I just love how the CEV puts Psalm 51v9-10:
Turn your eyes from my sin
and cover my guilt.
Create pure thoughts in me
and make me faithful again.
The sinner has no clothes. The sinner is embarrassed and shamed to be found standing before God (aren’t we always standing before God?) in such humiliation and so he begs God to look away or to hand him something with which he may be clothed. We cannot clothe ourselves. It’s no use pretending-the sinner here has realized he stands before God and there is no hiding from him. God has discovered the sinner, naked in Eden all over again.
That’s my prayer this morning: “Make me faithful again.”
Cover me. Forgive me. Love me…and then renew in me my love for you.
“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” - Jn. 1_46
It’s a question we’ve been asking ever since Nathanael first lobbed that grenade at Philip. The sarcasm shrapnel was everywhere.
But it’s a question we’ve been asking ever since in one form or another:
Many find it hard to believe that any good can come out of *shady* sources. As a result, we could miss out on a really good idea simply because it came from a source on someone’s “watch” list.
Yet the world is a testimony to God’s desire to draw something out of nothing. The cross is a monument of Christ’s adventure into our darkest, dirtiest parts to find a flicker of the Imago Dei. An idea should be evaluated on it’s own merits, regardless of its origin. God can use anything to reveal himself afresh. Is it possible then that by avoiding Nazareth we might miss the Savior?
RedBox Q&A, episode nine (04-16-12)
1. Should I be scared of the judgment?
Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller) shares his thoughts on Christian Evangelism. Check it out!
RedBox Q&A, episode eight (04-09-12)
Some thoughts on Rick Warren, Evangelism, and Fish.
Check it out. Sobering stuff!
I was recently discussing something with someone and at some point they mentioned how this movie that’s out there is terrible. “Hollywood,” begins the familiar gripe, “is corrupting this church.”
I’m not here to defend “Hollywood” or any particular movies. But I think we need a better mental framework in engaging complicated organisms like movies. We can begin, of course, by asking what on earth “Hollywood” is. But, more to the point, we need to determine how to evaluate things like movies. Does morally offensive content mean I’m incapable of feeling anything other than offended? Is it possible to value the thing as art - good cinematography, acting, score, what it says about life, etc. - while rejecting its moral ecosystem? Perhaps good cinematography doesn’t mean you’ll actually watch it, but it might enable better conversations and lead to a fairer evaluation.
There seems to be this insistence that we’re to only feel one emotion towards things like movies or books or politics or other religions or…
But is ambivalence impossible? Why can’t we do better to embody the tension that says to another denomination: “I disagree with you in many ways but I’m proud of what your community has done here and wish we could be more like you”? Is it wrong to feel longing/envy/hope/disappointment towards another church and not just the disappointment that they “went astray” somewhere in history? Certainly they’ve accomplished something for God that ought not be taken away from them. And how can I say my particular church does everything better than the rest? It’s through these questions that I realize my need to learn from them, to appreciate while perhaps disapproving. To wholly appreciate or wholly disapprove is to lose something of who they are as well as who I am.
The power of the single emotion is that it easily enables us to digest the world around us. The problem of the single emotion is that it’s grossly unjust to the world around us.
And what about God? The complexity of God’s feelings towards us is certainly beyond our ability to mentally coalesce. He loves sinners, hopes in them and is disappointed with them. He seemed to simultaneously threaten and woo Israel in Hosea’s narrative. The lesson for me is that if I’m to be a good pastor - a good Christian, even - I need to learn to feel ambivalently and somehow draw together these complex emotions.
