More Than a Carpenter

I recently finished More Than a Carpenter by Josh McDowell. A youth minister gave me a copy of that book 15 years ago, and what parts of it I read haunted me in the section of my life when I wanted God to leave me alone. Still, all the best reasoning and evidence in the world is useless unless the Father who sent Jesus draws us (John 6:44). Reasoning void of the experiential is vanity. Some people report flipping the Bible open at random and being shown exactly what they need. What I find more beautiful is that I can set out reading the bible very systematically every day for years and sovereign God arranges for whatever section I am on to speak to me or coincide with what I need that day. In pursuing my religious studies minor, I was exposed occasionally to questions and arguments contrary to a Biblical perspective, and for which I wasn't smart enough to reason out the answers on my own. That year of college remains invaluable to me. I remember one sunny day at the fountain on campus praying to God about these conundrums, then opening the Word to the pre-determined segment of scripture I was to read, in John 6. Jesus asks the 12 disciples after some hard teaching, "You don't want to leave me too, do you?" John 6:68 reports, "Simon Peter answered him, 'Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.'" I was smiling and crying, because his answer became my answer, and remains so, in a divinely profound way. McDowell writes, "Christianity is not a religion; it's not a system; it's not an ethical idea; it's not a psychological phenomenon. It's a person. If you trust Christ, start watching your attitudes and actions because Jesus Christ is in the business of changing lives." (p 119). While skeptics continue to look at church buildings and insist that Christianity divides people, those of us following and loving and being loved by the living Jesus Christ are meeting brothers and sisters in His kingdom wherever we go. Brian and Tara Riley exemplify this in their mission experience. They told of Jesus' people from every denomination seeking Him in unity. The Holy Spirit is not at all confined by our church building walls, and His movement perhaps borders on heresy. The Riley's, beautiful fascinating people, are a part of it, and I want to be a part of it. God is cutting edge and I can't wait to see what He does next. Meeting these missionaries gave me a joy that reminded me, in the midst of some sadness that Jesus brings not peace but a sword between me and some who reject Him, to keep my eyes on His kingdom, lest I miss the beauty and blessing of this new and ever-growing family He has adopted me into.

Darwin Day

I emailed the sponsoring Professor of the Anthropology club's Darwin Day display in the university library. Darwin Day is February 12. The display contained books, articles, quotes, pictures, all quite appropiate, except for multiple stickers depicting "icthus", the Christian fish symbol, with added legs and labeled "Darwin". I took a cultural anthropology class once for my religious studies minor. The most astute and useful observation I made was in noticing the consistent hypocrisy among some of those who presumed themselves to be observing human behavior objectively without noticing the blatant double-standard they held due to their own biased contempt for anything nominally Christianity. For the cartoon show South Park to parody anything possibly held sacred by any group in America, religious or otherwise, is comical and even progressive, but for Christian missionaries to unwittingly disrupt an indigenous culture's social structure by bringing gifts of axes for chopping firewood is contemptible, an inexcusable act of ethnocentric hubris, condescension typical of white Americans. And so it was with the Anthropology club's display: biased contempt, not objective Science, betrayed by the inability to resist an inflammatory signal to the less educated bible-thumpers. In a "Christians are Stupid Day" display, the modified Jesus fish would be appropriate; in a Darwin Day display, they are insidious. I begin to wonder if Darwinian Evolution can even be disconnected from anti-religious agenda. I think as an experiment, Christian fundies should begin to zealously advocate rapidly occurring macro-evolution as the only reasonable explanation as to how every species of non aquatic animal could possibly have appeared from Noah's ark, and then watch how quickly "respectable" science vacillates.

I once talked to a young druid at Paganfest. He'd been practicing druidism for a decade or more. His father was buddhist and his mother, he told me, was christian. I asked him what he found in druidism that appealed to him so. "Harmony with nature," he replied. "Nature has almost no one to defend her, and druids are her guardians." He wore a long, black robe and sold staffs which he whittled and ornamented from, as he pointed out, "already dead" forest material. We were at Paganfest peddling tie-dye. Next he flipped my question on me: "What do you find in being a christian?" I wasn't expecting the question; my subject had suddenly become the scientist. I had rather anticipated demonstrating to him that, whatever his answer, my God would not only put his talents and interests to good use, but bring them to completion. I was working off of the presupposition that no religion has anything good to offer which cannot also be found in serving Christ, and I still believe that to be true. We are broken and incomplete fragments of what He intended for us to be, prior to our acquiescing to His perfecting hands. In God's kingdom there is a place for environmentalists and capitalists, vegans and ranchers, poets and warriors. To cast myself upon God's mercy, His Son Jesus Christ, is not, I have been pleased to discover, to be brainwashed and assimilated. "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation" (1 Cor 5:17a) but that doesn't mean God threw all the old pieces away. Some of them were quite salvageable, and He doesn't like waste. I have been a dirty, outdoorish, guitar-playing daydreamer both out of His beautiful will and in the dead center of it. Nevertheless, "the old has gone, the new has come!"