Ted Newell's Blog, page 2

“Half Right and All Right” — Ruth’s story about trusting Israel’s God

“If God controls life events so you despair, God controls life events so you can have hope, too. A believer’s hope is in God, not in the events.”

AUDIO

http://1drv.ms/1Jd8nLS

TEXT

ruth-1-half-right-and-all-right-20150802-highf

 

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“Thou hast taken hold of my right hand.” –Psalm 73:21

When he realizes the fantastic success of practical people, the writer is strongly tempted to abandon his faith,. The rich and powerful have it all now; no seeming need to refer to any god. Earlier the writer says: my feet almost slipped – an image of walking on a narrow path, losing one’s balance, and falling.

Now he affirms: God, you are holding me even when I was an unthinking this-world-only being, not remembering your promises and your power. “I was like an animal before you.” Now he realizes, in this unrolling meditation that sees him restored, that even his foolishness was in God’s hand. The Spirit kept him, we see in the light of the New Testament. Even as a beast before you, I am continuously before you (same Hebrew word for “before” or some translations, “with.”

Not only my brain, not only my thoughts; you Lord have taken my right hand bodily to physically guide me and keep me from pitching off the road.

What a great, great assurance. For in-Christ people, the spirit of Christ himself lives within. Talk about a “paraclete,” a Comforter, one who comes alongside (John 15-17).

Photo credit “Guard Rail and Grass Woodstock Vermont,” Christopher Sessums via Flickr, license Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Christian faith, confidence, devotional, doubt, faith, Holy Spirit

Now, that’s praise! “Songs Of Praise” from a migrant/refugee church In Calais, France

The BBC Is Filming “Songs Of Praise” At Migrant Church In Calais And Some People Are Furious
TV crews plan to broadcast footage from a migrant camp in Calais, France full of people hoping to reach Britain.


The Huffington Post UK
By Aubrey Allegretti


Posted: 08/08/2015 07:06 AM EDT

The BBC‘s decision to film a special edition of ‘Songs Of Praise’ from Calais’ biggest migrant camp has inflamed opinions, with critics branding the move “insensitive” while others say it could help humanize the crisis.

Crews for the TV program have been filming at a church in the so-called ‘Jungle’, a sprawling encampment home to thousands hoping to reach Britain.

Andrew Rosindell, MP for Romford, told The Sun on Thursday: “This is an insensitive thing to do. We are facing a grave crisis.

 







PHILIPPE HUGUEN via Getty Images









MORE: calais migrant crisis, refugee, bbc, songs of praise, refugee church, France, United Kingdom, migrant

The BBC Is Filming “Songs Of Praise” At Migrant Church In Calais And Some People Are Furious.

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Free resource for baptism candidates and classes

I had responsibility to prepare a handful of candidates for adult baptism some fifteen years ago. After completing Jack Miller’s Sonship Course in 1996 (World Harvest Mission, Jenkintown, PA), the German Reformer Martin Luther’s understanding of active faith in Christ became precious. As I thought how to prepare candidates, it came to me that there is no need to reinvent twenty centuries of Christian experience. Thinkers and pastors have worked on initiation into the Christian life. So, I prepared an approachable edition of Luther’s Small Catechism. Run it in at least three sessions. You would need to research, possibly by personal Bible study or hearing a sermon or lecture related to each session. Click below and help yourself. If you see possible edits or changes in structure, or would like to add commentary, please, get in touch. Baptism, Move of Faith

I should note that Jack Miller’s disorganized but quite wonderful Sonship course took inspiration from many sources including Luther’s Commentary on Galatians (available here and there on the net for free;  probably the best thing you could read today or any day for free, except the Bible). Richard Lovelace’s Dynamics of Spiritual Life — Lovelace was a Gordon-Conwell Seminary prof at the same time as Jack was a renegade prof at Westminster Seminary Phila. —  tracks closely with Sonship. “Why do we live the Christian life as orphans when those in Christ are sons and daughters?” might be the focussing question of Sonship.

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Smart article on marriage in NYT July 18

Pretty funny piece on being married, smart, this weekend’s NY Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/fashion/the-wedding-toast-ill-never-give.html

Great bits: Her proposed toast!

“…it’s unlikely they will be each other’s best friend every single minute forever. And that while it’s good to aim high, it’s quite probable they will let each other down many times in ways both petty and profound that in this blissful moment they can’t even fathom.

Hard to imagine that making many glasses clink happily, but press on!

Her editorial comments:

It is easy for people who have never tried to do anything as strange and difficult as being married to say marriage doesn’t matter, or to condemn those who fail at it, or to mock those who even try. But there is so much beauty in the trying, and in the failing, and in the trying again. Peter renounced Jesus three times before the cock crowed. And yet, he was the rock upon whom Christ built his church.

Hey, a theology of grace in the NYT. Whew. So much better than the good old “try harder.” Ragamuffin Brennan Manning Jack Miller Martin Luther Sonship pure pleasure. Have your own read.

 

 

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What do those able to resist immense social pressure do right?

Cliffjumpers. Credit Dennis Graves. Creative Commons https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/

“The Day After Trinity” is a one-hour documentary on the unusually sensitive and literate organizer of the American 1940s atomic bomb scientific team. We ve been hearing about the seventieth anniversary of the testing of the first A-bomb in New Mexico, July 1945. For most of the period of the bomb’s development 1943-1945, the fear that the European fascists might get it and use it first compelled a counter project to deter its use. (Mutual Assured Destruction seems to have rationalized the horror device from the beginning.) However, well before testing, the European fascists surrendered in the first few days of May, 1945. After Victory-in-Europe Day, no “reason” for continuing the development existed. Yet, of the thousands of scientists working at the secret LosAlamos site on the “gadget,” only one resigned. “The Day After Trinity” includes the regrets of a scientist brought up as a Quaker who had convened meetings at Los Alamos to talk about the morality of the work, but who did not resign. Partly the solidarity was from J. Robert Oppenheimer’s personality, it seems. The sheer jouissance of the project brought its own inertia, too. Oppenheimer began to think differently almost as he saw the test explosion. He became an advocate of limitations on the use of the weapons that got him into trouble with the US government in the middle 1950s.

Zygmunt Bauman says about the Nazi genocide that it would have been well-nigh impossible even to conceive of exterminating a people apart from an engineering approach to society, entailing expertise, scientific management, and bureaucracy — all characteristic of an advanced state of modernity (reference below). Social settings make cruelty possible.

Perhaps these two observations above underline the contrary power of God’s people who fear God first and foremost. The book of Daniel includes this well-known-but -worth-studying window:

(The three Jewish civil servants) answered the king, “O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to present a defense to you in this matter. 17 If our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire and out of your hand, O king, let him deliver us. 18 But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods and we will not worship the golden statue that you have set up.” (ch. 3, NRSV)

Jesus said,  “I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!  Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight. But even the hairs of your head are all counted. Do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows. (Luke 12 paralleled at Matt 10)

The earliest church discovered the gumption to implement Jesus’ advice. Early leader Tertullian coined the saying, “The blood of Christians is seed,” actually, “Semen est sanguis Christianorum.” Such severe witness is seed of new life. Confirmation that you have something worth living for that you have something worth dying for, .

Perhaps there is no “best practices” or “how to” enabling resistance at the point of fierce temptation. Perhaps a rule of thumb is to be in tune — be read up in scripture, keep alert, be in prayer on a regular basis. No substitute for general spiritual well-being exists, neither in pill form nor one-hour crash session, or other. When Cranmer or Latimer or Hus or Clement, to say nothing of Stephen (Acts 6-8) faced the flames or stones, perhaps only empowerment by the Spirit of God made persistence possible. Jesus said as much:

“Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day does not catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.” (Luke 21:34-36)

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Day After Trinity, first part of nine (as of 20150719) is at

Thanks to http://thegoodheart.blogspot.ca/2009/06/blood-of-christians-is-seed.html for clarification on the Tertullian quote.

Roberts, David D. The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-Century Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics. New York and London: Taylor & Francis, 2006 p. 387

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Boyhood film and buying the Christian message

The filmmaker started twelve plus years ago with a child actor. His character Mason is the boy of the title, and we follow him from early awareness to his start at college. It’s two hours and forty six minutes but it clips along just like life. In fact, as the article that got me interested said (link below) we watch twelve years in only three hours or so, and the pace or compression of time leads us — like Mason — to ask the really big question — to me, the only question that matters: what is it all about.

A sequence in the second half of the film has adoptive grandparents attend church with Mason and his sister, and they give Mason a Bible as a grad present. I felt his bewilderment. It wouldn t have cut any ice for 16 year old me, either. Both church and Bible are another world and as a viewer I saw my church weirdness reflected back at me. Had Bruce Cockburn not come along, or Schumacher’s Guide for the Perplexed, I might never have found a bridge to get across to Christian faith. Who might be bridgemakers now? Ragamuffin Gospel? Shane Claiborne? I’m at a loss.

The film ends with Mason’s new roommate making a kind of existential affirmation of the power of nature and a desert sunset. As I watched it seemed like one more random thing but now I ll have to go back and see if it’s not a key.

Official trailer

appreciation — Rabbinical student appreciation http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/07/14789/

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Freud and Romans 1

Working on an article on unacknowledged knowledge and the impossible task of teaching, which bounces off Freud, J. Lacan, and S. Felman. Here is my current fascination:

It is a long superseded idea, and one derived from superficial appearances, that

the patient suffers from a sort of ignorance, and that if one

removes this ignorance by giving him information (about the

causal connection of his illness with his life, about his experiences

in childhood, and so on) he is bound to recover. The

pathological factor is not his ignorance in itself, but the root of

this ignorance in his inner resistances; it was they that first called

this ignorance into being, and they still maintain it now. The

task of the treatment lies in combating these resistances. Informing

the patient of what he does not know because he has

repressed it is only one of the necessary preliminaries to the

treatment.

Freud, Sigmund. “Wild Psychoanalysis.” In Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Leonardo Da Vinci and Other Works (1910), New ed. vol. 11 of Complete Psychological Works Of Sigmund Freud. London: Vintage Classics, 2001.


Hasn’t Freud picked up the New Testament’s Romans 1 and systematized it? Of course Freud was Jewish, but he lived in Catholic Vienna most of his life. He dealt with women and men with psychological problems in a (waning) Christian society. Well, whatever: what’s most interesting is that he sees that people actively resist certain kinds of knowledge. We are not curiosity sponges at all. We don’t want to know what we don’t want to know. How far and how deep might this go? (Ref: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans+1%3A18-32&version=NIV
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Ordinary Names, Doing Extraordinary Work, and Persisting in Faith: Thoughts for a prayer conference

June 6, 2014

Listen to the start of the apostle Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth:

“Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, and Sosthenes, our brother, 2 to the church of God in Corinth, to those who have been consecrated in Christ Jesus and called to be God’s holy people, with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, their Lord as well as ours. 3 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 4 I am continually thanking God about you, for the grace of God which you have been given in Christ Jesus; 5 in him you have been richly endowed in every kind of utterance and knowledge; 6 so firmly has witness to Christ taken root in you. 7 And so you are not lacking in any gift as you wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed; 8 he will continue to give you strength till the very end, so that you will be irreproachable on the Day of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 You can rely on God, who has called you to be partners with his Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

Notice three things about this passage. 1) Ordinary names, 2) doing extraordinary work, and 3) persisting in faith.

1) The mere names are written more or less in the standard form used to start letters in the Roman empire period. We would say, Dear Friends.

Such an apparently mundane communication make this kind of writing seem hardly scripture-like. It is in koine common Greek. It has no high literary style. The words are not like a Plato or a Greek poet. Even Augustine had trouble reading this comparatively unburnished writing as scripture. Crude, not worthy, he thought before conversion. The words hardly seem like once and for all chosen words. Yet they are.

God used the language of the people to communicate. Koine Greek was the language of business and politics all around the Mediterranean basin, all over the Roman empire. How convenient.

God has become incarnated in human history. He condescended to meet us where we are. He is on our level. It looks ordinary. The supernatural is dressed  in jeans, as it were.

On top of that ordinariness, God has Paul include the name of his colleague, Sosthenes.

When I go to a meeting, one of my strategies for making sure the next meeting crew know I was there is to second a motion. Sometimes I even move one. Then no one can say I wasn t there or did nt do anything. My name is in the minutes.

I m not entirely sure why Sosthenes gets a mention. Other than to be like, another second witness to the truth. “In the mouths of two witnesses let everything be established.” That was the Jewish law. Or to underline that Paul is not an authority like the Lord Jesus; he is one of the apostles who were commissioned together and whose collective authority really comes from the one who called them. Sosthenes anyway is in the minutes. And I m glad he is. It is very humdrum. Very ordinary.

But Sosthenes is doing the business of God. Everyone for all time can see God used old Sosthenes to do work that would be looked back on as long as the present age goes on. He is just Sosthenes, but under the triune God he was given work to do that will last for ever. God works through the ordinary. He is not a high style God. He uses all kinds of people in all kinds of places. In fact high and low and middle you name it.

Your name as a praying person at this prayer conference is in the minutes. If not some official minutes or record of attendance, then the record of God. All agents of grace in their place. All pray-ers are Sosthenes-es. Recorded by God special to him.

2. Notice that a kind of blessing starts the letter, a kind of prayer. “Charis kai eirene.” This initial passage prefigures all the concerns of the letter. All the introductions to Paul’s letters, except maybe Ephesians, a circular letter, have this character. After you read the letter to the Corinth Christians you see why Paul started out the way he did. He is very curt with the Galatians, and you see why after you read the letter. Here in the first Corinthian letter you have a church which is way off base in its actual life. A man is living with his stepmother. There are issues with food from pagan temples. There is abuse of the Lord’s supper. They are tolerating people who downplay the resurrection. But: Paul commences by giving thanks to God for them.

If it were me, I m sure I would be less enthused. I would be thinking about all the hard work to get this outfit straight and it might not even take, my efforts might fail.

Paul knows this: the faith of these folks is the work of God, not any human effort. That believers exist in the middle of an idol-worshipping, sexually impure, port city in the Greek part of the Roman empire is a miracle. Each and every believer is a miracle. Remember  to buck him up evangelizing, Jesus appears to Paul and told him: I have many people in this city. These folks are Jesus’ people — even thought their life is not all it needs to be. Their lives need to match their confession of Christ. But they are on the way — in Paul’s optimistic take. The glass is half full. Paul keeps the big picture firmly in view. “I am delighted you belong to Jesus. I have not forgotten the occasion of your coming to faith in the first place and what a miracle it was. I have not forgotten the day you were baptised. I delight in you with the delight of the Lord himself.” We could all learn something for our church relationships from these few verses. So easily overlooked. So expressive of the gospel of Jesus Messiah the Lord of heaven and earth.

3. But notice thirdly, Paul does not neglect to urge them. Humanly he uses words to do God’s work. The Corinth Christians need to persist in doing good. If they hear his words and act, they will be displaying faith. Notice that “call on the name” in verse 2 is almost the same thing as their identity in the same sentence. “To the church of God in Corinth, to those who have been consecrated in Christ Jesus and called to be God’s holy people, with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” – relying on the supreme authority — which is Jesus — is a sign of worship and submission. To pray is part of very identity of God’s people. Conversely, those who do not call on Jesus are not showing reliance on him. They are relying on themselves or on gods who really do not have the authority to make that difference.

In verse 8 Paul writes, “He will give you strength.”

This is a prayer conference. It takes an effort to go out of town, one more year to this prayer conference. Perhaps there was some competing allegiance, some family event, sports event, golf event, dancing for the stars event,  that you made a lower priority. I thank God for you doing the work of God in praying for God’s work in Asia. God is at work in you both to will and to do his good work. You still hear his voice. Let us, as long as it is still day, encourage one another. The work will last forever. Not many causes can say that.

Ordinary names, doing extraordinary work, and persisting in faith!

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Long Term Prayer – June 6, 2014

“Teach us to pray.” The disciples must have seen something in Jesus their spiritual master, some quality which they wished they had. The request is recorded in Luke’s gospel (11:11-13).

I want to think about one aspect of Jesus life of praying and believing that might help us to press on in the good work of prayer.

Probably nothing stops praying like Job’s wife. You know what Job’s supportive spouse said. Job had lost everything in disaster after disaster, his children, his livelihood, his investments. On top of that he was afflicted with constant pain – malignant ulcers from the top of his head to the sole of his feet.

However, he still had his wife. She said, ‘Why persist in this integrity of yours? Curse God and die.’ More or less she says: Job, it is over. God is not going to reverse this situation. God is not going to do anything.” Her unbelief is a dramatic foil or backdrop to Job’s faithful determination.

However, the truth is this: What looks like God’s unfairness can really kick a praying person in the shins. It might seem like proof that God is really absent altogether.

Now Job is usually dated after the exile. No surprise that Israel’s faith went through the fire in the exile. I m not just talking about Shadrack, Meshack, and Abednego who went through the fire that was hotter than hot. I’m talking about the Israel national project. Israel went through hades to get the Land of Promise. Yahweh said to Abram, ‘Leave your country, your kindred and your father’s house for a country which I shall show you; 2 and I shall make you a great nation, I shall bless you and make your name famous; you are to be a blessing! They were redeemed from Egypt. After 40 years they entered the land which God had promised them. Whew. God was going to bless the world out of Zion, Jerusalem, joy of the whole earth where God had taken up residence.

But now, with the exile, Israel had failed. They lost the land. The gentiles razed the temple. Where were God’s promises now? Would God ever use Israel again? Had God moved on?

Books like Chronicles, Ecclesiastes, Job, and many psalms are dealing with this disappointment of the national hope. They are working out a way to understand how God can still be faithful, still keep his cast iron promises when the obvious basis of those promises is all over — it seems. How do you keep on praying when there seems like there is no hope. Job’s challenge is to keep the faith while those around him are unsupportive. Indeed, the whole book is Job figuring out in dialogue back and forth why God is letting this all happen to him. Job is figuring out how he can keep on praying and believing.

In our own time in North America, for many of us, the trend lines are heading down. Our churches are in trouble, many of them. Attendance trouble. Financial trouble. Change in the culture has been huge and sudden. Major denominations are not baptizing many of the new generation, the millennials. It is easy to believe that the trends are going to kill Christian churches as we know them. You could call it determinism. Nothing is going to stop this movie from playing forward – and one might say, “I don’t like what I see.”

In the long gap of 400 years between the last prophet and John the Baptist, in the time of silence, when the God of Israel said nothing, at the very end there are a couple of models of faithful pray-ers. Simeon is one. Here is Luke 2:25: Now in Jerusalem there was a man named Simeon. He was an upright and devout man; he looked forward to the restoration of Israel and the Holy Spirit rested on him. 26 It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death until he had set eyes on the Christ of the Lord, on YHWH’s Messiah anointed King of Israel that is. He was praying! Simeon is a man who trusted the God of Israel and the world to come through. After 400 years of nothing doing, silence, he is praying. Anna: She was eighty-four years old and never left the Temple, serving God night and day with fasting and prayer. Simeon said, my eyes have seen the salvation 31 which you have made ready in the sight of the nations; 32 a light of revelation for the gentiles and glory for your people Israel. Anna began to praise God; and she spoke of the child to all who looked forward to the deliverance of Jerusalem. Prayer has to allow God to do things his way.

When I attended a missions prayer conference in the late 1980s, a real life China Inland Missions missionary also attended. She was someone who had cause to think the work had been wasted. In 1953, if not before, the Communists expelled all missionaries. Less than 1% of the population of China were Christians – 750 000 Protestants and 3 million Catholics in 1949. Then followed more than thirty years of silence to the early 1980s. No one knew what if anything had changed. In 2014 as many as 130 million Chinese may be believers in Christ, according to The Economist magazine – as much as 10% of the population. Prayer has to allow God to do things his way.

For allowing God to do it his way, no model is better than Jesus himself. Scripture records this at Luke 22: He …left to make his way as usual to the Mount of Olives, with the disciples following. 40 When he reached the place he said to them, ‘Pray not to be put to the test.’ 41 Then he withdrew from them, about a stone’s throw away, and knelt down and prayed. 42 ‘Father,’ he said, ‘if you are willing, take this cup away from me. Nevertheless, let your will be done, not mine.’ 43 Then an angel appeared to him, coming from heaven to give him strength. 44 In his anguish he prayed even more earnestly, and his sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood. 45 When he rose from prayer he went to the disciples and found them sleeping for sheer grief.

What would it take to believe that God will raise you from death? What would it take to trust God to accomplish the work of saving a people for himself through total defeat, total weakness? What would it take to put your mission and your life in God’s hands totally? No one ever faced such a challenge.

Yet God raised our Lord Jesus from the grave. On the other side of faith in an impossibility came resurrection!

In this time, when God appears to be doing nothing – in North America anyway – Jesus is our model for prayer. “What will the Lord be up to?” What is God doing in the least evangelized part of the world? What new China, what new Korea, what new Iran is God working on? Believers have every reason to pray. Like Job we might have to work it out and see it through. Like Jesus. Like Jesus’ praying people in every era. May God get the praise for his faithfulness working in us.

Teach us to pray.

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