little mystery, be pricked by guilt and plead forgiveness and move on. Wonder what’s going to happen to you when you die. Don’t fear death. Know that all the really good things that people come up with as regards ideas, dreams, stories, pictures, music come straight from heaven. It’s not boring!

That thing I wrote about Lord’s Supper a while ago published again, this time in Faith & Focus, in the bulletin gleanings section.

Translucent concrete [via /.]

Norman Maclean, who wrote A River Runs Through It said:

At sunrise everything is luminous, but not clear. It is often the same with those we live with and love and should know: they elude us. Yet you can love completely without complete understanding.

[via bdd]

I’ve edited my sprawling 13 and a half minute epic into a tight 7:40. I think it’s better for the cut: Dark epic boredom.mp3 [7MB]

John lent me Grant Lee Buffalo’s Mighty Joe Moon. It’s majestic. I really like Fuzzy and Copperopolis, but I think John’s right to say this is their magnum opus. Sounds like music that might have play at night in old National Geographic magazine stories about the hot wide open good rough places in America.

Lyrics: Rock of Ages, Honey Don’t Think

3D online church [Shockwave req'd]

Bruce Waltke, in a lecture about Biblical Theology says that in some church services the climactic moment – the thing that everything leads up to – is the decision, existential leap, conversion or recommitment to Jesus. In other churches the climactic high point of the service is Communion, a gift, sacrifice, grace. That made me wonder if our services have a climactic moment. If they do, I think it is probably the sermon. Which I regularly have to fight to stay awake in (by which I mean no disrespect to the Pastor, you know I have to fight to stay awake at parties too). If our worship service liturgy is important, if it moulds shapes directs our lives, how do you think our Reformed way of doing things shapes us?

Thinking a bit further – we’ve got three strands of worship style here, maybe I could call them Contemporary, Sacramental and Reformed. I’ve experienced all three, though the first two only a dozen or so times each, compared to about 2060 times for the last. Looked at from the outside, as a visitor from space with an interest in anthropology might see it, in contemporary services the most important person is the individual who walks to the front and has all sorts of amazing fireworks going off in her heart. In reformed services, the most important person would at first seem to be the man at front centre on the raised podium. The alien listening for a bit would after a while decide that actually, the most important person was actually God/Jesus, whom everyone present should be holding in their minds. In sacramental services the most important person seems to be some bread and wine, which the congregation is eating and drinking, quite bizzarely.

Another thought sparked by the Waltke lecture: historical criticism seeks to establish a new authoratitive canon defining *what really happened* in competition with the Bible books. And the new canon is of course *at least* as open to deconstruction as the old. Question is, how do we (or an outsider) decide between them? Where do we Christians get the authority to say the old canon is true?

“No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize, that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead”

John Stuart Mill

GK Chesterton apparently spent much of his energy in his last few years promoting an alternative to capitalism & socialism called Distributivism. I learned that EF Schumacher is in the same broad movement, which is (for me) an exciting connexion. I aim to find out more about Distributivism.

Communion service @ St Peter’s tonight was rather worthwhile, as it often is. At the end of his talk David gave us a task:

Much of the imagery used in these texts [Isaiah 8:11-15, 28:1-17, 1 Peter 2:1-12, Ephesians 2:19-22, Mark 12:1-12] to describe the church (rock/building stone, temple/house, priesthood/sacrifices, nation/race), are alien to our own way of life. We are called to proclaim the story of God’s mighty redemptive acts. Can you think of any contemporary image(s) or stories indigenous to our own culture(s) that capture the same truths?

Richard D Bartlett is moving into Flat 4b this week, which will be pretty cool, I reckon.

I have recently finished Greg Egan’s sci-fi novel Diaspora, which was recommended to me by Bryan T. I enjoyed it, though felt unsatisfied by the ending. Like Arthur C Clarke’s Rama series, it ends by revealing ‘the meaning of life’, which turns out to be trite and uninspiring. Reading it I realised that I read sci-fi looking for something completely different than what I look for in other novels. In regular fiction I want plot, interesting characters, perhaps a glimpse of a better way for me to live. In sci-fi, I want to marvel, to feel the ‘sense of wonder’, vast worlds of imaginative creation & history independent of our own.

Gmail via pop3 [via RDB]
Photo: On a tree in the Botanical Gardens
Jeremy Begbie interview

MEMORY & MEANING DIE IN MY HEAD,
BUT LIVE IN THE THINGS & PEOPLE
THAT SURROUND ME

Removing road markings [via Psybertron]
Trouble with worldview tests
Fast food for a week [via Deb]

In a videotaped lecture which the Port & Theology group watched last night, Richard Hays drew attention to the way Matthew frames the opening genealogy of his Gospel: Abraham -> Babylonian Exile -> Jesus, called Christ. I’d never noticed that before. It’s important because it sets the scene for what Jesus is going to do – bring the faithful remnant back from exile, fulfill the promise to Abraham (“and in your offspring all the nations of the earth shall be blessed”). To me this vindicates a lot of what NT Wright (and Aaron) have said on the topic. This exile and return is stuff is really key to understanding Jesus’ work, it’s not an artificial framework imposed on the text, it’s right there.

Is corporate prayer a chance to give up control of my internal monologue for a while? Also true engagement listening in conversation, or singing with a favourite song.

Stewart Copeland

I am excited that the flatmates have agreed to let me move my computer and desk to the lounge, where are the sun and the warm and the window on the harbour. It’ll be nice to have something to play music on in that room too.

Aucklanders, Meeting Karpovsky is currently showing near you.

Thank God for healthy baby Lucy born yesterday and mum Angela, and I guess it’s quite nice that David is alright too.

Reading old stories, Bible stories frees your imagination from its captivity to the narrow narratives of modern public life.

Says Philippe Bnton in Equality by Default: An Essay on Modernity as Confinement, of which a chapter is included in the most recent edition of The New Pantagruel:

All over the world, in New York, Paris, Istanbul, or Beijing, McDonald’s restaurants welcome you in the same way (automatic smile, guaranteed hygiene, industrial food), whether you are of the left or of the right, Turk or Kurd, Chinese apparatchik or dissident, a child or his grandfather, a policeman or a criminal, a racist or an antiracist. McDonald’s is the missionary of a new humanity, the builder of a new world, in collaboration with all the other businesses set to conquer the world market and sharing this great cause with a view to the greatest profit. This new world is undifferentiated, destined to unify itself on the basis of uniform consumption—an egalitarian world, except of course for the only distinction that matters (money), a world called to achieve unity by the grace of the market. The political problem par excellence, the problem that arises from differences among human beings, is finally about to be resolved: consumers of all lands, unite over a Big Mac!

Such spirituality finds its ground in the abiding reality of goodness, a goodness sourced in a Creator who is present, and who sacramentally draws those who drink of his goodness into a manner of living that more faithfully and wonder-fully reflects our creaturely estate. Because goodness presides and prevails, we gain the courage to pursue another way, defying the common sense of the day with acts that testify to another wisdom, a different vision, a deeper justice: acts as simple as planting a garden, writing a poem, or walking to a church; acts as grand as running for office, starting a grocery store, or having another child. In living our faith in such ways, we place always before us the reminder that the miracle that deserves our deepest respect and allegiance is not what we as a civilization have done with the gift of life, but rather the enormous, mysterious fact of life itself.

[from Realism Against Reality]

Today I have bitten the proverbial bullet with butterfly wings and am working in my sleeping bag.

I got to hold Lucy for ages yesterday which was nice. I was having difficulty working out what the name is for her relationship to me until I found this chart from a helpful website:

therefore:

Wendell Berry: Christianity and the Survival of Creation

I recommend Elbow’s album Asleep in the back. Simon has lent me his copy for a couple of weeks. The lead singer has a distinctive, slightly nasal but pleasing voice. They’re britpop I guess, in the same vein as Ride and the Charlatans. It’s a sonically adventurous album, with unusual rhythms and occasional little wisps of jazz.

Brian McLaren‘s new book A Generous Orthodoxy goes straight to my wishlist.

Trouble with worldview tests, take two
Wendell Berry on the Gulf War
Wendell Berry: The Agrarian Standard

Now this month this website is one year old, as is my paper-journal-keeping habit. It is tres interesting to me to read the entries of a year ago in both and try and remember what I was up to then. Seems I may have been treading water.

Yesterday afternoon I bumped into a guy who asked me for a dollar and then we recognised each other. Almost exactly a year ago Paul’d hitched a ride to Hamilton with me. He was disappointed to hear that I’d got rid of my car.

Psalm 104 chuffs me out, so I did a study on it for our Monday night Bible study group tonight. I want to develop into something to use with the WRC youth group. You can read my notes here if you like: Psalm 104 notes [35k PDF]

This afternoon before lunch with Dad I returned Terenesia – the second Greg Egan book I’ve read – to the library. Like Diaspora, it is full of amazing ideas but tails off towards the end. It feels like the books need some overarching ‘point’ to tie them into a satisfying whole.

The snowflake process for writing a novel [via Psybertron]
Lyrics: Ben Folds: Songs of Love

New Credenda/Agenda: God the Dangerous

Not walking & separation
Beck doco on BBC [audio]

Bedshaped – Keane

Aaron says dressage is more absurd than synchronised swimming and I strongly disagree.

A short story about buying lottery tickets

Have to stop watching TV news. Every event I or anyone I know has been involved in that was televised got completely garbled and completely misrepresented by the time it got to the news. And it’s that simplified filtered and altered version which becomes the raw material (the ‘facts’) of subsequent public discussion.

I have an idea that a network of trusted bloggers might be a solution. I have been fairly unimpressed with Aotearoa Independent Media Centre so far, which seems at least as narrow as the mainstream.

Who can I trust to interpret happenings around here?

Said Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

If we could read
the secret history of our enemies,
we would find in each person’s life
sorrow and suffering enough
to disarm all hostility.

[via DD]

In a newspaper clipping from a friend in the States, Father Anthony Ugolink says:

I am an Eastern Orthodox priest. My church marries only people of different genders.

A few passages in Scripture provide our justification. To find those quotes, you have to sift through thousands of passages which preach a bold advocacy for the poor and the condemnation of the rich who don’t help them out. They’re not often in letters to the editor. Perhaps they look too much like ‘class warfare.’

But Christians can’t be selective in their choice of revelation. God no doubt repeats the messages to which the stubborn are most resistant. It’s easy to amend documents forbidding sins we see in others. It’s harder to spend real money (yes, even tax money) to alleviate human suffering.

So I don’t marry gays. But oddly enough, whether Massachusetts marries gays or not doesn’t cause a stir in my congregation. You see, I have parishioners
without health insurance.

I have retirees whose health benefits have been slashed by former employers whose headquarters have fled abroad. I have working mothers who can’t get their teeth fixed and who can’t find day care. We are praying for one uninsured friend who has a tumor which prevents him from speaking. He has to wheeze through a tracheal tube and beg for chemo-therapy treatments, the cost of which will ruin him and his small business. (The president could have made his ‘small business’ speech from his front porch.)

So what stirs the church to action? Same sex marriage (and lots of campaign money).

What I see growing here in Lancaster County is not Christianity, it’s a cult of civil religion that defiles the church by making it a base for a political party. The cult infects and it corrupts. It feels good to be congratulated for your ‘values,’ especially when you have to do so little to prove them.

I pray the church here will not sell its soul. The Democrats have no monopoly on sin. No party is perfect—especially any party which promises you quick and easy virtue in return for your vote.

Why shouldn’t gays be allowed to marry?

I have a Gmail invite to give away.

Integrity and Integration: Loving God with Heart, Mind, Soul and Strength

Doug Wilson on globilisation

Today I discovered a second word that can be its own antonym. (The first is ‘cleave’ – ‘cleave from parents, cleave to wife’.) My one is ‘certain’. As in: ‘there is a certain sense of solidarity between us’. Which could mean either ‘there is undoubtadly, definetly a sense of solidarity between us’ or ‘there is a particular, limited sense of solidarity between us’. It’s a technical call, certainly.