“I suggest there are Reformed Missionals, Anabaptist Missionals, and Pragmatic Missionals. I suggest that each of these theologies tends towards a certain kind of epistemology and understanding of culture that influences how we think about missional church.”
link
..Well, Paul preached it first:
"We walk by faith,
and not by sight;
so certainly this is not certainty." ( 2 Cor 5.17)
-Bono, NY Times
- "I come to lowly church halls and lofty cathedrals for what purpose? I search the Scriptures to what end? To check my head? My heart? No, my soul. For me these meditations are like a plumb line dropped by a master builder — to see if the walls are straight or crooked."
“Moment of Surrender” tells the tale of a lost soul, borrowing an Alcoholics Anonymous term for the moment an addict admits helplessness. “The character in the song is a junkie, so that’s where I got it,” says Bono, who has written about heroin addiction before, most famously on “Bad” from The Unforgettable Fire. “I’ve been surrounded a lot in my personal life by addiction — in the last few years, in particular,” Bono says. “I know a lot of people — not least the bass player in the band — who has had to deal with their demons in courageous ways.” (In the Nineties — around the time he was engaged to Naomi Campbell — [bass player Adam] Clayton grappled with alcoholism, and went to AA himself.) “And maybe there’s a part of me that thinks, ‘Wow, I’m just an inch away’,” Bono continues. “There’s no doubt about the fact that I have a wild streak and I’d be very capable of setting fire to myself. So, you know, I don’t go to church for the view.” -Bono, Rolling Stone
you've been stuck in a lift
we've been trying to reach you, Thom
this is the place
it won't hurt
ever again
the smell of air conditioning
the fish are belly up
empty all your pockets
'cause it's time to come home
this is the place
remember me
I'm the face you always see
you've been stuck in a lift
in the belly of a whale
at the bottom of the ocean
the smell of air conditioning
the fish are belly up
empty all your pockets
'cause it's time to come home
the smell of air conditioning
the fish are belly up
oh, let it go
let it go
today is the first day
of the rest of your days
so lighten up, squirt
In the grip of that day's schedule, Richard bumped into a woman standing at the receptionist's desk. Not recalling her name, he offered his generic, "Hey, how're you doing? Being taken care of?"
She was supposed to say, "I'm fine. Good to see you, Pastor. So appreciated the sermon last Sunday," and then allow him to move on. But she didn't.
"Pastor," she said, "I was so hoping I'd find you here. Do you have a few minutes?"
Honestly? No. The finance people were waiting to talk budget with him, and the PDA showed only 45 minutes to the next chirp. Richard ratcheted up the charm.
"You know, I'm afraid I don't. Why don't you see if my assistant can get you on the calendar for later," he said, half-knowing it wouldn't happen. The next open slot for appointments with church members was two or three weeks away. She could meet with one of the pastoral care people, he was sure.
When will people get used to the fact that senior pastors in large churches can't get into unscheduled conversations? Soon he was into budgeting, the encounter forgotten.
Three days later Richard's assistant informed him that a church member had taken his life. When he heard the name, he recalled the woman in the reception area. She was the dead man's wife.
When he saw her at the funeral parlor (his guilt induced the visit; he normally didn't attend wakes), Richard learned that she had come that Monday seeking counsel about her husband who'd been out of work for six months, was drinking, and seemed unusually withdrawn. She'd thought that, maybe, if the pastor called him, it would lift his spirit.
"He always admired you and hoped that he could one day have a talk with you. But everyone knows how busy you are," she said as they stood by the open casket.
...In light of the con, it’s often a pleasure to turn to The Colbert Report or The Daily Show, perhaps especially when we consider Jon Stewart’s framing of his presentation, “And now … the fake news.” It unmasks the con that is news production, news as whatever will momentarily soothe our minds, news that presumes to name itself unfake. While the paradoxical authority of satire’s unseriousness would be undermined by a claim to legitimacy (”Listen to me! I’m serious now!), it’s hard to resist the suggestion that the real news is being meaningfully broadcast through a satirical presentation; that the only popular attempt at news analysis on offer is coming at us through comedy. The fake news is the news. Picking up on this note, Bill Moyers once remarked that he wasn’t sure whether the form Stewart and his team are practicing is parody or satire. Stewart replied that what they’re actually practicing is a new form of desperation..
... I recall a televised conversation between David Letterman and PBS’s Charlie Rose. When asked to draw a comparison between what he does and what was accomplished by Johnny Carson in his years on the air, Letterman remarked that what his team delivers is essentially “circus time,” with things being lit on fire, dropped in water, and thrown off of buildings. Letterman isn’t happy with this state of affairs. It isn’t as if trying to make conversation with the last person to get voted off the island is Letterman’s preferred vocation, but an exhibition of literal nonsense appears to be what’s required. He stressed that he could never really know for sure, but playing in the big leagues in the unending competitiveness of prime time seems to allow for no pause in circus time. He wants, after all, to stay on the air.
With heartbreaking candor, he expressed a preference for the kind of television associated with Tom Snyder and Rose himself, the exhilaratingly legitimate moment of people talking to each other and other people tuning in from far away. But could he risk it and keep up with Jay Leno and The Tonight Show? Would he remain, as the saying goes, commercially viable? Not necessarily. He has to play it safe. Back to throwing stuff off of buildings—back to whatever it takes.
Before the cameras, David Letterman can’t talk to the kind of people he wants to talk to. He can’t quite facilitate the stories he’d like. His show can’t show what he wants it to show. He can’t do what he wants to do without losing access. Access to what? Power? Influence? Like everyone else, he has to guess at what the biggest chunk of viewers want and then deliver it. And what haunts him is the feeling that the guess might be wrong. Maybe the viewers want what he thinks he can’t give them. The medium, in this sense, is devastatingly limited. The competition for viewers is a race to the bottom. I’m reminded of Fred Friendly’s observation that the producers of television broadcasts are so powerfully and amply rewarded for doing the wrong things that they aren’t inclined to ask what might be, television-wise, right and good and promoting of psychological health. Success makes a failure of the medium’s content...
...It is rumored that the Spirit of the Lord is being poured out on all flesh and that all flesh shall see the salvation of God. With the word (sung or spoken) now radically possessed by the second-class citizenry, poetry and song become a witness more reliable than the “official” status quo. A new way of talking and listening is born. There are all manner of news networks abounding, and the revolutions might occasionally be televised. The cosmic plainspealk that is everywhere will often help us overcome and articulate what Pete Seeger calls “the ocean of misunderstanding between human beings.” In the ancient Near East, the New Testament’s word of life under Roman rule would be very different from what the Empire was in the habit of telling itself about itself. The subversively truthful report we call good news brings mythic realities down low...
-David Dark, © 2009 by David Dark, excerpted from The Sacredness of Questioning Everything.
...glad (Jesus) didn't write any self help books or how to do better ministry books (perhaps He should've written a book called, '40 days of purpose' based on His own biographical account of being led into the wilderness)The biblical connection of baptism with self-death is obvious (if underpreached),
but, thank God, He sent His beloved Son as a Savior and not as a writer of non-fiction "build a better ministry" books.
link, emphasis mine
"...resurrection as referring metaphorically to baptism (a dying and living with Christ), and resurrection as referring to the new life of strenuous ethical obedience, enabled by the Holy Spirit, to which the believe is committed."Death is more fun than we've made it out to be, and resurrection life more demanding and demeaning than we've dreamed.
"Surprised by Hope," p. 47
running water..And as the character lies on that parched ground in failure, alienated from his brother, alienated from his homeland, alienated from those around them whom he "cannot know," alienated from the confidence in love he had at his baptism (nicely identified for us not just with a cleansing water metaphor and a standard-issue U2 moon metaphor, but also with a sonic reprise of God's signature melody from "Unknown Caller" a couple songs back), he dies. And his dying thought is, "If only a heart could be as white as snow."
What has struck me so poignantly and opened up the song for me is the realization that we are meant to ask the natural question: is that broken wish enough? He dies with it on his lips, and then what happens? That suspended moment is very similar to the moment we hang in this week. He dies a failure... and then what happens?
link
..Speaking of translation, and also connected with the mystery vs. relevance debate in Song of Solomon, check out Walter Benjamin's Task of the Translator here on Google Books version of the Postmodern Bible Reader. I have the big hard copy of this book at home but here you can read about dynamic equivalence in translating the Bible as a "modern" task OR the more postmodern idea of Walter B that a translator has to protect the text in order to honor it. In this understanding of translation, is John McArthur taking the postmodern approach and Mark Driscoll the modern? Thoughts?The post was about preaching/blogging the spiritual/eroticism of Song of Solomon. No surprise
-Tall Skinny Kiwi
Drop me an email, facebook message, or comment below if you have any interest in an Isral trip with us this year (late November) or (maybe instead) next February.
"Every Sunday, an old beggar used to play three tunes on his accordion in the courtyard of our apartment house...(this) created a thousand dimensions in space...
With sound, I never came to an end, for this was another kind of infinity."
-Lusseyrman, "And There Was Light".p.25, emphasis mone
"We are people borne of sound/The songs are in our eyes"-U2, "Breathe"
"We suddenly heard a military band drawn up on either side of a monumental entrance. The music it made sounded like dance tunes. The inscription over the gate read KONZENTRATIONSLAGER BUCHENWALD.
I passed through this gateway going in the opposite direction fifteen months later, on April 18, 1945. But here I come to a halt. I can't say how, but it is no longer I who am conducting my life.
It is God, and I haven't always understood how he went about it...
...There is no truth about the inhuman, any more than there is truth about death; at any rate not on our side, among us mortal men. Such truth could only exist for our Lord Jesus Christ, absorbed and preserved by him in the name of his Father and ours."
-p.272
..if Islands aims to be a building on the metaphorical Montreal cityscape, it’ll be an abandoned church with buttresses on scale with the Arcade Fire’s, though less haunted by the ghosts of dead relatives than made alive with the sounds of drunken bands using its basement as a jam space. Camus to Arcade Fire’s Sartre, the post-apocalyptic carnivalesque of “Humans,” Elephant 6 pop of “Rough Gem” and declarative but comfortably confident style of “Swans” are facsimiles of their city brethren’s theatrical indie-zine headshots, but with moustaches and eyebrows like a V drawn on, each song wielding slightly twisted melodrama as biting as an ax with a pink ribbon tied around its handle. This isn’t the kind of thing you’ll be able to tell by flicking through the first two minutes of each song: at 4:30 of “Swans,” for example, the simple progression and steady momentum established throughout the song’s first minutes blossoms into a honeyed guitar melody...Pitchfork review here
Even though its primary songwriter is vocally aware of the omnipresence of uncertainty..
The band is winking at you, after all, but at least now they seem assured enough to let their audience in on the joke, and the experience is more revelatory and gratifying for it.
-Crawdaddy
"almost as disturbingly memorable as a cuddly cartoon blood orgy. "
-Sytlus
Those who have been following reviews and discussion will have noted that a lot of hearers seem to be taking "I was born to sing for you...to lift you up" as an insufferably arrogant phrase directed at U2's audience; it has come in for a lot of criticism. In light of that, it is almost funny to see, as this moment arrives in the song, the visual Bono chooses (starting at about 2:45). He begins with a standard wide-armed orans position, but immediately shifts that into an awkward-looking, aggressively vertical orans with both arms parallel all the way over his head, and just holds it. (The text is directed up, folks. Not horizontally. Up. Is this clear enough for you?)
-Beth, U2Sermons, link
"There is no way around it. This is precisely the uncircumventable risk U2 took...some superficial listeners may have taken the song in exactly that way, and never taken it any further...For, as a song, it is also clearly addressed to a broader audience, and thereby seeks to transform this entire audience into the beloved."
-Ian Thompson, U2 and Philosophy, pp. 91-92
"...And as often happens to pronouns in U2 songs, that 'you' has grown more spacious since we first heard it....That 'you' is now big enough now for whatever we'll encounter when the door swings open."
(sermon included in Whitely/Maynard, eds, "Get Up Off Your Knees," p.106)
