Christmas Peace and New Creation Year

I have been listening to some Christmas music and thinking about what meaning they have for us. One song in particular has caught my attention. Before I tell you the song I find it interesting that we can sing about peace one time a year and then pursue violence as a means to an end the rest of the year. Perhaps we should be praying for a less hypocritical spirit instead of us winning a unjust war, just saying. This going to be a bit of a soapbox, but please stay with me. The song in question is "O Holy Night" in particular the last stanza which says:

Truly He taught us to love one another,
His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains he shall break, for the slave is our brother.
And in his name all oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,
With all our hearts we praise His holy name.
Christ is the Lord! Then ever, ever praise we,
His power and glory ever more proclaim!
His power and glory ever more proclaim!

We often celebrate, at least in the Christian realm, that the reason Jesus was born was so the he could die [for our sins]. What a terrible thing to be born for, he was born to die! Unfortunately we focus so much on Jesus death that we forget that he lived, in fact it appears that his life was more important than his death to the Jewish authors because it encompasses much more of what we call the gospels than his death does. When we put the emphasis on his death instead of his life we miss his true purpose and we miss what these songs are saying too. The portion that I quoted above says, what I think is one of the most important messages of Christianity, one that I believe has be lost. Mainly that bot Jesus and God's message is about love and peace instead of death and destruction as many have supposed. The key of the gospel is that Jesus is Lord and he showed what it means to follow him through his life and proved that he is lord not by his death but by his resurrection in the Creator's power.

As this year comes to an end and the new year is about to begin, may we learn to live with the Prince of Peace as our Lord and bring new creation in the New Year!

Heaven, the Coward's Way Out

Heaven has widely been thought of as the place where good people go when they die. I say good people because many religions talk about heaven as the place where good people go, although it has been associated the most with Christianity. I have many thoughts about heaven, but for the sake of time (and people's sanity) I shall discuss my thoughts based off of a recent status update that I had. The status update was: "If we go to heaven when we die, evil wins because we have not delt [sp; dealt] with it, but have run from it. If we stand against it, evil will loose!"

In this regard, heaven has been greatly understood. We have this idea that if we are good and escape this life, that evil will be dealt with because "there is no evil in heaven" but this view is more pagan than Christian. If a person holds this view, it allows that person to not care about what is happening in the here and now, not only to the Earth, the plants and animals, but also to the people that fill the planet.

Does this view actually deal with the problem of evil? To save time the answer is "no". Let us look at it in this way, if you are in a war (I have in mind the movie "Braveheart" and I do not intend this example to be construed as my views on war, because I assure you, I am against war, but that is a topic for another blog), so if you are in a war, you do not "win" that war by hiding and being passive, but rather by standing up and fighting. If you are following my metaphor going to heaven is the hiding, but living in the now, bringing justice to the world, we are defeating evil.

A person once said to me, "Only God can bring justice to the world" and I say that that is not wrong, but is an incomplete idea. Our role from the beginning is to be stewards over creation, working along side the Creator to restore creation, but it is only through the Creators power that we can do that in the first place. If we run from that role, evil wins, however if we fulfill that role, evil is defeated and creation is brought back around to its intended purpose.

"All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing." -Edmund Burke May you help bring heaven to Earth in the purest form.

The End of Fear

A friend of mine actually spurred me to write this because of what he wrote. I totally agree with what my friend said, however I would still like to weigh in with my own thoughts. Living in a city were there is some sort of church or religious establishment nearly on every corner, I hear all sorts of talk about "end times" and that we are there now.

In reality people have thought that they were in the end times long before I or even my city was born. How are we so sure that the "end" is now? I believe that we have to find some way to keep people worried about the uncertainty of the future, and the reason is simple, control. Fear keeps people in their place, creates some sort of order, and allows us to find common ground with our fellow man. We are all uncertain of what the future holds, and that uncertainty binds us together. I do believe, if you have not guessed, that we are not living in the end times. My reasoning behind this is that the same passages of the Bible that people use to say that we are living in the end times were talking about specific events that happened long ago.

Today we have people fearing that we are in the "end times" because we elected an African American president, global warming is getting worse (which it is not as a friend pointed out to me), there are nuclear warheads being fired, there are wars and rumors of war, recently the icing on the cake for many that we are in the "end times" is that our president got the Nobel Peace Prize. No matter your view on our president or his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, we cannot allow our own personal conflicts read into the text what is not there.

The passages in the Bible that people use to justify their thinking of "end times" are not used the way they were intended. The gospel writers said that the "end is at hand" which means that they thought it would be right around the corner, probably within the couple of years that followed their writing, not thousands of years from that point. Interesting how their way of thinking, that is that the end was close to them, sounds very similar to what is being said today.

Instead of reading "end times" language as we know it (ie the end of the cosmos) we should read it as the end of a time, not all of time. When they Bible authors were writing about the end, they were thinking more specifically about some event that would be the end of their existence. This was the fall of the temple, the heart of their existence, not the voting in of an African American president.

May we begin to think of these issues with a logical perspective instead of an emotional perspective.

Go and Sin No Long

It's been a while since my last entry, so you may be wondering what has been on my mind. Well let me tell ya, not much, actually a ton of things have been running through my wee little brain. A few week ago I posted a status update on Twitter/Facebook (modern technology for anyone who just thought that I was speaking in another language). The post went as follows: "Sin has been viewed as something that we have done, rather we should think of it in terms of who we are not: truly human." I feel that I need to expound upon this view a little more due to some confusion on what I am saying.

It dawned on me that in modern Christianity we view sin as specific actions (ie hate, lust, murder, etc.) which those are a part of it, but I do not believe that they fully define the term. For me, sin is more of being someone that we were not intended to be, rebelling by choice. When the Creator formed humanity in his image, there was no sin/sinners, they were human in it's purest form. When we chose to not follow our intended purpose, that is where we sinned and thus became sinners.

Jump ahead a few thousand (or million if that is your view) to present day. We are all still sinning (yes even Christians) because we are not yet fully human and we will not be until the final judgment. This is not to say that even though we have to wait to become fully human that we should not care about what is happening today (this topic has been covered in previous blogs, so I will not pursue it further unless asked to). We can however move toward being fully human if we come to truly understand what it will mean to be fully human.

I look forward to hearing people's thoughts on this, especially as I have almost left this open ended.

May we live today as collective sinners working to rid collective sin.

Sin and Sinners

In my 22 years of life I have come across many people, some of whom are still friends today and some whom are no longer directly in my life. It is funny how we use a term to justify our actions and treatment of others. I have heard a few people in my life say "Don't do that, that's what 'sinners' do" or "you can't hang out with them, they're 'sinners' and will bog you down under their 'sinfulness'", but what does the term sinner mean? "Anyone that goes against God, either directly or indirectly" some say and the Studylight.org lexicon says that a sinner is someone who is "devoted to sin" (way to use the word in the definition, my English teacher would slap you if you were a slap-able person, so watch you back). We must first define what sin is before we can discover the meaning of sinner. A very basic definition is: any act/movement that hinders the Kingdom of God (yes, that does mean, according to this definition, that there are even Christians that are "sinners", but again that is a big topic to discuss in such a small amount of time).

That definition of sin was also used as an exclusive term, that the Jewish people used to exclude anyone who was not a Jew. This definition became the prevalent usage in much of the Old Testament and particularly by the time of Jesus, it had been used by the different sects within Judaism in variant degrees but the main principle was still there: exclusion. When Jews heard that Jesus was chilling with "sinners" they did not think that he was hanging with people that got drunk for instance, although they probably did or at least some of them did; rather they heard that Jesus was hanging with people that were not Jewish even though some possibly held some similar beliefs with those of their fellow Jewish brethren.

Jesus even said that prostitutes would enter the Kingdom of God before the Pharisees would. Jesus dramatically changed their beliefs about being "chosen", or about being "selective". Jesus was leveling the playing field, by hanging out with people that were not Jewish by birth or belief. This attitude toward "outsiders" had apparently continued through the time of Paul, and so he had to re-level the field again, by saying that "all have sinned". Both Jesus and Paul are reframing the term from exclusivism to inclusivism.

It is scary that we have, or rather never left, that ideology. We have used the term to mean anyone who does not "go to church" or "read the bible" or the other synonyms. We have even used it like the other sects of the New Testament Jews saying that one denomination is more "sinful" than a particular denomination. What if we began to think in terms of "we are all sinners" instead of "they are sinners"?

As sinners may we live in that collective view instead of that exclusive view!

It's Ok To Think

I enjoy a good theological book, particularly any N. T. Wright books, and it always astonishes me that people begin to freak out when they see me reading something like that. I have had people come up to me and tell me to be careful because the theology in these books is not sound, which is a bunch of crap but that's for another time). Why are people so afraid of these views? The answer is simple, although if you ask these people they will deny it, but it is because they are afraid that what they have been taught may not have been right, and that it is easy to believe something that you have come to know as "true" but it is difficult to learn a new way of thinking. Another observation that have from these people is that many have not even read enough or any of the works of these authors, but have instead focused on hearsay. I say, grow up and think for yourself!

It is important to note that looking at other views on a subject is not dangerous (I bring this up, because I have been told by many people to be careful of reading Rob Bell or Brian McLaren for example). It is not dangerous to look at different views, no matter what people say; in doing so it simply allows us to be more informed on a subject so that we can formulate our own opinion and think for ourselves, heaven forbid.

May you be wise enough to seek different opinions on a particular subject and courageous enough to think and formulate your own views.

The Justice of God

A while back I was having a discussion with some friends of mine about justice. It was a very interesting dialogue in that we all have different views on what that term looks like in action. In our discussion on justice, I brought up the notion that humanitarianism is a form of justice. Unfortunately the term has a certain connotation about what it actually means. Many people think that justice is doing some action against someone/something that has wronged you in equal proportion to what was done to you. This cannot be true justice because we do not have a measurement to measure such actions (if anyone has found that please let me know).

Can we bring true justice to the world? I believe that we can, simply because we are created in the image of our just Creator, therefore I believe that deep down we have a notion of what justice is. If we (Christians that is) are in submission to the Lord of the entire creation, living in the Kingdom of God in the present (please do not think that I'm talking heaven in the sense that people use the term). What about people who do not follow this King, can they still do justice? The simple answer is yes, whether they know that they are doing it or not. Many companies that are not "Christian" are bringing justice to the world, for example Bono and his campaign to fight aids in Africa is doing justice, bringing heaven to earth as Jesus prayed.

This brings me to what my view of what justice is and how we can do true justice here and now in the present. In my opinion, justice is a way to bring the creation to right back to it's original purpose. Christianity is charged, in particular, to do and seek justice, together, regardless of the denomination. Every person that lives in the Kingdom of God must work to do this. What does this look like? It starts with the mind set that Jesus is truly risen, that the final tyrant, death, has been dealt with. We live in a revolutionary way, in a resurrection way, in which what we do today is important for the future. If we believe that nothing goes away, but is simply reenergized if you will, then we should work towards that today, through loving our neighbor as ourselves, and if we do that everything will fall into place.

May you live in pursuit of justice and live in the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.

The Coming Wrath

Over the past couple of weeks (neigh in actuality about 2 months ish, but weeks makes me appear less like a nerd :-) I have been thinking about judgment, partially in line with my recent blogs on resurrection and those forms of concepts. The gospel, which contrary to popular belief, is not about heaven/hell/afterlife. Rather it is the proclamation that the King has won, Jesus the Messiah is ruler over all. Christians are to bring to the present what will be in the future, meaning that we are to proclaim the gospel of the true King by acting according to his guidelines (this is not the main point I am trying to make so I will touch on it briefly).

We should know how to act today in light of the actual gospel, yet many do not simply because we misunderstand its meaning or we choose to act in our best interests. If we view the gospel in light of what the true meaning should be, then we have looked through the key hole and have seen the world as it should be. Our responsibility then, which has never changed even though it seems to have been forgotten, is to be stewards of creation, all of it. If we begin to look through the key hole and see that the future is not about where you go when you die, but of the judgment that is to come to all based on deeds making what was created to be good, good again, then maybe we would begin to act in a truly human way.

That little morsel is a lot to chew (pause and reflect). What? Everyone is judged, even the Christians? Yes! The term judgment has carried negative connotations for many years. It has become a term to mean "going to hell" or with those kind of overtones, only for the wicked. Paul never uses the term to say that those that are wicked are going to hell and those that are just are going to heaven. Paul says that judgment will come to all, both Jew (those charged with doing YHWH's work) and the Gentile (everyone else).

The other day when I was talking with some friends, we began discussing how many Christians waive their Jesus card in front of the world and say that they do not have to take care of the creation (stewardship). However if they were to think about that future judgment and how their deeds today have an impact on that judgment, then maybe the world would be a different place, with people working together to overcome what has gone wrong with this world (i.e. cancer, poverty, etc.) There is a belief that when we die, if we have that Jesus card, then we can skip the line and get into "heaven" without being judged, yet this is not found anywhere in the Bible or even anywhere in Paul.

Jesus the Sociologist

Sociologists are people who look at society and see how it works, how the people within that society interact with each other. After analyzing, we understand how to make the world the way it was intended, with humans being stewards over creation, and people looking out for other people. God never intended there to be class distinction, sexism, racism, or any other ism. God is not, contrary to popular Western thought, a Capitalist god or even an American god (meaning that he favors America or American way of life over all others). By the time that Jesus entered the scene, there was all of that and more going on, he saw all this and acted to bring the world to rights, giving us a model to follow in our our own lives.

Sociologists do not generally focus on the future but live in the present to make the future a better place. Jesus did this, living with those around him, acting to bring a better future to those around him (ie. teaching them to do what is against the "popular" way, meaning that he taught them to serve instead of be egocentric, to give instead take, to make all equal with not rich/poor, etc.); however us Christians, who are to act as Jesus did, usually do the opposite by saying for instance that women should not be in leadership positions in the church, or that we should tithe to the church to help make the church a better place when we should tithe to help the poor (widows and orphans). Time for the controversial statement if you were able to make it his far without being worried about my salvation, this next part may be socking:

Jesus was a liberal, democratic, socialist. All that means is that he went against what was popular and focused on equality, living with people now, instead of "saving souls". That may be harsh and some may even think I'm a heretic, but that is what I am thinking about right now. Feel free to join the Truth Seekers group to discuss different topics like this and voice your own thoughts. Although comments on this discussion are always welcome.

The True Meaning of Easter

Easter is an interesting time, usually a time when people, whether Christian or not, go to church. It is for that reason, that many church leaders talk about salvation.

The other day was Easter and as most Easters go, or at least the ones that I have been to, there was talk of salvation in the sense of going to heaven or judgment in the sense of going to hell, yet there is usually no talk of resurrection. There is usually a drama about a Christian who is knocking at people's doors and trying to get them to accept Jesus into their heart and go to heaven forever. Is that really what is important? Populating heaven so that we will have enough people to play in the heavenly football game, with subs and fans.

I find it interesting that when we think about resurrection we think about heaven and eternal life, yet that is not how the first century Jews and for that matter the first century Christians would have thought. Resurrection would have been heard not in terms of life after death but rather "life after life after death", however that is a topic for another time, but I can recommend some good books on the topic of "life after life after death." The main point is that they were not focused on saving souls from eternal torment, yet this is the main concept heard during the wide array of Easter services each year.

Perhaps we should re frame what the Easter holiday really stands for. If life after death and saving souls from torment was not that important in the life of the first century, why is it so important for us today? Maybe it should not be our focus, but rather bringing God's justice to the world today, working with God to make the world the way it was intended to be, having us be the stewards of this creation, and fulfilling our destiny.

The Christian Fortune Cookie

Through out my life I have always had other Christians, friends, family, even people I do not know, the lot of them offering answers to life's questions with simple Bible passages. Harmless and considerate, yet misunderstood! It was not until recently that I have been pondering over these inquiries, and have come to understand that when people use what they think they know, they are doing the same thing as fortune cookies, in a sense.

If you have ever eaten a fortune cookie, you know that the best part of the cookie, besides the cookie itself dipped in ice cream is that there is a fortune within it, and on the back there is a word in English and its translation in Chinese. Many Christians that I know, and I am even guilty of this, use a single passage found in the Bible and force it to mean something that it does not mean to make us feel better, or fulfill our own need to find a meaning of that passage that was never intended to be heard. This whole concept is about context, which the majority of the Christian population do not do. Hermeneutics before exegesis, does not help in our understanding of God or our role in this life.

For the purpose of this blog Christianity is the cookie, 1 or 2 passages are the fortune, and Christian terminology is the Chinese word to be learned. It is important to understand, that we can make anything sound the way that we want it if we do not have the context behind it, and unfortunately many people, including Christians, do this and think it is ok. Instead of eating the cookie and not paying attention to the context of the fortune, lets eat the cookie while searching for the context in order to have that fortune apply to us today.

Resurrection For Today

This morning was an interesting morning as most Sunday mornings are, but today was different, it is a week until Easter. In the midst of a chaotic rush of customers and drinks, I heard a group of people whom I assume had either just come from church or were on their way to church start talking about "how great it will be when this world is done and we are in 'heaven'". This thought is usually the type of talk that happens around this time of year, Easter time that is. As Christians we have this misconceived notion that the resurrection of Jesus and for that matter this whole time is about being saved from our sins and going to heaven when we die. When I heard that, I thought of the many times that I have had conversations with other people about many of the same concepts. "This life sucks, it will be better in heaven, and so we should just hope for that day to come soon," in essence what they are saying is that we should not worry about global warming, poverty, corruption, injustice, etc. instead we should focus on saving souls so that when all go to heaven we can break the heavenly fire codes by having too many people up there. What kind of hope does that offer for today? If that is truly the ideology of so many Christians, then we have no hope, in fact we are not Christian, we are pagan! Strong words, but there is truth in there.

Let me suggest what Christian hope should be. If we are created in the image of God, then we should be his hands and feet to the rest of the world. In the words of an author that I deeply enjoy reading, we are signposts pointing to things beyond ourselves (this is a reference to N. T. Wright). Our role is to work with God, restoring the original intention of creation, to bring justice back into what was created good. A friend once told me that he does not feel as though his role in this life is to help out, humanitarian aid if you will. He is correct in a sense, because it is not his role alone, it is ours as a whole, to work together to make the world as it was meant to be, or at least move in that direction. Instead of thinking of Easter as the time when we think about being disembodied and not having to worry about what is going on now, lets think of it as a time when God worked in a drastic way, a way that started new creation, in which we are the stewards. What would the world be like if we focused on where we are here on earth instead of focusing on where we'll be in heaven, and like wise, if we focused on the person as a whole instead of their spirit?

This blog does not necessarily convey everything that I would like to say, so if you have any questions or comments please feel free to respond.

Where is the Justice?

The other day, I had the chance to partake in a conversation about Justice with some friends. It is for that reason that I would like to open up the conversation to others, and then I will post my thoughts on the topic.

1) What is your definition of Justice?

2) What is our role in doing Justice, if we can?

3) What is God's (or any other deity that you believe in) role in doing Justice?

We cannot come up with one single definition that we all will agree on, but as long as we begin to have an open dialogue with each other, the closer we will be at making the world a better place!

The Truth About Context

I found it appropriate that my first blog of 2009 should be on that deals with context. So many people made resolutions to change their life, whether that be weight loss, cut back on some pleasure, organize, etc. and another great way to change your life is to look at different aspects of the world around you in a new way. I have heard many people say that context is important, yet many of us do not know what that means or how that would look. For the purpose of this writing, I am going to focus on Biblical context in the form of Scripture Interpretation, however I suggest that it is important to understand the context for everything to truly understand what that object is.

Let me give an example: Many times I hear people quote a Bible verse as meaning one thing when it does not really mean that at all. Matt. 5:29 says "If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell." So what does that mean?

Part of what it means to have context is to look at the entire picture: the who, what, where, and why of that particular time. The Israelites were a people who used vivid imagery because they were very much an oral society with I believe very active imaginations as well. Someone is most likely to say that what I quoted is not in context and so they will put it in the context that is given in the Bible, Matt. 5:27-30 "You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.' But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell."

I do not know about you but if people just heard this without context there would be many people without hands and without eyes. However that is not the context that it was meant to be heard in, that was only what the people who printed the Bible wanted in that section. The Bible was meant to be read as a whole, not taking out pieces for our own gain. That being said, we must understand that nothing is outside of its historical context, yes not even the Bible. In order to truly understand what the Bible is saying, we have to understand that it was written in a specific time in history and that it was not the writters idea to write it to us today. It was written by people in history to people of that time frame. There where events that shaped what was written, there was other people writing who shaped what was written. Only then can we understand what the Bible truly means.