“But maybe if they didn’t treat us like monsters, we wouldn’t be monsters. I want us to try living like people for awhile, see how that goes.”
N.K. Jemisin, Stone Hunger
Category: General (Page 2 of 2)
Shirley A. has put together a playlist of worship music that our worship team has used or may use in the days ahead when we are able to resume in-person worship together. I am passing them on here so you can appreciate times of worship in homes, while driving, or working, or wherever! This is Shirley’s March, 2020 playlist for Spotify. And, this is Shirley’s March, 2020 Youtube playlist.
In our world, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.
— C S Lewis, The Last Battle
Merry Christmas!
I listened to an interview with Matt and Julie Canlis. They both had quite profound things to say. One thing Matt said is sticking:
The biggest way to impact the world is to be trusted by a few.
And then, speaking of Christian faith:
Think of faith as trusting a person you know.
I know from the rest of what they said that faith includes being known by the person you trust. Instead of being “tossed out” when your uglies are uncovered, you’re given grace and honesty, which leads to change. Transformation, even.
Check out the Regent Audio Podcast, episode #74 with Matt and Julie Canlis.
At past LBFC Thanksgiving Celebrations, we have included times for expression of thanksgiving. In recent years, this took the suggested form of:
I am thankful to God for _____________because ______________
This was intended to help each of us form an expression of thanks to share in our worship celebration, allowing many to participate. This year, we are taking another step in structuring our Thanksgiving. This step is intended to integrate personal expressions thanksgiving into a sense of all giving thanks together – that is, corporate worship! The structure I recommended is taken from brief Psalms of praise or thanksgiving in the Bible. (This structure was explained and recommended to me and others at the recent Psalms Retreat that was led so well by leaders of Long Beach Grace Church.)
This structure is quite simple. It is in three parts:
- Call to Thanksgiving and Praise
- Reasons for Thanksgiving and Praise
- Call to Thanksgiving and Praise
Think of the first call as you speaking to others who are present as you speak or read your Psalm. You are inviting them to offer thanks and praise to God. The second portion of your Psalm is you giving reasons to those listening for your praise or thanksgiving. You may be speaking to the other people who are listening, or to God, or both. The third portion is you asking those who are listening, again, to join you in the thanksgiving – particularly now that you explained reasons for it.
Psalm 117 uses this pattern:
Praise the Lord, all you nations;
extol him, all you peoples.For great is his love toward us,
and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever.Praise the Lord.
The first portion:
Praise the Lord, all you nations;
extol him, all you peoples.
is a call for those who are listening – in this case “all you nations” and “all you peoples” – to praise God.
The second portion is giving reasons for this praise:
For great is his love toward us,
and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever.
And then the call to the listeners to praise God is repeated as the third part.
And that’s it. We are encouraging our congregation to work on writing their own Psalm of Thanksgiving leading up to our Thanksgiving Celebration. Bring it with you – in your memory or written down somewhere. (I keep mine on my phone). Then, in our time for sharing, as God leads you, read it or repeat it to call others to praise and thanksgiving, give your reasons why, and call them again!
Your Psalm might be longer than Psalm 117. For example, Psalm 118 follows the three part pattern with more words. The first call is verses 1 to 4. Then the reasons are given in verses 5 through 28! That’s a lot of reasons! And finally, a call is repeated in verse 29.
We probably wouldn’t encourage anyone to read a Psalm as long and complex as Psalm 118 at the Thanksgiving Celebration, but the simple three-part structure allows you to give more than one or two reasons for expressing thanks to God.
What do you say in your reasons?
You can talk about God and what He has done. Your reasons can be personal or general. They can be based on corporate experiences of our church family or your biological family. Reasons do not all have to be superficially “good”. Job and other examples of faith expressed praise for God in the face of severe trials, praising God in spite of circumstances. As several of the leaders told us at the Psalms Retreat, “Pain makes your praise credible.” When we are not driven by external circumstances, but by a deep experience of God’s faithfulness in times of trouble and pain, this can be a powerful witness of faith.
Lastly, even if you think you are unlikely to read your Psalm at the celebration, I’d like to encourage you to write one, or work on one. Several people – just in the 24 hours since Sunday when we introduced this exercise – have expressed how spiritually beneficial it has been for them to work through writing a Psalm of thanksgiving to God. I found it very encouraging and spiritually engaging to write Psalms as we were instructed to do so at the Psalms Retreat I attended. It’s a good thing to reflect and work through your reasons to thank God, particularly in this season of Thanksgiving, and to call others to join you – even if it is only in your own personal interaction with God.
As another example here’s a Psalm of Thanksgiving that I worked on during our worship times on Sunday. I was thinking of our very diverse church family as I wrote.
Justo Gonzales closes his book The Changing Shape of Church History:
No longer can the church claim the religious hegemony it once had… Many Christians think that thIs means that the church is losing is power, and yearn with nostalgia for the old times of Christendom. But if I understand correctly the message of Jesus, that marginality, whether imposed or voluntary, is to be received as an opportunity to recover an essential dimension of that message:
“The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors. But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves.”
Lk. 22:25-26
The church of the future, that Catholic and universal church that I have just described, will be a church of service, but of service from the margins. It will not be the church at the center, as in the paradigm of Eusebius. It’s great temptation will be to become a purely spiritual church, claiming to be above the vicissitudes of human history, as in the paradigm of Augustine. However, if it is obedient to the gospel of Jesus Christ, it will be a church incarnate, present, a participant of human life, but present above all at the margins, without pretending or even seeking to be at the center or to control, and with a clear call of service to all mankind.
Because I make my living as a university professor and philosopher I am frequently asked, in so many words, “Why do you follow Jesus Christ?†My answer is always the same: “Who else did you have in mind?â€
— Dallas Willard
Here are the raw numbers we have to account for in our failed health care system.
Highlights.
We spend more PUBLIC money on healthcare than comparable countries with national health care systems. When you add the private money in, we spend enormously more money on health care than countries with national health care systems. I mean really enormously more!
Ask regular people with national health care if they like it. They will gripe about it. Every system has limitations.
Ask regular people with national health care if they would trade it for the American system. They would not.
Rich people should be able to use their resources to get the health care they want. Regular people need something a whole lot more like national health care in these other countries than what we have now.
If we were reasonable, we could spend less than now and get better care and cover everyone. Less GDP than now, and less GDP than France – who is already less than us. The numbers are clear. They are not complicated. They are enormously unfavorable to us and our system. They are unfavorable for any system currently under serious consideration in Washington. It is a scandalous failure of our politics and society.
God is at work in Long Beach. That’s my theory. It’s more than an intellectual thing, actually – it’s a belief. Tied in with my belief in God and trust in Jesus to be one of his children is the sense that God is at work in this world where he has put us. The times we live in here in Long Beach are alive with His purpose and meaning. I believe, in fact that the times are pregnant.
When God called me and my wife Susie to Long Beach to serve, we didn’t want to come. God took it all (graciously) in good humor and told us to come anyway, a small-time Mosaic moment. (No bushes were burned in the making of this life…) Within weeks of arriving, God confirmed to us that he was moving in this place. He had plans for Long Beach, and we were here to be with him in those plans. At that time, the sense of the moment seemed that it was a time of preparation – a now but not yet. It was not, to continue using biblical terms, the fullness of time. It was more like the times were pregnant.
We were new to Long Beach and to ministry. There wasn’t much money – not just in the church, but in the neighborhood! I worked outside the church to make a living, driving daily to an office up the South Bay curve in the LAX area. We were blessed with many Khmer friends as the church grew. Babies were born, including a son for us: Samuel (heard of God) to add to the two we brought with us, Laura and Benjamin. With many other babies and their parents an historic downtown church came to life. Resurrection. Family. This year the church is 123 years old and younger than ever, perhaps.
A man who met Jesus at this church before moving away in 1961 dropped by yesterday. With tears in his eyes he told me that he became child of God here and that this church had taught him how to follow Jesus (back when I was being physically born). He said it had been a good life with Jesus these past 50 years since he left. He sought me out to tell me these things. Then he walked away. An unexpected messenger of encouragement. “This is a great thing you have going here!†He didn’t know what he would find after all these years. An unknown brother. What is God doing? It’s bigger than we know, rooted in the past, alive and growing in the present. The vain part of me wants to believe his “you†means “meâ€. But I know it is a great thing that God has going here in Long Beach, and it is bigger than any one local church. It is about the church of the city- all God’s people here. I am not essential to what God is doing. I am privileged to be a small part. Grace at work here.
Is God’s time of preparation in Long Beach moving into fullness? I think it is. A time of action for God’s people in Long Beach is being born. I think a foreshadowing of that action began in the past year. God’s people did something. It crossed church boundaries. It connected to what city government and non-profits were doing to help move homeless folk into housing. More than just housing, it moved a number of those homeless folk into regular connections with caring communities of God’s people. Being downtown, I have a lot of homeless neighbors and friends. I don’t want to overstate a small beginning, but what happened with this project was remarkable. Government and community leaders cooperated with churches to do an effective work with dozens of the most at-risk homeless people in the downtown area. Church teams provided furniture and friendship to people moving from the street into housing. More than this, the tone of how we work together in the city changed. God’s name and the body of Christ was respected in ways that I have not before seen in my time in Long Beach. We – God’s people – worked together in a way that was good for the city, good for homeless folks, and good for us. I have to say, it seemed literally miraculous to me. Hope. A new birth? How do we feed THIS baby? Is it, in God’s time, the beginning of a season of action? If it is, this effort is not the fullness of that action. It is a beginning – perhaps the first child of a new time in God’s plan for his people and Long Beach.
Where am I going with this? Allow me to suggest that you ask yourself a question. What would your community’s reaction be if your church disappeared? People, buildings, programs… everything. Gone. Who would notice? What would their reaction be? Would it be perceived as a loss or as a gain? Would anyone notice at all? What would be the reaction of our city – Long Beach – if God’s people were removed? I’m not talking end times theology. I’m talking practical display of God’s character, purpose and glory through the life of the body of Christ in our city. How will they see His glory, the glory of the One and Only, Jesus, walking around in Long Beach? We need to be that glory. It’s how we grow up and give birth to new life. We are called. Who will answer?
Well, being a famous online shopper, people ask me where to get stuff. So here are a few links to online vendors that I use. I don’t use that many these days, having found that these vendors hit the low-price and reliability combination that I want. I sometimes shop elsewhere online, but the list of next tier vendors is long and I’m too lazy to enter all those sites into my link area. Ask me if you want other references.
If you want high-quality Christian teaching on audio, look no further than the classes and seminars at the Regent College Bookstore. (That’s the one in Vancouver, BC.) Every class I’ve bought and listened to has been good to excellent. No losers yet. I’m particularly glad to have discovered Rikk Watts’ classes.
And then there are the podcasts. I listen to a few very regularly. I never miss Planet Money, because, well, these days it’s all about the economy and I can understand what they say on this podcast – they explain the jargon when guest experts use it.
I also greatly like This American Life, but can’t keep up. It’s creative and real and interesting. It’s often entertaining.
I started listening to Prairie Home Companion back in 1980! The News from Lake Wobegon doesn’t have quite the same kick it used to, but old friends are comforting, and Susie loves it.
Mars Hill Audio is a resource every thinking christian should know about. Ken Myers does a great job of keeping us up to date on intellectual trends we need to know about to keep up with what’s going on in thinking society. Subscribe to the audio Journal; they need our support.
I’ve always been fascinated by history, and the Hardcore History podcast gives me a fix every month or two that really charges my neurons. Dan Carlin, the podcaster, also does a more political podcast called Common Sense that is bound to offend almost everyone some of the time and make you think most of the time. I sometimes listen to it, but haven’t made it a priority listen.
You can probably figure out why I have the other links listed. This is left as an exercise for the reader.