Thoughts After Roaming the British Museum

This is not especially profound, I don't think.  But yesterday I roamed the British Museum all afternoon looking over different exhibits.  I went fairly quickly through it, didn't really spend a lot of time looking over things.  Part of that has to do with the fact that at a certain point a realization dawned on me, which is that everything in the museum is more or less the same!  By that, I mean there are only a handful of concepts used as to create all the different artifacts and  that the variety is merely minor variations on those concepts.  For instance, across every culture represented, any instrument used to hold water, be it a bowl or a vase or a jar or whatever, is always round.  Coffins always take on basically the same shape.  Statues always show people in more or less the same of one or two pose options.  Now, I'm not trying to take away from the magnificence of the artifacts.  It was quite an impressive collection and quite a bit of variety in the details of what was painted on the jar or what color was used or how decorated with jewels something was.  But my point is, the enormous size of the collection and the repetition of ideas that occurred in it also showed the very common set of concepts that people hold to that form the basis of all these other ideas.  Now, what that might mean, what conclusion might be drawn from it, I will save to explore on another day…

Going on Holiday!

After packing up my life into little cardboard boxes, loading it into two cars, and driving six hours to my parents house in TN where I am temporarily residing before I move to New Haven to start Yale Divinity, I now get to take a little bit of a vacation, or perhaps a holiday, I should say. I'm off to visit my family in England for about two and a half weeks. Will probably be next to nothing posted here. Hope to have some stories to tell when I get back!

Farewell to a Church, Part 7:

Last Sunday was my final day with the church that I have been working at for the past year or so.  The pastor asked me to speak and I am now posting a slightly modified version of the manuscript here in bite sized chunks.

Part 7:  A Charge

And so the third thing I want to do this morning is to leave you all with a charge of sorts. And that charge is to keep your foundation in this gospel. Do not tolerate teaching that removes the gospel from this world to focus on an “other” reality somewhere else. And do not tolerate teaching that selfishly hides from the reality of life in this world, the reality that desperately needs the hope we have. Instead, cling to the gospel of hope. The director of University Christian Fellowship gave a talk shortly after the earthquake in Haiti and one of the things he said that has really stuck with me was this: “If our gospel cannot make sense to a survivor of the earthquake in Haiti who has lost everything, if it cannot be meaningful to them, if it cannot give them comfort and hope, then it is not worth believing.”

The second part of this charge is to say that I’m not sure it’s enough to just talk about hope from the comfort of our lives here that are largely sheltered from the harsher realities of this world. We have the message of hope, but we are not meant to keep it to ourselves. We as a church are tasked with bringing that hope to those who desperately need it. I have been so thankful that this church does make an effort to do exactly that. Whatever else you do, never stop making that effort to give the hope of the gospel to those who need it. And always be looking for new ways to share our hope with the hopeless.

To close this out I want to read one of my favorite hymns, a hymn that I think perfectly captures this message of hope even in dark times and has been a tremendous comfort to me over the years. It’s called Dear Refuge of My Weary Soul:

Dear refuge of my weary soul, on Thee, when shadows rise,

On Thee, when waves of trouble roll my fainting hope relies.

To thee I tell each rising grief for though alone can heal.

Thy word can bring a sweet relief to every pain I feel.

But oh, when gloomy doubts prevail I fear to call Thee mine,

The springs of comfort seem to fail and all my hopes decline.

Yet gracious God, where shall I flee? Though art my only trust.

And still my soul would cling to thee, though prostrate in the dust.

Hast thou not bid me seek thy face and shall I seek in vain?

Or can the ear of sovereign grace be deaf when I complain?

No still the ear of sovereign grace attends the mourner’s prayer.

Oh may I ever find access to breathe my sorrows there.

Thy mercy seat is open still, here let my soul retreat.

With humble hope attend they will and wait beneath thy feet.

Thy mercy seat is open still, here let my soul retreat.

With humble hope attend they will and rest beneath thy feet.

May this gospel of hope ever comfort us, and may we be used to bring that same comfort to many others. Let’s pray.

Farewell to a Church, Part 6:

Last Sunday was my final day with the church that I have been working at for the past year or so.  The pastor asked me to speak and I am now posting a slightly modified version of the manuscript here in bite sized chunks.

Part 6:  The Gospel and the World

Now we can say these things, and we often do say these things, but I’m afraid, mostly because I have been very convicted of this myself lately, that we too often say these things and stop there. If this really is our faith then it has to be more than just words. And for that to be the case, it has to mean something to us.

When I was in high school I spent a couple of summers doing missions work in Reynosa, Mexico, which is a little border town right across from McAllen, Texas. So when we were in Texas, we were driving through nice suburban type neighborhoods just like what we might see in Hoover or Vestavia Hills around here. And then literally five, maybe ten miles away on the other side of the river, we were walking through neighborhoods where families of 8 or 9 were living in shacks made out of plywood and cardboard. We are so insulated in our society. My dad’s chosen occupation was a graphic design artist. So for any of you who have experience in any artistic field, you probably know how this works- there are a very few elite in the field that do quite well. Then everyone else barely scrapes by.  So when I say my dad was an artist I really mean that he worked every odd job he could find and we still at times were barely making ends meet. But even during the hardest of times then the five of us in my family still had a roof over our heads in a very sturdy suburban house outside Memphis. We still had food to eat. My siblings and I were still going to school. Eventually, my dad got tired of this and he went back to school and got a master’s degree in education and started teaching high school art. And he started off in inner-city schools in Memphis. Now Memphis is a rough little town, and let’s just say that after growing up there absolutely nothing in Birmingham really scares me or makes me uncomfortable. But even in the inner-city neighborhoods where my dad was working those families had some sort of shelter and source of food. They had a chance at going to school at least, though attendance was terrible. The point is even the worst off parts of our society have it good by world standards. The slums of inner city Memphis look like mansions compared to some parts of Mexico. A year ago last February was my British grandfather’s 80th Birthday, and so we got the whole family together and took a cruise in the Caribbean. You get off the ship at different islands and they take you to these very touristy built up areas. Well on one island we got a taxi and told the cab driver to take us to where he goes to hang out. The places he goes to eat, the neighborhood he lives in, etc. We wanted to see the real life of people on this island. And so we start driving and after about three blocks we are out of the tourist district. And about two blocks later, we are looking at shacks made out of plywood and cardboard and occasional pieces of sheet metal. And as we are driving around he is pointing out hotels to us, and apparently the way they measure the quality of the hotels on his island is by how many security checkpoints you have to go through to get to the actual hotel. He pointed out a really nice one where you had to stop for four different checkpoints with armed guards before you even got to the parking lot. I work some with a college ministry in Birmingham called University Christian Fellowship or UCF that is hosted by Mountainbrook Community Church on Highway 280- any of you youth that go to school in Birmingham, you need to check this place out, it’s a fantastic ministry. They partner with a ministry in Haiti that is working to save malnourished children whose families literally have to walk for miles to get to a clinic and have their kids looked at by a doctor to get food because they don’t have any at home. Some very good friends of mine that I just visited in Memphis a couple weeks ago founded a church there that works with crews doing the same thing in Haiti as well as in Africa. Those of you who have seen the movie Taken- the thing we don’t like to think about is that the premise of that movie is real. People all around the world really are being kidnapped and transported around the globe to be used as sex slaves. I just heard a story from a group of students in Birmingham who were doing missions work in Africa and were literally in the restaurant when a suicide bomber blew himself up during the World Cup Final that we were watching comfortably here without even knowing this attack had happened.

The point I’m trying to make throwing out all of these anecdotes is that the world we live in is broken and hurting and full of pain and misery. And we have the answer to that! We have the message that hope does exist. We have the message that God is in control no matter how crazy life seems. We have the message that God knows what our pain and misery feels like- that he has felt what it means to be betrayed or to be alone or to be overwhelmed and confused, that he has felt the agony of pain and death as Jesus died on the cross. And we have the gospel, the good news, that Christ has risen from the dead and that he is ushering in a new age when pain and suffering will be no more, when the hope that is promised to the poor and needy is finally going to come to fruition. We have hope, and we are called to share that hope, and that is what the gospel is about.

Farewell to a Church, Part 5:

Last Sunday was my final day with the church that I have been working at for the past year or so.  The pastor asked me to speak and I am now posting a slightly modified version of the manuscript here in bite sized chunks.

Part 5:  The Faith of Job and the Gospel

The conclusion of the book of Job, I think, is also probably the earliest written form of the foundational belief of our faith. In fact, I think this is the very meaning of faith in Christianity. Faith is not just about believing some statement to be true. Faith is about our trust in God to be in control, to be working all things for good, even when our lives seem violently out of control and headed for disaster. We see this faith played out all across scripture. We see it in the stories of Genesis- God calling Abraham to abandon everything he knows to follow God’s leading, Joseph being betrayed by his brothers and sold into slavery and yet still he trusts in God. We see this in the Exodus account as a nervous, shaking Moses is sent by God back to Egypt to challenge the most powerful monarch alive in his day. We see this faith in Joshua and Judges and the stories of David and Elijah as battles are won that can only be attributed to God working. And we find this faith in God to ultimately be in control all throughout the prophets of the Old Testament. I want to read just briefly from one of my absolute favorite passages in Isaiah 61:

The spirit o the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; to provide for those who mourn in Zion- to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit. They will be called oaks of righteousness- the planting of the Lord, to display his glory.

Here in Isaiah is a proclamation of the gospel, I think. That the misery and the suffering that we so often face in this life is coming to an end. That God is in control of all things and that we can trust him to bring about justice and to turn our mourning into gladness. I don’t think it is an accident that Jesus begins his ministry in the New Testament with almost the exact same words. Luke records Jesus reading directly from Isaiah 61 at the very beginning of his ministry, and in Matthew chapter 5 Jesus will open his ministry with these famous words: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted”- echoes of Isaiah.  The book of Revelation closes out the Bible by describing a future time when there will be no more pain and suffering, no more tears, no more death, no more sin. God is in control, he is bringing about the redemption and restoration of his creation, he is undoing the effects of sin and death. We can trust him, even when life seems to make no sense whatsoever.