Moving: Please Follow Me

Hi All. I've decided to try out some of my blogs over at wordpress.com. A Stumbling Christian has been moved over to http://astumblingchristian.wordpress.com . Please check it out there, along with a new post.

Notes on The Shack

So, I should just fess straight up: I'm a big fan of The Shack.

If -- let's just suppose for a moment-- the entirety of human history can be described as our endeavor to know and understand the nature, the essence, the heart of God... then I'd say The Shack was equivalent to some of humanity's best theology. And superior, probably, to at least one of the books of the Bible.

So I'm biased.

But I found great insight in this blog post from www.windrumors.com, William P Young's web site. And great comments from readers.

Check it out if you get the chance.

Adventures in Missing the Point

Great message today.

Actually, a great day in church all the way around: relatively few screw-ups in the worship set, great choice of tunes, a moment of quiet transcendence... it was good. Aaron's message was good, but...

I've been at this Christian thing for four or five years now. Sometimes it seems the closer I come to understanding Christ the further I move from fitting with his people. An impossible contradiction, but one I sense nevertheless.

A fair amount of today's discussion revolved around "eternity." It wasn't ABOUT eternity, but eternity played a key supporting role. The message was essentially about "why bad things happen to good people," even to Christians.

The problem is... I don't care much about eternity. I really don't. If the answer to the previous question is "Bad things happen in the here and now, but our reward is eternal," then I'm left a bit out of the loop.

Maybe if I could fully understand and appreciate what it means to be one with God, reconciled with God, a part of the divine Trinity in all its fullness and love... maybe then I would care more about eternity. But I'm not quite there.

Instead I see Jesus' message as being an emphatically HERE and NOW message. Matthew 11:4 was used today to extensively highlight the idea that what we expect God to do and act like is often not what he does and acts like.

Jesus responded to John's men in Matthew 11:4, "Go and tell John what you see and hear: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up and the poor have the good news preached to them..." In other words, there's no Messianic King here, but people are being healed and saved here and now, today, as we speak and with hearts expanding.

He never said in this exchange (as far as we know), "Brother John, the Kingdom is at hand because we'll all be together in eternity soon, and this BS we worry about -- you in prison and me on the run -- will just be a bad dream."

The people at church, though, seemed really moved by this message. Something about eternity to come rather than healing and kingdom-ness delivered here and now really warms and inspires them. But it makes me wonder what I'm missing.

Is it that I don't understand what eternity in the presence of the King would be like? Is it that I don't fully appreciate the concept of eternal peace, therefore I'm so willing to trade it for healing and forgiveness and peace in the here and now?

I don't know. But I know that I'm not very interested in my own eternal salvation. I leave that in the hands of God. And I really wish we'd all focus on ways we can make the kingdom happen here, TODAY, and not think too much about what it will be like in the "great by and by."

Feed homeless children. Care for widows in their distress. Make the crippled and ostracized feel valued and necessary. Let God dwell in our every gesture and word, from daily observances to grateful jubilees. These are the things Jesus showed John the Baptist.

Unless I am wrong, and poking helplessly around at the outside of a hard-boiled egg that's far too big for me to crack or understand.

My Double Life: A Twitter Dilemma

So here's a dilemma that didn't exist before I became a Christian and before my good friend Twitter came into my life:

I'm on Twitter as @MJThelander. I joined to follow my friends from church, primarily, and to follow people I care about in Christian music and contemporary Christian thought. I follow Emergent Village. As a closet Christian songwriter I follow bands like Kutless, Mercy Me, David Crowder Band, Jon Lloyd Band and Fee, and artists like Kathryn Scott, Jeremy Camp, Vicky Beeching, Lincoln Brewster and Kristian Stanfill. I follow Christian thinkers and writers like William Paul Young, Rob Bell, Aaron Gardner, and my friend and Pastor Reed.

Twitter is one of the places I go to discover and express the things that really matter to me: I post links to my God-focused, faith-centric original songs; I post quotes and thoughts that resonate with my image (my memory?) of who and what God is and what he's after in our lives; I follow discussions of faith and redemption.

That's cool, huh? So... what's the big deal?

Well, my very nice employer is rapidly coming up to speed in all aspects of social media, with our own online user community, a commitment to blogging by senior staff members like me, and an authentic embrace of the transparency offered by social media.

You say, "Great Michael. I still don't see the problem."

Maybe there isn't one.

But I see it this way: I can post my current Twitter name on all my work-related thoughts and ideas, and fold these new Twitterers in amongst the emphatically passionate, vocal Christians I follow and speak to. That would reveal me in short order as the emphatically passionate, vocal, songwriting (of all things!) Christian I am, to anyone who cares to look. My last post was a sorrowful plea to God to heal the strife that lead to the death of the beautiful young Iranian girl named Neda on Sunday.

These are not the thoughts of a technology business marketing professional. It may even dilute my credibility. We have to be honest: we're faced daily by professional people who think Christianity is a weakness. Followers of Christ are not often the best choices for leadership roles in the rough-and-tumble world of technology marketing. If I were still in educational technology it would be severely career-limiting to align myself with overtly Christian thought leaders. It's a bit easier in mainstream technology... but I've noticed that the other Christians I work with play their faith very low key.

Or… I can create a new identity that neatly sidesteps all this mess. (I already have another ID called TheOtherMichael but no one's seen it yet.) It would be easy to use @MJThelander for the one side of my life, the part that matters the most and feels the most real to me, and use @TheOtherMichael for comments on cyber security, multi-platform technologies, and trends in infrastructure management for data centers. But what would that make me?

A liar, at worst. Another Christian caught between their faith and the real world at best.

So, what should I do? Have you experienced this particular Twitter dilemma? Have you solved it? I'm eager to hear your story.

On Salvation

Joie and I had a semi-theological discussion yesterday. (Dangerous, I know, for husbands and wives!)

To understand how amazing this is, you have to know a little about our different ways of faith. Where Joie has in the past tended to be non-critical of scripture ("It says what it says, why try to read more into it?") I have been the one who insists—often wrongly—that there's some deeper meaning there if we just dig for it.

Yesterday in church Reed took us through the end of Galatians 5. His goal was to juxtapose the "works of the flesh" in verse 19 with the "fruit of the Spirit" in verse 22. So this passage, along with its two lists and this proclamation was on Joie's mind:

¹⁹The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; ²⁰idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions ²¹and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.

At the same time I've been reading If Grace is True: Why God Will Save Every Person by Gullley and Mulholland. This book, even in its first chapters, speaks directly to my own innate sense of how God works. To support their bold thesis they quote a number of sources, but three stand out:

Philippians 2:9: ⁹Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, ¹⁰that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, ¹¹and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Jeremiah 31:34:
No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, 'Know the LORD,' because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest," declares the LORD.

Genesis 12:3, in God's very first conversation with Abraham: ³ I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

I won't try to summarize all their points, but I'll say that I've been profoundly touched by the grandeur and simplicity of their view. A wrote an unpublished article a while ago that included my own simple-minded version of this idea: "Salvation, I began to see, could only be fully realized when we all experienced it together."

So as I described this book to Joie while we were driving around for errands and ice cream she asked a really good question. "What about what Paul says in Galatians? 'I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.'"

So I have to admit I'm stumped. The message behind If Grace is True is powerfully resonant with me, and the idea that no one is left behind matches the way I've come to see my God. But Paul is pretty clear here.

Now, it's possible Paul was growing and changing as we all are. The Galatians passage, according to some timeline, was very early in his ministry, and Philippians may have been the last thing he ever wrote. Maybe he started thinking Galatians-like exclusiveness, but came to see salvation as an all-inclusive, universe-absorbing thing by the time he wrote Philippians.

I don't know. But I'm glad Joie and I are talking about it. I think it means, among other things, that we're both still growing in Christ.

[Note: Why the hawk? I don't know. It was a picture Joie captured one morning outside our living room window and we were both amazed by it. He also looks very wise to me.]

On Faith vs. Religion

I came across an interesting article today. It's from US News and World Report and the headline reads, Many Americans Are Saying Goodbye to Religion, but Not Faith.

This is an interesting discussion for me, as someone who always considered himself adverse to religion but trying to find faith. It wasn't until I turned to Christianity as a thirty-something father of three that I realized how foolish and potentially misleading this point of view might be.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The article says in one place:

That trend has emerged in other recent surveys showing that more-bureaucratic and hierarchical traditions, such as the Catholic and mainline Protestant churches, are hemorrhaging members in the United States while highly personalized evangelical and nondenominational congregations are growing. But the move from religion to spirituality has also fed a surge in Americans identifying themselves as "spiritual but not religious," with more than 5 percent of Americans now describing themselves that way.

I understand fully well how dogmatic, fire-breathing and judgmental church experiences can push people to solemnly claim, "I consider myself a very spiritual person, I'm just not very religious." And I appreciate that they usually accompany this with a humanistic, healing worldview. "If I believe in the sanctity of all life," one might wonder, "and if I always strive to do no harm and to live an embracing and loving life…then why do I also need to be religious?"

Good question. The answer I've found for myself on this question is here, from James 2:16-18:

¹⁶If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? ¹⁷In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

¹⁸But someone will say, "You have faith; I have deeds."
Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.

I'll be the first to admit that this answer is not for everyone. It wasn't the right answer for Martin Luther, who famously argued that James' letter wasn't even suitable for inclusion in the cannon. Of course he was the founder of the reformation, and insisted that faith alone saves us – none of our works, none of our deeds, none of the things we run about trying to piously accomplish.

But if I could argue against Mr. Luther I'd say that proper religion is faith in action. We can have faith, and we can be spiritual persons. But I don't think we begin to pay back that faith until we start living a religious life, until faith goes out and about in the world, changing hearts and lives. And it's often religion – for better or worse -- that gives us the foundation to go out and act out our faith.

Read the article and let me know what you think.

(Image by Luc Feyman)

The World’s Worst City

I haven't traveled all over the world, but I've travelled a little bit. I've been all over North America, I've been in South America, I've been in Africa, and I've been in Europe. This doesn't make me an expert, but it qualifies me to pick a clear winner in my "worst cities" list: Las Vegas.

Here are ten reasons why I think Las Vegas is the worst city in the world.

1. Lack of Faith: As many prayers as are offered daily in this city ("Please, God, give me a seven and I swear I'll follow you for all my days"), it's a city remarkably devoid of God. I'm leaving after a 4-day trip here, having never seen a single church.
   
2. It's a city that appeals to nothing so much as it appeals to our own greed. Though an appeal to lust is a close second.
   
3. Cigarette smoke: Everywhere, anywhere, all the time. It's the lung cancer poster child city.
   
4. No one is real. If they are they hide it.
   
5. Nothing is real: I discovered here a near-perfect plastic spoon that was designed to look like a silver one; the dome of the mall in the Venetian is painted to look like the sky, with blue and fluffy clouds; and you can see on the boats poled by the fake gondoliers, if you look closely under their stern, small electric propellers that push them along.
   
6. Everybody wants something. Nobody wants to give anything.
   
7. It's a city devoted completely to the pursuit of incredible excess wealth – "the bread of today" is not an option.
   
8. Everyone seems desperate and sad.
   
9. Even the happy people seem angry.
   
10. Millions of foreigners come here thinking it represents the quintessential America. (Maybe it does, but I prefer to think not.)
    

As long as I'm in technology I'm going to have to keep coming here for events because it's a great trade show city – distractions, easy money, noise and smoke and lights. But I expect it will always make me sad.

I want to go home, where it's not so hard to find a quiet place to pray, where the songs come freely and easily to my mind, and where my family waits in all their dysfunctional glory.

My plane leaves in 2 more hours. J